Category Archives: Arts & culture

A poetic politician? Hard to believe….

I try not to write about politics here, but I am always willing to write about efforts to resist the anti-intellectualism that is dominant in the United States today. Columnist Ben Macintyre, writing for the London Times, has uncovered poetry which was written by Barack Obama “for a college magazine at the age of 19.” Macintyre’s assessment of the poems? — “Surprisingly good.” Apparently even Harold Bloom, the critic who is the self-proclaimed guardian of the “Western canon,” likes Obama’s poetry. Hillary Clinton, while not a poet herself, at least has no less than Maya Angelou to write poetry in her defense. Link to Timesarticle.

For the record, Macintyre reprints one of the 19-year-old Obama’s poems:

Pop

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me.

No it’s not Maya Angelou, but yes, Obama’s poem is “surprisingly good” — and, given the current anti-intellectualism of the political scene, I find it utterly surprising that a U.S. politician even cares about poetry. We can only hope that this will start a trend of U. S. politicians aspiring to be smart and well-educated, instead of aspiring to be badly-educated corporate hacks.

Singing together

In the spirit of thinking out loud…

Today’s New York Times has an earnest article about community singalongs (on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section), which got me thinking. The article, “Shared Song, Cultural Memory” by Ben Ratliff, starts off like this:

EAST LANSING, Mich. They meet on the first Monday of the month at the Universalist Unitarian [sic] Church here, not to worship but to sing. Just to sing. There are song leaders, some with a guitar or banjo or an autoharp, but this isn’t a class or a choir; the singers, not the leaders, choose the tunes. Most hold copies of a spiral-bound songbook of folk music called Rise Up Singing. They perform songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side” and “This Land Is Your Land.” No one minds a voice gone off-key.

From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches, and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voice and bring old songs into common memory.

Anyone who has hung around mainline churches, or folk music circles, long enough will recognize the phenomenon Ratliff describes — although I have heard them called “song circles,” or even “Rise Up Singing” after the book that is commonly used, but not “community sings” (which is perhaps a midwestern term?). The Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in has a monthly song circle they call “Rise Up Singing,” which last I heard was attracting about twenty people a month. Summer church camps of all denominations frequently feature informal group singing sessions. It’s a fairly widespread phenomenon, worth paying attention to.

This is a long post, so I’ll put a break here — read on if you’re interested! Continue reading →

Just the facts, ma’am

As the United States news media focuses on campaign minutiae — like the ongoing New York Times in-depth coverage of campaign advertisements (who cares?), and the fluffy personality pieces about candidate spouses — it’s hard to find solid factual information. So I turn to the BBC news Web site, which now features US elections map: state-by-state guide, an interactive map which shows who won (or is projected to win) how many delegates in which states.

Speaking of terrible election coverage, our local daily newspaper, the New Bedford Standard Times, never seems to have reported the result of many of our local elections last fall. They give us in-depth coverage of the Patriots (which is covered far better by the big regional papers like the Boston Globe), but ignore such important news stories as who won the New Bedford school committee race. I learned who was elected to the school committee from the local freebie paper, The Weekly Compass.

No wonder newspaper readership is rapidly declining in the United States. They feed us pundits and pablum, and expect us to suck it down and like it. When readers like me turn to the Web for our news — because that’s where we can get the facts we’re looking for, instead of pundits and pablum — the newspapers howl that blogs don’t provide “real journalism.” As it happens, blogs like Justin Webb’s BBC blog have given me more real news and factual information on the U.S. election than the New York Slime or the Wall Street Urinal.

Too bad, because I’m actually very fond of newspapers. But it seems to me they’re doing the damage to themselves, by not providing the facts readers want.

Cranky for a reason

And you wonder why Mr. Crankypants is cranky? Because he’s 48, that’s why. A University of Warwick professor has done research showing that simply being middle-aged is depressing:

Using data on 2 million people, from 80 nations, researchers from the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College in the US have found an extraordinarily consistent international pattern in depression and happiness levels that leaves us most miserable in middle age…. The researchers found happiness levels followed a U shaped curve, with happiness higher towards the start and end of our lives and leaving us most miserable in middle age….

For the average person in the modern world, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year. Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20 year old. Link to press release.

This news bit comes via Will Shetterly, whose commenters point out that for some of us middle-aged folk, age 20 sucked too. For his part, Mr. C. wonders if the average 20 year old just doesn’t have enough experience to realize how depressing the world is — never questioning why it is we are all in this handbasket, nor asking where it is we are all going.

A little more nuance with that, please

The January, 2008, issue of Locus celebrates the 90th birthday of Arthur C. Clarke with a number of special features, including a December interview borrowed from BBC’s Focus magazine. The interviewer asks, “What is the greatest threat that we, as a race, are facing?” and Sir Arthur replies:

Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation. It’s spreading the most malevolent mind virus of all. I hope our race can one day outgrow this primitive notion, as I envisaged in 3001: The Final Odyssey.

I think Clarke underestimates the threat of global climate change, nuclear weapons, and continuing population growth, but as he admits elsewhere in the interview, “I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy, if only because it offers us the opportunity of self-fulfilling prophesy.” There are a few other threats I’d throw in there before I got to religion — global poverty and associated malnutrition, the growing crisis around clean water supplies, violence against women, etc., etc. — threats that can physically kill you long before religion’s “mind virus” infects you.

Having said that, organized religion that “pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation” is indeed a dangerous thing; George W. Bush’s religion, which appears to have driven him to an ill-considered war in Iraq, is a case in point. Like Clarke, I am wary of religion that claims to deliver morality;– although I’m quite comfortable with a religion that allows consideration of moral issues in a skeptical but supportive community because it seems to me that moral issues are impossible to resolve on one’s own, and today’s market-driven society here in the United States allows precious few places where groups of people can talk through moral issues openly. Like Clarke, I am also wary of any religion that pretends to deliver spiritual salvation;– although I’m comfortable with a religion that simply states that all persons are automatically saved as a way of making the point that all persons are worthy of dignity and respect; but aside from that, I have no interest in a religion that claims to provide salvation only to a chosen few. (And yeah, I admit my bias, I like to think that my religion is one with which I can be comfortable.)

So I think Clarke makes one or both of the usual two errors that people make damning judgement of religion. The first error lies in damning all religion based on a small set of direct experiences with organized religion; and the second error lies in damning all religion based on portrayals of religion in the media. The first error uses too small a sample for adequate statistical analysis, and ignores exceptions that really must be considered before making such broad pronouncements. The second error is the classic error of relying on second-hand sources of questionable accuracy; if adequate first-hand observation isn’t possible, it’s always better to rely on serious peer-reviewed scholarly works, to get better data and a more nuanced analysis of that data.

Socialist sermons

Since 1992, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Standford University has slowly been issuing The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., a multi-volume series of King’s writings; new volumes come out as they get the funding for research, editing, and publication. The most recent volume, published in January, 2007, collects King’s sermons. In an article titled “The Prophet Reconsidered: 40 years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., new studies emphasize his economic and social philosophy,” Christopher Phelps reports that King’s sermons are far more leftist than you might think:

The most recent volume [Vol. VI of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.] comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (“There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”

This is a very different MLK than we get in the popular media these days! More about the book, including how to purchase for approx. US$40. Thanks to Fred for sending me the January 18, 2008, article on King.

My narrow and ill-informed view: best UU blogs

The amazing UUpdater has begun to get ready for the annual Unitarian Universalist (UU) blog awards, and you can follow the process at the UUpdater blog. Last year, I said that I was completely incompetent to vote for the best UU blog, and that goes double this year — not only are there more UU blogs out there this year, I have even less time to read all the blogs I’d like to read. But this year, I decided that in spite of the fact that my views are narrow and ill-informed, I’m going to tell you my choices for best UU blogs whether you want to hear them or not. Here goes nothing:

— I have long thought that Colleen at Arbitrary Marks offers the best theological writing out there. I don’t always agree with Colleen, but I consistently come away from reading her blog with challenging new insights and new ideas for challenging books I really want to read. If I need a sermon topic, this is the blog I read.

— Speaking of UU blogs which challenge me, most UU bloggers occupy a political position between John Edwards and Bill Richardson, which is to say, not very challenging really. But two UU bloggers do challenge me and make me think: Bill Baar on the right, and Will Shetterly far to the left. In the end, I have to give the nod for best UU political commentary to Will — sorry Bill, but after all Will is a professional writer and I promise it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m as far to the left as he is and agree with him about most everything except his analysis of racism and capitalism.

— When it comes to the “Best UU Themed Blog,” for me there is only one choice. Aside from being witty, urbane, and loving local food, Scott Wells at Boy in the Bands is the best UU blogger when it comes to Universalism. Universalism is what keeps me going when the going gets tough, and I often find myself turning to Scott for my Universalism fix.

— As for the best UU blog written by a minister, after all these years I still like Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie. I like his ideas, I like his prose, and I like his emphasis on religious education.

— When it comes to best writing overall, I kinda wanted to vote for Henry David Thoreau’s blog. Except that you could argue convincingly that Thoreau wasn’t really a Unitarian, and he’s dead. Besides which, if I’m honest I have to say I read Hafidha Sofia at Never Say Never more often than I read Thoreau; I consistently enjoy reading her prose, no matter what she writes about.

— Can we do Best U.S. Presidential Campaign Blog by a UU? No? Oh well, I guess there wouldn’t be that many contestants.

— And my final vote is for The Blue Chalice / El Caliz Azul, in the category of The UU Blog I Will Miss the Most Now That It’s Gone. Thanks for a great four years, Enrique.

And there you have it: my narrow and ill-informed views on the best UU blogs for the past year, views which you would do well to ignore completely.

TV zombies

Last night, Carol and I decided to watch an episode of “The Mighty Boosh,” the British cult TV show, as a way to relax before we went to bed. We put the laptop computer on a chair and settled back on the couch to watch. But although we have access to the most recent episodes, from the third season just now being released in Britain, we decided not to watch them. As happens to too many television series, the characters have now shrunk into crude caricatures of what they originally were.

Carol pointed out that this happened with “Sex and the City”: in the first season, she said you could almost believe that these were real women talking to one another, but as the show progressed they looked more and more like caricatures. We agreed that the same thing happened with “Will and Grace”: in the first couple of seasons, the four lead actors did some wonderful, fresh, spontaneous ensemble acting; but as time went on, the acting got stale, and by the last few seasons the show had become hard to watch. As for “The Mighty Boosh,” by the third season, you can no longer believe that the two lead characters would ever be friends or even spend any time together, and so the whole premise of the show becomes unbelievable. In each case, the characters became what I think of as “TV zombies”: they move around and talk to one another and almost look alive, but inside they are dead and rotting away. John Cleese did the right thing when he pulled the plug on “Fawlty Towers” after only twelve episodes; it would have been almost impossible to keep the characters and their interactions alive and fresh, and what a zombie horror that show could have become had it continued.

So Carol and I watched an episode from the first season of “The Mighty Boosh.” No stink of death then; the old shows remain delightfully free from TV zombies.

There are parallels to preachers here — preachers need to keep reinventing themselves on a regular basis to keep from turning into preaching zombies — but that’s kind of close to home for me, and, not wanting to be tarred with my own brush, I really don’t want to go there right now.