Crooked Timber

The one thing I enjoy about this season is watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Some part of me always hopes things will turn out differently this time—that maybe the Grinch won’t go back to Whoville and return the stuff. (Of course I do know better; still, it’s my holiday wish.) Also, it is impossible not to admire the Grinch’s efficiency.

From the blog Intellectual Conservative, I learn that my green hero is being Semiticized. Who knew?
Continue reading “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Whoville”

We’ve posted before here about the horridness of Christmas Music. Ian McDonald has the antidote.

captainlucy makes the blinding discovery that Christmas muzak can be made bearable by inserting the word ‘Sex’ for ‘Christmas’.

‘I wish it could be sex everyday…’ etc etc.

It can also be made deeply disturbing, vide the first line from ‘Do they know it’s Christmas…

I’m back from a trip to the West Indies, including several days on Canouan – the home island of my brother. It’s one of the Grenadines – part of the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which became independent in 1979. It’s still tiny – around 3 square miles and somewhere around 1500 people – but things have changed a lot since Adonal was growing up. There’s now central electricity, for example, and a few more paved roads. There’s also a fence around the runway, so airplanes don’t have to circle around to wait for the cows to be driven out of the way.

But the really big change was the development of the northern half (actually a little more than half, I think) of the island. What was previously an uninhabited forest is now an ultra-luxury resort, complete with championship golf course, casino, and villas developed by Donald Trump. (Here’s a link with a nice picture – and notice the url.) Essentially the only previous building on the area was a church to which Adonal remembers making the journey a couple times each year when he was a kid. On our last night, we went to dinner at the resort. The food was outstanding and the setting unbelievably beautiful – the buildings and design were lovely and surprisingly tasteful. I was also surprised that by American standards, it was not outrageously expensive. Still, it is far beyond the means of essentially all residents of the island. Quite the interesting dilemma. On the one hand, turn over half of the island to obscenely wealthy foreigners who will only admit you past the gate if you are employed there. On the other hand, essentially everyone on the island who is able to work now has a job. Most of the people I talked to about it were not outwardly hostile, but neither did they view it as their salvation, either – just part of life. In any event, we’ll never know what they would have chosen since the decision was made by politicians in St. Vincent.

As always, the choices are limited to maudlin, drunk, and maudlin drunk. I choose drunk.

Best wishes this Christmas to all our readers. Here’s a little bit from Alexander McCall Smith’s At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances that I like to think about at this time of year. Plenty of time for shouting at one another in the New Year, but for the moment:

The Master then rose to give a short address.

‘Dear guests of the College,’ he began, ‘dear Fellows, dear undergraduate members of this Foundation: William de Courcey was cruelly beheaded by those who could not understand that it is quite permissible for rational men to differ on important points of belief or doctrine. The world in which he lived had yet to develop those qualities of tolerance of difference of opinion which we take for granted, but which we must remind ourselves is of rather recent creation and is by no means assured of universal support. There are amongst us still those who would deny to others the right to hold a different understanding of the fundamental issues of our time. Thus, if we look about us we see people of one culture or belief still at odds with their human neighbours who are of a different culture or belief; and we see many who are prepared to act upon this difference to the extent of denying the humanity of those with whom they differ. …

‘Here in this place of learning, let us remind ourselves of the possibility of combating, in whatever small way we can, those divisions that come between man and man, between woman and woman, so that we may recognise in each other that vulnerable humanity that informs our lives, and makes life so precious; so that each may find happiness in his or her life, and in the lives of others. For what else is there for us to hope for? What else, I ask you, what else?’

It’s that time of the year again: the King William College General Knowledge Paper has arrived. It’s the kind of quiz that exists at a point just (or far) beyond the production possibility frontier of a space defined by your fondness for crossword-puzzles and your stock of cultural capital. If previous years are anything to go by it’s designed to be google-proof, but you’re in with a shot if you can guess the theme that unites all the questions in each section. Have at it. (The Great Miracle, incidentally, is scoring more than, say, 20 points.)

Tyler Cowen links to Leonard Peikoff, suggesting that”a bracing Randian approach is needed” to the commercialization of Christmas. But why settle for an epigone like Peikoff, when you can get the Randite vision of Christmas straight from the horse’s mouth?

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible.

Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”

(nb – I linked to this last year when it lived on its author, John Scalzi’s, blog). As a result of which people promoting Christmas specials like the The Happy Elf seem to have become convinced that I’m a valuable target for their marketing efforts).

David Kopel has a post about the origins of the Thanksgiving hymn We Gather Together. (Originally Dutch: a “Nederlandtsch Gedenckclanck,” which is a phrase I could say all day.) It put me in mind of the stuff I learned when growing up in Ireland. Much of it was pretty thin gruel, like the execrable Christ be beside me. But there were a few standouts—mostly leftovers from the pre-Vactican II fire-and-brimstone era. Chief among these was God of Mercy and Compassion. Nothing like hearing a bunch of eight-year-olds cheerily singing lyrics like “See our saviour bleeding, dying / On the cross of Calvary / To that cross my sins have nailed him / Yet he bleeds and dies for me.” Clonk! Clonk! Clonk! Do you hear those nails going in? Do you?

To offset this, though, when I was in fifth class our teacher, Mr Buckley, read us Frank O’Connor’s small masterpiece, “First Confession,” which put a more humane face on the whole thing. My view of religion was never quite the same afterward.

Then, to crown my misfortunes, I had to make my first confession and communion. It was an old woman called Ryan who prepared us for these. She was about the one age with Gran; she was well-to-do, lived in a big house on Montenotte, wore a black cloak and bonnet, and came every day to school at three o’clock when we should have been going home, and talked to us of hell. She may have mentioned the other place as well, but that could only have been by accident, for hell had the first place in her heart.

She lit a candle, took out a new half-crown, and offered it to the first boy who would hold one finger—only one finger!—in the flame for five minutes by the school clock. Being always very ambitious I was tempted to volunteer, but I thought it might look greedy. Then she asked were we afraid of holding one finger—only one finger!—in a little candle flame for five minutes and not afraid of burning all over in roasting hot furnaces for all eternity. “All eternity! Just think of that! A whole lifetime goes by and it’s nothing, not even a drop in the ocean of your sufferings.” The woman was really interesting about hell, but my attention was all fixed on the half-crown. At the end of the lesson she put it back in her purse. It was a great disappointment; a religious woman like that, you wouldn’t think she’d bother about a thing like a half-crown.

You can read the whole thing in the space of a few minutes. Vintage publish a good edition of O’Connor’s short stories.

Wow, there is some serious pumpkin-carving talent out there.

Anyone see any interesting costumes this year? One of my students had two “ears” on her head and pasted a “left click” and “right click” sign on her shirt. I thought that was cute.

I printed out a bunch of signs saying ebay, PayPal, some emails, some instructions to enter your password, and some login screens. I put those on my clothes and also had a plastic fish in my hand. What was I?

Brian Leiter is on sabbatical and seems to be enjoying a stint in London, most of the time, anyway. Welcome to our city, Professor Leiter, I hope you have fun while you’re here.

Oh, and by the way, you’re right both about the belly-buttons and the buffoon, but try to have closer to the correct change in supermarkets, it’ll make your life so much easier.

Shana Tova!