November 2021
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A train of thought that began with my noticing that in a few days it will be December eventually carried me to these lines from "The Raven": Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak DecemberAnd each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor… I hadn't read the poem in I don't…
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Extremely idle question to which a very brief search did not yield an answer: when did movies stop saying "The End" at the end? Or maybe some of them still do, but I don't think I've seen it for a long time.
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And they've invited me to contribute a monthly post. I'm extremely flattered, and a bit intimidated, as it puts me alongside Peter Hitchens and probably some other people who are better writers than I am. My first post appeared yesterday. It's called "Being Honour Bred," a phrase from a Yeats poem which mentions people who…
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Very early in my life as an adult Christian I realized that I had to come to terms with the fact that a lot of my fellow Christians were really Not My Sort. More significantly, they held views, or at least expressed them in ways, with which I disagreed significantly. I have in mind a…
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"Bishop Steven J. Lopes, the bishop of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, was elected to head the Committee for Divine Worship by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) at their annual general assembly in Baltimore." Full story at the web site of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. My master plan for the…
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I went to hear the Mobile Symphony on Saturday. There were three works on the fairly short program: Rossini's overture to The Thieving Magpie, Saint-Seans's Violin Concerto #3, and Mendelssohn's Symphony #4, known as "The Italian." I was slightly surprised to find that I recognized the overture–just slightly, not very. I knew it was one of…
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I recently read Vows, the title given by translator Tiina Nunnally to the first book in the tetralogy previously known as The Master of Hestviken, called in the new translation simply by the name of the main character, Olav Audunsson. From the book's brief Wikipedia entry it's not clear to me whether Undset gave titles to the…
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Anybody seen this? I'd been hearing about it-it's very popular right now–and watched an episode out of curiosity, slightly against my better judgment. Should've listened to my better judgment, because of course once I got to a certain point I wanted to see what was going to happen. And then I was sorry. It's a…
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Kompakt is a German electronica label which I think is mainly oriented toward the types of music that those of us who aren’t into them lump together as “techno.” EDM, for “electronic dance music,” is the preferred term, I think. Whatever you call it there are actually quite a number of sub-genres; see this Wikipedia…
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I went to a traditional Latin Mass last Sunday. Three observations: (1) I prefer the Novus Ordo (assuming no gross abuses thereof). (2) Of the roughly 50 people who were there, by far the majority were no older than 40-ish. (3) Traditiones Custodes was a mistake. I've done my share of…
Light On Dark Water 