Things Noted Here and There
Farewell to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
John Yoo has two new unpublished papers on SSRN about Jefferson, Jackson and executive power. This week on Legal History Blog, a leading scholar of the history of presidential power, Lou Fisher, will comment on them. Beginning today and continuing through the week, Yoo's abstracts and Fisher's responses will be on the blog.
The South: In Christopher Dickey,"Southern Discomfort," Newsweek, 2 August, the son of James Dickey follows William Tecumseh Sherman's trail through Georgia and the Carolinas to gage political sentiment in the summer of 2008. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Michael Pasquier,"Chesterton Wakes Up in Paschatoula," Religion in American History, 3 August, points out that the first statue of G. K. Chesterton in the United States will be unveiled later this year at Paschatoula, Louisiana. The little town is an hour north of New Orleans on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. Bryan T. McMahon,"Times unveils major new downtown statue, and more!" The Ponchatula Times, 22 May, has more information.
Chesterton might be unhappy about the association with Paschatoula developers, but this is a popular manifestation of my favorite book subject that I'll never complete:"To Be Southern/To Be Catholic." Some of my best essays have been on Southern Catholic writers in the 20th century. From Allen Tate to Flannery O'Connor and Willmoore Kendall to Garry Wills, they wrote both fiction and non-fiction. As American writers, they seem to me to be doubly outsiders: outside the American mainstream as Southerners and outside the Southern mainstream as Catholics. Yet, being both Southern and Catholic, they sensed a re-enforcing affinity of the two identities that yielded a richly textured conservatism. I should have done that book.