1. Thinking of 50s-era educational shorts this week made me wonder: they’re usually described as ‘cheesy’ or ‘corny’. What does this mean? What constitutes corn?

The heirs of Webster define it as “mawkishly old-fashioned : tiresomely simple and sentimental“. Fair enough, but what is the positive contrary? Up-to-date, sophisticated, and rational, I suppose. Though that doesn’t really work, since ‘up-to-date’ is a quality that by definition cannot be maintained, and as noted the shorts often were quite sophisticated and rational in their material, allowing for the subject matter and target audience (see, for instance, this short on political Propaganda).

Though mawkishness and triteness are, of course, real issues that works can fall into. C.S. Lewis gave an interesting overview of the concept in The Abolition of Man, though he noted that finding a demarcation line or definition is extremely difficult.

I think we might say that ‘corny’ is a sense of artificiality, particularly coupled with an older style (I don’t like the term ‘out-of-date’, since that implies that aesthetics can gain or lose over time).

2. For class we read Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock, which tells of a year in the life of a young girl in Quebec from 1697-1698. It’s a really delightful book, full of homey details and interesting meditations, and once again Cather shows her capacity to enter into a Catholic mindset even without being Catholic herself. There’s a warm humanity at work, as even the best characters are not free from vices and even superficially unpleasant ones are allowed virtues. The new bishop (Bishop de Saint-Vallier), for instance, is rather foppish and showy, building a grand palace for himself full of expensive furniture from France, in stark contrast to the old bishop (St. Francis de Laval), who subjects himself to a punishingly penitential lifestyle. Yet, it’s acknowledge that Saint-Vallier is sincerely pious and in fact rejected several posh assignments in favor of being assigned to this cold Canadian rock.

3. I don’t have enough information to say how accurate her historical portrait is (though a couple points seem contradicted by other sources), but it’s certainly a fascinating and charming look at life in Catholic America at its inception. I’d recommend checking it out!

4. There were a couple passages that struck me especially. One came from a Jesuit Missionary named Fr. Hector. Fr. Hector’s an extremely well-educated, sophisticated man, one who uses his noble bearing to impress his Indian parishioners and who might become a Professor of Rhetoric in France. However, he surprises his hosts by admitting that he’s vowed to stay in Canada as a missionary for the rest of his days. This, he says, is precisely because he loves high French living and the glittering sophistication and comforts of home.

“Listen, my friend. No man can give himself heart and soul to one thing while in the back of his mind he cherishes a desire, a secret hope, for something very different. You, as a student, must know that even in worldly affairs nothing worth while is accomplished except by that last sacrifice, the giving of oneself altogether and finally. Since I made that final sacrifice, I have been twice the man I was before.”

That, it seems to me, is very sound advice for anyone who longs to do anything worthwhile in this world.

5. Another comes in the private eulogy the heroine’s father gives for Count de Frontenac, the great governor of Canada, whom he describes as a relic of a dying age:

“…a soldier who fought for no gain but renown, merciful to the conquered, charitable to the poor, haughty to the rich and overbearing.”

Elsewhere in the same chapter, the two of them (who were direct dependents of the Count’s) feel the difference in the world without that ‘strong roof’ over their heads of a fearless and powerful man’s protection. Such is the ideal of hierarchy and patriarchal power in general; the ability of those higher to guard and aid those lower.

6. Which is one of the great evils of the notion of equality, and the poison at its heart. For if all are equal, then each is powerless. If every man under the state occupies the same place with the same rights and roughly the same level of property, than no man can stand against either the state or the majority.

7. A friend sent me this and I thought it was funny: