Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
When talking about this Anglosphere business, one occasionally gets asked whether discussions of Anglosphere culture and values are not ” really all about Protestantism?”
The short answer is “no”.
The somewhat more elaborate answer goes about as follows:
One of my colleagues at work was telling me the other day that she would like to know more about military history. I said I’d send her a list of books. I sent the following (without links) as an email.
Per our conversation, here is a “reading list” of military books. You and your husband might get a kick out of it, and even want to read some of this stuff.
Very difficult to keep the list short. I cruised around my library at home, and came up with the following. I decided to keep it to ten, but failed and ended up with a few more than that.
Since you like historical fiction, I decided to split the difference between that and narrative history and mostly suggest “you are there” memoirs.
I keep my sanity in this job by always having a couple of books going, even if I can only get in a few pages a day.
Here’s the list:
If Jonathan’s sartorial taste were not enough, an unmistakable sign of the end times was recently revealed. Someone has made a movie out of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. If you have never read this book, I weep tears of joy on your behalf. Assuming, that is, that you go on to read it — otherwise, I just weep. The book was published in 1760, which is only 20 years after the first novel written in English, the abominable Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (yes, it is every bit as bad as the title indicates, plus a 10% bonus of awfulness for being written in epistolary form — only Tom Jones, which brutally satirizes it, justifies the waste of ink on this steaming lump of sirreverence). Tristram Shandy wanders off on digressions, digressions from digressions, subplots in flashbacks, flashbacks in subplots, asides to the reader, imagined dialogues with the reader, and pages printed in marble pattern to indicate the impenetrability of a discussion of noses. It affixed a “kick me” note to the diaper of the infant English novel. Think of going from Bach to Zappa in 20 years.
I haven’t seen it. It’s safe to say, though, that it will likely depart somewhat from the text. I gather that the movie is a movie about making a movie out of the book, which seems about right, but only if the movie is never quite finished (Tristram only gets to about age seven in this fictional autobiography, despite the thickness of the book).
To give a small taste of the book, here is it’s dedication, which is found in Chapters 8 and 9 of Book I:
Chicagoboyz are renowned for their fashion sensibility. This candid shot captures one of our principal contributors snatching a brief moment of relaxation during a secret blogging retreat in the Bahamas.
“In Poland, we know the lessons of our own history,” he said. “In the long run, you pay for weakness.”
Radek Sikorski, Polish Defense Minister, quoted here. (Via Helen at the EU Referendum blog.)