Day: March 31, 2012

Vanderbilt U. loses its Catholic presence

. . . as in its official Vanderbilt Catholic organization, which has shaken the campus dust off its feet and decamped.

Vandy said it had to open officers’ ranks to non-Catholics, as it told all religious groups regarding their various affiliations.

It’s as if the Society of Midland Authors were ordered by the City of Chicago to open its leadership to talk-show hosts who never wrote a line.

Which may happen some day if radio talkers ever get organized and swing prevailing opinion in a talking-over-writing direction.

Even liberals would oppose that one.

H/T: The Blaze and Nashville Tennessean

Sobriquets and aphorisms for our troubled era

* Elena “I refuse to recuse” Kagan: the SC justice who argued for Obamacare as solicitor general but sits to declare its consitutionality.

* Words that went viral: #1 of a series, “guys,” for people of any age and gender or role (place?) in society.

* Convenient classification: There are two kinds of people men, those who wear their hats at the dinner table, out or at home, not at a picnic or beach, and those who do not.

Bonus:

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Times Lit Supplement 3/9/12 (subscription required):

* His Mother Night is his “funniest” book, says reviewer Thomas Meaney.

* Writing as he did when he did about WW2, he “faced the shibboleth of the Good War” as in the novels and books by Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Andy Rooney.  Not so the grim accounts by Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Tim O’Brien et al.

* Post-Slaughterhouse Five, in which he reached his apogee, he catered to semi-cultists, gave into “posturizing,” says Meaney, who sells him persuasively as a world-class ironist, never deviating in his accounts of the horrors of war, slipping into a “sentimental bog,” as O’Brien does in The Things They Carried.

He did that after Slaughterhouse, when “he began to recycle his gimmicks and [his] sardonic shell started to crack.”

As V. would say, so it goes.