Qua Humbug

Detail from the Book of Kells, p. 291v, portrait of St. John....

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:16:59 -0400

Detail from the Book of Kells, p. 291v, portrait of St. John. From the incredibly beautiful Book of Kells iPad app.

"What is today called ‘experimental’ writing is unreadable. It fails because it is neither..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:28:12 -0400

“What is today called ‘experimental’ writing is unreadable. It fails because it is neither intelligent nor interesting. Without seriousness it cannot be interesting, and without mastery it will never be intelligent.”

- Cynthia Ozick, “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means”

Some words used by Doc Emrick to describe a hockey puck

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:24:19 -0400

Beat, blocked, bounced, brought, came back, careened, carried, chipped, chopped, cleared, controlled, covered, deflected, directed, dragged, dropped, dumped, fed in, fired, flew, flicked, floated, forced, grabbed, handed, handled, held, hoisted, hooked, hunted, intercepted, jabbed, jammed, kept, kicked, knocked down, laid, led on, left, lifted, lobbed, nudged, packed, passed, picked off, played, poked, popped, posted, protected, punched, pursued, pushed, rebounded, recovered, redirected, re-gathered, rescued, ricocheted, rifled, rushed, saved, sent, settled on, shaken, shot, shoveled, shuffled, shut down, skipped, slapped, slowed, slung, spun, stashed, steered, stopped, swatted, swept, taken, tangled, thrown, tipped, tossed, trickled, turned over, twisted, walked, went off, wound, wrapped.

Excerpt from a work in progress

Tue, 14 May 2013 19:12:00 -0400

You and I sat together in the coffee shop for some time. Through a series of Machiavellian political maneuvers and suppressions of revolt we had come into sole possession of the comfy seats, and there we sat, crested in the spoils of monarchy, you reading and me composing my letter to the editor. After a while something dispelled the perpetual haze of self-involvement which has always dogged me, despite my most half-hearted efforts at resistance. I looked up and saw your eyes arrested by tears. You were moved by what you read. Like Virgil in the ancient days, not quite the days of yore but certainly before the time of hipsters, you were moved to public tears by what you beheld. I shall never forget how you appeared to me that day.

With one hand you were funneling sips from a three gallon frappuccino, and with your literate hand you were reading from my copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. Or rather, Strunk’s Elements. This edition predated White’s sinister involvement, and was uncontaminated by his Claudius-like underminings and buttings-in and his general insinuating air of de-Strunkification. So what you read retained the pure passion and ravishing grace of the celestial original.

As I say, you stood there, sitting—you sat there, standing—like Milton’s Adam at the gaping floodgates of time, surveying the endless tapestry of crimes and injustices committed through all the world’s history. You read from Strunk’s latter pages, the timeless section on “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” and the immaculate table of “Words Often Misspelled.” And you were deeply affected. Your frappuccino sips diminished in intensity to the level of beautiful mouthbreathing. Your eyes were blue with dribbling tears. Your eyes were blue anyway, but now they seemed blue also.

You mustered the courage to speak. “So many abused words,” you said in a low strained tone, indicating profound grief. The long train of human abuses against language rolled through your sensitive mind, like so many axes chopping at so many saplings. “So many misspellings,” you lamented. “So many indiscriminate pronouns. Inept adverbial phrases, clumsy transpositions of meaning, redundancies of expression. Offenses against clarity are littered about, strewn around my foot.” An alert barista heard this phrase and came by with broom and dustpan, but left disappointed, and you resumed. “I am the guiltiest of all. I am the chief of verbal sinners. I deserve to rot, like the turkey and avocado sandwich in the display case.” The barista did not return, but I returned your broken teary gaze, which seemed to go past me, past the whipped cream melting and diffusing into the middle regions of your frappuccino bucket, all the way to the innermost pages of your life and the narrative thereof. “Our words are broken,” you declared. You looked around and gestured with open palm. “Consider the hipsters. They are sabotaging our beautiful language with their indiscriminate displays of mindless casual swearing. They cultivate the appearance of refinement but in language they have renounced the obligations of judgment. We are in Carthage, where the cauldron of illicit loves boils all around us.” You emphasized the words “Carthage” and “boils” by smacking the wooden table with such force as to dislocate any ordinary item of furniture, but this table was steady as iron, firmly ballasted by its mammoth load of frappuccino.

I let the time pass at its will. At some point I looked around and began to consider the hipsters in our midst. I tried to think clearly about them. Yes, I thought, they swear too much, too artlessly. But look at the way these cats—they like to speak of cats—have dug down into the past and given old things new life and appreciation. Handlebar mustaches, spats, little neglected objects of desire. I began to realize that in my own life I wished for that sort of reappropriation. I wished for my soul to encounter the spiritual equivalent of people who turn tree stumps into chairs or old rowboats into bookshelves. For a while I retained that pleasant thought in the mouth of my mind, savoring it, dreaming of it.

In due time we abdicated our comfy thrones, having appointed two malleable-looking successors who would exchange influence for outlet access. We walked outside, and I longed for benediction.

How David Moyes and 'the god squad' infuriated a former team-mate with their Christian faith - News & Comment - Football - The Independent

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:10:06 -0400

How David Moyes and 'the god squad' infuriated a former team-mate with their Christian faith - News & Comment - Football - The Independent

A Theology of Singleness, Part 2

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:24:43 -0400

A Theology of Singleness, Part 2

To Go Stag is to Elope with an Ass

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:24:05 -0400

To Go Stag is to Elope with an Ass:

My suggested and rejected title for my essay on singleness for Image Journal’s Good Letters. Part two should appear tomorrow.

"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 09:53:18 -0400

“

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in this world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

I open the New Testament and read: ‘If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me.’ Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars! We would be sunk if it were not for Christian scholarship! Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would one, two, three, run us all down if it got loose (that is, if Christian scholarship did not restrain it).

”

- Kierkegaard, Journals (via ayjay)

"Education is the key to eliminating gender inequality, to reducing poverty, to creating a..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 16:02:00 -0400

“Education is the key to eliminating gender inequality, to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet, to preventing needless deaths and illness, and to fostering peace. And in a knowledge economy, education is the new currency by which nations maintain economic competitiveness and global prosperity.”

- Sec. of Education Arne Duncan

True enough, and yet sometimes it appears that Americans view education as a machine for the production and transmission of virtue, in the same way that some Christians have tried to build engines of morality. These are machines in which we place our trust not out of certainty but as a last resort, lacking conviction in any knowable source of virtue beyond ourselves.

"Optimism is not a Christian virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what you want..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 15:34:00 -0400

“Optimism is not a Christian virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what you want to see and not seeing what you don’t want to see. Hope is facing reality with eyes wide open and saying, nonetheless this is what we’re going to do by the grace of God.”

- Richard John Neuhaus

Purveyors and vendors of optimism never call it—explicitly—“a Christian virtue” because to do so would be self-evidently absurd.

Herbert Hodge – The Cabbie Philosopher « The Dabbler

Thu, 02 May 2013 08:26:30 -0400

Herbert Hodge – The Cabbie Philosopher « The Dabbler

"In a thousand years or so, when the first archaeologists from beyond the date-line unload their boat..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:40:31 -0400

“

In a thousand years or so, when the first archaeologists from beyond the date-line unload their boat on the sands of Southern California, they will find much the same scene as confronted the Franciscan Missionaries. A dry landscape will extend from the ocean to the mountains. Bel Air and Beverly Hills will lie naked save for scrub and cactus, all their flimsy multitude of architectural styles turned long ago to dust, while the horned toad and the turkey buzzard leave their faint imprint on the dunes that will drift on Sunset Boulevard.

For Los Angeles, when its brief history comes to an end, will fall swiftly and silently. Too far dispersed for effective bombardment, too unimportant strategically for the use of expensive atomic devices, it will be destroyed by drought. Its water comes 250 miles from the Colorado River. A handful of parachutists or partisans anywhere along that vital aqueduct can make the coastal strip uninhabitable. Bones will whiten along the Santa Fe trail as the great recession struggles Eastwards. Nature will re-assert herself and the seasons gently obliterate the vast, deserted suburb. Its history will pass from memory to legend until, centuries later, as we have supposed, the archaeologists prick their ears at the cryptic references in the texts of the twentieth century to a cult which once flourished on this forgotten strand; of the idol Oscar - sexless image of infertility - of the great Star Goddesses who were once noisily worshipped there in a Holy Wood.

”

- Evelyn Waugh, “Half in Love with Easeful Death”

Moby Dick, or, The Card Game — Kickstarter

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:02:24 -0400

Moby Dick, or, The Card Game — Kickstarter

"I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:25:30 -0400

“I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage.”

- Graham Greene on the great At Swim-Two-Birds

"The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:53:57 -0400

“The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.”

- Antony Jay (via thefearsarepapertigers)

The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever - Les Murray - Australian Poetry Library

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:54:40 -0400

The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever - Les Murray - Australian Poetry Library

Photo

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:08:36 -0400

Photo

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:05:15 -0400

theparisreview: INTERVIEWER Trains appear often in your novels—what do they symbolize? CLAUDE...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:56:23 -0400

theparisreview:

INTERVIEWER

Trains appear often in your novels—what do they symbolize?

CLAUDE SIMON

Nothing but trains.

Padres apparently attempting radical 8-man lineup

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:35:56 -0400

Padres apparently attempting radical 8-man lineup