Category Archives: Arts & culture

Country anthem

It ain’t writ by Jewel, nor by Willie Nelson neither. But here’s a genuine country anthem with lyrics by Indiana resident Jean (based on this comment), and tune by me. It’s a little ditty we call “(I Was) Standin on the Side of Love,” an it goes like this:

(I Was) Standin on the Side of Love (crappy MP3 of a crappy MIDI version of the tune and chords)

(I Was) Standin on the Side of Love (PDF of lead sheet, with tune and lyrics)

And now… the karaoke version, so you can sing along! MP3 file with country guitar, bass, and drum with occasional banjo and mandolin, and an “oo” track that you can sing along to. Lyrics are below.

(I Was) Standing on the Side of Love/karaoke version

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Horse barn anecdote

Jean, my older sister, just bought a new horse, after her last horse died tragically. In describing her new horse on her blog, she used some jargon I didn’t understand. I left a comment to that effect, and Jean responded with a lengthy post explaining the jargon. (“SLB” obviously stands for “Snotty Little Brother”).

Jean wrote a good explanation of the jargon, and now I feel I know a little more about the World of Horses. That’s probably a good thing, because once when I went to visit Jean, I almost got myself in trouble.

Jean invited me to go out and visit her horse at the barn where he lived. It was a lovely place, although I think I was about the only man there. Jean showed me around, and we stopped at the riding rink, where the woman who runs the barn trains both horses and the women who ride them. An attractive young woman was riding a horse around the ring, and after watching her for awhile, Jean said, “Wow, she has a good seat!” Now, as a heterosexual male, I had just been thinking exactly the same thing, but then because I try to be a good minister and a nice guy, I studiously looked at the horse and not the young woman.

Fortunately, before I started blushing, I realized Jean was using some horse jargon that I didn’t understand (and still don’t).

After that embarrassing moment, I wound up talking with a woman who was a professional ornithologist, who humiliated me by hearing birdsongs I simply couldn’t hear.

All in all, visiting a horse barn was a challenging experience for me.

Met while traveling

Written Monday, June 22, while on the train; posted Wednesday, June 24, and back-dated.

It’s what they call “community seating” in the dining car — they seat you with other people who come in at about the same time you do. Sure, you can take your food and go eat in your sleeping compartment, but it’s more fun to meet different people.

At dinner, I was seated with a family of three: mom, dad, daughter in mid-teens. They had been touring colleges on the East Coast, and were headed to Denver to visit colleges in that area. Upon finding out that I was from the Boston area, the dad turned to me and asked what I thought about Harvard College. I told him that I thought they were overpriced for what you got, unless all you wanted was the name on your diploma. “But,” I said, turning to the daughter, “it depends on what your filed is.”

“English,” she said, “writing, really.” So I asked what kind of writing she was interested in, and she said journalism and creative non-fiction. And then I asked what writers she liked, and she named Hunter S. Thompson and….

“Oh, New Journalism, huh?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, looking surprised that I knew what she was talking about.

So I told her that I love New Journalism, and besides my spouse, Carol, is a journalist, and my older sister has an MFA in creative writing, so like it or not I would know something about it. I told that Carol went to Newhouse School at Syracuse, and got good training in journalism; but what they told Carol at Newhosue was that you don’t need a degree in journalism, you mostly just need to write. So maybe it wasn’t so important which school she went to; maybe she should just find a college in New York City simply because it is the literary center of the United States. She had already thought about that.

Then the conversation meandered all over the place, and it turned out that the daughter had talked her parents into taking a side trip to drive past Woody Creek, where Hunter Thompson lived the last half of his life. Her parents didn’t quite roll their eyes, but obviously didn’t understand her passion. I love some of Thompson’s writing, especially Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, so I was far more sympathetic.

“Sounds like a good trip,” I said to her. “Literary pilgrimage is a venerable tradition. In fact, now that you mention it, going to Woody Creek a literary pilgrimage I should make.”

As we finished desert, I couldn’t resist asking her, “So how many words a day do you write?” “Well,” she said, and then admitted that she didn’t write every day. But wasn’t she was writing letters about her trip to a friend back home, which counts as writing, and writing in her journal? I said she should post those letters on a blog. She said that maybe she might do that some day.

New book: Liberal Pilgrims

What it says on the back cover:

“Liberal Pilgrims chronicles the experiences of Unitarians and Universalists from New Bedford, Massachusetts, offering a window on the sometimes unexpected context and development of liberal religion in North America. New Bedford’s religious liberals viewed the world from diverse perspectives, using different symbols, language, and actions to express their religion as they progressed in their pilgrimages — spiritual and religious journeys that that continue to transform the American liberal religious tradition to this day. Their stories remind us of the rich and sometimes disparate origins of liberal religious practice. And their stories challenge today’s liberal pilgrims to continue to seek out new directions for liberal religion, constantly reinventing contemporary liberal religious experience.

“Some stories have never been told in detail before. There’s the story of Reverend William Jackson, the first African-American minister to declare himself a Unitarian when he addressed a meeting of the American Unitarian Association in New Bedford. There are the stories of North Unitarian Church, a church of immigrants, and Centre Church, which changed its affiliation from the Christian Connection to Unitarianism. Other stories include the story of Reverend John Murray Spear, Universalist and abolitionist, minister of an interracial church in the 1830s, who was driven out of New Bedford when he helped free a slave. There’s the story of Mary Rotch, perhaps the most original Unitarian theologian to come out of New Bedford, and a confidante of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.

“Each of the 19 chapters tells about a different liberal religious person, community, or art work. By examining how these people and religious communities of the past lived out their religious ideals in their times, we learn more about our own liberal religion in the present day and its potential for the future.”

Yes, it’s now officially published. Yes, it contains the story of the very first African American minister to declare himself a Unitarian. Yes, it contains additional information about Unitarian and Universalist history, much of which has never before published.

And yes, it could use another round of copy editing, but I’m getting ready to move and I just don’t have enough time to go through the book again. But I promise it’s worth reading even with the typographical errors I’m sure are in it.

Go here to buy it. Cheap: $9.46 + shipping (I make no profit on the book). Cheaper still if you buy three or more.

Published (almost)

The preliminary edition of Liberal Pilgrims: Varieties of Liberal Religious Experience in New Bedford is now up on lulu.com. I call it a “preliminary edition” because I’ve never worked with lulu.com before, and I want to see a physical copy of the book before I decide it’s really OK. I’ll let you know when it’s really ready for release

The back cover copy reads: Continue reading →

Indexing

I am deep in the process of creating an index for this book project I’m working on. Who knew indexing could be so much fun? It’s just as much fun as mapping out all the links in a fairly large Web site — for after all, a book with an index is merely another kind of hypertext, using slower technology.

Binging on writing

I have spent the last few days binging on writing, trying to meet a self-imposed deadline on a big writing project. I have been writing in every spare moment (except those few spare moments when I was reading). I am going to miss my self-imposed deadline by a few days, but it has been an entirely delightful process: writing, revising, rewriting, and now proofreading and doing the final polishing. Tomorrow I get to start work on the index, something I am really looking forward to.

And what will be the final result? — a book-length project that perhaps only a dozen people will ever bother to read. Funnily enough, I have not been adversely affected by the thought of the small size of my expected readership. The dozen people who will read this book-length project will really care about the subject, and what I’ve written is reasonably well-crafted and well-structured. Above all, the process has been thoroughly enjoyable, from the initial conception right through the final revision. I guess I just like to write.

Broken Rule

Will Shetterly posted a link to “13 Tips For Actually Getting Some Writing Done.” So I had to go read it.

Here’s the rule I consistently break:

“3. Don’t binge on writing. Staying up all night, not leaving your house for days, abandoning all other priorities in your life — these habits lead to burn-out.”

OK, I don’t stay up all night, and I do leave the house, but I have been putting in way too much time on this book project I’m trying to finish. Thankfully, it’s almost done. It will be done by Friday. Then I will get back to normal. Whatever “normal” is.

Writing project

I managed to get myself involved in a big writing project. This project has been sucking up all my free time. Some people would say that this project is a waste of my time, since hardly anyone will read it once it’s done. There are three reasons why hardly anyone will read this writing project:

(1) This writing project is a book of sermons. People don’t read sermons any more, except maybe seminarians, and of course those high school students who have to read Jonathan Edwards’s sermon about dropping spiders into a fire.

(2) Worse yet, all these sermons are about the history of Unitarians and Universalists in New Bedford. No one wants to read sermons about New Bedford Unitarians and Universalists, except a dozen or so New Bedford Unitarian Universalists.

(3) Worst of all, a potential reader will have to pay for these sermons. (Church budgets being what they are, our church can’t afford to print them in-house.) I will publish them on lulu.com and sell them at cost, but most people who read sermons are used to having churches give them away for free.

When I am feeling enthusiastic, I think maybe a dozen people might buy this book. Then I remember that these are sermons with footnotes (yes, I have gone back and footnoted everything), and then I think maybe five people will buy this book, and two of those people will be me.

So why am I doing this? Why am I spending hours and hours writing, and rewriting, and fact-checking, and footnoting, and proofreading? Because it’s fun, that’s why. Some people participate in National Novel Writing Month, and they write novels that no one will ever read. Me, I like to write non-fiction, and do footnotes and a bibliography. Everyone needs a hobby, and so what if some of us have a hobby that involves creating books that no one will ever read.