Reading JavaMom’s site tonight, I noticed she mentioned seeing the author Alexander McCall Smith at a lecture series, and he was wearing a kilt. Since he hails from Scotland, this is not too unusual. Recently, a young lady I know of was married, and loving all things Celtic because it is part of her heritage, she arranged the wedding to have many Celtic influences, including the kilt worn by the good-natured groom. When we heard balladeer Charlie Zahm belt out Scottish tunes in his manly baritone last November, he also was wearing a kilt.

We occasionally talk about the controversial topic of modesty here. I have never promoted frumpy as an ideal for modesty, though I do think it better to err on the side of frumpy and be covered than to err on the side of fashion and reveal one’s nakedness to the general public. I began wearing dresses all the time as a protest statement after becoming frustrated with the body-revealing outfits assailing my eyes whenever I left home. I was particularly disgusted with the older women who had no sense of propriety and were clothed like teenagers but no longer had the figures to pull it off. I started to think about how I am getting older and I wanted to dress in a way that is—dare I say?—more mature, as well as more feminine.

I agree with those who contend that the differences in men and women’s clothing is very dependent on culture. I do not, however, believe that all cultures are created equal. I want to talk about that more, but not until I hear from you first on the following question:

What about kilts?

My friend, Steven, sent me this link, where the author makes a case that men ought to trash the trousers and switch to kilts. I think the guy is a nutcase who just wants to wear a skirt, but I want you to put on your critical thinking caps and tell me what you think about this. My purpose is not to get people mad at each other, but to discuss men in dresses in a level-headed manner. That means, let’s keep the expressions of preferences and cultural relativism to a minimum.

I hope I don’t regret this.

The following, written by yours truly, is the cheesy ending to my month of poetry posts:

Poets have been mysteriously quiet on the subject of cheese. ~G.K. Chesterton

The silence on this subject I must ponder—
How poets have forsaken such a food.
Triter topics garner notice, wonder;
Left mold’ring on the shelf the greater good.
What more profound and pressing than that brick—
Pungency curdled, comforting and fine.
Clabbered and transmogrified, a neat trick;
Complemented, its soul-mate from the vine.
Taste imbued with ancient connotations:
Time wheels along but staples stay the same,
Why doesn’t, with all its permutations,
The unsung stuff have much greater fame?
   Grated, crumbled, melted, consume some cheese,
   Raising glasses to G.K., if you please.

Tonight I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a syllabus for a workshop I’m doing for a homeschool convention in Sacramento in June. I’m speaking three times, but the syllabus is for a workshop called Homeschooling With Living Books. I am including a list of resources which includes the excellent online curriculum Ambleside Online.

When I visited that website tonight, I found a new article by one of the most talented Ambleside coordinators, Wendi Capehart. She wrote about how “Books Build Character,” using a book by one of my favorite authors, Jane Austen, as an example.

Wendi says:

I would also not like to tell my children too much about the unwisdom and sinful attitudes of people they know personally because children are such black and white creatures that I would fear I was making them very judgmental and harsh critics of their brethren. I think pointing out the flaws of our brothers and sisters in church to our children as an object lesson is a very dangerous route to take and bad for their characters. It can be done, and there may be times where it needs to be done, but never without the greatest tact and delicacy.

Dealing with fictional characters permits me to kick off my shoes a bit and get comfortable with the discussion.

When I grow up, I want to be as astute a thinker as Wendi, whose writing and thinking I’ve admired for several years. You can find several other articles by her at the Ambleside site.

Hi, Wendy .

The month of poetry is almost over, so I need to use a little more poetic license before my license expires.

Thanks to Rick for the link to this essay about the merits of traditional forms of poetry versus free verse.

Here’s a quick test for readers of poetry. Of the poems you can recite by heart, how many are in free verse and how many are in meter and rhyme? To revise Donald Justice’s formulation above, surely nine-tenths of the poems committed to memory last night and every night for millennia must have been in some kind of metered verse.

For Brianna’s benefit (and acknowledging that she is a very talented wordsmith), I want to make the distinction between contemporary and modern poetry. Like all labels, as I have been discussing recently, there are many variations within a particular genre or period of any art, though trends will stand out. Thus, generalizations have value: we live in what some have called a post-Christian age, yet current American society is considered one of the most -”churched” in the world. It is valid to note that generally there is a wide rejection of traditional Christian morality in our day, though we can also see pockets of revival in segments of the population. These trends will be reflected in art and culture.

Now that I’ve wishy-washily covered all my bases, here are a couple of essays for the diehard poetry aficionados. For those who wish my poetry affinity would die down, hang loose for a moment. The following is from The Fugitive, a poetry journal from Vanderbilt University in the early 20th century. John Crowe Ransom writes about “The Future of Poetry” in 1924, and Allen Tate replies. Their discussion concerns modern poetry, which for them was contemporary. From Tate:

Take the poor 19th Century in England: a community of faith, of aspiration (to be good even if a bit dishonest), of smuggery. What needed the poet but to re-state the self-evident amenities memorably, those categorical revelations common to all minds, immune to the blighting tentacle of scepticism? And so a Mr. Harold Nicholson tells us how Tennyson’s worst poems were then his best, that his messiahship undid him. We will credit no prophets. An individualistic intellectualism is the mood of our age. There is no common-to-all-truth; poetry has no longer back of it, ready for use momently, a harmonious firmament of stage-properties and sentiments which it was the pious office of the poets to set up at the dictation of a mysterious afflatus–Heaven, Hell, Duty, Olympus, Immortality, as the providential array of “themes”: the Modern poet of this generation has had no experience of these things, he has seen nothing even vaguely resembling them. He is grown so astute that he will be happy only in the obscure by-ways of his own perceptive processes; a priori utterance never escapes him. Claude Monet said: “The chief character in a group portrait is the light.” So the Modern poet might tell you that his only possible themes are the manifold projections and tangents of his own perception. It is the age of the Sophist.

If you have waded through those essays shaking your head, wondering if I will ever have done with this monotonous topic, I leave you with one of those trite Tennyson poems which will probably be committed to memory and recited by generations of homeschoolers to come. In honor of my friend Cindy, who has taken a blogging break, here it is:

Crossing the Bar
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

If you want to use this poem with your younguns, here’s a fine analysis of it.