June 2010
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As I've mentioned before, I really have not wanted to reflexively blame the Obama administration for not doing more to contain and collect the oil spewing out of British Petroleum's disaster. But I keep hearing more and more stories of delays, red tape, and inefficiency. This column by Winston Groom in today's Mobile Register crystallizes my…
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NOTE: This essay appeared originally in Caelum et Terra. —July 14, 2005 Nothing At the CenterNine Popes Without a GodThe Menace of Nice PeopleFalling Leaves in Late WinterPolitics and Communion Nothing At the Center [top] [next] Remote, lofty, and vast, the inside surface of a dome is a natural spot for the placement of…
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This piece was published almost twenty years ago, in the Winter/Spring 1985 issue of The Hillsdale Review (under the title “True Blues: Rock, Jazz, and Conservatism”). I dug it out a few months ago after an intermittent discussion with Jesse Canterbury about rock and jazz in which we discussed among other things the different criteria…
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(Note: this review appeared in the National Catholic Register, some years ago—around 1982, I think. I found, on re-reading it, that I had identified the character to whom the title refers. In the interests of not giving away too much of the story to first-time readers of the novel, I’ve removed that name; otherwise the…
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Weekend Music How many times does it happen that you hear the chorus of a song coming from the radio through someone’s open car window as you’re walking through the parking lot at work, and it haunts you so that you have to find out what it is? Not very often for me. In fact…
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At the time in my life when I was young and rebellious and might have been expected to like Kerouac and the other Beat writers, I had no use for them at all. I was a grungy rock-and-roll-loving hippie, yes, but my literary tastes were strictly highbrow: I liked Yeats and Eliot and Hopkins and…
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I am linking to this anti-soccer rant from alienated Englishman (and all-around curmudgeon) John Derbyshire because I think it’s funny, not because I agree with it (my view is here, in case you missed it—and care). Sample: The very inconclusiveness of soccer is, I suspect, what has made it the pet sport of the repulsive…
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Contradiction experienced to the very depth of one’s being tears us heart and soul: it is the cross. —Simone Weil
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Sunday Night Journal — June 20, 2010 I caught only the last few words of Mr. Obama’s Tuesday night speech on the Gulf Coast oil spill, and have just now tracked down the text and read it (you can find it here). As you may have heard, the speech was not especially well received, even…
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I like this picture a lot (it's yet another album cover I noticed on eMusic–don't know anything about the artist).
Light On Dark Water 