Most of these remind me of something a character in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum says, that the conclusion arrived at by means of a counterfactual conditional proposition is always correct precisely because the premise is false.
Saturday, October 24, 2020
Bizarre …
… Presidents and Other Fictions - Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Think. Live Free. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In praise of flaneurs …
… ‘The Walker’ Review: The Art of the Stroll. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I have been a walker all my life. I have walked all over Philadelphia and Chicago, and a good bit of D.C. I have routinely walked Philadelphia's Wissahickon Park from Walnut Lane to Chestnut Hill and back and Pennypack Park from Frankford Avenue to Pine Road and back. That's a good many miles. I used to walk to and from The Inquirer every day. That's about 4.4 mikes a day. My vacations were spent hiking and climbing in upstate Pennsylvania. I also still routinely stroll around what we call Center City.
This review, however, leads me to suspect that walking may be like humor — better enjoyed than written about.
Something to think on …
Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.
— Denise Levertov, born on this date in 1923
Friday, October 23, 2020
What a strange tale …
… The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw (1959). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I only knew of Robert Shaw as an actor. I did not know he was also a writer. I do remember him being eaten by the shark in Jaws.
Appreciation …
As noted earlier, this is Ned Rorem's 97th birthday. Don't let his charming glibness lead you to think he is not a great composer. I had the privilege of meeting him once.
Living faith …
… ‘He Mends Your Broken Bones’ a Response to Psalm 51. (Hat tip Dave Lull.)
Someone should email this to the Pope. I just bought the Kindle edition of Malcolm Guite's Faith, Hope and Poeetry.
Blogging note …
Life continues to get in the way of blogging. I will be settling down to do some again this afternoon.
Good question …
… Is the Pope Catholic? | City Journal.
…
the encyclical goes a little further than necessary, it seems to me, in considering all populism to be relatively respectable because the people are respectable, and populism is an expression of the people. But populism can also be an expression of the people’s violence—the very violence that democracy tends to channel. The case of Argentina, here again, might clarify the pope’s tendency. Peronism is a form of populism—anti-liberal and hardly democratic—for which Francis had a soft spot. The pope has sympathies for populist intentions, even when the results were (and still are) catastrophic.
Something to think on …
It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.
— Ned Rorem, born on this date in 1923
Thursday, October 22, 2020
To say the least …
…The deeply flawed opportunism of Pope Francis.
…the film includes a story of Francis “encouraging two Italian men in a same-sex relationship to raise their children in their parish church, which, one of the men said, was greatly beneficial to his children.” It also notes that in his 2013 book On Heaven and Earth, Francis stated that laws “assimilating” homosexual relationships to marriage are “an anthropological regression,” saying that if same-sex couples “are given adoption rights, there could be affected children. Every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help them shape their identity.”
So, which is it? Well, that probably depends on the day and week. Changing course and shifting narrative parameters for different audiences has been a regular feature of this pontificate, which often flies by the seat of its sentimentally-inclined papal pants.
Little blogging today …
I have to leave shortly to meet someone for lunch in town. Afterwards, I have some shopping to do. So I won’t be doing any blogger until much later.
Something to think on …
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
— Doris Lessing, born on this date in 1919
Beautiful …
… Weather Photographer of the Year Winners Celebrate the Beauty of Nature. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Rudyard Kipling
I've just finished Kim -- Rudyard Kipling's celebrated novel of British India -- and I must admit, I'm of two minds.
On one hand, this is a book guided by tremendous erudition. Kipling seems to have mastered it all: local dialects, fashion, geography; the list goes on. There were moments when reading Kim that I felt I'd entered something approaching a 'total novel.' It was as if I'd been immersed -- without warning, without welcome -- in the Raj. Put differently: this is a book made of four sturdy walls. There's one way in and one way out. In the middle, there's only character and description, society and culture.
Having said all this, I found myself surprisingly unmoved by the whole thing. And more: I found the novel a chore to read. Kim's journey -- his awakening and maturation -- are often obscured by the intensity of Kipling's prose, by the density and claustrophobia of his writing. I concede that I struggled at times to follow the story, and to understand how the European characters, especially, fit into Kim's evolution.
No doubt, there's an authenticity to Kim which would be -- and which has been -- difficult to match. Conversely, there's an opacity which I found difficult to surmount. Kim's adventures are one thing: how they fit into the 'total' vision of British India presented by Kipling is another. For my part, I suppose I'd still take Orwell's Burmese Days.
Good to hear …
… SECNAV Names Attack Boat After WWII USS Barb, DDG for Former SECNAV Lehman - USNI News.
John and I were classmates in college and still get together from time to time.
Keep it up, ladies
… Ocasio-Cortez Teams Up With Activist Who Said 'America Deserved 9/11'.
Remember, I’m so old I remember when it was thought appropriate to love your country.
Spys’ neighborhood …
… Even James Bond's working from home these days. But where does he live? William Boyd investigates | Daily Mail Online. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I suppose the most famous fictional abode for a character is Sherlock Holmes’s 221b, Baker Street. James Bond’s address and George Smiley’s have yet to achieve the same legendary status, but give them time.
Contemporary manners …
… This is social suicide, but OK, here goes | Judith Margolis Friedman | The Blogs.
… what do the more liberal among us call their secret Facebook group? Then it came to me — they just call it Facebook. And on Facebook, many of my liberal friends blast away without cause or concern that they are maligning unfairly people who they claim to love and respect. I have lost count as to how many real friends have posted “If you don’t agree with my political views, unfriend me.” Really? How tolerant of you. We’ve been friends for years, really? Your child played at my house countless times, really?
Careful what you wish for …
… Salvaging Secession. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Disagreements between independent political entities often leads to something called war. It was the southern secessionists who started the Civil War. Remember Fort Sumter?
I posted a link to this yesterday, but thanks to Blogger’s klutzy revisions it linked to my email. That is now fixed.
Something to think on …
I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born on this date in 1772
Tuesday, October 20, 2020
Hmm …
… E. B. WHITE’S “PLAIN STYLE” @75. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It might seem self-evident that White the author practiced what Strunk and White the style gurus preached, but the truth is more complicated. Like Ernest Hemingway, who mocked his fans’ enthusiasm for the writing tips he dispensed, White had mixed feelings about being anointed a master of plain prose.
I read the 1959 edition not long after it came out, during the year I spent between high school and college. I never got the impression from it that the plain style was the only way of writing, but rather that it was the foundation for good writing. Once you had it down, you could safely go your way however and wherever you wished.
Secrets behind the scenes …
… Trio by William Boyd review – lights, camera, chaos. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… brilliantly drawn, often grotesque characters make Trio Boyd’s funniest book since 1998’s Armadillo. I especially relished the horrible, Charles Hawtrey-esque actor Ferdie Meares, whose cameo in one of the film’s pivotal scenes is complicated by his insisted-upon right to deliver his dire comic catchphrase: “I’m excited! Are you?” Boyd, a screenwriter and occasional director himself, beautifully captures the chaos and exhilaration of a shambolic film set, in which unforeseen disasters andskulduggery create their own opportunities and problems.
Something to think on …
Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.
— Arthur Rimbaud, born on this date in 1854
Monday, October 19, 2020
Attention Blogger …
The new version of Blogger is awful. I would like to return to the original version, which I was able to do until recently. One can't seem to get this message through to you in any way that I can discern. So I guess I'll have to find another platform for this blog. Talk about screwing something up.
If anyone knows how to get this through to Blogger, please let me know.
Appreciation …
… Opposites Refract — A Review of Wonder and Wrath by A. M. Juster.
Wonder and Wrath is an apt title for a collection that both marvels at and rails against human frailty, against the backdrop of a fallen universe. The book’s seriousness lies in its sustained resistance to the easy way out: either to reject or embrace, without caveat, a cosmos that consists, in equal measures, of miracle and outrage.
As we might expect, Wonder and Wrath includes an ample selection of translations. These range from versions from the Chinese, to Welsh, to fragments of Rilke’s French, which Juster has, provocatively, “completed.” Juster seems to have a special affinity for Latin poems composed by English poets and has included two of them in this collection, both valuable additions to the canon for those of us who do not read Latin. “To my dear friend, M. J. Jackson, disparager of this treatise,” by A. E. Housman, is thought to be the last Latin poem by a major English poet and is significant for that reason. Typically, Housmanian, it adds little to his extant body of work—it is one more poem about death and unrequited homosexual love.
And a sample: “Rounding up the Mimes” by A. M. Juster.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Careful what you wish for …
… Salvaging Secession. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Disagreements between independent political entities often leads to something called war. It was the southern secessionists who started the Civil War. Remember Fort Sumter?
Sometimes bleak, sometimes tender …
… with always a visionary glow: The Grandmothers, by Glenway Wescott (1927). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the sky like such a newcomer.”
I’ve spent a good bit of time in Wisconsin. I love the place.
Hmm …
… Musings and Reviews: What the gospels have meant then and now.
I confess to feeling dubious about Garry Wills.
Something to think on …
Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
— Lewis Mumford, born on this date in 1895
Sunday, October 18, 2020
Pretty classy people
… Whittaker Chambers Monument – no thanks | Whittaker Chambers. (Hat tip, Dave Lull)
The best way to remember our grandfather is to read his books. They are his memoir Witness (1952) and his later writings in Cold Friday (1964). Rather than a monument, he left testimony to read.
Hmm …
… How the media is misreporting COVID-19's death toll in America. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The CDC itself caused a stir at the end of August by estimating that the virus directly caused only 6 percent, or now just over 11,000 of the 187,000 attributed deaths. Most of these deaths were in the elderly.
The remaining 94 percent died with and not exclusively of the coronavirus. These people also were on average elderly and had 2.6 other health problems. This implies a good fraction who succumbed had three or more comorbidities. In other words, most deaths attributed to the coronavirus were in very sick people.
Saturday, October 17, 2020
These times …
… First Known When Lost: Two Worlds.
"Each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." The temptation is great to conclude that one is wise and virtuous. A comforting delusion.
Something to think on …
The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.
— Raymond Aron, who died on this date in 1983
Friday, October 16, 2020
Something to think on …
When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it.
— John Polkinghorne, born on this date in 1930
Thursday, October 15, 2020
Credentialed fools …
… Writing teachers: Standard English is racist — Joanne Jacobs.
From the comments: “ If what students “bring to the classroom” is already sufficient, why teach them anything?”
Listen in …
… Episode 402 – Darryl Pinckney – The Virtual Memories Show.
“The vote has to be rethought in our American hearts as a radical act, because so many people don’t want you to vote. We have to think about the vote as the center of American culture and American purpose, that cuts across lines of identity that people have drawn so vividly.”
Something to think on …
As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.
— P. G. Wodehouse, born on this date in 1881
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Poetry and truth …
… Psalm to Our Lady Queen
of the Angels by Dana Gioia | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
— Hannah Arendt, born on this date in 1906
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
The latest from a master …
… The Best Way to Take a Break From the Current Chaos | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Epstein is a generalist in the finest sense. In his many collections, still available and worth the reading time, readers are likely to find a thoughtful essay on Joseph Conrad or Marcel Proust followed by a take on Michael Jordan, a putdown of Philip Roth followed by an affectionate Memory Lane treatment of his hometown, Chicago.
Critic’s choices …
… The best recent poetry collections – review roundup | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Sieg heil, professor …
… CSUN professor runs 'Boycott Israel Resource Page' on university website.
The page calls Israel “The most racist state in the world” accusing them of “Crimes against humanity” including “ethnic cleansing.”
Tracking the decline …
… Update: St. John’s limits academic freedom of history department in ongoing effort to punish professor for asking question.
St. John's appears to be advocating the wrong religion.
The writer as star …
… Musings and Reviews: “You shall know the truth ... “
You know how John Wayne movies give you the feeling that you’re watching John Wayne play himself? In a similar (but good) way, Flannery O’Connor’s literary voice is always front and center in her stories and novels. And what a unique voice it is—a brilliant mind, a fierce tendency to call bull**** on hypocrisy, and a skillful rendering of regional characters and places, all delivered in low country dialect. Underestimate her—or her characters—at your peril.That's because Wayne — Like Cary Grant — created a persona for himself that proved adapatble to a wide variety of roles.
The genuine article …
… Alternative Journalism, Indeed | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“We have always been the alternative voice in Philadelphia,” says McDonough now, regarding his decision to rebrand the paper. “That audience has changed over the years, and, in 2020, conservatives and people who are angry and fed up with an inept city government don’t really have a voice here. To continue our mission, we had to change.” PW’s chief revenue officer, Ed Lynes, told Philadelphia Magazine that, in the city, it is “conservatives who no longer have a voice. If you oppose a socialist and intrusive government, your views are rejected by the city’s mainstream media.”Anything that provides relief from The Inquirer’s Will Bunch and his Johnny-one-note rants can be thought a blessing.
Something to think on …
In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.
— Albert Jay Nock, born on this date in 1870
Confident cosmopolitan …
… Complex, Simple: On Robert Conquest’s “Collected Poems” - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Among his recurrent themes are love and sex, science and poetry. The verse — Conquest’s preferred usage — in Collected Poems, edited by his widow Elizabeth Conquest, some 60 years of it, is vast and various in every sense. Conquest is that rare sort of poet who might take anything as his subject matter. Without being shrill or resorting to bumper sticker message-mongering, Conquest is a poet of the people, or at least of that portion who read poems for pleasure. In The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History (2004), he writes:
Ignoramuses …
… Why are woke idiots attacking Gal Gadot? - spiked.
The main problem with this criticism is that Cleopatra herself was actually from Europe. The briefest Google search would have revealed to these furious tweeters that she was, in fact, a Macedonian Greek.
Monday, October 12, 2020
Poet and p[hotographer …
… Philip Larkin: a way of seeing - spiked. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Motion has skilfully juxtaposed his 13 photographic selections alongside related poems.
A lifelong pilgrim …
… Remembering Malcolm Muggeridge: Marked by Mobility and a Search for Morality | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Among Muggeridge’s contemporaries it was the idealistic, impecunious writer Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949) who meant most to him. The Poisoned Crown (1944), in which Kingsmill criticized the corruption and cruelty of power-worshipers, was central to his vision of things, and he wrote an introduction to Michael Holroyd’s 1964 biography of Kingsmill. Kingsmill argued a mystical Shakespearean-Blakean view that there were perennial human conflicts between lovingkindness and power and between imagination and will, and that the modern era particularly had seen the satanic hunger for Blake’s “poisoned crown,” the lust for amoral power, in humankind’s technological rape of nature and in totalitarian power maniacs such as Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung, and that against this post-moral Nietzschean will-to-power—Saint Augustine’s libido dominandi—only lovingkindness and imagination could ultimately triumph, though not necessarily visibly or in this life. Kingsmill was a fellow traveler with Christians, as was Muggeridge for the first part of his life; and Muggeridge took Simone Weil to be making the same argument in her reflections on gravity and grace.
Something to think on …
Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.
— Anatole France, who died on this date in 1924
Happy Columbus Day …
… The left created a fictional version of Christopher Columbus to erase his holiday | The College Fix.
Slavery was not introduced to the New World by Columbus. Rather, slavery was common even among native people in the Caribbean.
Columbus sought to be kind to the natives because he knew that they would be an essential component in not only his survival, but the survival of the men that accompanied him as well. When Columbus left Spain in 1492, in search of a faster and safer route to Asia, slavery was permissible. Spain did not formally ban the slave trade to its colonies until 1817 – more than 300 years after Columbus’ death.
See also this, about Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Always good to be informed.
Sunday, October 11, 2020
Appreciation …
… Le Mot Juste | Harper's Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hazzard’s fiction takes much from her life, but the temptation to read her work autobiographically never clouds the experience. “I think there is a tendency now to write jottings about one’s own psyche and call it a novel,” Hazzard told Kakutani after The Transit of Venus was published. “My book, though, is really a story—and that might have contributed to its success.”
In case you wondered …
…. How Elmore Leonard Really Wrote His Novels—According to His Characters | CrimeReads.(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This gives you a chance to see and hear him. Very worthwhile
I was once chatting with Leonard at Philadelphia’s Central Library, prior to introducing him onstage, and he kept asking me about Philadelphia. I asked him why he was so curious about Philly. He said you never know. What I was telling him might come in handy sometime while writing.
Hmm …
… The Idol Worshiper – Idlings. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Sacrificing Wordsworth on the altar of De Quincey seems odd to me. Whatever his personal shortcomings, Wordsworth is undoubtedly the greater literary figure. And even in this account, De Quincey seems to have been a person best kept at a safe distance.
Something to think on …
That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.
— François Mauriac, born on this date in 1885
Saturday, October 10, 2020
The original …
… ‘Twelve Angry Men’: First Deliberations - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… it is now possible to watch the live-TV version of “Twelve Angry Men” on YouTube, meticulously restored from a surviving kinescope film of the original 1954 telecast—and you know what? It’s better than the movie. A lot better.
Dangerous conformists …
… The Tyranny of the ‘Tolerant’ - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
One of the plummiest targets for attack by intellectuals in the 1950s was conformity. Conformists in those days were thought to reside in American suburbs; they were judged unimaginative, thinking dull thoughts, living out lives of quiet desperation. How it would pain the officially tolerant of our day to think themselves conformists. Yet to be tolerant today entails a strict conformity of opinion. They might wear rococo beards, ponytails and tennis shoes with tuxedos, have had 20 affairs and three abortions, and attended what the world thinks are the best schools. But they all know that, should they depart the deep grooves of locked-in opinion that is the source of their virtue, they risk social excommunication. Few are willing to risk that.
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