"I believe in boxing," says Jimmy Glenn. "A tough kid goes into the gym and finds out he can't lick everyone. All of a sudden he isn' so tough anymore. Then he starts to admit his shortcomings, and tries to improve in other areas as well. After a while that young man has a sense...
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Bettie Page and Other Guilty Pleasures
My tribute to Bettie Page is up at Culture11. Its publication is as good an excuse as I'm likely to get to post these passages from Coming to Power: Writings on Lesbian S & M, so I'll take advantage of unusual circumstances and throw up some Susan Farr. Stand warned that...
No, Brer Fox, don't throw me in the Roxbury briar patch!
I am trying to be grateful to the kind souls who sent me books from my Amazon wish list, but whoever sent me The Boston Irish: A Political History must have known that his gift amounted to first-degree drug trafficking through the public mails. I remain, as ever, a slave to...
Monday, December 22, 2008
Bookbag: Speaking of being untethered...
I can't remember which of his books it's in, but P. J. O'Rourke wrote that society could be cleared of much liberal cant if everyone came to accept this basic fact: a thing can never be "worth" more than what someone is willing to pay for it. In that straightforward spirit,...
Philip K. Dick: Freaks, Meet Geeks.
Philip K. Dick leaves me feeling untethered—his intention, I think—but I can generally counteract this disorientation in the usual way: by putting things in boxes. I am a human being. My computer is a machine. The Ramones are punk. Blondie is New Wave. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist....
Bookbag: Whit Stillman's Barcelona and Mutual Incomprehension
This comparison between the final scenes of Barcelona and The Graduate goes out to Nick and Priyanko, whose favorite movies those are:Ted explains the advantages of life with a European. "You see, that's one of the great things about getting involved with someone from another...
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
What do you get the traditionalist who has everything?
I can only speak for myself, but all I want for Christmas is the ability to talk about Joseph de Maistre in polite company.Maistre has gotten a bad rap as a proto-fascist, none of which is deserved, and as a throne-and-altar absolutist, not all of which is. The best way to put...
Bookbag: Ghosts in the (Boston Municipal) Machine
Supplemental material from Jack Beatty's biography of James Michael Curley, first on the failure of "clean government" platforms:The cry of reform had elected Andrew Peters. Business priorities now dictated city spending. Whereas Curley had not increased the budget of the paving...
Liberalism and Loyalty Revisited
I caught a little guff a while back for saying, in so many words, that liberals don't understand loyalty. I'll cop to that being an overly-sweeping statement, but I'd like to throw up some evidence on each side of the argument before deciding how far I want to walk it back.First,...
Monday, December 15, 2008
Bookbag: The Perils and Pitfalls of Genre Fiction
From I am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick:Of course, writing science fiction meant playing the game—working fast and cheap and putting up with editorial interference, inane titles, and garish illustrations of little green men with bulbous eyes....
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Offered without comment
Edmund Burke:Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty. Blushing has little less power; and modesty in general—which is a tacit allowance of imperfection—is itself considered as an amiable quality, and certainly heightens every other that is so. I know it is in everybody's...
The basis for a new trad/libertarian alliance
From Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History:Reagan, our Emersonian president, was carrying out the poet's wish when he aimed to rid us not only of govenment but of guilt itself, not realizing that without a bad conscience we can only have big governme...
"Philosphy is preparation for death; in this it resembles all other human endeavors."
Writing for three different blogs is, in part, a manifestation of my fragmented personality. The Helen who is addressing you at the moment is the big softie—I'm gonna die, and so is everyone that anyone has ever loved, but damn, girl, do you have to be so cavalier about it?...
Bookbag: Convergent Truth Edition
J. P. Diggins gets his James C. Scott on:As in Russia and Eastern Europe, the communist regimes [in the Third World] that overturned their autocratic predecessors turned out to be more repressive. Traditional autocracies do not penetrate every aspect of society, whereas communism...
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The children are our future, God help us!
Ross Douthat has pointed out that many college conservatives are monarchists, which is a polite way of saying that they're completely daft. However, back at Yale we wore the badge of insanity with pride; we knew it produced results. For those who are curious about what College...
Monday, December 8, 2008
Bookbag: Edward Abbey cracks me up
From Black Sun:"If you Indians are better than white men, why do you drink so much?""Because we are very happy that we are not white me...
Conservatism: The Gayest Science
There's a midnight Mass at St. Malachy's that all the show people go to . . .Reihan Salam managed to get through an entire post about the conservative wing of the gay rights movement without using the term homocon, but I don't have his powers of restraint. Blame James Poulos;...
Sunday, December 7, 2008
The problem with Conor Friedersdorf's Top Ten Rock Songs
His list: 1.) Like a Rolling Stone 2.) Suite: Judy Blue Eyes 3.) Johnny B. Goode 4.) The Dock of the Bay 5.) Baba O’Reilly 6.) Sympathy for the Devil 7.) The Sultans of SwingOf the seven songs on this list, five of them clock in longer than 5:00. It's not...
Asceticism and Saint Friedrich of the Broken Spine
I don't think James Poulos is a madman, but, if he is, it's the madness of a prophet. How else could he so consistently come up with crypto-cryptic nuggets like this one?I am really satisfied to discover that this post accidentally hints that Nietzsche’s main concern was how...
Bookbag: Nietzscheans for Christ?
I have a post brewing about asceticism as the perfect intersection of Nietzsche and Christianity, but, since Nietzschean Christianity is a weird thing to talk about, I thought I'd soften the ground with a couple of quotes, beginning with this one from gay sadomasochist Guy Baldwin:Christ...
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
"It's not your heart I want to break."
When it comes to untrustworthy feelings, there's always sadism. Anyone whose ethical system depends on people knowing (or even being able to figure out) what they want is going to run into the thorny problem of schadenfreude sooner or later; people, it must be said, want some...
Ideology is the ultimate aphrodisiac?
A story in three acts: Richad Posner bashes ideology—For myself, I would be happy to see conservatism exit from the political scene—provided it takes liberalism with it. I would like to see us enter a post-ideological era in which policies are based on pragmatic considerations...
The triumphant return of the Cigarette Smoking Blog
I'm back!It turns out that, in present circumstances, I produce an embarrassment of bloggable thoughts that cannot be adequately expressed in either my Pomocon voice (erudite) or my Ladyblog voice (snarkily traditional). Consequently, I've decided to revive CSB, while still...
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
All of My Heroes are Sad Little Girls
I am in the latest issue of Doublethink talking about Jezebel and the future of feminism.Because, apparently, women named Helen just can't help themselves from talking about date rape.UPDATE: Link fix...
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Packing it in.
Five-hundred posts ago, I started the Cigarette Smoking Blog on a drunken dare with myself. Nearly a year later, it's time to put the site on extended hiatus as I move to Postmodern Conservative full-time. Please update your blogrolls and follow me as I make this exciting transition....
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be Pomocon was very heaven.
[Pomocon]: John McCain, Boxing Fan?[Pomocon]: Rum, Socrates, and the Lasch, Part II: Why the Rum is Not, In Fact, Go...
I am Not Done with Woody Allen Yet
Shmuel Ben-Gad has posted a provocative diary titled "Are Woody Allen's Films Vile?" No prizes for guessing his conclusion:. . . Mr. Allen's films, I think, fall far short of excellent satire because such satire requires, at least implicitly, an alternative to that which it...
Monday, September 29, 2008
A funny story about chastity (as if there were any other kind)
Check one off the bucket list: Last night I had the chance to ask a sex columnist what she thought of vows of life-long chastity. "And the answer I'm looking for sounds less like 'If that's what makes them happy then they should go for it,' and more like 'No, Emily Dickinson...
Saturday, September 27, 2008
A Change is Gonna Come
[Pomocon]: I Found It Out in a Book (And She was Such a Pretty Dictionary).[Pomocon]: If Sophistry is the Game, Two Can Play.[Pomocon]: Postmodern Conservatism: Rum, Socrates, and the Lasch.[Pomocon]: Today, We are All Blind Korean Masseurs.As some of you have already noticed,...
Thursday, September 25, 2008
A Political Narrative Grows in Brooklyn
For those in the New York area, two events worth hitting this Sunday: a panel at the Brooklyn Museum on "The American Hero and the American Dream: Reflections on Our Contemporary Political Narratives" in the afternoon, and this month's Lolita Bar debate, "Is Modern Sex Good...
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
What Gives This Mess Some Grace Unless It's Fictions?
I've always said that there's something rabbinic about the way the my favorite undergraduate organization operates. In the Talmud, a verse like Ecclesiastes 10:8 (He who breaks a fence will be bitten by a snake) is sometimes deployed as honest advice about keeping safe by staying...
"I can get you photographs of Dwight MacDonald reading..."
What was I thinking, posting on the way female intellectuals are fetishized without throwing up a link to Woody Allen's "Whore of Mensa?"Allow me to correct the error:"Hi, I'm Sherry." They really knew how to appeal to your fantasies. Long, straight hair, leather bag, silver...
Hadley Arkes, You are My Stephen A. Douglas.
It's only fair for me to flip my cards at the very beginning: I have the utmost respect for Hadley Arkes as a serious Catholic thinker and, moreover, a man of great heart and geniality. That being said, he has no love at all for the Yale Political Union, an institution to which...
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
A Brief, Ill-Advised Defense of That McDonald's Coffee Ad
Bill Deresiewicz (who, to my great delight, is everywhere) once said in lecture, "Put away any dreams you have of being a writer, and replace them with dreams of writing." The easy defense of the much-ridiculed ad for the new upscale coffee menu at McDonald's is to say, very...
Self-Promotion (II)
[Ladyblog]: Top Ten Conservative Pop Songs.Join me as I take High Fidelity Tuesdays to Ladybl...
The UNDP's Vitamin D Deficiency: A Problem We Can Live With?
Stories of corruption at the United Nations are usually so many dogs biting men, but Nicole Kurakawa and Matthew Lee have both seen fit to give the matter some attention this week, and Kurakawa in particular has raised an interesting question: if everyone knows that corruption...
Monday, September 22, 2008
Reading Recommendation: Vincent Rossmeier on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
No, really: "If Seinfeld was about nothing, It's Always is about nothingness—the void created when individuals give in completely to their most solipsistic desires." Mo...
What do you mean Sorkin-esque patter doesn't fly in Red States? Haven't these people seen Sports Night?
The most interesting line from Aaron Sorkin's NYT piece:The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.Too much has already been said about bicoastal elites and the Real Americans who love...
Between the end of the Chatterley ban and Yeasayer's first LP?
Joseph Knippenberg asks the perennial question about kids today:. . . I learned a long time ago—I’m old, you see—that the original great exponent of youth politics was Niccolo Machiavelli, who was the first to celebrate the political daring and audacity of the young. Audacity...
Sunday, September 21, 2008
If Thorstein Veblen were here, he'd tell you the same thing.
Just as I begin to hear that there might be good news from Whit Stillman someday soon, I come across Whit Stillman's bad news for me:ALICE: It's odd that he knew I drank vodka tonics. I never told him.DES: It's uncanny.ALICE: You mean it's a complete cliché? All women recent...
Saturday, September 20, 2008
"Carthage Didn't Burn Hot Enough"
I've been following the career of Karmen MacKendrick for a while, mostly because she and I both hold the unpopular opinion that, in the words of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, "life would be quite unbearable without suffering." It turns out that those of us who walked away from...
"It's a documentary about weird Southern music, weird Southern religion, and how they're indistinguishable."
Speaking of theologically interesting premises, I recently came across this minute-long Youtube clip from the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which I have posted on before. The transcript doesn't do justice to the man's Appalachian accent:"Why can't flesh go...
Deconstructing Fallen Angels, and Other Postmodern Conservative Pastimes
When I finished Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God," I thought I would have a hard time coming up with enough of an angle on it to justify a post. "Hey Catholics, here's a short story with a theologically interesting premise" isn't much of a hook. All praises to God for...
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