Monday, March 23. 2009
It's not your parents' humanism. Scruton never disappoints. His main point is that the Old Humanism was about building up mankind's strengths and virtues, while the New is negative, and stands for nothing worthy. A quote from The New Humanism:
Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any rate for nothing in particular. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a tendency to adopt this negative approach to the human condition, rather than to live out the exacting demands of the Enlightenment morality, which tells us to take responsibility for ourselves and to cease our snivelling. Having shaken off their shackles and discovered that they have not obtained contentment, human beings have a lamentable tendency to believe that they are victims of some alien force, be it aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the priesthood, or simply the belief in God. And the feeling arises that they need only destroy this alien force, and happiness will be served up on a plate, in a garden of pleasures. That, in my view, is why the Enlightenment, which promised the reign of freedom and justice, issued in an unending series of wars.
That is, I think, a profound observation.
Saturday, March 21. 2009
Smith is a member of Montana's Flathead Nation. Like so many artists, as long as she steers clear of politics she makes nifty pictures to look at. Here are some of her works.
(I think I first became aware of her work in Jamake Highwater's The Sweet Grass Lives On; 50 Contemporary North American Indian Artists. Highwater himself has an interesting story. Born Jake Marks, he was a choreographer, critic and writer who worked in San Francisco and NYC and who, like Ward Churchill, wore a ponytail and passed himself off as an Indian. A fraud. In some areas of society, of course, being a member of an "oppressed group" lends mucho cachet and sex appeal. His Indian art book was pretty good, though. Lots of pictures.)
Twenty years ago she was making American Indian/Chagall-type mythic dream stuff. Ghosts and monks and coyotes and firebirds and petroglyphs. Here are two of her pastels:
Friday, March 20. 2009
A sad story. If he had been a candidate for Obama's Cabinet, this would never have happened. Come to think of it, I would have supported him for a Cabinet post, or at least for head of ATF.
Thursday, March 19. 2009
 I've been to a lot of colleges. I've seen geeks, dorks, nerds. Committed frat-icide by keg. Met gobs of the artsy fartsy stripe, too. Seen plenty of pencil pushers in their dorm room chrysalis. But in all my travels, I've never been to a grimmer hive of humorlessness than Wellesley College. I'd rather have two teeth out than go to a party at Wellesley College. But they've finally come across with one good laugh. Check out the chart. That's the self-reported rate of virginity among the denizens of Swellesley, according to their own Counterpoint magazine.
When I picture the pile of mendacity this chart represents, and then season it with the images of the LUGS gettin' it on under the watchful eyes of their Sauron, Obama, and Che posters, the desolate furtive groping interspersed with the endless acts of contrition and permission necessary to disrobe a feminist toward the center of the chart, and the beautiful frosting of a vision of the bell curve ends getting together by accident during an all night trance party, I forgive Wellesley everything. You finally came across. You're checkbox comedians after all.
I've read that a Wellesley student once reported that she switched her iPod to Bach while waiting at crosswalks, because she didn't want anyone to know she was listening to the Spice Girls if she got hit by a bus when the light changed. I bet that girl's off the charts, baby.
The reviewer of a new definitive bio of Chagall at NY Review of Books says, snarkily, "I don't think his art deserves a biography this good."
This is Marketplace at Vitebsk, 1917:
Wednesday, March 18. 2009
Photo: 1st Class stateroom, Queen Mary.
I remember, as a lad, passing the Queen Mary in mid-Atlantic on a clear day. Built in 1934, she was an old lady by that time. Yes, she did blow her 1-ton whistles. She sits in Long Beach, CA today.
They don't make em like they usta.
The website Lost Liners has it all. (h/t, Theo)
Monday, March 16. 2009
Charles Murray at The American. One quote:
...do we want the United States to be like Europe?
I argue for the answer “no,” but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.
My argument is drawn from Federalist Paper No. 62, probably written by James Madison: “A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.” Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.
and another
What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.
Perhaps we already linked Voegli's essay of the above title, but, if we did, it bears repeating. Here's one quote:
Our age has seen political disdain become seamlessly integrated into cultural disdain. The prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow showed the way in 1980 when he wrote that Ronald Reagan had grown up in "just the sorts of places [small towns in Illinois] responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces.... The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but the candidate was not among them." Reagan did attend college, but not the kind that would have given him some exposure to the world outside the soul-murdering towns where he grew up, and to moral ideas calling into question his parents' religion. Instead, wrote Doctorow, a "third-rate student at a fifth-rate college could learn from the stage, the debating platform, the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manliness and verbal sincerity that would stand him in good stead when the time came to make his mark in the world." Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, "giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys' clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals."
We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans, and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk, and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.
Sunday, March 15. 2009
A re-post from 2005:
Anthony Esolen:
If Jesus’ parable is an extended metaphor for a life of mercy—if we are to treat those suffering souls whom chance has thrown in our way as if they were people among whom we live—then we have taken the wheels off that metaphor’s vehicle. If you do not really have neighbors, how can you understand Jesus’ command to be a neighbor to others? You have to disembody it, etherealize it into a manifesto of general benevolence and almsgiving (perhaps of the political variety, whereby you stoutly sacrifice the alms of other people). Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, and you hear a call to be kind to your friends and to give to the United Way.
But before I come to how I think that parable must be understood, I should vindicate myself and my family just a bit, and in so doing point out a few reasons why neighborhood life in America is past. You see, my wife and I are not by nature sullen or withdrawn or suspicious. We live in a suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, but we have begun to spend summers in a small home in an old fishing village, called West Arichat, on the coast of Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. In that village, after only a few weeks, we have met more people—have been in their homes, have eaten with them—than we have in eight years in our place in the States.
Read entire piece at Touchstone.
Jan Lievens (1607-1674) was a pal and a rival of Rembrandt. This is The Feast of Esther (1625).
Friday, March 13. 2009
 Somebody told me this week that he was putting together a Team Penning team in New York State. Not only did I not understand how that Western game works, I never would have imagined that there are Team Penning classes and competitions throughout NYS, CT and MA.
Here's how the game is played. Sounds like good fun, a bit like billiards with horses and cattle. Or maybe more like Chinese Checkers?
Here's just one of the sponsors I found by Googling Team Penning New York.
Wednesday, March 11. 2009
Sippican does art.
"If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy."
Aldous Huxley, as quoted at Overcoming Bias
Theo asks whether the advertising image above is demeaning to Italian women. I say NO! (that's Italian for "No"). I say it's art. Let's analyze the picture:
It's a compelling image, with the late Renaissance landscape in the background (the Garden of Eden, with Eve covering her private parts with pasta in her new-found shame? Or is the background the bleak, sterile desert of Western Capitalism?). The gal's hair and the dinner plate are obvious echoes of Botticelli's Venus. But why the cup of cappucino? Coffee with pasta? What exactly is the artist trying to say about gender, transexualism, race, power, veganism, consumerism, carbon trioxide or whatever, capitalism, spaghetti, and coffee? Or does she have some Barbera in the coffee cup? Wine or coffee - bloodthirsty Christian wine or peaceful, spiritual Moslem coffee? West vs. East? But assuming it's wine in the coffee cup, what's up with that? Is she a victim of Capitalism, too oppressed and impoverished by The System to afford clothing or a proper wine glass? Or is her nakedness a warning about the Crisis of Anthropolitical Capitalist Global Warming? Is there Christian meaning in that cup: "Take this cup. This is my blood..."? For sure, she is saying "Eat me (and drink this)", but in what way, exactly? And does the lady represent a blasphemous pomo version of the Holy Virgin - or a faithful representation of the whores sex workers to whom Christ ministered? Madonna or sex worker? Or maybe a female Christ? Is she saying "Drink of me" (a request for an oral, not a phallic interaction - as a critique of our phallus-dominated, warmongering culture)? Is the snake-like pasta a reference to Satan, or an echo of Laocoon and his Sons? Or both, a deft blending of pagan with Christian imagery? And how do the tensions of all of these dualities help us to interrogate the dangerous and discredited assumptions of Western Civilization?
(I can do this sort of BS all day long, without once mentioning that she's a hot and delicious Italiano babe. Our college readers are welcome to expand on this post for their Art History term papers. An "A" guaranteed from your crackpot pomo prof.)
Tuesday, March 10. 2009
 Experts are 90% certain that this is a life portrait of Shakespeare.
Monday, March 9. 2009
I asked my excellent carpenter-handyman how business is going these days. He was replacing a couple of windows and fixing a few doors for us. A 2-day job. He stays entirely on one job until it is done, and he is meticulous.
He said he is making more money from 3-day jobs now than he was making from 3-10 week jobs last year. He confided that he generally makes $100-150,000/year, and that he is happier working solo instead of with the employees that he had for many years. Less aggravation, and happier customers. He is booked up for the next four months.
The guy is a serious history buff so he is fun to have around. He starts work a 7 AM, and refuses to work after 4 pm to protect his personal and family time.
O Magnum Mysterium. Listen to the music.
Friday, March 6. 2009
How about that grin on Cupid's face? And Psyche looks happy too.
Psyche and Cupid (1817)
Tuesday, March 3. 2009
We are still using some 20,000 year-old words.
Some Afghani weavers are producing "War Rugs." You can find them sometimes on the eBay rug sites.
Monday, March 2. 2009
I never cover my log piles. I like my wood damp, and out in the weather. Dry firewood burns like paper, which is not good. I do maintain a small supply under eaves and porches for starter loads, though. We had a nice, very enjoyable snow today, and my log piles in the foreground are entirely buried.
Samuel Johnson said of poet Thomas Gray, insultingly, "As a poet, his sole virtue is his creativity."
The world is packed with poets these days, including some of a very odd breed of "professional poets" - a crazy idea in itself. Not many people read much poetry though, and even less often outloud as it is meant to be read.
Jeffrey Gray in a Chronicle piece, Poets' Puffery, notes:
In spite of the tenor of book titles like The Marginalization of Poetry and After the Death of Poetry, and in spite of the almost complete removal of the study of poetry from the higher reaches of literary theoretical studies — postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and the New Historicism — the writing of poetry has never been more feverish. There are 300,000 poetry Web sites. Six years ago, an heir to the Lilly fortune — herself an aspiring poet — gave $100-million to Poetry magazine, though her own submissions were all rejected by the editor. Poets continue to graduate in ever-larger numbers from those much-maligned M.F.A. programs.
Writing poetry, it seems to me, is an avocation and a hobby craft. I guess songwriting could be a profession, but one for a tiny few. I used to write poems, but now I specialize in doggerel for special occasions. In his article, Jeffrey Gray discusses evaluation-inflation of poetry, and makes a case for "satisfactory" poetry.
Why should everything have to be "great"?
Sunday, March 1. 2009
The long-time prosperous but (historically) tasteful, silver-spoon WASPy NYC suburb of Greenwich, CT (the growing-up home of George Bush Sr.) became the hedge fund capital of the world over the past decade, as well as a highly-desirable address for newly-weathy Wall Street Masters of the Universe. Many houses, too, are owned by international folks who visit only occasionally, or as second homes for New Yorkers.
In 2006, the median home price was $1.7 million. I recently read that Greenwich suddenly has over 80 homes for sale for over 7 million. That's a lot for a small town. But yes, prices have toppled, sales are nearly dead, and the inventory is surging in the fancier NYC suburbs. Let's see what real estate is doing there now:
Here's one for $460,000. A simple, classic, nice c. 1900 workingman's house:
Here's a less modest listing, for $2,175,000. It says 4 bedrooms, but I'd bet that they are small:
This place is cute, for only $519,000. A happy couple could be happy here - but a contented couple could be happy anywhere:
Here's a 4-acre building lot (in 4-acre zoning) for 1 million. I like it just as it is:
Moving a bit upscale, this pleasant 3 BR place is now only $3,125,000. A tiny Cape with some small additions:
This 5 BR was the carriage house for the servants on an old estate from the pre-income tax days. 2 acres. $4,000,000. I like it:
That one was lovely, but you can also buy this hideous architectural monstrosity for $4 million. I guess you could set it on fire, live in a tent, and farm the land, but I doubt that tomato prices could pay your mortgage. But who cares? The Obama plan could get you off the hook:
Moving up to $6.5 million, your basic, solid New England 6 BR colonial:
Jumping up to $9.5 million, you often tend to leave good taste behind and begin to find new, self-aggrandizing places like the one below. Things meant to be "mansions," I guess, in wannabe Brit aristocracy-style. Some folks need a mansion-thingy for self esteem or social-climbing purposes. It's a free country: to each his own. You could cover this whole thing with ivy and it would look better:
Just for fun, let's see what $18 million will get you. This one is comfortable, homey, unpretentious - glitz-free - and pleasant:
Tommy Hilfiger's house is for sale for $22 million. The 20,000-square-foot home has seven bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, a massive great room, basketball court, spa with a waterfall, theater, gym and a 2,000-bottle wine cellar.
Let's spend our very last penny on this one. $95 million, plenty of bedrooms but a mere 40 acres. The sellers were major Lefty donors. Impress your friends! Set up a nice rifle range! Get some kegs, dig a pit next to the pool and roast a pig or two and throw everybody's girlfriend into the pool. Or is it just a shallow self-reflecting pool?
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