7 on the 7th

Our 7-year-old daughter just up and started reading books today! So far she's read seven with just a little bit of help from her 11-year-old sister. The first was "My First Colors Board Book", and the rest included the 8-year-old's first book, "Ducks in Muck." September 7, 2010 is a date to celebrate.

The Luxembourg Pipe Band

I just found out that my old friend Chuck Watkins is the bass drummer for the Luxembourg Pipe Band, "the first and only Pipe Band in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg." Here's a fine collection of videos.

The courteous canal

sancrucensis, with an assist from Newman, finds an important distinction that Roger Scruton missed in his lecture The Face of the Earth. Since all Truth is One, you might say, his distinction also sheds surprising new light on Belloc's poem Courtesy.

Homage

In the 1998 film Enemy of the State, a character chasing Gene Hackman as they zero in on his surveillance-proof workshop is wearing the same sort of horrifying translucent plastic rain jacket Hackman wore almost constantly in the 1974 film The Conversation. (If I hadn't seen plastic jackets like that when I was a kid, I'd never believe they existed.)

At extraordinary speed

A disquieting article in the Telegraph:

Simon Winchester, author of ‘The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary’, said the switch towards online formats was “prescient”. He said: “Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise. The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed. I have two complete OEDs, but never consult them – I use the online OED five or six times daily. The same with many of my reference books – and soon with most. Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand as a pastime; these are inescapable realities.”

It is yours

From the indispensable Laudator, this quote from Guy Davenport, "What Are Revolutions?" in The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art

Because I have no rational revolution to offer you, I suggest, for the fun of it, that you try the Erewhonian. Take back your body from its possession by the automobile; take back your imagination from the TV set; take back your wealth from Congress's bottomless pit and maniac spending; take back your skills as homemakers from the manufacturers; take back your minds from the arguments from necessity and the merchants of fear and prejudice. Take back peace from perpetual war. Take back your lives; they are yours.

I bought Davenport's book a few years ago on the recommendation of Patrick Kurp.

In the name of the Bodleian

Another book of essays to be read, via the Laudator. This is by Augustine Birrell, whom we last met through the good graces of Roger Pearse.

Congress shall make no law

Jerry Pournelle made an interesting point today that clarifies a bit in our federal constitution:

The Constitution specifically allowed the States to have established religions -- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and for the first forty years of the Republic some states had religions "by law established" which meant mostly tax paid clergy and public prayer at public events. Virginia had disestablished the Church of England before the Constitution was adopted, but seven of the thirteen States had Established Churches, and Congress had no power whatever to disestablish them (nor or course could it establish a Federal religion). There is on the Harvard campus what Russell Seitz is pleased to call "the established Federalist Church" and I believe it still stands and functions.

One wonders if it might not be better to do as the Framers intended, and leave religion to the States. I doubt any would establish a church, but certainly they have a right to do that.

Too often, we take our inferences ("separation of church and state", for example) to be fundamental facts. Here, our venerable wall of separation is seen to dissolve into its one simple element: Congress shall make no law...

Bigger government! Smaller government!

By my lights, Ray Bradbury isn't making much sense. In one paragraph he wants President Obama to announce that we (which, in context, can only mean We the Government) should be going to the Moon and Mars, etc., and in the next paragraph he says, "There is too much government today." Choose one, Mr Bradbury.

Perhaps Mr Obama's only true success since January 2009 is his evisceration of NASA's manned space program, which is one of the first few necessary steps toward opening space to ordinary people eager to do great things and make a buck while doing them. It's fine to have NASA working on propulsion systems and deep solar system exploration; meanwhile, get NASA out of Earth orbit and let us get up there ourselves.

"Seasonique"

I'm beginning to think modern society is trapped in a nightmare: read the Suburban Banshee's report about what she saw on teevee tonight. I think the hormonal poison/abortifacient she's referring to is Seasonique.

We too should translate some books

From King Alfred's preface to his own Anglo-Saxon translation of Gregory's Pastoral Rule:

When I then called to mind all this, then I remembered how I saw, ere that all in them was laid waste and burnt up, how the churches throughout all the English race stood filled with treasures and books, and also a great multitude of God's servants, but they knew very little use of those books, for that they could not understand anything of them, for that they were not written in their own language, such as they, our elders, spoke, who erewhile held these places; they loved wisdom, and through that got wealth, and left it to us. Here men may yet see their path, but we know not how to tread in their footsteps, inasmuch as we have both lost that wealth and wisdom, for that we would not with our minds stoop to their tracks.

When I then called to mind all this, I then wondered greatly about those good and wise men that have been of old among the English race, and who had fully learned all the books, that they have not been willing to turn any part of them into their own language. But then I soon again answered myself and said, "They did not think that men would ever become so reckless, and that learning should fall off in such a way. Of set purpose, then, they let it alone, and wished that there should be more wisdom in this land the more languages we knew."

Then I remembered how the Law was first found in the Hebrew tongue, and again, when the Greeks learnt it, then they turned the whole of it into their own language, and also all the other books. And again the Latins also in the same way, when they had learned it, turned it all through wise interpreters into their own language, and likewise all other Christian nations have translated some part into their own speech. Wherefore I think it better, if it also appears so to you, that we too should translate some books, which are the most necessary for all men to understand - that we should turn these into that tongue which we all can know, and so bring it about, as we very easily may, with God's help, if we have rest, that all the youth that now is among the English race, of free men, that have property, so that they can apply themselves to these things, may be committed to others for the sake of instruction, so long as they have no power for any other employments, until the time that they may know well how to read English writing. Let men afterwards further teach them Latin, those whom they are willing further to teach, and whom they wish to advance to a higher state.

In my tribe

Kathy Shaidle keeps saying, "We will ALL default to our tribes when the time comes." Who's your tribe? Mine is basically small-town Midwestern WASPs, people who keep their yards mowed and research genealogy and take care of old forgotten cemeteries and raise big batches of kids.

Speaking of which, we went to a family reunion recently - our small branch of the Bragg family. One of the older ladies noticed our large crew - Lisa, me and four of our five kids, and noted with a bit of sadness that "there aren't many children anymore." It was a chilling moment. Our family reunions used to have more kids than adults, but at this one there were only five - our four and one other little boy. Things change so slowly it's hard to notice the changes day-by-day; but when someone stops to compare life today to life fifty years ago, the changes for the worse are shocking.

Somewhere around here...

...some Green lunatic is thinking, "now there's a good idea."

Such is education

Here's a bit by Roger Pearse, our great commissioner of classical translations, from his engaging post "Why We Need Akkadian" - I've left the part about Akkadian for your enjoyment at his blog; I wish to excerpt this bit about a good book he once read:

I remember the last time I ever went punting at Oxford. I bought, in a now vanished bookshop in St. Clements, an old ‘Everyman’ volume to read. The cover had gone, and someone had recovered it with some brown paper. Written on the brown paper in felt-tip were the words, “A century of English essays”. But I took it with me, and read as we punted into the Cherwell, along the green-brown muddy river and under the trailing trees. I have it still. It introduced me to the essays of Augustine Birrell. These in turn led me to Dr. Johnson, to an appreciation even of Gibbon, whom I might otherwise have known only as a less-than-honest polemicist, and a score more. Such is education, and a university the opportunity to acquire it.

One thing leads to another

Kathy Shaidle issues one of her patented brilliant takedowns of modern "culture".

Around town

My Grandpa was a small-town building contractor in his younger days in Findlay, Illinois, and it's good to see that the houses he built are still lived in today. Here's one on the north edge of town that was rented by some hippie painter back in the early 70s - Mom may still have one of his psychedelic works in her closet. Here are a couple more; I grew up in the one on the left and Grandma and Grandpa lived in the other (hey - they cut down his evergreen tree!)

If you look to the north from that first house, you'll see a gloriously flat horizon.

What literature is all about

Paul Gruchow, via the Laudator:

At the University of Minnesota, on another spring day, I heard the poet John Berryman fail to lecture on The Iliad to a room jammed with students. He sat down at a table, as was his custom, put on his reading glasses, lit a cigarette, which he held at bottom of the space between his trembling index and middle fingers in the way that drunks do, and began to read to us from the poem in his dark voice, oddly powerful coming from such a frail man, paying as much attention to the stops in the lines as to the accents. He read to us the scene in which Hector and Andromache say farewell to each other. Hector is destined to die and Andromache to be hauled into slavery, and both know this by premonition. When he came to the end of the scene, Berryman was weeping and so, unexpectedly, were we. He made no effort to hide his grief, running from an ancient pen across the long centuries through a modern language into our hearts. He did not even brush away his tears. We sat, stunned, until he got up and left the room without another word, and then we, too, gathered up our books and emerged into the cruel sunshine. I hurried to my office (I was editor of the student newspaper) and locked myself in, and it was an hour or two before I could see anybody. It was the first time, I think, that any of us had ever been taught what literature is all about.

Why he's NOT going to buy a computer

Hello, Irony. Come on in. Where have you been?

Well, Bill, I've been surfing the web, where I saw a computer programmer post a link on his blog to a Wendell Berry essay about why he's not going to buy a computer.

The "devotions" meme

Zoinks! I've been tagged by TSO on the favorite devotions meme.

Well, the last few years I haven't really done off-the-shelf devotions. I keep one of these excellent little rosary booklets on my bedside coffee table, but I haven't gotten into it in a really long time, and I never did get into the various chaplets and whatnot. So what passes for my devotions nowadays are -

• reading the Psalms and Canticles - in the King James or the old BCP on the old Benedictine schedule (the weekly schema in the Psalterium Monasticum) along with Neale & Littledale's magnificent old 4-volume commentary. Not every day - I just drop down into them now and then. Note the recurring refrain: old, old, old. Speaking of old, I have a handy rule of thumb: never join a new Catholic movement that's less than 500 years old. Saves a lot of hassle.
  
• reading the Fathers - I try to keep up with the week's Gospel in the old calendar by reading through the relevant commentaries and sermons in The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers. For each week's Gospel, the relevant part of the Catena aurea of Aquinas is given, followed by a few of the complete sermons from which Aqinas gleaned his excerpts. I appreciate the old calendar's slow and steady emphasis on one reading per week over against the new calendar's frenzied whirlwind of daily readings. With SSOTGF you get the Gospel on Sunday, then you have a whole week to work through the Catena and a few patristic homilies before another Gospel comes up. Each of the homilies is from a preacher such as John Chrysostom or Gregory I, whose chief delights are stepping on toes and calling people to their senses. Works for me.
  
• reading Divine Intimacy - it's a mid-20th-century Carmelite book, keyed to the old calendar, with a short 3-part daily devotion. It's organized like Opus Dei's In Conversation With God series, but with more fundamental theology and less of something I can't put my finger on. It does come with lots of references to the chief Carmelite writers, which (grumble) I guess I can live with. Carmelites always read as though they've been translated out of French.
  
• quick Hail Marys - when I converted, I spent a lot of time with St Louis de Montfort's True Devotion and works of similar piety that I'd found at the Marian Center in Springfield, Illinois - a delightful mess of a bookstore. Somewhere, de Montfort emphasizes the power of a single Ave, and that has somehow stuck with me.
  

I basically read myself into the Church, and I guess I continue that today.

"Live by old Ethicks..."

From Sir Thomas Browne's Christian Morals (google books):

Live by old Ethicks and the classical Rules of Honesty. Put no new names or notions upon Authentick Virtues & Vices. Think not that Morality is Ambulatory; that Vices in one age are not Vices in another; or that Virtues, which are under the everlasting Seal of right Reason, may be Stamped by Opinion. And therefore though vicious times invert the opinions of things, and set up a new Ethicks against Virtue, yet hold thou unto old Morality; & rather than follow a multitude to do evil, stand like Pompey's Pillar conspicuous by thy self, and single in Integrity. And since the worst of times afford imitable Examples of Virtue; since no Deluge of Vice is like to be so general, but more than eight will escape; Eye well those Heroes who have held their Heads above Water, who have touched Pitch, and not been defiled, and in the common Contagion have remained uncorrupted.