Monday, July 29, 2024

Non-Poetry-Reading Conservatives

 There's a meme which you've probably encountered: the NPC.

NPC stands for "non-playing character" and is drawn from computer games. If you try to interact with a non-playing character, they will just repeat the same lines over and over.

The meme was used to satirize liberals and progressives as mindless parrots.

My own twist on the meme is the NPRC: the Non-Poetry Reading Conservative.

The Non-Poetry Reading Conservative is disdainful towards millennials, Generation Z, and young people in general because (he says) they spend all day on TikTok and social media, while he actually Reads Books.


Of course, he doesn't read poetry. I mean, he's read it at school, and that should be enough. Now and again he might read an anthology. He thinks it should rhyme and scan and it should be memorized at school but he will never actually read it.

The NPRC thinks he's going against the cultural tide, but he's really drifting on exactly the same cultural tide as his contemporaries in ignoring poetry. He frequently quotes G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and other conservative icons of the past. It doesn't occur to him that they would be horrified at a generation that never reads poetry.

If this seems bitter...well, it is. If it seems inflammatory, it's meant to be.

Don't be an NPRC!

Thursday, July 25, 2024

Something Stupid

Going through your drafts folder is very diverting. At least, for me. And generates blog content!

I've long had a fascination with the phrase "the eternal debate", and the concept behind it. So much so, that I once started making a spreadsheet of how many "hits" I could find of that phrase on the internet, and which debates they referenced. And how often each debate was mentioned.

I'd completely forgotten about this. You wouldn't be up to me. (An exclusively Irish phrase meaning: "That person/group always has some scheme going." Usually understood disreputably, but not necessarily.)

As with most of my projects, I gave up and forgot about it. But here's my findings as they were when I gave up.


Analogue vs. digital 1

Arminianism vs. Calvinism 1

Bernoulli vs. Leibniz 1

Blonde vs. brunette 1

Cardinal vs. ordinal data 1

Determinism vs. non-determinism 1

Einstein vs. Bohrs 1

Faith vs. science 1

Female genre vs. femininity 1

Freedom vs. security 1

God's justice vs. God's mercy 1

Ideal vs. reality 1

Ketchup vs. mustard 1

Left vs. right (toilet paper hanging) 1

Mentalists vs. idealists 1

Modernism vs. Postmodernism 1

Monism vs. dualism 1

Moral universalists vs. moral relativists 2

Nature vs. nurture 2

Optimism vs. pessimism 1

Windows vs. Mac 2

Poetry vs. prose 1

Politics vs. justice 1

Privacy vs. security 2

Quantity vs. quality 2

Rationalists vs. empiricists 1

Reason vs. faith (Islam) 1

Relatives vs. friends 1

Show vs. Tell 1

Simplicity vs. customization 1

Solidarity vs. charity 1

Sovereigntists vs. Federalists (Canada) 1

Storytelling vs. gameplay 1

Strength vs. skills 1

Tea vs. coffee 1

Thoughts vs. emotions 1

Tower vs. trough 1

Renting vs. buying 1

Bartending school vs. learning on the job 1

Kirk vs. Picard 1

Java vs. C/C+ 1

Chicken vs. pig (breakfast) 1

Urbanites vs. surburbanites 1

Liberal vs. conservative 1

Index investing vs. dividend investing 1

Men vs. women 1

Republicans vs. Demorats 1

Blackwing Technician vs. Dark cultist 1

Old money vs. new money 1

Owls vs. owlets 1

Science vs. religion 1

Knowledge vs. skill 1

Mountains vs. beach 1

Lights weights vs. heavy weights (muscle growth) 1

Monday, July 22, 2024

The Companionship of a Watch

When's the last time you checked the draft folder of your email account? If you're like me, you save all sorts of things in there. Then they get forgotten. My email account keeps telling me to clear space as its almost out of memory, so recently I found myself working through years of drafts. It was like a day spent in the attic going through dusty boxes and folders.

One thing I found was this rather odd composition, which I submitted to the RTE radio show Sunday Miscellany. They didn't bite. (I have had one piece broadcast on the show, but I've submitted many more.)

I think it's not bad, in a quirky kind of way. Here it is.

A few weeks ago, I bought a new watch at a catalogue store counter, for ten euro. I’d put off the acquisition for as long as possible. My old watch, which had cost the same amount, was literally hanging on by a thread, its strap frayed almost to snapping point. It had slid off my arm on many occasions. Reluctantly, because I am very sentimental about old things—even when they are only a few months old—I decided its career had come to an end, and bought its replacement.

My new watch looked almost exactly like my old watch; a brown imitation leather strap, and a brass-coloured dial which, in these digital days, is described by the rather incongruous term “analogue”. It took me all of one or two minutes to choose it from the display case.

All the same, I found myself looking at this watch more often, and more interestedly, than I’d looked at most of my previous watches. Not for utilitarian reasons, but rather for reasons which I might term aesthetic or—if I’m going to be particularly high-flown about it—spiritual.

My new watch is slightly, ever so slightly, more ornamental than my old watch. The Arabic numerals are slanted somewhat to the right, with rather pronounced serifs. The dial of the watch—which I would much rather call a face—is a pale gold. Slight as the differences are, they are enough to make my attention linger on it every time I look at it, enough to start a reverie.

There are few things in the world which are as inherently poetic as a clock or a watch, if the poetry has not been leeched out of it by a sleek modernistic design. Half of the poems and songs ever written are about the passage of time, the unattainability of the past, the drama and suspense of the present moment. The moving hands and stationary numerals of a watch dramatise all this with delicious understatement.

But, in the case of a wrist-watch, the poetry goes further. The little clock on my wrist is my own private domain, my own private retreat. In the ordinary course of events, nobody is going to look at it except for me. Every time I consult it, I’m momentarily drawn away from the stress and flux of the outside world to this utterly reliable, utterly serene sanctuary where the seconds, minutes and hours are counted out, one by one, imperturbably.

All through the varied moments of my life, my clockwork companion is accompanying me, loyally and patiently. When I’m asleep and lost in the weird timeless world of dreams, it’s evenly measuring out those moments according to the reassuring, dependable chronology of the waking world. In my most stressful moments, my watch is calmly living through them with me, a second at a time. On difficult days, it’s hanging on there with me, repeating its unspoken and unseen message that this, too, will pass. It’s always there.

The watch on my wrist seems, also, like a symbol of the strange duality of time. Time is public, but it’s also utterly private. Even our use of language indicates this; we talk about “man-hours”, as though human beings produce time in the same way glow-worms produce light. People ask each other, “How was your day?”, acknowledging the essentially subjective nature of time.

So looking at my watch reminds me of the irreducibly personal nature of experience. If a person has nothing at all in the world, he has at least this. Even if a person has never ventured outside his native country, even if he has never done or seen anything exceptional, the world as he experiences it is utterly unique to himself. The force of this mystery strikes me out of the blue, at the most surprising moments. If you are separated from a companion for ten or five minutes, even the most banal experiences that they report can seem like news from another world, somewhere utterly inaccessible now and forever; the scene underneath the glass dome of the snow globe, a place you can never go. And the watch on my wrist, patiently ticking away, announcing the time to me and me alone, reminds me that I also experience a unique world through unrepeatable seconds, minutes and hours.

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Whitefriar Street Church, Aungier Street

This is the church where I got married, where I prayed for a wife (and met her days after), and before that it played a big part in my journey to faith, particularly the photo of St. Bernadette. A good place to end my trek through Dublin churches.













Church of St. Philip the Apostle, Clonsilla

As this is fifteen minutes' walk from Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, I've included a picture of the shopping centre oratory at the end.