Kierkegaardashian

Some people have an impish sense of humour. Here is a Twitter feed which combines, in a volatile mixture, excerpts from Kierkegaard’s writings with gleanings from Kim Kardashian’s Twitter account. It is easy to tell who contributed what:

Can’t sleep & I’m googling double chin exercises! I’m petrified to get one! Here at last I have a definition of the tragic in modern times.

or

Weary of people, weary of myself, so weary that I need an eternity to rest. That’s why I always carry a pillow when I’m traveling.

Some of the entries can be quite pointed:

Transformed into a Tahitian princess by Bruce Weber! Made fantastic in this way, one fails to notice that in a deeper sense one lacks a self.

or

From lashes to blushes, makeup plays a huge role in all of our lives! By changing us outwardly, it helps us forget who we really are.

Perhaps Twitter isn’t all bad.

Should I now make an effort to learn who Kim Kardashian is? No, I don’t think so.

Springtime in Alberta

I am back from a few weeks vacation:

If pressed, I will admit that conditions were not quite this bad, but to say that they were entirely unlike this would also be false. It was a great vacation nonetheless.

Nostalgia for the 960s

Have you ever felt that you would have been happier and more at home if you had been born in another time? I certainly hope so. And you are not alone:

Can you imagine what it was like to have been around when Odo of Arezzo broke onto the scene? Or to have actually seen Reginold of Eichstätt live? It blows my mind that on any given weekend in the Abbey of St. Martial you could have seen St. Tutilo von Gallen, Ademar of Chabannes, or Hucbald. Hucbald! And just think how amazing it would have been to experience that unforgettable summer of 969, when it seemed like everyone gathered on the lea to circle-dance and intone around a communal fire. Yeah, it was muddy, and yeah, the food was almost assuredly rancid and diseased, but so what? Two words: Heriger and Wigbert!

(Tonsure-tip: The Chant Cafe)

Apocalypse soon

The impending end of the world has naturally attracted attention and commentary from many quarters. The event raises questions that nearly everyone is asking themselves: why should I bother with Christmas shopping this year? can I fit in one more Roland Emmerich film festival before the end? And so on.

But the apocalypse affects specialist interests as well. I was reminded of this yesterday when I picked up the most recent edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal and found an article exploring. . . well, here’s a quote from the abstract:

We discuss how the outcomes of clinical trials may be affected by the extinction of all mankind and recommend appropriate changes to their conduct. In addition, we use computer modelling to show the effect of the apocalypse on a sample clinical trial.

It is an issue that had not occurred to me before, and perhaps the same is true of you. Read the whole thing.

T minus a fortnight . . .

. . . although I probably will not be seeing The Hobbit until sometime in January.

I had thought that in the days before Peter Jackson got hold of them, hobbits were generally considered the special preserve of “nerds” and such, but I don’t see any evidence of that here:

Esolen on Fox: Homo ludens meets TV

Anthony Esolen appeared earlier this week on a Fox News program called “Fox & Friends” to talk about his wonderful book Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He took a risk, adopting for the interview the Screwtape-inspired perspective from which the book is written: up is down, black is white, left is right, the Left is right, etc. Evidently this proved too much for the hosts:

The befuddled looks and hasty retreat make his point for him. It’s a missed opportunity to promote an excellent book, and I am sure he was not pleased with the outcome — and, in fairness, he did stumble a little out of the gate — but I hope he laughed on his way home anyway.

**

Obviously this curtailed interview didn’t allow time for Esolen to say much of anything. Happily his pen has been busy:

• At Crisis Magazine, he has launched a projected series on Catholic social teaching:
  

  I’m sick of it.  I’m sick of hearing that Catholic teaching regarding sex and marriage is one thing, in that old-fashioned trinket box over there, while Catholic teaching regarding stewardship and our duties to the poor is another thing, on that marble pedestal over here.  I’m sick of hearing that Catholic teaching regarding the Church and her authority is one thing, the embarrassing Latinate red-edged tome tucked away in that closet, while Catholic teaching regarding the laity is another, and pass that bread this way!  No, it is all of a piece.

• Also at Crisis, a piece on cultivating a culture of courtship and romance within the Church:
  

  It is irresponsible in us, then, to let our youth muddle and meander; to suppose that marriage will eventually “happen.”  For my whole life, the ecclesially minded have asked, “What can we do to keep our youth in the Church?”  And their attempts haven’t worked, because they have viewed young people as consumers of a churchly product, rather than as boys and girls, young men and young women, with obvious natures and needs.So then—I call upon every parish in the United States to do the sweet and simple and ordinary things.

• And at Front Porch Republic he has been writing a provocative series on education called “Life under Compulsion”:
  

  Why do people invariably enjoy visiting old one-room schoolhouses?  They are human places, on a human scale, for the education of little human beings.  It isn’t just that one knows, without having to think about it consciously, that the planks and joists where pegged together by the hands of the same people whose children would go to school there.  It’s that the whole idea of the school is founded upon their natural desires and intentions.

But I doubt Fox will have him back to talk about those things.

Parenting strategies at Mass

Be honest now: how do you keep your kids quiet during the homily?

Filial encouragement

A fragment of tonight’s bedtime conversation:

Daughter: Where is Mommy?

Me: Mommy is at the hospital taking care of the sick people. Mommy is a doctor and knows how to help them.

Daughter: What do you know how to do?

Me (hesitating): Well, I can calculate quantum transition amplitudes, and I can solve Einstein’s equations in certain special geometries…

Daughter: I think you can do better things than that.

Headline of the week

Someone at the National Post is earning their keep:

Chesterton on blogging

The tendency of all that is printed and much that is spoken to-day is to be, in the only true sense, behind the times. It is because it is always in a hurry that it is always too late.

Give an ordinary man a day to write an article, and he will remember the things he has really heard latest; and may even, in the last glory of the sunset, begin to think of what he thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the nearest text-book on the topic, and make the best mosaic he may out of classical quotations and old authorities. Give him ten minutes to write it and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery where he learnt his stalest proverbs, or the old school where he learnt his stalest politics.

The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which, every day, is less worth delivering at all.

– Eugenics and Other Evils  (1922).