Monthly Archives: June 2007

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

No TV

The Neilsen people, the ones who do the ratings for television programs, called me up yesterday. The pleasant man who called wanted to know if I’d received the postcard they had sent out. Yes, I had. He asked if I would be willing to keep a log of my television viewing habits for one week.

“Yes, I’m willing,” I said. “It’ll be easy since I don’t really watch any TV.”

“Oh,” said the man. He seemed momentarily flustered. “OK. Well, I have a few questions I have to ask you, even though some of them won’t apply to you.”

He asked his questions, and I replied that I did not work for the Neilsen company or any related company, that our house does not have cable access, that there is one television in our house (it’s twenty years old and Carol’s parents gave it to us, though I didn’t bother telling him that).

He told me that I should expect a booklet in the mail, that it would have five dollars in it to thank me for my trouble, and all I have to do is write “No television viewed” on it and mail it back. He confirmed my mailing address. Then he said, “Be sure to open the booklet before you mail it back to us, and get your five dollars out.”

“OK,” I said.

“You know, this is an unusual call,” he said. “Usually when I reach someone who doesn’t watch TV, they tell me that they refuse to participate. But we need to hear from the people who don’t watch TV, too.”

So that’s why he had sounded flustered when I told him I didn’t watch TV. He wasn’t flustered because I don’t watch TV, he was flustered because I didn’t give him a hard time about the fact that I don’t watching TV. “Well it’s no big deal to me,” I said, laughing. “I don’t have to do anything except mail the booklet back to you.”

“That’s right,” he said. He thanked me again, and hung up.

What an easy way to make five bucks.

Race? Ethnicity? (Cape what?)

Back in 1981, a group of New Bedford residents got together and created a book called Spinner. Inspired by the “Foxfire” books from Georgia, the staff of Spinner collected lore, legends, and oral histories from older residents of the city. Five volumes eventually got published, the latest in 1995.

I came across the first volume of Spinner at Upstair Used Books, on Pleasant Street in downtown New Bedford. I went in and asked Ira, who owns Upstair Used Books, if he had any books on local history. “Oh sure,” he said, “I’ve got a couple of copies of the first volume of Spinner.”

The essay that really caught my attention was an interview with Lucy Ramos titled “Black, White, or Poruguese?: A Cape Verdean Dilemma.” Here are some excerpts from this interview:

Being a Cape Verdean is special to me and to my children even more so — because we’re a potpourri really, we’re a mixture of people. We have both European and African influence. When I was younger our country was still ruled by the Portuguese government, so we’ve gone through some changes, you know. When we were young we were Portuguese because that was our mother country, and the we went through the Black part of our lives in the sixties. And now I think we finally know who and what we are, which is Cape Verdean, and it is something special. And we are different, we’re different from the American Blacks and we’re different from the Whites. We’ve taken from both cultures and that makes us unique….

Here in New Bedford, you know, we just kind of accepted the fact that we were Cape Verdean and that everybody knew what that meant. But when Cape Verdeans began to go away from the community, they began to have problems.

For instance, one of my sons was in the ROTC and they travel a lot. Everywhere he went he would say, “My name is Ramos,” and everybody thought he was Spanish. And he would say, “No, I’m Cape Verdean.” “What’s a Cape Verdean?” they would all ask, so it became a thing to be able to tell them where the islands were, that we had our own language and dialect, had our own foods, music, and culture.

The older people may still say “We’re Portuguese”; that is how they were raised. But I think the New Bedford Portuguese always objected to us saying we were Portuguese, because they felt we really weren’t. And so we always had this little slight conflict. Now I think we have our own identity and we’re not Portuguese and we know it. But I think it was important in particular for our children to know this. Especially after the Black Crisis we went through. I think our children needed to know that they have their own culture and their own heritage. They don’t have to borrow from the Portuguese or anyone else….

In the sixties we had lots of problems here locally with the labels “Black” and “White.” You see, up till then the kids identified themselves as Cape Verdean. But at that point they had to take a stand, especially in high school. You were either Black or you were White, there was no in-between. So you had to decide then, “Am I a Black or am I a White?” and nobody wanted to hear whether you were Cape Verdean or not. The kids had a difficult time then because they had to make that decision.

People may not understand this, but it was very difficult because Cape Verdeans come in shades from pure white to ebony black. For instance when my kids were going to the Greene School, the teacher would identify the child’s race by looking at him. I had three sons all in the school at the same time. I was a carpet joke because I have three sons three shades; and one teacher identified one boy as Black, one teacher identified one as White, and one was identified as Mulatto. So I have three children identified as three different races….

I think the majority of kids now are coming around to saying they are Cape Verdean. But if it is a choice of identifying White of Black, I think they would choose Black. I think it was more difficult for the older ones, the parents and the grandparents, to accept that their children identified as Black. Some of the kids were even dropping the Cape Verdean altogether and it was just Black. There was lots of peer pressure, and they felt you couldn’t be in-between, you had to be one or the other, and if the color of your skin wasn’t pure white, that didn’t give you much choice to begin with anyway.

This essay caught my attention not only because it tells about a moment in time when racial categories shifted and forced some people to have to claim a new racial identity.

As a result of reading this one short interview, I’ve added another long book to my summer reading list: Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965 by Marilyn Halter (University of Illinois, 1993) — when I finish reading it, I’ll post a summary of this book here. I think there are some fascinating implications for the ways we perceive and construct racial identities here in the United States.

Bon mot

Carol and her co-author are close to finishing their latest book. I will be glad when the book is done. I will be glad when the late nights and the cries of frustration from Carol’s office finally end. Having said that, when Carol is working intensely, she sometimes throws off good ideas like a grinding wheel throws of sparks. A couple of months ago, she was typing away in her office and I was sipping a cup of tea in the dining-living room while reading the newspaper.

“The age of the paradigm is over!” she called to me.

“Huh?” I said.

“The age of the paradigm is over,” she repeated. “The time has passed for creating new paradigms. This is the age of actually doing things.”

I’ve been thinking about that idea for the past few months, and I think she’s right. I think we’re no longer living in a time when being overly conceptual will pay off. The age of the paradigm has passed, at least for the foreseeable future.

Good metaphor

Carol has a friend whom she sometimes refers to as “Sailboat Chris” — this distinguishes from the other Chris we know. He’s Sailboat Chris because he’s a naval architect who has lived aboard his sailboat for the past fifteen or so years.

Carol and Chris were talking about the leadership of a local community group. Chris contended that there are two different ways to be a leader in such a group. You can be the biggest sheep among all the other sheep — just one of the gang, but bigger. Or you can be a sheepdog — an entirely different species whose role is to provide guidance and leadership, and care deeply about the others, but not necessarily try to be everyone’s best friend.

I like this metaphor. It does not completely describe all aspects of leadership, but it helps me to see how some leaders prefer to be part of the pack or herd (depending on which animal you use for a metaphor), while other leaders are willing to give up intimacy and friendships in order to provide a different quality of leadership.

At the risk of stereotyping, I would also say that Baby Boomers in the United States tend to prefer being big sheep, whereas leaders from the G.I. Generation tended to be sheepdogs.