THE WELL-TEMPERED CAIPIRINHA: I don’t know enough about either Bach or Brazilian music to give a good description of it, but Heitor Villa-Lobos’s blend of the two is really fantastic. This is the CD I’m listening to, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It looks like Amazon will let you listen to snippets–go! go now! Read more

Your blog is as mean as your watch has been… About Last Night: Wisdom from… Colette! (RATTUS–click there!) Mumpsimus: What descriptive passages (can) do in fantasy writing. Rattus: Post-dominoital tristesse. (If St Therese had written about Domino Rally, rather than about her jam sandwich, would I have considered it profound rather than a bit precious? And if so, what does this say about me, really?) Read more

ROMERO THIS FRIDAY IN D.C.: This Friday, 9/7, Romero will be showing at 7 pm in the North Conference Room of St Matthew’s Cathedral (at 17th St and Rhode Island, NW, about two or three blocks from the Dupont Circle metro south exit). Words fail to express how much I will be there. I have stared for too long at this movie’s “release date: Unknown” stamp on my Netflix queue! If you’re in DC, you should come too…. Read more

“What are all these leaflets headed F.P., with a hammer, pen, and torch, crossed? What does it mean, this F.P.?” Mr. Verloc approached the imposing writing-table.“The Future of the Proletariat. It’s a society,” he explained, standing ponderously by the side of the armchair, “not anarchist in principle, but open to all shades of revolutionary opinion.”–Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent Read more

MAURICE BELLIERE IS ME/SAINT TERESA YOU’LL NEVER BE: Recently finished Patrick Ahern’s Maurice and Therese: The Story of a Love, reprinting and discussing the correspondence between St Therese of Lisieux and a young seminarian/missionary. (Alternate title for this post, credited to a friend of mine: “This is a toast to St Therese of Lisieux; and for all you pagans, it’s also a toast to beautiful women.”) I… don’t have a lot to say about this book. Ahern’s chewing over the... Read more

ALL THE LAZY DYKES: How is it that Morrissey’s 2004 album with the self-parodic song titles is relatively awful (yes, there are lovely bits of “Irish Blood, English Heart,” “The First of the Gang to Die,” and “I Like You,” but really, the guy’s incapable of making an entirely horrible album even when he decides to treat each song like a theopolitical Speak-‘n’-Spell)… and yet his 2006 album with the self-parodic song titles is amazing? Seriously, I would love an... Read more

KISSING TO BE CLEVER: This year marks the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind—and it is the intention of the Manhattan Institution’s Center for the American University (CAU) to give Bloom’s work the re-examination it deserves. On October 3rd, we will be hosting a commemorative conference entitled, “The American Mind: Opening or Closing?”, in which various scholars will give their views on this subject. However, the future of the American University depends not only on... Read more

QUESTIONS ABOUT SOUTH KOREAN MISSIONARIES AND THE TALIBAN. Read more

And a blogwatch unemployedIs nobody’s fool… Alias Clio: Drinkin’ styles, by country. (Drinkin’ in bars, anyway.) Americans, in this as in so much else, are more like Russians than like Canadians. Golden Age Comic Book Stories: Amazing, creepy, surreal illustrations for Goethe’s Faust. Seriously, these are fantastic. Via Journalista. Hit & Run: “…But as Maia notes, even people who claim to champion a disease model seem ambivalent about it: Can you think of any other disease for which the most... Read more

Indeed, Dylan Thomas himself–not that he was noted for regular jobs–said this; you can’t write more than two hours a day and after that what do you do? Probably get into trouble.—Observer interview with Philip Larkin, 1979 Read more