What is Lord of Indiscipline?
Welcome to Lord of Indiscipline, the newsletter of John Emmet Clarke—publisher, plebe, and pater familias.
Lord of Indiscipline is a newsletter about the good life. “You see, you really had a wonderful life,” the guardian angel Clarence tells George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. Bailey’s life was no bed of roses. Nor is mine. Nor, I wager, is yours. Yet by virtue of our refusal to throw it all away, we claim it as “good.”
Who is John Emmet Clarke?
I am a publisher by trade: since 2015, I have stewarded Cluny Media’s catalog of classic books. I am a husband and father by choice: I live with my wife and children in a quiet New England town where we never have any adventures and never do anything unexpected. I am a Roman Catholic by God’s good will. And in these and pretty much most things, I can say—like the guys on the Mount—it is damn good to be here.
Lord of Indiscipline is here to muse on those things that make it good. God, country, family; literature, sport, music; good food and drink—these things make my life good; Lord of Indiscipline aims to show they can make every life good. By necessity, it also contends with the opposing forces of all these good things: evil by any other name—deceit, isolation, smut, banality—still is evil.
What good can come from this place?
Every other Wednesday, Lord of Indiscipline publishes either a short story or an essay of moderate length on some aspect of or insight flowing from one of those above-mentioned core realities. Professional necessity and personal habit necessitate for me a relentless preoccupation with books, so literature and literary matters will anchor the majority of essays. As a proud pater familias, I will also take up domestic affairs, specifically on discipline (in its rootsy-est, educative sense).
Discipline, in all its senses, is the watchword for the good life. The good life starts now, not tomorrow; it takes discipline to act now, not tomorrow. “Do not fret over tomorrow; leave tomorrow to fret over its own needs; for today, today’s troubles are enough.” Yet even if indiscipline is my lot, I yield to no one my lordly authority over it.
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
Always, always, always, the topic will be of what my parents would call “general interest.” It will never, I guarantee, be relevant to any iteration of The Current Thing—unless, of course, you happen to make it so. It will, I promise, provide food for thought, recommendations for what (and maybe even how) to read, and a guiding-line of sanity and stability in an insane and unstable world.
P.S. You can write me at johnemmetclarke@substack.com.
