— Barbara Tuchman, who died on this date in 1989
Saturday, February 06, 2021
Something to think on …
Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.
Hmm …
… David Duchovny: My Urge to Fail and Fail Again - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This is why I must write—to make these searching guesses and to justify all the time and care my parents put into seeding my brain with the words and ideas that were meaningful to them. It’s my way of communicating with my ancestors; of talking to the dead, Ami and Moshe; of reaping what was so lovingly sown. When I write, I reach forward to a time when I won’t exist and backwards to a time before I existed. It’s a magical, light-year state to inhabit, and though the act of writing is brutal on the head, the soul, the confidence, the back, the shoulders, and the ass, the act of having written carries with it a blissful timelessness and quiet pride.
Friday, February 05, 2021
Something to think on …
Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, born on this date in 1848
In case you wondered …
… Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’.
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse …
Thursday, February 04, 2021
Something to think on …
Being a Christan is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.
-— Dietrich Bonhoefer, born on this date in 1906
Wednesday, February 03, 2021
Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front is one of those books that often appears on high school syllabi -- and I can see why: it's brutal without being savage; it's accessible without being indifferent.
I'd not read Remarque's work all those years ago. But I have now, and I'm grateful for the experience. For me, the most striking aspect of All Quiet is its universality: Remarque's characters are German, but their condition, their suffering is human. The anguish which results from reading All Quiet is not limited by nationality or creed; it is an anguish which transcends political allegiance.
There are scenes in All Quiet which are awful, tormenting: death and destruction cannot be avoided. When Remarque's characters face this destruction -- when they attempt to make meaning of it -- they fail: there is simply no place to begin their judgment. "Our knowledge of life is limited to death," writes Remarque. And really, what could be worse?
All Quiet is not a perfect book, but it is a vital one: as an introduction to the trenches, it elicits horror; as a presentation of the humanity lost in those trenches, it evokes a sense of agony and regret. Remarque's characters do not -- they simply cannot -- understand the war, and that shows: the chapters where they postulate on its meaning become twisted and confused attempts at rationality. This confusion was inevitable: for the violence and panic which it confronted was unyielding.
"What can possibly become of us?" asks Remarque.
Something to think on …
It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.
— Simone Weil, born on this date in 1909
Blogging note …
There will be little or no blogging here today. I have to take Debbie to a doctor's appointment this morning and, when that is over, take her to the assisted living facility she is moving to (at least for a while). I may be able to do a little blogging in the doctor's office, but don't count on it.
Tuesday, February 02, 2021
Master of imagination …
The Gentle Genius of Thomas Howard ~ The Imaginative Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thomas Howard’s genius does not reside … in his ability to grapple with philosophical definitions but in his ability to incarnate or concretize abstractions into living analogies. He shows us that the human imagination manifests itself in every aspect of our daily lives in ways that transcend and supersede the limitations of the scientific method. We have “festooned everything” with symbolic actions and gestures. “We shake hands,” he says, which is “pure ceremony.” Such commonplace rituals, done unthinkingly, nonetheless “bespeak much more than can be discerned in the functional demands of the situation itself.” They signify “our awareness that things are worth something—that they are significant.”
Mark thy calendar …
… At last! At last! Stanford spotlights William Kennedy’s “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game” on Feb. 26!
It’s happening! It’s finally happening! At 3 p.m. (PST) on Friday, February 26, Stanford’s Another Look book club hold its long-postponed Another Look discussion honoring author William Kennedy, a Pulitzer-prizewinning, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. Our event for the 1978 book was one of the early COVID casualties at Stanford last spring. Now it will be rescheduled as a Zoom event (isn’t everything nowadays)?
Register here.
Q&A …
… The Hillbilly Thomists Are Back | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)
Last week, the Hillbilly Thomists released their follow-up album, the exhilarating Living For The Other Side, which, if the first album didn’t convince you, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that these preachers are not a novelty act, but true artists and evangelists via the medium of American folk music.
Pushing back
… More on what modern "antiracism" does to schools, or could not -- and some insight on the Kendi thing. - It Bears Mentioning.
No – I do not mean that being against racism is, itself, bullshit. I mean that a certain strain of “antiracism” these days is, yes, bullshit. And on that, we must address that a certain Mr. (sorry, “Dr.,” as he so pointedly specifies in his Twitter handle) Kendi announced last weekend that I am of a piece with the Trumpian insurrectionists. This joins him calling me a racist who “’sort of’ should look at himself in the mirror” a few months ago when speaking at Harvard. (I liked the “sort of” hedge – he knew he was “going there,” and “there” he indeed went and should not have.) That is, my 20+ years of commentary on race is the work of a self-hating black bigot whose ideas are compatible with the right-wing zealots who stormed the Capitol.
Blue and bluer …
… Meet YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
And now, for the first time in two centuries, a new chemically-made pigment of the celebrated color is available for artists — YInMn Blue. It’s named after its components — Yttrium, Indium, and Manganese — and its luminous, vivid pigment never fades, even if mixed with oil and water.
Winter magic …
… The Night of the Snowfall by Mo H. Saidi : American Life in Poetry. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
History's rhymes …
… Before the Fall - Law & Liberty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Craveri’s book is not a narrative history of the French Revolution but a kind of portrait-collage of aristocratic lives shortly before, during and after the revolution. It is not to be recommended to those who do not have much knowledge of the French Revolution or European history of the second half of the 18th Century, for it moves back and forth in time and introduces persons and events without explanation and that will be familiar only to those already with a fairly intimate knowledge of the subject matter. It seems sometimes as if the author is writing for a coterie rather than a general audience.
Something to think on …
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
— James Joyce, born on this date in 1882
Monday, February 01, 2021
The focus of a bird …
… Poem of the week: The Owl by Edward Thomas | Edward Thomas | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.
— Hugo von Hofmannsthal, born on this date in 1874
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Just to be fair …
… MDS COVID-19 Vaccine Statement for Patients.
Since, heaven forfend, I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I am unaware of the official position. Though as Carl Sagan wrote:
One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.
Of course, we must take Dr. Fauci at his ever-changing word.
Not what you might think …
… First Known When Lost: Significance.
Slender threads. Little things. They all add up.
Worth considering …
… How COVID-19 'Vaccines' May Destroy the Lives of Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I've done some medical editing in my time (which only means I'm more or less medically literate), but it has seemed to me from the start that this vaccine has been rushed on to the market, and I have been skeptical from the start about the genetic factor. My wife has Parkinson's, so if she is urged to get the vaccine I fully intend to raise objections.
Then there's this: CDC Issues Report On Vaccine Side Effects Using Data It’s Own Website Said It Shouldn’t Use.
Something to think on …
Recipe For Greatness — To bear up under loss; To fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; To be victor over anger; To smile when tears are close; To resist disease and evil men and base instincts; To hate hate and to love love; To go on when it would seen good to die; To look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be. That is what any man can do, and be great.
— Zane Grey, born on this date in 1872
Saturday, January 30, 2021
In case you wondered …
… Why are books about books so fascinating? | The Independent. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… even a dry-seeming nonfiction category like “books about books” – a librarian might label them “studies of print culture” – can be dangerously fascinating.
Something to think on …
Solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
— Walter Savage Landor, born on this date in 1775
Friday, January 29, 2021
Distinctions …
… Celebrity, Success, and the Kingdom of Heaven - Front Porch Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Most of us are, I think, called to quiet, ordinary lives of faithfulness, the successes of which are largely invisible or at least unheralded. Many of the saints give us our model for this sort of quiet faithfulness. While some of them were famous and noteworthy people in their lifetimes, the vast majority of them were total nobodies as far as their societies were concerned. We know them today because they lived according to a radically different table of values: the virtues of the Kingdom of Heaven. Even then, there are tens, even hundreds, of thousands of saints whose names we don’t know, remaining anonymous and unknown in their faithfulness. The celebrity pastor is not the model—the model is the parish priest, faithfully saying the liturgy to his congregation, day in and day out for decades, without the vast majority of us ever learning his name.
Something to think on …
A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.
— Anton Chekhov, born on this date in 1860
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Much in what he says …
… The Young Poet and the Inauguration - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Fulton Sheen wrote God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925), not troubling to translate for his readers many a quotation from the original French or Latin. He brought that same learning and literary erudition, wearing it lightly, to his tremendously popular television show.
What happened?
A lot of things, of course, but near the top is the obvious fact that people who lead our cultural institutions do not know the arts, and do not care to learn.
Take contemporary hymns. Take them, please.
Fascinating …
… The 10 quirkiest physics stories of 2020. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
“Sag, settle, and curl” sounds like me at the end of the day.
Well, good …
… Student Activist Arrested After Reading Poem Wins Key First Amendment Victory - PEN America. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Let’s hope everyone involved remembers this when it comes to views they disagree with.
Something to think on …
A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.
— Colette, born on this date in 1873
Celebrity and grief …
… THE LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST, VOLUME 3 | Kirkus Reviews. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Explorer of darkness …
… Poet and UW professor Theodore Roethke moved among mysteries — and literary legacy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)Roethke, who also won two National Book Awards for collections of his poems, followed that maxim about vulnerability to sometimes-extreme lengths. With his perennial subject as a writer the dark yet often exultant journey to the interior of the self, Roethke indeed moved among the most profound mysteries of human existence.
Could that be possible?
… Veteran Film Scribe Fears Dems Are Crushing Free Speech - Hollywood in Toto.
“It’s nuts,” Stone says. “I don’t see any way forward in the atmosphere we have [now]. We have to branch out, expanding our voice … it’s become too stifling.
Poet and publisher — and friends …
… Remembered Relationships: A Review of John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship - Front Porch Republic.
Samway leaves no stone unturned in providing the chronological details of the life and publication history of John Berryman. The seven chapters of the work chronicle Giroux and Berryman’s lives from childhood to Berryman’s death in 1972. During Samway’s account of their Columbia years, we receive insights into the courses they took, the grades they received, and the relationships they had with particularly influential professors, such as Mark Van Doren.
Appreciation …
… The Enduring Prose and Poetry of Clive James. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
To me it seems that to give happiness is a far nobler goal that to attain it: and that what we exist for is much more a matter of relations to others than a matter of individual progress: much more a matter of helping others to heaven than of getting there ourselves.
— Lewis Carroll, born on this date in 1832
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Hmm …
… Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class - WSJ.
… the most salient theme of the past five years was not any challenge to democracy. The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t.
See also: The suicide of expertise: Glenn Reynolds.
It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.
And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty.
As Richard Feynman once said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
Always worth reading …
… Worth a Second Reading | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Schall wants his readers to realize that each of us has a decision to make, and a freely made decision it must be. After all, the “purpose of the Cosmos and our place within it” is to make possible that very decision.
Oops …
… New Yorker Gives Back Magazine Award Over Japan ‘Rental Family’ Story. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
People who have dealt with Family Romance said some of its services were real but the people its owner introduced to the media as customers were often themselves actors.
Something to think on …
Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.
— Louis Auchincloss, who died on this date in 2010
Monday, January 25, 2021
Yes, indeed …
… Thank you for the library and museum, Mr. Carnegie.
He paid for the Holmesburg Library I spent many a day in as a kid. It's where, one morning, I discovered H.D.'s poetry. "Pear Tree" has been a favorite of mine ever since/
Too clever by half …
… Oscar Wilde, my grandfather, ‘talked himself into prison’.
Here, as he reads from the cross examination, Holland groans. “Oh God! Honestly! How he could have done that. He had one joke too many and he talked himself into prison.”
That was my conclusion when I read an account of the trial many years ago.
In case you wondered …
… Yeats Now: How WB’s poetry still echoes in our lives. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Yeats’s great gift, and one which poets are still learning from, would seem to be his ability, acquired “labouring in ecstasy”, to achieve maximum intensity with minimal means, using simple nouns and verbs as well as basic metres, turbocharging rhetoric to make some of the most memorable – and most-often quoted – lines in the English language.
Be careful what you wish for …
… The New Censors | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Journalists celebrate the destruction of freedoms on which their profession depends. Also good to remember Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
Something to think on …
What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
— W. Somerset Maugham, born on this date in 1874
The romance of retail …
… Retail Heaven | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Sayaka Murata’s 2016 tale of a woman who becomes the perfect convenience-store employee, her whole body humming with the rhythms of the store, could have been a tragedy or even a grotesque. Instead it’s a strange romance, in which Keiko is the ingenue facing down societal disapproval in order to be with her fluorescent-lit, fully stocked beloved. Keiko, far from stalling out in life, has to grow and change in order to turn her early infatuation with Smile Mart into a mature love. Keiko’s voice, rendered in English by Ginny Tapley Takamori, is bright and curious, forthright and full of a kind of discount wonder. Convenience is a bit repetitive, perhaps too blunt in insisting that Keiko longs to be “a normal cog in society.” But on the rare occasions when Keiko reaches for metaphor, she shines: A baby’s cheek is “strangely soft, like stroking a blister.” She’s a little too chromium-plated to be sweet, a little too Teflon-coated to be gentle, and yet she’s a charmer and a delight. Her joy in the store radiates off the page.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Talk about cruel …
… Democrats Hiss In Terror As ACB Pulls Out Crucifix | The Babylon Bee.
Just a reminder: The Babylon Bee is a satire site, a Christian satire site.
Persona poems …
… Review: Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
To delve deeply into another’s psyche and try to make plain what perhaps even the subject herself has not fully realized is risky, especially with our contemporary sensitivity to cultural appropriation, but neither Ovid (nor any author of persona poetry that I can think of) felt compelled to justify their “stealth / and nerve to steal your mind and heart.” Perhaps because so many of us assume personal Flannery ownership, we react proprietarily, but in accepting these sonnets as literary creations, authorial what-if musings, I was thoroughly engaged. Did I agree? Disagree? Ever thought of that before? And so forth.
Soul brothers …
… Bright Star, Green Light by Jonathan Bate review – the parallel lives of a pair of romantics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
…
I find the ambition of Jonathan Bate’s new book a little on the mad side. Crikey, but this is daring. Attempting to squeeze the short, dazzling lives of Fitzgerald and Keats, already so much written about, into one short volume, he asks a huge amount of himself, and of his reader. Flipping between 19th-century Hampstead and 20th-century Los Angeles, between Keats’s mooning after the barely outlined figure of Fanny Brawne and Fitzgerald’s tortured relationship with the altogether more vivid creation that was his wife, Zelda, has the potential to cause a certain amount of dizziness. I felt at moments as though I was caught between two lovers. When I was with Keats, I longed to get back to Fitzgerald; when I was with Fitzgerald, I would experience a sudden, fierce pang for Keats.
Something to think on …
The human spirit is itself the most wonderful fairy tale that can possibly be. What a magnificent world lies enclosed within our bosoms! No solar orbit hems it in, the inexhaustible wealth of the total visible creation is outweighed by its riches!
— E. T. A. Hoffmann, born on this date in 1776
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Something new and brave …
… Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford review - both a requiem and a giving of new life | Francis Spufford | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“What if, what if”, people keep wondering in Light Perpetual; “Why this life and not the other?” The novel itself, for all its intricate realism, is questing for alternative histories, other futures. How can the loss of a life be measured, Spufford asks: “How can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time?” Once we’ve switched to this “other reel”, it comes as a shock to look back, to be reminded of the history that blew these children to dust. So Spufford proceeds with acts of measuring that defeat all tapes and scales, considering the inestimable value of people by imagining them gone. The novel is both a requiem and a giving of new life, fusing death and resurrection as they are fused in the Christian liturgy: “Let light perpetual shine upon them.”
Something to think on …
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
— Derek Walcott, born on this date in 1930
Quintet …
… Five Best: Philip Terzian on Memoirs by Writers - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The Percy memoir sounds very interesting. The Mencken is a classic.
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