Straussians in China?

Something I discovered while going through the PomoCon archives in search of the posts on True Grit: My Book and Chinese Straussianism by Peter Lawler.

The video associated with this comment to a post by Robert Cheeks on the movie is no longer available.

Iris Dement, "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms"


Carl Scott recommends the Anamnesis review: Charles Portis v. the Coen Brothers: More True Grit Studies
Peter Lawler, The Virtue of True Grit
True Grit and the Law - True Grit, Orestia, and the Rule of Law
LoOG

A critical review of the Coen Brothers' True Grit

Rooster Redux by Keith Hartzler (via FPR)

The context for events in True Grit is not merely physical and devoid of logic. Rather, it involves love of place, filial bonds, the bonds of friendship, the politics of Reconstruction, Christian faith, the nature of justice, and the interplay of virtue with heroism and grace with works. Evidence indicates the displacement of this context is the ultimate objective of the Coen brothers and their academic admirer.

Like Mr. Haworth, I enjoyed the movie since it is so different from the trash currently coming out from  Hollywood, but this review makes me think I should read the original novel.

From the Archdruid's latest:

The White Stag was written the year my father was born. In my youth you could find books that old and much older, plenty of them, in small town public libraries all over the country. Nowadays, increasingly, you can’t. What you get instead are shelf upon shelf of whatever’s new, glossy, popular and uncontroversial, massaged into innocuousness by marketing specialists and oozing a fetid layer of movie, toy, and video game tie-ins from all orifices, all part of the feedback loop that endlessly recycles the clichés of current popular culture into minds that, in many cases, have never encountered anything else. In the process, the threads of our collective memory are coming silently apart.

I don’t think it’s going too far to describe the result as a kind of cultural senility. That concept certainly goes a long way to explain the blank and babbling incoherence with which America in particular stares vacantly at its onrushing fate. Without a sense of the past and its meaning, without narratives that weave the events of our daily lives into patterns that touch the principles that matter, we lack the essential raw materials of thought, and so our collective reasoning processes, such as they are, spit out the same rehashed nonsolutions over and over again.

The impulse to vulgarity in the name of creativity

Peter Hitchens:

The BBC won’t rest until we’re all talking filth

In the superb recent remake of True Grit, I don’t think there was a single four-letter word.

Yet it was a perfectly credible portrayal of the lives of fierce and often violent men in a cruel, half-civilised time.

In fact, half the pleasure of the film was the almost biblical English, spoken naturally by everyone – slower, clearer and a hundred times more powerful than the slurred, jerky newspeak of our day.

But don’t expect the BBC, that propaganda organisation for avant-garde muck, to learn any lessons from that.

Fresh from ruining Winifred Holtby’s thoughtful classic South Riding on TV, the Corporation now plans to insert four-letter words into a dramatisation of Wuthering Heights on Radio 3.

Partly this is attention-seeking, and I know they are hoping for condemnation from people such as me. But that is because they are immoral and cheap.

Many people still loathe swearing and are made unhappy by it. For instance,
a grandparent trying to listen to this classic with a grandchild could not do so without great embarrassment.

The BBC knows this, thanks to the many complaints it gets about on-air swearing. It still does it because it is biased against the older Britain where swearing was done only under strict rules.

Its executives and journalists use four-letter words in front of their own children, and think it fine to use them in front of yours, too. They think you’re backward and repressed for not doing it yourself.

The same impulse lay behind the needless four-letter scene in that overrated film The King’s Speech. Fashionable liberals despise restraint and take special delight in debauching innocent and kindly things.

It is quite important that this dramatisation fails and is seen to fail, and that it receives a large number of complaints when it is aired. If they can get away with Wuthering ****ing Heights, it won’t be long before we have David ****ing Copperfield, Vanity ****ing Fair, Romeo And ****ing Juliet, Paradise ****ing Lost, Gray’s ****ing Elegy written in a ****ing Country Churchyard, Tennyson’s In ****ing Memoriam, Brave New ****ing World and, before you know where you are, Alice In ****ing Wonderland, Lord Of The ****ing Rings and (of course) Harry Potter And The ****ing Goblet Of Fire.

For goodness sake, we already have Martin Amis if you want this sort of stuff.

I am envious of those who can speak slowly (and also authoritatively). Wendell Berry might be an example. He speaks without the appearance of being mentally challenged, though this is what some Uhmericans may assume when they hear his accent and learn of his background. Speaking slowly and deliberately -- this is not an affectation -- it might reflects the fact that the gears in the head are turning. Cantonese speakers are often fast talkers, but the ones I admire in film speak slowly (Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love; actors in TVB dramas tend to speak more slowly than MCs and hosts of variety programs). People may talk fast, but often they have nothing to say. It's just gabbing in the worst sense. (I couldn't think of a better onomatopoeia.) The conversation revolving the most inane of things.

I would like to speak with correct grammar; thinking before one speaks, not just with respect to content but also to rules of grammar might be the stage of a beginner, but I'll admit that my speaking skills aren't that great. Is it another symptom of internet-induced ADD/memory impairment/mental diminishment?

Peter Hitchens on the Oscars, the Winner of Best Picture, and True Grit

True Grit meets South Riding

HitFlix feature on Carter Burwell

Watch: Carter Burwell settles the score in 'True Grit'



His website.

Peasall Sisters, "Where No One Stands Alone"

True Grit 2010 Western Peasall Sisters Where No One Stands Alone Movie Trailer [HD]




Plus:

Fresh Air interview with the Coen Brothers (update)

The mp3 for the Fresh Air interview with the Coen Brothers is now available for download.

Fr. Robert Barron on True Grit

(via Catholic Fire)

Fr Robert Barron's Word on Fire

Stanley Fish on True Grit

Narrative and the Grace of God: The New ‘True Grit’ (via Mere Comments)

In his review of True Grit, Peter Lawler writes:

Sure, we're constantly reminded of the disrespect for human life of these ex-Confederates (the Bridges/Cogburn character rode with the notrious Captain Quantrill of Missouri--the state where all the rules of war vanished into bloodlust). But we're also constantly reminded of the strange sort of cultivation that made these manly men (and woman) more able to articulate who they are than we are. The language of the film echoes that of the novel, where basically unlettered men speak with a formal and precise pagan grace. There's something civilized and even lawful in the violently state-of-nature Indian territory. These men and especially the very young woman are in some ways more civilized than we are, although, of course, not in many ways.


The film shows us what's to be said for and against the virtue that animated the Confederacy and the postbellum southern frontier. It doesn't varnish the truth about honor, even as it displays the virtue it can become when ennobled by personal love.

Is this what the author of the original novel meant to depict? Or is this a generalization that can be applied to any genuine Western novel? I believe Professor Lawler is originally from the South, but what would other Southerners (e.g. Dr. Wilson) make of his description of the characters and his association of them with the Confederacy?

NPR: From The Coens, A Grittier Sort Of Truth Out West
by DAVID EDELSTEIN

Roger Ebert

NYT review