The always astute and nuanced John McWhorter’s take on Vance’s Hillbilly Elergy which I’m now ready to dive into having recently spend some time (albeit briefly) in Appalachian country.
Hillbilly Elegy throws down a gauntlet to those who shape opinion on inequality and race in this country. Any reader must ask, “If Vance makes sense to me, then how does this affect my views on black America’s situation, and what should be done about it?”
I’ve been on a road trip for a month or so and as such have had the opportunity to randomly sample a cross section of food in several states/regions/price ranges/types of eatery and so on. After some sixty meals the dishes that stick out are as follows:
A bowl of chili ($5.50) in Butte, MT at the grill and bar in The Metals Bank Building. Without doubt the best chili I have ever had.
A plate of sautéed shrimp with grits and tasso gravy ($21) at the Oyster House on Market, Charleston, SC. The best grits I’ve had including the many I’ve had in New Orleans.
At Bella’s Mexican Grill in Taos, NM we had guacamole ($10 I think) creamed and mixed up at the table according to one’s desired blend of onions, garlic, coriander, and chili peppers. The critical thing, of course, is that one needs to start with top-notch avocados . . . the rest is so easy and it was the best guacamole I’ve ever had. The chips themselves were perfect and were interspersed with little baskets that seemed to be made of tapioca to scoop up the guacamole. The prevalence of Mexican food across the country was quite astonishing and the most consistent quality-wise and always a good deal.
And just for the sheer novelty value I include candy floss (or as you Americans call it, cotton candy) served as pudding (dessert) at The Hive, Bentonville, AR. (Also worth noting is that the hotel in which The Hive is located was immensely civilized and amusing, offsetting the unabashed trendiness of the joint).
Here’s an interview with Vernon Smith concerning the relationship of science to religion. I had no idea Vernon felt this way until I read his Discovery – A Memoir (which he so kindly sent me a few years back), so this interview is of no surprise. Despite Vernon’s genuine achievements the fashionably atheist philosopher would “cock a snook” at Vernon’s outlook. If anyone is interested in this topic, I have edited two “symposia” in ZYGON: (a) Walker Percy and (b) Michael Oakeshott.
The underlying reality is mystical, not “material” . . . You do not have to be brought up on it to have a sense of the spiritual. It’s human, in the image of God. Maybe all roads lead to this same understanding.
The Nola Players have just released their big band Christmas CD. I’m very much looking forward to hearing it in full and replenishing my Christmas selection with a bunch of stuff en route to me from the Louisiana Music Factory. In the meantime I’ve been playing a few other Christmas CDs because they work very well purely on a musical plane as opposed to being merely Christmas kitsch: Sharon Jones (who recently passed away), Nick Lowe and Debbie Davis/Matt Perrine and just to yank the chain of the humourless PC authoritarians John Valby.
The always challenging and informative Deirdre McCloskey one of the few taking on the tired, false and persistent inequality memes. Of course what the regressive left have done (and incoherently so) is to conflate patterns of inequality (access) with patterns of inequity (outcome).
Worldwide even the income gap between rich and poor has radical [sic] declined. If you arrange individual incomes in a Gini-coefficient manner, in the past 30 years inequality has declined sharply.
and then there was one . . . The Guardian — Rolling Stone — The Telegraph
There are two reasons to check out this documentary on Glen Campbell. First, is his going public about his cognitive decline. The trials and tribulations of Glen and his family will have resonance for anyone who has had experience of caring for a dementia sufferer. Cases such as these provide philosophical food for thought about personal identity and sense of Self. Indeed, just as Otto’s notebook was his “extended mind“, this role was filled by Glen’s wife Kim. Not surprisingly, Glen’s deepest existential marker, i.e. that of being a musician, was what held his mind together while all else was fraying. And like Glen, my mother always retained a sense of humour despite her decline. The second point that this film brings out, is to remind people of the understated musical genius of the man. Glen has never sung a bum note, his choice of material impeccable, a mean guitarist and for many, might just have been what drew us into country music — without us ever realizing it. Glen Campbell classics have always loitered in an unfussy transcendental way much like the work of Burt Bacharach, Herb Alpert, The Carpenters and Lou Rawls.
“He told me that he had—ah—discovered a mathematical proof of what God’s will is, that is, what we must do in these dangerous times.”
*****
There was more excitement in prison, more argument, more clash of ideology. In Alabama we were polarized every which way, into pro-nukes and anti-nukes, liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists, born-again Christians, old-style relaxed Catholics, lapsed Catholics, Barbara Walters haters, Barbara Walters lovers.
Nothing like Alabama!
The warfare in that quonset hut at Fort Pelham!
We inmates, or rather detainees—assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential aides, white-collar crooks, impaired physicians pushing pills, mercy killers, EPA inspectors on the take from lumber and oil barons—criminals all, but on the whole engaging and nonmurderous. And next door, Hope Haven, a community of impaired priests, burned-out ministers and rabbis, none criminal, none detained, but all depressed, nutty, or alcoholic, generally all three, who had not run afoul of the law as we had but had just conked out, and so had great sympathy for us and made themselves available.
*****
“It is not a question of belief or unbelief. Even if such things were all proved, if the existence of God, heaven, hell, sin were all proved as certainly as the distance to the sun is proved, it would make no difference, would it?”
“To whom?”
“To people! To unbelievers and to so-called believers.”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Because the words no longer signify.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the words have been deprived of their meaning.”
“By a depriver.”
“Right. Once, everyone admits, such signs signified. Now they do not.”
*****
He has the super-sane chipperness of the true nut.
The very excellent Philanthropic Enterprise has teemed up with the Smith-Tocqueville Center at Michigan State University to issue a call for papers for the 2017 Conference on Voluntary Governance.
My “old” Oxford chum, a real scholar, has just had this paper published — 10 years in the making! Jewish Quarterly Review, Volume 106, Number 4, Fall 2016. The intro to the piece as follows:
IN 2009, WHILE GATHERING MATERIALS for a book on Frankism, I made a pilgrimage to the grave of the famous adventurer Giacomo Casanova. My interest in Casanova was triggered by my discovery of his correspondence with Eve, the daughter of the Jewish heresiarch Jacob Frank. A single letter from this correspondence appears in a forlorn Italian publication curated by Carlo L. Curiel, Gustavo Gugitz, and Aldo Rava` in 1930, but the epistolary collection has never been discussed systematically by Casanova researchers. With one exception, it has gone unmentioned as well by the scholars of Frankism. While reading works by and about Casanova, I learned that he had had numerous contacts with Jews, including with some who were kabbalists. I was also told— wrongly as it turned out—that copies of Casanova’s literary estate remain intact at the location where he labored over his memoir and died, the Chateau of Duchcov (Dux) in Bohemia. I suspected that the estate might contain unpublished materials germane to the subject of my research.
manwithoutqualities 