Chesterton Applied to Music

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Frances Chesterton

Apparently, one of the poems of Frances Chesterton has been set to music. visit

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/c.asp?c=C1077

To get your search started.

Alarms and Discursions

Rrrringg!!! Hey! Wake Up!!!

It's TEST DAY!

(Oh, no!)

Ahem. I apologise for intruding into our comatosity. (Is that a word? It is now.)

But I decided I would try to assist in getting things going again. And I know you are wondering: What the heck is "alarms and discursions" anyway? So let's do that first. Alarms and Discursions is the title of a collection of GKC's essays, which I understand previously appeared in his weekly Daily News column, and so it goes with Tremendous Trifles on your bookshelves. As GKC explains in his preface, it is a take-off on the Elizabethan stage-direction called "Alarums and Excursions" (which my concise OED tells me means "noise and bustle").

I presume that most of us are busy at present - I am too, but I often have to wait for something else, and have room for little excursions into the E-cosmos. So, I was wondering, how I might assist in producing some activity here. Since everyone hates essay tests, and all too often the empty posting-box (or even the empty comment box) gives one that tension of having to write an essay, maybe I can make it a multiple-choice kind of affair...

Ready? Put your books away, sit up straight. You may begin now.

1. Given that I have some spare time, I would rather:
(a) Write something about Chesterton (or in his style)
(b) Read Chesterton, or a discussion of his writing
(c) Read more about my distant nephews and nieces who visit this blogg
(d) Learn more about what GKC writes about, like say Heraldry, or World War I, or Distributism, or Christianity, or Poetry, or...
(e) None of the above.

My answer: ______

NOTE: If you choose (a), we hope to see a posting from you soon.
If you choose (b), let us know what you want to read.
If you choose (c), you'll have to help us out by writing about yourself.
If you choose (d), let us know what topic(s) you'd like to see.
Otherwise, you have to say WHAT you WOULD do.

That's it. Just one question. (Hey, we're not that testing place in Princeton.) Now sharpen your number two pencils, open up that comment box and fill it in neatly.

By request: The Ballad of an ALMOST-Dead Blog

In the deeps of e-space, that gives birth, (like a god,
From nothing), to websites, text sites, journals, and blogs,
There lived The Chesterteens, fairest blog, and first.
(If you won’t post a comment, I will write verse) .

She collected some children, put them ’neath her wing,
And from them, learned Chesterton’s truth of many things.
O! for those old days when this blog fairly burst!
When some would write comments, and some would write verse!

For many long months, she lived with life bounding
For, being like mind, she could live on posting
But then things fell silent, so low that I durst
Say “If you won’t comment, then I will write verse.”

Her falling was caused by both lover and dragon
The beast was a failure, the lover a human
Together they threatened to send her a hearse
For one could not comment, the other wrote verse!

Until the over-poster, realizing his crime
Decided to combat the disaster with rhyme
And with full satire, he said with a burst
“If you won’t post a comment, I will write verse.”

And suddenly galloping like knights to her aid
Came two handsome comments. Her peril they stayed!
One was old Dr. Thursday’s, t’other’s Mom Who Learn’st’s
They posted a comment, I ought not write verse.

But in a brave effort to renew the blog’s quest
These two learned typing heroes made a request
For newly-wrote poetry, they have a thirst
Despite their two comments, I still have writ verse!

A Post (of sorts)

"Over and above the horrible rubbish-heap of the books I have written, now filling the pulping-machines or waste-paper baskets of the world, there are a vast number of books that I have never written, because a providential diversion interposed to protect the crowd of my fellow-creatures who could endure no more."
-G.K. Chesterton As I was Saying Chapter 1~ About Mad Metaphors

Well I have never quite written books, but if you merely replace the word book with the word post, that would probably apply pretty well to my blogging career. But OFL has begged for a post (and for good reason) and so in search of material I pulled As I was Saying (of course by GK) from the shelf. With such intriguing topics as About Relativity, About Traffic, About Mad Metaphors and About The Telephone one on such a mission could hardly fail to be intrigued. I was, and proceeded to read the essay About Mad Metaphors from which the above quote is taken. It was rather delightful. In it he explained an unfufilled plan for a story regarding, well....

"...something about some people who had reached so sensitized and transparent a state of imagination what when they mentioned anything it materialized before their eyes; and this applied even to metaphors or figures of speech which they had not consciously conceived as material."

Anyways there was a good deal more, but I probably shouldn't type the whole essay out as you can find it, along with the rest of the book right here.
Also, side note, I agree with Dr. Thursday and AGP, OFL you should still write a poem. (:

Beware!

If somebody doesn't start posting or commenting, I will write a poem, "Lament to a dead blog." And nobody wants that except me.

Chesterton in the National Catholic Register

In the newest issue of the National Catholic Register, there were two articles about Chesterton. One was a mini-article about Dale Alquhist's opinions on Chesterton's alleged anti-semitism. The other was a much longer article about how, after a long retreat from Chesterton (who used to be required reading in most places apparently) more and more colleges, including Seton Hall, Steubenville, Christendom, Notre Dame, and Cornell, are reviving Chesterton's writings. The momentum for the revival has been mostly students and Evangelicals, with Catholics recently joining in the revival.

(Official Chesterton at UNL is still quite limited to part of one class in modern English literature, but unofficial followers of Chesterton is a little more encouraging, including recent graduate Dr. Jennifer Overkamp, nationally known composer Kurt Knecht, and professor of composition Dr. Eric Richards.)

St. Paul, Fighting and Friendship

This blogg has gotten quiet, a bit of a surprise for a Chestertonian blogg. Did someone stick his tongue to a lamppost? (hee hee) Well, since today (though Sunday, a name of power and awe) is the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, I thought I might drop in here and provoke some comments by dredging up a bit of GKC's story from his days as a student at St. Paul. it's got a lovely fight in it, sort of like the strange warfare we read of "on the way to Damascus". Ever notice how we stick things into even well-known Bible stories? There aren't three kings, Veronica isn't on the way of the cross - and there's no horse mentioned when St. Paul is knocked off his h... - uh - when he encounters the Lord. In the same way, we might find it hard to imagine our loveable GKC as a young pugilist! Please read on, and comment at will...

Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy. There grows all over what was once the child a sort of prickly protection like hair; a callousness, a carelessness, a curious combination of random and quite objectless energy with a readiness to accept conventions. I have blindly begun a lark which involved carrying on literally like a lunatic; and known all the time that I did not know why I was doing it. When I first met my best friend in the playground, I fought with him wildly for three-quarters of an hour; not scientifically and certainly not vindictively (I had never seen him before and I have been very fond of him ever since) but by a sort of inexhaustible and insatiable impulse, rushing hither and thither about the field and rolling over and over in the mud. And all the time I believe that both our minds were entirely mild and reasonable; and when we desisted from sheer exhaustion, and he happened to quote Dickens or the Bab Ballads, or something I had read, we plunged into a friendly discussion on literature which has gone on, intermittently, from that day to this. There is no explaining these things; if those who have done them cannot explain them. But since then I have seen boys in many countries and even of many colours; Egyptian boys in the bazaars of Cairo or mulatto boys in the slums of New York. And I have found that by some primordial law they all tend to three things; to going about in threes; to having no apparent object in going about at all; and, almost invariably speaking, to suddenly attacking each other and equally suddenly desisting from the attack.

Some may still question my calling this conduct conventional; from a general impression that two bankers or business partners do not commonly roll each other head-over-heels for fun, or in a spirit of pure friendship. It might be retorted that two business partners are not always by any means such pure friends. But in any case, it is true to call the thing a convention in more than the verbal sense of a collision. And it is exactly this convention that really separates the schoolboy from the child. When I went to St. Paul's School, in Hammersmith, there really was a sort of convention of independence; which was in a certain degree a false independence; because it was a false maturity. Here we must remember once more the fallacy about "pretending" in childhood. The child does not really pretend to be a Red Indian; any more than Shelley pretended to be a cloud or Tennyson to be a brook. The point can be tested by offering a political pamphlet to the cloud, a peerage to the brook, or a penny for sweets to the Red Bull of the Prairies. But the boy really is pretending to be a man; or even a man of the world; which would seem a far more horrific metamorphosis. Schoolboys in my time could be blasted with the horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name. And the deadly nature of this blow really consisted in the fact that it cracked the whole convention of our lives; the convention that each of us was on his own; an independent gentleman living on private means. The secret that each of us did in fact possess a family, and parents who paid for our support, was conventionally ignored and only revealed in moments of maddened revenge. But the point is that there was already a faint touch of corruption in this convention; precisely because it was more serious and less frank than the tarradiddles of infancy. We had begun to be what no children are - snobs. Children disinfect all their dramatic impersonations by saying "Let us pretend." We schoolboys never said "Let us pretend"; we only pretended.
[GKC Autobiography CW16:61-63]

UNL Chesterton Society Takes Off!

Hey!

We had three people at our meeting tonight, two of which had never read Chesterton before! Pray for us!

My Experience at Chesterton Conference 2008

“They do not want regular plenty, but irregular wealth…They want Surprise.”

--G.K. Chesterton, “The Surprise”

Yes, I was one of the attendees of the 2008 G.K. Chesterton Conference, the
Orthodoxy Centennial, and I think that “Surprise” is one of the best one word
descriptions of it. Not that I came expecting nothing, and was gloriously
surprised. It was so good, that I could expect and expect and still be
surprised.
In the first place, I was surprised that I was able to attend at all. But
that does not pertain to the conference itself, so I will pass over it.
Second, I received a very pleasant sort of “Wake Up, you need to go to this”
when I saw that Dr. Jennifer Overkamp, a resident of the same city as myself,
would be on the program. I had met her just a few weeks before.
Third, I found the abundance of attendees quite refreshing--especially after I
saw a friend of mine, went to talk to him, and “got lost” in a large crowd of
homeschoolers that I had not met and probably would never had otherwise.
Apparently, I never found my way out. My membership on this blog is one of the
results, and they‘re not over yet.
Fourth, I was struck by the utter fascination provided by the speeches,
especially the ones that “expanded” Chesterton into the world of Pascal, Jane
Austen (I learned more about Austen from the conference than I did from Pride
and Prejudice!), and the Pro-Life movement.
Fifth, I was surprised by the utter accessibility of the conference
“dignitaries;” I was able to talk to five of the speakers (including Mr.
Alquhist) and eat with two of them.
Sixth, I got to serve mass outside my diocese for the first time in the most
beautiful cassock and surplice I have ever worn.
And last, but not least, I was shocked when I got home and found that one of
the books I bought was by a radical feminist. It made good firewood, which was
not a surprise. I got a very good replacement by Jacques Martain, and that WAS
a surprise.
In other words, unless you know you hate literary conferences or are an
anti-Chestertonian, you MUST go to the 2009 conference.

A Request

This actually came originally from Dale Ahlquist and hasn't really been fulfilled. I know this is a little funny to be asking about at this time of year, but I'd really like to have the Chesterton conference attendees on this blog write about their experience of the conference, particularly for the sake of those who weren't able to attend or those who might be thinking about attending this year's conference.

Fire away!

The Transition has Finally Begun

Thank you for your most generous and extreme patience! We've finally started our transition to transform the Chesterteens/Flying-ins in to two separate blogs. I've sent out invitations to everyone I could find who is a current contributor to this blog to join the new Flying-ins. http://theflying-ins.blogspot.com

All current contributors are welcome to contribute to both blogs. The Chesterteens blog will focused on discussions closely related to Chestertons writings and will be of particular interest and appropriateness for high schoolers. The Flying-ins is much more open-ended and can include lots of stuff more loosely related to Chesterton.

Thanks and God Bless!

Mrs. VH

The Joke's on Chesterton

Here's some Chestertonian humor (meaning about Chesterton, not from him).

1. Three Scots are going to play a musical trio. It is written for Bagpipe, Tuba, and Bells. Being a valuble family heirloom, the bagpipe is kept in an old trunk. The tuba of course is very heavy. One of the players, while asking the other two what instrument they want, stubs his toe. This is what he says:

"Dee yee want the instrument o' chest, or ton, or Bell...Och!"

2. Q. If Mrs. Chesterton had had a child, and they had gone to play at a playground, and Mrs. Chesterton had died from playing to hard, what would we call her?
A. St. Frances of A See-Saw.

3. A not-so-absurd sentence:

To the painted Ball, add a White Worse with A Piece of Chalk; make it Leap into a
fence, Or, though ducks be in it, a lake (for the purpose of removing insects from its hide; make sure the ticks are in the hair, not the Hair on ticks).

A "Job" for Frances Chesterton

I don't know if there is a patron saint of blogging yet. If Mr. and Mrs. Chesterton are canonized, however, Frances would make an excellent patroness. Her maiden name was Blogg, after all.

A Decision at Last

We've had to do a little thinking here in order to better define this blog and make it more usable and enjoyable for all.

What we've decided to do is a fairly friendly variation on an older idea. We will be splitting the blog into two - "Chesterteens" and "The Flying-Ins", but all current members will be invited to join both blogs.

The Chesterteens blog (which will remain at this present URL) will be focused on posts very closely relating to the writings of Chesterton and fun things slightly tangential to his writings, like the Gype game. I believe this will be very close to what the Chesterteens blog always was. It will be more heavily moderated content-wise and I think particularly appealing to the high schoolers around which the blog was built.

The Flying-Ins blog will move to a new URL and will be much more open and less moderated as far as content goes (I will still, as moderator, have high expectations regarding tones toward others - particularly guests of the blog). I'd still like to see some strong connectedness to Chesterton's writings so that the blog still retains some authentic Chestertonian focus. I think this will be especially appealing to the newer members of the blog - particularly those in college who are branching out and applying Chesterton's ideas elsewhere.

I think both blogs will be pleasant and beneficial to all of our members and I would encourage everyone to join both blogs as they desire. Further details will be pending and invitations to the new blog should be forthcoming to all members.

Thank you for your patience and God Bless!

Mrs. Van Hecke and Ria