McCain campaign clerihew

John McCain
to spark his campaign
sought help from "above" -
Alaska's "Gov".

Zmirak on Chesterton

In case you missed it, Zmirak reviews, summarizes and promotes The Everlasting Man. Great stuff. Excerpt:

If you don't know the book, stop reading now. Click over and order your copy. Go ahead, I can wait . . .

When your package arrives, settle into a comfy chair with a decent supply of monastic beer, because you're in for a wild ride. In this easy book of medium length, Chesterton tries the impossible -- and nails it. A roistering tale of earthly life, and its fitful pilgrimage from the primordial ooze up through the conversion of Evelyn Waugh, The Everlasting Man is the ale-drinker's answer to Hegel.

"Gilbert" and the Books are here!

As is the tradition here in lovely western New York, my latest issue of Gilbert arrived long after others across the nation have received theirs and gushed about it.

Let me gush anyway.

I love the cover. As a pro-lifer, I enjoyed the insightful editorial. The interview with Ann Petta was delightful. "By the Babe Unborn" has always been one of my favorite Chesterton poems.

So much more to read!

It would have been perfect if one of my clerihews had gotten published. I wonder what happened to the batches I sent in over the last year? Sigh.

Around the same time, I received the package containing the books and DVD I ordered from the Chesterton Society, and a thank you for a donation.

Beyond Capitalism and Socialism, Chesterton on War and Peace, and The Surprise should kill a few hours most productively.

As for the donation, the American Chesterton Society is reaching out for help - consider giving.

We need Chesterton's sanity today.

Besides, the society has so many jolly folks in it.

(The American Chesterton Society, 4117 Pebblebrook Circle, Minneapolis , MN 55437.)

Battle of Vienna: September 11, 1683

Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history - September 11, 1683. But the peril remained, Islam was still immensely powerful...

- Hilaire Belloc in The Great Heresies

Young Chesterton Chronicles

There was a time when I would’ve received advanced notice and a sample copy: The Young Chesterton Chronicles. It came out in March, but I just read about it in Faith & Family this past weekend. F&F gives it high marks. I’m curious, however, to know why I didn’t see it mentioned in Gilbert Magazine or this blog. Maybe I missed it? Goodness knows, I'm not in a position to criticize anyone for being negligent.

The Books Are Here! The Books Are Here!

The Ignatius sale spurred me to buy some books I coveted (in a non-sinful way, of course) but could not justify purchasing: Volumes 29-34 of the Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (The Illustrated London News).

Ah, but at only $5 a volume, the temptation proved too much.

They arrived the other day. My wife gave me that "Not more books?" look.

I blame Ignatius.

Grin.

SAY HALLELUJAH

Usually the Republicans don’t develop a sense of humor until late September of an election year and mostly drop it after the last vote on November 4th. However with ads like this it bides well for a new type of political ad. True, the big “O” asked for it and finally he is getting it served back to him.

Garrison Keillor is my favorite liberal and here is why.

The Real Iron Chef

I once heard a metaphor for prayer that I think Gilbert would agree with. “There are three types of prayer, microwave, oven baking and crock pot. All prayers need to cook and is only answered when done. Microwave prayers are answered instantly, like “Lord, let there be a parking space in front of the store.” Then there those that need to bake, these take longer like “Lord, let this operation be a success and recovery be complete”. Then there are the crock pot prayers that have to cook a long time, like the one of Monica, Saint Augustine’s momma, did.

“No prayer will be served before its time.”

Three and a half years ago I lost my cushy well paying job through a corporate buy out – oh well.
I spent the first year looking for new work in a similar field to no avail so I took a factory job but kept looking. Every day I said this prayer, “Lord thank you for letting me have this job to help support my family and please Lord, get me OUT-OF-HERE.”

This prayer baked a good long time.

The other day I received notice that I have been hired as an Art Teacher for the Jr. High. Way back when this was my original choice for a career but I went in the business world. So now here I am, a beginning teacher at an age where all other teachers are retiring. What fun!

Chesterton in a horror novel?

I have been working on a horror novel (working title: "Swedenborg").

I bring it up here because in one section I will be talking about Distributism! The "good guys" will be discussing the issue at a party with Professor Staples (could his first name be Clive?), the wise scholar and Christian apologist who's dying of cancer, and one of his admirers, a rotund but brilliant grad student (wonder if I should give him a moustache and a walking stick?) who befriends the protagonist. The party scene is coming up - after the hospital scene where the mentally ill and very sick can see the dead souls besieging the living.

Hmm. Did Chesterton ever talk about Swedenborg and his ideas?

How about ...

"An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella. It is exactly in their souls that they are divided." - Orthodoxy, Chapter 8

I also think he mentioned him in connection with Aquinas in some way - but can't remember exactly where. Any help with this one - or any other G. K. mentions of Swedenborg?

Collected Works voIs 29-34 (ILN articles)

available right now for $5 per book as part of an Ignatius Press sale!

h/t to Marcel @ Mary's Aggies, a lucid writer and engaging speaker

Kewl Science

"Science can analyze a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyze any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful." GKC

This is very cool science and very useless. Maybe that’s why it is so cool.
Art historians are getting moist all over with this new technique, to see what lies underneath. Some have already said Van Gogh painted over old paintings because of the cost of canvas was so high. This is a perfect example of the art critic knowing nothing about the creation of art. Van Gogh was never short on money for canvas or paint, (Theo was there for him just as Pope Julius II was there for Michelangelo.) Simply looking at Vincent’s application of paint will tell you that he was not worried about his paint supply.
Artists paint over old canvases because they don’t like the work they are painting over or find it too weak to survive.

These critics/historians believe they can find the “secret” of the artists mind with this new method. They believe they will now be able to tell the Orthodox Jew what a pork chop tastes like. Oh well I guess it keeps them off the streets.

Oh yea, this is very cool too.

Catholic Convert Poets

Liam over at Sententiae et Clamores (http://trepanatus.blogspot.com/) began a discussion July 23 about Catholic convert poets (talk about a specific category!). The poets he and others cited were generally highly regarded as poets.

The list that was posted:

Denise Levertov
Gerard Many Hopkins
Thomas Merton
Oscar Wilde
Paul Claudel.

I immediately noted a certain prominent Catholic convert poet missing from the list: G. K. Chesterton.

Now I know G. K. is not known primarily for his verse, but he certainly was a prolific versifier. And some of his poems are very fine indeed. If Merton made the list, why not Chesterton?

Here’s the sonnet Chesterton wrote to celebrate his entry into the Church in 1922:

The Convert

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

Other convert Catholic poets include John Dryden, John Abbott, John Henry Newman, Alfred Noyes, Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Dunstan Thompson, David Jones, Rolf Jacobsen, and George Mackay Brown. I’m sure there are many more.

Of course, not all of these fine folks have gained the same repute as the ones on the original list, but some of them certainly rank high as poets.

I think G. K. fits in with that distinguished poetic crew quite nicely.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.

read more

Not quite Chestertonian

Okay, my excuse is that Chesterton would have known Gilbert and Sullivan's work, and would likely have appreciated Tom Lehrer's cleverness.

The Saint Song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnt-P38ykc4

The Matrix Part 4

Plot line: Agent Smith finally penetrates Zion by convincing everyone he is the ‘The One'.

When I heard Obama’s speech in Berlin he talked a lot about the future he will give the world and then says the phrase, “…. people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time.” And that popped out at me as eerily familiar because I had heard it before. It took awhile to remember then it all seemed to make sense.

I’m not saying Obama plagiarized. He may not even be aware where it was first said. This phrase is very nearly what Agent Smith said to Morpheus just before Neo decides he is going to rescue Morpheus and then he and Trinity kick some butt in the lobby.

Oh, yea, “There is no spoon.”

"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." - Christendom in Dublin, 1933

Ross Douthat in The Atlantic re: Gopnik

In The Atlantic Ross Douthat mildly defends G.K. Chesterton against Gopnik's charges published by the New Yorker. Earlier posts about Gopnik's article are here and here.

But the whole point of the "in the context of his times" argument is precisely that by the standards of the '20s and '30s, it was morally impressive for a political writer to reject both fascism and communism, to praise Zionism, and to speak out forcefully against Nazi anti-Semitism - and not in its eliminationist phase, but in its very earliest stages.

ITN: GKC in NYT, Most Joyful and Dreadful Thing

Tom Vanderbilt mentions GKC in this weekend's NYT "Sunday Book Review". The review is of Spiral Jetta by Erin Hogan and he writes:

More than three decades later, the draw — part spiritualist, part survivalist — hasn’t ebbed. Erin Hogan, the director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago , was one of many who felt the pull — perhaps even the same impulses that motivated the works’ creators. Quoting Smithson quoting G. K. Chesterton, she writes of wanting “that most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe ... the fiercest note ... the highest light.” A prototypical urbanite, surrounded by friends and noise, Hogan says she was beset by an “early midlife crisis,” wondering if there wasn’t more to life than meetings and e-mail. “I wanted to learn to enjoy being alone,” she writes. And as a “recovering art historian,” she longed to experience works she had only known refracted through art criticism and seminar slide shows.

Calling for Clerihews @ The Guardian Book Blog

Billy Mills, blogging about books at the Guardian, has a post today about writing Clerihews (link).


Also present in his post is the above picture which I do not remember seeing before.

Need a Vanilla Patch?

'Americans," G.K. Chesterton once said, "are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices." He did not mean that as a compliment, but he was exactly right -- puritanism has always been a strong streak running through American life. Canada, however, has always made the United States look libertine in comparison and one can only cringe at the thought of what comments the situation here might have elicited from Chesterton.

A century later, Canadians still have cause to cringe over the official attitude to the use of alcohol and tobacco. Right-thinking young Winnipeggers, joined by others from Thunder Bay and Ottawa, on Thursday protested the sale of flavoured cigarettes in the belief that if nicotine is not enough to hook you, the flavour of vanilla might and must be stopped.

read more in "Puritism Marches On" in the Winnipeg Free Press