Category Archives: Arts & culture

Book excitement

Friday

On a quiet side street in Somerville, Mass., two pre-adolescent girls were slowly pushing themselves along on their scooters. They were deep in conversation, ignoring the middle-aged woman walking just behind them (their mother?) — not ignoring the woman, but so engrossed in their conversation they weren’t aware of her. I barely caught the murmuring of their voices, but as they passed me I heard one of them say, “…but then in the sixth book, he….” Of course:– they were talking about Harry Potter.

Saturday

I was browsing in a used bookstore in Central Square, Cambridge. Two twenty-something clerks were chatting with each other.

“Did you hear that yesterday, some guy with a bullhorn was standing in Harvard Square shouting spoilers to everyone who walked by?”

“That’s just –” and the tone of her voice tells reveals how despicable she thinks it is. “People should be allowed to read the seventh book on their own.”

“I heard someone grabbed the bullhorn away from him or something.”

“Good.”

Sunday

J—-, who is headed off to college next fall, came to church. During social hour he was in a corner reading a large book. “The last book?” I asked him.

“No, I’m rereading the sixth book first,” he said. He had gotten his copy of the final Harry Potter book at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday from Baker Books, an independent bookseller near New Bedford. He arrived at about ten, and was first in line. He said Baker Books was extremely well organized — the books were pre-ordered and pre-paid, the staff talked to everyone in line and checked them off on their master list, and when 12:01 came, everyone filed in and just picked up their book. “It was over really quickly,” he said. “But I heard the Barnes and Noble in the mall wasn’t well organized, and it took forever.” We agreed that independent bookstores are the best.

Two good links

  1. Carol and I aren’t married, so I call her mother my mother-out-law. And my mother-out-law sent me a link to an incredible online resource, the Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative (CDRI). What is CDRI? — “CDRI has assembled an impressive digital image collection that features woodcuts, coins, maps, postcards, sermons, and other ephemera.” For example, here’s a postcard of First Universalist in New Bedford (First Universalist merged with First Unitarian in 1930, and the old church is now an art gallery).
  2. Everett Hoagland, former poet laureate of New Bedford, turned me on to a great news story about the Presidential Scholars who, when they met George Bush, presented him with a petition asking him to cease illegal renditions, and to remove his signing statement to the McCain anti-torture bill. One student’s account of the event is here, and Amy Goodman’s interview with two of the students is here. Apparently, Mr. Bush was a bit nonplussed when presented with the students’ petition. Regardless of their political position, I am glad to hear that our educational system is indeed educating young people for democracy by teaching them how to genuinely engage with our elected leaders. Gives me hope for the future.

July 4th. Woo, hoo.

It’s July 4th, Independence Day. Reading the news usually depresses me. But I managed to find good news in a couple of unlikely news stories.

Today I read an article by Niko Koppel in the New York Times titled “A Country’s Past Is Unearthed, and Comes into Focus.” It’s an article about an archaeological dig at 190 High Street in Philadelphia, right next to the home of the Liberty Bell, a mansion that was the home for presidents George Washington and John Adams when the federal capitol was still in Philadelphia. I knew that George Washington had slaves, but I didn’t know that he went to such great lengths to hold on to them….

Early efforts to end slavery in Pennsylvania resulted in the passage of the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, which allowed Washington, as a citizen of Virginia, to keep his slaves here for six months, at which point they were entitled to freedom. But Washington circumvented the Pennsylvania law, Mr. Lawler [a historian with the Independence Hall Association] said, by rotating the slaves across state lines…. Link.

Yuck. I already know that many of our presidents have feet of clay, so I suppose it’s good for me to remember that the trend began with George Washington. On the positive side, it’s good to know that Pennsylvania passed abolition legislation as early as 1780.

Even better, the news story reveals that two of Washington’s slaves were able to escape from that presidential mansion in Philadelphia. Let freedom ring!

Then I turned to the arts section of the paper, where I read an appreciation of Beverly Sills, the opera star who died on Monday. It’s sad that Sills died, but I loved reading about how she appeared on TV in the 1970’s with comedian Carol Burnett and popular singers Eydie Gormie and Dinah Shore — and how the four of them argued about who was who’s best friend. Beverly Sills not only had a gorgeous voice, but she helped the TV-viewing public realize that “high culture” was a whole lot of fun….

Watching Ms. Sills schmoozing with her friends on television, hearing her sing comic duets with Ms. Burnett one moment and lyrical Donizetti arias the next, had a major impact on American culture. Millions of viewers who had assumed that opera was an elitist art form for bloated divas pretending to be lovesick adolescents experienced little epiphanies before their television sets…. Link.

What a great moment for America, as American-born and American-trained Beverly Sills showed both the intellectuals and the average TV-viewer that Art Is Fun. Makes me proud to be an American.

UU Bloggers meet

Chris Walton, editor of the UU World magazine, and Deb Weiner, Director of Electronic Communications, both of the Unitarian Universalist Association, hosted a reception of Unitarian Universalist bloggers.

I was fascinated to hear about the different ways Unitarian Universalists (UUs) participate in the blogosphere — including writing a personal blog, writing a blog as a religious professional, political blogging, Live Journal blogging, and writing as a regular contributor for someone else’s blog.

Below you’ll find a list of the bloggers who showed up….

Continue reading →

Coincidence? No!

Mr. Crankypants here, Dan’s evil alter ego — back to educate and enlighten you. While Dan is too much of a scaredy-cat to write about politics, Mr. Crankypants loves to tell you what’s wrong with the U.S. of A.

Generally speaking, Mr. Crnakypants does not believe in conspiracy theories and the like, but the UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico is well known to be true (Mr. Crankypants knows it’s true because he read it in a book once when he was ten years old, and he has believed it ever since).

Today, Mr. Crankypants received the following email message from a mysterious, unidentified sender (probably a secret government agent):

Many will recall that, on July 8, 1947, witnesses claimed [It’s not a claim, it’s the truth –Mr. C.] an unidentified object, with five aliens aboard, crashed onto a sheep and cattle ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico.

This is a well-known incident which many say has long been covered up by the United States Air Force and the federal government.

However, what you may NOT know, is that in the month of March 1948, exactly nine months later, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Condoleezza Rice, and Dan Quayle were all born.

This information may clear up a lot of questions.

Indeed, this information opens many new avenues of exploration. For example, this reveals that the cover-up is even more extensive than we had thought. Remember that George W. Bush claims to be born in July, 1946; Cheney in January, 1941; Rumsfeld in July 1932; O’Reilly in September, 1949; Limbaugh in January, 1951; Rice in November, 1954; and Quayle in February, 1947. Clearly, the alien conspiracy must reach the highest and lowest levels of government, involving falsification of birth and school records, insertions of birth announcements in newspapers, etc.

On the other hand, Al Gore was in fact born in March of 1948. Or was he? The falsification of records has extended as far as trying smear Gore with the accusation of being alien offspring! Either that, or he was injected with something that allowed him to create PowerPoint presentations on climate change before PowerPoint had even been invented.

Mr. Crankypants would only add that March, 1948, is the month the Hells Angels was founded. Coincidence? Hardly!

Too many books…

Between reading for sermons and reading for pleasure, the pile of books next to my writing table has gotten pretty high. To help me remember what I’ve read in the past two weeks, here are short takes on a few of those books:

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and other Hangouts at the Heart of Community, Ray Oldenburg.

Oldenburg claims to be a sociologist, but this book is filled with undocumented assertions that smack of nostalgia for a time that never existed. Worse, the book is rooted in prejudices of which Oldenburg doesn’t seem to be aware. Like this sentence telling why wine bars are driving pubs out of business:

The wine bars are more comfortable [than pubs], cosmopolitan, and favored among working women and the softer male that one finds everywhere throughout the modern world these days….

Based on that statement, I guess I’m glad that Oldenburg’s favorite “great good places” are fast disappearing.

Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, June Jordan.

Jordan claims the poetic tradition of Walt Whitman, and claims Whitman as a poet of liberation, which works for me. Her poems are certainly poems of liberation. Yet she isn’t Puritanical in her liberative message. Take, for example, the poem “Alla Tha’s All Right, but,” which Sweet Honey in the Rock made into a song:

Somebody come and carry me into a seven-day kiss
I can’ use no historic no national no family bliss
I need an absolutely one to one a seven-day kiss…

Amen. I’m already figuring out how to use this poem (and others of her poems) in a worship service….

A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut’s last book is short, uneven, and slight. But it’s got some kickin prose epigrams buried in the meandering text…

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

…and for good measure Vonnegut throws in some delightfully vicious offhand ad hominem attacks on U.S. political leadership:

…She wrote, “I’d love to know your thoughts for a woman of 43 who is finally going to have a child but is wary of bringing a new life into such a frightening world.”

Don’t do it! I wanted to tell her. It could be another George W. Bush or Lucrezia Borgia….

…and you’re quite sure Vonnegut feels he has listed the most violent man first. Slight as it is, I’ve already read this book twice.

Drawing the Line, poems by Lawson Fusao Inada.

Not just poems, but some good clear prose too, mostly telling quiet stories with lots of depth. The prose poem “Ringing the Bell” tells about a Japanese-American boy in a multi-racial neighborhood, making friends with a Mexican-American boy and his family. “Picking Up Stones” tells about a Zen teacher in an internment camp during World War II who wrote words on stones and scattered them outdoors. Some of the poems aren’t stories; “Just As I Thought” begins…

Just as I thought: One blue jay
                        shakes
                        a whole morning.

Just as I thought: The streetsweeper
                        is related
                        to the preacher….

…and goes one for six rhythmic pages, a collection of images and sounds and feelings that makes most sense when read (or chanted) aloud.

The Case of the Perjured Parrot, Erle Stanley Gardner.

A millionaire is found dead in his mountain cabin, with a parrot watching over his body. Perry Mason is called in, and he discovers that the parrot swears like a trooper and says things like, “Drop that gun, Helen…. Don’t shoot…. My God, you’ve shot me.” By the time the novel is done, there are three parrots (one of whom is brutally and bloodily murdered), a man who may or may not be dead, and a murder case that’s solved in the middle of the coroner’s trial.

In this crazy world, if I can’t get a seven-day kiss, at least I can read a Perry Mason novel.

Found poem

The weather was so perfect this afternoon — clear blue sky, refreshing breeze blowing out of the west, cool and delightful temperature — that I needed an excuse to get outside. I walked the three or four blocks over to Upstair Used Books. Ira, the owner of Upstair Used Books, has been working the library book sales, and he had a lot of new poetry.

I saw a book titled Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, and pulled it out to look at it. Tucked inside there was a sheet of typing paper — the good stuff, thesis paper — folded in half and with a short unsigned poem centered and neatly typed on it:

Near the solstice,
Everything sleeps, like
Thunder beneath the earth.
The passes are closed,
And the travelers rest.
Light flicker across
The valleys below.
The moon, almost full,
Bodes well.

So I bought the book.

As I was paying Ira for the book, I showed him the poem tucked inside it. He read it over once. ” ‘Thunder beneath the earth…’,” he said.

“Yeah, like something out of the Yi Jing,” I said. “That poem is really why I’m buying the book. Maybe I’ll frame it, the way it’s typed….”

” ‘The moon almost full…’,” said Ira, reading the poem over again. ” ‘Bodes well.’ Yeah, I like it more the second time. Hey, would you make me a copy….” So I went out and made a photocopy and brought it back to him. An unsigned found poem — who could resist?

Email [curse | blessing], part three

The third installment in an occasional series where I think out loud about using email effectively. First installment.

I know this is a minor matter, but when it comes to email I’ve been thinking about….

Salutations and endings

We all pretty much know how to write proper letters. If it’s a formal business letter, you start out with “Dear Ms. Lastname,” then you type or print the body of the letter, and you end with “Sincerely,” followed by your signature. If it’s an informal note, you can start with “Dear Firstname,” the body can be printed or handwritten, and you end with “Yours truly, Me.”

None of us really knows how to write proper email messages, because as yet there are no widely accepted standards. I usually begin all my email messages with “Dear So-and-so,” which won’t offend the traditionalists, but which probably seems hopelessly stuffed-shirt to those with easier manners. I usually end my email messages “Cheers, Dan,” which will neither please nor offend the traditionalists, but which probably seems hopelessly boring to many others.

Yet when it comes to church business, in United States Unitarian Universalist circles at least, I do see faint signs of some standards emerging.

For longer email messages:– More often than not, salutations begin with “Dear…” and here in the United States it is usually considered acceptable to address someone by first name even if you don’t know them. When sending email messages to more than one recipient, I most often see “Dear all,” or less often “Dear friends,” (the latter is my preference, at least in church circles). Endings seem to be less formal than salutations. I never see “Sincerely” or “Yours truly.” I do see “All the best,” “Cheers,” and more specialized endings such as “Thanks,” or “My two cents worth.”

For very short email messages, or for routine replies:– For salutations “Hi,” is perfectly adequate, or no salutation at all. No ending is needed; just typing your name seems acceptable. (By “very short email” I mean maybe half a dozen lines or less.)

What are your perceptions of acceptable standards for email salutations and endings? I’m mostly interested in church business, but I’d be curious to know if other subcultures are evolving their own standards.

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing] part four