ONE OF THE interesting things about used books – that is, books bought secondhand — is that they often bear traces of their former owners. On the negative side, there are the underlinings and notes on the pages themselves, sometimes revealing personal obsessions or preoccupations in the passages marked with exclamation points or double lines. I find these distracting, a form of literary graffiti that is often a desecration of a book.

There are also book plates and dedications on the first pages or inside the cover, such as “To Cindy — Merry Christmas/ Love, Aunt Margaret, 1962.” These dedications are charming and seem to leave a book with traces of living affection.

Then there are bookmarks or other papers, such as store coupons, left in the books themselves. Recently a piece of paper flew out of a used book when I picked it up from a shelf. I absent-mindedly put the paper on my night table. I then came across it later and read it. Written in a trembling hand, it said:

A Possible Prayer

Please, Please Lord heal me, let me live for I have much I desire to do, but if I must die, let it be peaceful and let me go this path with great love.

The page was dated January 19, 1997. As I read it, I felt an uplifting connection with the person who had held the same book, whomever he was and wherever he is. Alive or dead.

(more…)

AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes about the Golden Globe Awards:

None of the films sounded attractive, imaginative, interesting, beautiful, thought provoking, educational, or any of the normal reasons one goes to the movies. Instead, they sounded like horror movies with grotesque story lines, or with over-the-top sexually active characters, or just plain boring. Also, it costs about $15 to watch a movie these days, which is about 2/3 the price of a dinner in a restaurant, which [is] preferable to sitting in a dark room being terrorized by a sadistic film director.

So, I was surprised when all (98%) of the women came to the Golden Globes dressed in classic – and I mean those classic Golden Ages of American Cinema – gowns. I shouldn’t be surprised, though, since this has become the standard actress persona: make ugly films, but dress up in beautiful gowns in public appearances.

(more…)

JAMES P. writes:

The simpering lack of manliness described by Wheeler MacPherson in your recent entry is, in my opinion, the product of the leftist dogma that equality is good, and that hierarchy and authority are bad. When applied to the family, this means leftists do not believe that parents should exert authority over their children. Crazy as this may seem, I have seen it in action. Time after time, other parents weakly ask — even plead — for their children to do something, instead of exerting their proper, loving authority and telling them what to do.

The absurd leftist formula is captured in this article about “consensual living,” which advocates that parents and children should have an equal say in family decisions. Some excerpts with my comments:

(more…)

A WOMAN named Elif Koch writes in The Atlantic of being denied admission to Deep Springs, a liberal arts college located on a cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in the desert of California. Miss Koch, who believes the world is interested in this utterly trivial infringement of her personal desires and is wholly oblivious to the recent feminization of colleges, argues that higher education is limited for women because it does not offer them the sort of experience available at Deep Springs, which emphasizes learning and rugged, dude labor. This is similar to a man stating that because he was not accepted onto the Notre Dame football team, higher education is closed to him.

The all-male outpost of Deep Springs has only remained all-male by court decree. Even the current board of trustees, no doubt worried to death of lawsuits by the likes of Miss Koch, wants it to go co-ed. Nevertheless, Miss Koch smells a conspiracy.

She writes:

The fact of the matter is that young women face a lack of diversity in their higher education. Young men do not pine over all-women schools like Bryn Mawr or Scripps because there are reasonably similar co-educational programs. However, there is not a school like Deep Springs that is available to young women. (more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

Brett McKay of The Art of Manliness website has written several worthwhile columns exploring the history of the idea and importance of manly honor, a concept much lacking among the majorty of postmodern males in the West. He starts:

Across cultures and time, honor and manliness have been inextricably tied together. In many cases, they were synonymous. Honor lost was manhood lost. Because honor was such a central aspect of a man’s masculine identity, men would go to great lengths to win honor and prevent its loss.

(more…)

WHATEVER ONE thinks of the face of the Duchess of Cambridge, whether one finds it as mesmerizingly insipid as I do or beautiful, this official portrait of her by Paul Emsley is an abomination. Yes, it is a painting, one which erases entirely the glorious tradition of British portraiture. Joseph McKenzie at Taki’s Mag captures it:

Instead of a portrait, Emsley has produced an overblown mug shot. All mug shots are unflattering because they have nothing to do with the human soul’s depths. Kate Middleton is more than the sum of her facial attributes glacially rendered by an uninspired technician’s cold hand.

(more…)

ACCORDING TO CBS BALTIMORE:

[T]wo 6-year-old boys were suspended while playing cops and robbers during recess and using their fingers to make an imaginary gun.

(more…)

JOE A. writes:

I just got off the phone with Senator Bob Casey’s Philadelphia office. I spoke with some twentysomething girl (they used to be “women” at that age). I asked her a series of Socratic questions. Here is a paraphrase of our conversation, which was not recorded:

Ring, ring, ring …

“Hello. Bob Casey’s office can I help you?”

I want to talk about gun control.

“Okay, you can talk to me.”

Great. So Bob Casey wants us to ban “assault weapons,” whatever that means.

“Yes.”

So we’re to turn over our guns?

“Yes.”

(more…)

ONE WOULD think that a Supreme Court justice might have a consuming interest in, well, the law. According to Damon W. Root at Reason.com, Sonia Sotomayor’s new memoir My Beloved World contains “no discussion of Sotomayor’s many years as a federal judge and no mention of any sort of legal philosophy that might be guiding her approach to the law.” It does talk about her “struggles” with diabetes, her brilliant school career and her wedding night.

Sotomayor is the sort of intellectual lightweight that rises to the top today. Before the advent of feminist preferences, bright women found ways to succeed. With the reign of feminist preferences, not-so-bright women find ways to succeed.

(more…)

IF Western society today is politically and morally corrupt, how do we live in it and yet not be of it? How do we resist it and not become engulfed by it? In a recent post at The Orthosphere, Alan Roebuck explains with characteristic clarity and insight how to resist and oppose liberalism without having to move to the backwoods and live in seclusion. The most important tasks are to acknowledge with brutal honesty the destructiveness of modern liberalism, to separate oneself inwardly from it and to support anti-liberal principles. Mr. Roebuck writes:

The origin and continuing source of the power to resist is your mind. This may seem obvious, but man has a tendency to jump too soon into the practical realm, and to let the practical define how he thinks. If you find that no significant practical and outward resistance is possible right now, you may be in danger of becoming demoralized. Therefore you must be equipped to understand and reject liberalism regardless of your environment. The necessary source and prerequisite of all of practical resistance are your mind and spirit.

And here is an extremely important point: “You must be anti-liberal, not just non-liberal.” He continues:

It is not enough to be non-liberal in the sense that you do not consciously think liberal thoughts or behave like a liberal. You must actively resist liberalism, or else you will either passively endorse it or actively embrace it. You must be anti-liberal, not just non-liberal.

You must be prepared to retain your spirits even when forced by external circumstances to make a show of going along with liberalism. Totalitarian regimes know that they can generally break the spirits of their opponents by forcing them make a public show of supporting the regime. But just as the Christian life begins with, and is always based upon, repentance and faith in Christ rather than outward actions, so the traditionalist resistor must first and always cultivate his internal opposition to the liberal order, an opposition based on his knowledge of the true, the good and the beautiful.

And if you are forced to make a show of going along with liberalism, see it as what it is: A show. Inwardly, you know liberalism is wrong, and you will not change your convictions to match your external behavior. Your behavior is just a pragmatic accommodation to transient circumstances. You do what you must to survive, and you choose when to fight and when not to, but you don’t give the Liberal Establishment what it wants most from you: your approval. [cont.]

(more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

The men’s issues writer Jack Donovan has written at AltRight about the issue of manliness and children based on the entry at your site by Wheeler MacPherson. He writes:

I don’t spend much time around kids, but I have seen this out and about. There are tons of “emo dads” in NW Portland who talk to their children this way — the way that lonely old women talk to lapdogs.

Like the man [MacPherson] who wrote the comment, I can’t remember my grandfathers ever speaking to me that way. They weren’t cruel or abusive. They took me places and taught me things.  They supported me even though I was an oddball. But they never spoke to me in baby talk. They were men. They were authoritative. And, to this day, years after lingering illnesses and deaths, they both maintain a certain command presence in my memory. (more…)

THE blogger Tiberge at Galliawatch reports that France 2 News, a major French television network, did not broadcast its news program on Sunday, the night of “La Manif Pour Tous,” or “The Rally for Everyone,” a demonstration against homosexual marriage rights believed to have drawn as many as one million supporters. It is unclear why the news program was not aired. Was it a deliberate attempt to suppress the remarkable news of the rally? If so, it is a shocking instance of the manipulative power of the press.

One aspect of the rally worth noting was the banners that various regional contingents carried with them, a typically French display of affiliation and local identity. What’s so important about these proud displays of communal identity is that they symbolize something that the resistance to homosexual marriage is defending: not just marriage, but human connection and tradition. Tiberge writes:

Below the department of le Vaucluse proudly marches. Like the Olympic Games where every nation parades, on Sunday every department and region, every special association and organization, carried its banners. Unlike the Olympics, however, this was inherently Christian, religious, patriotic, traditionalist and moral.

In his book Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement, the French writer Philippe Bénéton describes the principle of radical equality — which he calls “equality by default” — that is the animating idea of contemporary life. Equality by default is a pulverizing force. It flattens and levels. It creates a gray, lifeless homogeneity where natural distinctions once prevailed and preserved individuality. Equality by default is different from substantial equality, which consists of a primary and fundamental supernatural equality of human beings, because it “excludes all vital inequality.” It renders human beings autonomous and indifferent to each other. In the end, radical equality weakens love and loyalty. It’s the very foundation of the heartless anonymity that is so characteristic of the modern world. Bénéton writes:

Default man is liberated from every norm and every model: he no longer forms part of an order that transcends him. He enjoys a sovereign independence. He is a stranger in the universe.

Homosexual “marriage” is an idea founded on equality by default. It is an enemy of the very traditions these proud banners represent. Tradition cannot survive without the basic unit of society: Maman, Papa et enfants.

(more…)

MARY writes:

The most recent discussion about “neutered men” brings to mind a casual conversation I took part in a few years back at a sporting event. A group of mothers was chatting on the sidelines and the discussion wandered to the topic of family pets. A woman was telling the story of how they came to own their dog when one of the mothers asked if they had gotten the dog neutered. The woman replied, “Oh, yes,” and then added archly, “All of the males in my house are neutered,” at which point everyone but me cracked up appreciatively.

(more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

Mark Steyn has provided a rather dismal view of both American conservatism and America itself:

Not to be too pedantic, but for there to be a “future of conservatism in America” there first has to be a future in America. And that’s a more open question than my more optimistic comrades like to admit. (more…)