Thursday, February 13, 2025

T.E. Lawrence

Lawrence of Arabia
(1962) was one of those films—spectacular, but (more or less) based on history—that enthralled teenage me (another was A Man for All Seasons). I did learn more of the actual history as time passed. The movie was directed by David Lean who also directed my favorite films of Dickens' novels, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, as well as the film of Doctor Zhivago, another wide-screen spectacle. The Telegraph reports today about a re-creation of one of Lawrence's most heroic WWI feats:
It was a journey immortalised by Peter O’Toole in the epic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia – and now four military veterans have become the first people to recreate T.E. Lawrence’s 700-mile (1,126km) trek across the sands of the Middle East.

Howard Leedham, James Calder, Craig Ross and Martin Thompson spent 25 days on camelback crossing the Nafud desert in Saudi Arabia to mark 90 years since Lawrence’s death.

The four men, who served in the British special forces, endured 37C (98F) heat, sandstorms and sheer cliffs on the trek from Al Wajh in Saudi Arabia to the Aqaba in Jordan.

They collected sand from four significant areas on the journey to spread on Lawrence’s grave in Moreton, Dorset.

Lawrence was a First World War hero who led the Arab Revolt against German-supporting Turkey. In 1916 he swept across the desert to Jordan and rewrote the map of the Middle East.

His remarkable feat was described in his autobiographical account Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the classic film Lawrence of Arabia. ...
On the penultimate day, the group, with 40 locals, re-enacted Lawrence’s attack on an Ottoman train that was transporting friends and family who had travelled to celebrate the end of their journey. The staff on the train were aware of the attack, but the tourists were “somewhat startled”. ....

Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident near his home at Bovington, Dorset in 1935. He is buried in the graveyard of St Nicholas Church in Moreton. (more)

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Lincoln, on the anniversary of his birth

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. These words from the conclusion of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861) have an obvious relevance to our times:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Lincoln Addresses the Nation - NYTimes.com

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Is Pascal's Wager a good bet?

Ross Douthat is a New York Times opinion columnist. He is also a Christian, author of the soon-to-be published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. A recent column was titled "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God." From that:
...I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. ....

[An] underrated argument I’d be inclined to emphasize is what you might call the argument from intelligibility, which sits at the intersection of two lines described above — the line of evidence from the fine-tuning of the universe and the line of evidence from the strange capacities of human consciousness.

The fine-tuning argument, to oversimplify, rests on the startling fact that parameters of the cosmos have been apparently set, tuned very finely, if you will, in an extremely narrow range — with odds on the order of one in a bazillion (that’s a technical number, don’t question it), not one in a hundred — that allows for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets and complex life. To quote Bentham’s Bulldog, this would seem like a pretty strong prima facie case for some originating intelligence: “If there is no God, then the constants, laws and initial conditions could be anything, so it’s absurdly unlikely that they’d fall in the ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life.” ....

.... We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.

This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. ....

“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon? ....

As the previous line suggests, the intelligibility of the cosmos is perhaps not exclusively an argument for the existence of God. Rather it’s more of an argument for a position that some people who concede divine possibilities are still inclined to doubt — not only that God exists in some distant, unfathomable form, but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”
Douthat's column is behind a subscription wall. I read it by getting a free, limited, subscription.

Monday, February 10, 2025

Rooting for justice

Alan Jacobs is writing a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. Today he considers a distinction she makes between stories of crime and stories of detection:
Dorothy L. Sayers, once she had established herself as a writer of detection, was asked to edit an anthology of, roughly, her kind of fiction. In the end she edited several such volumes, but the first, largest, and best of them was published in 1928 as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. (The following year it was published in the U.S. with the much less accurate title The Omnibus of Crime.)

In her highly illuminating introduction to the anthology, Sayers argues that in one form or another tales of detection and tales of horror are quite ancient. ....

Concerning the tale of detection proper, Sayers muses on a curious fact: Why, if there are such ancient examples of such tales, did the genre not really take root and grow expansively until the second half of the nineteenth century? Drawing on the work of what she rightly calls “a brilliant little study” by a scholar rejoicing in the name of E.M. Wrong, she makes a fascinating suggestion: that while stories about crime always have flourished and always will flourish, stories of detection depend on the reader’s confidence in the basic integrity of the forces of law and order. That is, detective stories depend on the reader’s essential sympathy with the Law rather than the criminal — the reader must want the criminal to be caught.

This does not mean that the reader is expected to have any real confidence in the competence of the police — unless, of course, the protagonist is himself or herself a police officer, in which case we typically see an honest and skillful investigator thwarted or at least impeded by corruption or incompetence in the higher ranks. (This is a problem often faced by Maigret and Morse, and sometimes Dalgleish.) When the detective-protagonist is not a police officer, most famously in the case of Sherlock Holmes, we expect that the police will be none too intelligent and, whether they realize it or not, in desperate need of Holmes’s help. But we never for a moment imagine that Lestrade or Athelney Jones is corrupt. ....

So if the detective story depended on the readers’ confidence in the integrity of the System, what happens when that confidence evaporates? Obviously a return to crime fiction: from the uprightness of Poirot and Lord Peter and even Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, we move to the morally sloppy, thoroughly compromised, just barely more-slimed-than-sliming porotagonists of Elmore Leonard’s novels; or Danny Ocean and his crew. Perhaps that’s why the most popular detective stories are those of the Golden Age, which provide an opportunity for us to enter a more innocent time than ours, more innocent in multiple respects, one in which we’re not openly rooting for thieves and murderers. (more)
I enjoy recent authors like Elmore Leonard, but my favorite authors, Dorothy L. Sayers among them,  wrote in the Golden Age.

The book cover above results from an image search and is the second in the series Sayers edited. I own a copy of the first, the one to which Jacobs refers, but I don't know where it is. The dust cover on my copy is very tattered.

Saturday, February 8, 2025

"Witness" is forty years old!

Before Master and Commander Peter Weir directed Witness, forty years ago. It's an old film by now, I suppose, but it doesn't seem so to me. Like Master and Commander it isn't just a story, it immerses the viewer in an unfamiliar (to most of us) culture:
Before we see a gun, a bullet or a drop of blood, we see tall grass swaying in the breeze. Amid the grass there is a mass of men, women and children walking peaceably but confidently. We soon discern, from their unmistakably austere manner of dress, that they belong to the Amish community; we quickly realize that they have gathered for a funeral.

These images constitute the stirring, surprising opening of Peter Weir’s peerless thriller Witness. The film, which was released by Paramount Pictures 40 years ago this month, will eventually develop into a police procedural of rare drama and intensity, but not before Mr. Weir lays the firm foundation for the setting with which it begins and to which it returns: an Amish community in Pennsylvania in 1984. ....

In the film’s early stretch, Mr. Weir exercises great patience in establishing the principal Amish characters: Rachel (Kelly McGillis), a widow whose late husband was being mourned in the opening scene, and her little boy, Samuel (Lukas Haas). By the time Rachel and Samuel have made their way to a Philadelphia train station, Mr. Weir has engendered such audience identification with them that, although they are outsiders in this environment, we no longer perceive them as such. Instead, Mr. Weir makes alien and unsympathetic the other travelers, some of whom cannot suppress their stares.

Mr. Weir’s approach of acclimating us to the Amish worldview pays dividends in a pivotal scene. After entering the train station men’s room, Samuel observes, through a slightly ajar stall door, a murder.... (more, with spoilers)

Peter Tonguette, "Peter Weir’s Witness: Crime and Community," The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2025.

Friday, February 7, 2025

"May I but safely reach my home"

Re-posted


From Conjubilant With Song: Safely Reach My Home:
.... A simple, four stanza text by Isaac Watts, first published in 1707, which appeared under the epigraph The hope of heaven our support under trials on earth.... It could be set to many different tunes in Common Meter (8.6.8.6.) such as ST. ANNE or WINCHESTER OLD, tunes which were known in Watts's time. However, it has become more familiar in this country with a folk tune from Scotland which was arranged in an early American tune collection titled Kentucky Harmony (1817).
When I can read my title clear
To mansions in the skies,
I'll bid farewell to every fear,
And wipe my weeping eyes.
And wipe my weeping eyes,
And wipe my weeping eyes
I'll bid farewell to every fear,
And wipe my weeping eyes.
Let cares, like a wild deluge come,
And storms of sorrow fall!
May I but safely reach my home,
My God, my heav’n, my all.
My God, my heav'n, my all,
My God, my heav'n, my all,
May I but safely reach my home,
Ay God, my heav'n, my all.

Should earth against my soul engage,
And fiery darts be hurled,
Then I can smile at Satan’s rage,
And face a frowning world.
And face a frowning world,
And face a frowning world,
Then I can smile at Satan’s rage,
And face a frowning world.

There shall I bathe my weary soul
In seas of heav’nly rest,
And not a wave of trouble roll,
Across my peaceful breast.
Across my peaceful breast,
Across my peaceful breast,
And not a wave of trouble roll,
Across my peaceful breast.

Isaac Watts, 1707
Tune: PISGAH (8.6.8.6.6.6.8.6.)
Scottish tune, arr. Joseph C. Lowry, 1817

Conjubilant With Song: Safely Reach My Home

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Marple

Last night I watched two of the Joan Hickson Miss Marple mysteries. I think Hickson is by far the best Marple on screen. I've owned the DVDs of that series for some time but last night, I watched streaming on Britbox and was glad I did — the episodes have been restored and are beautiful. I saw "The Moving Finger" and "A Pocket Full of Rye," neither of which I had watched recently and much longer since read. Speaking of the books, today I came across one reader's ranking of the twelve Agatha Christie's in which Miss Marple appears:
  • A Murder is Announced
    (1950)
  • The Moving Finger (1942)
  • The Body in the Library (1942)
  • A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
  • The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
  • Sleeping Murder (1976)
  • The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
  • A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
  • 4.50 from Paddington (1957)
  • They Do It with Mirrors (1952)
  • Nemesis (1971)
  • At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)
Not bad, although I would rank The 4:50 from Paddington a bit higher.

Jose Ignacio Escribano, "My Ranking of the Twelve Miss Marple Novels," A Crime is Afoot, Feb. 4, 2025.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Virtucrats

Joseph Epstein is a favorite essayist I always read whenever and wherever I find him. From "Virtucrats on Parade":
To win an argument you need reason, and, when it comes to politics, you cannot, as Jonathan Swift had it, reason someone out of something into which he or she has not been reasoned.

Consider how one came to one’s own politics. Many among us have adopted the politics of our parents. Others have come by their politics in direct opposition to their parents’ politics. Some take up the politics reigning among their social milieu; still others, seeking to distinguish themselves, choose a politics of nonconformity. For some people, politics is of trifling interest; for others, politics dominates their lives. Still others, bored blue by the subject, scarcely have any politics at all. ....

Michael Oakeshott thought politics “an inferior form of human activity” that was about nothing more than the struggle for power, and as such “an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others.” Oakeshott viewed “politics [as] the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life but of organizing a common life.” He contemned those who in the political realm thought they had all the answers, which many strongly politicized people do.

Michael Oakeshott’s were the politics of conservatism, but of a kind that entailed “the propensity to use and enjoy what is present rather than to wish to look for something else.” For him, to be conservative “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” ....

In our time, politics have more and more become about dueling virtues: with those on the left claiming themselves superior because of their struggle for justice, those on the right claiming the wisdom of their perception of the limits of the possible. And each side is intent on crushing the other. The more politics dominate a time, as Oakeshott noted, the worse that time. ....

In 1985 in an article in the New York Times Magazine, I coined the word “virtucrat.” Elsewhere I’ve defined a virtucrat as “any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply righteous in the bargain.” A virtucrat apprehends the world’s injustice and feels obliged to set things right. He is confident that he sees through the lies and cons of the rich and powerful, which he feels must be exposed. His life becomes a mission, his view of himself that of a sensitive, serious, above all highly virtuous person. ....

The old adage has it that virtue is its own reward, yet in politics the pretense to virtue has all too often brought not reward but the severest punishment to those societies—Russian, German, Chinese—whose leaders promised that under their plans virtue would flourish as never before. (more)

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Moral imagination

From a long, very interesting, essay by Katherine Rundell, herself an author of books for children, "Why children’s books?":
.... It was W.H. Auden who said: ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’ The great discipline of children’s fiction is that it has to be written for everyone: because if it is not for everyone then it’s not for anyone at all. It offers us the specific joy of finding our commonality: we can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida. ....

...[T]here are common threads that run through the children’s books that have endured and the new books that children currently devour. If, as a practitioner, I were to draw up a list it would include: autonomy, peril, justice, secrets, small jokes, large jokes, revelations, animals, multitudinous versions of love, inventions – and food.

Food gives both solid reality and delicious longing to children’s books. Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series about monastic chivalric mice, was a milkman when he began volunteering to read at a school for the blind. He found himself horrified by the quality of the books he was reading, and decided to write his own – and, because the children were blind, he accentuated senses other than sight: smell, sound, temperature, texture and, most important of all to children, taste. The food in Redwall is the thing most of its readers remember....

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages. And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder? ....

What is​ fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death. As Tolkien said, in an interview in 1968, ‘human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.’ ....

C.S. Lewis wrote that tales of the marvellous are their own, real thing: fictional, yes, but also solid pieces of knowledge. They are ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.’ The greatest children’s fantasies were worth your time when you were twelve, and they are equally worth it now. They keep the imagination sharp, and big, and hungry. They remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood. It is at the very heart of everything. It is deadly serious, the necessary condition of political change, of love. It is the sharpest tool of ethics. Edmund Burke popularised the term ‘moral imagination’ to describe the ability of ethical perception to step beyond the limits of the fleeting moment and beyond the limits of a single person’s experience. ....

There’s no doubt that reading for pleasure as a child can change your life. It is a key predictor of economic success later in life. But the main reason to help children seek out books is this: if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. ....

To write those books is to insist that though the world burns, and there is more fire to come, it will always be worth teaching children to rejoice. It will always be worth showing them how to build an internal blueprint for happiness. Nothing about being alive demands joy. But, over and over, the great children’s books insist on it: on joy as a way that humans both create and are given meaning. Joy is insisted on through talking spiders, and rats in rowing boats, and in the vast promise of an opening line: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ .... (much more)

Saturday, January 25, 2025

On Robert Burns' Day

I learned from a DNA test that I have Scots ancestry, almost certainly on my mother's side of the family, the Bond side. Many Scots celebrate the poet Robert Burns on the anniversary of his birth — January 25.

Madeleine Kearns, herself a Scot, wrote about several of Burns' poems a few years ago. I looked up a few of them online. First from "Address To The Unco Guid," the first and last verses (full poem here):
O YE wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell   
Your neibours' fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi' store o' water;
The heaped happer's ebbing still,
An' still the clap plays clatter.
Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.
Kearns also quotes from "To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church":
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An foolish notion:
What airs in dress an gait wad lea'es us,
An ev'n devotion!
Much more at this site.

Robert Burns’s Antidote for Our Self-Righteous Times

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Norman Vincent Peale

The incoming President's favorite pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952, but still in print). Today Jake Meador writes about "The Perils of Positive Thinking":
[F]or Peale the Christian message isn’t a message about the nature of reality, the reasons that mankind suffers and does evil, or the way that we might be saved from those things by something that exists outside of ourselves. It is not a story of God taking on flesh and entering the world as a rescuer, and the renewer of all things. Rather, Christianity—and really it’s just Christian words for Peale—is a technique for people in advanced industrial societies to achieve their dreams. It represents a kind of baptism of egocentrism for the wealthy and the powerful. Indeed, virtually every personal anecdote Peale shares involves well-to-do people. You will find many business owners, civic leaders, and men about town in The Power of Positive Thinking. What you won’t find are janitors or plumbers.

When Peale cites Scripture, it is invariably out of context and applied in ways that would have been quite shocking to the original authors. The point of one of Peale’s favorite texts—if God is for us, who can be against us?—is not that...people should pursue their personal kingdoms with confidence and positivity because God is on their side. It is, if anything, almost the opposite: The quite extensive witness of Scripture is that the sorts of people Peale constantly cites in his book are precisely the people least likely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless they repent of the very avarice and self-centered ambition that Peale’s work encourages.

The results of this confusion on Peale’s part in which he seeks to use Christian language to advance wealthy Western individualist goals are sometimes hilarious. In one passage, he explains that one can harness “prayer power” to achieve one’s goals, but only if one understands the rules and formulas required to pray “scientifically.” ....

According to the wisdom of Scripture and mother church, prayer is a way of laying our fears and concerns before God. But it is not a self-help technique or a kind of celestial snack machine we visit whenever we are hungry. Prayer is a way through which human creatures enjoy communion with their creator and through which they are renewed and restored to what they were made to be. .... Often prayers seem to go unanswered, not due to using the improper technique but, as the Scriptures tell us, because God’s ways are inscrutable to us, and the work of prayer is not so much to yield the results we want, but to align our fallen and imperfect will with God’s will so that we might be caught up in closer relationship with him.

All of this complexity, which one must speak Christian to understand, falls away in Peale’s work. It is almost as if he doesn’t even recognize such complexity as being part of the human experience, let alone the Christian experience. Prayer is simply a technique one practices in order to improve one’s daily material life, to help one’s mood, or, quite crassly, to grow one’s bank account. .... (more)

Saturday, January 18, 2025

A personal library

Robert Caro is the author of "titanic biographies of Robert Moses (which took seven years) and Lyndon B. Johnson (a multivolume project that began in 1976 and is still ongoing)." The Washington Post has just published an article about his very extensive personal library. I particularly enjoyed this:
.... Lower [in his bookcase] in much easier reach, sit the Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester, about the ascent of a British Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic Wars. The young Caro loved the series so much that, whenever the public library got the latest installment, he would plop down on the building’s metal steps and start reading right there. As a gift, his wife, Ina, who has worked as his researcher on all his books, had Caro’s set rebound in blue, with anchors and naval insignia on the spines.

“I had them all my life,” he said. “It means a lot to have the very pages — because I read these books so many times that I sort of know where the words are on the page. And I’m ashamed to tell you how often I reread them.”

“Oh dear,” he said, his eyes falling on a different stamp, on the top edge of one volume: the faded words “East Meadow Public Library.” “Well, that’s quite true, I was not always good at returning these books. This is going to look really bad! It’s too late.” ....

“Sometimes you look at these bookshelves,” Caro said, “and I have all these memories, all wrapped up in them.” .... (more)
The book cover illustrated above is of one of the Hornblower books in my library.

Thursday, January 16, 2025

David Lynch’s only Disney movie

Among the notable deaths reported today is that of filmmaker David Lynch. I've watched several of his films and TV series. Enjoyed some of them but I haven't revisited any except this: 
The Straight Story (1999)

It’s David Lynch’s only Disney movie, which is delicately illustrated with scenery that looks like it’s been pulled out of the pages of National Geographic. The story concerns an aging man who travels across the heartland on a dilapidated lawn mower, hoping to reunite with his brother (played by Harry Dean Stanton). It’s not only Lynch’s most romantic film, it’s also the only one where his strange interpretation of Americana becomes almost Rockwellian. There is nothing Lynchian about Alvin Straight, who’s a swisher-smoking wiseman who shares his thoughts over crackling campfires and warm meals—each time his eyes filling up with tears. Though it’s based on an unusual story that made headlines in 1994, Lynch’s interpretation of Straight’s story is elegiac. This is a film about an aging outlaw taking his last ride towards the sunset.
Not really about an "outlaw" at all, but a decent old guy played by Richard Farnsworth who wants to see his brother at least one more time. It was filmed in Iowa and Wisconsin where the real events happened.

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Against stupidity we are defenseless

A comment I read today led me to look for a Bonhoeffer essay apparently included in Letters and Papers from Prison. My immediate inclination was to apply the insights to the left but, of course, they can apply to just about any group.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against stupidity we are defenseless.

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. ....

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings. .... (more)

Saturday, January 11, 2025

Alone against a warship

I've seen the film and own a DVD of Sailor Of The King, a pretty good film based on a book by C.S. Forester, Brown on Resolution, that just entered the public domain. It was one of the first Forester books dealing with nautical subjects. The text is available at Standard Books with this description:
Albert Brown was fated to enlist in the British Navy, his destiny set by his unusual birth and upbringing. While on operations in the Pacific during the First World War, his ship is sunk—but he survives, and is taken on board the German cruiser that sank them. It too has suffered damage, and heads to the Galapagos Islands to effect repairs. In this unlikely and hostile setting, Brown, alone, pits himself against the German ship and its crew, seeking to delay its progress while British naval reinforcements make their way to the region.

C.S. Forester became famous for his Horatio Hornblower series, but Brown on Resolution is among the first of his works of nautical fiction. In it, he weaves together the gritty social themes of his earlier work with meticulous accounts of naval adventure.
The book is set during World War I but the film moves the story to World War II.

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Integral to humanity

From a review of Alister McGrath's Why We Believe:
His latest book, Why We Believe, provides McGrath with another opportunity to defend belief in the face of those who deride it as at best irrational and weird and at worst, dangerous. It coincides with the 1,700th anniversary of the Christian Nicene Creed, first adopted by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and still used today as a profession of faith by those with official positions in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran Churches.

But as McGrath rightly says of a creed – a word taken from the Latin credo, “I believe” – it might be a description of what a Christian believes, but it’s a limited statement. To truly understand belief, he argues, we need to see it lived. As he reminds his readers, CS Lewis, one of the 20th century’s most high-profile atheists-turned-Christians, as well as the creator of Narnia, understood that “the Christian narrative is primary; Christian creeds are secondary… creeds cannot convey either [Christianity’s] imaginative appeal or its subjective impact.”

McGrath’s basic premise is that belief, rather than being outmoded and unscientific superstition, is integral to being human. In a rewriting of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, he argues that homo sapiens needs to make sense of life, not merely survive it. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson would put it, we are meaning-seeking creatures. Beliefs, whether humanist, or Christian, or that of another religion, shape the way we understand and experience the world.

The most interesting issue about faith and its understanding of human nature, after all, is how it keeps bubbling up, not only in people’s everyday lives but in public discourse. While humanists, as McGrath points out, believe in the inherent goodness of people, a Christian such as Miss Marple understands the simultaneous capacity for its opposite. Only this autumn, forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead reached for Christian theology in her Reith Lectures to help explain evil. It was, she argued, an absence of good, and its antidote to evil was therefore to practise goodness – in other words, the development of virtue that theologians and philosophers from Aquinas onwards have been advocating.

McGrath uses this book to take on Dawkins et al once more: he complains that the New Atheists “degraded and rationalised faith”, and treated it as though it were “simply a form of data”. But he also gives an account of belief’s many facets, from the search for a big picture to the difference it makes to navigating a difficult world. He perceptively comments on how suffering, once seen as a connection between Christians and Christ, is now often perceived as a problem by Christian thinkers drawn into trying to rationalise pain. .... (more)

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Creepy crawlies

About the only time I make up my bed is immediately after I launder the linens. That's because I am lazy and almost nobody (other than me) enters my bedroom. But now I have a new justification:
Tiny dust mites, only the largest of which are visible to the naked eye, exist in their hundreds of thousands – if not their millions – between your sheets. They might hide out in your mattress after a night spent eating the dead skin on your face, pillows and sheets, or linger on your duvet throughout the day.

These arachnids (yes, they have eight legs, like spiders) thrive in moist, damp places, and hoover up the dead skin left behind as your cells renew themselves throughout the night.

“Apparently the typical bed contains somewhere between 100,000 and 10,000,000 dust mites,” says Dr Sermed Mezher, a British GP....

...[D]ust mites don’t bite, and they are relatively harmless. But they do proliferate quickly, die off fast and create a lot of debris from their droppings. Those with an allergy to the tiny creatures can see their health derailed by this build-up: dry eyes, sneezing, coughing, wheezing and fatigue are all telltale signs that you might be allergic to dust mites. ....

While you can’t eradicate mites totally from your bedroom, it is possible to reduce their presence significantly by airing out your bed, washing your sheets regularly, and making sure that your room is kept at a reasonable temperature. ....

Between washes, against conventional advice, it’s best to leave your bed unmade throughout the day .... Mites thrive in warm, damp environments, so by airing out your bed you’re “allowing your mattress and sheets to respond to the temperature of the room more quickly,” (emphasis added)

Sunday, January 5, 2025

In the public domain

Every January 1st more works go out of copyright and enter the public domain. This year, in the United States, the songs, books, and films, are those published in 1929. Standard Books selects twenty of the "best," books available on their site including, for instance, The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and others, including several by authors I always enjoy:
Each of the above is linked to a page where it can be downloaded or read online. All but one are mysteries. The non-mystery is the C.S. Forester, a WWI naval thriller. The Buchan is a Richard Hannay I haven't yet read but will soon.

Saturday, January 4, 2025

"A slayer of Communists"

John Podhoretz is not particularly fond of Bob Dylan but liked A Complete Unknown because of a theme Podhoretz isn't sure the director understood. Who knew that electrified guitars were anti-Communist? From the review of the film:
The hidden story of A Complete Unknown is that Bob Dylan is a slayer of Communists—maybe not because they’re Communists, but I’ll take what I can get.

His rebellion against the elders in the folk movement of the 1960s was a rebellion in part against the static conformity and dreary humorlessness of the far-left politics that had dominated that corner of the music world for a quarter-century.

That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if co-writer and director James Mangold might not completely grasp it. The not-so-hidden general theme of the movie is that Dylan is the inceptor of the new American age of the 1960s because he rebels against and ultimately rejects the expectations of elders and authority figures. What Dylan’s mentors, users, financial exploiters, and groupies want is the voice of social justice inveighing as he does against "Masters of War"—but a social-justice warrior is not what he wants to be. And this guy simply will not be what other people want him to be. In a genuinely brilliant performance, Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s combination of insolence, petulance, self-assurance, and hunger for authenticity without ever once trying to make the man even remotely endearing. In an equally brilliant performance, Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, seemingly kindly but deeply self-satisfied, the mentor from whom Dylan must break away to be free. Their dynamic is the beating heart of A Complete Unknown. ....

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, no conservative to put it mildly, lays it out authoritatively in his 2010 book, Bob Dylan in America: It was the political aesthetic of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers, which had reached its entropic phase by the time Dylan stepped off the Greyhound. The world of folk music was, by then, led by a hidebound Establishment of its own that had emerged from the Popular Front—the effort, in the United States during the 1930s, to advance the interests of Stalin’s Soviet Union through the seizure of the high ground of culture.

It was led by an unreconstructed Stalinist named Alan Lomax, who worked out of the Library of Congress during the FDR era recording and storing and transcribing what he believed to be authentic working-class musical art unstained by bourgeois Kulak values in pursuit of revolutionary change. (He was assisted in these efforts by nepo daddy Charles Seeger, Pete’s paterfamilias.)

The key tunes of the time were the celebration of the radical Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill and the anthemic "Which Side Are You On?" nominally about the Harlan County mining strike of 1931—but over time the "side" in question was the Soviet side in the battle between democracy and Stalinism.

A Complete Unknown concludes with Dylan’s betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the Popular Front through his embrace of electrified instruments—which an enraged Lomax and others considered a surrender to the capture of the youth vanguard that was supposed to save America from bourgeois conservatism by capitalist tools like the Beatles.