changes!

     So, over the weekend I made a couple of decisions that will, by next autumn, radically change our lives around here. Ancillary to these decisions was a stunning insight (for me anyway) - the whole Seminary Quest is over. My last gasp of Seminary Nostalgia was the whole "I'm going to Nashotah House" debacle. Long time readers of ER have long grown used to such histrionics; to those of you who are new the the Spectacle, my apologies. As so often happens, I needed to make such a bold assertion in order to expel it for all time, and clear the way for the real decisions that force themselves upon me every so often. 
     In any case, it's clear to me now that Seminary, as a route to something called Ordination, is a phantom. It's never going to happen. That's not really my calling, dear reader. This does not imply that I will never return to formal studies in theology and philosophy, but such studies, if a reality at all, are in the future. For now, I have other work to do. 
     As for the details of those decisions made over the weekend, I'll leave those to your imaginations for now. I will say that if all goes as planned, this time next year my company will have a completely different direction and focus. I also hope to be launched on a difficult venture that could allow me to pick up some teaching gigs here and there. Again, leave details aside - suffice it to say that we have a plan, we have the means, and all we need now is patience. Yes, patience, my greatest virtue...

What a great poem by David Wheatley. Yes, that's a sort of sonnet, and it's brilliant.

Here you go. I love a good anthology.

more lazy cross-platformed lunacy...

In my reeducation camps you'll find only the best scotch. And tea. But no coffee - that will be banned from all areas of life, every sphere of our revolutionary world.

I'm sick of hearing about it. I can barely write or say the word.

Starbucks can remain, however, for the sake of the lemon pound cake. But they'll serve no coffee. Tea and scotch from 6am onward, with wine starting at a civilized 2pm - that's the universal drinks menu.

Some of us from the Flyover States will all be drunkenly laughing as we move into George Clooney's houses and take over Matt Damon's ranch and suchlike. In quieter moments, with our tea, we'll all recite from the Book of Kafka, and eat gumbo from Jamie Oliver's skull.

Can I still live in the hills of Virginia! asks a counterrevolutionary friend.

Absotively! I encourage it, once you are released from the camp. Just remember that when the wind shifts, the smoke from the ruins of the wealthier suburbs of Washington, D. C. will sting your eyes a bit.

This will be the first revolution against overweening pretension and condescension. So Warren Buffet is safe, but George Soros is hosed.

But of course, the ultimate goal is the incarceration of Bono until he signs the confession.

And anyone caught with a Che Guevara T-shirt will suffer some sort of indignity. Walter Salles will certainly be relieved of his $2.6 billion in assets and cash, and he will be forced to watch The Motorcycle Diaries backwards for the rest of his natural life.

lazy cross-platform posting about revolution or something...

     I propose a Revolution!
     When the revolution comes, and the wealth of the Ruling Class is expropriated, it'll impoverish whole populations in Berkeley, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Hollywood. New York'll be stripped bare. Texas will just secede, so we won't have to worry about 'em. Meanwhile, much of 'flyover country' will be just fine. 

     Yes, the wealthiest of the pretentious will be found among the Liberal Intelligencia, our Betters who daily encourage us to live ‘simply‘ on ‘less‘ as they carve for themselves ever more lucrative means of escaping a dystopia they helped to create.
     It’s not money in itself that is the problem. I don’t care if you own an island and half of Montana. No, I can do without their smugness, their smallness, their obvious love of power. 

     O how I hate people with jets and supercars telling the rest of us to ‘accept less mobility‘ so as to ‘save the planet’. Enough already of idiots milling about Davos chattering about income gaps and global warming while looking for a waiter with more champagne. Sink to the bottom of the sea Progressives With Expansive Portfolios, movie stars with ranches and palaces on Lake Como who lecture the Masses on Social Justice.

This tea isn't bad either.

You know, wine really does gladden the heart. My heart is gladdened after only two glasses with my dinner. Yes, it's a good consolation on the way.

everyone needs a profession...

Yes, I watch this sort of thing for fun. 

trendy trends trending...

'Pussy Riot' is 'trending' on Facetube - do I want to know what that means?

do stop whining about your ph.d. and the market for perfessors...

     So, you went and obtained, at great cost in both time and treasure, a Ph. D. in one of the disciplines delightfully bundled as The Humanities. Good for you. Perhaps it took many years, and perhaps you had to endure hour upon hour of hard labor to finish everything. Again, good for you. Now hear the good news - the world owes you not a damned thing for such an achievement. 

     That's right, you are owed neither a tenure-track position, nor a good salary, nor benefits, nor the prestige that used to accrue to the title 'Professor' (such as it was). If there are no good teaching jobs available for you, well, suck it the hell up. You took the risk, you signed on the line that was dotted, and now you have to live with your decisions.

     Here's the even better news - the sheer fact of obtaining a Ph. D. in The Humanities signifies nothing. From the fact that you now possess a Ph. D., I can infer nothing about your intelligence, your talent, your brazen originality or lack thereof. To be blunt, I find most Ph. D.'s to be little more than somewhat smart time-servers. They have an uncanny ability to please, to negotiate bureaucratic tangles, and to stay just on this side of the truly transgressive. Most can write somewhat serviceable prose, but don't ask me to spend time reading it. In short, rarely does the labor and time required to obtain a Ph. D. signify anything other than a desire to never leave school, and that, dear reader, qualifies a person to do absolutely nothing.

     This implies that the lack of good teaching jobs might just reflect on you, the holder of that newly minted Ph. D., as much as it does on the 'Market'. Perhaps, despite your GPA and all those reviews, you're at best a passable teacher and a mediocre scholar. To put it in the most brutal terms possible, perhaps you're just not worth the $250k a year a good school would spend on you as a tenure-track professor pulling down a good salary. 

     So please, stop whining about the State Of The Humanities. Stop whining, for the love of God, about how you can't make a living teaching Old Church Slavonic at the local state school. You knew the odds, you took your chances, now be a grown up and live with the consequences. 

     Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to review the Greek Verb in the Subjunctive Mood, then drive thirty miles to inspect an enormous roof. If all goes well this week, I should secure three contracts worth around $18,000 to my company. This might allow me to hire another person - it'll take some more math to figure out if that's possible. All the while, there will be world enough and time to read Homer, study some Greek, and contemplate Pranger's argument in Eternity's Ennui. What do you have planned?

Homer and Plato, together again...

     'The real culprits, and the only ones, are the gods, who live "exempt from care," while men are consumed with sorrow. The curse which turns beauty into destructive fatality does not originate in the human heart. The diffuse guilt of Becoming pools into a single sin, the one sin condemned and explicitly stigmatized by Homer: the happy carelessness of the Immortals,' Rachel Bespaloff, On the Iliad.

     Here we find a key, perhaps, to Plato's decree of exile for the poetes who would thus sow corruption not simply by the unworthy mimetic rendering of unworthy gods, but also by the displacement of responsibility from the human heart to the whimsy of those unworthy immortals. 

     Here too we find a theological crux that remains alive to this day. More about that anon - for now, note that Plato offers a radically new vision of virtue and the formation of the soul inclined to the Good. There may, for all that, be a way through the thicket, one which will allow us to have our Homer and keep some fellowship with Plato. 

     To find that way, we need Augustine as revealed by James Wetzel. We also need Paul. 

     It's a tangle, no?

stuff you really need to know...

     So I made spaghetti carbonara for lunch, and yes, I cooked with white wine in the middle of a workday. Even had a small glass. Altogether, it took twenty minutes to cook, forty to eat.

     It's called civilization my friends. You really should try it some time. I could descant on how civilization is a manifestation of our priestly calling as creatures made in the image and likeness of God but hey, you already know all about that.

     By the by, spaghetti carbonara is a peasant concoction, like most great classic dishes. Thus, you can now slide into a fine dining establishment and buy it for up to $30. 

     Mine probably cost about $6. 

     Both are civilized. Think about it.

     Anyway, back to work.

an amiable encounter...

Came upon this philosopher on my stoop yesterday afternoon. 

so it looks like 'Blame Canada' isn't just a South Park bit...

     'Meanwhile, one might have expected the American Civil War to have refocused American military thinking, but as Richard A. Preston shows in The Defense of the Undefended Border, until 1940 anglophobia remained a central motivating factor in the United States, and Canada a target for conquest. Between the world wars the United States developed three major war plans: one against Japan, one against Mexico, and War Plan Red, against the United Kingdom. (Germany was color-coded black, but there never was a War Plan Black.) In 1935 secret congressional hearings for air bases to launch surprise attacks on Canada, based on War Plan Red, were mistakenly published by the Government Printing Office and reported by the New York Times and the Toronto Globe. The story was re-discovered in 1975 and again in 1991 before being dug up once more in 2005. The existence of such a plan was treated with a sense of disbelief and laughing up the sleeve. But War Plan Red was not funny: it was detailed, amended and acted upon, and . . . it was no defense plan. The United States would start the war, and even if Canada declared neutrality the United States would still invade and conquer it, planning to "hold in perpetuity" all territory gained and to abolish the Dominion government. The plan was approved in May 1930 by the secretary of war and the secretary of the Navy in expectation of "consequent suffering to the [Canadian] population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country." In October 1934 the secretaries approved the strategic bombing of Halifax, Montreal, and Quebec City "on as large a scale as practicable." A second amendment, also approved at cabinet level, directed the U.S. Army to use poison gas at the outset as a supposedly "humanitarian" action that would cause Canada to surrender quickly, and thus save American lives. Even as late as 1939, as the free world was mobilizing to fight fascism, the U.S. Army War College and the Naval War College set as their planning priority "Overseas Expeditionary Force to Capture Halifax from Red-Crimson Coalition." This enduring hostility to Britain and Canada within the U.S. military was a legacy of the War of 1812 and was finally extinguished only by the Second World War, which ushered in the "special relationship,"' Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America, p. 407-8.

intervention fever...

     Below you have an illustration from Punch, as found on page 318 of Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War. 'Reports of the terrific slaughter at Antietam shocked the nation [Britain]; the 25,000 casualties on a single day seemed inconceivable, especially when compared to the 25,000 Britain suffered during the entire Crimean War,' (p. 315). 

yes, i watch football...but not futball...

     OSU's football team plays the California Golden Bears later tonight. California Golden Bears - are their biggest rivals the Care Bears? Do they enter the stadium doing an interpretive dance? 

     If Urban Meyer is looking for a terrible fifteenth string player for this game, I'm available.

something apt to the day...

     'Achilles pays for nothing; to Hector everything comes dear. Yet it is not Hector, but Achilles, whose insatiable rancor feeds even on victories, and who is forever "gorging himself with complaints." The man of resentment in the Iliad is not the weak man but, on the contrary, the hero who can bend everything to his will. With Hector, the will to greatness never pits itself against the will to happiness. That little bit of true happiness which is more important than anything else, because it coincides with the true meaning of life, will be worth defending even with life itself, to which it has given a measure, a form, a price. Even in defeat, the courage of Hector does not give way before the valor of Achilles, which has been nurtured on discontent and irritable anxiety. But the capacity for happiness, which rewards the efforts of fecund civilizations, puts a curb on the defender's mettle by making him more aware of the enormity of the sacrifice exacted by the gods of war. This capacity, however, does not develop until the appetite for happiness has been stilled, the appetite the drives the aggressor, who is less civilized, on toward his prey and fills his heart with "an infinite power for battle and truceless war," Rachel Baspaloff, On The Iliad.

something from Fr. Capon +

     'Omnes dii gentium daemonia sunt; Dominis autem coelos fecit. Deliver us, O Lord, from religiosity and Godlessness alike, lest we wander in fakery or die of boredom. Restore to us Thyself as Giver and the secular as Thy gift. Let idols perish and con jobs cease. Give repentance and better minds to all pagans and secularists; in the meantime, of Thy mercy, keep them out of our [wine] cellars,' The Supper of the Lamb, p. 88.