Who Started the Polarization?

Every time you hear someone lamenting political polarization, I suggest you ask yourself: who actually started it?

Who introduced the idea that people are wicked simply for having opinions?

That such opinions were not to be taken seriously on their own merits, but understood as the expression of irrational feelings, or of defending one's supposed privileges?

It seems to me that "polarization" only became bad when the pushback took on a momentum of its own.

All through the seventies, eighties, nineties, and possibly the early noughties and beyond, "radical" was a compliment. Because radicalism was mostly on the favoured side. Wholesale questioning of the institutions and traditions of society was simply a sign that you were an intelligent, idealistic person.

Suddenly there is a radicalism on the other side-- a wholesale questioning of the wholesale questioning, as it were-- and that's bad, bad, bad...

A Good Article in the Catholic Herald

I look at the website of the Catholic Herald every day. A lot of their stuff is behind a paywall, but not all of it. I read the free articles.

(My recent post poking fun at the Latin Mass obsession of the conservative Catholic media was mostly prompted by the Catholic Herald. Every single day they seem to have another Latin Mass-related article, even if it really has nothing new to report. But it was also prompted by the Raymond Arroyo show on EWTN, and half of the Catholic YouTubers I follow, or half-follow.)

Anyway, today there is a very interesting article on the CH's website: "Return of the Word: why the young are turning back to God at remarkable speed".

Yes, there have been a lot of these articles (thank God), but this one is especially interesting.

Before I look at it, I think we're all a bit wary about polls and statistics. How much do they really tell you? How much do the findings of any survey rely on the questions and definitions used? And even aside from whatever caution we should use when approaching statistics, we should be rather wary about hyping this sort of news too much. It might always be a blip. 

Having said all that, it's definitely welcome after so many years of polls and survey going in the opposite direction.

But to the article. Here's a good passage: "From the first postwar generation, the Baby Boomers, through Gen X to Millennials, Western children were largely educated, ruled and raised by adults who had progressively abandoned real belief in the Christian God and strict religious observance. Alongside this was frequently a naïve insistence that their doing so would usher in a utopia of heightened rationality, free from “downer” superstition and cruelty. I believe Gen Z are the first to realise what has resulted is in fact the opposite.

"All our recent forebears have instead achieved widespread family dysfunction, divorce, slavery to sexual appetite, corruption in society, and the rapid undoing of one of the most incredible 2,000-year civilisational inheritances."

Well, I don't think anyone reading this blog will disagree with any of that, or fail to recognize it.

I think "strict religious observance" might be a key term there. Even most of those who were well-disposed towards religion, over the last sixty years or so, didn't seem to think religious observance was very important. It brings to mind G.K. Chesterton's description of his wife-to-be: "She actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it."

The idea seemed to have been that you could have the spirit of religion without the form, the trappings. But the spirit always seems to evaporate pretty quickly without the form.

One thing that surprises me, though, is that the Nordic, Scandinavian, and Baltic countries have been heavily secularised for many decades now-- as far as I can tell-- and this reaction doesn't seem to have occurred among young people there, in all that time. Again, as far as I can tell.

(The article, which I was able to access earlier, suddenly seems to be paywalled...so I'll end my commentaray there, I guess.

How Certain People Respond When I Ask Them If They've Seen a Particular TV Programme

A Coffee Table Book on Traditions

I have lots of ideas for books that I know I'm never going to write.

One is a coffee table book on traditions, which would probably just be called Traditions, or maybe Encyclopedia of Traditions.

It would be pretty much a book version of my short-lived blog Traditions Traditions Traditions!

It would be a lavishly-illustrated volume with sections on:

• National Traditions
• Local Traditions
• University Traditions (both within universities in general, and in particular third-level institutions)
• Professional Traditions (like the "stork pin" a 9/11 dispatcher gets when he or she helps with the delivery of a child over the phone)
• Sports traditions
• Religious traditions
• Cinema traditions
• Internet traditions

And so on.

It would probably kick off with some kind of essay about tradition, psychological theories and so forth. But nothing too intense.

I'm surprised that no such book as this seems to exist already. Books on tradition are usually about either the concept of tradition or particular sorts of tradition.

When tradition is discussed, what's surprising (to me) is that nobody seems to want to discuss the subject on its simplest level. There are brilliant essays like "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T.S. Eliot, that analyse the concept in a profound way. But what about the simple meaning of tradition-- the one that we all tend to mean when we use the word "tradition"?

Like putting up Christmas trees, barber's shops having white and red poles outside, people hanging fuzzy dice in their cars, actors calling Macbeth "the Scottish play", fortune cookies, Valentine's cards, soccer crowds performing Mexican waves, bingo announcers saying "two fat ladies", cinemas having red seats, the audience standing up for the Hallelujah chorus of The Messiah...that kind of thing.

I suppose, in my view, the simplest definition of tradition is: something we do because it's been done before, for the sake of a tradition. Something we do more or less unthinkingly because it's a tradition (like shaking hands or sitting on chairs) isn't what I mean.

It's fascinating to me. Not just fascinating, but delightful.

I always want to know about peoples' family and personal traditions. I've worked in University College Dublin for almost twenty-five years and I regularly feel ashamed that I've never seriously tried to create a new tradition there. (Sometimes I've thought of randomly opening and closing an umbrella by the lake every day. Yeah, that's stupid.)

This blog has its own traditions, of course. Chiefly: changing its background colours with the liturgical season, posting "The Burning Babe" by Robert Southwell every Christmas, and including random pictures of Dirk Benedict. (Maybe I should go back to using pictures all the time, for the sake of that tradition...) I can't think of any others.

When I was in my early teens, I had an ultra-specific tradition: I would buy a packet of barbecue beef flavoured Hula Hoops on my walk home from school, put the first one in my mouth, and keep it that way all the way from the shop to a traffic light a block away.

I've always had the idea that you can measure the vibrancy of any institution by the number and strength of its traditions. 

A friend once bought me the book Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake as a birthday present because she knew of my love for traditions. But I didn't like the treatment of tradition in that book at all; it's shown to be oppressive and stultifying. I'm no longer friends with that person as she became increasingly woke and angry. Perhaps the book choice was an early indication?

If you have any interesting personal, family, work, or other traditions, please tell me!

The Simple Beauty of a Shop Window

Here is a picture of a shop window that I see almost every day. I've recently been appreciating its beauty, or at least its charm.

Looking at it now, I'm wondering why exactly I find it so charming. Perhaps because it's midway between "fancy" and utilitarian. The owners have obviously gone to some effort in putting it together; it's a tableau. And yet it's fairly simple. I'm guessing nothing in the shop window is hugely expensive. It's a very ordinary shop. (A newsagent's rather than a toyshop.)

There's something very poignant about toys. I swear that reading Coventry Patmore's poem "The Toys" makes me a better person, for all of thirty seconds or so. I can't read it without sobbing.

Also the Mona Lisa at eye-level is a nice touch.

Many years ago, I had a blog devoted to pictures of Dublin shops. I once asked if I could include a link to it in a library newsletter but was told I couldn't, as it might be seen as "self-promotion"! Self-promoting? Moi?

Is the "New Mass" Really New?

A great video from Dave Armstrong and Kenny Burchard on the Lux Veritatis channel.

Just like the makers of this video, I'm not at all anti-Latin Mass. I would just like us all to live in peace within legitimate, Chuch-sanctioned liturgical diversity.

Time and the Sublime

A quick thought, and perhaps an obvious one. It occurred to me today that time is usually an important ingredient of anything that is sublime.

I was listening to somebody talking today, somebody who was talking about a very ephemeral matter and saying whatever came into his head. Nothing wrong with that; we all have to do it.

But it got me thinking about words that have been hallowed by time and that contain a great amount of time, in the sense of concentrated human experience.

Take a few lines almost at random from W.B. Yeats:

Civilization is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under a semblance of peace,
By manifold illusion...

This was quite clearly an idea that was germinating in Yeats's mind for a long, long time. In fact, I  believe the greatness of Yeats lies to a great extent in this fact; that nothing he writes ever seems to be written for effect, that it's all an organic development of his thought and life (even where there are contradictions).

But it doesn't have to be great poetry. Even the words "mind the gap" have tremendous poetry in them, because they bring to mind so many train journeys by so many people over so many years.

It's true even more of any favourite quotation. Any speech from Shakespeare, for instance, not only has its own intrinsic brilliance but inevitably carries the aura, the mystique, of having been repeated through so many generations.

I can't stand in a church or look at a football field (or indeed a railway platform) without thinking of all the human experience that it represents. I once tried to put it into a verse called "Where Life Has Been" (skip if you want):

On a battered Monopoly board;
On a dog-eared deck of cards;
In football boots that have scored
Four thousand goals; on yards
Where generations have played and passed, like changing guards.

In a chipped Coronation mug
In a letter-filled biscuit tin;
In the teddy you used to hug
And the bed that you slept in
When life was a drama waiting to begin.

In the pounded, muddy path
That the cows come home along;
In a battle’s aftermath
Of ruin, and tale, and song;
In an empty dancehall dreaming of its scattered throng.

In an old, old story spoken
By a low fire’s dying light—
Of promises made and broken
Or old wrongs put to right;
That hushes the room, while the wind howls on a winter’s night.

I'm quite proud of that last line. I also love the phrase, "till the cows come home".

Other, better poets have captured the sensation much more masterfully, like Philip Larkin in "Church Going".

Of course, sometimes the momentary and ephemeral is sublime in itself. For instance, the words that Howard Carter spoke when he first saw into Tutankhamen's tomb (through a chink in the wall), and someone asked him if he could see anything: "Yes, wonderful things". And there's a sublimity in the very sight of a news-stand on a city street (in my view).

But in general, I think "concentrated time" is a crucial ingredient of the sublime.

The Strange Reluctance of the Media To Research

Pope Leo has been Pope for over three months. And still, I really know nothing about him and his career up until now.

There was a flurry of attention regarding his choices on his first appearance: what he wore, the languages he used, what he said, and so forth. This despite the fact that the initial appearance of a new Pope is highly ceremonial and stylized.

Since then, very little. 

Robert Prevost has been a public figure for decades now. Surely he made innumerable speeches, wrote innumerable articles, and met innumerable people in that time. All I really know about him is that he's a fan of the Chicago White Sox.

I'm not suggesting there's any agenda behind this. It's just really strange. Think of the legions of journalists, bloggers, YouTube channels, academics, and so forth who would supposedly take an interest in this.

Last year I read a good chunk of Austin Ivereigh's biography of Pope Francis, The Great Reformer. Turns out Josemaria Bergoglio was a very interesting guy long before he became Pope. I didn't know the half of it-- I didn't know a hundredth of it. Even though he had been Pope for more than a decade and I follow the Catholic media.

And this doesn't just apply to papal life stories. I've encountered this strange phenomenon over and over-- that only a small smattering of facts about any given subject ever seem to enter the public realm, the public consciousness.

Latin Mass Latin Mass Latin Mass Latin Mass Latin Mass

Latin Mass Latin Mass TLM Latin Mass Novus Ordo clown masses Latin Mass Latin Mass incense large young families Latin Mass Latin Mass Spirit of Vatican II Latin Mass Traditiones Custodes Latin Mass Latin Mass young people overflowing seminaries Latin Mass Latin Mass priest doing comedy routine Latin Mass Latin Mass Latin Mass.

(I'm trying to fit in with the rest of the conservative Catholic blogosphere and media.)

Progressivism Eats Away at Everything Eventually

I've been reading Fr John Fahy: Radical Republican and Agrarian Activist by Jim Madden, a biography of an Irish Catholic priest who was a political radical.

He was friends with Peadar O'Donnell, one of the most prominent Irish radicals of the twentieth century, and editor of the much-revered (by Irish leftists) Bell journal. It's hard to get a clear picture of O'Donnnell. I read somewhere once that he actually had the rosary said every day in his house, although I can't remember where I read this so I can't verify it.

In any case, the point is this: it's extraordinary that these Irish radicals of the twentieth century lived quite conservative lives, for the most part. Most of them remained married to one spouse and they generally had a respect for religion even when they were anti-clerical. (I treasure the story of Big Jim Larkin, the trade unionists and Comintern Member, who was told by a priest on his death-bed to turn to the Mother of God. "I never did anything else, Father", he said.)

I'm not a very observant person-- sometimes I'm spectacularly unobservant-- but I'm baffled that anyone can miss the historical pattern whereby progressivism turns against everything eventually.

I don't think this is because progressivism is directed by some sort of secretive cabal, whether that be Freemasons, Illuminati, or lizard people. I think it's simply the internal logic of progressivism.

To take an example: during the Troubles, the international left was generally sympathetic to the Catholic and nationalist population of Northern Ireland, since they were cast in the role of oppressed. And progressively-minded nationalists in Ireland sometimes even converted to Catholicism, examples being Maud Gonne and the Labour TD David Thornley. (I don't doubt their sincerity; I'm talking about the historical tides they were swept up in.) But this progressive sympathy to the Catholic-nationalist side didn't imply any esteem towards Catholicism or Irish nationalism in itself.

The "oppressed" category is all that counts for progressives. But this is always changing, both because historical circumstances change and because progressivism needs to find constant new injustices. The very word "progressivism" indicates a progress through different stages.

Progressives can't love anything in itself. I'm talking about progressives in their capacity as progressives. I'm sure individual progressives love their cats and their mothers and their favourite sports teams. But the progressive element in them can only love the oppressed and only love them in their capacity as oppressed-- not for themselves.

Renunciation in itself seems to be a virtue for progressives. "Twenty years ago we thought it was progressive to be such-and-such, but now we realize it's not good enough."

The progressive left is always changing its positions. I can remember when it was against censorship and war, for instance-- where today it cheers on "hate speech" laws and apparently wants to drag us into World War Three. The British and Irish left (including Peadar O'Donnell) strongly opposed European integration at first, whereas today they are its most enthusiastic advocates (apart from some on the far left). I'm sure you could supply your own examples.

I'm not naive enough to think the same thing doesn't happen with conservatives. For instance, American conservatives in the 1960s would have been very pro-Vietnam War, whereas today they're more likely to see it as the first in a series of "forever wars" pushed by the Deep State. I've changed my own opinions on many things, too.

But conservatism in principle seems more attached to tangible, real things-- nation, family, marriage, religions, traditions, the organic web of society with all its imperfections and particularities. For progressives, the fact that something is a tradition is a mark against it (although they can show a fondness for particular traditions, like everybody else. Irish progressives tend to be pro-Irish language...for now, at least).

John Stuart Mill was an unusually honest and self-reflective progressive, as this passage from his autobiography shows: "It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for."

(Mill's breakdown was cured by reading the poetry of Wordsworth. But, of course, neither liberals nor conservatives read poetry today, so that balm is no longer available. Poetry would be a way out of such relentlessly goal-oriented thinking, since poetry teaches us to love things for their own sake, contemplatively, timelessly, freed from the "what-next" urgency of plot or reasoning. This is why I pleaded with conservatives for so long to care about poetry-- but I've given up that fight as futile.)

I love the scene in the Stephen Spielberg film Munich where the French patriarch of a radical family (who are selling intelligence to the Mossad agents) turns on his own children with this diatribe: "In my despair I fathered madmen who dress like factory workers but never do manual labor, who read nonsense and spout pompous bull**** about Algerians and, and who love nothing, not Algerians or French or flesh and blood or anything living. [to Louis, pointedly]: So I have sympathy for a man who can say "I have a papa." "

(To go a bit off-topic, but not entirely, I also love this speech from the film, delivered by a Palestinian terrorist who thinks who is speaking to a member of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, but who is actually speaking to a Mossad agent: "You don't know what it is not to have a home. That's why you European reds don't get it. You say it's nothing, but you have a home to come back to. ETA, ANC, IRA, PLO -- we all pretend we care about your "International revolution." But we don't care. We want to be nations. Home is everything.")

Well, I didn't expect this post to be as long as it's turned out to be. I've often tried to make this argument with progressives, by saying: "Twenty years ago you would have considered this [whatever woke madness we happen to be talking about] crazy". But it seems to have no effect.

Incidentally, this subject reminds me of the greatness of Edmund Burke, who supported the American Revolution and staunchly opposed the French Revolution, seeing that they were two very different things in their essences. Would that we all had such discernment!

A Candle's Flame

Here's a poem I put out onto YouTube last year. It has amassed sixty-eight views in that time.

It's one of my own favourite poems that I've written. I was just trying to evoke atmosphere. I think a candle's flame is one of the most beautiful sights in existence. I also used some of my own favourite phrases, such as "softly-falling snow" and "sepia-steeped". And some of my favourite atmospheres, like a cinema before the film. 

I believe that reading this poem softly and meditatively, perhaps several times in a row, will induce a trippy effect. It's much safer than magic mushrooms.

I sent this poem (among others) to The Irish Times, but no luck. They told me they have three thousand submissions a year for fifty-two slots.

Incidentally, I have since learned that the recurring refrain of this poem is an example of a rhetorical device called symploce, where the beginning and end of a repeated phrase remains the same but the middle varies.

Is "away from hurt and fear and shame" too namby-pamby? Maybe. I don't know. I've always been very moved by the line from a Mormon hymn, "Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid".

Here is the text.

A Candle's Flame

Your mother's voice, so soft and low,
Calling from distant days your name.
The kind light of a candle's flame.

That winter dawn's so-gentle glow
The morning after Santa came.
The shy light of a candle's flame.

The cinema before the show
Dreaming of stories old in fame.
The bright light of a candle's flame.

The sight of softly falling snow
Making the same street not the same.
The soft light of a candle's flame.

A moment captured long ago,
Sepia-steeped in a silver frame.
The dim light of a candle's flame.

A place that only you can go
Away from hurt and fear and shame.
The still light of a candle's flame,
Oh, the gentle light of a candle's flame.

A Dream I Had In August 2018

Are dreams worth recording? I don't know. I've recorded them, on and off, through much of my life. My sense is that some dreams are "important", in that they reveal deep things about your own mind and personality, while other dreams are just random.

I've also had recurring dreams. A swimming pool is a constant motif, along with more obvious situations like being back at school and having a few weeks left before the Leaving Cert.

I don't remember this dream, but I thought it odd enough to record it.

Extraordinary dream. Featured a large cast of people I knew (including some of my FB friends), set in sumptuous house (almost a mansion). All orchestrated by a very innovative dramatist/social radical, who resembled Tony Kushner but nobody knew if he was right-wing or left-wing or beyond those categories. The idea was that the drama happens first and afterwards is "deconstructed", or talked through-- like group therapy.

The drama included long arguments about what was happening in the play itself-- I didn't know if they were staged or not. At one point, the person who wrote the musical score (also a player in the play) was having an argument with the dramatist over the plot. At another point, I was swimming in a swimming pool and all the water disappeared.

It went on way into the early hours of the morning (in the dream). At the end, as everyone was  going home, I found myself confronted with a small red bear. I just froze. It walked up to me, looked me in the eyes, and walked away. Then later, as everyone was about to assemble in another room (going home apparently forgotten), but I was there first, Pope Francis came in on a wheelchair and said, in very bad English: "Maolsheachlann, there is a Panadol for your headache", even though I didn't have one-- and wheeled back out immediately, leaving the Panadol.

And then, to be completely meta, everyone who was in the dream was in a room and I was describing the dream to them-- it was the atmosphere of "I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was" [from A Midsummer Night's Dream], or like the scene when Dorothy wakes up in The Wizard of Oz (which I haven't seen.)

I did watch The Wizard of Oz soon after this, perhaps prompted by this dream.

(Incidentally, A Midsummer Night's Dream was Chesterton's favourite Shakespeare play. The Tempest is mine. What's yours?)

Refusing to Have the Conversation

One definition of conservatism in our time might be this: those people who just refuse to have the conversation (or conversations) that the liberal left wants us to have.

I can't imagine how often I've stopped reading a book or article because I've thought: "I'm not interested in having or even hearing this conversation". It just happened now, actually.

Alison's Birthday (1981), a Surprisingly Good Horror Film

I've recently been watching a lot of horror TV films from the seventies and eighties. For a few different reasons:

1) I love horror and always have.

2) I love the seventies, which rather overflowed into the early eighties. I feel "at home" in that decade even though I was only three when it ended.

3) Films from that time are pretty much (not entirely) pre-political correctness.

4) Although the cinema will always be one of my greatest loves, TV films have something going for them. They are more concentrated on plot than flashy editing or on big set-pieces. And they tend to be more subdued, which I like. It's definitely an advantage when it comes to horror.

Alison's Birthday is an Australian TV horror film, made by the Australian Film Commission. But it's not just "good enough for government work" (one of my favourite American sayings), it's actually very good-- in my opinion.

It's a supernatural/occult horror, with elements of folk horror. And it's quite a slow-burner.

Anyone who doesn't like this film would probably have these criticisms of it (I've looked at a few reviews):

1) It's predictable.

2) It's a mish-mash of elements from better films.

3) It has some corny scenes, including the opening scene.

All of these criticisms are justified. None of them bother me, though. They're even reasons I like it.

Anyway, the film can be seen on YouTube at this link, unless it's been taken down by the time you read this. (I watch a lot of old films on YouTube. I don't think it's taking the bread out of anybody's mouth, but feel free to harangue me on why I'm wrong.)

A Symposium on Sleepiness

I was inspired to write the following poem (which is not a particularly good poem) by a real-life experience I had in a classroom. It was a philosophy class on Plato's Syposium. I was very sleepy and struggling to stay awake. It was a stuffy room.

Then, suddenly (or perhaps I only remember it as suddenly) everything the lecturer was talking about seemed real to me: present, vivid, timeless.

I wrote this poem many, many years after the experience. I sent it to the lecturer in question, who had moved onto another institution by then. I never got a response. I'm baffled by that kind of reaction (or non-reaction). If someone wrote a poem in which I featured in some way, and it wasn't downright insulting, I'd be delighted.

I also sent it to a fellow poet and he said: "I don't think of you as much of a classicist". This response delighted me. I'm really not a classicist in any sense. But I got the vibe at that moment, you dig?

The Symposium

The class-room was stuffy and nothing seemed sweeter than sleep.
The lecturer’s voice drifted in and out of my mind.
Plato and Socrates, Eros, names from the deep
Of the ocean of time, from fathoms too distant to find.

Then suddenly, strangely, and out of nowhere at all
The centuries vanished like vapour, and I was awake.
I thrilled to the siren of beauty, Eternity’s call,
The thirst of the artist, the lover, to make and remake.

The Golden Age hovered around me, and Athens was there
In the dim, dusky classroom. The stretching horizon of time
Was lit with broad sunlight, and I could see plain from my chair
Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and the sublime.

Soft Bonds Revisited

In the editorial of the latest edition of Position Papers, Fr. Gavan Jennings writes: "It is clear that there is something stirring in the USA and in the Anglosphere at large. First intellectually, and now also politically, there is a growing dissent from the established anti-Christian ruling elite. Perhaps then the election of a man who comes from within this world will turn out to be politically timely. To this it is objected that Pope Leo has not lived in the USA for decades, but I doubt that is particularly relevant. He grew up in a very American family (his very American brothers Louis and John are a testament to this), and received all his education in American institution. And the fact that he is a lifelong fan of the Chicago White Sox means a lot for Americans".

This passage brought to mind a blog post I wrote about "soft bonds" nine years ago (which I declared a "revolutionary new sociological concept", with tongue-in-cheek pomposity). Even in the blog post I express a sort of bashfulness about writing it. And it never got any response. But maybe I was onto something! So many people have mentioned the Pope's White Sox connection, and not entirely in jest.

Back to Provence

I was recently blogging about the title A Year in Provence, and how much it appeals to me. (I've never read the book or seen the film and probably never will.) Short version: it appeals to me because it suggests that a particular time spent in a particular place might be special and noteworthy.

In a similar vein, today I found myself (not for the first time) thinking about something David Hyde Pierce (who played Niles in Frasier) said in an interview, according to his Wikipedia page.

He said the producers told him that Niles was "what Frasier would be if he had never gone to Boston and never been exposed to the people at Cheers."

That pleases me a lot because I like the idea of Boston and Cheers both being formative, life-changing experiences for Frasier; and, more generally, places and environments being life-changing and character-changing experiences for people in general.

This seems how it should be.

Another "text" that awakens this pleasure in me is "Baker Street", by Gerry Rafferty, one of my favourite songs:

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well, another crazy day
You'll drink the night away
And forget about everything
This city desert makes you feel so cold
It's got so many people, but it's got no soul
And it's taken you so long
To find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything.

(There are other "city" songs I could cite, like "New York, New York", "Last Summer in New York" by the Saw Doctors, and "The Last Morning" by Dr. Hook.) 

Then there is poetry as well, such as "When I Set Out for Lyonnesse" by Thomas Hardy:

When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!

I even like proverbs that evoke the difference between places (especially cities), such as "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" (which actually has to do with Christian customs). Or "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas". Maybe you could get a whole book out of place-proverbs...

I also like the title of the Herb Caen book, Don't Call it Frisco (though I've never read that one, either). Or the title of the novel Goodybe Hessle Road by Daphne Glazer, which I saw on my trip to Hull, found impossibly evocative, and eventually read years later-- well, most of it.

I guess, at the back of my mind, I've always had two "models" of time and place.

One is the model of a grid, a set of coordinates, a continuum, or whatever you want to call it. My image for this is the holodeck on Star Trek, when no simulation is being run.

The other model is time and space as full of enchantment, character, and particularity. My image for this is Lord of the Rings, or maybe the Odyssey-- and I don't italicize the Odyssey because I'm talking about the myth we all seem to have in our marrow, even if we've never read Homer.

Much of my conservatism boils down to wanting the world to be more like the second model than the first model. But I didn't want to make a political point, just an observation.

(Admittedly the David Hyde Pierce quotation isn't so much about the intrinsic character of a place, as the effect it has on an individual life. Although, come to think of it, maybe that's not true. I imagine Boston is more blue-collar and down-to-earth than Seattle, and Cheers is more folksy than the Café Nervosa-- or the real-life equivalents of both establishments. In any case, even where we are just talking about the effect of a place or time on an individual, that thought pleases me, too.)

How did Irish Catholic Nationalism Become Progressive Internationalism?

I'm currently reading The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions by Ruth Dudley Edwards. I'm not reading it all the way through, but skipping over parts I find less interesting.

Ruth Dudley Edwards once "liked" a tweet of mine, but that's the limit of my interaction with her. (I forget what the tweet was.)

The Orange Order were the bogeymen in the Republic when I was growing up. There was much indignation about them marching through "nationalist" areas in Northern Ireland.

In our time, when freedom of assembly and freedom of speech is under such attack, the whole controversy about Orange parades appears in a very different light. To me, at least.

I still consider myself an Irish nationalist in the sense that I would like Ireland to regain its national sovereignty and to revive its national culture. However, it's shocking to see how Irish nationalism (on both sides of the border) has become quite the opposite of what it used to be; secularism, progressivism, globalism, and so forth.

This is an extraordinary change, but it rarely seem to be commented on. Indeed, Irish people today seem to see it as an organic and natural progression. They rarely seem to ponder the fact that their great-grandparents would probably be bitterly disappointed in their beliefs and way of life. This, in itself, doesn't make anything right or wrong; but at least it should cause some reflection.

As a matter of fact, I do think the change was organic and natural in the sense that some elements in Irish nationalism and Irish Catholicism (for instance, the emphasis on oppression and victimhood) morphed fairly easily into liberalism. But it didn't have to happen that way.

Unionism has, to a greater degree, remained true to its religious and cultural heritage. Whereas the two main nationalist parties in Northern Ireland now embrace social liberalism and globalism, the DUP are pro-life, pro-family, and pro-nation.

History is full of ironies.

Written a little later: On page 522, Dudley Edwards quotes a 1986 speech in which Gerry Adams said that his goal was "an Ireland free, united, socialist, and Gaelic." I somehow doubt he would advocate for the last article in that laundry list today!

Dancing About Architecture

My taste in music is pretty horrendous, and my knowledge of classical music is atrocious. I've made efforts to improve it, over the decades, but they were rather spasmodic efforts and they never got very far. I won't convince myself that I'm enjoying something when I'm not.

It seems to me axiomatic that one's response to beauty (of any kind) should be involuntary. It can be trained, but it should still be involuntary. As an example: if you don't get a joke, but somebody explains it to you, and you spontaneously laugh, then your response is still involuntary-- even though it's been "educated".

As I said, I'm not going to pretend to enjoy something that I don't. Unfortunately, this includes the overwhelming majority of classical music, including the most famous and celebrated compositions. I regret my tin ear, and I hope I some day overcome this deficiency, but that's the state of play.

Among the vanishingly few classical compositions I do enjoy is "Gympnopédie No. 1" by Erik Satie-- a piece that everybody recognizes, I'm sure.

I can't remember where I first heard it. It came to my attention in the film My Dinner with André, an excellent film which is literally about two guys having dinner and talking. On other occasions, I heard it playing in the shop Sostrene Grene, at a particularly emotional interlude in my life.

To say I enjoy it, in fact, is an understatement. It captivates me. I can listen to it over and over and never get tired of it-- although, as with all forms of art, it moves me especially when I'm in the right mood.

The best things in life, I think, are those which always seem to exceed our hopes-- even when we've experienced them before.

Is it possible to put the experience of music into words? I've looked for analysis of this composition. I can find musical analysis, but I couldn't find any analysis of the experience of listening to it, although some people take a stab at it in the comments section of YouTube. Here are some of the comments:

This piece evokes the feelings of being in a dream, like floating amongst clouds in ultimate tranquility, I hope it brightens your day.

This is either: A. The most relaxing piece ever B. The most depressing piece ever.

This piece feels like walking alone through an empty forest on a quiet night under the big, bright moon, feeling lonely and nostalgic, yet tranquil and at peace.

It feels like someone I love is dying in few minutes and we're making the best out of the remaining moments.

I personally don't find this piece depressing or sad at all. I think everybody would agree that it's melancholy, but I experience it as a sweet kind of melancholy. A very sweet kind of melancholy.

The comment that comes closest to my own reaction, of those above, is the third one: "This piece feels like walking alone through an empty forest on a quiet night under the big, bright moon, feeling lonely and nostalgic, yet tranquil and at peace."

It definitely has a lonely feeling to it. It seems very pensive and reflective, and at a distance from the hurly-burly of life. (Something that always feels delicious to  me. Indeed, it makes the hurly-burly itself seem move loveable, to be viewed from a distance.)

The last comment, about trying to make the most of someone's dying moments, is the furthest from my own reactions. This composition gives me a sense of timelessness, of a total lack of urgency or anxiety or haste. (Sometimes I suspect whether the goal of all art, or one of its goals, is to heal or abate the wounds of transience and loss).

The gentle tinkling of piano keys evokes for me the image of drops falling into a body of liquid-- but drops falling very slowly and gently. "Peace comes dropping slow." Indeed, I imagine a sea of amber-golden-sepia liquid, in some imaginary realm, lit by a dim but rich light.

Similarly, the piece makes me think of of a timeless world of abstract but harmonious forms, such as the canvases of Mondrian. Not precisely like Mondrian, but that sort of thing.

On the plane of the human world, the world of nature... I think this composition has a very autumnal atmosphere. It makes me think of walking through autumnal fields, brown leaves crunching under my feet, perhaps scenting the smoke of a far-off bonfire, and feeling dreamy and reflective, but at peace. 

And it has the same effect on me that all powerful beauty does...a deep excitement, a near-expectation that the whole world can, should and will be beautiful, that I'm just not looking at it from the right angle, or doing the right thing, or playing my part in the creation of a world of total beauty and meaning.

Something For Everyone Here

A scathing indictment of both "Novus Ordo" and Trad Catholics from Substack:

While your typical mainstream Novus Ordo parish liturgy and culture evinces irreverence, emasculating music, and no sense of the supernatural, feeling less like a ritual sacrifice than a celebration of the community, with hardly any talk of sin (unless it be wokish ones) and the possibility of damnation, and with the “presider” acting like a gay clown and entertainer; your typical TLM-only parish is gloomy, guilt ridden, scrupulous, Calvinist, misogynistic, inner circle, cultish, 4 plus children or be ashamed, reactionary, fear-based, coercive, schismatic, uncharitable, snobby, joyless, judgy, dour, and sad. Priests are impersonal, neurotic, and arrogant, superior to you and needing to be treated that way, with confessions that are abusive, and homilies that are either shaming and guilt-inducing, or just scapegoating cheers for the in-crowd.

Of course, there are parishes, priests, and lay people, both NO and TLM, that evince none of these ideological toxins, but they are the exception. Catholic discourse and subcultures, both “left” and “right”, are becoming more and more ideological. A typical “Trad” now means a neurotic and prideful ideological Pharisee who thinks having 4 or more children (which he makes sure to tell everyone every other day) and treating his wife like a a child-slave makes him superior and gives him a ticket to heaven, and who despises the Novus Ordo and thereby commits the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. But the anti-trad discourse and subcultures are just as rotten, making a worldly and godless woke mockery of the Faith. Where are the normal Catholics?

Probably a bit harsh on both sides, to put it mildly. But (among other things) the phenomenon of mentioning your many children at every possible opportunity rings true. To be fair, it's not just Trads, it's JPII Catholics who do this as well. Yes, I realize that it is itself a reaction against an anti-natalist and anti-family culture.

I'm a JPII Catholic, entirely pro-life and pro-family, but I do feel very excluded by this sort of rhetoric. I know, I know, I sound like a liberal. Suck it up and don't be such a snowflake, right? But there it is. Sometimes I break off listening to Catholic YouTube videos because of this, it inhibits me from going to pro-life rallies, and it's one of many reasons I left Facebook. Doubtless it's something I should just "get over".

At the end of the day, I'm grateful for everybody who practices their Faith and strives to be orthodox according to their lights. And I'm always overjoyed to see (and hear) children at Mass.

A Year in Provence And All That

A Year in Provence is a book I've never read, and a film I've never seen. I have no wish to change either of those facts, although who knows what the future holds?

The title has always seemed magical to me, though-- without my ever having really thought about it or known what it was, until I purposely looked it up recently. (How many ideas simply flicker on the periphery of our consciousness?)

In fact, I like all "time and place" titles, such as:

Seven Years in Tibet.

A Night at the Opera (and A Day at the Races).

Weekend at Bernie's.

Last Year in Marienbad.

Of all those works, I've only seen A Night at the Opera and Weekend at Bernie's, though I started watching Seven Years in Tibet-- I can't remember why I didn't finish it. I get the impression I only watched a few scenes.

Why do I find titles like these magical and evocative?

It's a simple answer. Time and space themselves are mysterious and exciting, so titles that evoke them are bound to be mysterious and exciting. But, more importantly, a title like A Year in Provence suggests that a particular time spent in a particular place might be especially memorable and worth writing home about (to use an idiom I love).

And somehow, that also hints to me-- and perhaps only to me-- that every period of time spent in every place might have its own charm, its own character, and its own memorability. That's an immensely appealing idea. 

I've kept this blog post as a draft for the last couple of days. I could say so much more. But have I said it all before? In a recent post, "The Magic of Backstory", I tried to articulate the sense of wonder I always (well, often) feel when people share their memories. I can't remember ever getting much of a response when I've written in this vein, though, so maybe it really is just me.

Artificial Intelligence Impersonating Philip Larkin

I hate artificial intelligence and avoid using it. But today I found myself wondering whether A.I. could write a good poem in the style of Philip Larkin. I know what answer I wanted: no, nothing even remotely like it. I wanted to be reassured.

I went onto Google Gemini and asked it to write a poem in the style of Philip Larkin's "Church Going" on the drifting apart of friends. I reproduce it below. I was not reassured at all.

Friend Going

Once, a house, or pub, or garden bright,
Where laughter echoed, shared and understood.
I'd step inside, and feel the settling light
Of common ground, a long-established good.

Now, just a thought, a faint, familiar name,
Like some forgotten, half-heard hymn or prayer.

No obligation, no enduring claim,

Just silence settling in the empty air.

I pull a memory from its dusty shelf,

A face, a joke, a bond I thought secure.
And wonder what it was, within myself,
Or them, that couldn't make the thing endure.

A Facebook feed, perhaps, a distant 'like,'

A ghost of presence, barely there at all.
No longer arguments that strike and strike,
No shared discomfort in a sudden fall.

The easy evenings, talk of aims and dread,
The knowing glance, the comfortable repose—

All scattered now, like words the wind has spread,

Or petals fallen from a fading rose.
This slow diminishment, this quiet seep

Of lives diverging, on a different track,
Leaves something hollow, something buried deep,
A truth that whispers, and will not come back.

And what remains when the last text is sent,

The final, dwindling call left unreturned?
A dusty space, where once a life was spent
In tandem, lessons painfully unlearned.
No ritual to mark the closing door,

No eulogy, no solemn, whispered plea.

Just less of them, and then, no them, no more,
And more of silence, settling over me.

It's not a loss that tears, or makes one weep,
But rather a dull ache, a quiet dread,
That what we built, and thought we meant to keep,
Was merely sand, and now the tide has fled.

Reader, it wrote this poem in two seconds. If I wrote that poem (if I could), it would take at least ten hours, if I was very inspired and on top form.

I'm not saying it's as good as a poem Philip Larkin would write. Some lines are duds (like "no shared discomforts in a sudden fall"). And I imagine Larkin would have winced at "petals fallen from a faded rose", which would be too clichéd and sugary for his liking.

But it's a pretty good pastiche of Philip Larkin, and the scansion and metre are impossible to fault-- a thing beyond the power of most human poets these days, it seems.

And it has some very good lines. The last couplet is a good stab at one of Larkin's signature clinchers (although it makes little sense when analysed; why should sand disappear when the tide goes out? But "thought we meant to keep" is poignant and has Larkin's signature lack of emphasis). And "just less of them, and then, no them, no more" is very good.

And this couplet does sound like authentic Larkin to me:

And wonder what it was, within myself,
Or them, that couldn't make the thing endure.

Here's a (grimly) funny footnote. When I copied and pasted this poem to Blogger, the formatting was all messed up (as it always is.) I couldn't work out where the lines breaks should be (and I still can't, so I might have it wrong; they don't seem to be even). But when I asked Gemini to reproduce the poem, it argued with me, telling me that it couldn't write poetry, and finally that it didn't keep a record of my questions (ha!). It said:

"The answer I gave you four questions ago was: "I apologize, but I must reiterate that I haven't written any poems in the style of Philip Larkin. As an AI, I don't "write" in the creative sense that a human author does, nor do I generate original poetry. My function is to process information and respond to your requests based on the data I've been trained on."

It sounds to me like AI is trying to placate our human egos! Yes, technically speaking, AI can't write poetry. But if you can't tell from reading a poem that it was written by A.I.-- and I think this one passes that test-- that distinction seems academic. The Turing test and all that.

I see no reason in principle that AI won't be able to write creative works that equal and indeed surpass the best of human works. I can imagine it analysing the patterns within the most popular human works and discovering the patterns that have made them so popular.

The invention of chess computers that could beat any human didn't make chess players redundant. But is it quite the same thing?

I don't like this. It's bloody depressing. I hope I'm wrong!

(I'm blogging so much because I'm still sick. Another inferiority to A.I.)

Second take, a few hours later:

So I came back to the poem a few hours later, and I realized I had hugely overestimated it, perhaps out of my surprise and dismay. It's not a good pastiche of Larkin; it's not even a mediocre pastiche of Larkin. It's a poor pastiche. The metaphors are trite, and they don't come together. It has no depth or real progress of thought.

(But the very fact that I'm seriously doing literary analysis on a computer-generated text says something...)

Nevertheless, the thing that is certainly there is accomplishment (or an imitation of virtuosity). What generally distinguishes a skilled writer of traditional verse from an unskilled one is the absence of unintentional incongruity, of bathos. Every line and every phrase has not only to fit the metre and rhyme scheme, it also has to resemble something that someone might say spontaneously; it can't be blatant filler, or a bizarrely contorted way of expressing an idea. This poem achieves this; nothing actually grates. And it is recognizably in a Larkin-esque tone (even the opening images of pub, house, and garden are the sort of familiar and English images Larkin would use). And that's impressive on its own.

Plurality by Louis MacNeice

I'm still feeling miserable and sick, so I'm going to indulge in another post about poetry. This one won't be a lamentation, though.

Today (as so often) I found myself thinking about the poem "Plurality" by Louis MacNeice. I don't understand why this poem isn't more famous. Perhaps because it has some dense philosophical passages, and I'll admit I don't understand them all. But I think anyone could understand the basic thrust.

I'm going to reproduce the whole poem here. I hope the MacNeice estate doesn't come after me. I'll take it down if they do. It's easily available elsewhere on the web, anyway, so I don't see the harm.

(I've just realized I posted it before. Well, it's worth posting again.)

Most of my readers probably know who Parmenides was, but just in case: he was a pre-Socratic philosopher who believed only the One existed, and that plurality was an illusion. It sounds ridiculous until you try to meet his arguments (a challenge out of which the Aristotelian system grew, or so I have read).

The whole poem is good but I think the conclusion, from "Man is surely mad with discontent" is the cherry. It brings me to tears. I think it's a powerful expression of humanism (and personally I've always been a humanist). I am indeed proud to belong to the human race, as MacNeice asserts here.

This is a great poem because the reader could apply it to any number of aspects of the human condition. For instance, it probably won't be a surprise to my readers that it makes me think about political correctness and globalism. Especially these lines:

The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,
His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means he chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal...

I think it's fair to say that this is what everybody who tends towards Burkean conservatism (or libertarianism) hates about political correctness and globalism; the relentless push towards sameness, for all their mendacious talk of "diversity". The belief that all the glorious imperfections of humanity, all the historical accidents and cultural quirks, have to be flattened out by the rolling pin of equality, diversity and inclusion. To quote another great poem, "The Rolling English Road" by G.K. Chesterton:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

Before I became a Christian, I think it's fair to say that Louis MacNeice's worldview was the closest I had to a religion. I told myself I preferred imperfection to perfection (and even wrote stories and poems expressing this theme) This, however, doesn't seem tenable for a Christian, considering Christ told us to be perfect and our goal as Christians is the Beatific Vision. But I tell myself that this might probably include all desirable goods, including those we associate with imperfection.

Notice the incredible intricacy of the poem, especially the internal rhymes.

But enough of my yakking. Here's MacNeice!

Plurality

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun
The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;
World is other and other, world is here and there,
Parmenides would smother life for lack of air
Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks—
No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,
Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,
All your foes are friends and all your days are nights
And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all
And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.
The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,

His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means he chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal, refusing to allow
Division or dispersal—Eternity is now
And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see
Postulating a dumb static identity
Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without
Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt,
Action along with error, growth along with gaps;
If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse.
No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear
That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year,
That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because
It is something that began and is not what it was,
Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled,
Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world,
Its entity a denial of all that is not it,
Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit,
An absolute and so defiant of the One
Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done,
Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought
And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought.
World is not like that, world is full of blind
Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind,
Swollen or diminished according to the dice,
Foaming, never finished, never the same twice.
You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form—
Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm
And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained,
Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained,
Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet
Would not be worth achieving if the world were set
Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb
World should find its voice for good and God become
Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means
Something but must fall unless there intervenes
Between that meaning and the matter it should fill
Time’s revolving hand that never can be still.
Which being so and life a ferment, you and I
Can only live by strife in that the living die,
And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim
Only to what a bird can find within the frame
Of momentary flight (the value will persist
But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).
Man is man because he might have been a beast
And is not what he was and feels himself increased,
Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet
Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget
The means within the end and man is truly man
In that he would transcend and flout the human span:
A species become rich by seeing things as wrong
And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong.
Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled
By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,
Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,
Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux
And so he must continue, raiding the abyss
With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,
Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick
Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,
Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,
Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,
But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

The Pain of the Neglect of Poetry

 I'm ill as I'm typing these words, so perhaps that will add to the melancholy and even bitterness of this post. Please bear that in mind.

Recently, as I was making a cup of tea, a line from Tennyson's long episodic poem "Idylls of the King" came into my mind:

But when he spake and cheered his Table Round
With large, divine, and comfortable words,
Beyond my tongue to tell thee—I beheld
From eye to eye through all their Order flash
A momentary likeness of the King.

As so often with poetry, I felt a stab of intense pleasure followed by a stab of even more intense pain.

(The likeness is momentary because none of the knights can fully live up to the ideals of Camelot, except Sir Galahad, who is taken up to heaven by angels.)

I know my blog readers probably get sick of me moaning about the neglect of poetry. A few months ago (I know I've told this story) I was speaking to one of my fellow library staff, at a coffee morning (we have tons of those), about the decline of poetry. She said she needed more coffee, walked away, and never came back.

At another coffee morning (we have lots of them), I found myself standing next to her and teased her a bit about it. She said: "I'm more interested in the revival of poetry than the decline of poetry."

Well, so am I, but they are closely related.

Here are some principles that I subscribe to when it comes to the decline of poetry:

1) Poetry is difficult to read. It requires mental exertion in a way most reading (or arts) don't. The pleasure very rarely comes on an initial reading. It comes later, if it comes at all. (Of course, there are exceptions.)

2) The problem with poetry today is not a problem of supply. It's a problem with demand. When I complain about poetry, people often tell me that they write poetry or they know someone who writes poetry. OK. There's no shortage of poetry in the world and all the schemes for making poetry available to the masses won't achieve anything. It's the reading of poetry that has to be stimulated. I think the best thing the education system could do for poetry would be to bring back learning it by rote. It's hated at the time but appreciated years and decades later.

The best thing the media could do is have programmes of poetry appreciation and poetry criticism, not more poetry being recited.

3) Anthology pieces are far from the whole of poetry. If you look through the Collected Works of nearly any great poet you will notice that short poems are in the minority. Most of the great poets took their long poems far more seriously than their lyrics. They would probably be horrified to know that people only know their lyrics today.

"Idylls of the King" by Tennyson, for instance. Please understand I'm criticizing myself as well as other people. I have read "Idylls of the King" in its entirety once in my life, despite the poem "Morte d'Arthur" (written long before the rest of the Idylls, and rewritten to be their finale) having been one of my favourite poems since my teens. I mean, how can you not love lines like these, spoken by King Arthur to the last surviving one of his knights after the final battle, before he is taken away on a supernatural barge to the island of Avalon (like Tolkien's Grey Havens):

And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

Can you read that without tears?

So why have I only read "Idylls of the King" all the way through once in my life, a few years ago? Laziness, madam, pure laziness. It took me decades to actually finish it. What a bum!

But maybe not just laziness. One of the pleasures of any literary or cultural pursuit is sharing it with other people. It's terribly lonely when there's nobody to share it with. I've known about three people who've taken a serious interest in poetry in my life, who were willing to discuss it on the "granular" level of particular lines and words, themes, etc. One was my father and he died in 2019. (He never had much interest in Tennyson, strangely.)

Imagine you had only known about three people all your life who took a serious interest in films, and everybody else thought it was OK to have watched maybe twenty films in school, and OK to watch another one maybe once every five years. And never to rewatch them. And absolutely never to talk about them except whether you liked them or didn't like them. No analysing scenes or reciting dialogue or anything like that. It takes one of the great pleasures of an art away from you and leads to a lot of frustration. (The first thing I do after watching a film is see what other people thought about it.)

Honestly, I don't see any huge difference between reading only prose and spending all day on TikTok. There was a time when reading novels was considered dissipation and I don't think it was entirely a wrong idea. 

(I was reading a sermon by our most recent Doctor of the Church, just yesterday, on the dangers of novels. He preached it as an Anglican; he seemed to have changed his mind as a Catholic. But I think his Anglican scruples have something to be said for them. Novels appeal mostly to the arousal and gratification of suspense, which isn't a particularly elevated appetite.)

Of course, a lot of the decline of poetry is down to free verse, which is rubbish (for the most part). People encounter it and think they don't "get" poetry when really there's nothing to "get", most of the time. (I think some free verse is good, like some of the free verse of D.H. Lawrence; "Snake", for instance. But only a tiny proportion of it.)

It's very discouraging. 

I have no uplift with which to end this blog post. I can't see any of this changing, especially since conservatives don't care about the decline of poetry, and especially since even supposedly conservative magazines like First Things (one of the vanishingly few magazines who actually publish poetry), mostly publish free verse.

I fully expect I'm going to be like an Ent seeking the Entwives for the rest of my days.

(If you read and love poetry, please don't be insulted by this post. Join me in trying to shame our contemporaries, especially "conservatives", to do the same.  It won't work, but like Camelot it's worth striving for anyway.)

Cool It

One phrase that really irritates me is "water cooler talk" or "water cooler discussions".

First off, nobody on this side of the Atlantic calls it a water cooler. It's generally just called "water".

Secondly, I don't think I've ever seen anyone have a "water cooler discussion".

The idea seems to be that getting a cup of water is a sort of pretext for a conversation. But my experience of the workplace is that you don't really need a pretext. Unless someone is doing something that obviously shouldn't be interrupted, you just go up and talk to them.

Also, people tend to get a cup of water one at a time.

In my experience, "water cooler discussions", insofar as they exist, are usually "waiting for the kettle to boil discussions".

The Brittas Empire

British TV sitcoms have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching them. I assumed that everybody else did, too, and it's only in recent years that I've realized this isn't true. I've frequently asked people (in Ireland, naturally) for their favourite British sit-coms and I'm always taken aback when somebody says: "I never really watched any."

There were always British sit-coms on the television in my home, growing up. My father was an Irish republican who had an anglophobic side, at least in theory. But he'd often say: "The British do comic characters better than anybody." Sometimes he'd preface this with: "It pains me to admit it..." (And yet, he read Samuel Pepys and John Le Carré, watched English soccer and cricket and every other English sport, and was hooked on British politics. As a bigot, he was an abject failure.)

Yes, the British do comic characters better than anybody, although I can't really comment on the comic creations of Iceland, Indonesia, or Fiji. But you know what I mean.

And this long predates television, of course. Since I read it in my teens, I've believed that Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmiths (1892) is the funniest book ever written. But then there's Bertie Wooster and Adrian Mole and any number of other literary gems.

Still, you can't beat a good old British sit-com on the good old telly, with a good old cuppa.

Here are some of the British sit-coms I love (and a few I don't), broken down into different tiers. It's not at all comprehensive (or perhaps I should say "comp"):

The Top Tier: Fawlty Towers (best of the best), The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, The Office (UK, obviously), Only Fools and Horses.

The Second Tier: Porridge, Rising Damp, Blackadder, Father Ted, The IT Crowd, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Sorry!, Steptoe and Son.

The Third Tier: Men Behaving Badly, Yes Minister, Keeping Up Appearances, Ever-Decreasing Circles, Bottom, I'm Alan Partridge, Red Dwarf, Yes Prime Minister, Only When I Laugh, 'Allo 'Allo, Bless Me Father, Bless This House, On The Buses, Love Thy Neighbour, Shelley, You Rang, M'Lord?

The Fourth Tier (stuff that I either don't find funny at all, or just so repulsive that I might occasionally laugh but still hate it); Last of the Summer Wine, The Young Ones, The Vicar of Dibley, Bottom, Rab C. Nesbitt, Dad's Army.

As eagle-eyed readers will have gathered from the title of the blog post, I'm going to be writing about The Brittas Empire here. The central character of this one is Gordon Brittas, the obnoxious but idealistic manager of a sports and leisure centre. It ran from 1991 to 1997.

I've been watching The Brittas Empire recently, and I think I'd place it in the second tier.

The funny thing is, I can remember when The Brittas Empire was originally broadcast, and I didn't like it at all. I half-watched it when my father was watching it, but I was never won over. I bracketed it with its close contemporary Keeping Up Appearances; a painfully formulaic show that won a certain amount of laughs from the fact that it was so audaciously formulaic.

Watching it again, I've completely changed my mind. The Brittas Empire is significantly different from any other sit-com I know. For the following reasons (none of them are unique in themselves, but the combination is unique):

1) The large cast. It's very much an ensemble piece with lots of regulars, despite the focus on the central character.

2) The frequently brutal nature of the comedy. It can't really be described as dark, because it's not realistic or serious enough to be dark. Nor can it be called unsentimental, because it has some quite sentimental moments (and I'm fine with that.)

No; brutal is the best term I can think of. Characters frequently die violently in The Brittas Empire. There's a general atmosphere of menace and extremity. One of the best lines comes when we're told that Gordon Brittas worked for the Samaritans for one day. In that one day, four callers committed suicide, and one of them had only called because of a wrong number. (It shouldn't be funny, but it is.) 

In another scene, Brittas's long-suffering wife is sitting by his hospital bed, as he lies unconscious, and is moved when one of his colleagues gives a speech on Brittas's complete lack of malice and his sincere desire to make the world a better place. She's is so moved that she plugs his life-support system back in.

Then there is the receptionist who is keeping her baby in a drawer at reception, and seems to be in a perpetual sense of nervous breakdown.

But the brutality isn't constant. That would get tiresome and too depressing. It's intermittent, and clubs you over the head at just the right moments. And the smattering of invincibly cheerful and oblivious characters (including Brittas himself) lifts the mood sufficiently.

3) The surreal elements. Sometimes the surrealism comes from highly improbable occurrences (like deadly and exotic spiders being sent to Brittas through the post), but sometimes it goes beyond improbable-- like the episode where a long line of people holding hands are simultaneously electrocuted, in a very cartoonish manner.

What makes the surrealism especially effective is that it's in contrast to the underlying atmosphere of the series. It's not a comedy like Father Ted or Blackadder, where the entire world in which the characters exist is zany. In The Brittas Empire, the bizarre is constantly breaking through a mostly very ordinary, very English existence.

4) The intensity of the farce. The Brittas Empire is like Fawlty Towers in that it generally involves a series of mishaps that come together, in unexpected ways, and form a disaster that is much greater than the sum of its parts. It's not as ingenious or brilliant at doing this as Fawlty Towers (nothing is), but it's much more extreme. The disaster often involves explosions, fires, deaths, and so forth. The best comparison is probably the comic fiction of Tom Sharpe.

To sum up, I'm surprised at how much I've had to revise my previous impression.

(One little additional thing: watching it this time round, I've wondered if the character of Carol, the permanently stressed receptonist, might have had any influence on Renée Zellwegger's portrayal of Bridget Jones. The resemblance is very striking. But it might just be coincidence. I'd link to a reel of Carol moments, but I can't find any.)