Young Man/Old Man

Always Getting Worse

2013-06-17T17:00:00.000-04:00

"I mean this,” said Dimble, answering the question she had not asked. “If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family—anything you like—at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing."

CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Old Man: Sunday Style

2013-06-16T13:44:00.001-04:00

Let us review the points of my Father's day this year. I hope to persuade you, after the facts are out, that I, and no other man, have the best wife and daughter in the world.

First, the present. My daughter (with my wife's help) made me three laminated bookmarks, made out of pictures of my sweet girl. This is not only adorable, but immensely practical, since I am always losing the flimsy little folded-paper bookmarks I use. Or just laying the book upside-down, which does not work.

Second, the breakfast. We had homemade chocolate-chip pancakes. Amazing.

Third, the lunch. We had a picnic on the porch, in the best weather ever recorded on a June afternoon in South Carolina. And not only that, but we had a pound of Smoking Pig brisket (I think it was a 75-25 split, in my favor), wisely bought yesterday afternoon.

And fourth, the as yet unrealized dinner, which will be even more animal products, in the form of burgers (probably two for me).

I am a very blessed father.

Oh ya, here's what I wore to the celebration this morning.

Glory to the One Father who is great.

Conor

The Effect of Modern War

2013-06-15T20:00:00.000-04:00

It was not the technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs.

-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Young Man: Rings

2013-06-15T11:48:00.002-04:00

No, not Lord of the Rings. Not this time.

I'm talking about real rings. Or at least about real rings other than wedding rings. The obvious choice is probably a class ring, but pizza makers/private school teachers don't make the scratch to afford a class ring. Not at Clemson's prices, anyways. Maybe someday.

Derek Shaw's Waskerd wooden rings are super cool, but I wanted something a bit more durable, and maybe a bit less expensive.

I knew that carbon fiber rings are durable, but also pretty expensive. In a fit of fantasy and wishful thinking, I was searching Etsy for carbon fiber rings, and happened upon KO Kreations, a shop which sells carbon fiber jewelry, particularly rings. He (Kade, the owner) has been working with carbon fiber for years, and wanted to provide a low cost option for carbon fiber rings.

If you look around the store a little bit, you'll see all kinds of fancy stuff, but my wife and I chose the simplest one, in a flat finish. They look pretty cool. She wears hers (5 mm wide) on her right-hand ring-finger, and I wear mine (8 mm wide) on my right-hand pointer-finger. No photos of rings on fingers, but here are some of my ring. (If you want to see it in action, go to this post, and zoom in on the first picture)

These rings are great. I don't wear mine when I work out, because the first time I did a little of the finish rubbed off, but otherwise I wear mine pretty much all the time. They are super light and comfortable, once you get used to having a ring on a finger that normally has none.

I think it looks pretty cool, but obviously it is different for everyone, and I'm sure these will not appeal to all. But if you do like extra rings, and carbon fiber, give Kade a shout out. He's very easy to deal with and does great work.

Conor

Playdate, pt. 2

2013-06-14T19:00:00.000-04:00

Playdate, pt. 1

2013-06-14T07:00:00.000-04:00

CS Lewis and Perelandra

2013-06-13T20:14:00.000-04:00

As you could tell from the last few quotation posts, I've been going through Perelandra. It was a great book.

This was one of those books where something which has happened maybe a half a dozen times before happened. It happened with The Road, with Life of Pi, and with parts of A Song of Ice and Fire. It took me a few days to really get into it - maybe the first fifty or so pages.

Then I was going to read a little in bed. Once I got to the part where Satan - in Weston's body - was tempting Eve II, I couldn't put it down. I ended up going to bed at three in the morning, having finished the rest of the book.

I will say that, while that bit with the second garden and the second tempting was one of the most gripping and terrifying things I've ever read, the ending part seemed to drag a bit. It was all very good, and it might very well have been my fault, since it was 2:30 AM, but it seemed a little back heavy.

I've started That Hideous Strength, which should be good, but probably not one I'll finish in bed tonight. Three hundred pages to go and all that.

Chief Qualifications

2013-06-12T19:00:00.000-04:00

One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications.

C.S. Lewis Perelandra

Right Down the Middle

2013-06-11T17:44:00.002-04:00

This is one of the first shots from the Nikon D90. I'm borrowing Carson's 50 mm f/1.4 lens. It rocks.

Old Man: Russell Street's Flag of Victory

2013-06-11T09:37:00.000-04:00

Since the dust has mostly settled on the Ivy Style vs. Wasp 101 thing, and it seems that no-one really cares - although I suppose we'll have to wait until the congressman is up for re-election next to say for sure - I thought I would give another perspective on this, one which has been occurring more the more I think about this whole mess.

Backstory

Let's go back a little, and bring in a third party (although they all might be one - who knows): Russell Street/JFM/Jim/Jimmy/Uncle Russ/two of every three menswear forum users.

His claim to fame was being the catalyst for the whole trad movement online. That he "trolled" it into being. It always struck me as a pretty arrogant claim.

He also claimed credit for creating the Ivy Style website, and particularly for bringing Christian to the trad world, and even more, making Christian what he is today.

How does he claim to have done all this? Trolling, of course. (for the uninitiated, trolling is making a statement for the sole purpose of getting a reaction. My high school students are masters at this)

Application

OK, lets bring it back to Wasp vs. Ivy. How does Russell come into play here? Well, based on Christian's actions in this whole thing, it seems clear to me that, for once, Jim was not being merely arrogant, but was being arrogant and right. This whole thing is a giant trolling by Christian. He made an outrageous statement (not here outrageous because it was untrue - though I won't comment on that - but outrageous because of the enormity of the punishment for the total inconsequence of the crime *see digression below*) for the purpose of getting a reaction. It worked like gangbusters, of course, because Russell wouldn't claim a poor troll for his creation.

So congratulations, Christian. With your giant victory (I'm sure you made a whole lot of money from the traffic), you planted an even bigger victory flag for your arch-nemesis, Jimmy. I'm sure he will be happy to buy you a drink next time you're in London.

*Digression: This act by Christian was a truly inhumane act, cruel and unusual. I'm not trying to make the menswear "scene" a bigger deal than it is, and it is precisely how little this "scene" matters in real life that makes this punishment so much more cruel than the crime deserved. If Richard really is the congressman, and this affects his career, are you, Christian, prepared to take responsibility for ruining a man's career (one that he has supposedly worked his whole adult life on) because he bugged you online? Are you really that petty?

And by the way, those silly people who say that condemning Christian's actions necessitates backing Richard's comments are just that, silly. That is a totally fallacious statement. Richard was a goon. Christian behaved like a goon. They are not mutually exclusive. So there.

Just a Widening View

2013-06-10T19:17:00.004-04:00

Doug Wilson (surprise, surprise) wrote a post a few days ago about all this Verizon/spygate nonsense, and all the other scandals surrounding President Obama lately. He focused in particularly on the Patriot Act, and how it started before Obama, with Bush. A good perspective. However, he added:

Now that said, I do hope all this hubristic spying business gets wrapped around Obama’s neck three or four times, and it looks like that is happening. Great, and yay. I confess that all these scandals plopping out of the sky have made his second term a much more pleasant prospect than I thought it was going to be. Ya Think?

This is an interesting statement, and brings something up that I think we need to keep in mind.

It is my firm belief that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time (read this as hundreds of years: yup, even back before computers and stuff just made it easier), and that one of the only things that has changed with Obama's rule is that more is coming to light. I mean, Bush wrote the Patriot Act, for crying out loud. Is there any doubt that he was doing this kind of spying? Not in my mind. He just didn't get caught. So maybe his virtue as a president was just being sneakier at betraying the Constitution? I don't know.

And remember the NDAA? Who wrote that piece? Oh that's right. John McCain. The other guy.

Now I will grant that Obama fussed over not having personal autonomous authority over which citizens he gets to detain and kill, and that is certainly wrong, but hey, aren't we just squabbling over semantics at this point? After a certain degree of evil is reached, each increase yields diminishing returns.

So I don't think that all of this scandal that is falling on Obama's head is anything out of the norm for a President of the United States. I think the only real change from Bush to Obama is a widening view of it. And maybe that's a good change for the long run.

Our Own Little War

2013-06-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

Haven't you noticed how in our own little war here on earth, there are different phrases, and while any one pase is going on people get into the habit of thinking and behaving as if it was going to be permanent? But really the thing is changing under your hands all the time, and neither your assets nor your dangers this year are the same as the year before.

C.S. Lewis Perelandra

Much Higher Up

2013-06-09T19:00:00.000-04:00

No. The order comes from much higher up. They all do, you know, in the long run.

-C.S. Lewis Perelandra

Consistent Inconsistency

2013-06-09T13:54:00.000-04:00

The Inescapable Concept

As Douglas Wilson has said, it is not whether, but which. The real question posed by post-modernism is not whether there will be meaning to the world, but which meaning will be given to the world. There is no philosophy or worldview that has no dogma or system of thought. The real statement that post-modernism makes is not “the center cannot hold,” but “your center cannot hold.” Or, nearer the mark, “only my center can hold.”

So the real accomplishment of post-modernism is not, as stated, the erasure of all dogmas, but the supplanting of traditional and tested dogmas for another dogma, one that is not tested. Or rather one that has been extensively tested, and has been shown to fail.

What’s the Problem?

There are many logical problems with post-modernism, but I will focus on one here in particular: inconsistency. The dogma of post-modernism is fundamentally inconsistent. It is the selective application of a supposedly universal erasure.

The goal is to tear down all pedagogues. Except the one teaching it.

The goal is to tear down all ideologies. Except itself.

The goal is to liberate rational Man from the shackles of faith. Except for faith in the rationality of man and the irrationality of faith.

I dearly hope that no-one who claims to believe in a philosophy fully and to the end (that is, someone who has put the whole of their life into its hands) would admit at the outset that their philosophy is fatally flawed, and contains the seed of its own destruction in itself. That would be truly building your house on the sands. But with postmodernism, how could it be otherwise?

If you do not consistently destroy all ideologies, including your own ideology of destruction, you are no post-modernist. But if you do consistently destroy your own ideology of destruction, then it is destroyed, and you cannot believe it in good intellectual conscience. I am truly not trying to reduce this to absurdity, but the whole thing seems like one big logical fallacy when you break it down into its essence.

Consistent Christianity

If you dislike Christianity because of its claims of exclusive authority, at least respect it for its intellectual consistency. If you dislike Christ for saying “no-one comes to the Father except through me,” at least respect that he added “through me.” At least be glad that He did not say “there is no way” and leave us at that. At least He said “My Way says that there is no other way, except My Way,” and not “my way says that there are no ways, even my way.” That is a paradox, and not in the good way.

Paradoxa

There are two kinds of paradoxes. One is a functional paradox. This might be defined as two things which, looking from a rational viewpoint, should never exist together, but, looking from a realistic viewpoint, do exist together, and more than that, function together. An example of this would be a humble man. If we look through almost all of recorded history, we would conclude that it is absurd to expect Man to be humble, or even to be anything but destructively proud. And yet this does not make it any less true that my pastor sweeps off the front mat before every Sabbath Day. (In this way, a functional paradox might be said to be a miracle, or accomplished by a miracle.)

The second kind of paradox is a dysfunctional paradox. This might be defined as two things which, looking from a rational viewpoint should never exist together, and do not. Or, if they do exist together, do not function together. Postmodernism is such a one, since its central teaching is a consistent inconsistency. And thus there is no true postmodernism or postmodernist. Or, if there ever was, he or she would be dysfunctional, in the sense that they would have, as their foundation, a dysfunctional paradox, and this will affect and infect everything they do.

Conclusion

I hope that you, if you consciously or unconsciously accept postmodernism as a system of life or thought, at least see and acknowledge this paradox. What you do with this knowledge is the subject of a different paper.

Foreign Policy

2013-06-08T18:00:00.000-04:00

Why would it come as a surprise

to anyone, when once the list

is scanned, that our colonies say

in perfect harmony with Patten,

the Scot,
“I lyke not thys wooyng”

Faith and Reason

2013-06-08T07:00:00.000-04:00

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

A Sense of Proportionality

2013-06-07T20:34:00.002-04:00

I have no objection to a war on terror – in its place. There are terrorists in the world, and we should go after them, lawfully and constitutionally. But if we are fighting this war for the sake of our freedoms, we need to have some sense of proportionality. What is the greatest threat to our freedoms? If we must fight for our freedoms, and we must, we obviously need a much bigger “war” on the federal government – on the NSA, the IRS, the DOJ, the BATF, all those alphabet johnnies.

-Douglas Wilson

Reclaiming Academics

2013-06-07T17:22:00.003-04:00

This isn't a grand, sweeping post on how awful the educational systems in this country are, and what I would suggest to change to "Make Our Universities Great Again!"

It is mostly not that because four years in higher education doesn't give one enough perspective on what's wrong and how to make those wrongs right. I'll leave that to professors and grad students.

It is also not that because, while I did have experiences that I wish would have gone differently, I really enjoyed college. I hardly use any of the "teaching stuff" that I learned, and I don't really subscribe to the mainline view of literature that I was taught (post-modern, deconstruction, etc.), but I liked it.

One thing I really liked was the library, and all the stuff I was able to access through the library. I miss being able to get the full Oxford English Dictionary on-line, and I miss access to all the weird academic journals I got there.

I was listening to a lecture on Corey Olson's The Tolkien Professor podcast by Michael C. Drout, who I had heard before through the Modern Professor series. He was talking about Tolkien's background as a philologist, and fun things you could do with words, mostly centering on the OED and its etymological information.

This made me miss college all the more.

But then I remembered that I have a new Clemson ID because of my volunteer firefighting, checked it out, and I can get in to everything! I've been playing around with the OED a bunch, as well as reading abstracts and saving articles to read in full from Drout's journal Tolkien Studies.

It should then be no surprise to any of you that I'm geeking out like crazy over here. I'm also in full-blitz planning mode for next year (more on this later), and so, concurently, my reading list keeps growing. I'm now going through Aeneid, Gilgamesh, Herodotus' Histories for school, plus Orthodoxy, and will be starting Perelandra for my own entertainment.

To Keats

2013-06-07T16:29:00.002-04:00

To John Keats, Poet, At Spring Time

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats; There never was a spring like this; It is an echo, that repeats My last year's song and next year's bliss. I know, in spite of all men say Of Beauty, you have felt her most. Yea, even in your grave her way Is laid. Poor, troubled, lyric ghost, Spring never was so fair and dear As Beauty makes her seem this year.

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats, I am as helpless in the toil Of Spring as any lamb that bleats To feel the solid earth recoil Beneath his puny legs. Spring beats her tocsin call to those who love her, And lo! the dogwood petals cover Her breast with drifts of snow, and sleek White gulls fly screaming to her, and hover About her shoulders, and kiss her cheek, While white and purple lilacs muster A strength that bears them to a cluster Of color and odor; for her sake All things that slept are now awake.

And you and I, shall we lie still, John Keats, while Beauty summons us? Somehow I feel your sensitive will Is pulsing up some tremulous Sap road of a maple tree, whose leaves Grow music as they grow, since your Wild voice is in them, a harp that grieves For life that opens death's dark door. Though dust, your fingers still can push The Vision Splendid to a birth, Though now they work as grass in the hush Of the night on the broad sweet page of the earth.

"John Keats is dead," they say, but I Who hear your full insistent cry In bud and blossom, leaf and tree, Know John Keats still writes poetry. And while my head is earthward bowed To read new life sprung from your shroud, Folks seeing me must think it strange That merely spring should so derange My mind. They do not know that you, John Keats, keep revel with me, too.

By Countee Cullen

The Music

2013-06-06T18:48:00.001-04:00

Then he raised up both his hands, and in one chord, deeper then the Abyss, higher than the Firmament, piercing as the light of the eye of Ilúvatar, the Music ceased.

JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion

The South Wind

2013-06-04T13:53:00.001-04:00

It was as if the South Wind were fanning fire

Through the fields, or a mountian torrent had leveled

The farmlands and swept away the oxen's tillage,

Flattening the hedgerows, and I was a shepherd

Listening in the dark from some towering rock.

Virgil, Aeneid, book 2, 304-308

Translated by Stanley Lombardo

Authority

2013-06-04T11:19:00.001-04:00

Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Symbols

2013-06-02T20:48:00.001-04:00

Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing.

GK Chesterton Orthodoxy

Old Man: The Wasp's Nest

2013-06-01T21:16:00.001-04:00

Out of a holy fear of Christian's scathing critique of "amateur bloggers" like me, I'll keep these comments short and just say that poor taste and mediocrity is a scale, and that, whereas Wasp 101 was always on that scale, Ivy-Style, with the latest series of posts is now there too.

I won't reveal the order. It mostly depends on which one I'm currently reading.

Conor

Addendum: If you have no idea what I'm talking about, be grateful and don't try to figure it out.

Chesterton on Materialism

2013-05-31T14:00:00.001-04:00

Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may well call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy