October 2008
29 posts
“Religious people are just like nonreligious people, except religious people have...”
– from Kathryn Lofton’s article on McCain’s faith, “No God but Country.”
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From "The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning"
For given Man, by birth, by education, Imago Dei who forgot his station, The self-made creature who himself unmakes, The only creature ever made who fakes, With no more nature in his loving smile Than in his theories of a natural style, What but tall tales,the luck of verbal playing, Can trick his lying nature into saying That love, or truth in any serious sense, Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?
...
The Availability of Sweet Tea in Virginia as a... →
“Is that the thanks I get?” Jeff...
"The Idea of Order at Key West," Wallace Stevens
She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was...
“The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for...”
– Charles Murray (via ayjay)
“… No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of...”
– Joseph Conrad, from Heart of Darkness
“Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th Century environment...”
– Marshall McLuhan, 1967
“Poll: Most annoying NPR host: A) Ira Flato, Science Friday B) Diane Rhems, the...”
I seek geographic solutions for deep-seated...
Interviewer: You think you can move and leave your problems behind?
Phillip Roth: Isn't that how the West was won?
[from his Weekend America interview a few weeks ago]
Christopher Buckley, on resigning from NR
I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that...
Kundera an informant? →
“Graceland,” by Casiotone for the...
A comforting thought
It is not quite the fastest way to cook an egg, but researchers in India have found that if a raw egg is placed in between four switched-on cellphones, it will be ready to eat in about 80 minutes. Researchers at Panjab University, studying the impact ofthe electromagnetic radiation emitted by cellphone devices on living matter, have found that the radiation adversely affect tiny insects, wheat and...
260. If you spot a teacher outside of school,...
(via rulesformyunbornson)
Auden not our contemporary
And what would Auden have made of the intolerant atheism now abroad in the guise of liberalism? Perhaps he would have pitied it, but he might well have found it harder to claim public space in which to do so, especially if he wanted to say this, from a review of T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) published in the New Yorker: “Nobody has ever really believed in Freedom of...
“On hearing Billy Sunday preach in 1909 he became an atheist…”
– Wikipedia’s entry on Ammon Hennacy, via The Ochlophobist
Stanley Hauerwas: Excuse me, do you know where the library is at?
Harvard student: Here at Harvard, we don't end our sentences with prepositions.
Stanley Hauerwas: Okay. Where's the library at, asshole?
