Tag: whaling

Lazy Sunday XXVII: Bric-a-Brac

The Portly Politico50 Comments

It’s been a pretty crazy week, and the weekend has only eased up slightly.  Last week’s Lazy Sunday was all about small town living, and about how valuable social peace is to maintaining a healthy society.

I’ve been harping on this idea a great deal lately.  Politics is an abyss, and staring into it for too long and too often starts to distort and twist one’s perspective.  In some ways, avoiding the topic twists the perspective of those who are not staring into the abyss, as I wrote about yesterday.  Nevertheless, it gets tiring—indeed, soul-sucking—to focus on politics constantly.

Additionally, I am increasingly in a state of despair about the ultimate direction of our nation and culture.  President Trump has been a welcome, God-given reprieve, but even his efforts have been repeatedly stymied, even by those within the party he remolded into his own image.  Even normal ideas are increasingly considered “radical,” and we can’t even discuss problems openly anymore in a polite setting.  I am a declinist by nature, but this is just ridiculous.

So, in the midst of this deepening despair—and this sense that, in abandoning God, He’s abandoned us to our fate—I’ve been trying to write more about lighter topics.  Perhaps it’s a bit of buoyant distraction as the ship slowly descends into the murky depths of irreversible darkness, or maybe it’s the recognition that there’s more to life than petty political squabbles (although most of those squabbles are increasingly theological battles for the soul of the West), but I’ve found that writing about Saturn is more enjoyable.

With that in mind, here’s a grab-bag of portly bric-a-brac:

  • “The Bull on the Roof” – I wrote this post on my phone—never an enjoyable endeavor—while watching my little niece and nephew one evening (they lived, so I guess I wasn’t too negligent).  It’s about a delightful little piece of classical music from 1920, before modern classical music turned into atonal trash and killed the genre.  I wish music composition schools were still churning out composers who could write stuff like this piece.
  • “Funcling” – I love being an uncle.  My little niece and two nephews are fun (and exhausting) to watch and to play with, and their imaginations are amazing.  This piece was about their obsession with pretending to be various Nintendo characters, mostly Kirby and sundry Pokemon.
  • “Summer Reading: The Story of Yankee Whaling” – I read this little book over the summer, and loved it.  Written for children in the late 1950s, the book is an historical overview of the defunct whaling industry, an industry that built and fueled New England and America.  They don’t write history like this anymore; now, the book would be full of hand-wringing about whales being endangered species due to overhunting.  None of that in this book:  whales are powerful creatures, and men need to make a living.  Adventure ensues.
  • “Saturn: The Creepiest Planet?” – Other than Earth, Saturn is the best planet (and, next to Earth, the creepiest, it seems).  I dream of being able to visit other planets.  In fact, I get perturbed when talking to scientists because they’re such buzzkills about space exploration.  “You would be crushed instantly, TPP, if you tried to fly into Saturn’s gaseous core” (even that sentence mocking them is probably riddled with errors to which they would object)—yeah, I know!  Let me suspend disbelief for a minute.  Better yet, come up with some solutions.  I’m sick of nerds telling me that putting plants and potting soil on the moon won’t terraform it.  Figure it out!  Aren’t we paying you to make science-fiction a reality?

That’s it for this week.  Don’t let politics suck your soul away.  Maybe God will hear our cries for help and do something; maybe not.  Regardless, spend time with family, read good books, and listen to good music—and try to enjoy yourself as the ship goes down.

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Lazy Sunday XXII: Reading

The Portly Politico54 Comments

Summer is drawing to a close, and with it free time for reading.  One of my enduring frustrations as a student was the lack of time to read what I enjoyed (even though my English and history courses in high school and college often presented me the opportunity to read many excellent works).

As an adult, the situation has improved only marginally, as work often eats up most of my time, both during the day and at night.  As a blogger and politics junkie, I also tend to read vast quantities of quick news stories and opinion pieces, while neglecting longer-form works that would be more satisfying.

Reading short articles on the Internet is like scarfing down a box of Cheez-Its:  it’s enjoyable in the moment, but it just raises my blood pressure and leaves me unfilled: an unhealthy indulgence in large quantities.  A good book, or even a well-crafted short story, is like a steak dinner:  filling, satisfying, and sustaining.

I’ve released two reading lists, in 2016 and 2019 (the full 2019 list is a SubscribeStar exclusive), but I thought this Sunday I’d feature some recent posts on books, short stories, and pieces I’ve enjoyed:

  • “McClay & Sheaffer on American History” – This piece examines a new American history textbook from Wilfred McClay, who once mailed me a copy of the Italian novel The Leopard after I wrote to him (he’d written about the book for a conservative publication).  My girlfriend’s father actually owns a copy of this book, and I had an opportunity to flip through its glossy pages while in New Jersey.  My post offers up an analysis of the state of American history education.
  • “Summer Reading: The Story of Yankee Whaling” – I was still in the process of reading The Story of Yankee Whaling, a fascinating account of America’s whaling heyday aimed at younger readers, when I wrote this post.  It was a charming—and hugely informative—book, which gave me access to an entire forgotten industry and its role in American history.  The book dealt with its subjects sympathetically and unapologetically; there is no hand-wringing about whether or not it was right to kill whales for their blubbery oil.  Instead, it simply detailed—and what thrilling detail!—the tough lives of whalers, and the gory particulars of their bloody, necessary trade.
  • “Reblog: Conan the Southerner?” – This post dealt with an interesting piece from the Abbeville Institute, a Southern history website with a strong Jeffersonian streak.  The original post details the influence of rural Texas and its mores upon the creation of the Conan the Barbarian character.  Strength, honor, integrity, hard work—these are the hard-won morals of the titular barbarian king, and they are deeply rooted in the Southern tradition.
  • “Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Mother Hive’” – my History of Conservative Thought class read this chilling short story one morning as an icebreaker.  It’s about the insidious infiltration of a dangerous foreign element into a proud but aging beehive.  The infiltrator—a wax-moth—fills the heads of the young bees with abstract claims of a utopian society, all-the-while laying its eggs and creating great strains on the hive.  Fewer healthy bees are born, much less willing to work to support the colony, so more and more work is shouldered by a diminishing number of healthy workers.  It all ends in a fiery blaze, with hope for the future, as a young Princess and her loyal retinue escape to rebuild.  Written in 1908, the story sounds like it describes the modern West today—a terrifying warning that, I fear, we have not heeded.

So, there you have it.  A little extra summertime reading for you before the academic year resumes.  Teachers at my school report back in the morning, and students are in the following week.  Yikes!  Where did the summer go?

Enjoy your Sunday,

TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Summer Reading: The Story of Yankee Whaling

The Portly Politico7 Comments

I released the Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2019 on my SubscribeStar page a few weeks ago, which features a few books I highly recommend.

After dashing off yesterday’s post on Sunday night, I picked up a little book I’ve had in my private collection for some years now, The Story of Yankee Whaling.  It’s part of the now-defunct American Heritage Junior Library series of history books for young readers, and it’s a charming little volume about the grand adventures and brutal lives of whalers in colonial and nineteenth-century America.

The first edition of the book was published in 1959, but my edition is a slender paperback edition from 1965.  It is rich in primary source documentation, as well as sketches and woodcuts from the high watermark of whaling.  The author is Irwin Shapiro, who worked closely with Edouard A. Stackpole, the then-curator of the Mystic Seaport Marine Historical Association in Mystic, Connecticut.

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