Chesterton in Sight and Sound

H/T: Bob C.

This YouTube video contains more audio than I've heard before. The part that was new to me was the Canadian Literary Luncheon for Rudyard Kipling. I'd read that before, but never heard it.

Highlight: Hearing Chesterton laughing at his own humorous jokes–always a pleasure.

Chesterton in the Newspapers

Thursday's Crossword Puzzle in the Philadelphia Inquirer (page D-7, written by Alan P. Olschwang) has a 5 part clue for a "Chesterton Quip."

The "quip" (mis)-quoted reads "If a thing is not worth doing, it's worth doing badly." That is, unless I did the puzzle completely wrong.

Fitting that he would be misquoted, I suppose. Just wanted to give you a heads-up. Perhaps the reference will pique some interest at any rate.

H/T: Joey G.

Facebook and Chesterton

Here is an amazing fact: Chesterton has over 3,600 fans on Facebook! Isn't that an incredible number?

This is a screen shot of the Chesterton page. I am just awed by the numbers. And Facebook is mainly high school and college.

H/T: Mike, thanks!

Mrs. Laura Bush quotes our man GKC

Mrs. Bush quoted GKC at a National Book Festival.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, D.C.
7:16 P.M. EDT, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2008

MRS. BUSH: Thank you, Dr. Billington. Thank you, and the Library of Congress for hosting this beautiful evening for the eighth year in a row.

Welcome to the Eighth Annual National Book Festival. Tonight, we celebrate what G.K. Chesterton called "the mere brute pleasure of reading." Tomorrow, our celebration will continue on the National Mall. More than 70 authors, many of whom are here tonight, will tell the stories behind the books we love and introduce readers to new favorites. Thanks to the Library of Congress for organizing tomorrow's great festival. ...

H/T/: David Z.

A Chestertonian Teacher explains the Bentley Poem

H/T: Dale A.

Steve Knapp teaches English at Indian River State College in Ft. Pierce, Florida. He includes Chesterton in his courses. To help out his students, he has annotated Chesterton’s dedicatory poem to Bentley from The Man Who Was Thursday.

Today is a New Day

Poetry via norumbega:

G. K. Chesterton
When Plain Folk, such as you or I,
See the Sun sinking in the sky,
We think it is the Setting Sun,
But Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
Is not so easily misled.
He calmly stands upon his head,
And upside down obtains a new
And Chestertonian point of view,
Observing thus, how from his toes
The sun creeps nearer to his nose,
He cries with wonder and delight,
“How Grand the sunrise is to-night!”

by Oliver Herford
from Confessions of a Caricaturist

Complete Searchable Chesterton?

H/T: Ellen

It looks like there may be a searchable Chesterton database available. Has anyone ordered this or is anyone familiar with it?

Among many other things, it claims to have the "complete" works (112 books) of Chesterton on it, searchable by keyword, etc.

It looks like a terrific product.

India--NAP--oplis gets its very own Chesterton Society!!

Good news for Indianapolis! Your very own starter Chesterton group! Yeah for you! It is named Naptown Chestertonians, after the nickname (I presume?) for your city.

To join up, please visit the web site and email John M for questions or directions or finding out what will be discussed at the first meeting, or anything else.

GKC and Father O'Connor link talked about in England

From the blog:

For the Catholic boys of Bradford, Fr. Arthur Hinsley (later Archbishop and Cardinal) founded St. Bede's Grammar School (originally) near St. Patrick's church. His assistant was Father John O'Connor. Fr. O'Connor was a great friend of G.K. Chesterton who based his famous character, Father Brown, on this real priest.
St. Bede's daughter school was Cardinal Hinsley Grammar School for boys. As far as I am aware, this was always a school with lay staff and under the control of its only Headmaster, the late Walter Earnshaw. In the early 1980s Hinsley/Clitherow amalgamated to form Yorkshire Martyrs Collegiate School.
The link between G.K.Chesterton and Mgr. O'Connor and the much maligned Heckmondwike will be a future feature on this blog.

I'll keep an eye out for this "future feature".

National Post Defends Chesterton

From the National Post article:

T he New Yorker magazine recently got into all sorts of trouble for its satirical front cover cartoon depicting Barack Obama as an orthodox Muslim and his wife, Michelle, as a terrorist. Some people, it seems, simply can't take a joke. G. K. Chesterton could. Which is a good thing in that the British writer was the subject of a long and critical essay in the preceding issue of The New Yorker, in which the great man was accused of anti-Semitism and his Catholic religion painted with a strong, dull coat of condemnation.

It goes to Chesterton's reputation and influence that he's still being vilified even though he died in 1936. The dead only matter if they once spoke the truth.

Read the whole article, it's pretty good.
H/T: David Z.

More on the NewYorker, if you can stomach more

Ross Douthat takes Gopnik to task, his readers take Douthat to task, the combox takes everyone to task.

H/T: Dave Z.

A HUGE bunch of Clerihews

Billy Mills, a book blogger for the UK Guardian is looking for clerihews. Go join the fun.

More about Chesterton's beliefs from Dale Ahlquist

After someone commented that the official statement from the Weiner Library was not strong enough proof that Chesterton wasn't anti-Semitic, Dale responded:

I certainly agree it could have been better written, but if you read it again, it is clear enough. They don’t think he is anti-Semitic, but they admit he has a reputation of being anti-Semitic. This is pretty much 180 degrees opposite of what Gopnik says, who claims that “Jew-hating” is part of Chesterton’s very fabric. As much as we’d like the statement to be better, the point is that it comes from what can be considered the most “authorized” mouthpiece on anti-Semitism. And there are plenty more testimonials on Chesterton’s behalf – the greatest being his own life and words in which he abhors racial theories and defends the dignity of all human beings.

The controversy largely exists because Chesterton had the gall to also hold people accountable for their actions, and he did not give any exemptions to the Jews. Chesterton criticized everybody, but not for who they were but for things they said and did. No one got a free pass, and his criticisms of the Americans and the Germans and especially the English go much farther than anything he said about the Jews. Joseph Pearce sums it up in his biography of GKC, that Chesterton defended the Jews when they were oppressed, but criticized them when they were the oppressor (which is basically how he dealt with anybody).

Obviously, there are people – both Jews and non-Jews – who cannot abide the characterization that Jews were ever the oppressor and who regard any criticism of the Jews as anti-Semitism. The accusation in such cases is meaningless.

We’re going to have to devote an issue of Gilbert Magazine to this topic, and we will refute the charge on all accounts.

I wanted you to know this, and to know we'll do a future issue of Gilbert on this topic.

More Responses to the New Yorker (and I don't mean the Obama cover)

The American Chesterton Society's own William Oddie (speaker at the 2008 conference) was quoted in this unfavorable account of the New Yorker article by the British Catholic Herald as a counter to the 9/10ths of the article which repeats the same anti-Semite accusations. (H/T Ellen F.)

And Rod Dreher pipes in.

And I still take umbridge and will be commenting again soon. As soon as I finish reading the terribly long article of which I am only half way through due to a lack of interest on my part in reading the rest of the diatribe against the man I love and refuse to see that I myself cause disinterest in--Chesterton.

Taking Umbridge

New Yorker says:

But his core readers are mainly conservative pre-Vatican II types who are indignant about his neglect without stopping to reflect whether their own uncritical enthusiasm might have contributed to it.

I beg to differ. I personally am not a "conservative pre-Vatican II" anything. I'm not a liberal post-Vatican II anything either. And I don't know many Chestertonians who are either.

We are an extremely diverse group, I'd say. I am always amazed at the variety of people who show up at any Chesterton events: from truck drivers to nurses, to DC lobbyists to PhD Computer Scientists. From triple PhD Physics professors to homeschooling homemaking mothers. From Jew to Gentile, from Protestant to Catholic, from young to old, from Greek to Norwegian. There is nothing homogeneous about us, no category to fit us into, other than a mutual love of a certain large writer.

And to say that we, the American Chesterton Society are the contributing factor to Chesterton's lack of popularity today seems to me absolutely absurd. And offensive. Ridiculous. Paradoxical.

Commonweal thinks it is a mistake to defend the anti-Semitic allegations in the New Yorker Chesterton article.

Second Spring goes ahead and defends our man.

Vote for Chesterton!

The Summer Reading Program at Aquinas and More is asking for votes to narrow down the reading choices to the top three for the summer. Please go vote for Chesterton!

Thanks.

Finding More GKC

After you've read all the books, the novels, the plays, the poetry, the Illustrated London News and the autobiography, what's left of GKC's to read? Plenty.

You've still to read the Daily News, which are yet to be published as a collection, the New Witness and GKC's Weeklys that have yet to be collected. Some of these can be found in various on line sources, but no collection of any order has been made. Yet.

There is a way, though, to read some more Chesterton on line, if you know how. And I'm going to tell you the secret.

You go to the New York Times. You sign up for a free account. And you start searching under Chesterton, and put in a year, say, 1912. You will find a motherlode of more Chesterton available on line!

Happy Reading!

Biblical Research Tool includes the work of Chesterton and Belloc

I can't remember whether you've linked to this on the blog or not, or whether I might have seen it in the "Chesterton is Everywhere" category of Trifles in Gilbert magazine, but I wanted to make sure you heard about Biblia Clerus.
It's an awesome Biblical research tool published by the Congregation for Clergy at the Vatican. The link. It contains all sorts of commentaries on Scripture, and other useful tools such as Catechisms, Magisterial documents, Patristical sources, and more. You can download multiple language packages, which have various contents depending on what works have been translated into what languages (thus, there may be some Aquinas works available only in French from the Latin, for example). This includes packages of several ancient languages with Bible translations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Interestingly for us Chestertonians, under the English language package is a subheading entitled "Literature." Significantly, two authors have been included at this phase; whether more will be added later is unknown, but the first choices are telling: Chesterton and Belloc. Several of each author's works are available in full text, packaged with the download.

I thought you and your readers might find it interesting. The software is a remarkable asset in many respects. The addition of Chesterton is icing on the cake... and the revolution continues!

Thanks, Joe G.

In case your readers are not aware already, there exists a monthly based on Chesterton in Madrid, Spain. This publication is called "Chesterton" and is a magazine dedicated to current analysis based on Chesterton's common sense.

Thanks to reader: Rich

GKC on NYC

Why he will never visit.