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Post by assisi on Nov 15, 2021 14:15:48 GMT
I picked up a trio of conservative leaning books for my birthday a while back. I mentioned Tory Boy previously which is excellent. To avoid the COP coverage from Glasgow I avoided the telly and watched John Wayne movies and finished books over the weekend. So my second book read was Louis Bouyer's Memoirs , which are an interesting account of a prominent convert who became an Oratatorian and major liturgical, theological and spiritual writer. Bouyer describes the continental Oratories that seemed to have been more progressive than their UK counterparts and intellectual and and clerical problems long before Vatican ii. Bouyer famously came up with the text of Eucharistic Prayer ii in a Roman trattoria probably the most common EP used at mass nowadays but disappointingly he only gives it a few lines here. He's very critical of the chair of the liturgical reform Mgr Bugnini whom he accuses of deceiving his fellow experts and the pope to push more and more radical measures. Recommended. The third book is Matthew Rose's A world after Liberalism - Philosophers of the radical right. Rose holds Liberal democracy is in serious decline and that thinkers from the right like Spengler, Julius Evola,Parker Yockey ( never heard of him either before!)Alan de Benoist and Samuel Francis. Rose is very good on the neo pagan and radically anti Christian beliefs of many on the new far right. A useful book for those who imagine conservatives have no enemies on the right. What were your favourite John Wayne movies? I've probably seen them all over my younger years but have decided to revisit a few to watch again. I enjoyed the Searchers recently and was thinking of revisiting Rio Bravo, Liberty Valance or the 'Cowboys'. I would prefer a western to a war movie simply for the scenery and setting.
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Post by cato on Nov 15, 2021 17:14:06 GMT
What were your favourite John Wayne movies? I've probably seen them all over my younger years but have decided to revisit a few to watch again. I enjoyed the Searchers recently and was thinking of revisiting Rio Bravo, Liberty Valance or the 'Cowboys'. I would prefer a western to a war movie simply for the scenery and setting.[/quote]
I had never seen She wore a yellow Ribbon before which I watched yesterday . It's directed by John Ford and has the familiar haunting Arizona/Utah landscapes that Ford used so well in his westerns. A young Wayne plays an old retiring army captain which he does well. Its a very Irish movie too with lots of recently arrived emigrants from the old sod and references to the Irish dead at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It's well worth watching and it's portrayal of the "Indians" isn't patronising either.
I like the Shootist . The Man who shot Liberty Valance, the Searchers ( you mentioned . Its a dark powerful classic) True Grit, Big Jake ( another with Maureen O Hara) . All off the top of my head. He's a childhood hero and sometimes it's healthy to have a good old nostalgic indulgence session.
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Post by kj on Nov 15, 2021 18:57:46 GMT
thinkers from the right like Spengler, Julius Evola,Parker Yockey ( never heard of him either before!) I've never read Yockey, but he was very enamoured of Ireland and curiously enough wrote his masterwork Imperium while living at Brittas Bay, County Wicklow. Shady story: I remember investigating him a few years ago and there was a discussion chain somewhere where someone was organising a commemoration at Brittas beach. An anonymous mobile number was provided which you had to ring if you wanted to attend.....
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Post by Tomas on Nov 21, 2021 20:26:51 GMT
What were your favourite John Wayne movies? I've probably seen them all over my younger years but have decided to revisit a few to watch again. I enjoyed the Searchers recently and was thinking of revisiting Rio Bravo, Liberty Valance or the 'Cowboys'. I would prefer a western to a war movie simply for the scenery and setting. I had never seen She wore a yellow Ribbon before which I watched yesterday . It's directed by John Ford and has the familiar haunting Arizona/Utah landscapes that Ford used so well in his westerns. A young Wayne plays an old retiring army captain which he does well. Its a very Irish movie too with lots of recently arrived emigrants from the old sod and references to the Irish dead at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It's well worth watching and it's portrayal of the "Indians" isn't patronising either. I like the Shootist . The Man who shot Liberty Valance, the Searchers ( you mentioned . Its a dark powerful classic) True Grit, Big Jake ( another with Maureen O Hara) . All off the top of my head. He's a childhood hero and sometimes it's healthy to have a good old nostalgic indulgence session. [/quote] Four of those mentioned have been rewatched this autumn - dvd, yet in straight minute sync with a friend in the UK watching at the same time, some chatting along - namely She wore a yellow ribbon, The Searchers, The man who shot Liberty Valence, and prime of prime, Rio Bravo. I would add two *early greats* to the majors: Rio Grande (Wayne as cavalry officer) and, the amazing breakthrough, still superb Stagecoach!
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Nov 22, 2021 10:09:19 GMT
Not what I'm currently reading, but something I read a good few years ago...
I notice there's a big publicity push for the new Wheel of Time series which is being made by Amazon. It's based on a colossal series of books by the American author Robert Jordan. He described himself as a "high church Episcopalian", but wasn't very forthcoming about his beliefs. However, the series is definitely infused with a Christian worldview. It's a fairly standard set-up; a good Creator God, an evil Satan-figure who is known as the Dark One, and a Messiah who is destined to win the Final Battle. Robert Jordan died before finishing the series (not surprising, considering the books got longer and longer as he went along), and the writer who he nominated to write the final instalment was a Mormon, Brandon Sanderson. The morality in the series is quite conservative in many ways.
The series is VERY classic high fantasy. As I was reading it, it seemed as though Jordan was trying to put together all the elements of high fantasy in one massive, definitive synthesis.
Some of the individual books in the series (and there are fourteen) run to over a thousand pages. I'm astonished in retrospect that I persevered with it as long as I did. Perversely, I never finished the last book. There was a long gap between the last book and the rest of the series and I guess I had lost interest in it at that stage. It was a colleague who get me into reading them. It's helped me at a few social occasions where the only thing I had in common with someone was that I'd read the series.
I wouldn't recommend the books unless you're a glutton for fantasy fiction, but I'm looking forward to seeing how they translate to the screen.
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Post by cato on Nov 22, 2021 14:55:32 GMT
I have started Simon Heffer's biography of Enoch Powell which at 961 pages is going to take some time to get through. Heffer is a fine writer and has a good weekly cultural column in Saturday's Daily Telegraph.
He is also editor of the Chips Channon unexpurgated diaries. Maolsheachlann's previous remarks on very long books prompted me to think about these massive tomes of roughly a thousand pages each, two volumes of which have appeared with a third due. I have had my eye on them and enjoyed the old censored abridged diaries but doubt I ll ever get through all three of these enormous monuments.
Channon was a deeply unpleasant snobbish Tory MP who never left the back benches, but knew everyone prominent in English society and had a waspish opinion on most of them.
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Post by kj on Nov 24, 2021 11:22:17 GMT
I started in on War and Peace a while back, having a bit of a guilty conscience about never having read it. I try and read about 5 or so pages a night.
To my surprise, I'm finding it oddly child-like. The characters are very much like small, spoiled infants with no self-awareness. Now admittedly, I am only about 400 pages into what's around 1,500 pages in my edition, so maybe the coming Napoleonic war will transform them into something else, and I'm guessing that's the point of the whole thing. I read Anna Karenina when I was about 20 and thought it was the greatest novel I'd read and it struck me as very profound. Two and a half decades later I wonder what I'd make of it now.
I will say the 1972 BBC series of W&P is excellent with Anthony Hopkins in the lead. It's scattered over YouTube if anyone is curious.
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Post by Séamus on Nov 24, 2021 11:54:21 GMT
I started in on War and Peace a while back, having a bit of a guilty conscience about never having read it. I try and read about 5 or so pages a night. To my surprise, I'm finding it oddly child-like. The characters are very much like small, spoiled infants with no self-awareness. Now admittedly, I am only about 400 pages into what's around 1,500 pages in my edition, so maybe the coming Napoleonic war will transform them into something else, and I'm guessing that's the point of the whole thing. I read Anna Karenina when I was about 20 and thought it was the greatest novel I'd read and it struck me as very profound. Two and a half decades later I wonder what I'd make of it now. I will say the 1972 BBC series of W&P is excellent with Anthony Hopkins in the lead. It's scattered over YouTube if anyone is curious. For me Anna was a much superior novel. I thought that too many characters were inserted too early into War&Peace,with added confusion- in the translation that I read- of French,English,Russian and Russian diminutive variations of every name being interchanged throughout,making it hard to recall who half of them were. This contrasts with the drum-roll entrance of Anna Karenina and her future lover,who will become the uncontested centre of that tale. The conclusion of War's story suggested that it was also primarily about a couple's (or two couple's) love and marriage,but it was a windy road to arrive there. Some have criticized the merger of fact and fiction in war&Peace, particularly Napoleon himself becoming a character. There's less complaint that Hugo did the same thing;maybe he was better at it. There's certainly less direct political and philosophical thrust in Anna, although,even there there's an tedious addendum of Tolstoy's musings at the end,which is really not what people read a novel for,though thankfully shorter than the overstretched ending of War&Peace.
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Post by kj on Nov 24, 2021 12:31:18 GMT
For me Anna was a much superior novel. I thought that too many characters were inserted too early into War&Peace,with added confusion- in the translation that I read- of French,English,Russian and Russian diminutive variations of every name being interchanged throughout,making it hard to recall who half of them were. This contrasts with the drum-roll entrance of Anna Karenina and her future lover,who will become the uncontested centre of that tale. The conclusion of War's story suggested that it was also primarily about a couple's (or two couple's) love and marriage,but it was a windy road to arrive there. Some have criticized the merger of fact and fiction in war&Peace, particularly Napoleon himself becoming a character. There's less complaint that Hugo did the same thing;maybe he was better at it. There's certainly less direct political and philosophical thrust in Anna, although,even there there's an tedious addendum of Tolstoy's musings at the end,which is really not what people read a novel for,though thankfully shorter than the overstretched ending of War&Peace. Yes, I was constantly referring back to the "cast-list" in my copy. I suppose in Tolstoy's defence he could say the novel was (I think anyway), originally serialised so readers would have gradually acclimatised themselves to the various characters. The moralistic elements are a little grating, or at least my anticipation of them. I thought having Napoleon as a character was a bit off. And yes, I've heard about the endless "philosophising" Tolstoy indulges in. I suppose all this sounds very negative, but I do have a great deal of respect and sympathy for Tolstoy's own later struggles and anguish with his life and faith. I love how in his Confession in his retrospective of his life he's so past fame and literature he doesn't even bother mentioning his two great novels by name! Incidentally, there was also an excellent 1977 BBC version of Anna Karenina that is also on YouTube.
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Post by Séamus on Nov 24, 2021 12:44:34 GMT
For me Anna was a much superior novel. I thought that too many characters were inserted too early into War&Peace,with added confusion- in the translation that I read- of French,English,Russian and Russian diminutive variations of every name being interchanged throughout,making it hard to recall who half of them were. This contrasts with the drum-roll entrance of Anna Karenina and her future lover,who will become the uncontested centre of that tale. The conclusion of War's story suggested that it was also primarily about a couple's (or two couple's) love and marriage,but it was a windy road to arrive there. Some have criticized the merger of fact and fiction in war&Peace, particularly Napoleon himself becoming a character. There's less complaint that Hugo did the same thing;maybe he was better at it. There's certainly less direct political and philosophical thrust in Anna, although,even there there's an tedious addendum of Tolstoy's musings at the end,which is really not what people read a novel for,though thankfully shorter than the overstretched ending of War&Peace. Yes, I was constantly referring back to the "cast-list" in my copy....etc... Incidentally, there was also an excellent 1977 BBC version of Anna Karenina that is also on YouTube. I automatically thought of Vivien Leigh from the start, even before knowing that she'd once played the role. From the Gone With The Wind film you would suppose that Margaret Mitchell borrowed the character, even to the important scenes in both stories where the anti-heroines triumph in culturally different ways by dancing in black dresses, but after reading Mitchell's actual novel the comparison much less-so.
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Post by Séamus on Jan 5, 2022 12:08:40 GMT
The feasts of Charles of Mt Argus and John Neumann both fall today, January 5th: two European saints who had significant pastoral interest in Irish people,Irish speaking immigrants to New York in the case of the latter. A similar theme of mission to Ireland came up in Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion which I read over the last week of Advent. His period in Dublin was one of inner discernment,having decided against low-church Protestantism but not having decided on official reconciliation with Rome;here he wrote a piece on Ireland which,by Waugh's quotations, is not entirely sympathetic to the people outside 'the Pale'. If we could hear from him several years later after much torture at the hands of aristocratic Englishmen,I wonder would he have mellowed in opinion of comparative civilization?
Waugh,while giving charming descriptions of English splendor,even to a minute description of Elizabeth I's make-up, doesn't hide the longstanding fickleness and hypocrisy of the culture he loves so well...I suppose he does the same with the Catholic Brideshead family in his most famous fictional work.
"Sir Thomas More had stepped out into the summer sunshine to meet death quietly and politely at the single stroke of the axe. Every circumstance of Campion's execution was brutal and gross" Some of the anecdotes in Edmund's life kept reminding me of recent restrictions, whether experienced by Missionaries of Charity in India, worldwide church closures due to fanatical covid measured or traditional priests at the hands of their own church...it is good to know that something seemingly grosser than an earlier generation can still be sanctifying
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Post by Stephen on Jan 5, 2022 20:52:03 GMT
Im currently reading Liberalism is a Sin. A book written by Félix Sardà y Salvany in 1884, which became a rallying point for political movements such as Integrism and Carlism.
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Post by Séamus on Jan 24, 2022 12:07:12 GMT
"After attending a crowded and beautifully celebrated High Mass with 30 acolytes at the cathedral of Philadelphia [in 1879],Mother Pauline commented, 'And our little Bismarck in his pretensions and his pride wants to destroy the Catholic Church! Let him come to America and see that what he suppresses in one country is blossoming and prospering in another'" cf Anne Ball Modern Saints Their Lives and Faces book.II
Notwithstanding feeling violent at the very thought of thirty servers in a sacristy at once,the above passage struck me for several reasons. Pauline von Mallinckrodt (beatified by John Paul II)spent most of her life caring for neglected children,the blind, people in extreme poverty- "a half-blind woman and ragged dirty little girl,her head crawling with vermin,came to the door...cutting off much of the matted hair, she carefully cleaned the child's scalp of blood and dirt...". Nor was she cut off from the world of her time: "Often,as her duty as the official hostess for her father demanded, Pauline attended or gave parties and dances..." As officials in the Vatican speak of divisive liturgy,we see this charitable saint inspired by an extra-lavish mass in the traditional form,and,far from making it a fetish,returning back to her hardworking life in the face of adversity.
Secondly,it was interesting to see that perceptions of dying Old Churches vs dynamic New Churches is far from new. And yet the Church in German territories was to continue to produce many great people,martyrs who stood against the fascism of the Third Reich and one of our recent pontiffs. Heartening.
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Post by cato on Feb 3, 2022 12:22:07 GMT
I picked up Mark Dooley's edition of Rodger Scruton's journalism Against the Tide yesterday. Its a wide-ranging easy access to Scrutons thought. Enjoying it so far.
I also picked up Richard Harries Haunted by Christ -Modern writers and the struggle for faith which looks promising.
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Post by kj on Feb 3, 2022 12:36:37 GMT
After starting it in 2020 and letting it drop, I recently finished Julian Jackson's De Gaulle biography A Certain Idea of France.
For someone who had never read a CDG biography previously, it was certainly very enlightening.
Jackson's main idea that forms the pillar of the book is that DG viewed himself as France incarnated, which led to an autocratic political career, guided by absolute self-certainty and a feeling of destiny. This theme leads to a DG who seems to exist in a personal vacuum, in spite of being at the centre of political life for decades. There are no mentions of any friends, hobbies etc. Politics was his life.
I certainly understand now why he and De Valera got on like a house on fire when DG fled here after his resignation.
The other thing that forcibly struck me was how vacuous and empty the May 1968 student upheavals were. A lot of chaos and uncertainty with no real aim or purpose. An epic youthful bourgeois fit.
On the whole, a good read if you're prepared to slog through 800 pages.
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