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.

yes, this...

Sometimes you just need a little encouragement. 

something from Ernst...

'...it is never unequivocally clear who God is. The one for whom we live and die, whom we love or hate, who possesses us in our inmost being, yields the evidence. If this is so, then Christianity is not merely akin to conviction, even less a mere religious doctrine, or conversely a particular morality within a limited social sphere. Rather it is worldwide service in the discipleship of Jesus and in resistance to superstition. What is determinative is the tie to the Lord, who was crucified on Golgotha, ' Ernst Kasemann.

not a movie review...

     In a fit of melancholy, I watched Taken 2, and found it hilarious. Apparently, one can set off hand grenades all over Istanbul without anyone noticing a thing.

     Like I said, it's hilarious.

the elca never fails to disappoint...

     I see the ELCA continues its slide into both fully embraced apostasy and the bad sort of irrelevance. I've long since accepted that the ELCA's was a false promise. Still, it saddens me from time to time.

time to denounce the Left once and for all...

     Yes, when I say that the US Progressive Left is more dangerous, more Totalitarian, than Russia's Authoritarians, I mean just what I say. Soon, we will find the illusion of neutrality stripped away once and for all. For me and my house, we reject the Progressive Left and all its pomps and works.

     And what are those pomps and works? Well, behold the gifts of the Progressive Left in the US: eugenics (abortion; euthanasia; the elimination of the poor and unfit); a vast digital panopticon; war without end for revolutionary ends both vague and dubious; the destruction of the family (itself a product of an earlier, more truly progressive movement).

     That's all just the beginning of the end you know. 

yes, i wrote this...weird it all is...

     So, we're in Oppositeland - Russia seems more and more sane a place, even with its outbursts of violence (which are, perhaps, over-hyped by the Progressive West). Progressives in the US are, to my ear, the greatest threat to life and liberty at the moment. In fact, they are for all intents and purposes the new Fascists in this country. 
     It comes down to what is, at the moment, the only choice - Totalitarian or Authoritarian order. What's so hard to accept is that the US is rapidly moving in the Totalitarian direction, while Russia simply follows its Authoritarian ways. I really don't know what to do with that. 

damn, 'die hard' is taken...

     Through the first half of the sales season, I got my ass kicked repeatedly. There's no other way to put it. I could go into detail, but would thus quickly fall into a litany of Salesman's Excuses, and I hate those. Suffice it say, again and again, my ass hath been kicked repeatedly. For that reason, I found myself down for a couple of weeks. It was the lowest your factotum has been for many a year. 

     Well, the past week or so has seen a shift in momentum. Those insurance adjusters who were taking the most delight in kicking me up and down the road are gone. So far, I have outlasted the bastards. If there are more out there, then let them come. 

     Yes, I daresay things are getting back to normal. 

     Although sales for the year obviously track to the end of December, the season ends around the last week of November. I am determined to break my own record, and to do it between now and that November deadline. What's more, I have been asked to help carry the office through the end of the season so that we meet our goal for the year, and that is precisely what I'm going to do.

     Believe it or not, there is one good thing about taking a lot of real beatings while growing up - I know how both to survive and prevail. So, come the Christmas bacchanal round about the second week of December, I will come limping into the room, yes, but for all that I will win.

     There's a lesson in that somewhere, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it is.

a poem...

A Request



Run, tell the one who killed my heart
that it might live again, They’ve lost
the life you gave them, tossed 
it aside, so only you,
who embraced them at the start,
can by terrible words accost
them, making them fearful of the cost
of flight and wringing their hearts anew -
such intercession may renew
a bond so strangely wrought for us
with one who, through illustrious,
lived with a flock all unaware
of who it was who found them so fair.

so, that happened...

     I threw my back out on Sunday. How, you ask? Well I'll tell ya - I was pulling weeds when it happened. 

     O, the day was beautiful, cool and breezy it was, out of character for late July. It had been far, far too long since I had tended to the gardens, and they were overrun with nettles and ivy. So, a little weeding seemed the thing to do.

     Damn this pain. Love the pain killers - it's easy to see how folks could become addicted to the things. I won't of course. After all, I have far too many addictions as it is. 

     To sum up, here's the buzz - the back's out, wifi's down, and I'm in bed reading The Spanish Civil War by one Hugh Thomas. It's a damn fine piece of work. Soon, life will once more become a wonderful dream. 
     So annoying it is.

a poem...

Musings at the End

 It’s past time that I found my ancient broom,
 cleaned out all this junk, and swept my cell
 from end to end, an exercise to quell
 my anxious roving round this messy room
 beneath a dark, apocalyptic doom, 
 for I’ve made myself some trouble - hell,
 I wouldn’t be too shocked to hear the knell 
 that signals earth’s one last defiant bloom
 before all creatures find eternal rest
(me too, I hope, for nothing is my own) - 
 and so I tidy up as for a guest
 right royal, with a fickle faith now grown
 old, untended, hardly made to wrest
 good fruit at last from words yet newly sown.

'a million revisions'...

    So, I revised the poem in that last post. The fault was in those last two lines. It also now sports a title, which, while not essential, is often a welcome challenge.
     

On the Lookout for Fall



About the house our summer seems
a riot now of madness, all order
gone in a tangle of vines and nettles 
forcing all to cede their place, 
heat creeping slow, a garden gone
to seed, until the days grow shorter
and the slanting sun in time restores 
to dappled form each dying leaf.

an untitled poem...

About the house late summer seems
a riot now of madness, all order
gone in a tangle of vines and nettles 
forcing all to cede their place, 
heat creeping slow, a garden gone
to seed, until the days grow shorter
and the slanting sun restores 
at last every calm and dappled form.

poetry criticism...

     As usual, there's not a poem in the current Poetry that's worth a damn. For instance, there's a blurb of hideousness entitled 'Age Appropriate'. Here are the first few lines:

Sometimes,
mystified by the behavior
of one of my sons,
my wife will point out
if it's age-appropriate,
making me wonder why
I still shout at ballplayers on TV
and argue with the dead.

It's complete lack of style and grace is a manifestation of its intellectual and emotional banality. The turn implied by 'and argue with the dead' is senselessly appended to add a spectre of depth to the damn thing. And, it's pairing with the clunky 'I still shout at ballplayers on TV' is risible. Who cares why you do anything?
     Nothing more than bad prose chopped at random into lines that run down the page without music, this bland thing is a perfect example of the typical Contemporary Poem In America. All such works deserve their future inevitable oblivion.

something he said...

     The Rev. Soon-to-Be Doctor Tripp Hudgins wrote on Facething: 'The great theological debate of our present time is more fundamental than that. It is about what we do.'

     Yes, the world groans to find itself once again a Pelagian wilderness. In fact, there is no debate my friend - there is good, there is evil, and more and more our fine-tuned options for apparent neutrality are being taken away from us. This not, however, about what we do, but rather about whose we are. Now, that is far from certain in this opaque time if we are left to discern on the basis of what we do. How fortunate then to know that what's been done to us is far more important than what we do - it's crucial in fact. 

     As for me, I'm just a scoundrel who would like to be saved - 'deserve's got nothing to do with it'.

news...

     Time for Nabokov, Vaughan, Keats, Gogol, Cervantes, and assorted Latin poets.

sure, i'll say something about the Zimmerman verdict...

     Allow me to uselessly and presumptuously ramble on the basis of the scant reading I've done to date: 
     First, it's likely that both Martin and Zimmerman were defending themselves. Zimmerman set in motion a series of events that led to a confrontation in which each rightly felt that his life was in danger. This confrontation was neither inevitable, nor necessary. Right up to that fatal moment, Zimmerman could have identified himself and stated his purpose, in which case we might have had a story of a stand off that ended when police arrived to find that Martin was doing nothing wrong, and that Zimmerman was an overzealous fool. (The bulletproof vest etc are giveaways that he likely inflated not only the purpose of the Neighborhood Watch, but his role in it.) 
     Second, Martin isn't a symbol of anything, neither is Zimmerman. This horrible event doesn't tell us anything about race, gun violence, 'Stand Your Ground' laws - it tells us nothing at all about anything at all. It just happened. It was pure absurdity, abetted by idiocy. It's likely, to speculate on the basis of nothing at all, that Zimmerman is in fact guilty of some kind of criminal recklessness, but the idiot prosecutor chose to overcharge and thus lost the whole thing. So there's more stupidity, more idiocy (those are different things). 
     The death of Trevon Martin can only be used to further an agenda - whatever that may be - at the expense of the truth that it is, for all of us outside the circle of family and friends of both men, meaningless. The death of that young man, and the weight of having killed him borne by another, are without purpose, without meaning, without yield for us and our various Causes. Why did it happen? Because it happened. The reality of providence in which I firmly believe does not imply that such events are anything other than absurd acts of stupid fortuity, fortuity aided, yes, by idiocy and misapprehension, but not less but more fortuitous and thus stupid for all that. 
     The real question therefore is, Can we live in a world where things like this just happen? Can we accept moral responsibility for our free acts in such a contingent world? Zimmerman to be sure acted freely, if idiotically. That the Triune God is first and final cause of all that is, does not mitigate but rather establishes this freedom, this existential responsibility. So, rewind that night, and have Zimmerman or Martin do the least little thing differently, and the whole damned tragedy might never have happened. Once again, we see that this tells us nothing about anything other than the often blind contingency of our lives, and our moral responsibility to act accordingly, knowing that foolishly overreaching can yield terrible consequences. 

it's called a bar...