Hilaire Belloc's Christmas card
I pray good beef and I pray good beer This holy night of all the year, But I pray detestable drink to them That give no honour to Bethlehem.
May all good fellows that here agree Drink audit ale in heaven with me, And may all my enemies go to hell! Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!
May all my enemies go to hell! Noel! Noel!
There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article. It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is. Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling ordinary and sad; for it is only Wednesday. At the next moment your heart leaps up and your soul and body dance together like lovers; for in one burst and blaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming (of course) that you are a worshipper of Thor, and that you celebrate his day once a week, possibly with human sacrifice. If, on the other hand, you are a modern Christian Englishman, you hail (of course) with the same explosion of gaiety the appearance of the English Sunday. But I say that whatever the day is that is to you festive or symbolic, it is essential that there should be a quite clear black line between it and the time going before. And all the old wholesome customs in connection with Christmas were to the effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something before the actual coming of Christmas Day. Thus, for instance, children were never given their presents until the actual coming of the appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in brown-paper parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications. Especially it ought to be observed in connection with what are called the Christmas numbers of magazines. The editors of the magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more likely to be still lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration, I should favour the editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to individual choice.
peak and career value
I think it was Bill James who introduced into sabermetrics the distinction between peak and career value in baseball players. The distinction can be approached by comparing, say, Pete Reiser, who was truly great but (thanks to injury) for only a brief time, with Billy Williams, who was never more than very good but was very good for a long time.
Ever since James made me aware of this distinction, decades ago now, I have found it extremely useful not just for thinking about baseball players but for thinking about many other kinds of achievement as well. For instance, I tend to think of Johann Sebastian Bach as the Hank Aaron of composers: truly great and freakishly consistent for a very long time. Whereas Keats might be the Herb Score of poets, Rimbaud the Mark Fidrych; and, at the other end, Czeslaw Milosz is Walter Johnson: dominant for an exceptionally long period. You get the idea.
But I think the peak/career distinction is exceptionally helpful in the notoriously fraught task of evaluating rock-and-roll bands. To wit:
The Clash is the Pete Reiser of bands: meteoric, brilliant, brief. Peak value off the charts; career value much less.
The Beatles: Sandy Koufax. Transcendently great over a significant but too-short period of time.
Nickelback: Juan Pierre. Ineffectual but strangely long-lived.
The Who: Dwight Gooden. Truly great for a short period, then hung on for a surprisingly long (but not especially effective) afterlife.
U2: Greg Maddux. Highly professional, amazingly consistent, remarkably long-lived, but always thought of (perhaps wrongly) as just below the very highest level of brilliance.
Nirvana: Smoky Joe Wood. Totally dominant early on, then limited and eventually broken by bad health.
The Rolling Stones: Fernando Valenzuela. A relatively brief period of true greatness followed by an remarkably long period of being unproductive but still active. A lot like The Who, except great for slightly longer and professionally functional for much longer. (This one is the least-good fit: it would be perfect if Fernando had pitched for 25 years at below replacement level.)
Please feel free to pick up where I’ve left off.
autumn canopy
[caption id=“attachment_13879” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”]
Autumn at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois.[/caption]
hello and welcome
Following the advice of many wise people, I’m beginning to move my online writing away from prefabricated services and to my own turf. It’ll probably take a while for me to make this transition fully, so consider this a placeholder for action that is to come. I’ll be doing some test posts in the coming days and weeks.
Here in this gospel note, that here was singing and rejoicing for the great and unspeakable goodness and mercy of Almighty God the Father, whom it pleased to redeem mankind through the death of his only, natural, and most dearly beloved Son, our Saviour and Redeemer, Jesus Christ; very God and very man; the Son of God, after his Godhead; the Son of Mary after his manhood, which he hath taken upon him for man’s sake; to redeem and deliver the same from all misery, and to set him at unity with God, the Father; and, finally, to bring him to everlasting life.Now it followeth in the text, “As soon as the angels were gone from them,” &c. Mark here, that the angels, as soon as they had done their business, they returned unto their master which had sent them. By the which all good and godly servants may learn, that whensoever their masters send them on their business, they ought to do the same diligently, and quickly to return again to their masters; not spending the time in loitering and lewdness, as the common sort of servants do in these days, clean contrary to the example of these angels of God, which returned to God immediately after their message was done. And would to God that all servants would consider this, and keep in remembrance these angels of God! For if this were well considered, there would not be so great complaints of the lewd service of servants, as there is every where. God amend it!
Cultural criticism is a kind of reading. As we try to understand our times, discern where the Spirit is afoot, and identify what powers and principalities hold us captive, we are interpreting culture. It’s like our cultural context is an open book, but like any book, the meaning has to be mined. We need to learn to read well.But as Alan Jacobs argued in A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, we need to be careful not to confuse criticism with suspicion. Reading well means reading charitably. Yet reading charitably does not mean reading uncritically. Charitable cultural criticism is its own sort of dance.
[gallery] 50watts:
Yury Annenkov, illustration for 1945 French Dostoyevsky edition. Previously: 50 Watts post of Annenkov’s illus. for Blok.
