a portrait of the artist as a young man

“An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven”

What kind of man I was to be you’ve known since the beginning,

since the beginning of every creature.

It must be horrible to be aware, simultaneously,

of what is, what was

and what will be.

I began my life confident and happy,

certain that the Sun rose every day for me

and that flowers opened for me every morning.

I ran all day in an enchanted garden.

Not suspecting that you had picked me from the Book of Genes

for another experiment altogether.

As if there were not proof enough

that free will is useless against destiny.

Under your amused glance I suffered

like a caterpillar impaled on the spike of a blackthorn.

The terror of the world opened itself to me.

Could I have avoided escape into illusion?

Into a liquor which stopped the chattering of teeth

and melted the burning ball in my breast

and made me think I could live like others?

I realized I was wandering from hope to hope

and I asked you, All Knowing, why you torture me.

Is it a trial like Job’s, so that I call faith a phantom

and say: You are not, nor do your verdicts exist,

and the earth is ruled by accident?

Who can contemplate

simultaneous, a-billion-times multiplied pain?

It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you

deserve your praise.

But perhaps because you overwhelmed by pity,

you descended to earth

to experience the condition of mortal creatures.

I pray to you, for I do not know how not to pray.

Because my heart desires you,

though I do not believe you would cure me.

And so it must be, that those who suffer will continue to suffer,

praising your name.

-Milosz (I know, I know, too much Milosz on this blog. It had to be done, though)

or those of us whose vision of Moses begins and ends at the movies, or more to the point, perhaps, with Charlton Heston, it may come as a great surprise to learn that Moses was just about everywhere in mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century America. You might even say he gave Jesus a run for his money. True, Cecil B. DeMille, who hired the then young and relatively unknown Heston because of his alleged resemblance to Michelangelo’s fabled sculpture, had a great deal to do with firmly affixing Moses and his Ten Commandments to the modern imagination. After all, “Mr. Movies,” as he was widely known, made not just one but two wildly popular motion pictures about the Decalogue: the first, a silent film in 1923; the other, the 1956 cinematic extravaganza that we now screen every year on television come Easter and Passover. But even granting DeMille his considerable due, the historical record makes clear that the latter-day film was but the latest in a long series of encounters with the biblical figure which punctuated American history from the mid-nineteenth century on. The apotheosis of all things Mosaic, DeMille’s postwar epic actually owed its success in large measure to the way it drew on the nation’s longstanding preoccupation with the scriptural character, a preoccupation that was every bit as quotidian as it was holy. [here]

1983-2007

he ministry is a calling, but it is also a career, and, in 1987, a Baptist minister named Wilbur Ellsworth was given the career opportunity of a lifetime. After nearly two decades of pastoring modest congregations in California and Ohio, Ellsworth, at the age of 43, was called to lead the First Baptist Church of Wheaton, Illinois—one of the most prominent evangelical churches in what was then the most prominent evangelical city in the world. Often called the “Evangelical Vatican,” the leafy Chicago suburb is home to Wheaton College—the prestigious evangelical college whose most famous graduate is Billy Graham—and a host of influential evangelical figures, a number of whom worshipped at First Baptist. “I was now preaching to these people every Sunday,” Ellsworth recalls. “It was all sort of heady and exciting.” [here]

During the TOC Conference in June, keynoter Manolis Kelaidis talked about how much he loved the feel and smell of books, even those on his shelf that he’s never read. A compelling case for the codex form factor.
Now comes word that CafeScribe.com will be sending eBook buyers a scratch-and-sniff sticker to bring the musty smell of “old books” to digital reading. Says CafeScribe CEO Bryce Johnson:
By placing these stickers on their computers they can give their e-books the same musty book smell they know and love from used textbooks — without any of the residual DNA you often find stuck to the pages of used textbooks.
Likely just a clever gimmick (see Smell-o-Vision),though the underlying survey findings are worth noting:
A survey of 600 college students conducted by pollster Zogby International found that 43 per cent of students identified smell, either a new or old smell, as the quality they most liked about books as physical objects.
(Then again, a more cynical interpretation leaves one slightly distressed that before the quality of the contents, college students place the highest value on a book’s smell.)

[here] 

When I was a boy in Geneva, sometime in the 1960s, a schoolmate of mine belonged to a society of junior lepidopterists. A couple of times a year, under the guidance of mature butterfly experts, he and his fellow enthusiasts went off to capture papillons in the alpine meadows above Montreux, at the opposite end of Lake Geneva. On one such expedition the guide was a stout, bald Russian gentleman in shorts and a parka who, despite being in his mid-60s, bounded ahead of the pack, brandishing his net and firing off exhortations and butterfly lore in accented but fluent English and French. When the hunt was over, he abruptly took his leave with a cheery “Au revoir, tout le monde.” His name I heard for the first time as, approximately, Monsieur Nabucco. He was, said my friend, one of the world’s leading experts on butterflies. He was also, he added in awe, the author of a really dirty book.

 [here]

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Bill Murray could face a drunken driving charge after cruising through downtown Stockholm in a golf cart and refusing to take a breath test, citing U.S. law.

 [here]

Q. In the subway corridor under Bryant Park on 42nd Street, there is a huge artwork with a strange quotation by James Joyce: “Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!” Can you make sense of it?

A. Samm Kunce, the environmental artist who created the 2002 glass, stone and marble mosaic, “Under Bryant Park,” obliged. The line, she said, is from “Finnegans Wake.” She suggests pronouncing the first word “Tell me tale” with an Irish accent.

Like quotations from Jung and Ovid that are also in the artwork, Joyce’s words deal with nature, water and stone. “For me it talks about music,” Ms. Kunce said of the Joyce quotation. “It talks about the sound the water makes in the night, how you might hear the brook babbling over stone, how the leaves may rustle in the night.” Joyce, she said, “cared so much about capturing the musicality of language in his native Irish.”

The Bryant Park station is used by many commuters, and she didn’t want people to grow tired of something too simple. “I wanted it to have a long life for them,” she said.

[here] 

Can we call it a trend now: German cities removing post-war construction to restore pre-war architecture? First, there was the recreation of Dresden’s Frauenkirche. Next, the demolition of the East German Palace of the Republic with the hope of restoring the Hohenzollern palace. Then, the Berlin SPD proposed returning to rows of single family townhouses to replace the large, blocky, Bauhaus-inspired apartment buildings. Even Cologners’ racist resistance to the construction of a “super-mosque” belonged to a larger debate about the lost character of the city. The newest proposal comes from Frankfurt, which is considering demolishing its city hall and surrounding buildings in order to recreate the Altstadt, the old city center, at the cost of 70 million euros. [here]

He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”
He did not quite believe it. Lyric poets
Usually have—as he knew—cold hearts.
It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art
Is given in exchange for such an affliction.

-Milosz