Man, this cold weather is killing me. Full-blown frost advisory last night. Statistically speaking, there is only a 10% chance of frost after the average last frost date, and we got hit ten days after the average last frost date (the average last frost date for Kalamazoo, Michigan, is May 15th). It took me 45 minutes to cover everything and carry pots inside. Good thing the gin and tonics had taken full hold, after three hours of cleaning my office. It wasn't exactly a Friday night to make a frat boy drool with envy, but a guy does what he can.
That's it for now. I have a long couple of days ahead of me and TDE traffic slows considerably on holiday weekends. Enjoy yourself.
BYCU
The un-official start of summer . . . and patchy frost is the word. This really sucks. * * * * * * * But it doesn't suck as much as my holiday weekend. My plans: Work in the office: Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, Monday morning. The one bright side: I plan on drinking Friday and Saturday nights while I work. It's actually pretty enjoyable. The phone doesn't ring, I put on some light music while I get things organized, and drink vodka tonics. I can't do any hardcore billable work while drinking, but I have a mountain of fluff and administrative crud that has been backlogging for a month now. My family will be gone, so I'll use the opportunity to catch up on everything, from hard projects (in the morning) to fluff administrative projects (evenings). * * * * * * My family is bird watching for the weekend, so I can't complain about spending my holiday in the office. I'm getting off easy. * * * * * * * Dastardly long hairs: "According to a new report from Restaurant Sciences, which tracks food and beverage sales nationwide, “Pabst Blue Ribbon-swilling hipsters” are the reason why “sub-premium” beer prices have climbed 9.4% in the last seven months in New York City and risen 6.8% on the national level, even though the fancier beer prices have stayed relatively stable." Link. * * * * * * * Dastardly nerds: "Vulcan Ale was dreamed up by Canada’s Delancey Direct to celebrate the centennial of Vulcan, Alberta, a small Canadian prairie town that has leveraged its name (which it shares with Spock’s home planet) to become a Trekkie tourist mecca." Link.
Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
In June of 1921, Max Beerbohm wrote discouragingly to a prospective biographer that he, Max, was not (as Shaw had labeled him] "the incomparable Max," but rather (as the humorists had it) "the comparable Max." Beerbohm continued,
I am not incomparable. Compare me. Compare me as an essayist (for instance] with other essayists. Point out what an ignoramus I am beside Belloc, and how Chesterton's high spirits and abundance shame me.
And so on. The biographer, Bohun Lynch, had mentioned he was planning a little book. "Oh, keep it little!" begged the incomparable Max. [S.N. Behrman, Portrait of Max, Random House, 1960, 21-22]
Politics
The IRS official will take The Fifth. How special. * * * * * * * I'm glad we turned health care over to the IRS. No risks there. * * * * * * * So now the Obama White House is engaged in three scandals. * * * * * * * I have a theory: The Powers that Be want two strong, yet roughly equal, political parties. When one party starts to get too strong, the Powers bring it down a notch. These scandals picked up considerable steam right around the time that preliminary polling indicated that the Democrats would pick up seats in the 2014 elections. * * * * * * * Why do the Powers want to two parties? Simple: It keeps out third parties, and the Powers have the two ascendant parties under their thumb. If they get third party mavericks in there, they might lose their grip. * * * * * * * In fact, I think the Democrats want a viable Republican party and vice-versa. Why? The same reason: It keeps out third-party candidates. If two parties are viable, a vote for any other candidate is merely a wasted vote. Just a theory, of course, but I suspect it's valid.
Random Thoughts from Vacation
That's the King of Rock-n-Roll and me. It's not the real Elvis; just a picture.
Comparably-priced hotels: Super 8 and Days Inn. Super 8: Good. Days Inn: Bad (unless you like it when the bathroom of your room smells like urine, the continental breakfast sucks, and the double beds are almost half the size of the Super 8 doubles).
What exactly is the difference between a "hotel" and a "motel"? I used to think that a hotel had interior hallways and a motel didn't, but that's not the case.
How much of The Seven Storey Mountain royalties were plowed back into Merton's monastery?
Possibly the best reading advice I ever received: read biographies, not histories. You get a better flavor for the times, and the personal story holds the reader's attention better. History is fine and good, of course, but biography simply offers more.
I'm sad I didn't receive that advice 25 years ago.
One of the best bios: The Seven Storey Mountain. Sure, Merton turned out to a little whacked and very liberal, but that book is a flat-out classic.
I find traveling absolutely exhausting. Is it just me? And why is it exhausting (either for me only or for everyone)? I slept over eight hours Sunday night after getting home. I could barely keep my eyes open at the office on Monday.
Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi is renowned as one of the country's best bookstores. It was a great place, no doubt, but the renown seems a little exaggerated.
Memphis is a pit. Beale Street is great and the view of the Mississippi River alone is worth a visit, but Memphis is a pit. It's the bankruptcy capital of the United States and it's laced with crime and poverty.
At one point, I was within yelling distance of twelve Memphis police officers while on Beale Street (which was closed off to vehicle traffic). The Memphis authorities wanted a presence there for a reason.
Mammoth Cave isn't worth the trip, unless you have small kids or unless they can give you an expedited tour. Our tour was three hours long . . . and two hours too long.
A hundred years ago, the Mammoth Cave tours would take over twelve hours. I think I would've broken down in tears at hour six.
Whirlwind trip to the upper South, the Mississippi Delta region. We started at the Abbey of Gethsemani Wednesday evening. Caught Compline, then left for our hotel in Cave City. Mammoth Cave Thursday morning, then Memphis for its barbecue festival Thursday night. Hurricanes were pretty strong; so was Beale Street; probably my favorite jaunt of the trip, though the trip to Graceland Friday morning rocked. I always get a kick out of Elvis. He strikes me as the laboratory test for what happens to a genuinely good person when he gets too much fame and fortune. I wish he had given me one of those Cadillacs. Then we went to Oxford, Mississippi to check out the Ole Miss campus. The football stadium is pretty nice . . . its top notch class of new recruits will probably be happy there. We also checked out Rowan Oak. I told my family about how Walker Percy and Shelby Foote drove hours to the house, just to meet the famous author, but Percy couldn't muster the nerve to get out of the house. Foote spent a long time on the front porch, talking with the master and drinking lemonade. I guess Percy sat in the car the whole time. We also checked out the city's famous town square and world-class bookstore. After that, we went to Tupelo, Mississippi, where we met up with family for my niece's wedding on Saturday in New Albany, Mississippi. I didn't go to Elvis' birthplace, because I've been there twice before and, though worth one visit, there's not much to see. Nice wedding; nice groom for my niece. We're very happy for her, though Sunday's trip back home was brutal: 12 hours, with a pounding (pounding, pounding) 45-minute thunderstorm in the hills just outside Nashville.
And kudos for the first TDE reader to draw the link between the prose style of this post, the content, and the picture.
"To finish off what we do often means taking care of minor details, of the little things. This demands an effort, demands sacrifice, and when we offer it, it is pleasing to God. Taking care of the details for love of God does not diminish the soul. It ennobles it, because it perfects the work we are doing, and when we offer it up for specific intentions we share in the needs of the whole Church. In this way our job takes on a supernatural dimension it previously lacked." Francis Fernandez
Miscellaneous Passages
"True freedom comes only to a lucid mind unbound by conventional wisdom and suspicious of received opinions." Joseph Epstein, on the thought of George Santayana
"[H]umanitarians have an intense hatred of mankind as it is." Santayana
"Santayana says that, as we approach death, the world itself begins to look dark to us because we cannot imagine it being much good without us in it." Joseph Epstein
"The most interesting American political figures cannot be squeezed into the constricted and lifeless pens of liberal or conservative." Bill Kauffman, Ain't My America
"You can have your hometown or you can have the empire. You can't have both." Bill Kauffman, Ain't My America
John Randolph was kicked out of William and Mary for dueling over the correct pronunciation of a word.
John Randolph referred to Kentucky as the "Australia of Virginia."
"No government, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, can be fit to govern me or those whom I represent." John Randolph
"Never make people laugh. If you would succeed in life, you must be solemn, solemn as an ass. All the great monuments are built over solemn asses." Senator Thomas Corwin
In John Wu's "well-known translation of the New Testament he opens the Gospel of St. John with the words, 'In the beginning was the Tao.'" Thomas Merton, "A Christian Looks at Zen."
"You can hardly set Christianity and Zen side by side and compare them. This would almost be like trying to compare mathematics and tennis." Thomas Merton
"Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands." Seneca
Tonight is the much-anticipated release of the new "Star Trek" movie. It's expected to make $100 million this weekend. That's a lot, but imagine how much it would make if the people buying tickets were going with dates.
Most "Star Trek" fans are men, or a reasonable facsimile.
Miscellaneous Passages . . .
. . . with a little commentary:
"To consort with the crowd is harmful; there is no person who does not make some vice attractive to us, or stamp it upon us, or taint us unconsciously therewith. . . . I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman, because I have been among human beings." Seneca
"Your good qualities should face inwards." Seneca
Seneca on "the flow": "When one is busy and absorbed in one's work, the very absorption affords great delight."
Seneca on the saints: "Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts."
On the brain's elasticity: "We become, neurologically, what we think." Nicholas Carr
Nineteen-century missionaries ""who went into the Five Points, the poorest neighborhood in New York City, believed the Irish there to be so degraded that they dragged down the African Americans around. them." Thaddeus Russell
Re: Eminem: "Whites imitating blacks is America's oldest pastime." Thaddeus Russell
"We must come to terms with the fact that a majority of ex-slaves--field hands and house slaves, men and women--had a positive view of the institution, and many unabashedly wished to return to their slave days." Thaddeus Russell
"Economic historians have determined that on average, Northern farmers worked four hundred more hours per year than did slaves. And no group in world history worked more than industrial workers in the nineteenth-century United States." Thaddeus Russell
Miscellaneous excerpts from my recent reading:
"Several of America's greatest heroes who were born during the age of slavery were whipped far more often than most slaves." Thaddeus Russell
"In fact, only a tiny minority of anarchists have practised terror as a revolutionary strategy . . . historically anarchism has been far less violent than other political creeds . . .". Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
It is merely a "popular prejudice that the anarchist tradition has not produced any thinkers of the first order." Peter Marshall
"The anarchist sensibility made its first appearance amongst the Taoists of ancient China." Peter Marshall
"When asked what would replace government, numerous anarchists have answered with 'What do you replace cancer with?'" Peter Marshall
"The State never abdicates in the face of failure, but seeks to cover up its deficiencies with an extension of power." Frank Chodorov
"No economy can attain or maintain a high standard in the face of frequent visits from brigands, in which class, economically speaking, the tax collector must be put." Frank Chodorov
Re: The U.S. Dollar. "That this piece of paper, or electronic impulse, of no intrinsic value is accepted the world over as a means of payment and a store of value must stand as one of the greatest, and most improbable, monetary achievements of all time." James Grant
Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
When Dorothy Sayers attempted to explain the process that an author uses to create a character, she found she could not improve on the "detective system" expounded by Father Brown in the story, "The Secret of Father Brown." Sayers quoted the priest's own summary ("I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders.") Similarly, she argued, "the jealousy of Othello is the true creative expression of the jealousy of Shakespeare." [The Mind of the Maker, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1941, p. 29]
Catholic Men's Quarterly, a one-of-a-kind general interest men's magazine written by Catholic men for Catholic men. Makes a great Father's Day gift.
"The Daily Eudemon is the sort of thing
that Chesterton or Mencken would be doing, if they were
alive today. It's what, in saner times, was called journalism.
In the writing and in the reading, it's exactly the sort
of leisure we should want at the basis of culture."Mike
Aquilina, Author of The Fathers of the Church
and TV Talk Show Host.
"Literate
Catholicism-urbane, witty, engaged-is alive and well!
If you can read, you should be reading The Daily Eudemon!"David
Scott, author of A Revolution of Love: The Meaning
of Mother Teresa
"If
you like your blogs pithy, nimble, pointed, high-spirited,
and waggish, then bookmmark Eric Scheske's The Daily
Eudemon. Ooops! You want prolixity, density, meandering,
dull, and sober? Then run (do not walk!) to the blogs
of the major news outlets. They have just what you want.
Honestly they do." John
Peterson, Editor, G.K. Chesterton: Collected Works,
Volumes 12 and 13.
"Eric
Scheske's web site is full of information and insight.
Always worth a read."James
V. Schall, Author of Another Sort of Learning.
"Eric
Scheske has one of the few indispensable sites in an overcrowded
blogosphere." Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D.,
New York Times Bestselling Author and Author
of How
the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
Miscellaneous Passages
"True freedom comes only to a lucid mind unbound by conventional wisdom and suspicious of received opinions." Joseph Epstein, on the thought of George Santayana
"[H]umanitarians have an intense hatred of mankind as it is." Santayana
"Santayana says that, as we approach death, the world itself begins to look dark to us because we cannot imagine it being much good without us in it." Joseph Epstein
"The most interesting American political figures cannot be squeezed into the constricted and lifeless pens of liberal or conservative." Bill Kauffman, Ain't My America
"You can have your hometown or you can have the empire. You can't have both." Bill Kauffman, Ain't My America
John Randolph was kicked out of William and Mary for dueling over the correct pronunciation of a word.
John Randolph referred to Kentucky as the "Australia of Virginia."
"No government, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, can be fit to govern me or those whom I represent." John Randolph
"Never make people laugh. If you would succeed in life, you must be solemn, solemn as an ass. All the great monuments are built over solemn asses." Senator Thomas Corwin
In John Wu's "well-known translation of the New Testament he opens the Gospel of St. John with the words, 'In the beginning was the Tao.'" Thomas Merton, "A Christian Looks at Zen."
"You can hardly set Christianity and Zen side by side and compare them. This would almost be like trying to compare mathematics and tennis." Thomas Merton
"Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands." Seneca
Miscellaneous excerpts from my recent reading:
"Several of America's greatest heroes who were born during the age of slavery were whipped far more often than most slaves." Thaddeus Russell
"In fact, only a tiny minority of anarchists have practised terror as a revolutionary strategy . . . historically anarchism has been far less violent than other political creeds . . .". Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
It is merely a "popular prejudice that the anarchist tradition has not produced any thinkers of the first order." Peter Marshall
"The anarchist sensibility made its first appearance amongst the Taoists of ancient China." Peter Marshall
"When asked what would replace government, numerous anarchists have answered with 'What do you replace cancer with?'" Peter Marshall
"The State never abdicates in the face of failure, but seeks to cover up its deficiencies with an extension of power." Frank Chodorov
"No economy can attain or maintain a high standard in the face of frequent visits from brigands, in which class, economically speaking, the tax collector must be put." Frank Chodorov
Re: The U.S. Dollar. "That this piece of paper, or electronic impulse, of no intrinsic value is accepted the world over as a means of payment and a store of value must stand as one of the greatest, and most improbable, monetary achievements of all time." James Grant 