Monday, cigarette #2Nicola's post on patriarchy keeps the spoonful of sugar and forgets the medicine:...it seems like this kind of feminism only actually differs in the world of theory, not of policy, yes? Still down with paid family leave, non-discrimination, access to contraception...
Monday, March 31, 2008
Smoke Break Over
Monday, cigarette #1I'm back! More precisely, my laptop is back after a week at the tech support spas, and its recovery seems complete.Things to expect in the coming week:Who's a wittier gay playwright, Noel Coward or Mart Crowley?More on campus conservatism: Should it feel...
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Oakeshott Samizdat
Tuesday, cigarette #2A reader calls my dream of a right-wing urban subculture comparable to gay urban subculture romanticized and idealistic: "Having some secret gnosis boosts your self-esteem, but there's no reason to go underground for the sake of going underground!"I'm not...
Beyond Roy Cohn: The Queer-Conservative Alliance
Tuesday, cigarette #1From Gay Metropolis: A Landmark History of Gay Life in America:Fifty years laters, Reynolds was nostalgic for the understatement of the thirties and forties. "People didn't shove it down your throat," he remembered. "When I see two boys walking down the...
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Happy Easter
Sunday, cigarette #1My favorite Easter memory, from last year: walking home around 2:30 in the morning and running into two of my old housemate's friends who I didn't really know but who I saw at Mass from time to time. It seemed like they'd had a few."Hey, you're Claire's roommate,...
Saturday, March 22, 2008
AIDS ministry; you're doing it wrong.
Saturday, cigarette #3It turns out that Jean, who I had hoped would write the second most interesting senior essay in the Yale Religious Studies department's class of 2008, has surpassed all expectations and written something far more interesting than mine. He spent the fall...
"You ain't done nothin' if you ain't been called a Red!"
Saturday, cigarette #2On last word on the cultural contributions of organized labor: Housemate Will, who has traveled extensively in far-off lands, complains that Americans have no national songs. There's "God Bless America" and the national anthem, and everybody knows the...
"You work. They don't. That's all you got to know about the enemy."
Saturday, cigarette #1"The coal company don't want this union. The state government don't want it, the federal government don't want it, and they're all of 'em waitin' for an excuse to come down and crush us to nothing. We got to pick away at this situation slow and careful,...
Friday, March 21, 2008
What is he supposed to listen to, "The Times They Are a-Changin' Back?"
Friday, cigarette #3John Harris is miffed that a Tory politician would have the unmitigated gall to dig the Smiths:The plan was for him to have his photo taken in front of the building à la the Smiths, but the local Labour party got wind of the script, and dispatched a pack...
Oscar Wilde on the phenomenon of blogger flophouses
Friday, cigarette #2To those who ask whether the tappity-tappity soundtrack of living with a blogger (or, worse, three bloggers) is annoying:My dear Robbie, I assure you that the typewriting machine, when played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played...
"Oh, thank you! You’ve rescued me from the most hideous of nightmares, Edward."
Friday, cigarette #1From 'Jeeves of the Plaza':“Always remember,” Mr. Robinson, a stout, cheery man with silvery hair, told the assembled group, “salt to the left and pepper to the right. Why?”A moment later, he answered his question. “Because it’s ‘salt and pepper,’ ” he said....
Thursday, March 20, 2008
I said, "Pretend you've got no money," and she just laughed and said, "Oh, you're so funny!"
Thursday, cigarette #3All the talk of class (no, being a science major is not your "class background") calls to mind the last century's greatest meditation on class differences, now available in Archie Comics form.Better than "Rich Girl" by Hall & Oates, you ask? Even better.All...
The Yale Scene Eats Itself: Unscripted!
Thursday, cigarette #2David Broockman decided to beat up on tradition and the Party of the Right; unsuprisingly, a traditionalist and a member the POR have been hitting him right back in comments.The position that started it all:Analyses of all three experiments cite the lack...
Cigarettes and Whiskey and Ivy League Women, They'll Drive You Crazy, They'll Drive You Insane
Thursday, cigarette #1Three defenses of cigarette smoking have appeared in the Brown Daily Herald in the last month, which must be some kind of a record. One was entirely uninteresting ("If it weren't for smokers, you wouldn't know that you're better than everyone else"), but...
Monday, March 17, 2008
Rev. Wright and Barack Obama; Why all the cool conservatives like Spike Lee
Monday, cigarette #1Daniel Larison predicts liberal backlash against the Rev. Wright flap:Many Christian conservatives took criticism of The Passion as an open attack on their religion, and so overlooked anything that might give them pause about Gibson and viewed his demonisation...
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Lazy Sunday Throw-Away about Movies: "It's yours to right the great wrong done..."
Sunday, cigarette #4The Housemates and I watched Citizen Kane last night, and, while I could use that as an excuse to write a mash note to yellow journalism, I think my views on that are pretty clear. (Yale Political Union plug: When Katrina vanden Heuvel comes to the YPU,...
But a good cigarette is a smoke.
Sunday, cigarette #3Whippersnappers Broockman and Adam have been having a back-and-forth on sin taxes. Adam responds to Broockman's accusation that the negative health effects of tobacco and alcohol disproportionately affect the poor:Poor people don't buy cigarettes and alcohol...
Why it's bad to read too much Camille Paglia
Sunday, cigarette #2Too much Camille Paglia in one sitting made me end up reading To me, the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tearsas "the meanest flower that blows can give," as in a bruise.Girl, why you gotta be so cthoni...
"To Be True Christians and Political"
Sunday, cigarette #1The Indians shall be brought together in towns to live politically... And because in order to be true Christians and political, like the rational men they are, it is necessary to be congregated and subjected in towns, and in convenient and accessible places,...
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?
Saturday, cigarette #2Yale Free Press blogger TKB (also of Eli's Coffer) weighs in on the attempt to make danger illegal:For too long have Americans indulged in the frontier fantasy. We would-be cowboys have kidded ourselves into believing that ours is the society where risk-taking...
The Yale Mafia: Today the blogosphere, tomorrow the world!
Saturday, cigarette #1The Party of the Right's fall alumni debate is a chance for the current administration to demonstrate to the "democracy of the dead/graduated" that they haven't killed the organization yet, and when I had the chance to throw one I picked the resolution...
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Yale plays nice, and so (occasionally) does Dara
Thursday, cigarette #3The last sentence of Dara's YDN column ('In creating dialogue, Elis should raise the bar') is:We shouldn’t strive for a dialogue so universal that nobody feels comfortable speaking at all.I think she could have been snarkier (and therefore better) by saying...
Male Headship & Crunchy Conservatism: The personal just gets more and more political...
Thursday, cigarette #2John Zmirak suggests a possible alliance between paleo-libertarians and neo-distributists. He does a yeoman's job of finding common ground, but fails to answer the real problem, which is that, even if one were to make a successful alliance, it would still...
From the train ride today
Thursday, cigarette #1From Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke:[James] Mill was disposed to talk down to history, and to talk at it, telling it how it should have behaved.In contrast to Burke's "blend of awe and horror, seeing in it...
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Camille Paglia sings as the Boy does by the Burying Ground, because she is afraid.
Tuesday, cigarette #1Eve baits the hook with thoughts on Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae:Several times, I found myself saying, "Oh, c'mon, you're just being trendy with that reading--this bit really isn't about daemonic lesbians or whatever"... but then she'd quote a few more...
Friday, March 7, 2008
Libertarianism (Hunh! Good God, Y'all!), What Is It Good For?
Sunday, cigarette #1Most young conservatives have designs on the movement ("Conservatism, will you come bust up this chiffarobe?"), but there's always the danger that the conservatism you're selling will exclude some otherwise loyal wing of the Right. However, I'm still looking...
So you're saying I can be postmodern and love Kirk?
Friday, cigarette #2Dan McCarthy's review of The Postmodern Mind of Russell Kirk has hit the cyber-shelves to well-deserved acclaim. I join the resounding chorus, with two reservations.Yet Kirk admitted to a few areas of agreement with antistatists: “they do not believe that...
Hank Williams, You Problematized My Worldview
Saturday, cigarette #1Rebecca Solnit over at Orion wonders why so many people who love Nature have such contempt for the down-home folks who actually live out there in it ("One Nation Under Elvis: Environmentalists might be a lot more effective if they listened to more country...
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
The Canon Wars Return!
Tuesday, cigarette #1Right-wing brothers-in-arms at The Princeton Tory posted a report that Dean Nancy Weiss Malkiel had been fired from her position as Dean of Princeton College, which turned out not to be true. (Tough year for the Tory.)Ivy Gate has responded by relaunching...
Monday, March 3, 2008
4 out of 5 Camel smokers experience relief from fragmentation of identity!
Monday, cigarette #1If constructing an identity that avoids Romantic solipsism but still exists when no one else is around sounds like your kind of high-stakes postmodern parlor game, Richard Klein suggests you take up smoking: Like writing, smoking belongs to that category...
Sunday, March 2, 2008
How not to defend tradition: Have conservative theory begin and end with Burkean traditionalism
Sunday, cigarette #1Before he sent it to the publisher, Edmund Burke sent draft copies of the Reflections to friends. One of these was Philip Francis, who wrote back that Burke would suffer embarrassment if he didn't get rid of his rhapsodic paragraph about Marie Antoinette...
Saturday, March 1, 2008
"Conservatism is the failure of tradition."
Saturday, cigarette #1Traditionalism is unreflective and an immediate experience of a way of life. It has no need for intellectual formulation. It just is. Conservatism is the representation of the gap between the traditional and the political; for conservatism as an ideology...
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