Miriam Marston: Innocent Smith Song

Miriam Marston, who has a lovely voice and plays piano well too, has written a song about Innocent Smith. Click here, and click on her playlist till you find the title "Innocent Smith".

I wonder if the Manalive movie people have a credits song to play yet? (Hint....)

H/T: Bob C.

Check Out Chestertoons

The audio, although it sounds old, is really Chuck Chalberg from the ACS tv show on EWTN (by permission), but I do think it adds to the presentation to have the graphics, and is another clever way to present Chesterton to the waiting world. Check out Chestertoons.

H/T: Bob C.

Today in Chesterton History

Today, June 28th, is Frances Alice Blogg Chesterton's birthday, as well as the date that Frances and Gilbert married, as well as my Father's birthday, which is how I so perfectly remember this date ;-)

The Green Bay Wisconsin Chesterton Society

Nice to know my home state has another Chesterton Society! Go Green Bay!

The Green Bay Chesterton Society

The Green Bay Chesterton Society Meets on Saturdays at 1:00pm
at "The Attic Books & Coffee" 730 Bodart Street, in Green Bay.

Michael F. Lee, President
920-360-8663
GB_Chestertons-owner@yahoogroups.com

Michael blogs at The Small Shop.

Check out Chesterton Square

Follow up of our report from almost a year ago, the statue and square are now complete in Louisiana, I love the motto:A Place to Celebrate Life. Check out the larger-than-life statue of our man, G.K. Chesterton.

A Chestertonian Epithalamium

Since Saturday is John and Sheila's wedding and Sunday is GKC's and FBC's wedding anniversary, and also the date of Jules Verne's beginning of the Journey to the Center of the Earth, perhaps I ought to ...
Ah well. I was trying to write a fuller commentary on the topic, to be entitled "Just say NO"... but decided to do it in rhyme instead.
--Dr. Thursday.

Just Say NW
(for John and Sheila, with all my love.)

Let us take the relation between man and woman, in that immortal duel which we call a marriage.
[GKC Appetite of Tyranny CW5:257]

...there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:548]

...the sexes are two stubborn pieces of iron; if they are to be welded together, it must be while they are red-hot. Every woman has to find out that her husband is a selfish beast, because every man is a selfish beast by the standard of a woman. But let her find out the beast while they are both still in the story of "Beauty and the Beast". Every man has to find out that his wife is cross - that is to say, sensitive to the point of madness: for every woman is mad by the masculine standard. But let him find out that she is mad while her madness is more worth considering than anyone else's sanity.
[GKC The Common Man 142-3]

O Lamb Eternal, aid this wedding song!
Bring forth the star's and atom's arcane lore:
A stable nucleus of metal strong,
Mystic iron, our blood's and our earth's core.
Fused in the stellar furnace from two parts,
Which left to themselves would be repelling,
But as the Heart Aflame unites their hearts,
The strongest force of all defeats rebelling.
In ancient tongues an ending odd and rare -
Not one, not many, but precisely two -
The dual: like the duel, warring pair
Which by losing both, reveals something new.
As now you-two in matrimony go,
May God grant both the wit to just say NW.

--Dr. Thursday.
Made June 25, 2009, the antipodes of Christmas.

Notes:
1. Cf. Rev 19:9: "Blessed are they that are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb."
3,5 Stable: iron has a very stable nucleus. Though it is formed in stars by fusion, it does not undergo fusion itself.
4. blood's core: the working component of the erythrocytes (red blood cells) is hemoglobin, which contains an iron atom in its center, which actually performs the transport of oxygen to the rest of the body. The earth has a huge iron core which by rotating generates a magnetic field, protecting us from harmful radiation.
6. repelling: bare nuclei (atoms which lack electrons) have positive charges and repel each other.
7. see Acts 4:32 "the multitude of believers had but one heart and
one soul"; cf. Litany of the Sacred Heart: "Heart of Jesus, burning furnace of charity, have mercy on us"; (cf. Mal 3:2-3, 4:1-2) Also see the "Canticle of the Sun" of St. Francis:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

8. The "strong nuclear" force is the strongest of the four universal forces and can unite protons which otherwise repel each other into the nucleus of an atom.
9. In grammar, "number" usually refers to "singular" or "plural", but the "dual" number exists in ancient languages such as ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Old English. The "dual" provides endings for things that come in twos. (Latin contains traces of it in the "-o" of duo and ambo.) Also note the pun on dual as an odd ending. Hee hee.
13. See the last line of GKC's Return of Don Quixote:

"I say ... iit in matrimonium."

("He has gone into matrimony" - that is, he got married.)
14. In Old English, "wit" is the dual of the first person, and means "we two"; in Greek, NW (pronounced "NO") means the same. Also see GKC's essay called "Heroic Wit":

...we shall never understand the French until we understand that this wit of theirs is not mere wit, as we mean the word. In fact, this can be very simply seen by noticing the connotation of the word for wit in the two languages. What we call wit they call esprit - spirit. When they want to call a man witty, they call him spirituel. They actually use the same word for wit which they use for the Holy Ghost.
[GKC Lunacy and Letters 84]

The Gettysburg Address

In the latest Gilbert, the last essay is from The New York American, October 24, 1931. Isn't that amazing? Have you ever heard of The New York American magazine (newspaper?).Chesterton once again gets to the heart of the discussions regarding Lincoln's address. We need to consider that this great popular experiment of self-government may fail. In today's situation, with the current administration, with our states failing to retain state's rights, with federal encroachments everywhere, this is something indeed timely to consider.

Deadline Extended for MAPACA Conference Papers

From Jill:

Hi Dale,

As I've mentioned, response to the the Chesterton session at the MAPACA conference (Boston, November 5-7) has been very little. I've received one proposal only. I wanted to let you know that the MAPACA board has extended the submission deadline until June 30 (originally, it was June 15). Perhaps, if the information is on the blog once more, it will bring one or two additional proposals. This would allow the session to materialize.

Thanks so much.

Blessings,
Jill

If you know of anyone interested in this, please forward this message to them immediately. Thanks.

Strong Pro-Life Editorial Noted in New Gilbert Magazine

Naturally, Gilbert is strongly pro-life, as he was alive during his lifetime. So naturally, most Chestertonians who are alive find themselves pro-life as well.

Lee Strong found our lead editorial to be very lively indeed. Thanks, Lee.

A Descendant of G.K. Chesterton's brother Cecil's wife Ada Writes to Us

In response to "Gramps"'s advice on the blog of the American Chesterton Society, on how to pronounce Cecil in Dec 2006, I wrote:

Yes, or even Cess-all. I'm two years late, I know, but Ada Elizabeth Jones Chesterton was my great-aunt. When her brother died in 1926, his wife and three daughters went to live with her at 3 Fleet Street. They were my aunts and my mother, who died in 2002. The other day, at my father's house, looking through some old photos, I found one of her grandfather, Charles Frederick Jones. I'd never seen one of him before. It is posted here. My mother was a writer...
... both her parents were too, and a lot of us have Sheridan as a middle name (I do -- but I'm no writer at all). Any idea why? I haven't. Incidentally, Ada Elizabeth was always known (to me from my mother, grandmother and aunts, as 'Keith' -- no idea why, though that's what K in GK stands for.

(On the back is the photographer's name and address, AYLING, 493 OXFORD STREET, and if you google that, you can find a picture of a lady in an enormous skirt posing for her portrait, with the same dado behind her.)

I was idly surfing to see what there was out there re my great grandfather and great aunt (who I never met, though my Nana lived with us at the end of her life, the late 50s). My mother wrote poems, plays and a fictionalised autobiography which included idolisation of 'Keith' and her years there (1926-8, I think). She had one play put on, but mostly earned money as a local journalist. My grandfather, the one who died in 1926, Charles Sheridan Jones, was a journalist and pamphleteer of not much note, and my grandmother wrote pot-boilers. She and her sister-in-law were campaigners, she for nursery school provision, and 'Keith' for homeless people.

I know almost nothing about this man, my great grandfather. I didn't even know his name before two days ago! My father admits never even seeing the picture. Sadly, my mother had Alzheimer's Disease for the last few years of her life, and her papers became very muddled. So did her middle sister. She said her parents should NEVER have married: "she was quite wrong for him". Isn't that a funny thought, that I might never have been here!

Yours sincerely
Nick Barnett

Notes from Nancy: I reminded Nick that Ada chose the name JK Prothero, or John Keith Prothero, as her pen name for her journalist career. She preferred people to call her Keith all her life, and as we see here, she preferred her relatives to call her that as well.

I've written to our British correspondant, Aidan Mackey, to ask about the name Sheridan, as he was a friend of Ada's and knew her.

June Gilbert 2009

I just received my June Gilbert and was pleased to see a Letter to the Editor with regard to something I wrote. This is a first for me, if memory serves me (not that it will).

I found it interested to see that I said almost the same thing as the editorial writer in the column I wrote in the same issue, a column inspired by reading and interviewing Alice Von Hildebrand.

"...my father..."

My father gave my mother books by Chesterton.
What about Chesterton's father?
--Dr. Thursday.

My father, who was serene, humorous and full of hobbies, remarked casually that he had been asked to go on what was then called The Vestry. At this my mother, who was more swift, restless and generally Radical in her instincts, uttered something like a cry of pain; she said, "Oh, Edward, don't! You will be so respectable! We never have been respectable yet; don't let's begin now." And I remember my father mildly replying, "My dear, you present a rather alarming picture of our lives, if you say that we have never for one single instant been respectable."
...
My father was a Liberal of the school that existed before the rise of Socialism; he took it for granted that all sane people believed in private property; but he did not trouble to translate it into private enterprise. His people were of the sort that were always sufficiently successful; but hardly, in the modern sense, enterprising. My father was the head of a hereditary business of house agents and surveyors, which had already been established for some three generations in Kensington; and I remember that there was a sort of local patriotism about it and a little reluctance in the elder members, when the younger first proposed that it should have branches outside Kensington. This particular sort of unobtrusive pride was very characteristic of this sort of older business men. I remember that it once created a comedy of cross-purposes, which could hardly have occurred unless there had been some such secret self-congratulation upon any accretion of local status. The incident is in more ways than one a glimpse of the tone and talk of those distant days.
My grandfather, my father's father, was a fine-looking old man with white hair and beard and manners that had something of that rounded solemnity that went with the old-fashioned customs of proposing toasts and sentiments. He kept up the ancient Christian custom of singing at the dinner-table, and it did not seem incongruous when he sang "The Fine Old English Gentleman" as well as more pompous songs of the period of Waterloo and Trafalgar.
...
My father was very universal in his interests and very moderate in his opinions; he was one of the few men I ever knew who really listened to argument; moreover, he was more traditional than many in the liberal age; he loved many old things, and had especially a passion for the French cathedrals and all the Gothic architecture opened up by Ruskin in that time. It was not quite so inconceivable that he might admit another side to modern progress.
...
I have begun with this fragment of a fairy play in a toy-theatre, because it also sums up most clearly the strongest influences upon my childhood. I have said that the toy-theatre was made by my father; and anybody who has ever tried to make such a theatre or mount such a play, will know that this alone stands for a remarkable round of crafts and accomplishments. It involves being in much more than the common sense the stage carpenter, being the architect and the builder and the draughtsman and the landscape-painter and the story-teller all in one. And, looking back on my life, and the relatively unreal and indirect art that I have attempted to practise, I feel that I have really lived a much narrower life than my father's.
...
I am just old enough to remember in infancy the world before telephones. And I remember that my father and my uncle fitted up the first telephone I ever saw with their own metal and chemicals, a miniature telephone reaching from the top bedroom under the roof to the remote end of the garden. I was really impressed imaginatively by this; and I do not think I have ever been so much impressed since by any extension of it.
[GKC Autobiography CW16:22,33,41-2,107]

Seventy years ago The Illustrated London News was established. Less than seventy years ago (considerably less, I think I may justly say) I was a little boy of ten. But even then my fate was linked darkly with this periodical, for my father had carefully collected the bound volumes of what was long the only illustrated paper; and I can see those pictures now by shutting my eyes. The word "illustration" really applies here, as it never does in modern novels or magazines. Those illustrations did illustrate, like a triangle on a blackboard. They illustrated not only the letterpress inside the volume, but the whole life outside, all my parents' memories and anecdotes and allusions at breakfast or dinner. If they spoke of the Commissariat scandals in the Crimea, I did not know what "Commissariat" meant, but I knew what "Crimea" meant, and even something of what it looked like. If they spoke of Louis Napoleon's later policy and defeat, I did not know about his policy, but I knew all about his face and his funny pointed beard - in which I was much more interested - at the time. To me the Crimea was a place and Louis Napoleon was a person: two truths that are really important and are omitted in modern history books. But I learnt my recent history not from a history book, but a sketch-book. Mine was unusual luck.
[GKC ILN June 8 1912 CW29:304]

For instance, if I have a hobby or a potential hobby, it is probably a toy theatre. Hobbies imply holidays; and while it is very arguable that journalists do no real work, it is also true that they have no real holidays. But if I had no need to cam my bread and cheese, and no country and no conscience and none of all those nonsensical things, I should settle down with a serious aim in life, which would be working a toy theatre. It is to me almost as much a box of miracles today, as it was when I first saw it as a baby; and I feel as if I knew that mimic world before I knew the real one. The gilded figures of a prince and princess glow in my memory against black oblivion, almost before the memory of my father who had made them for me; which things may be an allegory. Now this example is an understatement. I am in no sense alone in this taste; Stevenson and my father and many others evidently shared it. But it is an excellent example of something which, without being exactly eccentric, is just sufficiently out of the ordinary way to make it most improbable that any practical organiser would see it; or provide it, or put it into any definite class of things. I do not think I could say carelessly to a waiter, over my shoulder, 'Just get me a black coffee and a Benedictine and a toy theatre, will you?' I cannot imagine the head waiter roaring down the speaking tube, 'Three Manhattan cocktails and a toy theatre'. I cannot imagine it was mentioned among the minor luxuries printed on the piece of clockwork in the bedroom. But even if it was, it would not meet the case. Even if the waiter returned laden with toy theatres, as he sometimes comes laden with cigar-boxes, it would not solve the problem. For a hobby implies work as well as play; a process as well as a result. It would be a little nearer the mark if the head waiter brought me trays of tinsel and cardboard and that glorious metallic paper as intoxicating as all his wines, a crimson richer even than his burgundy and a green better than the greenest Chartreuse. Even then it would only work if the head waiter would sit down on the floor with me and help to cut the things out; and of this one could never be absolutely certain.
[GKC New Witness March 17 and March 24 1917 quoted in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks 32-33]

Of Milk and Guns: Wedding Preparations and Thoughts:

It is just a scant novena of days until Sheila and John - two of my most dear Chestertonian friends - get married (on June 27), and the day after that will be the 108th anniversary of the marriage of Frances and Gilbert. So I thought I would hunt for just a bit of appropriate history to begin final preparations.

The wedding day drew near and the presents were pouring in. "I feel like the young man in the Gospel," said Gilbert to Annie Firmin, "sorrowful, because I have great possessions." [See Matthew 19:22] Conrad Noel married Gilbert and Frances at Kensington Parish Church on June 28, 1901. As Gilbert knelt down the price ticket on the sole of one of his new shoes became plainly visible. Annie caught Mrs. Chesterton's eye and they began to laugh helplessly. Annie thinks, too, that for once in their lives Gilbert and Cecil did not argue at the Reception. Lucian Oldershaw drove ahead to the station with the heavy luggage, put it on the train and waited feverishly. That train went off (with the luggage), then another, and at last the happy couple appeared. Gilbert had felt it necessary to stop on the way "in order to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another." [see below] The milk he drank because in childhood his mother used to give him a glass in that shop. The revolver was for the defense of his bride against possible dangers. They followed the luggage by a slow train.

Meeting her [Frances] for the first time I think the main impression was that of the "single eye." She abounded in Gilbert's sense, as my mother commented after an early meeting, and ministered to his genius. Yet she never lost an individual, markedly feminine point of view, which helped him greatly, as anyone can see who will read all he wrote on marriage. He shows an insight almost uncanny in the section called, "The Mistake About Women" in What's Wrong With the World. "Some people," he said in a speech of 1905, "when married gain each other. Some only lose themselves." The Chestertons gained each other. And by the sort of paradox he loved, Frances did so by throwing the stream of her own life unreservedly into the greater river of her husband's.

[Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 151, 167]

In case you are wondering about the gun and the milk, here is the groom's own explanation:

A man does not generally manage to forget his wedding-day; especially such a highly comic wedding-day as mine. For the family remembers against me a number of now familiar legends, about the missing of trains, the losing of luggage, and other things counted yet more eccentric. It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself, and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller. They seemed to me the most natural things in the world. I did not buy the pistol to murder myself - or my wife; I never was really modern. I bought it because it was the great adventure of my youth, with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound; where, after all, there are still a suspiciously large number of families with Danish names. I shall not be annoyed if it is called childish; but obviously it was rather a reminiscence of boyhood, and not of childhood. But the ritual consumption of the glass of milk really was a reminiscence of childhood. I stopped at that particular dairy because I had always drunk a glass of milk there when walking with my mother in my infancy. And it seemed to me a fitting ceremonial to unite the two great relations of a man's life. Outside the shop there was the figure of a White Cow as a sort of pendant to the figure of the White Horse; the one standing at the beginning of my new journey and the other at the end. But the point is here that the very fact of these allegories having been acted over again, at the stage of marriage and maturity, does in a sense transform them, and does in some sense veil even while it invokes the original visions of the child.
[GKC Autobiography CW16:43-4]

I must not overlook two things. First, this June 28 would be Frances' 140th birthday - yes, she was almost 5 years older than GKC; she died two years after him.

Second, if there is to be any discussion of feast days in connexion with these two, I would heartily recommend it be on June 28, because it is the date of their wedding. Such things have been done before, as in the case of St. Ambrose, whose feast on December 7 recalls the date he was ordained a bishop. (So much for nolo episcopari right? Hee hee)

May Frances and Gilbert watch over Sheila and John as they prepare for their new life, and intercede for all their needs...

Hey John don't forget the milk and the gun. Sheila be sure he takes that tag off his shoes. Now pardon me while I consult the lexicons for the endings of the dual...

The Flag of Earth

An alert reader thought you might be interested in The Flag of Earth, since it sounds Chestertonianly like the Flag of the World.

Thanks, Michael P.

Delinquent

Yes, I've been delinquent in mentioning, last Sunday it was, the anniversary of the death of Gilbert Chesterton. It was 1936, which means it was [takes out pocket calculator] 73 years ago. My mother was born in February of 1936, she and GKC were alive on this planet for a short while together, and that thought brings me a step closer to Gilbert, whom I believe I would have loved as a dear friend, had we ever met.

A Seriously New Picture of Chesterton

Never saw this before, have you? Thanks to McNamara's Blog.

I spend a LOT of time perusing image databases looking for new pictures of GKC, and this is a first for me.

Also note: cigar in hand.

Shoot.

Darn it, after the Judge so wisely quoted Chesterton and prevented Madonna from adopting the child, Madonna has now (?paid off someone and) adopted little Mercy.We should pray for both Madonna and Mercy.

A collision: GKC on esse

Sorry I have no time for my own posting today, so I shall offer you a bit of Chestertonian insight...
--Dr. Thursday

...I think there is another and more curious cause for this common human fancy of a wild wish which is disappointed by being fulfilled. The idea is very common, of course, in popular tradition: in the tale of King Midas; in the tale of the Black Pudding; in the tale of the Goloshes of Fortune. My own personal feeling about it, I think, is that a world in which all one's wishes were fulfilled would, quite apart from disappointments, be an unpleasant world to live in. The world would be too like a dream, and the dream too like a nightmare. The Ego would be too big for the Cosmos; it would be a bore to be so important as that. I believe a great part of such poetic pleasure as I have comes from a certain disdainful indifference in actual things. Demeter withered up the cornfields: I like the cornfields because they grow in spite of me. At least, I can lay my hand on my heart and say that no cornfield ever grew with my assistance. Ajax defied the lightning; but I like the lightning because it defies me. I enjoy stars and the sun or trees and the sea, because they exist in spite of me; and I believe the sentiment to be at the root of all that real kind of romance which makes life not a delusion of the night, but an adventure of the morning. It is, indeed, in the clash of circumstances that men are most alive. When we break a lance with an opponent the whole romance is in the fact that the lance does break. It breaks because it is real: it does not vanish like an elfin spear. And even when there is an element of the marvellous or impossible in true poetry, there is always also this element of resistance, of actuality and shock. The most really poetical impossibility is an irresistible force colliding with an immovable post. When that happens it will be the end of the world.

It is true, of course, that marvels, even marvels of transformation, illustrate the noblest histories and traditions. But we should notice a rather curious difference which the instinct of popular legend has in almost all cases kept. The wonder-working done by good people, saints and friends of man, is almost always represented in the form of restoring things or people to their proper shapes. St. Nicholas, the Patron Saint of Children, finds a boiling pot in which two children have been reduced to a sort of Irish stew. He restores them miraculously to life, because they ought to be children and ought not to be Irish stew. But he does not turn them into angels; and I can remember no case in hagiology of such an official promotion. If a woman were blind, the good wonder-workers would give her back her eyes; if a man were halt, they would give him back his leg. But they did not, I think, say to the man: "You are so good that you really ought to be a woman"; or to the woman: "You are so bothered it is time you had a holiday as a man." I do not say there are no exceptions; but this is the general tone of the tales about good magic. But, on the other hand, the popular tales about bad magic are specially full of the idea that evil alters and destroys the personality. The black witch turns a child into a cat or a dog; the bad magician keeps the Prince captive in the form of a parrot, or the princess in the form of a hind; in the gardens of the evil spirits human beings are frozen into statues or tied to the earth as trees. In all such instinctive literature the denial of identity is the very signature of Satan. In that sense it is true that the true God is the God of things as they are - or, at least, as they were meant to be. And I think that something of this healthy fear of losing self through the supernatural is behind the widespread sentiment of the Three Wishes; the sentiment which says, in the words of Thackeray -

Fairy roses, fairy rings
Turn out sometimes troublesome things.

Now the transition may seem queer; but this power of seeing that a tree is there, in spite of you and me; that it holds of God and its own treeishness, is of great importance just now in practical politics. We are in sharp collision with a large number of things, some of which are real facts and all of which are real faiths. We must see these things objectively, as we do a tree; and understand that they exist whether we like them or not. We must not try and turn them into something different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches.
[GKC ILN Nov 22 1913 CW29:587-9, emphasis added]

Distributism Does Not Mean Free Stuff

OK. That's settled. What, then, does distributism mean?

I'll tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean two acres and a cow.

And it doesn't mean software should be free.

And it doesn't mean you should work and no one pays you for an honest day's work (i.e. meaning, you wouldn't be paid), even if the work you do it write software or even just write, for example, for the web. We are so used to free web stuff, we don't even realize how that cheapens all the information.

So, what does distributism really mean then?Class, discuss.

Conference Reminder

I am reminded by an alert reader (thanks, Mark!) that there is only two months til...ChesterCon09! Get your room reservations in now, and get the banquet tickets before they run out, and get the pre-conference pricing for the conference. Plenty to do, hear, and see, so get planning! (If you're already registered, good for you!

For the Cause of Frances and Gilbert

Sean at The Blue Boar mentioned a meeting in England to discuss the holiness of GKC and brought up the topic of the Cause for sainthood of GKC. This issue has been going around for a while - there have even been articles in the Chesterton Review about it. It is a curious topic, and even if one is not Catholic, it may be interesting to explore the question of what the Church considers in such cases. But I cannot go into all that here and now.

I would like to publish a possible prayer - no not to GKC - but for his canonisation - and for his wife Frances. It's not approved, and cannot be used "publically" - there are actual church laws about this sort of thing - we must be very careful not to violate them. (The main idea is not to anticipate an authoritative decision - that's up to the Authorities... but you're read Orthodoxy, so by now you ought to know all that by now.)

Perhaps another day I can go into the matter a little more deeply, but for today, here is the prayer, which seems very appropriate for the feast of the Most Holy Trinity:

Prayer for the Canonization of G. K. & Frances Chesterton
(for private use only!)

Oh, Most Holy Trinity, in the union of Frances Blogg and Gilbert Chesterton in Holy Matrimony, You gave us an example of Your own Trinitarian love and revealed the supernatural fruitfulness of Christian marriage. You enlightened Your servant Gilbert with great gifts of mind to defend the One True Faith, and endowed Your servant Frances with many gifts to be his loving, patient, and devoted wife and trustworthy support. If it be Your will, may the Church recognize the sanctity of this married couple, modelled upon Jesus Christ the Everlasting Man, through Whom we pray. Amen.
Mary, cause of our joy, your servants Frances and Gilbert acknowledged you to be the Virgin Mother of the Incarnate Word. Through your intercession, may the Church soon acknowledge their sanctity.

Naughty!

There, I thought that would get your attention. (hee hee!)

In my continuing search for inspiration as I proceed into my present subcreation, the third part of The Three Relics - that dark and fantastic Catholic Fantasy centred in Quayment's renowned "Weaver's Books" - I found an interesting entry in the real-world bookstore called Loome:

#N3816

BELLOC, HILAIRE. Songs from the Bad Child's Book of Beasts. London: Duckworth, 1932. First edition. A delightful collection of 10 songs on various beasts by Hilaire Belloc, set to music by Dudley Glass, with illustrations by Basil Blackwood. Large 8vo, 36pp. Original pictorial hardcover boards with matching dustjacket. In very good minus condition. Scattered foxing throughout. Boards are slightly bowed. The unclipped dustjacket is in good condition, with some scuffing and very light edgewear, now protected in a clear Mylar wrapper. A naughty child has begun to color in (fairly neatly) two of the illustrations (Belloc would have disapproved, and written a cautionary tale about bad children who mark up their books). A lovely first edition copy overall.
Price: $50.00

I am not so familiar with Belloc as to postulate such a thing, though I have read about Mrs. Markham in G. K.'s Weekly. Perhaps, perhaps. But I do know a little about Chesterton, and I know that he had a very different perspective....

I earnestly hope that all children will spoil this book by painting the illustrations. I wanted to do this myself but the publishers would not let me. But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that.
[GKC "A Fragment" in The Coloured Lands]

And as tempting as it can be to colour in our blogg, I would advise against keeping a box of crayons by your computer - although I do keep one handy, I am a real computer scientist and know how to do such things safely.

Ahem.

In any case, today we shall consider another sort of books for children...

The sort called BOYS' Books. Now this is not as exclusive a term as you may think - but I shall let GKC handle that part of the argument, and I think you will be radically surprised how he does it. Besides, my discussion is not really to be that wide, or perhaps deep - as you shall see.

But what got me off the very curious matter of addition and the "free monoid" and such exciting topics? A very simple thing... reading a boys' book.

In order to maintain a certain kind of fluency with my material, I have been re-reading our collection of the very famous Hardy Boys mysteries. And at the end of one, I happened to notice there were still a couple of printed pages left, even though the story had concluded by the usual rituals, rewards, food, a scolding from Aunt Gertrude, a shiver at the narrow escapes of the past story and a tantalizing mention of the next title... Ah, for the good old pre-Vatican II form of such rituals! (Ahem, hee hee) Well, as you might expect, those last printed pages were an advertisement for another adventure series, about another young pair called Rick Brant and his pal Scotty. However, it was the lead-in which caught me, and which I repeat here for your consideration:

Have you ever thought why you get so much fun out of reading the Hardy Boys stories?

It's probably because the Hardy Boys, Joe and Frank, are fellows like yourself. They like action, plenty of it. They are as full of curiosity as a couple of bloodhounds. And just leave a mystery around and they'll be in it before you can say "Sherlock Holmes!"

It's probably, too, because they like a wisecrack almost as well as they like Aunt Gertrude's cooking, and because they think girls are all right - in their place!

It's because they can drive a car and pilot a speedboat and are at home in the great outdoors and keep their heads in an emergency (and an emergency always is just around the corner).

Isn't that why you like to read about the Hardy Boys?

Well, fellows, another treat's ahead of you!
etc...
[Franklin W. Dixon, While the Clock Ticked]

Very exciting. Girls, please do not take umbrage at the apparent slight; for one thing recall this was written in about 1928... and yet as difficult as it may appear, there is something mystical about it which we must defer to another time and place. But let it pass for now. Besides, your turn is coming!

This is perhaps one of the most Chestertonian bits of writing to be found anywhere. Compare that, if you will, to Chesterton's own encomium [a word I learned from Fr. Jaki's books: it means formal, elegant praise]:

No one will ever understand the spirit at the back of popular and juvenile literature until he realises one fact, that a large amount of it is the result of that enthusiasm of the young reader which makes him wish to hear more and more about certain heroes, and read more and more of certain types of books. He dowers the creatures of fiction with a kind of boyish immortality. He is not surprised if Dick Deadshot or Jack Harkaway renews his youth through a series of volumes which reaches further than the length of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These books have the vital philosophy of youth, a philosophy in which death does not exist, except, indeed, as an external and picturesque incident which happens to villains.

The serious student of this class of books and papers will go on to observe that a very large mass of such works has arisen directly out of the interest taken in some of the creations of great masters. An irresponsible writer for boys early in the century continued the adventures of Pickwick. An interminable book of Oriental adventure which we read in our boyhood was avowedly a supplement to the Arabian Nights, and mingled Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba in one inexhaustible tale. To take a more vulgar example, it is said that "Ally Sloper" is simply an infinitely degraded version of Mr. Micawber; the literary zoologist will trace the same rudimentary organs, the hat, the tie, and the bald head. All this amounts to one of the great laws of the question, the fact that the youthful mind takes hold of certain figures, insists upon them, tears them, as if were, out of the covers of the story, and could follow their adventures in any number of day dreams. Hence one of the essential qualities of this cheap literature - its astonishing voluminousness. A library keeping a record of it would need a dome vaster than the Bodleian.
[GKC The Common Man 229-30]

Oh, yes. Did GKC ever read any Hardy Boys book? He could have; I don't know - the record is not clear. But certainly both GKC and the mysterious author (authors?) of the Hardys have an insight into a very deep truth about our longing for adventure and for Story Writ Large (as Fr. Jaki would say).

And you do not have to be a boy to enjoy them. Indeed, it is an even more mysterious truth that boys enjoy (hush, come close to the screen so I can whisper it) GIRLS' BOOKS.

Yes... and so did GKC:

For just as the boy was an intruder in that club of girls, [in Little Women] so any masculine reader is really an intruder among this pile of [Miss Alcott's] books. There runs through the whole series a certain moral philosophy, which a man can never really get the hang of. For instance, the girls are always doing something, pleasant or unpleasant. In fact, when they have not to do something unpleasant, they deliberately do something else. A great part, perhaps the more godlike part, of a boy's life, is passed in doing nothing at all. Real selfishness, which is the simplest thing in the world to a boy or man, is practically left out of the calculation. The girls may conceivably oppress and torture each other; but they will not indulge or even enjoy themselves - not, at least, as men understand indulgence or enjoyment. The strangest things are taken for granted; as that it is wrong in itself to drink champagne. But two things are quite certain; first, that even from a masculine standpoint, the books are very good; and second, that from a feminine standpoint they are so good that their admirers have really lost sight even of their goodness. I have never known, or hardly ever known, a really admirable woman who did not confess to having read these books. Haughty ladies confessed (under torture) that they liked them still. Stately Suffragettes rose rustling from the sofa and dropped Little Women on the floor, covering them with public shame. At learned ladies' colleges, it is, I firmly believe, handed about secretly, like a dangerous drug. I cannot under stand this strange and simple world, in which unselfishness is natural, in which spite is easier than self-indulgence. I art the male intruder, like poor Mr. Laurence and I withdraw. I back out hastily, bowing. But I am sure that I leave a very interesting world behind me.
[GKC on Louisa May Alcott in The Nation quoted in A Handful of Authors]

I would check for a parallel text in my Nancy Drew collection, but I have fewer and they are not the ancient texts... (Ask my sisters? I'd rather risk my life in your roadster! Hee hee.)

But what is the mystery? Do we need to call Bayport for the Hardys or River Heights for Nancy Drew? Is this something about th old Sherlock Holmes thing (which GKC comments on in many places, and has offered his homage in Father Brown and other forms of mimicry)? Or is it something simpler?

We grown-up people have made a mess of eating, as we have made a mess of everything else. We have made a mess of fighting, as we have made a mess of everything else. We have corrupted with an impure Epicurism the exalted, nay, the austere, joy of eating. The greediness of a schoolboy is something clean and chaste, which is above our heads - an armed and awful virginity. The bun is not a thing which we have passed: the bun is something perfect and terrible to which we cannot attain. We are not innocent enough to share the pure appetite of the schoolboy. We are not good enough to be greedy. And exactly as we have corrupted the original appetite for feasting, so we have corrupted the original appetite for arms. A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting; a child always stands for the good militarism as against the bad. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression. The child's hero is never the man or boy who attempts by his mere personal force to extend his mere personal influence. In all boys' books, in all boys' conversation, the hero is one person and the bully the other. That combination of the hero and bully in one, which people now call the Strong Man or the Superman, would be simply unintelligible to any schoolboy. To put the matter shortly, a boy feels an abysmal difference between conquest and victory. Conquest has the sound of something cold and heavy; the automatic operations of a powerful army. Victory has the sound of something sudden and valiant; victory is like a cry out of the living mouth. The child is excited with victory; he is bored with conquest. The child is not an Imperialist; the child is a Jingo - which is excellent. The child is not a militarist in the heavy, mechanical modern sense; the child is a fighter. Only very old and very wicked people can be militarists in the modern sense. Only very old and very wicked people can be peace-at-any-price men. The child's instincts are quite clean and chivalrous, though perhaps a little exaggerated.
[GKC ILN Oct 20 1906 CW27:306-7]

Actually, I think it is simply answered in the famous "Argument From Story" in GKC's The Everlasting Man, butressed by Tolkien's essay on Fairy Tales and such things as Ende's The Never-Ending Story... it is really part of our life as subcreators, made in the image and likeness of the Creator, and our longing to share in His adventures... but I cannot go into this further today. I must go back to Quayment... Now where are the keys to my roadster?

Serendipity?

Someone on the blog wonders if it is some kind of karma to wander the blogosphere and run across the same Chesterton quote more than once. Does that mean that quote is important to you at that moment?

My personal feeling is no. After being on the receiving end of Google searches for Chesterton info, I find that people tend to use the same quotes of his over and over again in their blog posts. Occasionally, you find people who have Chesterton quotes as their signature, and so you see those quotes quite a bit.

There are many often quoted Chesterton quips. I now tend to think the less quoted thoughts and paragraphs more important than the short but sweet paradoxical sayings of his.

Trying Read More

This is a short post.

Here is the rest of the post.

Blog Slow?

I've had a few comments that the blog loads slow, or some things load and others seem to get hung up. I haven't had any problems, have you?

My only concern now is that I had this "read more" thing set up so I could truncate the posts, and now I can't figure out how to make it work in this new template. Anyone have any ideas?

UPDATE: I was just messing with it, and now EVERY post has a Read More! I think I still have some more fiddling to do!

Following Us on Twitter?

I noticed today, with the blog update, that we have 24 followers here--Hi everyone! THANKS!! for being here with us.

We're Twittering too, and I've got 78 followers, how amazing is that? Maybe it's easier to follow on Twitter. Certainly quicker with the 140 character limit.

Sometimes, I think about what the next "Twitter" will be. Will Chesterton be able to keep up????

Just in Case You're Interested

in finding out more about author James Kennedy who wrote the Order of the Odd Fish.

Major Blog Changes

After resisting the urge to upgrade (Chestertonianly, I didn't want to take the fence down before knowing why someone put it up there), I did change things today due to some requests I've had for being able to spread the Chesterton news further afield; a situation which I heartily agree to do.

So, check out the new features, try them out, and hopefully, all shall be well.