IN RESPONSE to yesterday's post on noise and music pollution, a reader recommended the 2005 movie Into Great Silence, about the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. This is one of my favorite movies, one of only two I personally own, given to me as gifts. Josef Pieper said, "Worship is the fountainhead of leisure." The same is true of silence. We revere silence not because we love emptiness. To the contrary. The exact opposite is true. I highly recommend the movie, which is very long and includes little action. You can fall asleep for an hour and wake up and the movie is still there.   

IN A 2002 VFR entry on the relentless noise in public places, Lawrence Auster wrote:

One expression of this breakdown [in the Western idea of form] is the ubiquity in our society of loud unpleasant “music” and other electronic noise and, more significantly, the unthinking acceptance of same. In today’s New York City, for example, you will walk into a retail store or a hair-cutting salon, and not only will there be loud black funk music blasting from speakers in the ceiling from morn till night, with its interminable, melody-less, rhythmless, lyric-less (and identical in every song), “oh ooo ohh, ooh, hoh baby, woohoo, uhh, uhh, Woohoo WoohuahAHahAAA, yeah-huh, baby oh yeah”, but the radio reception is so bad it’s all static. I’m talking about loud static, filling the establishment from powerful speakers. When you ask the employees to adjust the tuning of the radio station or to turn the volume down, they will do so, but there seems to be absolutely no consciousness on their part that there was anything inappropriate about this horrible noise. There is a shocking insensibility in young people today, a complete acceptance of noise and disorder in one’s environment.

It reminds me of India, where villagers love to have all-night festivals with electronic speakers turned up to the max, where people in cities are surrounded by unbelievable, all-encompassing noise and disorder and are not disturbed by it at all. In one sense, this is an impressive quality, expressing the spiritual dimension of the Eastern civilization and the idea of the soul unaffected by matter. (more…)

IN MORE THAN 20 years of marriage, I have made, as mentioned before, many hundreds of gallons of chicken broth. A poultry vendor nearby sells six-pound bags of chicken bones for $2.69. I put the bones in a pot of water, add onions, carrots and bay leaves, and let it sit on the stove for hours, often ignored until late at night when my husband pours it into a container and puts it in the refrigerator. I make soups and sauces with the broth for very little money. If I could summon all the broth I have made, we would be awash in stock. I could sail to France on a broth sea or fill the Grand Canyon with soup. I have made so much of the stuff that my husband has dabbled in broth jokes. Here are a few. (more…)

JIM B. WRITES:

I just wanted to relay a story which made me think of your blog.

A few days ago, after I had been at work a few hours, my wife called me up, annoyed. It seems that the door to the baby’s room had swung shut. The breeze coming in the windows newly opened to the warm spring air had done the deed. Unfortunately, the outer doorknob was broken, and it couldn’t be opened. This was something that was on my list to fix before the baby came three months ago, but you know how it is (we never shut the door, and many other things had to be done, etc.etc.) (more…)

  Speaking of Oz Conservative, I highly recommend Mark Richardson's 2008 entry on the David Blankenhorn book, Fatherless America. Richardson writes: There is now an assumption that "parenting" is what women have traditionally done - the hands on care and nurture of children - and that a good father is therefore a man who shares or takes over this mothering role. This is an excellent insight into parenting today.

MARK RICHARDSON, of the outstanding website Oz Conservative, also takes issue with the words of a reader here who wrote a thank you letter to traditional women.

Mark writes:

When men do self-deprecate, when we do defer, it is a sign that the culture of relationships has become unbalanced, that the romantic instincts are not balanced by an awareness of what is required from men to maintain a successful system of marriage and family life.

While I agree that an over-emphasis on romance can destroy traditional morality and that masculine objectivity is the cement of family stability, I disagree that the words of this reader in this particular context represent male submission. After all, they were expressed at a website advocating feminine deference to men in all realms of life, a site which has never seriously put forth the idea that women do more of the essential work of life. In fact, the opposite has been strenuously argued and the reader who expressed this gratitude has written at length here on the destructive consequences of the women’s vote. If such words are objectionable here, if they are a sinful submission to women, they cannot be spoken anywhere. Certainly they should not be spoken often anywhere nor should they be mistaken for fact. But it seems the reaction to these words portends a further drying-up of social courtesies and of male expressions of affection. I realize many men say to this: Tough luck. Every woman must now hang on the gallows of feminism, even one who has devoted her life to husband and family. (more…)

WHEN ASKED if he was bothered by a booing crowd during a game, Bill Russell, the Celtics basketball legend, said, “I never heard the boos because I never heard the cheers.” It’s a mistake to live for compliments. It may mean you live too much for the opinion of others. One should possess conviction of what is right and wrong, of what one wants to achieve, and live by it.

But no one can entirely live that way except maybe the greatest saints. Life without compliments is like life without some essential vitamin. One can survive, but not live well.

We live in a narcissistic culture and some people are stuffed with praise – the praise of their parents or teachers or themselves. A narcissist wears a particular bland and unvarying glow. He doesn’t hear or see others; he emanates light.

But even in this climate, many individuals are malnourished, or only given a sugary version of approval.

A compliment can be a disarming experience, particularly if you have lived a relatively cold existence. A person who is not used to compliments may actually be suspicious when one is given. He searches for ulterior motives because the experience is new. If the compliment concerns something trivial, like an article of clothing, it may simply provide a moment of pleasure or, for some of us, a moment of confusion. Sometimes the praise can be trivial and yet said with so much warmth it carries greater meaning.

The rarest and most valuable compliments are those in which a person has seen into another and found something real that others cannot see or do not value. This sort of compliment can be redefining or redeeming. One or two in an entire lifetime is enough. They are never forgotten, held in the inner chambers, like an heirloom ring in a box. (more…)

    KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, reviewing the new Kitty Kelley book on Oprah, peers into the emptiness behind the legend. She writes: This is a woman who thinks (and who everyone thinks) wields more power than she does. In fact, when her show did influence the election of G.W. Bush, it was the adroit Bush who got the better of her and sent a positive message to her audience. The forces do not revolve around Oprah. Oprah leaves her daytime show for her new network the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN – Oprah is always ready to focus on her "girl power") next year. I think she’ll simply be relegated to a respected, but somewhat obscure, chapter of American cultural history. I honestly don’t think people will remember her into the next century (or generation) other than the apparent sensation she caused: "What did she do?" people will ask. Well, she hosted a paradoxically big but inconsequential "first black woman's" talk show.

LYDIA SHERMAN WRITES:

I think women should not expect compliments from men and if they happened to get any, should consider it an enormous privilege. Although I never get compliments from young men, every so often an elderly man will say, “Nice dress” or “Like your hair.” That does not bother me. I know what they are saying deep down: “I wish we had something nice to look at in this old world.” It used to be heart-lifting to see a woman in a pretty dress with an innocent smile. Today women are either drab or trying to show their wares. When we do see something pretty, our compliments are taken as harassment. I say it’s time to go on a compliment strike. Just give out compliments to those who really deserve it. We should be more reserved in our compliments, our smiles. “A few smiles, a few compliments of the navy,” said Jane Austen in Persuasion, and (Captain Wentworth) he’s a lost man! These things were always preludes to something serious. They were also measuring sticks or grades that told people how well they were doing. If women are not doing well, I don’t think they should be complimented. The Proverbs 31 writer said, “her husband praises her in the gates.” These were well-earned praises after a long list of character qualities and accomplishments brought on by those higher qualities of diligence and faithfulness to the home.

(more…)

David writes:

As a young man growing up in a culture saturated with the sort of misandry Youngfogey describes — a culture where it is taken for granted that women are superior to men, to the extent that men are sometimes simply considered useless and risible — I want to express my wholehearted support for the things Youngfogey and Samson have stated in response to Randy’s post. Youngfogey, you in particular have done a phenomenal job challenging Randy’s post. Way to go! Since you are obviously intelligent and articulate I hope you continue to speak up whenever the misandrist mentality rises to the surface. (more…)

IN THIS PREVIOUS POST, a reader argued that women mature more quickly. But is this true today? The evidence is overwhelmingly against it. Here is an excellent 2008 piece by Thomas F. Bertonneau, looking at the mature girl of yesterday and the creature of vanity and mindlessness of today.

He includes this vignette:

In the crush of students we find ourselves walking next to a female undergraduate engaged, like eighty percent of other students, in a peripatetic cell phone conversation. The young lady is well dressed—in the female equivalent of “junior executive.” She walks briskly, oblivious of anyone’s co-presence in the public space. Her dialogue grows excited. She is complaining to a sympathetic listener about one of her instructors, who has apparently assigned what she believes to be too much reading and who grades, as she sees it, harshly. “He f—ing thinks nobody’s got other things to do,” she says loudly. “Well, I’m f—ing not going to let him push me around. I’m f—ing going to report this f—er to the dean.” In three sentences, she has inserted sailor-talk into her speech four times. At the second usage of the Anglo-Saxonism, I give her a disapproving glance. At the fourth I say loudly, “Thank you for sharing that with my twelve-year-old.” She drops back, looking more irritated than ashamed, avoiding my eyes. (more…)

IN A SMALL STORE in New England today, I saw a basket of freshly harvested fiddlehead ferns. This is a delicacy of spring that one can never find in a mainstream market, the unfurled fronds of ostrich ferns gathered from local woods, suggestive of a tightly-curled marine animal, just removed from its shell, fished from the forest tides. They reminded me of the Ted Hughes poem Fern:

Here is the fern’s frond, unfurling a gesture,
Like a conductor whose music will now be pause
And the one note of silence
To which the whole earth dances gravely. (more…)

THE FOLLOWING statement by a reader will land me in trouble with my critics from the men’s advocacy blogosphere. I post it anyway. [See the comments by a reader who says the sort of praise Randy expresses for women is rarely, if ever, publicly expressed by women for men.]

Randy B. writes:

Granted, most if not all of the points and topics brought up on your site are valid, and largely self-supporting to the logical mind. But I want to take a minute and say thank you, not only to my wife and daughters, to you for this site and quest, but to most women in general. (more…)

IN A RECENT ENTRY, Michael S. drew attention to the improper and profligate use of the word “literally.” Its abuse appears to be prevalent among women. (Just the other day, I said, “This sandwich is literally tasteless.”) Literally must always be the pulsing center of a sentence. It expresses a lack of confidence in the simple declaration of fact and indicates an impoverished descriptive vocabulary.

T.G., a reader who is an English teacher, sent this link. The author of the blog has devoted part of his life to “literally.” He writes, “Misuse of the word “literally” gets my blood boiling (no, not literally). It started as a nit-picking distraction, grew to a frustrating obsession, and finally resulted in the creation of this blog…. If I can stop one person from using literally inappropriately I have done my job.”

A noble mission, but the writer may go insane in a non-metaphorical way before he is done. (more…)