It is a good day for the music of Hiroshi Yoshimura.
Music For Nine Post Cards
Preview
Thursday night: the dangers of Patreon intellectuals, how the wellness industry has spread into private education, the feel-good flattery of bloggers whose ad revenue depends on telling everyone, “Society demands too much of people like you,” and more.
Sign up for the GibbsClassical.com mailing list for a link to “Intellectual Honesty in an Age of Flattery.”
There Was No Other Header Image That Would Work For This One
The inexperienced man trusts human beings; the experienced man trusts human nature.
The inexperienced man finds common sense offensive and cruel; the experienced man knows the alternatives to common sense are crueler still.
My latest for CiRCE is a series of proverbs about experience.
In Loco Parentis
My lecture Thursday night, “Intellectual Honesty in an Age of Flattery,” will gloss an increasingly troublesome conception of the classical Christian classroom as “a safe space where none of my son’s ideas about god, politics, and video games are ever challenged.”
To sign up for the GibbsClassical.com mailing list and receive a link to this lecture, sign up here. Tell all your friends, too.
What The Wellness Industry Has Done To Us
Tom: How did you sleep last night?
Harry: Eh, not so great.
Tom: Did it take you a long time to fall asleep?
Harry: No.
Tom: Did you wake up often in the night?
Harry: No, it wasn’t that either.
Tom: Did you wake up early and have a hard time falling back to sleep?
Harry: No.
Tom: Were you plagued by bad dreams?
Harry: No.
Tom: Then what went wrong?
Harry: I mean, I slept for eight solid hours but it just wasn’t a transformative, restorative night of sleep that makes you wake up feeling whole, healthy, unified, energized, dynamic, and full of confidence.
Tom: I’ve never had a-
Harry: Honestly, the solution might be some organic cotton pajamas I saw on Instagram the other day. And a more guilt-free skin care routine.
The Best Film of 2020
For the record, there are two great filmmakers working today who happen to be Christians: Whit Stillman and John Patrick Shanley.
Shanley’s Wild Mountain Thyme was both weird and conventional, traditional and Shakespearean, and included a number of scenes so thematically rich, I was already looking forward to my third or fourth viewing. It has my vote for the best film of 2020.
Sing Night And Day
This song is overwhelmingly beautiful. Britten does more in these one hundred seconds than many other competent composers can accomplish in forty minutes.
Proverbial: Episode 46
After a month off, Proverbial is back. Available now, “A New Twist on an Old Favorite.” Up for consideration is Edmund Burke’s aphorism, “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish tempter and confined views.”
The Proverbial Air Max 90
More On Senior Thesis
“No thesis statement should be approved which merely calls for the government to make a new law or spend more money. Assuming the audience of a senior thesis is the high school student body, the only thesis statements that should be approved are those which an audience of high school students can personally, immediately respond to. Likewise, arguing that high schoolers should vote for political candidates in the future who will throw money at a certain cause should likewise be banned. Unfortunately, American politics now centers around the idea that other people should pay for things that I want and allowing students to make such arguments in front of their peers only perpetuates this problem.”
-from “Stopping a Mediocre Senior Thesis Before It Starts,” my latest for CiRCE
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. 