We are not a fashion conscious people, but we love our books (probably why I love living here).
Who Will Win The Next Nobel Prize For Literature (Poll)
Seeing His Holiness At The Capitol
I wasn’t one of the handful inside the Capitol, but was one of the ticketed folks on the West Lawn of the Capitol. We waited (the gates opened at five am – though I was not there nearly so early) for him to arrive and watched his speech on the jumbotrons (bless you, Pope Francis for spending so much time on the need to abolish the death penalty!).
When he came out, he was a vaguely anthropoid shape, dressed in white on a distant balcony. The experience was not physical closeness, nor even the presence of the Pontiff, which could have just as easily been experienced with far more clarity on a television (and perhaps more enthusiasm; it wasn’t the most rabid crowd I’d ever been in). Rather it was knowing that this was an important moment and you were there. Like the days when we have gone to the White House, such as when Osama Bin Laden was killed or Obama re-elected, when we went not to change history, because history was already changed, but to be there, at a symbolically important location, at a symbolically important time when something important (and good) was happening. Such things are important, personally.
On Care For Our Common Home (Laudato Si’)
Rather than give thoughts on it (other than – wow! a powerful statement for environmental and economic justice), I’m just going to copy out a bunch of passages that struck me.
Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message. We have no such right. (33)
“If we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations [John Paul II] (61)
Respect must also be shown for the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality. (63)
They suggest that human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor, and with the earth itself. According to the Bible, these three vital relationships has been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin. (66)
The Spirit of life dwells in every living creature and call us to enter into relationship with him. Discovering this presence leads up to cultivate the “ecological virtues.” (88)
For believers, this becomes a question of fidelity to the Creator, since God created the world for everyone. Hence every ecological approach needs to incorporate a social perspective which takes into account the fundamental rights of the poor and underprivileged. (93)
Underlying every form of work is a concept of the relationship which we can and must have with what is other than ourselves. (125)
To claim economic freedom while real conditions bar many people from access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practice a doublespeak with brings politics into disrepute. (129)
We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – need to be progressively replaced without delay. (164)
Saving banks at any cost, making the public pay the price, foregoing a firm commitment to reviewing and reforming the entire system, only reaffirms the absolute power of the financial system, a power which has no future and will only give rise to new crises after slow, costly, and only apparent recovery. (189)
The environment is one of those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces. (190)
If we reason only within the confines of [empirical science], little room would be left for aesthetic sensibility, poetry, or even reason’s ability to grasp the ultimate meaning and purpose of things. (199)
“The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.” (217)
It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. (217)
Mary, the Mother who cared for Jesus, now cares with maternal affection and pain for this wounded world. Just as her pierced heart mourned the death of Jesus, so now she grieves for the sufferings of the crucified poor and for the creatures of this world laid waste by human power. (241)
It’s Almost Time For The Republican Debate! What Drinking Games Should We Play?
‘The Intellectuals & The Masses: Pride And Prejudice Among The Literary Intelligentsia: 1880 – 1939’ By John Carey
The book got better.
I was immediately disappointed when I started reading, but it improved. Begun as a series of lectures, it still has too much tendentious point-making – like a doctoral these or, well… a lecture – but it turned into something interesting in spite of itself.
Some wonderful deep research into a series of literary figures (Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and others) to capture a sort of deep seated disgust with the masses (or the proles or whatever you want to call ’em; Carey makes a good point that it’s a fiction they’re appalled by and what they thought of as the masses never existed).
But his larger thesis, which is basically that works like The Wasteland (and Modernism, in general) were written complicated as a gate to keep out the unwashed was not well proven (and really, he didn’t even seem to be trying to prove it; he just said and moved on to show that some of these intellectuals were kind of morally ‘icky’).
Weekend Reading – I Can’t Believe An Oil Company Would Want To Hide Information From Us!
Ho Chi Minh
My better half actually bought this for herself. A dyed in the wool capitalist, she’s got a strange obsession with Leninist-Stalinist strongmen like Mao and Minh.
But I’m the one who wound up reading it first, mainly because it was there.
What can I say? It’s light reading, but not very illuminating. Official statements for public view don’t tell one very much. The interesting bits were gleaming a few bits of history that I didn’t know (taken with a grain of salt) and it was also interesting to see an article that he had written in the early thirties about the lynching in America (something that was on the rise at the time).
At first, I thought that some of the writing (translated, of course) came across as almost an Orwellian parody of itself. Talk about ‘right policies’ and ‘right thinking’ and ‘right ideology’ (sometime with ‘right’ being replaced with ‘correct’) leading inevitably to success. This was done the context of success having already been achieved and describing as the obvious outcome of that correct thinking.
Except then I remember the translations I have read of Sun Tzu and Confucian thought, as well as the religious pamphlets (translated into English) from the Wat Thai in Maryland. This seemed something rather endemic to a lot of Eastern thought. Rather than good actions leading to goodness, as it were, good or proper thinking (or religious practice) leads to good actions and good results. Not defending Ho Chi Minh, but this particularly trend in his writing is more about a non-western way of thinking than anything else.
Midweek Staff Meeting – It’s Not So Bad In Iowa
Revolution Books
I found myself in New York City for work the other week, so naturally I looked to find what bookstores were near my hotel. Weeding out the ones primarily serving Japanese speakers, I came across Revolution Books.
They are attempting to raise funds to move to a new (and more affordable) location and were having a series of readings and performances, as well putting their stocks of used books out for sale – $12 got you a back and all the used books your could fill it with. I wasn’t going to take advantage of that until I saw Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins. So, I added Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps and two books by Robbe-Grillet. My better half is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. She would probably be a Republican if the GOP weren’t so obviously crippled by dog whistle racism. But for some reason, she has a fascination with Asian communist leaders, so she added a collection of writings by Ho Chi Minh.
It’s a great resource and I hope that the place survives.
the coffee philosopher 