Category Archives: Literature

Updated: Honest Abe’s Anguish

History, Iraq, Just War, Literature

“[W]hile small-time functionaries like Scott McClellan can be big enough to express remorse, self-reproach is rare in the leaders they serve. A breast-beating Bush: now that would provide a truly teachable moment.

Although never belabored, it is believed that Abraham Lincoln may have suffered misgivings for his role in ‘the butchering business’—J. R. Pole’s turn-of-phrase. Pole is Rhodes Professor Emeritus of American History and Institutions at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Before Pole, a number of prominent historians had floated the idea that Lincoln might have wrestled with remorse for shedding the blood of brothers in great quantities. …”

Read more about the literary “clues to Lincoln’s possible contrition” in “Honest Abe’s Anguish,” my new WorldNetDaily.com column.

Update (June 22): TIME magazine reports that “Scott McClellan … said President Bush has lost the public’s trust by failing to open up about his Administration’s mistakes and backtracking on a promise be up front about the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.”

The man does have a knack for stating the obvious.

Or as I wrote in this column, McClellan has “hindsight rather than insight on his side; what he [is] imparting [is] neither new nor even newsworthy.”

But in America the simple are celebrated.

Updated: The Magic Of MacNeice

Aesthetics, Art, English, Literature, The West

1 Reply

Beauty is the best antidote to politics, my daily drudgery. The poetry of Louis MacNeice is a salve for the soul. It inoculates against the Maya Angelou bastardizations. (She was court poet to the Clintons.)

From “Louis MacNeice From Cradle to Grave“:
The final poem in Louis MacNeice’s collection Plant and Phantom (1941) is the lyric, “Cradle Song”:

Sleep, my darling, sleep;
The pity of it all
Is all we compass if
We watch disaster fall.
Put off your twenty-odd
Encumbered years and creep
Into the only heaven,
The robbers’ cave of sleep.

The wild grass will whisper,
Lights of passing cars
Will streak across your dreams
And fumble at the stars;
Life will tap the window
Only too soon again,
Life will have her answer –
Do not ask her when.
When the winsome bubble
Shivers, when the bough
Breaks, will be the moment
But not here or now.
Sleep and, asleep, forget
The watchers on the wall
Awake all night who know
The pity of it all.

Update: Please people, this post was about transcendence. I mean, I’m no poetry expert, but I know beauty when I read it. That’s why I like MacNeice. So I beg of our reader hereunder, spare me mumbo-jumbo. Give us “Snow,” rather, will you, please?

VD on the V Factor

Feminism, Gender, Literature, Political Correctness

My colleague Vox Day has this to say about “the Silly Sex”

“…This reminds me of my favorite game with female writers. From the time their first column appears, count the number of columns they write before mentioning their children, (if they have one), their husband/boyfriend, (if they have one), or their cat (if they lack the aforementioned accoutrements, they’ll DEFINITELY have one).

The Over/Under is usually around four. A woman who can resist referencing her personal life for more than ten columns will often turn to be very good, while you know it’s going to be a short and ugly run when she’s working in references to her ‘life-partner’ with whom she shares Moggsy and Mr. Tiddles, in the very first one.”

Another signal to head for the hills is the double-barreled surname; that’s usually a give-away: you don’t want to read the stuff penned by a woman by the name of, say, Pamela Kester-Shelton.