So ska was really just White Guy Reggae...

...only with more Doc Martens and working-class English bitterness

Suggs...

What is it with liberals and food, anyway?

Kathy asks,

What IS it with liberals and their stomachs?

..."It's a happy invasion for most people in this country," Clift proclaimed. "[W]e love the diversity of food."

I sent her an email,

...actually there is an answer to this question.

philosophically, the large grouping of ideologies that we usually call "liberalism" for brevity's sake, all come from the same root: radical materialism. They don't admit of anything higher than the material world. Their "ideals" all have to do with the material world; the causes they champion are strictly relegated to material ends. They deny any meaning or relevance of any transcendent value, and it tends to impoverish their minds and souls.

This was one of John Muggeridge's themes in our conversations. He held that most 'liberals' are obsessed with things that strike us normal people as very petty and transient. He also said they tend to develop food fetishes. John's father, he said, never got over his weird insistences about the way his food was cooked and what sort of food he ate, even long after he had more or less converted from liberalism to reality.

While I lived with John, we had a family friend from way back, in fact Anne's school friend from Newfoundland, come to stay for a while. I didn't get much contact in those days with the liberals and hippies in Toronto, being somewhat shielded by the Oratory and my work, and this woman, though she was very like the hippies and lefties and feminists I grew up around, struck me as extremely odd. She lived in a strange little world of her own in which very petty things took up a great deal of her attention. For example, she insisted on buying organic eggs, of which she would only eat the whites. The yolks, she said, were "contaminated".

They're materialists, so they have to make up things to become obsessed with that, while remaining strictly within the material realm, can be imbued with a counterfeit, substitute significance.

One of these is food. The other is sex.

Facebook

I think Facebook was designed by clinically depressed people who are conflicted over their deep need to feel connected with their friends, but who can't actually stand to leave the house to see them.

...and who have long since fallen into the neurotic habit of referring to themselves in the third person...

Today on Facebook:

Hilary Jane Margaret White has long felt that there are internet spirits or "kami" who try to communicate with us through the word verification windows. Their messages are often obscure and cryptic, but I think it's like the Delphic Oracle: they need to be properly interpreted.

Hilary Jane Margaret White watched the John Carpenter version of The Thing last night, and was blown away by how cool and scary non-digital special effects used to be.

Hilary Jane Margaret White is wondering if I've had a stroke of something. Everything I've eaten and drunk today tastes bitter. Like licking an inner tube.

Hilary Jane Margaret White will be buying a second set of snorkel stuff after she moves into her new flat so friends can come and do it too.

Hilary Jane Margaret White 's new favouritest thing in the whole world is snorkeling. It's like flying above a magic world...amazing!

Hilary Jane Margaret White is taking her new snorkeling stuff to the beach today.

Monday Music

Many of our "conservative" friends think this song is just awful. Dreadful. Terrible.

Yes.

Of course it is.

Awful.

Enchiridion militis Christiani

or, "Handbook of a Christian Knight"
By Desiderius Erasmus

The mortal world a field is of battle

Which is the cause that strife doth never fail
Against man, by warring of the flesh
With the devil, that always fighteth fresh
The spirit to oppress by false envy;
The which conflict is continually
During his life, and like to lose the field.
But he be armed with weapon and shield
Such as behoveth to a christian knight,
Where God each one, by his Christ chooseth right
Sole captain, and his standard to bear.
Who knoweth it not, then this will teach him here
In his brevyer, poynarde, or manual
The love shewing of high Emanuell.
In giving us such harness of war
Erasmus is the only furbisher
Scouring the harness, cankered and adust
Which negligence had so sore fret with rust
Then champion receive as thine by right
The manual of the true christian knight.

If I get a little money, I buy books. If there is any left over, I buy food and clothes."

Today's Dead White European Male:

Desiderius Erasmus.

"I detest dissension because it goes both against the teachings of Christ and against a secret inclination of nature. I doubt that either side in the dispute can be suppressed without grave loss."

Wiki:

a Dutch Renaissance humanist and a Catholic priest and theologian...was a classical scholar who wrote in a "pure" Latin style and enjoyed the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists." He has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists."

I can see why he changed his name. Gerrit Gerritszoon. I imagine that the other Christian Humanist scholars would have made fun of him.

He accepted poverty as a necessary adjunct to his dedication to what he was doing, which I think is a great and admirable thing:

Despite a chronic shortage of money, he succeeded in learning Greek by an intensive, day-and-night study of three years, continuously begging his friends to send him books and money for teachers in his letters. Discovery in 1506 of Lorenzo Valla's New Testament Notes encouraged Erasmus to continue the study of the New Testament.

Erasmus preferred to live the life of an independent scholar and made a conscious effort to avoid any actions or formal ties that might inhibit his freedom of intellect and literary expression. Throughout his life, he was offered many positions of honor and profit throughout the academic world but declined them all, preferring the uncertain but sufficient rewards of independent literary activity.

He was an example of that thing that is so rare in our times, a Catholic thinker who criticised and critiqued, but would never have dreamed of "dissenting" in the modern sense from Catholic doctrine:

His revolt against certain forms of Christian monasticism and scholasticism was not based on doubts about the truth of doctrine, nor from hostility to the organization of the Church itself, nor from rejection of celibacy or monastical lifestyles. He saw himself as a preacher of righteousness by an appeal to reason, applied frankly and without fear of the magisterium. He always intended to remain faithful to Catholic doctrine, and therefore was convinced he could criticize frankly and virtually everyone. Erasmus held himself aloof from entangling obligations, yet he was the center of the literary movement of his time. He corresponded with more than five hundred men in the worlds of politics and of thought.

In his Catechism (entitled Explanation of the Apostles' Creed) (1533), Erasmus took stand against Luther's teaching by asserting the unwritten Sacred Tradition as just as valid a source of revelation as the Bible, by enumerating the Deuterocanonical books in the canon of the Bible and by acknowledging seven sacraments. He called "blasphemers" anyone who questioned the perpetual virginity of Mary and those who defended the need to occasionally restrict the laity from access to the Bible.

....and quite honestly, he was a very snappy dresser, if the many portraits are to be believed. I've just got to get me one of those black velvet, fur-lined scholar's robes and velvet thinking caps. Mmmboy!

(And don't get me started on those hand-tooled, leather bound books!)

Or you could just move to Alberta

Yes. It's clever, I suppose. But really, I just don't get why people insist on living in places like Hong Kong. Or Toronto, for that matter.

I realise in some cases (damn commies) lots of people aren't given a choice, and sometimes if you want certain things (like success in some kind of fancy-schmancy job like, ummm...something financial I guess) you have to go where those things are, like Toronto or New York, or Hong Kong. But in most cases in our industrialised western world, people have a lot of choices. They can decide what their priorities are. You can decide that you want to be a futures broker (or whatever they call it) and that limits your choices. If you decide that this kind of job is the only thing for you, that the climb up the wealth ladder is what life is all about, off you go and say Hi to the muggers and smog for me. Hope you enjoy your psychotherapy.

When I saw the pictures of those tenements in Hong Kong, something in my soul recoiled. It gives you a kind of strange nausea, and images of Terry Gilliamesque dystopias come to mind. People dehumanised, stacked up like crates of tins in a warehouse.

Maybe it's where I was raised, and when and by whom, but I've always thought it was very strange that people would buy an apartment. You don't buy apartments. You buy houses. You only live in an apartment if you can't afford a real place to live; a house.

I think I've remarked before that I suspect the people who are always banging on about reducing the surplus population, are people who live in cramped apartments in cities. Who jam themselves every day onto a bus, line up at Starbucks for a five dollar cup of coffee, who hang on a strap on the subway to get to their little offices.

I've found that I like people a lot better now that I don't have to get on a Toronto street car every day.

'"Theological Woodstock"

Heh. That's a good one.

You know what's neat?

photo from the Art Renewal Centre

I'm studying drawing in the same building where Antonio Canova worked.



Here.


Yep.

Life in Rome has it's cool moments.

Next time

you read about or hear someone accusing Pope Benedict of "poaching" converts from among disaffected Anglicans,

you can tell them,

"It's not poaching if you've got a license."