Blithe Spirit, the Blog

This book-writing lady did a bad thing, per U. of N. Carolina-Greensboro prof David A. Cook, in a letter to Times [of London] Literary Supplement 1/4/08:

In 1972, I was preparing to write an essay on [John Cowper] Powys’s Owen Glendower (1940), a two-volume, massively researched novel of the Welsh prince’s revolt against Henry IV, and I learned that a historical novel on the same subject had been published that year [1972] by G. P. Putnams.

This was Martha Rofheart’s Fortune Made His Sword (published in 1973 in the UK as Cry God for Harry). I quickly got my hands on a copy to see if Powys and Rofheart had used the same sources, but what I discovered was page after page of verbatim plagiarism. This was no accident: I counted more than a hundred such instances, extending over about 150 pages in the middle of the novel.

Martha gets a respectful hearing elsewhere however, especially at Randolph-Macon College, where an Honors 141 student observed that her 1976 novel The Alexandrian was “fun to read,” being “told from Cleopatra’s voice” and thus “interesting.”  This novel also “allowed the readers to feel like they were Cleopatra.”

That’s nothing.  Writing Fortune Made His Sword made her feel like John Cowper Powys.  It must have been a wonderful experience.

Barnes & Noble is not stocking the #1 Amazon-rated book by Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, at least in a number of places, east, west, and heartland.  It apparently hits too close to its target.

Haven’t cracked it yet myself but am fascinated by the title, which matches how I feel about so-called liberals.

What to read while double-casted (22 days to go, b.t.w.)?  Try Black Oxen, by Gertrude Atherton, a 1923 novel set in the New York of its day, full of Edith Wharton-style depiction of High Society and also of the day’s “Sophisticates,” namely the newspaper-literary set that has been so long attracted to the big city.

I got Black Oxen — the name is from a line from Yeats about time as inexorable — as a gift through www.abebooks.com, which I recommend as a place to find the hard to find, out of print, etc. at low, low prices.  Atherton as reminder of Edith Wharton fails, however, when we consider this as her only book about New York.  She was a Californian, in fact, and has another novel, of many, called The Californians.

Wharton’s A Backward Glance, her memoirs, nonetheless beckoned when I’d done with Black Oxen, which was demanding as to extended conversations but rewarding as per characterizations and plot suspense.  Those conversations contributed a lot to the suspense.

I also renewed acquaintance with The New Criterion, a 10 times a year highly literate exercise in social, etc. criticism.  More later on this, as on other materials for the shut-in.  . . . .

. . . Father Barron on Beauty, Lady Asquith on Shakespeare

Rev. Robert Barron explored beauty for the Catholic Citizens of Illinois Oct. 12 at the Union League Club; and Clare Asquith, an English viscountess, argued that Shakespeare tried to subvert the Elizabethan anti-Catholic police state.

Read it.

Sir Thomas Browne offered advice for the thinking Christian believer in his Religio Medici (1642), along the way dropping memorable observations:

* The wisedom [sic] of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a grosse simplicity admire his workes; those highly magnify him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research of his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration. (Part I, Section 13)

I like that “devout and learned admiration.”  He is describing a 1950s Jesuit approach to learning and religion and I suppose one of 2000s too.

Speaking of us, our persons:

[We] are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endlesse volume.  (I,16)

It’s the “bold and adventurous piece of nature” I have in mind here.

He looks to nature, “that bold and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all . . . the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens,” who have no written Scripture to learn from.  Foolish we are, he says, to “disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature.”  Sounds like Wordsworth here.

As to the works of nature, “God is like a skilful Geometrician” who devises “according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art.”  He has in mind God the Artist, operating not in a capricious manner.

So to give all credit to Nature as if it were acting alone is to do it for a hammer or pen for a building or poem.  It is to “let our Hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honors of our writings.” 

And so it is that “Nature is the art of God.”

Not bad stuff, I say, bespeaking a simple faith which many in our churches embrace.  And many’s the preacher who could quote this fellow.

In his review of S.A. Venkatesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard) in the 6/22/07 Times Lit Supplement, Paul Seabright, U. of Toulouse econ prof and author of The Company of Strangers: A natural history of economic life, 2004, accepts V’s assessment of rampant intelligence among S. Side Chi residents (dubious tho it may be) but notes the non-transferability of the skills by which they survive.

Much of their capital turns out to be highly personalized, dependent on their network of contacts and loyalties, on favours given and returned, and to have little or no value to anyone who tries to set up in a different city or even a different neighbourhood.  People are risk-averse, and the neighbourhood is an informal insurance system, so it takes an unusual degree of self- assurance to take the gamble of leaving.

He asks what would help, for instance, more or less regulation of “labor markets.”

After all, regular jobs at the minimum wage are a luxury here, so does this make the minimum wage an irrelevance, or is it a part of the problem?

I have my strongly held opinion in this matter, having embraced the teaching of F.A. Hayek in these matters.  Even without it, however, Wal-Mart wages seem irrelevant in this situation, as opposed to legislated ones.  The starving man is glad for bread, and telling him to eat cake for the sake of union power is not a good idea.

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Coming up on the St. Sabina RC parish calendar is Bible class by televangelist Tommy Tenney, of Godchasers Network, tonight at 7.  Tenney is a white guy out of Pinevilla, LA.  It is not surprising that he’s not RC, which I presume he is not, because with all its protesting and marching and hosting Dem pols and other demagogs in the pulpit, St. Sabina is a Bible church.

That is, most of its members are black church-goers, which means mostly evangelical-oriented.  When the irrepressible, undigestable Al Sharpton mounted the pulpit a few years back for a largely political harangue, the packed church included people who consulted their Bibles, not their missals, during the service.  Pfleger is successful because he plays not only to black social concerns but also to their Bible orientation.

In this he isn’t out of sync with Things Catholic, where The Word has come to equal if not supersede The Sacrifice in importance.  He just goes at it more vigorously.  I’m sure this Tenney fellow is a boffo performer.  And I’d like to say the same for more Catholic preachers and teachers.

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“Thank you, Christopher,” Hugh McDiarmid’s wife wrote him, using his real name, after he’d written a glowing poem about her, he having been a very difficult husband for many years.  “Always remember . . . I love you and only you.”  But she added, pointedly and poignantly, “ . . . and could have been so very much more if you’d only let me.”

This from her letters to him, edited by Beth Junor, in a TLS review 8/10/07.

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In his review of DESIRING ROME. Male subjectivity and reading Ovid’s “Fasti” (Ohio State) in TLS 6/8/07, T.P. Wiseman skewers author Richard J. King for characterizing Ovid as “submissive, feminized and, of course, symbolically castrated” (Wiseman’s words).

“If psychoanalysis has a value,” Wiseman writes of such a treatment, “it is surely therapeutic. There seems little point in attempting it on a man who has been dead for nearly two millennia.”

I’d say so.

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And finally, world population growth since the 1950s has been not from people “breeding like rabbits” but from their no longer “dying like flies,” says an unnamed UN advisor quoted by Bjorn Lomborg in his Skeptical Environmentalist.  You can remember something like that.  All things being equal, a simile works better than a metaphor.

* Christopher Smart, in his 1751 poem, “An epigram of Sir Thomas More, imitated,” has a man kissing Dorinda, whom he playfully tells her nose is too big.

At which Dorinda, “equally to fun inclined,” placed “her lovely Lily hand behind./ ‘Here, Swain,’ she cried; ‘Mayst thou securely kiss,/ Where there’s no nose to interrupt thy bliss.’”

Right here, Bud.

* The academic (not athletic) racial achievement gap at one Oak Park K-6 school was said to be “more unique” than at other schools — by its principal.

Is she more unique than other principals?

* A book I am working through is The Roots of National Socialism, by Rohan D’O. Butler (Dutton, 1942). It would be good reading for others, I think, especially by young folks who do not know Naziism was socialism — national socialism, as opposed to the international version run out of a building in Moscow.

The roots in question are heavily philosophical. The book is a tour de force showing the consequences had by ideas.

* We routinely object to senseless violence (it’s a consecrated phrase), but when do we hear praise for sensible violence?

On the football field is one place, but no guns allowed.  The Bears’ Tank Johnson has done his time for gun violations and is suspended for several games at considerable monetary loss. I am assuming he had to promise not to go armed onto the field.

Last night’s Midland Authors event, the annual awards dinner at the Chicago Athletic Assn. on Boul Mich, was a hit.  The dinner in the 8th-floor dining room overlooking Millennium Park was marvelous, but award presenters and award recipients sealed the deal.  It was an excellent demonstration for the most part of how smart, nice people can talk to each other. 

Highlights included the stunning appearance of Roger and Chaz Ebert, he joining her at the podium to receive an award, she doing the talking because he doesn’t do any these days (tracheostomy does it), and making quite a presence.  No surprise to many, I’m sure, but it was my first time seeing her.  She’s poised and genuine, and the two of them, one hand covering the other’s at the stand, just looked great as thoroughly believable loving couple.

The Fradins, another excellent couple, were awarded for their children’s book on Jane Addams.  They are Judy and Dennis.  Best line of evening was his noting that he rarely leaves his study, where he researches and writes, but did so for this event.  Their book, Jane Addams: Champion of Democracy (Clarion), has a painting by their daughter on its cover, one that the parents couldn’t afford to buy, Dennis noted.

As to his library and study concentration, I told him afterwards it was rather medieval of him, and he agreed.  A monk’s life, I said.  And in today’s limelight-seeking climate full of back-slapping, even of oneself sometimes, he was refreshing indeed.

It was fun meeting the adult fiction winner, Samrat Upadhyay, a young teacher at Indiana U.-Bloomington who hadn’t been informed even that his novel, Royal Ghosts (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin), had been submitted, much less that he’d won.  The committee tried to reach him but couldn’t until the day before the dinner. 

It was fun, I say, because he’s from Kathmandu, Nepal, where he was taught by Jesuits I know, including Rev. Charles Law, a physics teacher.  Samrat and I chatted about Charley, one of my best Jesuit friends, who died a few years ago in Nepal of natural causes.  “He loved Nepal,” Samrat told me with feeling.  He was very well liked by the students and loved them too.

Go here for the winners and runners-up.

Capping the evening was my chat on the return Green Line ride back to Oak Park with two long-time residents, who had got on the stop before me after hearing the Chicago Symphony perform.  We passed on our experiences.  Theirs was wonderful (Brahms) but also forgettable (some new German stuff interspersed with the Brahms) — somebody’s idea of bring along the Great Unwashed regular symphony-goers, apparently, giving them a dose of new good stuff.

There we were on a 20–minute ride.  They lived near the “L” stop, as do I.  Living in Oak Park, we hopped the train and returned same way, each heading for his cultural event of the evening.  Not bad.

“I never knew a passion for politics exist for a long time without swallowing up, absolutely excluding, a passion for Religion,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 5/16/1797 letter to J.P. Estlin.

A few months later, to his clergyman brother, Coleridge said he had withdrawn himself from consideration of “immediate causes,” i.e., current political arguments.

AUTHOR: Hugh Kingsmill, mentioned here earlier as declaring Victorian sentimentality the product of “an unnatural union of poetry and Puritanism,” has two books on Samuel Johnson, one, Samuel Johnson, is a bio. The other, Johnson Without Boswell, consists of passages from others who knew him besides his famous chronicler.