Favouritism

There's been quite a flap about the fact that Sir Keir Starmer, according to an interview in The Guardian, admitted that he didn't have a favourite novel or poem. This provoked various opinion pieces indicting him as a soulless robot. (This happened a little while ago, but I've only heard about it today.)

I think it's a stretch to call someone soulless because they don't have a favourite poem or novel-- to say the least. But it has got me thinking about favourites, and the whole business of having favourites.

Personally, I've always had favourites. I like having favourites. I like thinking about favourites, and deciding on favourites, and awarding favourites.

I've realized that other people are different. In fact, lots of people make a face if you ask them for their favourite film, book, etc. "I don't really have a favourite", they reply, in the same tone that people say: "I don't have a television."

I find this irritating. Back when I was on Facebook, I asked people to their name their favourite film (or something), but added: "If you're one of those tiresome, precious people who don't have favourites, just tell me a few that you especially like." (Or something like that.)

Anyway, I'm a favourites kind of guy, for good or ill. Here are a few of my favourites.

1) Favourite overall author: G.K. Chesterton.

2) Favourite poet: W.B. Yeats.

3) Favourite poem: "Ulysses" by Lord Alfred Tennyson.

4) Favourite song: "Night Fever" by the Bee Gees.

5) Favourite film: Groundhog Day.

6) Favourite horror film: either The Wicker Man or Dead of Night (1945).

7) Favourite word: Kaleidoscope.

8) Favourite book of the Bible: Ecclesiastes.

9) Favourite Shakespeare play: The Tempest.

10) Favourite TV show: The Office (US)

11) Favourite dinner: Steak, chips, pepper sauce, onions, peas, Coke.

12) Favourite colour combination: Red and white.

13) Favourite sound: the hum of voices in the air. (Runners up: the sound of cheering and commotion coming from far way, the sound of billiard balls hitting each other, the sounds of a busy train station in the morning.)

14: Favourite female beauty: Kate Beckinsale circa her Van Helsing period.

15: Favourite environment: the cinema.

16: Favourite animal: Crow.

17: Favourite place: Chiocca's, an eatery (more precisely, a ratskeller) in Richmond, Virginia.

18: Favourite phrase: Softly falling snow.

19: Favourite historical period: the 1970s.

(I do have this in common with Sir Keir: I can't name a favourite book. Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis is one candidate. Dead as Doornails, a memoir of literary Dublin in the forties and fifties by Anthony Cronin, is another.)

The Magic of a Title

Recently I've found myself musing on the title of a book I read many years ago, certainly more than ten  years ago: University Ghost Story by Nick DiMartino.

To be pedantic, I didn't actually read it. I listened to it on MP3 Player. I was going through a phase of listening to audio-books at this time. It never really stuck, but I have a few warm memories of the practice.

Ridiculous as it sounds, I can't remember whether University Ghost Story was a good book or a bad book. I can't even remember the plot.

But I like the title very much! It's so simple, and strangely audacious. I remember wondering how nobody had ever called a novel University Ghost Story before.

I've worked in a university for my entire working career-- twenty-five years on the fifteenth of October (on the same date that, by coincidence, this blog will be fifteen years old). I love the atmosphere of universities but it's a constant struggle to appreciate it, for it not to become invisible to me.

Some titles never cease to enchant me, like (as I've mentioned many times before) The Winter's Tale. They seem to have a concentrated sort of existence. A good piece of fiction draws on broad human experience, a particular aspect or territory of existence; it's already a concentration; and the title is a concentration of that.

A Quotation I Like

The list of G.K. Chesterton quotes that I treasure would be very long. Here is one that isn't even one of my favourites, but I still really like it:

Mr. Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs, to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air. The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way to enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with characteristic contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot see why I should keep Shakespeare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand Shakespeare's birthday—and Shakespeare's poetry.

The passage occurs early on in Chesterton's book George Bernard Shaw. I don't think I've ever read the whole book.

I treasure this passage because it's a sort of photo-negative of what I would wish for, both for myself and everybody else. The more living traditions the better; the more college customs the better; I wish we had more toasts and sing-songs. In this passage, Chesterton is describing something which has no exact word to cover it. I know, because I've often looked for one.

Alas, there isn't nearly enough of such things in the world for my liking, and certainly not enough in my own life. In fact, there's hardly any in my own life. My attempts to create traditions and running jokes and customs have been almost entirely unsuccessful. Nobody is interested. Even when it comes to this blog, all my little traditions-- posting "The Burning Babe" by Robert Southwell at Christmas, changing the colours to reflect the liturgical seasons, throwing in random pictures of Dirk Benedict-- never really provoked the slightest interest or amusement.

Yes, I want cheese with this whine.

I often want to ask people about their personal traditions, school traditions, etc. But I suspect they'd just think I was trying to be whimsical. It's socially bad form to talk about anything that's actually interesting.

Happy St. Kevin's Day!

Today is the feast-day of St. Kevin of Glendalough!

One of his name-sakes is the footballer Kevin Keegan, who played in the seventies and eighties and became a manager in the nineties and millennium. And I swear a Kevin Keegan quotation came into my mind this morning, without me realizing the saints' day connection.

Keegan credits his career to the encouragement of a nun. He went to Catholic school, got married in a Catholic church (and he's been married to the same woman for fifty-one years), and I even found one reference to him giving a talk to a school on his faith.

Although he was a legendary player and manager, Keegan's greatest talent might be his commentating. He regularly came out with glorious gaffes that have come to be known as "Keeganisms". Here are my five favourites, though I won't vouch for their authenticity. (I suspect they're all kosher as they regularly appear on lists of Keeganisms.

1. "“Life wouldn’t be worth living if you could buy confidence because the rich people would have it all and everybody else would… would have to make their own arrangements." (This is my favourite.)

2. "There'll be no siestas in Madrid tonight."

3. "The 33 or 34-year-olds will be 36 or 37 by the time the next World Cup comes around, if they're not careful."

4. "England can end the millennium as it started– as the greatest football nation in the world."

5. "Despite his white boots, he has real pace."

There are lots more out there. You can find them pretty easily.

I also like (non-ironically) Keegan's hit single from 1978, "Head Over Heels In Love With You", both lyrically and musically.

(Incredibly, as I was about to publish this blog post, I discovered that Kevin Keegan announced he has stage four stomach cancer just yesterday. I thought of not publishing it out of respect, but then I thought...well, it's clearly an affectionate post, I hope, and it's highly unlikely that him or anyone in his family will see it. But if they do, I assure them of my prayers. God bless him and them! But if anyone thinks this is the wrong choice, let me know.)

The Sources of Energy

I was re-reading my diary entry for Halloween night of 2023. That night, I watched The Wicker Man from 2006 (not exactly my choice) and I was also reading a book called Christmas: A Biography by Judith Flanders. What I wrote really does express some of my most enduring and powerful feelings, whatever that may mean to anyone else.

My entry refers to "the sources of energy", a phrase from Freud that I've come to think as "talismanic", as I put it. I encountered it more than twenty years ago in A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson. Freud (a staunch atheist, of course) used it when he was urging a friend to raise his son as a Jew: "If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew, you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else." Of course, I'm not thinking of its application to Judaism per se (for all my profound respect for Judaism), but rather its application to tradition and the sacred and everything that is excluded by mere rationalism.

I was glancing through a book, Christmas: A Biography. I was moved by the description of the Puritans in America. Even though I love Christmas, I’ve always been strangely sympathetic to the Puritan antagonism to Christmas. Perhaps because it means they’re taking it seriously. It’s the same way I’ve always had a sympathy for book burners and people who riot at plays.

I felt very moved and even agitated, thinking of holidays and traditions, observances, rituals, customs, all that kind of thing. Halloween and the Wicker Man and the Christmas book and thoughts of poetry all ran through my head.

My whole life seems to be about going against the stream of utilitarianism and rationalism and sameness and disenchantment. Observing holidays and reading long poetry and cultivating eccentricity and attending Mass and praying the rosary and reading the Bible somehow all seem to be a part of this. What Freud called “the sources of energy”, a phrase that seems talismanic to me and that recurs to me over and over again.

I guess I feel a sort of faith that it’s the poetic, the symbolic, the immaterial, the imaginary, the intangible, the visionary that really fuels culture and society. And even if it isn’t, even if the dialectical materialists are right, I will always be on the side of those things. And I feel a contentment and eagerness in thinking of that.

I don’t think it’s incompatible with Christianity at all. I think all good things are compatible with Christianity. The important thing is not to lose sight of what’s MORE important. People and their welfare are more important than traditions. Eternal salvation is the most important thing. But that doesn’t mean that these things AREN’T important. They contribute to the joy and meaning of life, and I think they are also ennobling and may well be an aid to salvation.

Reading poetry, especially long poetry, is particularly important. Even if it has no immediate benefit. It’s so counter-cultural it’s immeasurable.

In Praise of Solemnity, Revisited

In my last blog post, I used the word "solemnity", and linked to the poem "In Praise of Solemnity" that I published here eleven years ago. I decided it would bear re-posting. It's the closest thing to a "verse essay" I've ever written and it articulates many of my abiding feelings about solemnity, "kitsch", irony, and several other important subjects.

If you're the kind of person who thinks Monarch of the Glen (the painting below) is kitsch, or who has ever sarcastically used the phrase "ye olde tea-shoppe", then you might be the kind of jerk I'm reacting against in this post. As for me, I'm a different kind of jerk.

In one line, I complain about the blanket coverage of sport at the weekends (on radio, for instance). This isn't an attack on sport itself, or even spectator sports, or even commercialized spectator sports. I'm not one of those people who talk snootily about "sportsball", and in fact, such people annoy me greatly. I think sport is a valuable part of life. Actually, if I rewrote the poem, I would remove that reference, just to put as much clear blue water between me and the "sportsball" crowd. But I'll let it stand for now.

In Praise of Solemnity

Call it pomposity, bombast, what you will;
Call it vulgarity, but I crave it still;
The cinema called the Odeon or the Lux;
The epigraph of Everyman's Library books;
Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide--
The monument that is not too proud for pride
Splendid in bronze or marble; the public house sign
That blazons "licensed to sell beers and wine"
In gold italics; The Monarch of the Glen;
The silhouette of ladies and top-hatted gentlemen.

I have seen so much of death, this past two years;
The awful shock when a whole life disappears;
The empty words at the funeral home, the walk to the grave;
Name after name some adoring mother and father gave
Etched onto stone. It won't let me forget
The rarity of every heartbeat, every breath.

They cannot convince me that life is a trivial thing;
A pretty toy that a man should be ready to fling
Away with a laugh; (were mine to be sacrificed
I would leave it with tears and agony, just like Christ);
The world may rebuke me with taking life seriously;
But I cannot get my tongue round the verb to be
As easy as that. Existence itself should shame
The whimsicalists who teach us that life is a game.

But let there be games, and laughter, and nonsense, and sport,
And idleness, and whimsy of every sort.
Let life be complete, let life be filled to the brim
And overflowing. But-- should all life be a whim?
What relish has laughter, when laughter goes on all the time,
When mirth may not even give way to let in the sublime
For a half hour, or less? As love is to aimless lust
True mirth is to this. I don't want to laugh if I must.

But laughter itself has its dignity stolen away
And the man who walked into a bar is considered passé--
For a joke is a rite, and a joker a ritualist,
And a punch-line's too formal a thing to allow to exist
In a era when randomness stands for all humour, all art,
All beauty, all meaning; a world with a whirligig heart.

But on a clear night, when I go out and look at the stars
How painfully, painfully, all our frivolity jars
With so lofty a sight; those pinpricks of iciest flame
In the ocean of night put our freaks and our follies to shame;
Under the clear silver gaze of the stars and the moon
How can a man not feel degraded to play the buffoon?

But still we have gameshow on gameshow, and hip-hop, and memes,
And bachelor parties with weird and un-wonderful themes,
And twelve magazines about cars on the newsagent shelves
And eighty-eight photos on Facebook we took of ourselves
All exactly the same. We have advertising campaigns
About doughnuts and dogfood and toothpaste and hard-to-shift stains
And the news gives us Hollywood gossip and fighting in court
And Saturday morning to Sunday evening of sport,
And playwrights write plays about nothing, and artists splash mud
On a canvas, and newspaper critics declare it is good,
And in the museum there are interactive displays
Where once there were exhibits. Nobel laureates praise
The lyrics of rappers, and nobody thinks this is odd;
Oh man! Man! The heir of the ages! The image of God!

Enough! We belong to eternity. We have a soul.
All around us, unthinkable clusters of galaxies roll;
Behind us lie millions of years, and before us our doom;
Imagination and wonder find limitless room
In the ocean of being. Around us, our brethren, mankind;
Each one with a measureless soul and a fathomless mind;
And calling us onwards, the joy that is higher than mirth,
The joy of the unsmiling stars and the serious earth,
The dim light of dusk and the pale light of dawn, and the ghost
Of the myriad dead; all the joy that moves us the most;
The joy of the straight-faced urchin consumed in his game
Or the worshipper's eyes lit up by the candle's soft flame
Before his saint's shrine, or the lover lost in his love,
Or the girl alone in a field, agape at the glories above.

Blanchardstown Oratory

I was going through my archives and I came across this photograph of the oratory in Blanchardstown shopping centre. I've been there about a half a dozen times, including attending several Masses there. I'm quite drawn to it, it has a solemn and catacomb-like atmosphere.

It was common to have oratories in Irish shopping centres, back in the day. The Omni Centre in Santry has one, with Eastern Orthodox icons on the walls. The Ilac Centre had one up until a few years ago. Naturally, new shopping centres don't.

The shortest Mass I ever attended, by far, was in the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre oratory. I think it lasted all of six minutes. (I was so surprised I checked my phone as soon as it was ever.) I don't think this is a good thing, although I tend to prefer short Masses to long one. (An Australian friend told me once that Irish-Australian Catholics are known for their preference for short Masses. The more pious will happily attend several Masses a day, but they want them to be short. Personally I prefer short Masses because otherwise my concentration and sense of reverence lags.)

I don't know how easily it can be seen in the photograph, but in this oratory, the window at the back is behind a wall so you only see the light filtering out from it. I like that very much. It's very solemn. It satisfies my priggishness and my craving for solemnity.

Sometimes I think there should be completely dark rooms in every building, where somebody can go and sit periodically and then re-emerge into the wonder of light.