Tag: Books and authors

Random nuggets . . .

In his review of S.A. Venkatesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard) in the 6/22/07 Times Lit Supplement, Paul Seabright, U. of Toulouse econ prof and author of The Company of Strangers: A natural history of economic life, 2004, accepts V’s assessment of rampant intelligence among S. Side Chi residents (dubious tho it may be) but notes the non-transferability of the skills by which they survive.

Much of their capital turns out to be highly personalized, dependent on their network of contacts and loyalties, on favours given and returned, and to have little or no value to anyone who tries to set up in a different city or even a different neighbourhood.  People are risk-averse, and the neighbourhood is an informal insurance system, so it takes an unusual degree of self- assurance to take the gamble of leaving.

He asks what would help, for instance, more or less regulation of “labor markets.”

After all, regular jobs at the minimum wage are a luxury here, so does this make the minimum wage an irrelevance, or is it a part of the problem?

I have my strongly held opinion in this matter, having embraced the teaching of F.A. Hayek in these matters.  Even without it, however, Wal-Mart wages seem irrelevant in this situation, as opposed to legislated ones.  The starving man is glad for bread, and telling him to eat cake for the sake of union power is not a good idea.

more more more

Coming up on the St. Sabina RC parish calendar is Bible class by televangelist Tommy Tenney, of Godchasers Network, tonight at 7.  Tenney is a white guy out of Pinevilla, LA.  It is not surprising that he’s not RC, which I presume he is not, because with all its protesting and marching and hosting Dem pols and other demagogs in the pulpit, St. Sabina is a Bible church.

That is, most of its members are black church-goers, which means mostly evangelical-oriented.  When the irrepressible, undigestable Al Sharpton mounted the pulpit a few years back for a largely political harangue, the packed church included people who consulted their Bibles, not their missals, during the service.  Pfleger is successful because he plays not only to black social concerns but also to their Bible orientation.

In this he isn’t out of sync with Things Catholic, where The Word has come to equal if not supersede The Sacrifice in importance.  He just goes at it more vigorously.  I’m sure this Tenney fellow is a boffo performer.  And I’d like to say the same for more Catholic preachers and teachers.

more more more

“Thank you, Christopher,” Hugh McDiarmid’s wife wrote him, using his real name, after he’d written a glowing poem about her, he having been a very difficult husband for many years.  “Always remember . . . I love you and only you.”  But she added, pointedly and poignantly, “ . . . and could have been so very much more if you’d only let me.”

This from her letters to him, edited by Beth Junor, in a TLS review 8/10/07.

more more more

In his review of DESIRING ROME. Male subjectivity and reading Ovid’s “Fasti” (Ohio State) in TLS 6/8/07, T.P. Wiseman skewers author Richard J. King for characterizing Ovid as “submissive, feminized and, of course, symbolically castrated” (Wiseman’s words).

“If psychoanalysis has a value,” Wiseman writes of such a treatment, “it is surely therapeutic. There seems little point in attempting it on a man who has been dead for nearly two millennia.”

I’d say so.

more more more

And finally, world population growth since the 1950s has been not from people “breeding like rabbits” but from their no longer “dying like flies,” says an unnamed UN advisor quoted by Bjorn Lomborg in his Skeptical Environmentalist.  You can remember something like that.  All things being equal, a simile works better than a metaphor.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Great thoughts from far and near

* Christopher Smart, in his 1751 poem, “An epigram of Sir Thomas More, imitated,” has a man kissing Dorinda, whom he playfully tells her nose is too big.

At which Dorinda, “equally to fun inclined,” placed “her lovely Lily hand behind./ ‘Here, Swain,’ she cried; ‘Mayst thou securely kiss,/ Where there’s no nose to interrupt thy bliss.’”


Right here, Bud.


* The academic (not athletic) racial achievement gap at one Oak Park K-6 school was said to be “more unique” than at other schools — by its principal.


Is she more unique than other principals?


* A book I am working through is The Roots of National Socialism, by Rohan D’O. Butler (Dutton, 1942). It would be good reading for others, I think, especially by young folks who do not know Naziism was socialism — national socialism, as opposed to the international version run out of a building in Moscow.


The roots in question are heavily philosophical. The book is a tour de force showing the consequences had by ideas.


* We routinely object to senseless violence (it’s a consecrated phrase), but when do we hear praise for sensible violence?


On the football field is one place, but no guns allowed.  The Bears’ Tank Johnson has done his time for gun violations and is suspended for several games at considerable monetary loss. I am assuming he had to promise not to go armed onto the field.

Tags: , ,

Last night at SMA . . .

Last night’s Midland Authors event, the annual awards dinner at the Chicago Athletic Assn. on Boul Mich, was a hit.  The dinner in the 8th-floor dining room overlooking Millennium Park was marvelous, but award presenters and award recipients sealed the deal.  It was an excellent demonstration for the most part of how smart, nice people can talk to each other. 

Highlights included the stunning appearance of Roger and Chaz Ebert, he joining her at the podium to receive an award, she doing the talking because he doesn’t do any these days (tracheostomy does it), and making quite a presence.  No surprise to many, I’m sure, but it was my first time seeing her.  She’s poised and genuine, and the two of them, one hand covering the other’s at the stand, just looked great as thoroughly believable loving couple.

The Fradins, another excellent couple, were awarded for their children’s book on Jane Addams.  They are Judy and Dennis.  Best line of evening was his noting that he rarely leaves his study, where he researches and writes, but did so for this event.  Their book, Jane Addams: Champion of Democracy (Clarion), has a painting by their daughter on its cover, one that the parents couldn’t afford to buy, Dennis noted.

As to his library and study concentration, I told him afterwards it was rather medieval of him, and he agreed.  A monk’s life, I said.  And in today’s limelight-seeking climate full of back-slapping, even of oneself sometimes, he was refreshing indeed.

It was fun meeting the adult fiction winner, Samrat Upadhyay, a young teacher at Indiana U.-Bloomington who hadn’t been informed even that his novel, Royal Ghosts (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin), had been submitted, much less that he’d won.  The committee tried to reach him but couldn’t until the day before the dinner. 

It was fun, I say, because he’s from Kathmandu, Nepal, where he was taught by Jesuits I know, including Rev. Charles Law, a physics teacher.  Samrat and I chatted about Charley, one of my best Jesuit friends, who died a few years ago in Nepal of natural causes.  “He loved Nepal,” Samrat told me with feeling.  He was very well liked by the students and loved them too.

Go here for the winners and runners-up.

Capping the evening was my chat on the return Green Line ride back to Oak Park with two long-time residents, who had got on the stop before me after hearing the Chicago Symphony perform.  We passed on our experiences.  Theirs was wonderful (Brahms) but also forgettable (some new German stuff interspersed with the Brahms) — somebody’s idea of bring along the Great Unwashed regular symphony-goers, apparently, giving them a dose of new good stuff.

There we were on a 20–minute ride.  They lived near the “L” stop, as do I.  Living in Oak Park, we hopped the train and returned same way, each heading for his cultural event of the evening.  Not bad.

Tags:

BON MOT PARADE

“I never knew a passion for politics exist for a long time without swallowing up, absolutely excluding, a passion for Religion,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 5/16/1797 letter to J.P. Estlin.

A few months later, to his clergyman brother, Coleridge said he had withdrawn himself from consideration of “immediate causes,” i.e., current political arguments.

Samuel Johnson’s aunt, a gossip, was “willing to find something to censure in the absent,” said SJ. It’s in Kingsmill, editor, Johnson Without Boswell, 1941.

Prime Min. Gladstone’s falling into the Thames would be a misfortune, his being pulled out a calamity, said witty man quoted in 1/19/07 Times Lit Supplement.

A “gentle dimming of the libido” is a benefit of growing old. “It’s like being unshackled from a lunatic,” said a contributor to Late Youth: an anthology celebrating the joys of being over fifty (S. Johnson ed., Arcadia), reviewed in TLS “In Brief,” 3/9/07.

It’s “a fat book covering just two years, with gruel-thin contents,” said Jan Marsh of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ed. Wm. E. Friedman, Brewer), vol. 6: Last Decade, 1873-84, Kelmscott to Birchington I: 1873-74.

“I always have to be the bad guy. Let’s both be good guys,” said Johnny, 4, to Madeline, 6, in playground in Intercourse, PA.

AUTHOR: Hugh Kingsmill, mentioned here earlier as declaring Victorian sentimentality the product of “an unnatural union of poetry and Puritanism,” has two books on Samuel Johnson, one, Samuel Johnson, is a bio. The other, Johnson Without Boswell, consists of passages from others who knew him besides his famous chronicler.

ANOTHER: Coleridge’s writing his Biographia Literaria is a case of long-delayed production, short-term hard work on a publisher’s advance. It distilled and summed up his life’s work as poet, essayist, and philosopher, combining autobiography, criticism, and philosophy in a manner best suited to his talents as he had come to understand them. This is from the 1955 intro by Geo. Watson to the Everyman’s Edition of BL.

MOVIE, MOVIE: “Touchez pas au grisbi” (Do not touch the loot) is a 1954 film with Jean Gabin and several gorgeous women, none of whom in vulgar fashion remove their clothes or leer into the camera. He’s a criminal who protects swag from a huge bullion robbery. It ends in a gunfight on a country road which I’d say the Cohen brothers drew on for their small-city film of Prohibition times, “Miller’s Crossing.”

This “Do not touch” is deliciously tense from the start and blessedly refrains from being cute or maudlin. No faux O. Henry ending here. The film puts pleasurable tension even into a man brushing his teeth. It’s part of the Criterion Collection, which the OP library stocks to our continuing benefit.

Tags: , , ,

Verrrrry interesting items . . .

* Victorian sentimentality was the product of “an unnatural union of poetry and Puritanism.” – Hugh Kingsmill, Anthology of Invective and Abuse, Dial, 1929

* “Throwin’ up his little finger” means doing a lot of drinking, in fact coming home drunk, in Legends and Stories of Ireland, by Samuel Lover, an 1831 collection published anew in 2006 by Nonsuch (nonsuch-publishing.com). In story “New potatoes,” in which Dublin potato-seller Katty complains to herring-monger Sally of her Mike, who had come home drunk: He “was done to a turn,” she said, “like a mutton-kidney.”

* The word “dickens” = devil. My mother and her mother knew that when they called a kid “that little dickens” of said, “Isn’t he (or she) the dickens?” Thus James H. Montgomery, of Austin TX, translator of Don Quixote. In TLS letters 3/16/07.

* Time Mag worried about a coming ice age in its Nov. 13, 1972 issue. And again in its Jun. 24, 1974 issue. So did Newsweek on April 28, 1975 – “The Cooling World, by Peter Gwynne: “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically” etc.

Tags: , , ,

How the west and east were won

U.S. was a third-world country 150+ years ago.  Consider Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia or Daniel Boone’s Kentucky.  Hernando de Soto says so in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (Basic, Perseus, 2000).  Squatters’ rights is his focus: how the new country and the English colony before that managed to recognize and codify them. 

Such codification of recognized practice is the essence of workable law, he implies, echoing Hayek.  Good law does that, he says.  It’s not made of whole cloth and it changes custom only in “trivial” ways, he says, quoting one of many sources he has consulted to produce his mid-book chapter, “The Missing Lessons of U.S. History.”

Sidetrack: Our civil rights revolution went astray when it moved from abolishing bad laws to making new ones that attempted too much and poisoned the well of respect for law.

Continuing the thread: Colonial Pennsylvania “connived at or permitted many usages it was powerless to prevent . . . “ (115–116)  The making of Maine, 1820: squatters made Maine too hot for Massachusetts to handle.  (118)  Squatters moved in and wouldn’t move, so Mass. said the hell with it. 

In such matters, the American revolution can be seen to be already under way, colonists refusing (pre-Lexington and Concord or Boston Tea Party) to be bound by the Crown’s property laws, which proved inapplicable in the new world.  Indeed, “local elites,” usually themselves immigrants or related to some, were sympathetic to squatters and gave them a break.

All in all, these early Americans were not easily cowed or domesticated, I say.  “Don’t tread on me” was the motto not only of the first Marines. 

Legislating against squatters in the first half of the 19th century, as in regard to Northwest Territory and other government-owned lands, Congress had no idea what the situation was out there, where a sheriff could be shot and the shooter exonerated if he tried to enforce their laws.

It was all in the course of the U.S. creating a body of laws that allowed entry into property ownership, says de Soto, who presents himself not as a rewriter of American history but, like his “legendary” predecessory of the same name, an explorer.  He’s a Peruvian who writes platinum-grade English without translator.  Quite an interesting book so far.

Tags: ,

Greeley bombs in Jesus-land

Devastating review of Andrew Greeley’s Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women in Sun-Times:

Was Jesus eye candy? A dreamy Messiah who could walk on water and make women swoon? Does it matter?

Andrew Greeley caves to appearance-obsessed Americans in Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships With Women. This Jesus heals hearts and melts them, too.

The reviewer, Susan Hogan/Albach [sic] is billed as a veteran religion writer in Dallas and Minneapolis. She gives Greeley credit for writing “many distinguished books,adding, “but this isn’t one of them.” She praises him for “extolling [she means exhorting!] Catholics to rediscover the religious imagination that distinguishes and anchors their faith.”

But she skewers this book, which she says

reads like an adolescent fantasy about manhood and priesthood (priests represent Jesus). It’s salvation through titillation. Women are portrayed as shallow — a mindless mass of bodily desires who fall all over Jesus like Brad Pitt groupies.

She quotes the book to make the point:

“Because he represented the Father-in-Heaven … Jesus had to be the most charming man who ever lived,” Greeley writes. “His eyes, his expressions, his smiles, his posture, his laughter, must have melted human hearts, male and female.”

. . . . Greeley’s Jesus is a handsome, heavenly and happy celibate.

“Handsome people charm,” writes Greeley . . .

This is Greeley the romance novelist, letting his imagination run away with him. The man needs an editor but probably wouldn’t put up with one.

=====================

From Reader Cynthia:

Clearly, Greeley didn’t bother reading the part of the Bible that states that “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” It was all spiritual. Or, as Jesus said, the people who came to him are those whom God drew to him.

From Reader D:

This review, if accurate, makes the book repulsive to me. (Well, like most of Greeley’s books.)

If we know St. Paul was a runt of a man with a hook nose and maybe a receding hairline — and he mesmerized everyone — why did Jesus have to be a super stud to have the same effect?

We have the shroud of Turin as a guide — they figure Jesus was taller than the average man of his day — if he had arresting eyes and a muscular build (as Fr. Corapi points out, a carpenter-before-power-tools) and a voice that made the message indelible — why would he stoop to tempting women to see him as a sex object? Why would he set it up so that women would be so distracted by their hormones they wouldn’t grasp his wisdom?

Boy, I hate thinking Jesus was a self-centered metro-sexual who would have blow-dried his hair if he could have. It goes without saying, in Greeley’s Gospel, the Women of Jerusalem on the Via Dolorosa, were groupies, eh?

I’m reminded of that poem Sheen used to quote about If Jesus Went to Birmingham — at the end “He cried for Calvary…”

Tags: ,