Everything is Oll Korrect!

2022: Watch Out, You Might Get What You’re After

Posted on 31 December 2022 by Richard Carroll

Dead blog, lol.

Almost, anyway, but that’s fine. For the last couple years, and probably for a while to come, Everything is Oll Korrect! will primarily be a repository of old writing, updated very sporadically. I have a few ideas for future posts, but they’ll have to wait since I have more important projects.

I don’t even know what kind of traffic Everything received over the past year. Looking it up as I write, I’m at about 5,200 views, a bit up from last year’s 4,900 but under half of my peak in 2018, which was 12,800. The most viewed post of the year was, by a huge margin, “Which Translation of The Analects Should I Read?” The most popular from this year was my review of Henry Sumner Maines’ Popular Government, I suspect because publisher Imperium Press linked to it in a couple places. Coincidentally, all four posts this year looked like something from my more explicitly political days from about 2015-18. Popular Government, in fact, had been discussed by the old Neoreactionary bloggers Foseti and Radish Mag.

Hey, Everything may be dead, but it’s pretty OK compared to those two. They may well still get more views than me, though…

What else? I wrote about Yuri Pines’ book Foundations of Confucian Thought, mostly sharing some particularly interesting excerpts. There’s also John “Borzoi” Chapman’s essay collection Cultured Grugs, hit-and-miss like all compilations are but mostly good. Rounding out this year’s posts is a review of The Penguin Book of Haiku, which stinks. Sorry, weebs.

So did I not read anything? Well, of books written for adults, I read thirteen this year, by far the smallest number in a very long time. Certainly the smallest since I started tracking this back in 2015. Of the books I read to my toddler, I’ve read a ton of them. At least a couple every day, though of course the same books are reread many, many times. I’m sure someday my hobbies will recover from what marriage and parenthood have done to them. Well, to some extent, anyway; music and video games never recovered from what college and then working full time did to them.

One highlight of 2022, though, is that I do have one less thing to worry about: School. I’m done. I’ve got my Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, finally. With this in hand, moving on to a new career should be much easier.

School sucks, by the way.

Just terrible.

Absolutely rotten.

Anyway, besides that, my daughter is now a toddler, and a big sister. My son was born a bit earlier this year. In some ways, having a second child is easier than the first; my wife and I have a better idea of what we’re doing, which helps a lot. On the other hand, we now have twice as many small children to take care of, and we’re stretched thin even with substantial help from our parents. With God’s grace, though, we’ll make it.

For a long time, basically all of my twenties, my life largely revolved around my hobbies. I’d go to work, get home, and then read, watch anime, and write about the same. I was content in a relatively low-paying job because, hey, it was sufficient to buy the books I wanted. Eventually, though, I decided that these things were ultimately unsatisfying, and I became serious about finding a wife and starting a family. Well, now my free time is largely gone, money is tight, and I never have time for myself anymore. However, this is a project whose fruits last into eternity and which fulfills me in a way that reading even great books does not.

I certainly have some nostalgia for how things were, of course. There’s an appeal to the bachelor life of doing mostly what you want, when you want, and to the relatively carefree days of childhood. Childhood must end, though, and the bachelor life has no larger meaning in itself. The family life is the path I chose; its difficulties are the cross Christ gives me to bear, but it’s a cross that bears fruit. I can’t explain, but when I hold one of my children, I understand that I’m doing what God put me here to do.

Have a happy New Year, everyone, and thank you for reading.…

Foundations of Confucian Thought

Posted on 16 July 202220 July 2022 by Richard Carroll

A few years ago, I read and reviewed Yuri Pines’ book The Everlasting Empire, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in Chinese intellectual history, or Chinese history generally for that matter. Since I enjoyed that book, when I was looking for more work on Confucianism a while back I picked up one of his earlier books, Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722-453 B.C.E. Confucius and his followers did not, of course, emerge from nowhere, so a full understanding of Confucianism requires some knowledge not just of their source materials (primarily the Five Classics), but the intellectual milieu they originated in.

In fact, Pines’ book is broader than that. Though Confucianism does receive more attention than the rest of the Hundred Schools of the Warring States period, Pines refers as often to Warring States (typically by its Chinese name, Zhanguo) thought as to Confucian thought in particular. So, what he’s doing is tracing the origin of the terminology and ideas that formed the context and foundation for Zhanguo intellectual life.…

The Penguin Book of Haiku

Posted on 8 June 2022 by Richard Carroll

As a person who likes Japan, likes literature, and likes what he’s read of the combination of those two, I want to like haiku. However, it’s never really appealed to me. In my experience, five-line tanka are about as short as a poem can be and still feel like it has some substance to it, and even that takes a patient sort of reading to appreciate. I also hadn’t read all that many of them though and didn’t know much about the context in which they were written, so I hoped that reading The Penguin Book of Haiku, with its large sample size accompanied by an extensive introduction and some commentary, would help me to at least appreciate if not enjoy the form.

Conclusion: I still dislike haiku, but now I have more reasons to dislike them.

First, a little context. Editor and translator Adam Kern includes a rather long introduction, most of which is worth reading but the main point is that before the early Twentieth Century haiku weren’t written as short, standalone poems. Rather, it was more of a game played with a group of people. You begin with a challenge verse, and participants compose, on the spot, verses in answer to the challenge and to each other. Haiku contests, in which a challenge verse is published and the best responses win a prize, were also extremely popular. This form of haiku, as essentially a word game, does sound fun and, though you certainly did have the meditative, serious haiku we typically associate with the form today, many of them were comedic and in their original context probably were quite funny. To give Penguin’s collection credit, this context is important to understanding haiku and reading these poems alongside the challenge they responded to makes them far more intelligible than the more common format of printing them as standalone poems. Unfortunately, I still can’t get past two problems.

One is the same reservation I’ve always had, which is that they’re insubstantial. The first few entries in the “Washbasin” series, which introduces the book, should suffice as an example:

The washbasin’s
drip-dripping gives way
to crickets chirping.
[by Bonchou]

with oil burning low
an early-to-bed autumn
[by Bashou]

fresh new straw mats
having just been installed,
in the moonlight!
[by Yasui]

here’s wishing
a millennium of sundries gathered –
New Year’s feast
[by Bashou]

Kern adds some commentary, but even so, there frankly isn’t much here. In the Hyakunin Isshu, the poems are short and rely heavily on the reader savouring a given poem’s predominant image, but here all you have is a phrase and the reader ends up doing most of the work trying to get something out of them. Now, given haiku’s popularity, many readers seem to enjoy that, and I suppose if you’re using the more serious poems as a sort of meditation, I can appreciate that. I open to the possibility that I’m just missing something. Personally, I prefer poetry that stands more on its own.

In any case, the other problem is the many, many puerile haiku. An example Kern uses in the introduction to illustrate low-brow haiku is the response to “However grim, / It was also funny,” by Soukan Yamazaki, “Even while / my father lay dying / farts kept ripping!”

Is it funny? Well, sure. Is it worth writing down and preserving? Frankly, no. Gross, irreverent jokes may be funny in their immediate context, but they aren’t something I particularly want to read. Kern also includes obscene haiku, sometimes with accompanying Edo-era illustrations. He says in the introduction that he includes them to give an accurate idea of what haiku was like, and to emphasise that the Japanese of this era were human, for better and worse. That’s perfectly defensible, of course, but it still doesn’t make me interested in reading someone’s old porn stash.

So, would I recommend The Penguin Book of Haiku? Well, if you want an opportunity to learn about the form, there are a lot of them here with a solid and substantial introduction. If you don’t like haiku, though, it won’t change your mind. For that matter, if you do like haiku the way it’s most often presented, it might even change your mind for the worse. I went into the book expecting short scenes of cherry blossoms and frogs jumping into ponds, instead I got short scenes of farting at wakes and masturbating voyeurs. I suppose that’s the risk you take when you walk into a new literary scene.…

Henry Sumner Maines’ Popular Government

Posted on 7 March 20227 March 2022 by Richard Carroll

I first heard of Henry Sumner Maine and his book Popular Government several years ago, back when Neoreaction was a growing, relevant school on the Right. Indeed, Popular Government was reviewed by such NRx stalwarts as Foseti and Radish, both obscure now but highly regarded in their own niche, not long ago in the grand scheme of things, but in internet terms they may as well have been contemporaries of the presocratics.

I bring up these older blogs because they’re from a time when the Right had a more theoretical focus than now. Much of the discussion in Reactionary circles was on precisely how states operate and how to design a state than functions well – and, for that matter, what it means for a state to be well-functioning. Today there’s much more focus on contemporary events, for better and worse, but it’s still worthwhile to consider the fundamentals of political thought. Maine’s primary value to current readers is assistance in thinking clearly about government, and about democracy in particular. Perhaps the key line in the whole book is something that sounds extremely obvious:

Democracy is a form of government.…