2026s

One thing I like to do whenever possible is support my e-friends by buying their books. Of course, all of my friends and acquaintances are intelligent, sophisticated people, so I’m rarely disappointed (see, for instance, my old reviews of Northern Reaction and Sanity). Today, we’ll look at The Witness of Beauty, a collection of essays by James Clark. Several of these have been previously published (most at The North American Anglican, where he serves as Book Review Editor), but as we’ll see, the collection is solid enough that it’s worth owning even for someone who’s already seen them online.

I’ve reviewed five video games in nineteen years of blogging, and it’s been seven since the last one, so we’re overdue for another. Back in July a couple friends of mine suggested that I try out Undertale. I knew next-to-nothing about the game, but since I have some free time now and it was on sale anyway, I decided to give it a shot.

As you can see, Everything is Oll Korrect! has a new look. When I migrated from WordPress to Hugo in early 2024, I went with the Mainroad theme because it was good enough and didn’t require much configuration. I had enough on my hands with the migration, and didn’t want to spend a lot of time finagling with the theme. Mainroad had the basic layout I wanted, most of the features, and looked decent, if a bit plain.

One of the most interesting developments over the past, very roughly, twenty years or so in the Catholic Church has been the renewal of interest in the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). I’ve spoken to some people who would like to attend one, but run into some obstacles: availability is very hit-and-miss, depending on whether a TLM-oriented religious order like the FSSP has set up a parish nearby, and how friendly the local bishop is to the TLM. Even aside from that, though the TLM is clearly related to the Novus Ordo, it’s different enough that even pious Catholics seem a little intimidated by it. It reminds me a lot, in fact, of the uncertainty some non-Catholics I’ve known feel about attending a regular diocesan parish - what are these prayers? What are the responses? When do I stand, kneel, or sit? None of these problems are particularly big, really; in both cases, the answer is really just to attend and do what everyone else does. Nonetheless, it’s natural to approach new experiences with a little anxiety, and we often prefer to go with a friend who can gently offer some guidance. If you don’t know anyone who can take you to a TLM, don’t worry – Eduard Habsburg will be your friend.

The bulk of this post will be a review of the Four Books iOS app (also available for Android), developed by Daoxue Academy, an aid in studying the Four Books of the Confucian canon (the Great Learning, Analects, Mencius, and Doctrine of the Mean). Rather than just giving an overview of the app’s features, though, I’m going to focus on how I personally use the app, which necessitates spending some time talking about my experiences studying Classical Chinese and the Confucian canon. This approach will let readers know what basis I’m using to evaluate the app, and, I hope, allow others to benefit from my experience.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the creation of my Confucian quote bot on Twitter, UnwobblingPivot. Today, it has over 13,600 followers, has received a lot of positive feedback, including good questions about the passages shared, and has gained a little brother on the Fediverse. In fact, it’s significantly more popular than my main account (which has a bit over 1,800 followers), but I don’t feel too bad about being outclassed by the Master and his sources and students. I have a page of general information about the bot already, so in this post, I’ll look back at how and why I created the bot, and what plans I have for it.

This review, of Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, will be a short one, because I found it to be frustrating read.

For most of the year so far, we’ve been reviewing books about the study of literature. I’ve made a case previously about why you sould study literature, but let’s assume you’re ready to begin studying in a serious way. What should your first steps be?

In my review of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, I wrote that Pound had many interesting insights and asides that, though they didn’t fit with the main review, are nonetheless worth discussing. So, here, I’ll go over some of the highlights. I’ll cover them in no particular order, and much of it will be direct quotations from the book with a few comments from me.

Today we’ll continue our series of books about literature, following Mortimer Adler’s advice about syntopical reading. This time, though, instead of a Classical author, will be someone of almost our own time, Ezra Pound.