SubscribeStar Saturday: Festival in the Park

30 September 202327 September 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

‘Tis festival season, and yours portly is living it up. In just a couple of weekends I’ll be hawking my humble wares at the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival, which will be either my Hastings or my Gallipoli.

Before I return to my spot inside the tent, however, I’m enjoying experiencing festivals from outside. The coming of autumn means it is the height of festival season, and yours portly couldn’t be happier.

After a successful visit to the Columbia Greek Festival two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to take in Charlotte, North Carolina’s Festival in the Park last weekend. It is, perhaps, the best festival I’ve attended in recent years.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Columbia Greek Festival

23 September 202317 September 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Festival season is back in full swing, and yours portly couldn’t be happier. Festivals—like everything good, fun, and wholesome—took a hit in The Age of The Virus, but I’m pleased to report they are back with a vengeance.

Yours portly had the opportunity to enjoy the Columbia Greek Festival last Saturday, 16 September 2023 (with some agreeable female company), and it was packed. As I noted to my companion, “I love it and I hate it.” I love seeing the throngs of unwashed (sometimes literally) humanity sauntering around aimlessly in amorphous blobs of sweat and excitement. I also hate waiting in lines and being around amorphous blobs of sweat and excitement.

But it’s encouraging to see people eating gyros and baklava. It’s heartening to see little kids scampering about recklessly. It’s cool hearing upbeat Greek dance music. There was even the Orthodox priest running around, looking like a harried Rasputin, complete with a massive Apple Watch on his bony wrist.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Compose-a-thon II: Movement

16 September 202310 September 2023 The Portly Politico7 Comments

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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Phone it in Friday XLII: An Appeal to Readers

25 August 20231 August 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

The following is an adaption of an e-mail I sent to paid subscribers on 1 August 2023. I’m working hard to provide quality content on a daily basis, and am hoping to increase my subscribers. There are real financial costs associated with maintaining The Portly Politico, and ad revenue does not come close to covering those costs. Subscriptions are what keep the blog self-sustaining; without them, it would require a substantial financial outlay from yours portly to keep the blog going.

There is also a substantial amount of time that goes into maintaining the blog. It takes hours each week to write, edit, and promote the blog and my related ventures. Subscriptions certainly help financially, yes, but they also motivate me to keep going. I want to provide a quality product in exchange for your hard-earned dollars. It is difficult, at times, to churn out post after post, day after day.

As conservatives, we should support conservative creators. The Left is eating our lunch in the culture wars (well, they were until everyone started waking up in the last couple of years) in large part because they support their own. Maybe it’s not me you choose to support, but I would be humbled to receive your support. Remember, Ben Shapiro, Turning Point, Dennis Prager, etc., etc., have plenty of resources already.

As the below e-mail/post relates, I am a good steward of the money sent my way. I don’t blow it on fancy parties or glossy promos. I use it to maintain the blog and to obtain necessary supplies, and occasionally to commission works from other creators for the blog.

Thank you for taking the time to read this appeal. Even if you are not in a place to subscribe, please forward this message to others who might be interested. Every little bit helps.

Regards,

TPP

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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Offensive Poems: With Pictures Preview: “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial” & “Space Frog”

9 August 20239 August 2023 The Portly Politico10 Comments

The following is a re-posting of this past Sunday’s edition of Sunday Doodles (Sunday Doodles CXCV), which is normally a perk for $5 and up subscribers to my SubscribeStar Page. The post serves as a preview, of sorts, to the kind of content that will make up (I hope!) my third book, tentatively entitled Offensive Poems: With Pictures. I thought I’d bring it to the masses—you, my beloved free subscribers and daily readers—to get feedback—and to let you in on this new project. —TPP

Typically, Sunday Doodles is reserved for the classy $5 and up subscribers, while $3 a month gets the first Sunday of the month to gawk at doodles. However, I’m opening this post up to all subscribers.

That’s because this weekend’s edition of Sunday Doodles features a preview of my current book project, Offensive Poems: With Pictures. This project started almost by accident—I was doodling at an open mic night on Tuesday, 18 July 2023, and started sketching people around me. Two nights later—Thursday, 20 July 2023—at another open mic, I drew “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial”; he prompted me to write the haiku “Learn to Code.”

That got me thinking: what if I wrote a red-pilled haiku for every doodle? I was already toying with the idea of writing poems to accompany each doodle, but I wasn’t thinking of making them a satirical commentary on the strange times in which we find ourselves. Now, I can’t stop coming up with pithy verses about the various sacred cows and empty bromides of our time. It’s remarkable how many Leftist slogans are seven-syllables, which works great for that second line of each haiku.

Why haiku? I like the challenge of stating a complex sets of ideas in seventeen syllables. The structure of a haiku—five syllables in the first and third lines, seven syllables in the second/middle line—means I have to be extremely efficient with words.

And, to be totally honest, I just find haiku easier to work with than other poetic forms. It offers enough flexibility in terms of rhythm, meter, etc., for a hedge-poet like myself to play around with. Once I have to worry about iambic pentameter, for example, and stressed and unstressed syllables, it’s a bit too much for yours portly.

That said, I wanted some form, as I find most free verse to be too loose. There is something to be said for structure, as it forces me to think intentionally about every word. Also, I find that much free verse quickly becomes indistinguishable from prose. Much of it seems like prose writing with random or mildly clever line breaks.

So! Enough rambling. Let’s get to the doodles!

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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The Portly Politico

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

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