Attention Poets: Blog Poetry Contest

Sheila, at My Enchiridion, is conducting a poetry contest in honor of Christmas.

She, like Chesterton, prefers poems that rhyme. Although she doesn't mind free verse as long as it isn't completely random.

You may submit up to three poems.

Sheila The Famous, is also known for her Triolet Contest last year, which resulted in many good and popular triolets. Some of which received the honor of publication in Gilbert Magazine, after being published on My Enchiridion.

Now, let's get those creative juices going and make some Christmas poetry!

The Bohemian Catholic Likes our Latest Gilbert

You can read her post here and comment if you wish. I'm taking my Gilbert on the road with me today and hope to devour it while passing the pastoral scenes of southeastern Wisconsin on our way to Madison to put up a relative's tree.

Happy Tuesday! One week till Christmas!

Welcome Italia!

The Italian Chesterton Society Blog is here. If you know Italian, you're good. If not, you'll need a translation page.

Thursday's Dr. Thursday Post

The Wind: Setting the Volume to Max

As I have mentioned in last week's posting, there are a lot of memories connected with September. It was in September of 1969 when I first picked up a bow and began to learn the bass fiddle, also called the double-bass or string bass, the largest of the orchestral strings.

It was a lot of fun... I was never very good, but I did play in the high school stage band, and also in the string ensemble at college. That first practice we began with Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" and it was so awesome that I forgot to play, I was just so amazed by being "inside" the orchestra.

But my playing the string bass had another outcome: a good friend who is now the organist of a cathedral. He provided the musical talent when I built the pipe organ in my basement, and played at its first (and only) recital. From him, from our music teacher at high school, from a number of books, and from direct experience, I learned a lot about pipe organs, which have some strange associations with computers. Computer scientists aren't the only ones who care about numbers like 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1 - but organists must also deal with two-and-two-thirds and one-and-three-fifths, the so-called "mutation" stops, which we can talk about another time.

The first thing one learns about the pipe organ is that it is two major parts: a collection of pipes sitting on a box full of compressed air (the "wind chest"), and machinery to control them (keyboards, stops, and so on). One must have at least five dozen pipes - because each pipe can make only one sound. An organ pipe is not like a flute or clarinet, which has a number of holes, and various keys covering those holes. In an organ, the music comes by having a "rank" - a set of 61 pipes, each made as similarly as possible to the others, except for its size - one for each of the 61 keys of the standard organ keyboard. (That's five octaves and a note, from the "C" 2 ledgers below the bass clef to the second "C" above the staff.)

Most organs have several ranks of pipes. Each rank will have its own shape, which gives that rank its particular "timbre" or tonal quality... again this amazing topic is something for another time.

But I tell you about this very high "system" view of the pipe organ for this purpose: all the keyboards and other various switches (called stop knobs or tabs) are arranged simply in order to control getting the "wind" (the compressed air) to each single pipe. The particular key pressed determines which size pipe - what pitch. The stop knob selects which rank of pipes - what tonal quality. Obviously, when you press several keys, you play a chord, and notes sound in harmony (let us hope!). And, when you pull out more than one stop, you get an increased and mixed tonal effect. This is the origin of the phrase - "pulling out all the stops" - which is called "full organ". In rock and roll, it is called setting the amps to "ten" ("eleven" if you are in "Spinal Tap"). The first album of the rock group "Rush" directs the listener to "set the volume to maximum for best results" (See here for more on that.)

Now it may seem surprising to go into such details about music on a Chesterton blogg. It is said that he was nearly tone-deaf: "Yet it was all but impossible to teach Gilbert a tune, and Bernard Shaw felt this (as we have seen) a real drawback to his friend's understanding of his own life and career. Music was to Shaw what line and color were to Chesterton; but to Chesterton singing was just making a noise to show he felt happy." [Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 276, my emphasis] Father O'Connor, perceptive and careful, applies the scholastic distinguo: "[He] was tone-deaf, though most sensitive to musical rhythm or tempo. [O'Connor, Father Brown on Chesterton, 21, my emphasis]

But as usual Chesterton understood a lot more than we think.

To hear more about this, pull out all the stops and click here...


I think GKC would have greatly approved of the instructions from "Rush", or the "eleven" on the amps of "Spinal Tap" - because - of all things - he understood just what really happened on Palm Sunday.

Now, if that sounds like a Father Brown riddle, perhaps you have not yet read Tremendous Trifles, which is again available! Here is the solution:

I remember a debate in which I had praised militant music in ritual, and some one asked me if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band. I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment. When the street children shouted too loud, certain priggish disciples did begin to rebuke them in the name of good taste. He said: "If these were silent the very stones would cry out." [GKC, "The Tower" in Tremendous Trifles, quoting Luke 19:40, my emphasis]

As usual, there is something more to be discovered, if one takes the time. This is an example of where saying the Rosary can pay off - careful reading of Scripture, or real attention at Holy Mass have equal effects, but the Rosary is designed (ah, let use keep to our musical theme) to compose variations on a basso ostinato.

On that Sunday before Passover, as the palms were strewn and the children raised their voices, there was something more than just making noise - there was, to use a modern term, an advertisement, an attention-getter. Specifically the cheers and cries of "Hosanna!" called attention to something going on - to a piece of news - to a new event.

And, if one takes a look at the events exactly eight weeks later, one finds the exact same thing happening. But this time, the sound had a rather different origin:

And when the days of the Pentecost were accomplished, [the Apostles] were all together in one place: And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming: and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. [Acts 2:1-2, emphasis added]

Wow. Talk about setting the volume to max!

Here we see that Someone has controlled the wind! The master Organist of the Universe has "pulled out all the stops" in order to call attention to something new. ("Behold, I make all things new." [Rv 21:5])

This new wind is so powerful, and yet so subtle that Chesterton could not help but call upon it in his own writing:

"How The Great Wind Came To Beacon House"

A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon and astonished him like a blow. In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read Treasure Island and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconsciousness she half remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint cloud far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or curate, plodding a telescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes of a hearse, when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings. There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobody harm. [GKC, Manalive, first chapter]

As you may have expected, I bring all this up for a purpose. For in just over a week, the date of October 7 shall again occur on a Sunday, as it did in 1571, when the young Don John of Austria defeated the galleys of the Turks in the historic battle of Lepanto. That Sunday morning, he had small hope for victory - the Turkish fleet was far larger; the forces of the West were hodge-podge, barely united under Don John's command. Their hope, such as it was, was based on the plea of the Pope, who had asked for prayers to be said - in particular, the prayer of the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, wherein the various mysteries of the birth, life, death and glorification of Jesus the God-Man are recalled.

The records tell of the dramatic moment after Holy Mass, soon after sunrise, when the forces of the West rowed into the wind, towards the sun, in the battle-array of a cross - facing the west-sailing galleys arranged in the Crescent of the Turks....

But then! Ah, how to make this pivot dramatic... Then as the historian Beeching puts it in a paragraph of just five short words:

And then the wind changed.

The wind swung into the west (as it did on Beacon Hill for Innocent Smith!) aiding Don John and thwarting the Turks - and hope sprang up for the forces of the Cross.

Yes, that battle was won. But we must still face evil - not fearful galleys on a sunrise sea - but the hidden Powers of Darkness. They continue to assault our world, our country, our cities, our families, our own lives - not with swords or guns, but with every spiritual weapon, to destroy peace, wipe out hope, darken faith, quench love.

Where can we go for aid?

"And they came to him, and awaked him, saying: 'Lord, save us, we perish'." [Mt 8:25]

We must pray - we must ask for the Spirit of light, of strength, of love. We must again appeal to the One Who directs the wind, Who came upon the Apostles in tongues of fire!

And Jesus saith to them: "Why are you fearful, O ye of little faith?" Then rising up, he commanded the winds, and the sea, and there came a great calm. But the men wondered, saying: "What manner of man is this, for he winds and the sea obey him?" [Mt 8:26-27]

So, please join in the nine day novena of the Rosary, starting this Saturday, September 29, and continuing to Sunday October 7.

Dr. Thursday's Thursday Post

Last week - it being the week containing that date "among the most famous in history" - I recounted, in a half-fictional form, my own memories of that day in 2001. I prefaced it by saying that "September is rich in memories, for many reasons..." It is the month when many of us went back to school - even if, once we were in college, we had to return in August. For me, it is connected with work (I mean employment) in one very special way - yesterday, September 19, marked the thirtieth anniversary of my starting work in computing. I left that job long ago, and the company was sold back in the 1980s, but so many of my best memories of work are there. Some real triumphs, some horrible failures, some rude awakenings - as usual for most of us.

Ahem. But this is NOT my blogg - if you wish to know a bit more you can go here where I tell a bit about that first day.

Four years before, September was the month when I first began to write computer programs - punching cards on the old keypunch machines at the school-which-must-not-be-named, with their two-million dollar computer designed by Seymour Cray (a name as great to me in computing as GKC is!)...

But there is another memory which is recalled by September - a memory from much further back than 1977, and which was renewed in me by another blogg-item (to be mentioned at the very end of this post). It was that day in 1962 when, just after lunch, my second-grade teacher told us she was going upstairs to the third grade, and the third-grade teacher was coming to teach us. This was something new.

So the third-grade teacher came in, and she picked up some strange little something (I did not really know what it was) and went up to the blackboard and moved her hand...

And there appeared not ONE line - but FIVE lines at once.

Then on top of those she drew a something, a strange shape, a wonderful shape, something I had never seen before - a shape, as I would now say, which is NOT an ASCII character, so I cannot type it. It was the shape we call the "treble" or G-clef.

As you know, the word "clef" comes from the Latin clavis or key. The "key" is key to all kinds of things, not just music, not just computing. It was important to Chesterton also.

To read more, press your mouse "key" here...

The key is the framing symbol to GKC's autobiography. The second chapter is called "The Man with the Golden Key" and the last is called "The God With the Golden Key". It will be best if I let GKC speak here:

The very first thing I can ever remember seeing with my own eyes was a young man walking across a bridge. He had a curly moustache and an attitude of confidence verging on swagger. He carried in his hand a disproportionately large key of a shining yellow metal and wore a large golden or gilded crown. The bridge he was crossing sprang on the one side from the edge of a highly perilous mountain chasm, the peaks of the range rising fantastically in the distance; and at the other end it joined the upper part of the tower of an almost excessively castellated castle. In the castle tower there was one window, out of which a young lady was looking. I cannot remember in the least what she looked like; but I will do battle with anyone who denies her superlative good looks.

[all the intervening chapters are here omitted]

This story, therefore, can only end as any detective story should end, with its own particular questions answered and its own primary problem solved. Thousands of totally different stories, with totally different problems have ended in the same place with their problems solved. But for me my end is my beginning, as Maurice Baring quoted of Mary Stuart, and this overwhelming conviction that there is one key which can unlock all doors brings back to me the first glimpse of the glorious gift of the senses; and the sensational experience of sensation. And there starts up again before me, standing sharp and clear in shape as of old, the figure of a man who crosses a bridge and carries a key; as I saw him when I first looked into fairyland through the window of my father's peep-show. But I know that he who is called Pontifex, the Builder of the Bridge, is called also Claviger, the Bearer of the Key; and that such keys were given him to bind and loose when he was a poor fisher in a far province, beside a small and almost secret sea.
[GKC Autobiography CW16:39, 330-1]

It would be futile for me to attempt an analysis of the word "key" in all its wonderful senses, even if I merely limit my study to the works of GKC. If one is curious to read more, especially in the application of "key" to things like the Petrine Commission in Matthew 16:19, I would advise consulting Fr. Jaki's wonderful little book called The Keys of the Kingdom: a Tool's Witness to Truth available from Real View Books - yes, as a careful scholar and deep Chestertonian, he quotes GKC to advantage!

But there is one powerful Chesterton quote which Jaki does not mention. Perhaps because it comes in the masterwork which forms the "head of the corner" to GKC's conversion, and Jaki's work, dealing with the Papal office as it does, did not require this particular analysis. I should here point out, as GKC does in his preface, that "It is impossible, I hope, for any Catholic to write any book on any subject, above all this subject, without showing that he is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians..." [CW2:141] And those of you who have suffered through my lengthy ramblings may perhaps sense how I've tried to proceed in that manner. Ahem! In any case, let us hear GKC's keynote discussion of the keys:

Christ founded the Church with two great figures of speech; in the final words to the Apostles who received authority to found it. The first was the phrase about founding it on Peter as on a rock; the second was the symbol of the keys. About the meaning of the former there is naturally no doubt in my own case; but it does not directly affect the argument here save in two more secondary aspects. It is yet another example of a thing that could only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and even long afterwards. And it is yet another example of something the very reverse of simple and self-evident even in the language, in so far as it described a man as a rock when he had much more the appearance of a reed. But the other image of the keys has an exactitude that has hardly been exactly noticed. The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art and heraldry of Christendom; but not every one has noted the peculiar aptness of the allegory. We have now reached the point in history where something must be said of the first appearance and activities of the Church in the Roman Empire; and for that brief description nothing could be more perfect than that ancient metaphor. The Early Christian was very precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key. It was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept along with it similar or dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement. As we shall see in a moment, it rather definitely refused to do so. It definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as you please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty. The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it differs from all that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which makes a sort of pool of night in the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of uncreating all the creatures. That is where it differs also from the analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism; the idea of creatures constantly losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed. But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting in his pocket, and branching into new wards or complications, would not be more gratified. Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of abstractions; in that sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simpler key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar. And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and corners. The problem itself was a complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve anything so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored and unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers in all directions. If the faith had faced the world only with the platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum. What it did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex; indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.
[GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:346-7]

Indeed - no relativistic view of words can by any means whatsoever permit access to your computer if you press the wrong key when you type your password! As in DNA, as in music, as in computers - "not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter shall pass away..."

--Dr. Thursday

P.S. Just in case you are wondering what it was that linked all these thoughts together, please see the lovely picture on Nancy Brown's blogg, which shows Pope Benedict XVI at the keys...

An Essay to read

John is a young Chestertonian, who attended the conference in 06 (and is one of the instigators of the shortcut "ChesterCon").

GK Chesterton: The Patron Saint of Working Writers?

Apparently, a Chestetonian is about to graduate and become a free lance writer, which seems Chestertonian.

And now: The Bloggin' Editor: Sean Dailey!

Sean's new blog, go check it out.

Chesterton Stuff on the Web

I wanted to let you know that Rich is putting up some GK's Weekly articles on his website for those interested in seeing some Chesterton that's nowhere else on the 'net. Here are the articles:

Wanted - More Homes
On Direct Action
An Excerpt From the Horror
More Hints On Free Speech
On Mr. Wells And Mr. Belloc
The Fortress of Property

Click on the link and scroll to the right side bar and down a ways, and you can read any of the above articles. Rich is also working on a book about Chesterton and distributism, doing research over at Christendom where the copies of GK's Weekly have a home.

Using Modern Technology...

The link above takes you to a slide show put together by the The ChesterBelloc Mandate Distributist Blog. Good job, guys.

St. Louis gets a blog of its own

Check it out here. Congratulations, St. Louis!

Max and Gilbert

Denny has a wonderful post up about Max Beerbohm and GK Chesterton. The part that made a tiger of jealousy rise within me, though, was where Denny says he was "perusing the G.K. Chesterton folders in the British Museum a couple of years ago". This is a secret wish of mine, and Denny's already done it! Lucky guy. Go read his post, it's wonderful.

Neat Coincidence Discovered by Chestertonian Detective Joe

H/T: Joe

This past Thursday, I had a little epiphany about the significance this year of the liturgical calendar as it lines up with the Conference schedule. It's a neat little coincidence, you might want to say something about on the ACS blog. I posted my own reflection on my own site: http://joegrabowski.blogspot.com/

The oddity is this: that Chesterton died on June 14, the Sunday in the Octave of Corpus Christi (a Thursday in England); and the conference will begin June 14, a Thursday withing the Octave of Corpus Christi (which we celebrate today, Sunday.)

I can imagine GKC and Aquinas having quite a chuckle together over the fittingness of it all: and when the conference itself is all about the relations between Thursday and Sunday!

Young guy quoting Chesterton

I read a bit of his blog, good stuff.

Dawn Eden on the Radio talking about the Chesterton Conference

I'm happy to report that going to be on Gus Lloyd's "Seize the Day" show this Monday on Sirius Catholic Chanel at 6:40 a.m. Eastern and have told the producer I'd like to discuss the Chesterton conference and what I'll be speaking about there. Could you mention it on any Chesterton blogs with which you're involved? I believe readers can get free three-day online Sirius memberships at http://www.siriusradio.com, where they should be able to hear the Catholic Channel. Thanks!

Gabrie-Ale inspired poetry

by Nick Milne (past Gilbert & Frances Scholarship award winner).

Now hear of the hundreds so hearty and hale
Who drunk of the dregs of the Gabri-ale;
Who shouted for glory and clenchèd their fists,
And cried out, "good heavens, that flavour persists!"

They quaffed it like water and praised it like wine;
They called it exquisite; they said it was fine;
They toasted the Pope and the Infant on high,
And they fought with the earth and eloped with the sky.

And each man, sincerely, who had drunk so well:
"I alone have escaped to tell."

Well, Nick, we'll miss you again this year. But thanks for the poetry.

For the Ale Drinkers

Emily Post on Literary Etiquette

Of course, Chesterton is always right for the guest room bedside table. ;-)
Hat tip: Denny

Another Chestertonian Blog (with a funny name)

Hebdomadal?!! OH! Now I get it.