1) I’ve been meaning to say something about P. D. James, the novelist, who died the other day. Charles Moore has said something. Let me quote:
Phyllis James, whom I knew quite well for 25 years or more, was, in her own words, “superbly taught in the old grammar school tradition, scholarly, Christian, liberal”. She clung to all these qualities in adversity — a hard, poor father who thought girls should not go to university and made her leave school at 16; a broken, schizophrenic husband; children to be brought up on nothing much — and in her later, well-deserved prosperity. In her own life and thought, she had a strong Christian recognition of the existence of evil, but a stronger one of good. She had a great love of civilisation, sharpened by the knowledge that it was precarious. In the light of her faith, she understood that a society which lives for the present alone will despise the past and ignore the future.
I admire this kind of person tremendously. I wish there were more of them.
By the way, did you notice the word “clung”? Moore wrote that P. D. James “clung to all these qualities,” both in adversity and in prosperity. Our president once used the word “clung,” or a cognate, in disparagement: “They cling to guns or religion . . .”
2) A parent in California sent me this news article. It’s about her sons’ school. I will quote a paragraph:
Along with local area groups, some parents are irate that their children’s sex ed class at Acalanes High School in Lafayette is being taught by employees of Planned Parenthood without their prior knowledge. They are also fuming over the methods and materials being used, including a checklist that asks students if they are “ready for sex” and another worksheet that describes how to give and obtain consent, as well as a diagram that uses a “genderbread” person for lessons in gender identity.
Oh, yes, the classic genderbread person. The kids who are being subjected to this are as young as 13. The parent who wrote me said, “I’m just glad my kids aren’t younger. It’s getting worse every year.” What a sad, and tragic, comment.
3) A Hoosier sent me a bulletin that reads as follows: “Students at Indiana University Bloomington can now use preferred names in place of legal names on ID cards.” The bulletin continues, “This change will support transgender members of the IU community who go by a preferred name and others who submit valid, appropriate name change requests . . .”
Finally, “The students who raised this important issue on behalf of their transgender classmates and those outside the gender binary have worked with staff from multiple areas for months to make this happen, and as a campus, we’re very proud of them.”
Great. But let me say this: It’s not merely that I feel estranged from my national culture, sometimes. I don’t even understand its language. “Gender binary”? Men and women?
4) On to something lighter. The funniest thing I have read all month comes from Eric Owens — not the opera singer but the education editor of The Daily Caller. He called anthropology “the most pathetic college major that doesn’t end in the word ‘studies.’”
I will mount a defense of anthropology another time — a qualified defense. In the meantime, this is hilarious (and true, I’m afraid). (But what about sociology? I mean, it goes downhill from Durkheim, doesn’t it?)
5) For the music-minded, I have a review at The New Criterion: It’s of a recital by Daniil Trifonov, the young Russian piano sensation, in Carnegie Hall last night — here.