A Very Strange Night
“If they want supernatural, let’s give them Godly supernatural,” Mr. Watters says.
clusterflock Donations Update
Just a few words to say how thankful and overwhelmed I have been by the inpouring of generosity to help the site. It shows me how much all of you enjoy the site in a way that I had hoped would be the case. We are well on our way to the goal we had set for the drive and I look forward to keeping you up to date on our progress.
The New NBA Ball
“The one thing I hate about the ball, it always feels new,” he said. “And if you ask Kenny, when we played, we always wanted an old, used ball.”
(My) Sexual Revolution
I grew up the son of reformed fundamentalists and attended college at the peak of the politically correct revolution. Needless to say I have felt a lot of shame about my sexuality.
My first memory involves a road trip with my mom and siblings. I’m not sure where we were going, but I had seen some televised movie with Sally Field (perhaps a rebroadcast of Norma Rae?) that showed two adults in a sexual relationship without the burden of marriage.
My initial and heart felt sense was that this was okay, that human relationships could take many forms, from the pleasurable to the committed (not that those are necessarily exclusive), but as I had never heard unequivocally concerning the morality of sexual union from either of my parents I endeavored to ask….
My mother’s answer sunk my heart in a way that probably I am only now beginning to recover from.
How’s that for melancholy? But it’s true. Sew up a young man’s heart against the inevitability of his body and you will create a tension in him that cannot be resolved.
Our Ailing Communities
You say, “The modern America of obesity, inactivity, depression, and loss of community has not ‘happened’ to us. We legislated, subsidized, and planned it this way.” When did you first start to make the connection between the design of our national landscape and the health of our citizens?
Sunday Heroes: Matthew
(hat tip to junkmail)
Have you ever googled yourself?
Pardon me if I don’t feel chastised for googling on yahoo. I’d rather celebrate and encourage the linguistic process that turns a name into a verb, and I think Google should too. Here’s why.
SHHH!
Sedaris, not the one you are thinking of
Don’t think of pony kegs and loud Southern rock or cigarillos and businesswomen. Don’t think of pools and diving for loose change. Don’t think about cockfights — even though it’s hard not to.” Instead, she urges us to “think simplicity. Because if there is one thing that I am, it’s clinically simple.”
Translating Virgil
“Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit,” Aeneas tells his exhausted, shipwrecked followers in “The Aeneid,” Book 1. “Maybe someday you will rejoice to recall even this.”
Beauty, Eyes, Beholder…you know the deal.
So – what are the journeys that are really worth making to see art? To launch the Guardian’s new arts blog, let’s work together to make a definitive list of works of art everyone should, at least once in a lifetime, travel to encounter – a list of 50 Works of Art to See Before You Die.
I’m kicking off the debate by listing my own top 20…
Dibdin on Dawkins
Others have appealed to the canonical texts as proof not only of Dawkins’ existence but also the dual modalities of his being. For most believers, he is the charming, articulate media don who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten books over to explaining evolution in terms even you could understand. It is indeed a challenging test of faith to reconcile this Dawkins with the fire-and-brimstone authoritarian given to smiting the heathen and heretics such as Stephen Jay Gould, who interpret the Darwinian commandments in a revisionist form, thundering, “Thou shalt have no other gods before meme.”
Interview with George Saunders
DB: You more explicity reveal in your latest book that undergirding your satire is a spiritual primitivism, i.e. a very simple and basic individual humility in God’s world. The reason your spirituality is so primitive is because the current value systems, especially in these fictional extremes, reduce your characters to an elemental state of consciousness, very much stunted and in desperate need of loving relationships and truthful language. Diminished by circumstance, your characters are doing the best they can. Your artistic decision is to locate our moral salvation in a God toward whom our first steps are likely to be sincere but awkward. Why?
George Saunders: I like the phrase “spiritual primitivist,” kind of. I am not traditionally religious. I was raised Catholic and got a lot of good from that. My wife and I are Buddhists now, me in no small part because a lot of things I’d come to believe, through observation and experience (and via writing), I found present in those teachings…. Though it may not be a happy state of affairs, we are only as good as our individual moral impulses, and these are only as good as our willingness to be constantly reappraising them…. So maybe the important human work is to constantly be working to clarify and fire-test these impulses while improving our ability to monitor them…. In this book, what kept happening was, somebody who was lost in a shitstorm of bullshit and lies and propaganda kept struggling to get to that place of innate wisdom/kindness. To me, that’s moving, and it’s also what each of us is doing every day, maybe more in these crazy times than in others, although actually I doubt it. We’re just doing it in a particular flavor. But the extremity of the anti-truth forces (corporate logic, government forces, happy-face New Agers, our own darker impulses) and their newfound volume (via the new media, totally in bed with money) make it all that more urgent a struggle and maybe necessitates a kind of loud restating of basic truths.
Link
Link
PostSecret
Barefoot Bob
“It’s for fun,” he said.
Hallowed
A short while back I posted a couple of peevish outbursts vis-a-vis Hallowe’en (current-day manifestations).
Jim Coudal speaks of these things far better (and more directly) than I did in his “All Hallows” piece at The Morning News. (And he conjures up recollections of Redmoon Theater pageants I was fortunate to witness.)
(via Coudal Partners)
clusterflock Donations
It looks like clusterflock is about to exceed its bandwidth! I have created a paypal account to accept donations to help pay for the growing site. If you have any interest in participating, please do not hesitate…. Your kindness is greatly appreciated!
Dangerous St. Louis
I just read an article about how St. Louis has become the nation’s most dangerous city (murderous killing, etc.). I was going to blog that this probably had something to do with Andrew then realized the Mayor’s name is Francis Slay.
100 Million-Year-Old-Bee
“It’s exciting to see something that seems so different from what we think of as modern bees,” Danforth said. “It’s not an ancestor of honeybees, but probably was a species on an early branch of the evolutionary tree of bees that went extinct.”
James Fee
James Fee, whose photographs of abandoned factories, lonesome highways and disjointed human figures express his sense of loss for what he remembered as better times for this country, died on September 4, 2006. He was 56.
Terry Eagleton blows a fuse…
“Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree.”
Hello Darkness My New Friends (Or, Powder on the Tracks)
Last Friday and of course that means another Downtown Highlife Bicycle Club ride. Brad and I arrived at the Alamo at exactly 9pm to find a group twice as large as last month (10×2=20), which was an exciting development because we did next to nothing to get the word out, or put another way, we took a laissez faire approach and surrendered to the market forces. But what really happened was Brian emailed a bunch of people to show up, and in the email, he hinted that I might be wearing a costume, which is funny because it’s the one thing I said I wouldn’t do. So what was the theme for the ride? Obviously, Halloween.
Oblivion
Fans
It seems to me if you are willing to stick around and watch your team win you should be willing to stick around and watch your team lose.
Meet the Flockers: John Henry Pakaluk
I am currently a junior at Thomas Aquinas College in southern California. Every student at the school studies the same things: philosophy, theology, mathematics, natural sciences, latin, music, and seminars in politics, ethics, history, economics, psychology, literature, and the rest.
I was born in Cambridge, MA but moved to Worcester, MA when I was two, where I lived until I was 17, living in three different houses. I did another year in Cambridge, then my family moved to the country, Lancaster, MA. They’re back in Cambridge now, but only for a year or two. I tell people I’m from Cambridge but I consider Lancaster to be home.
I work for IVES, Inc. as a lowly data-entry type. I therefore spend a lot of time on the internet researching financial and accounting information (fraud and the like), and also auditor trends, which information I primarily gather from the SEC database. My favorite part of the job, besides the pay, is that the SEC is a client of ours, which speaks loudly and humorously to the incompetence of government bureaucracy: the SEC pays us for their information.
My interests are a virtuous and intellectual life. After that, I’m a lover of music. I play piano and trumpet, both classically and jazzily. I’ve composed in both genres as well. I direct a choir here at TAC that has focused on the choral works of Anton Bruckner and, more recently, on english medieval carols (for Christmas). I’m a season subscriber to the LA Philharmonic.
Finally, in my wanderings over the web I stumble on innumberable things of interest. I doubt my posting activity will go much beyond linking to such things, allowing for some small amount of commentary.
