If a thing is worth doing, YOU should do it.

Somebody slap this boy for perverted use of a Chesterton quotation: John Patrick Grace: Health care reform, even if done badly, may be better than nothing. J.P.G. applies G.K.C.'s "if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly" as a defense to push a muddled health care reform bill through to approval. Chesterton's memorable statement was never an excuse for unthinking mediocrity or ignorant pursuit of Progress. It was a statement against government involvement in the details of our lives; that the basics of life should not be relegated to professionals. Do or delegate it yourself. What our Gilbert meant was exactly what John Patrick Grace does not want.

Belloc's Windmill To Be Closed

Hilaire Belloc's windmill, the largest working windmill in West Sussex, is closing its doors to the public. See BBC article Historic windmill forced to close for the sad details.

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.

more on the New Yorker article

The Times of Malta posted a piece against the slanderous New Yorker article mentioned earlier:

Gopnik's allegations have been dismissed by Dr William Oddie, whose book Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy will be published in November. While admitting that Chesterton's views on Jews were "eccentric" he holds that they were no different from those of Zionists, who maintained that Jews were exiles and would never be happy until they had their own country. (Chesterton died in 1936 before the state of Israel was created in 1948.) Dr Oddie states that "Gopnik is quoting grotesquely out of context" and that on several occasions in the late 19th century, Chesterton had passionately attacked anti-Semitism and that he particularly disliked the persecution of Jews.

Also, Nancy Brown posted Dale Ahlquist's response to the New Yorker at the ACS blog along with some more details on Chesterton's beliefs about the Jews.

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“A nation with the soul of a church,” Chesterton called the Americans. In the midst of the current economic mischief, it is worth pondering that they still enjoy the world’s second-oldest living constitution--the only older regime being the Papacy. Semper Fi.

from Tell it to the Marines @ MercatorNet

GKC ITN: Romance, Procession, and Travel

G.K. Chesterton in the (recent) news:

Marc T. Newman in Exile Street:

WALL-E is mystified and alarmed. He calls out to her, but she is unable to answer. Not knowing what is wrong, not able to “fix” her, WALL-E does the one thing that separates the true lover from the sap. G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, noted that he was unimpressed with the romantic poets of his day. Sure, they would laugh and sigh and weep for love. They struck all the right poses. But Chesterton knew it for a sham, because there was one thing that these young fops would not do for love: sacrifice.

in the Ulster Herald:

Frank [McCrory] told Ben that he had better get along to the main processional area where his literary idol, the novelist, poet and essayist, G K Chesterton, was about to speak. Ben did so, and was later to recall the distinguished English writer carrying a pole supporting the canopy over a monstrance, with all 'the gravity of an Irish publican'. Frank McCrory was more a man for H G Wells and Bernard Shaw, but you couldn't say too much about that as a postal official in a small Irish town in the 1930s.

Chesterton was the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in the English-speaking world at the time, although a little past the peak of his creative powers.

Nick Hewer in the U.K Telegraph:

As a child I was told that G.K. believed that it is always better to travel than to arrive and he used to practise this belief by waking up his household very early in the morning, urging everybody to raise themselves quickly.

“We’ll miss the train,” he would bellow. Chaos, which he craved, would ensue: maids scurried about, gathering clothes, the housekeeper and cook would be in a state looking for anything that would make up a packed lunch, cabin trunks came crashing down from the attic to be dusted off, and packing would start, hasty notes scribbled to cancel long standing arrangements, cabs and carts would be called, children screamed and got under everyone’s feet, his poor wife would rush here and there, not knowing what to do for the best, and they would all set off for Waterloo, G.K. urging the cabbie to drive the horses harder, and, finally, they would screech to a halt at the station forecourt, all in a lather.

“Marvellous,” G.K. would declare, and the whole ensemble would quietly trot back home.

[an urban legend? the children under foot makes it sounds like one.]

New Yorker article

This showed up at the NR Corner:

The Jolly Journalist [Rick Brookhiser]: Adam Gopnik has an interesting piece on G.K. Chesterton in the current New Yorker. I know Adam a little bit, and I enjoy his writing. I also share many of his reservations about Chesterton. But there is always a sense in Adam's pieces, as he rounds the club house turn, of making himself the measure of all things. Yet the world would be such a smaller place if we were all like Adam Gopnik—or all like any one of us.

The New Yorker article "The Back of the World: The genius of G. K. Chesterton" is not available online. Can any reader of C&F comment on it?

UPDATE:
the Commonweal mag's blog has some comments about the New Yorker article here. Some interesting points in this writeup, but the criticisms are the same old things one comes to expect.

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Roy, Gilbert!, and GKC

Roy F. Moore, Gilbert Magazine, and GKC in The Phoenix yesterday:

“Ever get that feeling like you just kicked Lucifer in the face and got away with it?!” Roy F. Moore of Woburn grimaces in triumph against the broad afternoon light. “That’s the feeling I get from that movie.”

We’re outside the Fresh Pond 10 — most desolate of Cambridge’s multi-screens, wedged in the southeast corner of the Fresh Pond Mall between a boarded-up acupuncture center and the railroad track. It’s one of the four places in Massachusetts where you can see the anti-Darwin documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It was just the two of us in the theater, and having observed the affirmative nature of Mr. Moore’s reactions — his gasps, guffaws, fist-shakings, and signs-of-the-cross — I introduced myself. Mr. Moore (somewhat unexpectedly) is a columnist for Gilbert Magazine, the official publication of the American Chesterton Society, so we talk about that roly-poly old Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton. We talk about the Tridentine Mass, and punk rock, and Mr. Moore quotes approvingly from the Dead Kennedys’ “A Child and His Lawnmower”: “You know some people don’t take no sh!t/Maybe if they did, they’d have half a brain left!” And we talk about Ben Stein.

"Book's exuberant truths still impact readers a century later"

Ray Waddle writes today in The Tennessean about his choice of book for Lenten reading. It is G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

Existence itself was always a shocking wonder to him. It made him grateful for creation, where nothing is trivial because everything holds clues to divine revelation.

His religious witness offered a rare mix — intellectual dazzle and humility. We could use both just now.

GQ Guy Quotes GK Chesterton

Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, quotes GK in today's [London] Daily Mail article Attack of the 50ft Dream Woman. The article overwhelms me. Perhaps someone else can comment on it.

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GK's Poetry in the NY Times

A bit of Chesterton's poetry was quoted in yesterday's New York Times (link). The article was about suicide and the quoted poem was, of course, Ballad of a Suicide.

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Chesterton in Russia

Take a minute to watch this video clip about a small Chesterton conference and debut of a new edition of his writings in Moscow.

H/T to Mark at Straight Flusche who sent me the link.

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Super Winston

Jonah Goldberg in today's LA Times:

As a conservative, I'm a big believer in the importance of tradition, which writer G.K. Chesterton dubbed "democracy for the dead." But tradition can only be as strong as it is in the people who pass it on. And so when I read that 23% of Britons think Winston Churchill is no more real than Spider-Man, it makes me shudder at the voluntary amnesia of society, the wholesale abdication of parental responsibility that represents.

"You should see him catch buns in his mouf"

an article by Gilbert Adair, all about our favorite big man, in today's Guardian

There was never just one GK Chesterton. There was Chesterton the Catholic proselytiser, the hearty balladeer of Merrie England, the harrumphing castigator of teetotallers and vegetarians, the blustery anti-Communist, anti-plutocrat and, also, alas, anti-Semite [alas, Adair is misinformed on the anti-Semite bit, and just regurgitates what he read or heard from some anti-Chestertonian]. There was Chesterton the charmer of children - one little boy, asked after a visit to the great man's home if GKC had been awfully clever, replied, "I don't know about clever, but you should see him catch buns in his mouf." ....

The article somewhat focuses on The Club of Queer Trades and even mentions Kafka and Borges.

So she hesitated.

today in BBC news:

In 1937 Marie Slocombe was working as a summer relief secretary at the BBC.

One of her tasks was to sort out - and dispose of - a pile of dusty broadcast discs. She noticed that among them were recordings of GB Shaw, HG Wells, Winston Churchill, Herbert Asquith and GK Chesterton. So she hesitated.

In that moment was the humble beginning of what became one of the most important collections of recordings in the world - the BBC Sound Archive.