SubscribeStar Saturday: Compose-a-thon II: Movement

16 September 202310 September 2023 The Portly Politico7 Comments

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While working on Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids (coming to Bandcamp on Friday, 6 October 2023), I composed a couple of tracks that only somewhat related, “Meandering” and “Plodder.” These were pieces I’d written snippets of in my composing journal, but which were more or less experiments in unusual meters and concepts. “Plodder,” for example, is written to be intentionally muddy—lots of low-end bass notes and tight tone clusters, producing something akin to the effect of a small child or a cat leaning on the low keys of the piano:

I added in tuba and bass clarinet (the latter is quickly becoming my favorite, spooky sound) to drive home that thick, sludgy low-end sound.

“Plodder” fits the cryptid theme of the album a bit better of these two “movement”-inspired pieces. One could imagine Bigfoot or some zombie (are zombies cryptids?; maybe some variations would be considered as such) plodding slowly through the forests, although all the “footage” of “Bigfoot” I’ve seen seems to indicate he’s a fairly fast fellow.

Regardless, I found these two pieces particularly unusual and unorthodox, and opted to share them with you, my faithful subscribers, ahead of the album’s release.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Behind Every Great Man

2 September 20237 August 2023 The Portly Politico2 Comments

We’ve all heard the expression “behind every great man, there’s a great woman,” or some permutation of it (my personal favorite is Groucho Marx‘s: “behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife”). It’s a familiar expression because it’s generally true, even if not quite as universal as the word “every” suggests.

Just as a bad woman can lead to a man’s swift downfall—or, worse yet, years of misery and then a swift downfall—a good woman can support a man through his trials, and even make him king.

Such was the case of Margaret Beaufort, who, through a combination of skill, diplomacy, wealth, and mother love, guided her son Henry through the complicated and dangerous War of the Roses to emerge as King Henry VII, the first monarch of the Tudor Dynasty.

Her bravery, tenacity, and sheer luck safeguarded her son through a lengthy exile, and ultimately to the height of power. Her grandson, Henry VIII, would become the most powerful English monarch of his age, so much so that modern historians frequently regard him as a tyrant.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Folly of King Edward VIII

26 August 20234 August 2023 The Portly Politico4 Comments

One of my favorite passages of Scripture is Proverbs 31:10-31, the famous passage about the qualities of a good woman. As verse 10 reads, “Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies.” The implication is that a true “Proverbs 31 Woman” is a rare and precious thing.

Based on earlier chapters of Proverbs, which extensively detailed the dangers of a wanton floozy, it’s pretty clear that a bad woman can be quite destructive. Proverbs 7:6-23 is an entire cautionary tale about a foolish young man who dies when a harlot stabs him after a night of passion!

Too many men (myself included) fall for the allure of a pretty face, which is probably why there are three or four chapters in Proverbs warning us off of them (and only one chapter about a good woman).

Such is the potentially corrosive effect of a loose woman that one nearly destroyed a monarchy. The short-reigned King Edward VIII, who ruled in 1936 for barely eleven months.

The controversy over King Edward VIII’s decision to marry a twice-divorced woman (still married at the time of Edward’s abdication in December 1936), Wallis Simpson, threatened the House of Windsor, and nearly resulted in a constitutional crisis for the British Empire.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Mostly Peaceful Politics

19 August 20235 August 2023 The Portly Politico1 Comment

Lately I’ve been listening to a number of historical biographies from The People Profiles, an excellent YouTube channel that produces incredibly balanced, detailed biographies of historical figures. The videos are always very well done, and the channel hosts a stable of exquisite narrators with British accents.

My absolute favorites are their biographies of English monarchs (at the time of this writing, they’ve just posted a video about King Charles II, which I am excited to listen to soon). What strikes me about these monarchs is that, even as rulers, they dealt with constantly shifting political landscapes that would make our current politics look tame by comparison.

It wasn’t like these monarchs were sitting back and eating grapes (I mean, they probably did do that stuff); they constantly had to balance the needs of their people; their ornery nobility; and their expensive foreign policies (which typically meant “expensive foreign wars”). Add to that rebellions, assassination attempts, succession crises, and all the rest, and it quickly makes one thankful for a relatively peaceful and predictable political order.

At the same time, there is something enviable about monarchical rule. A bad king could cause a great deal of damage—and many bad kings did just that to England—but could also be identified easily as the source of a nation’s woes. Dealing with a tyrannical monarch, in some ways, was far easier than dealing with a tyrannical bureaucracy.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Floozy Report

12 August 202327 July 2023 The Portly Politico4 Comments

As yours portly edges ever closer to forty, something interesting has happened: I have suddenly—apparently!—become irresistible to the ladies.

I am as mystified as you, my dear readers. All I can figure is all the babes have finished riding The Carousel in their twenties and find a chubby, tall, financially stable beta male an attractive prospect.

The point of this piece, however, is not to brag about my sudden abundance of single ladies in their early-to-mid-thirties hankering for some doughy man-meat. Rather, it’s to document the state of the dating world today, and to identify for the curious reader the types of women that find themselves—like yours portly—cruising dating apps for a chance at love.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Back-to-School Update 2023

5 August 202324 July 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Yours portly is not quite back to teaching just yet, but I am back to work. That means I’m entering into this odd period of quasi-work before the storm of the school year begins. It’s a kind of ramping up to the main event, but I’ve been teaching for so long, it feels a bit more like spinning my wheels.

Whatever the case, I’m no longer allowed to enjoy leisurely mornings, and have to be somewhere other than home during an arbitrary stretch of hours that another person dictates. In other words, I’m doing what everyone else does year-round.

With school looming, some of my projects and their output will slow down a bit, but I do have a few updates to share with subscribers, some of which will interest them greatly (or, at the very least, slightly), including my next book project idea.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Washington, D.C. Trip Part VI: Arlington, Holocaust Museum, Home

29 July 202324 July 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

After a hairy night of elevator-related shenanigans, everyone was pretty ready to hit the road. That said, we still had a long hike through Arlington National Cemetery, followed by a trip to the Holocaust Museum, before heading home to South Carolina.

Sadly, it appears I lost the photographs I took at Arlington National Cemetery, as well as the powerful World War II Memorial from the previous night. It’s a shame, because it’s a humbling and breathtaking place. The cemetery is massive, with graves everywhere; even so, it is running out of space.

We chanced upon the changing of the guard ceremony, where the guards stand vigil over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Our tour group was a bit late hiking up the hill to the Tomb, but our students managed to position themselves in such a way as to witness the guards perform the ceremony.

Even with our typically rambunctious group and dozens of other school groups, it was very quiet. After two long days of trying to explain to them why these places were sacred, the awe and reverence of Arlington did more to quiet their ever-running mouths more than any of my self-righteous jeremiads ever could.

Following the quiet, contemplative morning at Arlington, we had a quick lunch at a mall food court, then headed to the Holocaust Museum—a sobering final coda to our trip.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Washington, D.C. Trip Part V: Elevator Shuffle

22 July 202313 July 2023 The Portly Politico4 Comments

I’m finally getting back to this series about a late-March 2023 trip my school’s ninth- and tenth-graders took to Washington, D.C. I put it on hold due to a number of factors, few of which I can recall anymore. Travel posts with tons of pictures are always a bit time-consuming (even as I’m realizing I don’t have any pictures for this post—d’oh!), and the end of the school year likely left me with inadequate time. Whatever the reasons—lame or otherwise—I’m continuing the saga of the field trip that nearly made me quit education for good.

Our school trip to Washington, D.C., was going pretty well up to this point. Despite the kids being knuckleheads and talking over the tour guide, we were at least herding them efficiently from one place to another on this rather frenetic trip around our nation’s capital.

What struck me on this trip is how little common sense teenagers possess. I should know this truth by now, having taught fourteen-to-sixteen-year olds for over a decade. Still, some lingering bit of vestigial optimism clings stubbornly to my mind, and I always think they know better.

Nothing dissuaded me of that incorrect notion more than what happened when we got back to the hotel that second night in D.C., and a group of rowdy teens overloaded an elevator.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Chicago

15 July 202312 July 2023 The Portly Politico1 Comment

Here at The Portly Politico, I like to roleplay as some kind of Jeffersonian country squire, overseeing my little homestead while contemplating the grape harvest. As much as I love living in a small, country town, yours portly is not immune to the allure of the big city.

Naturally, I have little desire to live in one, and most certainly not the one that is the topic of today’s post. However, there is a vibrancy and energy to large cities that is intoxicating, especially for those of an artistic bent. Cities can be cesspools of crime, homelessness, and progressive politics, but they also pulse with an electric creativity and a sense of hustle—everyone is working hard to survive and create in a sea of humanity.

Granted, I don’t want to live in an overpriced shoebox, isolated by the sheer size of that very sea. Some people thrive in that environment, while others should probably live on forty acres in the woods somewhere. The rest of us are somewhere in the middle. Most Americans don’t want to live like lab rats in an urban playground.

All that aside, cities are cool—the seats of civilization, as Milo once argued. Despite its crime-ridden reputation, I think Chicago, Illinois makes for a good illustration of cities as the centers of art and architecture—of civilization. After all, what is a civilization but the expression of its cultural achievements? Few cities exemplify achievements in architecture more than that great epicenter of nineteenth-century America, Chicago.

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Lazy Sunday CCX: MAGAWeek2023 Posts

9 July 202329 June 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Well, another MAGAWeek is in the books. It was a star-spangled affair, with biographies of four important historical figures (one of recent vintage, the others from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). $5 and up subscribers also got three bonus editions of Sunday Doodles (here, here, and here).

Of course, to get access to my four detailed biographies—as well as all past MAGAWeek posts—it’s just $1 a month. One measly buck! As of the time of this writing, there are 429 posts on my SubscribeStar page, over half of which are available for just $1 a month. At $5 a month, it comes out to one cent per post as of right now, and I’m adding new content every single week (with rare exceptions).

Even at just $1 a month, and assume (conservatively) that you only get access to half of the posts (about 215 posts), it works out to just $0.0047 per post—less than a half-cent per post!

At $12 a year—the price of a single, one-topping large pizza—you can a.) support your favorite chubby content creator and b.) gain access to an ever-growing library of long-form essays. For $60 a year—what most of us pay for Internet access for one month—you get everything—doodles (which often contain additional commentary), bonus doodles, bonus posts, exclusive election coverage posts, etc., etc.

Thanks to those who have donated and subscribed in the past. Please help spread the word!

“MAGAWeek2023: John Taylor Gatto” (SubscribeStar) – John Taylor Gatto was a major figure in the homeschooling and “unschooling” movements, and highlighted the insidious nature of compulsory education in the twentieth century and today.
“MAGAWeek2023: George Whitefield” (SubscribeStar) – A somewhat forgotten figure now, George Whitefield was a celebrity evangelist in his day, and brought revival to England and British North America (the colonies).
“MAGAWeek2023: Benjamin Franklin” (SubscribeStar) – The quintessential, living embodiment of the spirit of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin’s long and varied career is an inspiration to Americans to the present.
“MAGAWeek2023: James Madison” (SubscribeStar) – Short and shy, what James Madison lacked in stature he made up for with political brilliance.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Category: SubscribeStar Saturday

SubscribeStar Saturday: Washington, D.C. Trip Part V: Elevator Shuffle