Category: eulogy

A Joe Sobran Story

In Glen Arbor, Michigan Thursday, I saw Sobran Gallery, and indulged my curiosity, engaging the man who appeared to be the owner:

Me: I have to ask this. I’m a great admirer of the late Joseph Sobran, and I know he was from Michigan. Do you know if you’re related to him?

Artist (rising from his sofa): He was my brother.

Greg Sobran and I then engaged in some pleasantries, and I recounted when I met Joe, when he shared the dais with Attorney General C. Everett Koop in the early 1980s. Koop bantered that he was trying to get Joe to give up his cigars – which in my book captured a lot about both Koop and Sobran.

I knew that Joe was an amateur Shakespeare scholar, but I wasn’t ready for this:

When we were in high school, he’d hand me his volume of the complete plays, and tell me to open it randomly and read a line. Then he’d quote the next line.

“I think I’ve got it memorized,” he said, a little sheepishly. “I didn’t mean to, but I think it’s happened.”

He’d started seriously reading Shakespeare at age 9. Greg says that more and more scholars seem to be adopting Joe’s “Oxfordian theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays generally attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon.” (Wikipedia)

The rest of our conversation tip-toed around the issue of Joe’s alleged anti-semitism, and Greg’s perception of Joe’s world-weariness, following his banishment from the increasingly neo-con pages of National Review, preceding his death at age 64.

Joe lived too late for one to shrug off any anti-semitism by attributing it to the spirit of the age – since philo-semitism was the spirit of his age. I like to attribute it more to contentiousness accompanied by a sort of Aspie cluelessness about how much trouble contentiousness on that subject can land one in.

I lamented his death at the time and I lament it still.

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Lord’s Day, September 16, 2012

  1. When the solution’s a problem.
  2. Exploiting the valuable, defending the beloved.
  3. Need prophets know about the electromagnetic spectrum?
  4. Hillbillies, yokels and perceptions.
  5. The lab versus the Cross.
  6. Incommensurable art.
  7. Boomers and Stickers.
  8. Perfectly assimilated, perfectly forgotten.

Continue reading “Lord’s Day, September 16, 2012” →

Dan Terry, R.I.P.

My friend, Greg Kostraba, lost his Dad today at the V.A. Hospital in Danville.

Friends losing parents is becoming more frequent, and I’ve felt the cold breath on my own neck a time or two. But I think this is the first time a friend has lost a Dad who has a Wikipedia article about him. As a jazz lover, I’m intrigued:

Dan Terry (b. Daniel Kostraba, December 22, 1924, Kingston, PA, d. December 27, 2011, Danville, IL) was a big band leader, arranger, and trumpet and flugelhorn player who appeared in Birdland with Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Chris Connor, Johnny Smith, and other jazz luminaries …

Check it out.

Christopher Hitchens

Everyone seems to be lamenting the death of Christopher Hitchens. Some excerpts.

Mark Shea:

I will add this (since [Douglas] Wilson’s Calvinism forbid him from praying for the dead):

Father, grant Hitchens the grace of eternal life through Christ our Lord. Forgive him all his sins and find some way, through his love of honesty and scorn for BS, to sneak through some crack in his armor and let him see your face in the Christ who is truth. I don’t know how you might do that, but I do ask that he not be lost, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Remember our brother Christopher, who bears forever the mark of baptism, the next time you go to Mass. He needs all the prayers he can get.

…

(Yes.  I’m aware of his faults.  One of them was an eagerness to speak ill of the dead when it was wrong to do so.  Do not imitate him in the comboxes, please.)

Daniel McCarthy:

I had read more polemic against Hitchens than of Hitchens himself until I picked up a copy of his Thomas Jefferson: Author of America and found myself compelled to recognize him as a writer first and ideologue a distant second — the only way any essayist of first rank should be evaluated. Read him, even if you shouldn’t believe him.

Mollie at GetReligion:

Many people have been noting that though they didn’t agree with him on many things, they grieve his death. Well, obviously. Not only did he change his mind rather dramatically on some seminal issues of our day, he was a through-and-through contrarian. If you agreed with him on too much, I’d suggest — in the words of Ed Koch — you seek a psychiatrist. Speaking as an anti-war, libertarian Lutheran … I’m not really sure I agreed with him on anything. But who cares? The man could write. An amazing prose stylist with devastating wit. A master.

Christopher Buckley, quoted by Mollie, above:

One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.

I don’t think it’s over, nor do I expect to channel these forever. You surely can find them if you’re interested.