Fidel is "da man"
When communist dictator Fidel Castro is an acceptable hero, what with his autobiography now available on the shelves of our bookstores, it is as well to record Edmund Burke's scathing criticism of the birth of the revolutionary spirit.

"We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against not only reason but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot, and in the drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembick of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization amongst us, and among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition, might take place of it. "

In other words, the revolution was "throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort". Everything depended upon the Christian foundations. Hence the Revolution was "the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours" and "the most important crisis that ever existed in the world."

Burke or Castro?

Mark Steyn on Pop Culture and Allen Bloom
In a piece celebrating the anniversary of Allen Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, there are some great moments form the unstoppable Mr. Steyn:

"Popular culture" is more accurately a "present tense culture": You're celebrating the millenium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We're at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college a best part of a quarter-century later - or thirty years later in Germany. Yes in all these decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceburg, and teaches you the seven eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven eignths under the water, what's left on the surface gets thinner and thinner."

"..what happens when a society's incidental music becomes its manifesto.."

On relativism: "It's lined up for you and all have to do it pick what you want. It's the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally valid, equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish."

(The New Criterion, Vol 26 .No. 3. Nov. 2007)

Favourite Books of 2007

History:
McCullough: "1776"
Rodney Stark: "Victory of Reason"
Rodney Stark: "To The Glory of God: How monotheism ".

Novels:
Cormac McCarthy: "The Road"
Homer: The Odyssey
N Wilson: Leepike Ridge

Theology:
Andrew Sandlin: "Backbone of the Bible"
Keith Mathieson: PostMillenialism
Leon Podles: "The Church Impotent: Feminization of Christianity"

Issues:
Mark Steyn: America Alone
P J O'Rourke: All The Trouble in the World
Bjorn Lomborg: "Cool it"
Theodore Dalrymple: "Our Culture, What's Left of It"

Bible:
Jeff Meyers: A Table in the Mist (Ecclesiastes)
Jonathen Wells: PiG Guide to Intelligent Design and Darwinism
Peter Leithart: Baptized Bodies

Education:
Simmons: Climbing Parnassus
Diane McGuinness: "Why Children Can't Read"

Biography:
Gaines: An Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach
Paul Johnson: Creators
Alan Jacobs: The Narnian

Economics:
Virginia Postrel: The Future and its Enemies
Schneider: "The Good of Affluence"

Art:
Roger Kimball: "Arts Prospect"

Genevan Psalms
Here is a good and lively recording of some of the genevan psalms and the Magnificat...
Unfortunately, they don't seem to sell the CDs on this site, but the clips are worthwhile: so LISTEN

PC Blurb
When even the author's blurb on the front page of a children's novel complies with the canons of PC orthodoxy, one can see how far things have gone.
Michael Morpurgo, noted children's writer, rejoices that one of his novels, Kensuke's Kingdom, has been printed on environmentally "compliant" paper. This is displayed across the top of the front cover, a place usually reserved for recommendations of an author's work - not comments by the author upon his own work!
The fact that anyone thinks that this has a bearing on the quality of the book or it's contents is startling. Rather it is a none-too-subtle indoctrination of our children into thinking that this might be the most important aspect of the book, even before the story begins.

Roger Kimball on Modern Art

"..as the egalitarian imperatives of the Sixties insinuated themselves more and more thoroughly into mainstream culture, the very ideal of aesthetic excellence came under fire. Adulation, not connoisseurship, was the order of the day. Many commentators - even many artists - rejected outright the pursuit of aesthetic excellence; they saw it as an elitist holdover from the discredited hierarchies of the past."

Quoting Clement Greenburg,
"The middlebrow in us wants the treasure of civilization for himself, but the desire is without appetite. He feels nostalgia for what he imagines the past to have been, and reads historical novels, but in the spirit of a tourist who enjoys the scenes he visits because of their lack of resemblance to those he has come from and will return to... In his reading, no matter how much he wants to edify himself, he will balk at anything that sends him to the dictionary or a reference book more than once."

Quoting Karsten Harries on "kitsch":
"The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare, when desire lies dormant and needs artificial stimulation. Kitsch is an answer to boredom. When objects cannot elicit desire, man desires desire. More precisely, what is enjoyed or sought is not a certain object, but an emotion, a mood, even , or rather especially, if there is no encounter with an object that would warrant that emotion.. Thus religious Kitsch seeks to elicit religious emotion without an encounter with God, and erotic Kitsch seeks to give the sensation of love without the presence of someone with whom one is in love."

"The most delicious news to emerge from the art world in 2001 came in October, courtesy of the BBC. Under the gratifying headline "Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation", the world read that,

'A cleaner at a London gallery clearered away an installation of artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm Gallery on Wednesday morning.'

I hope that Mr. Asare was immediately given a large raise. Someone who can make mistakes like this is an immensely useful chap to have around."

"..the Andy Warhol museum reminds us that Pop Art represents an infantilization of art and culture."

On avant-garde art:
"Having won battle after battle it gradually transformed a recalcitrant bourgeois culture into a willing collaborator in its raids on established taste."

"The assualt onthe human form (i.e. portraiture) - above all the assault on the human face - has epitomized the progress of paintings dehumanization."

Modern Art: Kimball and Kramer

Dr Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion stand against the tide of pomposity, self-importance and political correctness that has flooded the art world. The works of Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Damien Hurst or Andy Warhol and others are ruthlessly exposed and unsparingly criticised , as are the many pretentious exhibitions that show works of a highly transcient nature - e.g., Hurst's pile of cans, ashtrays etc. The latter is the work that was cleared away for the night cleaner at the gallery, because he, understandably, mistook it for a pile of rubbish. The aesthetic values of the cleaner are to be admired.

Kimball and Kramer call us to hold onto the values of beauty, truth abd glory that have shaped western art for centuries against the landslide into the dark, ugly and disfigured world of modern art. They tell us that there is plenty of good about, but it is not shown and harder to locate.

Modern art has become the engine for the bleets and cries of the politically correct crowd. Every work is viewed in terms of what it illuminates as to women's issues, sexual orientation, gender concerns, race and so forth. These pet concerns become the prism for every artistic interpretation, and the measure for the selection and valuation of newer pieces.

The language of modern art criticism is contorted, pretentious and deliberately opake.

But on the subject of modern, great art look at the wonderful works of the american artist, Jacob Collins at http://www.jacobcollinspaintings.com/.

Finally, in the essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, T S Eliot located the root of the problem, where he criticised

our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the particular essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas, if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. (quoted in Roger Kimball, Art's Prospect p, ix)

On Lying In...

On hearing that good friend has taken to "lying in.."

"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling" (G.K. Chesterton)

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead. (James Thurber (1894 - 1961)).

Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed. George Burns (1896 - 1996)

More Christmas Listening...

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Fantasia on Christmas Carols

Fantatsic Tools form GOOGLE

If you have not seen:

http://books.google.co.uk/

here are whole books - millions of them form the finest libraries, and some that are downloadable....

and

http://scholar.google.com/

for articles and all sorts!

What resources!