MP's Substack Moves Forward

Changes coming now

In today’s post you will find:

1. as always, beauty from the vault;

2. changes to come, including a possible name change;

3. approaching the Bork martini

(1) Beauty from the vault: refined articles of daily life

Nick and Nora glasses, the best all-around glasses for cocktails, and steak knives from New West Knifeworks. The knives are expensive. But we are a large family and entertain frequently. They are used often and will last a long time. I bought them discounted, as an anniversary gift for my wife. And they are beautiful.

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(2) Changes to come

On this substack, I promise you new content in the areas of philosophy, theology, asceticism, culture, music, wine, political economy, economics, and reading text of the New Testament—all from the point of view of a scholar and classical philosopher, who styles himself a student of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and is a believing Catholic.

If you know my scholarly books and like them, you may like this substack too. If you know my popular books and like them, you will most likely love this substack.

It’s fair to say that most substacks repeat the work of others, sometimes with light commentary. I hardly ever repeat the work of others. Since I am to provide “new content”—that is, thoughts and insights that you will find nowhere else, I ask you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription, on the principle, “the worker is worthy of his wage.”

I’ve hit upon several these routines, which I plan to continue going forward:

1. Saturdays devoted to music

2. Tuesdays devoted to the text of the gospel for the Sunday to come

3. Sundays, a day of rest, no posting

4. begin each post with a beautiful image

And also, henceforth, I plan to give at the start of each post a list of what I will cover. You are busy persons, and this way you can see at a glance whether you want to read the post or not, and which parts you wish to read.

Paid subscribers have the ability to comment. In the future, I will be reserving one post per week for paid subscribers only.

Finally, I am considering changing the name of this substack. Currently it has no name. I was thinking:

• Michael Pakaluk’s Diary (adapt Rod Dreher’s name, why not?)

• Walk in the Good Way (a loose allusion to Jeremiah 6:16), and

• Nihil Humani Alienum (a loose allusion to a famous line from Terence)

Of the three, the last expresses best my conception (and my conception of Catholicism also).

If you have opinions, why not weight in ?

I’m using the Jeremiah phrase my next book, forthcoming with The Catholic University of America Press. Here’s the cover mock-up I received yesterday:

I’m pleased to say that I picked out the cover art myself, a famous photo of the crowd watching the launch of Apollo XI in July 1969.

I find it highly appropriate for the book, because it shows American civic friendship at the time; the laws of physics and sound administration governing the launch mirror natural law; and everyone is looking up in wonder, which expresses contemplation.

Also, this is a book about classical natural law, and a striking fact about classical natural law is that everyone pictures it as coming ‘from above.’ The New Natural Law is never understood in that way and does not easily accept such an interpretation.

Again, feel free to weigh in:

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(3) A couple of years ago, Mary Ellen Bork, the widow of the great Judge, Robert Bork, passed on to me all the research materials (not very great, tbh) which Bob had begun to amass for a book he had been planning on the martini. I therefore feel a debt of piety to write this book and tie it into originalism somehow.

I took a first step towards that goal by going back recently to Bork’s famous essay in the National Review from 1996 on the martini.

I’ll discuss that essay in a later post. But here’s a lovely reminiscence by John O’Sullivan in the issue of February 4, 2009:

I wish I had come earlier to the party celebrating Judge Bork’s book and firm drinking prescriptions. His dry-as-a-bone essay on the Martini in our 1996 post-election issue provoked some wonderful responses. They included (again if my memory is right) a letter from a former U2 pilot who wrote that it was a matter of pride among his fellow-pilots to strip out the iron rations from their survival kit and replace them with a Martini kit. The idea was that if your plane was shot out of the sky, you would land somewhere in Siberia, get out of the parachute, scoop up a handful or two of snow, mix the martini, and drink it while waiting for the Russians to arrive.

The spirit of the story strongly indicates gin rather than vodka as the drink’s mainstay.

On the wider question of cocktails, … we can indeed all get along. Judge Bork himself regularly enjoys a gimlet as a sort of vacation from the Martini, rather like going on the wagon. But the alcohol in his gimlets not only has to be gin, the lime juice absolutely has to be Rose’s already-sweetened version. Accept no substitutes. Gimlets made with a blend of some other lime juice and bar sugar might as well be called a limetini and abandoned to abandoned young women.

The 1996 Bork discussion of the Martini, incidentally, appeared in an issue entitled “How to Forget the Election.” Is anything happening at the moment that might explain the recurrence of this topic?

It’s not easy to find Bork’s essay on the internet (at least not for me), but Stephen Bates posted a nicely formatted copy on his blog once: https://batess.posthaven.com/judge-bork-martinis-mintthecoin

I’ll give you a graph from it and come back to it as I said later.

Well, what is the recipe for the perfect martini? Edmunds says the proportion of gin to vermouth may range from 4:1 to 8:1. The upper end of that range is preferable, and one may even go to 10:1 (the martini that American officers called “the Montgomery” to annoy British officers with a reminder of the Field Marshall’s unwillingness to fight except with overwhelming odds). Some years back a despairing producer of vermouth took out ads advocating 3:1 and asserting that “a dry martini is not a hooker of gin.” Not quite, but a hooker of icy gin would be infinitely preferable to a 3:1 martini.

Bork’s essay was written at a time when men were trying to prove how manly they were by diminishing the proportion of vermouth. The crucial question is raised by Bork’s remarks here:

there is only one drink that conveys conservative correctness, spreads warmth and courage throughout one’s soul, and has the additional merit of being the most delicious cocktail ever invented. I refer, of course, to the dry martini, a distinctively American invention, which Bernard DeVoto called the “supreme American gift to world culture.” (Not that the world accepted the gift very eagerly: until recently the only sure way to get a decent martini in England was to go behind the bar and make it yourself. Most of the rest of the world is hopeless.)

What proportion of gin to vermouth actually makes it, or makes it seem, “the most delicious cocktail ever invented” and conveys the character of being “distinctively American”? I’m quite confident that 8:1 removes “deliciousness” while below 3:1 the drink begins to taste French not American.

The fad now is toward recovering the original proportion, which was 2:1.

Again, weigh in!

Postscript:

Remember my instructions for Claude for solid proofreading:

Proofread this as a copy editor would, reading against the possibility that every sentence contains an error. Flag: (1) typos and spelling errors; (2) grammatical errors; (3) drafting residues — words or phrases that appear to be notes to the author rather than finished prose; (4) incomplete thoughts; (5) punctuation errors; (6) inconsistencies of register or tone. List every item you find before offering any stylistic observations.

Now, I have not changed anything from how I drafted the above copy. I’ve left it uncorrected, because I want you to see what Claude came up with, as corrections, after I fed in the above prompt:

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CLAUDE:

Here is the full flag list, item by item:

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TYPOS AND SPELLING ERRORS

1. “weight in” (twice) — should be weigh in each time.

2. “the Field Marshall’s” — should be Field Marshal’s (one l).

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GRAMMATICAL ERRORS

3. “everyone pictures it as coming ‘from above’” — the quotation marks around from above are inconsistent with the surrounding prose, which uses no such marking for other paraphrases. Either drop them or apply them consistently.

4. “tbh” — inappropriate register for a Substack aimed at the readership described (see also tone note below).

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DRAFTING RESIDUES

5. “Not very great, tbh” — the parenthetical reads like a private aside or text-message notation rather than finished prose. If the thought is worth keeping, it needs to be rewritten.

6. “On the wider question of cocktails, … we can indeed all get along.” — the ellipsis in the O’Sullivan quotation appears to truncate something without indicating what was cut; if this is your own abridgment of the quotation, standard usage requires a bracketed ellipsis: […].

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INCOMPLETE THOUGHTS

7. “gimlets made with a blend of some other lime juice and bar sugar might as well be called a limetini and abandoned to abandoned young women” — the phrase abandoned to abandoned young women is obscure to the point of incomprehensibility. If this is Bork’s or O’Sullivan’s own wording quoted exactly, a [sic] or brief gloss would serve the reader; if it is a transcription error, it needs correction.

8. “Is anything happening at the moment that might explain the recurrence of this topic?” — O’Sullivan’s rhetorical question (written in 2009, referring to the Obama election) will be opaque to contemporary readers without a brief editorial note explaining the reference.

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PUNCTUATION ERRORS

9. The bullet-point lists throughout use inconsistent terminal punctuation: some items end with no punctuation, some end with what appears to be a line break being used as punctuation. The lists should be internally consistent.

10. “Nick and Nora glasses, the best all-around glasses for cocktails, and steak knives from New West Knifeworks.” — this is a sentence fragment (no verb). It reads as a caption rather than prose.

11. “I find it highly appropriate for the book, because it shows American civic friendship at the time” — the comma before because is unnecessary here; because introduces a restrictive clause essential to the sentence’s meaning and should not be set off.

12. “the laws of physics and sound administration governing the launch mirror natural law” — no punctuation error per se, but the semicolons separating the three-part explanation of why the image is appropriate are correct; however, the first item in the series (”it shows American civic friendship at the time”) ends with a semicolon, the second (”the laws of physics and sound administration governing the launch mirror natural law”) ends with a semicolon, and the third (”everyone is looking up in wonder, which expresses contemplation”) ends with a period. This is technically correct but should be verified against your house style.

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INCONSISTENCIES OF REGISTER OR TONE

13. “tbh” — strikingly out of place in a post that otherwise sustains a learned, slightly formal voice. It belongs to a different register entirely.

14. “why not?” (after “adapt Rod Dreher’s name”) — casual to the point of flippancy, inconsistent with the surrounding prose; acceptable only if the post is consciously maintaining a playful register throughout, which it does not do consistently.

15. “Accept no substitutes” — a sudden imperative, advertising-slogan register, in the middle of reporting O’Sullivan’s prose. If it is part of the quotation, the quotation needs to be closed and re-opened to make this clear; if it is your own interpolation, it should be marked as such.

16. “abandoned young women” — as noted under incomplete thoughts, this phrase is likely Bork’s or O’Sullivan’s, but without clearer attribution the contemporary reader may read it as the author’s own phrasing, with consequent register problems.

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STYLISTIC OBSERVATIONS

The post has three distinct sections that don’t yet feel like a unified piece — the beautiful-objects section, the housekeeping section, and the martini section are each engaging but pull in different directions. If this is intentional as a miscellany format, a brief framing line at the top (beyond the bullet-list preview) would help the reader settle in. The explanation of why the Apollo cover image is appropriate for Walk in the Good Way is genuinely arresting and could be expanded — it’s the most substantive paragraph in the post and feels slightly rushed given how good the observation is.