As Mencken said, “There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.” Or, as George Orwell put it, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
Claude McKay was born on September 15, 1889
I had never heard of Sam Smith before he made this announcement. With any luck, I’ll never hear of him again.
The rest of the country is pretty equally startled. Overnight, denizens of the Spectator have seized power. Early on in Margaret Thatcher’s reign, she is said to have startled guests at a Downing Street reception by leaping on a sofa to declare: ‘I am the rebel head of an establishment government.’ One wonders if the staff at the Spectator aren’t now taking it in turns to bounce up and down on former editor Boris Johnson’s old couch (certainly the springs are broken) because, if anyone’s in charge today, it is the ex-employees of this magazine (which coined the very term The Establishment).
The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
— William Carlos Williams, born on this date in 1883
Wittingly or not, public-health activists have labored away on behalf of Big Pharma and Big Tobacco.
It is indeed heartbreakingly beautiful.
I guess the takeaway from this is that our current political discourse is going in all sorts of directions at once. The problem may be categorism — thinking in terms of labels. I know persons who have been liberal Democrats all their lives who feel uncomfortable with the views of those calling themselves progressives. The practical problem, it seems to me, has to do, in government, with the unelected bureaucracy and, in education, with bloated administrations.
Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.
— Sir James Jeans, who died on this date in 1946
The colleges will now point to Huffman in her orange jumpsuit as proof that the admissions’ process is fair and clean. But Huffman’s conviction demonstrates the opposite. The applications system is rotten to the core, and Huffman is the fall girl.
I read a lot of Blake when I was young. I can't say I was ever sure I got what he was driving at, but I always found him — and still find him — thrilling. I cannot, however, see him at the center of any organized sociopolitical movement, and to attach him in any way to today's goofy politics seems to me to trivialize him.
I’ll have to look into these, but I am somewhat surprised that Esa-Pekka Salonen’s violin concerto received no mention. I think it’s excellent.
… Weiss’s book is an important read. It isn’t exhaustive, but it’s an excellent overview. There are insightful gems worth consideration for those new to the topic, as well as those who are well versed in it.
Johnson had a fascination of and gift for crafting the arresting image, but what separates him from his Imagist progeny is how the objects Johnson depicts always seem to flash for an instant before dissolving into an ethereal mist. If Imagists followed the notion that the world is all that is the case, Johnson’s prose was struck through with the ephemerality of life itself. In Johnson’s poetry, as a fellow mystic said sixty years later, life is a dream already over.
The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.
— François de La Rochefoucauld, born on this date in 1613
The pagan religions of the past were founded on the fatalistic submission of the weak to the powerful. Biblical religion invites the humblest as well as the most exalted to act as free people, by taking moral responsibility for their actions. It demanded equality before the law for rich and poor, for home-born and stranger, with the premise that every human being was a free agent with the right to live without fear of predation from the strong or oppression from the rich, and that every human being was equally responsible for his or her actions
The pagan religions of the past were founded on the fatalistic submission of the weak to the powerful. Biblical religion invites the humblest as well as the most exalted to act as free people, by taking moral responsibility for their actions. It demanded equality before the law for rich and poor, for home-born and stranger, with the premise that every human being was a free agent with the right to live without fear of predation from the strong or oppression from the rich, and that every human being was equally responsible for his or her actions
I don’t believe most African-Americans believe this, outside the elites. They’re much less doctrinaire than elite white leftists on a whole range of subjects. I don’t buy it either — alongside, I suspect, most immigrants, including most immigrants of color. Who would ever want to immigrate to such a vile and oppressive place? But it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end. To present a truth as the truth is, in fact, a deception. And it is hard to trust a paper engaged in trying to deceive its readers in order for its radical reporters and weak editors to transform the world.
… if Mr. Johnson, like Churchill and Disraeli, seems like an adventurer, it is mainly because all three saw their lives in politics as one big adventure. The sheer improbability of their careers energized them.
The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
— Allan Bloom, born on this date in 1930
Good Lord. If hearing Spicer talk makes you scared, (a) don’t attend his talk and (b) never leave home again.
“Lincoln’s Spies” is the story of Allan Pinkerton, Lafayette Baker, George Sharpe and Elizabeth Van Lew — important Union agents who operated mainly in the Civil War’s Eastern Theater, which included Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. The U.S. government, of course, ran intelligence operations elsewhere — against Confederates in the Deep South and the western campaigns, for example, and to root out pro-Confederate subversives in the northeastern and northwestern states. To cover all the spying that went on in the Civil War would consume several volumes,” Mr. Waller writes in his note to readers
Make of this what you will. I have been skeptical of Gladwell for years. But he seems like a nice enough guy.
So much seems to be going wrong these days. Perhaps the people taking over these days just aren’t up to the job.
In other words, not as it has been “reported.”
Finally, there was Rob, our Glorious Leader. I've had the pressure of playing for NBA championships in front of millions of people, but that paled when watching the pressure he faced every day of the five months I was there. While we planned out the plot and character arcs of the eight episodes of Veronica Mars, he and Diane were also overseeing the final season of iZombie. He was making decisions about budget, casting, editing, music and a thousand other things. While we ate lunch, he was editing scenes from iZombie or on the phone trying to get J.K. Simmons. Yet he came in each day with good cheer, a clear vision and a great sense of humor. All while on a juice diet!
… the Enlightenment didn’t last long.In practice, it was inadequate to actual human life. Enlightenment thought was like trying to feed people with vitamin pills only. Technically all the necessary nutrients might be there, but people need more than that. They need flavor and texture and scent. They need the whole human experience. The Enlightenment didn’t feed the soul.
Ask people now what liberty means and they might say freedom to determine your own laws or make your own choices. But Blake’s freedom is not at root the liberty to do this or that. It’s founded first on something more substantial: the glorious capacity to see “a World in a Grain of Sand”; “Heaven in a Wild Flower”. It’s a liberty based upon perception. “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” he remarked.
By the end of the war, Steinway had produced about 5,000 Victory Verticals, roughly half of which went to military service. (The others were sold to schools and churches.) Piper notes that the specially designed instruments were an incredible moment for the makers of musical instruments, and their resilience through the war years. But more remarkable were the moments of comfort, joy, and camaraderie those pianos created in difficult times.
Now, exercise offers more of an opportunity to pause. I have favorite houses. Many mansions have had their facades lifted. After being swathed in netting or shrink-wrapped in white plastic for months, even years, exteriors are revealed to the street in pristine turn-of-the-century clarity. I have long admired the novels of American wealth — Wharton, James, Fitzgerald — and the interior secrets they revealed. Walking along Vallejo or up Steiner, however pleasant, is not like reading novels. There is no discernible narrative.Richard is three years younger than I am.
The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
— J. B. Priestley, born on this date in 1894
When I look at you now, I see another human being. When you look at me, what do you see?” she asked.“I see a Christian person,” he said. “A person who isn’t a Muslim.””Do you think you have anything in common with the people that you killed?” Callimachi pressed.”No. There was nothing in common,” Abusamadov said. “They are humans and so are we. We didn’t have anything else in common.”
The whole purpose of democracy is to manage situations in which everyone believes they’re right and everyone disagrees. The dangerous game Remainer politicians are playing could indeed result in a win. But what good is triumph, if in the end your system of governance looks a farce, its ‘democratic’ decisions revealed as rigged by the lowlife electorate’s haughty betters?Trump won in 2016 because he ran a better campaign than his opponent did. Hillary's larger vote totals came from a few concentrated urban areas. Also, she and Trump were not the only candidates. She won a plurality of the vote, not a majority. Let's see what the people decide next time.
It has long seemed to me that the notion of an eternal hell suggests that hell is coexistent with God, who is eternal in the sense that He has no beginning and no end. Jesus refers to the everlasting fire. But everlasting is a temporal term — last until the end of time (the eternal being that which transcends time (i.e., God). I think Hart's conclusion has much to recommend it: "the end of history in a final judgment and then, beyond that, the end of judgment in a final reconciliation." C. S. Lewis said that the door to hell is locked from the inside. I do not think hell will last longer than the world.
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
— Stanislaw Lem, born on this date in 1921
As Dr. Johnson observed, “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.”
I find it impossible to imagine Lawrence having an iota of sympathy for the European Union. I think he would have had wonderful things to say about a government that put the matter to a vote and then could not implement the will of the people. I am certain he would not have been in sympathy with the views fashionable among the elites.
The agents are federal law enforcement officers who enforce the laws created by Congress.So Congressional hacks who claim to not like what they’re should undertake to change the statutes they object. That’s what Congress is supposed to be about.
Several Dickinson scholars have expressed to me their frustration with Harvard’s policies. It is a topic frequently whispered about in Dickinson studies, but some avoid speaking publicly for fear of reprisal. Critics who spend their entire careers citing Dickinson cannot risk losing permission to do so. One tenured Dickinson scholar who wished to remain anonymous wrote to me, “Frankly, this topic makes me very nervous!” The same person underscored Harvard’s power to intimidate: “Please, please, I’ll tell you anything I can, but I can’t afford to be on the outs with Harvard!” The chilling effects of Harvard’s policies not only make it harder to cite and edit Dickinson, then, but also to discuss the issue publicly.
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder. ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ is the message of Flight 93. … As the plane crashed in the fields of Shanksville, it exploded and could be heard all across the hills, and shook the houses, and people heard it for miles around. That’s how powerful is the message of Flight 93. Once we understand it, it will explode upon our hearts. Never surrender. Never surrender. On Sept. 11, 2001, the old world passed away forever and can never be restored the way it was. The old heavens and the old earth passed away and behold, God said, ‘I create all things anew, and this time I give you 40 new stars — 40 stars to guide you in the darkness of terror.’
Now and again, I go hear a Latin Mass. Not too long ago, I heard one in the basement chapel of St. John Cantius in Chicago. There, a great sea of young people, clutching their breviaries, women in veils, knelt about me on the hard tile, contemplating the back of the priest as he offered the holy sacrifice of the Mass in almost perfect silence. Those around seemed at home here, by which I mean only that this – what a generation older than me would refer to with intolerant and vitriolic disdain as an antique, museum, and oppressive Church – has somehow become the one and only true Church of their worship.
There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder.
— D. H. Lawrence, born on this date in 1885
Makes one wonder how Snopes would have reacted to Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Maybe they should fact-check this one: In Embarrassing Gaffe, Biden's Head Falls Off During Town Hall. I can see some people taking that seriously.
What I’m trying to do with my work, particularly with my latest novel, Original Prin, is write fiction where there is purchase, where you are reading about someone who’s pursuing a life that could, in fact, be yours, because it is a life lived in the chaotic, messy world of assorted extremities that pile up into life in the twenty-first century. This world is globalized in a jagged variety of ways and marked—especially for a religious believer—by a sense of First World urban life as constitutionally inimical to religion, which makes it hard to be a believer in such places. Harder still is weighing that sense of felt difficulty against the knowledge that there are people elsewhere in the world, right now, being slaughtered for believing in the same God.
“I think Couney understood that no one else was going to save these children if he didn’t.”
The writer who was offended should have expressed their discomfort directly to Mosley so they could have a mature discussion. The offended writer should have asked themselves a few questions about whether or not taking offense was a legitimate response to a black man telling a story that happened to him and quoting the dialogue used. Clearly, the story has much more visceral impact — which was Mosley’s point — when you hear the actual word being spoken so cavalierly by a police officer. And why was there no offense taken to the use of the derogatory “paddy”? Finally, one has to question the ability of that writer to produce complex and layered characters and themes if they lack the sophistication to understand all that.
It’s a reincarnation of the Back Bay shop, with the same wistfulness and feeling of being homesick, yet not knowing what for. But in New Hampshire, the barn is rent-free and has its own parking. There’s also little-to-no traffic on the quiet country road.
Gladwell has often built his arguments from other peoples’ sketchy statistical manipulations and the far-fetched results he’s managed to cull from social science journals. The data, taken uncritically, served to buttress anecdotes that were intended to dramatize some general truth about the human animal. What’s new in Talking to Strangers is that Gladwell doesn’t use these bits of pseudo-science to point to any larger lessons. It seems he’s no longer trying to explain much of anything. By book’s end, the best he can do is counsel a sense of realism about what we can and cannot know—a kind of epistemological modesty.
Religion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy.
— Franz Werfel, born on this date in 1890
