AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat explores the manly style of Jenna Lyons, president and creative director of the clothing retailer J. Crew. Lyons received widespread criticism for appearing in an ad earlier this year that showed her painting her young son's toenails pink. She recently left her husband for a woman.
THE SCANDAL at Penn State University, in which a former coach repeatedly raped boys as young as ten in a university locker room and in which university officials knew about it and failed to inform authorities, is one of the most shocking and disgusting stories in this age of shocking and disgusting stories. (more…)
FRED OWENS writes:
On this day in 1918 the first World War came to an end. That’s why it’s a holiday. It is not good to make holidays generic. Holidays cannot be generic, because they are special days. This holiday, by extension, honors all veterans, but it should be focused and named after the Armistice that ended that war 93 years ago. (more…)
LYDIA SHERMAN writes:
This is a few days late getting to you but it is tremendous. It is Herman Cain on Jimmy Kimmel Live responding to sexual harassment charges. I love the banter of this man, like the “real American” men used to speak, unself-conscious and without fear or PC, and, his elocution, enunciation, articulation, etc. are excellent. By the way, he is introduced in this way, “Our next guest has never held a public office, but he does know what is most important to Americans: pizza!” (more…)
THE current practice of referring to mothers as "moms" and women at home as "stay-at-home moms" is part of the trivialization of motherhood, as I discuss here. Mommy-ness suggests fun and play. But motherhood is, by its very nature, sacrificial. Even in modern life, the mother is called upon to give up self and die for others. When motherhood is equated with fun, it is often shocking for women to learn the truth. They may think something is wrong with them that it is so difficult. By contrast, a job may seem easy. The expectations are clear and the rewards are concrete. Besides when people say, "What do you do?" which they inevitably will in a world in which identity is based on career and consumption, a woman can hold her head up high and say, "I am a teacher" or "I am a lawyer" or "I am a marketing associate." By comparison, to say, "I am a stay-at-home mom" suggests she is a child herself and has yet to grow up and enter the real world. The mother has gone since the time of the above portrait by Hans Holbein from heroine to playmate.
MRS. HAYWOOD writes from Indiana:
I just spent a very interesting evening reading many columns on your website. You represent sanity and common sense on the topic of women and work, which is never allowed in mainstream media.
Just a quick thought/question: Are you as offended by the term “stay-at-home mom” as I am? It seems clearly a feminist linguistic fabrication to avoid the obvious and truthful “full-time mother” (which of course has the corollary that working mothers are merely “part-time mothers.”) “Stay-at-home mom” also implies that it is the mother who stays at home who needs a qualifier, as the one departing from the norm. (more…)
COLUMNIST David Brooks actually has a column in today’s New York Times in which he makes an important observation. Radical egalitarianism does not abolish inequality. It only creates new forms of it. He writes:
Foreign tourists are coming up to me on the streets and asking, “David, you have so many different kinds of inequality in your country. How can I tell which are socially acceptable and which are not?”
This is an excellent question. I will provide you with a guide to the American inequality map to help you avoid embarrassment. (more…)
KAREN KRAUSHAUER, another woman who has come forward to describe being sexually harassed by Herman Cain, told The New York Times: “Anyone should be able to report allegations of sexual harassment without fear that their lives and careers will be put on public display and laid open to public scrutiny.” (more…)
ALAN writes:
To a certain extent, your blog is a chronicle of loss – of common sense, moral principles, cultural standards, beauty, decency, manners, restraint, elegance, patriotism, strong families, respect for elders, and respect for the past, among other things; and a plea for the restoration of those things, a goal with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Another thing Americans have lost is popular music that is cheerful, engaging, uplifting, memorable, and easy to sing along with; ballads with lovely melodies and sentimental lyrics; and songs that celebrate the virtues of marriage, family life, parenthood, self-restraint, and loyalty.
Consider these examples from an American culture now vanished: (more…)
JAMES H. writes:
I just bought Chesterton’s book on Dickens on your splendid recommendation. I can hardly wait!
Every Saturday morning, since discovering CWNY, I wake up, print the latest installment, and read it over breakfast. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy his writing. Your blog also provides such tremendous food for thought and great reading. Thanks.
I sent my wife the posts on smaller homes (here, here, and here). Man, I’d love to move out of our monstrosity (modest by local standards), but my wife loves it. Our neighbors are building a 25,000-square-foot, $35,000,000 grotesquerie. (more…)
[The Mermaid, Howard Pyle; 1910. Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.]
THE WORKS of the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, who died 100 years ago today, are a message from the past. In the hundred years since Pyle died, the world of children has changed profoundly. It has not changed all for the worse obviously. Medical care is much better and living conditions are good. However, children no longer inhabit a mentally separate realm. It’s not just that they are exposed to sexually-explicit imagery and music. Even in run-of-the-mill commercials, as Neil Postman noted in his book The Disappearance of Childhood, children are initiated into the world of adult worries and concerns. In commercials about prescription drugs, car insurance and politics, they encounter the trivial preoccupations of adult life.
Childhood is in some ways a form of higher awareness. “What a distressing contrast there is,” said Sigmund Freud, “between the radiant intelligence of a child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.” Children know things adults can no longer fully grasp. The adult world once protected that knowledge and melded it gradually with reason, information, practical ability and wisdom. Technological change and spiritual decline have abolished that protection. It is gone in a larger cultural sense and the individual parent is left to fight against the prevailing tide.
Fortunately, Howard Pyle is still alive. Just last weekend, I was at a library book sale when, as I was about to leave, I turned to a table of children’s classics. There for $2 was the 1919 edition of Howard Pyle’s novel Men of Iron. It was one of those moments of synchronicity, given that I have been writing about Pyle, that have convinced me over the years that angels have specific interests and like to interfere with our reading. Men of Iron is the fictional account of the young son of a lord during the reign of Henry IV who is unjustly accused of treason. The son, Myles Falworth, sets out to avenge his father and recover his family’s good name. Pyle’s illustration below, courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum (now staging a major retrospective of his work), depicts Henry IV on the first page of the book.
I brought the book home. It was a message from a past that still lives and from a remarkable man who had a sense of the inherent nobility of his artistic mission. Where the children’s illustrator today offers unease, confusion and escape in the occult, Pyle offered the heroic. He gave children a reason to anticipate adulthood with excitement and to perceive it for what it is, even in modern cities and office parks: a battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light.
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
This week the text in my course on “Science Fiction in Literature and Film” is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first-published work, A Princess of Mars (1912 – original title, Under the Moons of Mars). The protagonist is John Carter, formerly of the Army of Virginia under General Lee, who, succumbing to a paralyzing gas in an Arizona Cave circa 1870, wakes up on Mars and begins his rise through the strata of Martian society. He finds a helpmate in the beautiful and resourceful Dejah Thoris, Princess of the Twin Cities of Helium. It is essentially a chivalric romance on another planet. Predictably, the women in the class speak out positively in praise of the novel, which they like a good deal more than they liked The World Set Free and The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells or Last and First Men by W. Olaf Stapledon. They do not consciously realise how opposite to the feminist values that they have learned elsewhere A Princess of Mars is, but they intuit it. The men like Burroughs too. A couple of years ago I wrote an article (it appeared at The Brussels Journal) on “Edgar Rice Burroughs and Masculine Narrative.”
I believe that college students are starved for moral narrative, of the kind once offered by Howard Pyle. There is nothing PC in Burroughs, but the characters male and female are independent, decent, loyal, resourceful, stalwart, and courageous.
HERE IS A photo of Howard Pyle taken by C.P.M. Runeford in 1898 (courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.) A reader named Jim writes: Growing up, my mother read me stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood, and I loved the Howard Pyle illustrations. I assumed that everyone was read these stories, along with Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now I realize how lucky I was.
[“We Started to Run Back to the Raft For Our Lives,” Howard Pyle, 1902. Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.]
I was looking up this painting by the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, whose centennial I have been honoring in recent posts, when I found a blog devoted to the artist. Under a reproduction of this Pyle illustration of “Sinbad on Burrator” by A. T. Quiller Couch in Scribner’s Magazine for August 1902, the blog’s author Ian Schoenherr quotes this letter from the artist to William Merchant Richardson French, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, in June 22, 1905. These words express what every great artist knows, that though art depicts reality, its main source of knowledge is unseen:
…I think you may easily see that in the making of a successful picture, the artist must compose and arrange his figures and effects altogether from his imagination, and that there is very little opportunity in the making of such a picture for him to copy exactly the position of a model placed before him in the lights and shadows which the studios afford. Nor is it likely that he can find any background to copy accurately and exactly into such an imaginative picture. (more…)
IF AT LEAST one of the major comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live does not do a send up of yesterday’s press conference by Sharon Bialek then the entire comedy establishment is bankrupt and derelict in its partisan duty to make fun of Republicans.
Here we have a woman effusing sensuality with tousled hair, dangling earrings and heavy make-up who stands before the nation and says that many years before, when she was presumably much more attractive and effusively sensual, she went out on a dinner date alone with a business associate who had just told her he had upgraded her hotel room to a suite. Then – horrors! – after a number of drinks together and a romantic evening in an Italian restaurant, he put his hand up her skirt and moved her head towards him.
“How could this happen to widdle ol’ me?! I was only looking for a job!”
Not only is Cain’s accuser a joke, but Cain himself (if what she says is true, and it appears to be true) is a joke. Who wants a man guilty of such reckless, illicit behavior in the presidency? I don’t.
JAMES P. writes:
According to the Daily Mail,
A veteran police officer, 55, was beaten and stabbed to death by her 15-year-old grandson after she came home to find he had skipped school, prosecutors said. (more…)