Pop philosophy

“Oh what a pearl, what a well-made world.”

“If you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.”

“Nothing is lost, everything’s free / I don’t care how impossible it seems.”

“Don’t go to the volcano!”

Market fundamentals

There was this American on Radio National yesterday morning who was basically screaming about how bad the bailout would have been. He sounded like he was going to pop a blood vessel and poor Fran Kelly didn’t quite know what to make of it: you can tell she doesn’t read many economics blogs. And good for her, because I’ve realised that with roughly 90% of them you can perform the following substitutions and it just turns into a standard-issue hellfire sermon:

Divine Providence	Invisible Hand
Grace	Wealth
Sin	State intervention
Paradise	19th Century
Satan	FDR
The Fall	Great Depression and New Deal
Moses	Von Mises

WYDney Bingo

Special WYD wannabee-Catholic edition part 4

Irish priest	Tiny nuns	Grumbling Sydneysider
Dags with flags	Happy-clappy singing	Ponchos
Discalced monk	Egregious Pellism	Bad beard

James Blish

Special WYD wannabee-Catholic edition: science fiction writers who should be in the canon ahead of Philip K Dick, part 5

Either Thomas M Disch or R A Lafferty could also have been in this week’s science fiction post with equal justification; maybe even John Sladek, too, thinking of the ludicrous Oulipian treatment he gives the Nicene Creed in The Müller-Fokker Effect. But I’ve already done them.

Blish is more sober about his incorporation of Catholicism into science fiction than the other three writers. Where Disch and Sladek are anti-clerical satirists, and Lafferty is a sincere believer, expressing himself using the Chestertonian techniques of fable, allegory and paradox, Blish is a more neutral observer who is fascinated by the ways in which science and religion interact. In A Case of Conscience, he sends a Jesuit biologist on a first-contact mission to an alien planet, and treats his characters’ beliefs with a kind of politely distanced respect.

The linked novels Black Easter, or Faust Aleph-Null and The Day After Judgement are not quite as calm: brief exercises in midnight-black comedy which mix medieval demonology, Cold War nuclear paranoia and Menippean satire, and manage to get in some pretty good philosophy-of-science jokes along the way. A good illustration of the novels’ tone: a group of Dr Strangelove-style Strategic Air Command scientists argue about the implications of the spectrographic readings they are getting of the red-hot iron walls of the city of Dis, which has broken through the Earth’s crust in Death Valley, California.

Together with the historical novel Doctor Mirabilis, a biography the 13th-century Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, all these books form the After Such Knowledge trilogy.

Blish is probably more well-known for his Cities In Flight books, which I haven’t read.

Hey! Luciani

Special WYD wannabee-Catholic edition, part II

Found floating in the Googlewake stirred up when I was trying to search for the best papal pop song ever on YouTube, a transcript of Mark E Smith’s 1986 play:

Hey! Luciani

WYD Reading List

Special WYD wannabee-Catholic edition, part I

Patrick White claimed that all Protestant Australians wish that they’d been raised Catholic; in this, the attentive scholar will recognise the great man’s characteristic blend of overstatement and getting one back at his aunts. In honour of World Youth Day, here’s a list of recommended reading for those of us who – for whatever reason, whether it be tribal politics, family history, a taste for intellectual rigour, or simply the conviction that nothing could have been more dull than Methodist Sunday School – maintain a sentimental fondness for Catholicism, as well as the sneaking suspicion that it’s all very well for us: we didn’t have to grow up with it.

James Blish, the After Such Knowledge trilogy

G K Chesterton, The Man who Was Thursday and the Father Brown stories

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

J-K Huysmans, The Cathedral

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

R. A. Lafferty, Arrive at Easterwine

John O’Brien, ‘Said Hanrahan’

Flannery O’Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge

John Kennedy O’Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Ruth Park, The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange

François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, François Villon – A Documented Survey

WWŽD?

It has been a scatterbrained week, hence all the image posts.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” – how the heck would Socrates know?

My favourite Bible story

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”

-Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited”

William Lorando Jones

In Sefton, on the way to my parents’ place, I drive down Helen Street, from which three Avenues proceed: Chifley, Lorando and Roosevelt. I’m a bit of a fan of suburban street name themes. Helen Street is part of a small Classical precinct, along with Priam, Hector and Virgil; the last is a bit of an odd man out, not being a character in the Iliad, and when I was a kid I though it was named after the pilot of Thunderbird 2.

Chifley and Roosevelt Avenues make sense, as two political heroes of the postwar years when the market gardens and orchards of the west were being turned into suburbs, but I’d always been puzzled by Lorando. A Google search last weekend turned up the following story from the 1871, about a trial of one William Lorando Jones for blasphemy – he had given an address at Parramatta Domain which roundly criticised the Bible, and the Old Testament in particular, after the fashion of Thomas Paine, as being “a mass of immoralities and a lie.”

Whether or not the street at the back of Sefton High School commemorates a 19th-century deist, I’m glad that it led me to this case – I never knew there was a Domain at Parramatta where firebrands gave speeches, and Mr Buchanan’s case seems to me to be a fine defense of the principles of freedom of speech, even though it failed. William Lorando Jones was found guilty and sentenced to two years in Darlinghurst Gaol and a fine of 100 pounds.

The Queen v William Lorando Jones

Mr. Buchanan, before addressing the jury, submitted that there was no case to go to them. The defendant was charged with blasphemy; this, according to the highest authorities, was an offence consisting in an attack upon the established religion of the country. In England there was an established religion, which thus became part of the law of the land, and to speak against that religion was to speak against the law itself; at the same time, however, any person who choose to do so might criticise, or even libel, the religious belief of any other sect in England beside the Church of England, and might call into question the doctrines of the Roman Catholic, Wesleyan, Congregational, or other dissenting sect, with the utmost impunity. Here in Australia the case was different, for we have no established religion; therefore, as a logical sequence, as the religion established by law in England is not law in this country, to speak against that religion here could not be an infringement of the law.

His Honor considered that any one who, in a wholesale way, says that the Bible is not true, and denies the divinity of our Saviour, is amenable for blasphemy.

Mr. Buchanan still contended that any attacks, save upon an established religion, were not amenable to law.

His Honor admitted that Christianity was not established in this colony by Act of Parliament, but did not hesitate to say that it came to us as part and parcel of the common law of England necessarily incorporated in the Constitution of the colony as an offspring of the British nation.

At the request of Mr. Buchanan, however, his Honor reserved the point.

Mr. Buchanan, in a forcible and eloquent speech extending over two hours, upheld the right of the defendant as a free subject in a free country to express his opinions on matters of religious belief, either public or private, and contended that a jury who would convict a man as guilty of blasphemy when he had merely given utterance to the convictions of his soul for the benefit (as, he however, wrongly thought) of his fellow-creatures, were individually and collectively worthy of being held up to the utter scorn and contempt of the entire civilised globe. To punish such a man for expressing his honest belief would be to roll us back to those dark ages, when, as in the case of Galileo, pains and penalties were held over every man who dared to think for himself and publicly express his opinions.

At the conclusion of Mr. Buchanan’s speech, during the delivery of which the Court was crowded to excess by a most attentive audience, whilst the seats on the Bench were occupied by many of the leading magistrates, there were audible expressions of approval, which, however, were promptly suppressed by the police.

François Villon: a documented survey

D B Wyndham-Lewis

I have decided to stop kidding myself about going into Berkelouw’s on Oxford Street and “just having a look around before the movie.” What I will say from now on is that I am going to buy a very good secondhand book, because, Hume be damned, this is what has always happened in the past.

D B Wyndham-Lewis was the happy Wyndham-Lewis; not Percy Wyndham Lewis, the painter and novelist, but the light humourist and editor of the marvellous anthology of bad verse The Stuffed Owl. In this biography of the 15th-century French poet, he’s in a somewhat crankier mood, although nowhere near as stroppy as his near namesake – who gets a mention, I believe, in the book’s dedication, as “The Frothing Vorticist”.

The book is peppered with jibes at those of the author’s contemporaries who despised religion and the medieval; these give it a rather sulky tone at times. Wyndham-Lewis, like Chesterton and Belloc, was one of those belles-lettrestical defenders of the reputation of the Middle Ages and Catholicism against the contempt of the Modernist and the Whig. I don’t know if this movement has a name; I find it fascinating, and somewhat disturbing, mostly because Chesterton and Belloc could be hair-raisingly anti-semitic. Their apologists are always swift to point out that they were never anti-semitic in person – the “some of my best friends are Jews” defense, which is not in fact a defense at all. Wyndham-Lewis seems to be not altogether free from this prejudice, but in the Villon study he limits it to a completely gratuitous poke at Freud.

In his spare time from being a poet, Villon was a convicted thief and full-dress roisterer, and I found it impossible not to share Wyndham-Lewis’ enthusiasm for him, despite the fact that I can only pretend to read French. Because of this sad limitation, I can’t comment on the poetry, except to say that reading the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis in this volume and following along with Swinburne’s English translation is the closest I’ve come to appreciating the beauty of a poem in another language. This is like being locked outside a stately home while a civilised entertainment, full of beautiful women and the aroma of fine wines and delicious foods, is proceeding within; but it’s better than nothing.