Wednesday, October 07, 2020
Appreciation …
… Giving Hoagy His Due - Terry Teachout, Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
To this day, though, Carmichael’s art resists easy categorization. As a friend wrote in the epilogue to The Stardust Road, his 1946 memoir: “You made your greatest success as a composer by not writing songs about love. You gained popularity in radio and records by singing; yet you have no voice….You got interested in movie acting about a year ago and now you are in that. Every time you put your mind to something you really get on the outside of it before you let go.”I am lifelong Carmichael fan.
Good …
… Gun-Rights Group Sues Philly Over Massive Permit Backlog - Washington Free Beacon.
This city is currently a poorly managed as ever in my lifetime. The mayor is an idiot. The DA still thinks he’s a defense attorney.
Something to think on …
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.
— Allan Bloom, who died on this date in 1992
Sounds familiar …
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Tuesday, October 06, 2020
Hmm …
… I Don't Remember the Last Time I Enjoyed a Book | Book Riot. (Hat tip, Jon Caroulis.)
I have reviewed books that I didn’t enjoy, but usually, if I’m not enjoying a book, I stop reading it.
It's about time …
… Great Barrington Declaration. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Signed by:
Medical & Public
Health Scientists
Health Scientists
1,604
Medical
Practitioners
Practitioners
1,803
General
Public
Public
27,378
I just signed it.
Simenon without Maigret …
… Musings and Reviews: Georges Simenon “makes me think of Chekhov".
I reviewed this novel. It is quite disturbing.
… Godforsaken: religion is vanishing from American politics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The crucial point is that these millions of Christian voters can no longer find churches that reflect their attitudes and anxieties. They can’t identify with the evangelicals’ obsession with sexual purity, and the mainstream Protestant churches just strike them as spineless, especially right now. Conservative Catholics feel the same way about their own bishops. They had nothing inspiring to say during the COVID pandemic and retreated into cowardly platitudes when antifa mobs moved from defacing statues to trying to burn down whole cities.
But, as Charles Williams observed, "The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church."
Appreciation …
… Discovering Whitney Balliett, the True Poet of Jazz | City Journal. (Hat tp, Dave Lull.)
I have never read a jazz writer with a more assured command of the English language. It’s a testimony to his precision of expression that the Merriam-Webster dictionary changed its definition of that ineffable jazz word “swing,” based on Balliett’s feedback. But you didn’t need to be a lexicographer to appreciate his virtuosity. Oral historian Studs Terkel, another master of the journalistic profile, lauded him as “one of our most trustworthy guides.” Taking a different tack, poet extraordinaire (and fellow jazz critic) Philip Larkin declared that “Balliett is a master of language” who brought “jazz journalism to the verge of poetry.” In fact, the surest way to assess Balliett’s stature was to gauge the stature of those who praised his work. He was the artisan whom other artisans admired.
Something to think on …
To philosophize is not to solve problems but to live them at a certain level.
— Don Colacho
Monday, October 05, 2020
Ave atque vale …
… First Known When Lost: Farewell, September. Welcome, October.
I am October child. In a short while I will turn 79. And the next day will begin my 80th year.
I am October child. In a short while I will turn 79. And the next day will begin my 80th year.
Maybe …
… Review: “The Listeners and other poems” by Walter de la Mare | Form in Formless Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the lonely go.
For the thing unsaid that heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling - calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
When the shadows are falling.
O, be beauty for all my blindness,
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving-kindness
In the dark of the end.
I see no diminution of quality in that.
My fellow de la Mare fan, Stephen Pentz, in a recent post had much to say of de la Mare (it's what prompted me to get Whistler's biography.) Here is that post: Awake. And here is something from it:
But, as they say, read the whole thing.
Those poems are all at the beginning of the book, and after them the poems degenerate into unequal attempts to catch the evocative spirit.Well, I have just started reading Imagination of the Heart, Theresa Whistler's biography of de la Mare. I have also been reading the Collected Poems, just dipping into it at random. I just came upon this one, far into the book:
For All The Grief
For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the lonely go.
For the thing unsaid that heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling - calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
When the shadows are falling.
O, be beauty for all my blindness,
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving-kindness
In the dark of the end.
I see no diminution of quality in that.
My fellow de la Mare fan, Stephen Pentz, in a recent post had much to say of de la Mare (it's what prompted me to get Whistler's biography.) Here is that post: Awake. And here is something from it:
In the year prior to his death, he said to a visitor: "My days are getting shorter. But there is more and more magic. More than in all poetry. Everything is increasingly wonderful and beautiful."
But, as they say, read the whole thing.
Something to think on …
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
— Václav Havel, born on this date in 1936
Sunday, October 04, 2020
Have a listen …
… Ty Segall Releases New Harry Nilsson Covers EP: Listen | Pitchfork. (Hat tip, Gwen Hansell Hendry.)
Appreciation …
… The Poetry of the Prosaic - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Quinn believed that the caucasian men causing damage were white supremacist supporters of President Donald Trump, who were attempting to make Black Lives Matter protests appear in a negative light. In an effort to expose the alleged racist Trump supporters, Quinn went undercover and infiltrated the groups. Instead, he found that these destructive forces were "true believers in insurrectionary anarchism."One of the luckiest days of my life was when, in grad school, I suddenly realized I did not want to spend the rest of my in the faculty lounge (and I gather it was a more interesting place then than it is now).
Journalist does journalism …
… Photojournalist discovers left-wing anarchists cause riots - TheBlaze.
Quinn believed that the caucasian men causing damage were white supremacist supporters of President Donald Trump, who were attempting to make Black Lives Matter protests appear in a negative light. In an effort to expose the alleged racist Trump supporters, Quinn went undercover and infiltrated the groups. Instead, he found that these destructive forces were "true believers in insurrectionary anarchism."
Progress …
… Deep Water: ‘Independence,’ by Robert Petrillo - Portland Press Herald. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
In case you wondered …
… How to Generate Fake News by Frank J. Fleming – According To Hoyt. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A great poet’s great editor …
… New beginnings for John Berryman and Robert Giroux | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… Giroux would remain a loyal friend, never backing away from his commitments to Berryman; his strength of character helped him to accept Berryman’s overwhelming personal difficulties of severe alcoholism and dependency on a variety of drugs. He encouraged Berryman to write poetry during both good periods and difficult ones—even when Berryman went through prolonged periods of hospitalization, which tended to become more and more frequent, creating for him a disturbing series of mentally uninhabitable spaces.
Something to think on …
The journey is essential to the dream.
— Francis of Assisi, who died on this date in 1226
Saturday, October 03, 2020
Something to think on …
Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.
— Thomas Wolfe, born on this date in 1900
Friday, October 02, 2020
Hmm …
… Pandemic Memories and Mortalities - IEEE Spectrum.
Though many of us lived through the flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, almost nobody can dredge up personal memories of those times. And that's interesting.I sure in hell can’t.
… the worldwide death toll attributable to SARS CoV-2 was about 865,000 by the end of August 2020. Given the global population of about 7.8 billion, this translates to an interim pandemic mortality of about 11 deaths per 100,000 people. Even if the total number of deaths were to triple, the mortality rate would be comparable to that of the 1968 pandemic, and it would be about two-thirds of the 1957 rate.But people today seem more timorous, credulous, and servile. Certainly more manipulable.
RIP …
… Derek Mahon, one of Ireland’s leading poets, has died, aged 78. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
His poem, Everything is Going to be All Right, captured the national mood during the pandemic.
Something to think on …
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
— Wallace Stevens, born on this date in 1879
Thursday, October 01, 2020
Fabulous …
… British Wildlife Photography Awards Celebrates Ten Years with a Show. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Keeping busy ¬
… Simon Armitage on Ted Hughes, trying to write during the lockdown and drive-in poetry | Yorkshire Post. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
“Hughes was this person from the next valley and as well as finding his work inspiring I found his journey inspiring, too. This idea that if he could do it then coming from a similar background and in a similar-looking house, then I might be able to do it as well.”
As the city once was …
… A Side Street by Louis Untermeyer | Poetry Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Louis Untermeyer was born on this date in 1885.
Louis Untermeyer was born on this date in 1885.
Something to think on …
The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
— Daniel J. Boorstin, born on this date in 1914
A contest of kindness …
… Jeremy Treglown - The Long Road to Leopoldstadt | Literary Review | Issue 490. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It’s the book itself, though, that made me most happily jealous. The research couldn’t be more thorough. Stoppard’s decade in provincial journalism in Bristol is perfectly evoked, for example: jazz clubs, coffee bars, kids chain-smoking in polo-necked black jerseys. I was one of them and went to some of the productions at the Old Vic that Stoppard reviewed …
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
Blogging note …
I am about to take off to have lunch with the widow of a dear friend. Blogging will resume whenever.
Forgotten founder …
… Luther Martin Gets His Close-Up | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Martin was the most voluble, if not valuable, Anti-Federalist, a dipsomaniacal delegate to the Constitutional Convention whom the greatest historian of the old Republic, Henry Adams, called “rollicking, witty, audacious…drunken, generous, slovenly, grand…the notorious reprobate genius.” Martin also leveled the most serious and sustained critique ever essayed upon the U.S. Constitution, that handiwork of 55 mortals who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”
Home and back …
… Self-Exiled from New York: A Reverse Study Abroad | by Cassandra Csencsitz | Sep, 2020 | Medium.
I bring back to New York an abundance of lessons from my study abroad. What defines your family when you are squatting for months on end? It turns out the same things that define you at home. We are all little more than snails who carry our values (and our failings) on our backs. After five months of moves, my family could pop-up shop in no time, unpacking with masterful efficiency, settling into new digs with the routines of musicians on tour. “Make yourselves at home.” “No problem!” As guests, we became even better chameleons. Each family is a micro-culture, and you learn to pick up on the habits and behaviors that keep your hosts comfortable. You become adept at pitching in and expressing gratitude. We learned to live with fewer things, to adapt and improvise without luxuries that once seemed “non-negotiables” but may be little more than overcompensation for other more vital ways one’s cup is not being filled. I had to take a hard look at my ephemeral creature comforts versus my eternal human needs — and which I should really be investing in.
Something to think on …
The better the actor, the more stupid he is.
— Truman Capote, born on this date in 1924
Worth noting …
… Michael O’Brien’s newest novel speaks to loneliness pandemic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
O’Brien is an outstanding novelist.
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Much in what he says …
… The Catholic case for focusing on local issues - Our Sunday Visitor. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
You don’t bolster citizenship by casting votes for people whom you do not know, people whose existences seem almost incorporeal, accessible only as pixelated (not to mention pixilated) images on a screen. Nor is it an act of citizenship to type nasty anonymous messages into internet comment boxes or to virtue-signal on Facebook. No, real citizenship is exercised, and our communities are strengthened by our cheerful, committed and loving involvement in our towns, on our streets, in our parishes and with our neighbors.
Contemporary journalism …
… Fact check: Only in satire could 9th Circuit overturn Ginsburg's death.
Let get this straight. A site that advertises itself as a satire site is found to have published a piece of satire. Good thing we have USA Today’s fact-checkers to help us.
A strange list indeed …
… Musings and Reviews: And now a few words about banned books 2010–19.
Further proof that people who want to ban books are also people you probably don't want to know.
FYI …
… False positive tests | Dr. Malcolm Kendrick. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A false negative is a result which informs someone that they do not have a disease, when in fact they do.
A false positive is a result which informs someone they do have a disease, when they don’t.
Ideally a test should never give a false negative (100% sensitivity) nor give a false positive (100% specificity). There is no known test that does this. In general, there is a trade-off going on between these two measures.
FYI …
… False positive tests | Dr. Malcolm Kendrick. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A false negative is a result which informs someone that they do not have a disease, when in fact they do.
A false positive is a result which informs someone they do have a disease, when they don’t.
Ideally a test should never give a false negative (100% sensitivity) nor give a false positive (100% specificity). There is no known test that does this. In general, there is a trade-off going on between these two measures.
Q&A …
… An Interview with A.M. Juster. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I am not a big fan of poetry about the partisan politics of the moment, such as Calvin Trillin’s epigrams in The Nation. Such poems tend to be painfully predictable and become rapidly less interesting as the election cycle tumbles along.
The greatest political poetry from Horace to Yeats, Auden, Walcott, Szymborska and Zagajewski ignores the specific disputes of the time and focuses on our successes and failures as political beings. Important political poetry also comes from poets, such as Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry, and Terrance Hayes, whose pervasive ideologies provide new lenses for viewing the world.I'm more with him on that.
Something to think on …
My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.
— Miguel de Unamuno, born on this date in 1864
Monday, September 28, 2020
Indeed it is …
… though it lightens that and makes it more bearable: zmkc: Poem for Our Moment. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Mihail Sebastian
There's something refreshing about reading the work of a novelist about whom you know nothing: there's no preoccupation with reputation or context; there's no focus on contemporaries or predecessors. There's just the book: the words.
This was the case recently as I made my way through Women, the enticing novel by Mihail Sebastian. Jewish, Romanian, intellectual: Sebastian wrote during the interwar period, and died when he was not yet forty, in 1945. Women is the first of his two novels.
From the start, I knew I'd enjoy this book: a sense of levity permeates Sebastian's stories; there's nothing here -- in these relationships, these trysts -- which is permanent. Characters enter and exit the stage: their love is a temporary, often comical thing. In this way, I was reminded while reading Women of Kundera, who was later to employ a similar approach to romance.
Women does more, however, than explore love and relationships. It is a book which deals in equal measure with age and gender, and with the assumptions surrounding them, particularly in the context of sexuality. Sebastian is insightful without being overbearing; he is funny without demeaning. His stories are part Daisy Miller, part Unbearable Lightness.
It was a treat to read Women because it was a relief to be rid of context, to read for the sake of the characters, for the sake, really, of reading. Not knowing much about Sebastian's life or reputation freed me to evaluate his novel on its own merits. And what I discovered was a playful, rueful book very much at ease with itself, but also aspiring for something greater. Women is a great success.
Oh, no …
… Wokeness Comes For Dawkins | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Richard Dawkins has been disinvited by a debating society at Trinity College Dublin because he would supposedly make members uncomfortable. But isn’t debate supposed to be challenging and uncomfortable?I’m no fan of Richard Dawkins, but I certainly don’t approve of this sort of crap. And what’s behind the deference to Islam?
Something to think on …
Truth is in things, and not in words.
— Herman Melville, who died on this date in 1891
Hmm …
… Did the Northern Lights Play a Role in the Titanic's Demise? | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine. (Hat tip, Jon Caoulis.)
Sunday, September 27, 2020
Hmm …
… Brideshead Revisited at 75 | Alexander Larman | The Critic Magazine.
I read Brideshead Revisited for the first time when I was about 11, a decade or so after the TV series had appeared. I still remember the circumstances in which I encountered it, lying on my bed one summer afternoon. I didn’t understand everything in it, either the language or the situations described, but it made me feel transported, as if I had travelled to a new world that I had previously only dimly perceived the existence of. Like Charles, I thrilled to the description of prelapsarian Oxford; delighted in the straight-faced tomfoolery of Mr Ryder; enjoyed the farce of the worst tutor in literature, Mr Samgrass; and, above all, revelled in the vividly evoked sense of another, richer world. While my peers lost themselves in science fiction and fantasy novels, I, precocious little prig that I was, took my escapism from Evelyn Waugh.
The greatness of Brideshead is discernible in the intensely personal reactions it evokes. Edmund Wilson’s drivel is easily dismissible. He had no sensibility for appreciating something like Brideshead.
I read it during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college. It was on a list of books we were encouraged to read in preparation for the course in the modern novel I had signed up for. I had read Decline and Fall and thought it hilarious, so I started with Brideshead thinking it would be a lark.
But after reading it for about 45 minutes I looked up and said out loud to myself (there being no one else around), “I think this is the saddest book I have ever read.” That did not keep me from reading on. I finished it the next day. Perhaps you have to be Catholic to really get it. Because its insight into what it means to be a Catholic is extraordinary.
Something to read if you want to know Poe …
… Musings and Reviews: The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe.
Well, thanks to the French Symbolists, he helped give birth to modern poetry. And “To Helen” is a well-nigh perfect poem
Teasing out what won’t stay put …
… Kay Ryan, 'Giddy with Thinking' | by Matthew Bevis | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The first piece in the book, “A Consideration of Poetry,” foregrounds a vital element of Ryan’s aesthetic. She believes, perhaps counterintuitively, that “feelings, attachedfeelings that is, are also dead weight in a poem.” Nowadays, many poets and their readers prize the attached, the feelingful, the personal, but when Ryan attends a debate about “transgression” in contemporary poetry at the largest literary conference in North America, she demurs: “How about, transgression against obsessive self-regard? That would be a good one: ‘Hello. I’m Jen and I keep having impersonal thoughts.’”
Hmm …
… Suicide of the Liberals by Gary Saul Morson | Articles | First Things.
Most important, and of greatest concern, was how intelligentsthought. An intelligent signed on to a set of beliefs regarded as totally certain, scientifically proven, and absolutely obligatory for any moral person. A strict intelligent had to subscribe to some ideology—whether populist, Marxist, or anarchist—that was committed to the total destruction of the existing order and its replacement by a utopia that would, at a stroke, eliminate every human ill. This aspiration was often described as chiliastic (or apocalyptic), and, as has been observed, it is no accident that many of the most influential intelligents, from Chernyshevsky to Stalin, came from clerical families or had studied in seminaries. For Struve, the mentality of the intelligentsia constituted a cruel parody of religion, preserving “the external features of religiosity without its content.”
Certainly atypical …
… Odd Poem: ‘The Skipping Rope’, by Tennyson | Form in Formless Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hmm …
… Beyond Cancel Culture | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It is no coincidence that O’Connor and Updike are both Christian writers, because the literature of self-recrimination follows in the footsteps of St. Paul: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15 NRSV). This self-recrimination is neither a self-justification nor a boast that the author has conquered sin: it’s a recognition of good and evil and an admission that he is frequently on the wrong side of that line.Neither art nor life is formulaic. As Somerset Maugham says somewhere, human beings are not of a piece. Blackguards can at times be kind and generous, and saints sometimes mean and vicious. Art is about how people and life are, not how we think they ought to be.
Something to think on …
A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, born on this date in 1821
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Aid from Lord Byron …
… Hock and Soda-Water – Idlings. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
What an outrageous performance! With every comic, bawdy, snarky, adventuresome stanza I feel my 2020 anxieties washing away. Don Juan is like – what? Not quite like anything I can think of, but you might shelve it near Tristram Shandy, The Three Musketeers, Tom Jones, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and The Golden Ass.
Complete thoughts …
… Some sentences about sentences. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In his new book, Suppose A Sentence, essayist Brian Dillon offers a compilation and discussion of memorable sentences that he has been copying into the pages of his notebooks for over two decades. These are the stars that, for him, shine more brightly from “a teeming sky of inscriptions”.
Bifurcated man …
… ‘The Selected Letters of John Berryman’ Review: Dark Dispatches - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
No one is likely to surpass Berryman in providing the fullest account of what might mildly be called a harrowing career.
Something to think on …
The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women — of all classes — detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.
— T. S. Eliot, born on this date in 1888
Friday, September 25, 2020
Squaring off …
… The Woke and the Un-Woke - Tablet Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Signs of a none-trad alliance can already be seen in the growing connections between the relatively secular “Intellectual Dark Web” and conservative religious intellectuals. Last year, Bishop Robert Barron—one of the most intellectually sophisticated and technologically savvy leaders of the Catholic Church—appeared on the podcast of Jordan Peterson, whose work he has praised. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying—atheists who supported Bernie Sanders—recently became visiting fellows at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, an organization run by the conservative Catholic thinker Robert P. George.
Her own person …
… The Beauty Parton - Rob Long, Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… if the podcast producers thought they were frustrated by her refusal to be a feminist or an LGBTQ activist, they’re stopped cold by this admission. Dolly prays for Trump, by which she means, she’s not praying that he wins reelection or lowers his handicap. She prays that God will grant him wisdom and foresight and guide him as he leads the nation. Praying for the president—any president, every president—is actually part of the official liturgy of the Episcopalian church. But this is problematic for Dolly’s interviewers, for whom basic religious faith seems weird and baffling. They keep asking How does she do it? And she keeps answering them By writing songs that are emotionally true and not being a political activist and praying for God’s guidance. And they just don’t hear it. Can’t be that. Gotta be something else.
Q&A …
… Sebastian Shakespeare talks to Beryl Bainbridge | Literary Review | Issue 279. (Hat tip, Dave Lull)
Can fiction be more truthful than biography?
I’m not sure. It depends who’s writing it. If you stick to the facts of someone’s life and manage to absorb the personality of the subject, then it’s perhaps possible to give a truthful, yet fictional account. After all, who knows what anybody is really like, or what they really think? The biographer – same as a painter of portraits – cannot help but reproduce himself to some degree.
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