“Beginning in 1868, Martha Farquarson developed the female redeemer figure in the Elsie Dinsmore series: Elsie was a pious heroine who redeemed others by bursting into tears at hardness of heart. She brought her irreligious father to repentance by fainting at the piano when he tried to force her to play secular music on Sunday” …
An American Variation on the Myth
“Americans have not moved beyond mythical consciousness. Moreover the form of the classical monomyth, with its symbolic call for lifetime service to a community’s institutions, allows us to highlight its absence in the distinctive pattern of what we call here the American monomyth. Although there are significant variations, the following archetypical plot formula may be …
Some Protestantism as Arch-Romanism
“The holy community which Calvin sought to set up in Geneva represents in some ways a completer integration of Christianity with civilization than anything Europe had yet seen. It is true that there emerges within Calvinism, especially in its later Puritan developments, a more negative attitude toward the cultural amenities than had been present in …
Reinventing Yourself
“I like that merges into I’m like that. Identity prevails” (Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, p. 101).
Always Smite the Commies
I have mentioned before the fact that I am pleased to have participated in the Cold War, first as a child doing the public school nuke drills at Germantown Elementary in Annapolis, and then later as a sailor looking at Russia through a periscope. But personal experience aside, the hot wars of the first part …
Bit By Bit
“Not all personalized expression looks good to other people, of course. Especially in the early days of desktop publishing, a lot of amateurs went in for the multifont ransom-note look. PowerPoint presentations are still often hard to read or cluttered with clichéd clip art, and the Web is full of ugly sites. But, on the …
Like Butterscotch Pudding
One of the things I learned from Rushdoony (is that okay to admit?) is the concept of tolerance as false truce. All law is imposed morality, and the only question is which morality is going to be imposed, not whether one is going to be imposed. Periods of “tolerance” are times when this appears not …
About Time
“Although clever allusions still have their place, the breakdown of modernist ideology means that it’s no longer necessary to hide aesthetic pleasure behind postmodern irony and camp” (Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, p. 13).
Rescuing Art from the Artists
“Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously” (Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, pp. 4-5).
Speaking of Hatchet Jobs
A correspondent informs me that somewhere out there on the web, one of our local critics is chastising us for a bunch of stuff. All to be expected, and part of the cost of doing business. This is not worthy of comment, but one point Nick Gier made in this criticism was too good to …