A Link
To a rambling conversation
Girofle (Tredi), 3 Messidor, CCXXXIV
Over at Sesame and Lilies, Eugene McCarraher and I have posted our latest conversation, this time (disappointingly, perhaps) with only one another. Various scheduling complications have forced us to put off our next proper interview—which will be with the historian Tom Holland—until July. Our apologies. I thought, though, that it might prove amusing to some of you.
The post’s description is as follows:
Due to certain shifts in various schedules, our conversation with Tom Holland (the historian, not Spider Man) will appear later in July; but we thought we should catch up in the interval, with one another and with the circumstanding world. Our conversation ranged far and wide, covering such topics as our deplorable indolence, Gene’s forthcoming book Automated Vistas, Thomism, the nature of capitalism, Rad-Trad-Catholicism, cannabis as opposed to bourbon, bourbon as opposed to cannabis, the misnomer “post-industrial”, Greeks, Nigerian Greeks, Kenyan Greek Demigoddesses, Homer, Helen of Troy, the infinitely repellant J. D. Vance, Vance’s ingenuity in finding his way to Catholicism while scrupulously avoiding any contact with Christianity, the hyenas of Brideshead Revisited, why so many culture warriors are so uncultured, why so many self-appointed champions of Western Civilization are so eerily ignorant of Western Civilization, Lupita N’yongo’s entrancing smile, ethno-nationalism, the Kalevala, the nature of myth, why DBH blew his stack or flipped his wig or lost his cool at Jonathan Pageau, THC, the unbearable lightweightness of Jonathan Pageau’s mind, racism, cosmopolitanism, and much much much more…
"Some of my best friends are my wife" is a great line.
I appreciate your diss of Brideshead Revisited. As an incurably Anglophilic gay man, I was charmed by the youthful romance of the early chapters. But it quickly devolves into tendentious, reactionary drivel. The book would’ve remained merely a disappointment, however, had I not discovered the existence of a subculture of “traditional” British gay men who embrace the novel as some kind of manual for living. That elevated the book from merely obnoxious to actively pernicious in my eyes.