Category Archives: Arts & culture

The true nature of happiness

Having based sermons on readings from the Beatles and from Monty Python, I consider myself open to the insights of the sacred texts of British popular culture. But for the past couple of years, I have not found myself inspired by the Brits.

Until Carol discovered The Mighty Boosh. And lo, unto us has The Mighty Boosh spoken words power and righteousness on the nature of happiness. I’m not sure when exactly I’ll use this reading in a worship service, but it will be sometime in the next year….

Scene: the Zoo.

(Howard Moon and Vince Noir, in green zookeeper’s uniforms, carry a bucket of animal feed to some small cages. Vince wears a poncho over his uniform.)

Vince: C’mon, Howard, put some energy into it. Get involved.

Howard: I’m carryin a bucket of seed. How am I supposed to get involved in that?

Vince: This is the best job in the zoo — millet distribution!

(Vince opens door of small cage, chucks a scoop of seed in. Sound of small animal squeaking in delight.)

Howard: Somethin wrong with you, you know, don’t you.

Vince: What d’you mean?

Howard: You’re always happy aren’t you? Everythin’s fun for you.

(Vince sighs.)

Howard: You see a peanut — the day’s off to a good start. You witness some soil — it’s a jamboree for Vince Noir. I need something more.

Vince: I think it’s this poncho.

(He swirls around so poncho flares out.)

Vince: I mean, it’s impossible to be unhappy in a poncho!

And there it is, the answer to one of humanity’s age-old questions: how to find true happiness.

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The primaries begin

Today is the date of the New Hampshire presidential primary elections. This quadrennial event causes me to reflect on American democracy.

Some people tell us that the United States of America is a true meritocracy, where only the most capable and talented people rise to the most prominent political positions.

By contrast, Teresa Nielsen Hayden tells us: “Never believe in a meritocracy in which no one is funny-looking.”

If Nielsen-Hayden if right, United States presidential politics is not a meritocracy.

Good play

Roger Clemens told Mike Wallace that he “never” took steroids. “Swear,” said Roger.

Roger Clemens had an hour-long phone call with his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee. This was not long after McNamee had said publicly that he had given Clemens steriods. A lawyer for McNamee has raised the possibility that Clemens was engaged in “attempted influencing” not long before both men are supposed to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Roger Clemens very much wants to get into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

This would make a good play, written by Sophocles, at the end of which Clemens’s hubris destroys him.

It’s cute!

When I got to church today, I discovered that my XO laptop had arrived on Friday, which was my day off. I got home from lunch carrying the cardboard box from the One Laptop Per Child foundation. “Look what I got!” I said to Carol.

While I was taking off my coat, she finished getting the box open, and we took out the cute litte green-and-white laptop. “It’s cute” she said.

It is cute. To open it, you unfold two little ears (which serve as antennas for the wifi) and that releases the screen, which then folds up to reveal the child-sized keyboard. The whole design is brilliant, including both the hardware and the software. And it comes with amazing software: a varitey of educational software including measurement programs, a calculator, etc.; photo- and audio- and video-editing software; music-creation software; a text editor; a simple Python compiler; a paint program; and much more.

The XO does have distinct limitations. No printer drivers yet (a low priority, according to the One Laptop Per Child Web site, in part because they are committed to cutting down on paper use for ecological reasons). A tiny, child-sized keyboard (I’m typing this entry on my new XO, and my big hands definitely do not fit the keyboard well). Some holes in the software (the Flash player on the Web browser does not work yet). A small screen (not so good for middle-aged eyes). It’s pretty slow compared to my Mac Powerbook. And it is clearly designed to be an educational tool, not a general purpose computer.

But overall, I’m very impressed with the XO — and I’ve just begun to explore its capabilities and possilities. As I learn more about its capabilities, I’ll let you know more about it — maybe I’ll make a video so you can see it in action.

Moby-Dick marathon at night

Carol and I went across the street at about eleven o’clock to see who was left at the Moby-Dick marathon.

The Readers, those who would be reading during their assigned time, sat on one side of the room, where the Watch Officers could keep an eye on them. They all wore numbers on their left shoulders, big numbers on stick-on labels. They paid close attention to what was going on, and they followed along in their own copy of Moby-Dick, or shuffled through papers with the reading schedule. Attentive and ever so slightly restless, it looked as though either caffeine or adrenalin was pumping through their bloodstreams.

The Spectators sat in the chairs on their side of the room, or on the stairs leading up to the balcony, or they sprawled out on the balcony itself, or they wandered back and forth to the back room where the bathrooms and coffee were. There were two groups of Spectators. There were a few people like Carol and me who would stay until they got tired and then go home. And then there were the people who obviously planned to stay all night. The all-nighters were predominantly young and slightly giddy; but the older all-nighters had more of an appearance of grim resolution.

We stayed and listened for a while. The rhythms of Moby-Dick, when read aloud, are expansive and calming; I sat cross-legged and felt meditative; although not all that meditative, because I craning my head back and forth so I could watch people come and go. At last Carol touched my arm and said we should go. We went across the street and went to bed.

——

At around two in the morning, I was awakened by loud voices outside our apartment building. There are a lot of bars in the neighborhood so we get more than our share of drunks walking by our house. But these voices kept on and on; and besides, it wasn’t a Friday or Saturday when we usually get the loud drunks. I went to the front windows and looked out. Three guys stood just under one of the windows, all bundled up against the bitter cold, and one of them appeared to be sipping out of a large can; but they didn’t sound drunk, merely high-spirited.

I opened the window a crack. “People trying to sleep up here guys.”

“Oh, sorry, sorry,” said the one with the can, and they scampered off towards the Whaling Museum. The only thing I can figure is that they were at the Moby-Dick Marathon and decided they needed to take a break outdoors; but it seems odd that they would come across the street and stand under our windows.

Moby-Dick marathon 2008

Screen grab from the video showing someone holding a book.

Every year, the New Bedford Whaling Museum hosts a Moby-Dick marathon, where Herman Melville’s entire novel is read aloud. I went over on my lunch hour, and this is what I saw and heard….

(You’ll hear the voices of Scott Lang, mayor of New Bedford, and Barney Frank, our representative to Congress, among others.)

2:56

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Emerson speaks

This Sunday, I’ll be preaching one of the sermons that Ralph Waldo Emerson preached while he was in New Bedford during 1833-34. In those years, Emerson’s cousin Orville Dewey was the minister at the Unitarian church in New Bedford; but Dewey’s health had been damaged by overwork, and Emerson came to preach here while Dewey took a sabbatical to regain his health.

I knew the Concord Free Public Library had the complete four volume set of Emerson’s sermons (ed. Albert J. Frank et al., Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1989), so I drove up there this morning. I went down into the Special Collections rooms in the basement, and Leslie Wilson, the extremely knowledgeable curator and librarian of the Special Collections, got the four volumes for me.

Emerson kept a careful record of which sermons he preached in which church. Many of the sermons he preached in New Bedford appear to be among his favorites, for he preached them over and over again, sometimes as many as fourteen times. Mostly he did not write new sermons while he was here, but merely dug out sermons written originally for his church in Boston, or some other Unitarian church. But it appears that he did write sermon no. 169 (on the text Psalms 139.14) specifically for the New Bedford church; at least, this was the very first place he preached the sermon, on September 7, 1834. I decided this would be the sermon I’ll preach this Sunday.

Leslie Wilson, whom I have known for years and years, was curious what I was working on. I told her how I was going to preach one of Emerson’s sermons.

“You’ll have to cut it down,” she said.

“I know, no one wants to listen to a sermon that long these days,” I replied.

“And let’s face it, you’re not Emerson…,” she said thoughtfully.

“No, I most certainly am not!” I said emphatically.

“He was known for being an absolutely wonderful speaker,” she said. “He could say almost anything, and keep his audiences enthralled.” We both knew the old story of someone’s uneducated maid who went to hear one of Emerson’s lectures on Transcendentalism or some such obscure topic. Her employers were surprised that she would go to hear a lecture on such an esoteric subject. Ah, said the maid, but when Mr. Emerson says it I can understand it.

Emerson’s sermon no. 169 is so well written that it will stand up to even my delivery of it. Right now, I’m going through the two manuscript versions of the sermon — the earlier version which must be the one he delivered at New Bedford, and the later version that he delivered at Unitarian churches in Plymouth, Waltham, Boston, East Lexington, Concord, and at the Harvard College Chapel. It’s fascinating to see how he changed the sermon, mostly for the better, although at times the earlier version is more vigorous. But in both versions, you can sense a great writer coming into his full powers.

What must it have been to sit in the pews of the old wood-frame Unitarian church on the corner of William and Purchase Streets, and listen to Ralph Waldo Emerson preach on September 7, 1834, less than two years before he would publish his book Nature? The New Bedford church had wanted him as their minister — Orville Dewey having announced that his health would not allow his return — but Emerson got out of the offer by saying that he could not in good conscience preside at the communion table, nor offer a prayer unless he was truly moved to do so. Instead, in October, 1834, he moved to Concord and began writing in earnest.

Vintage computers for sale?

John Pageless has “tagged” me with one of those Internet memes: I am supposed to write my own eulogy. Except there’s one problem: as a minister, I do not doubt that by the time I retire I will be so sick of hearing myself preach every week that I will attend the nearest Friends unprogrammed (silent) meeting for worship, so for once I can sit in complete silence on Sunday mornings, and not have to listen to myself or much of anyone else for that matter. Therefore, when I die, there will be no eulogy per se because the memorial service will be silent; and God willing, no one will be moved to speak.

Instead of a eulogy, I suppose I could write an obituary for myself. Before I get to that, though, I have to tell you the story about the old New England Yankee couple. The old man finally up and died, and his wife wanted to complete the arrangements as cheaply as possible: she had him cremated in a cardboard box, scattered what was left in the henhouse to avoid buying a cemetery plot, and managed to talk the local minister into doing the service for free, with no music because that would cost money. But the minister told her that she’d better run a death notice in the newspaper, so she called up the local newspaper. “Got to run a death notice for old Allen,” she said. “The first six words are free, and after that we charge you a dollar a word,” said the person at the newspaper office. Silence for a moment, then she said, “Allen dead, car for sale cheap.”

The local newspaper here in New Bedford doesn’t charge for obituaries, so Carol might be able to do better than that old Yankee woman. Maybe something like this: “Harper dead. Silent meeting for worship at —— Friends meeting, after which we’ll compost his cremains. Don’t send cut flowers, which are imported from South America where they can be grown with pesticides banned in the U.S. using workers who are forbidden to unionize, and then shipped to the U.S. using huge amounts of jet fuel thus worsening global warming. His vintage computer collection, including an orange iBook, an aluminum G4 Powerbook, a Mac Mini, and an original OLPC XO laptop, will be sold off (see listings on craigslist). His collection of vintage dead-tree books, including some 20th C. literary firsts, will also be sold off (craigslist!!). Also selling his ukulele and mountain dulcimer, not worth much & glad to see them go, best offer takes them away.” But Carol probably won’t be able to get anything for my car, unless she can get a junk yard to give her a few bucks for it, so that shouldn’t go into the obituary.

And what about you? If you had to write your own eulogy or obituary, what would you say? Or would you, like me, dodge the whole question?

Update: Based on a couple of email comments, I guess I need to explain that the above is an an attempt at dry New England humor. Death is considered humorous in New England Yankee culture.

Humbug.

“For preventing disorders, arising in several places within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other communities, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others: it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.”

The Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony, May 11, 1659.

Via