February 2008
43 posts
The problems of justifying suffering
There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of secondary causality—in nature or history—is governed not only by a transcendent providence but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But one should consider the price...
January 2008
46 posts
January is the time to "Practice the Scales of...
From Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son, We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father; “Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.” They will come, all right,...
Swimming in a Sea of Death
“A good death” may be one of the emptiest phrases in the English language. Research has confirmed that no two people use it to mean exactly the same thing. Even the premise is unclear; for whom, exactly, is that death supposed to be good? Many would prefer a swift, sudden and painless exit for themselves — but a little warning when it comes to friends and relatives, with time to prepare and to say...
Ingmar Bergman on Art, Worship, and the Bane of...
People ask what are my intentions with my films, my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck...
All Stud and No Hole
Ole Kirk Christiansen made wooden toys for a living. (He also made stepladders and ironing boards.) The Lego company started using plastic in 1947, and dealt in it exclusively after 1960, when its wooden-goods warehouse burned down. Part of Christiansen’s genius was to make the new material feel almost as comforting, as domestically reliable, as wood itself. There was nothing very natural...
“Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of small near...”
– Jean-Do, From The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [thanks to Greg for the script]
I recommend seeing this film →
"Crossing the Border," Jason Gray
In a vineyard after snowfall I’m convinced it’s an army of skeletons marching across Denmark. The one leaf still clinging is the General’s feather, or the single hair you left in my brush. We managed to get you in the ground before it froze. In the spring, you’ll be the melting snow. All I have now is the typewriter. I tore its keys off and bloodied my hands on...
100 books every child should read →
This article kicks ass
In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed a bill honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday. Reagan opposed it, but back then, in the olden times of checks and balances, the vote by 338 representatives and 78 senators establishing the holiday threatened certain veto override. So there was the president in the White House Rose Garden pretending to enjoy turning this drain on the Gross...
Too much free time in Linnaeus's home town
Sweden to Study Belching Cows A Swedish university has received $590,000 in research funds to measure the greenhouse gases released when cows belch. About 20 cows will participate in the project run by the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, about 40 miles north of Stockholm, officials said Monday. Cattle release methane, a greenhouse gas believed to contribute to global...
David Bazan Live at the Grey Eagle (free mp3s) →
The Joy of Silly
LET us now praise goofy men.Richard Knerr died last week at the age of 82. He co-founded Wham-O, the corporation that brought us the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee and the SuperBall. Mr. Knerr and his partner, Arthur Melin, who died in 2002, were able to pull off one of the most difficult tricks in marketing: starting a fad. Repeatedly. Like quantum mechanics and comedy, not everybody can do it. [NYT]
Psychic Murder
“How about a game?” I asked. He was amused. I grabbed the white pieces, not even giving him the chance to draw for color — what the hell, he was Bobby Fischer — and played a Queen’s Gambit. It was the best game I ever have played. I held out for about 30 moves, and when I resigned, it was with flags flying and bands playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” I went down with honors. The game took...
The private-public reality of writing
I had known a writer’s lonliness before, working on my dissertation in the British Museum. But that experience did not prepare me for the task of writing these pages where my own life is the subject. Many days I feared I had stopped living by commiting myself to rememebr the past. I feared that my absorption with events in my past amounted to an immature refusal to live in the...
Young Reviewers Competition (perhaps the only time... →
London: The terrible letdown
I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German interview under the title ‘Ich bin ein Reiseführer in die Geschichte’ (‘I am a travel guide to history’). Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the survivors of the school I went to when I...
The Recorders of a History of Suffering
Cut off from the past by the war, the poetry of postwar Poland is much more guarded and complex. And yet, in spite of the strain of pessimism, Polish writers had an inherited appreciation for the critical role that poetry has to play in mediating “those questions that History poses to the individual life and that human life poses to History.” The lessons Herbert, for instance, drew from his own...
“The Christian who suffers is tempted to think this a proof that he is nearer to...”
– W.H. Auden
'i've got the hots for anne lamott'
the sexy octopus-dreads adorne her fetching face she wears her comfortable humor like a well-worn woolen poncho and her sad-colored eyes and red-ripe lips cover the self, the one who writes so much [the much lamented Luke Anderson]
Fish and the humanities, part two
I still remember serving on an all-university committee at Johns Hopkins University and hearing one of my fellow committee members say that he would happily support the English department because his wife very much enjoyed seeing plays. When I told him that the department never put on plays, and at that moment did not even have a faculty member who was interested in plays, he was amazed and asked...
From "Letter From Birmingham Jail," MLK Jr.
I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to...
This explains at least one of the Mercedes S500's...
It’s Mob Economics 101: Find a business that’s easy to enter and lucrative to control. Criminal organizations make lots of money from drugs, human trafficking, and counterfeit goods, but creating a monopoly on garbage collection is attractive because the business itself is legal, and public contracts return big profits. Compared with something like running a casino or grocery store,...
"A Poem For The End Of The Century," Milosz
When everything was fine And the notion of sin had vanished And the earth was ready In universal peace To consume and rejoice Without creeds and utopias, I, for unknown reasons, Surrounded by the books Of prophets and theologians, Of philosophers, poets, Searched for an answer, Scowling, grimacing, Waking up at night, muttering at dawn. What oppressed me so much Was a bit shameful. Talking of it...
“Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston”
– Name of one of the fifteen Southern novels published within two years in response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
“To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions...”
– Charles Tayler, Sources of the Self [perhaps in light of posting Milosz poem, “Ars Poetica,” or the recent Fish article ]
AIDS Patients Face Downside of Living Longer
CHICAGO — John Holloway received a diagnosis of AIDS nearly two decades ago, when the disease was a speedy death sentence and treatment a distant dream. Yet at 59 he is alive, thanks to a cocktail of drugs that changed the course of an epidemic. But with longevity has come a host of unexpected medical conditions, which challenge the prevailing view of AIDS as a manageable, chronic disease. Mr....
(a good metaphor for how I have unfortunately come...
Sharon Olds, “Sex without Love” How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. How do they come to the come to the come to the God come to the still...
“Embarrassingly, we have now failed twice to describe accurately the Fair Tax...”
– The Economist
Literally, A Web Log →
[thanks to viz]
Are the humanities worthless?
Philip Sydney put it as well as anyone ever has when he asks (in “The Defense of Poesy,” 1595), “Who reads Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wishes not it was his fortune to perform such an excellent act?” Thrill to this picture of filial piety in the Aeneid and you will yourself become devoted to your father. Admire the selfless act with which Sidney Carton ends his life in “A Tale of...
The Reading Cure
The idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato. But now book groups are proving that Shakespeare can be as beneficial as self-help guides. Blake Morrison investigates the rise of bibliotherapy. Book_2 At a reading group in Birkenhead, nine women and two men are looking at Act 1 scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale, in which Leontes and his wife Hermione...
“To the handful of people that check this: My apologies for the spotty posting as...”
I agree with this not because of the logic, but...
It’s time to put an end to this silliness. Using an open WiFi network is no more “stealing” than is listening to the radio or watching TV using the old rabbit ears. If the WiFi waves come to you and can be accessed without hacking, there should be no question that such access is legal and morally OK. If your neighbor runs his sprinkler and accidentally waters your yard, do you...
“To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest [slavery] was the object for...”
– Abraham Lincoln, from The Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865