old dog

They say it is good to break habits: it keeps the mind supple and prevents mental deterioration. So this switchover from PC to mac must be extending my capacity to rant about them young people for at least another three years. I am amazed at how seamless my interface with my keyboard has been. The habits so strongly ingrained that switching keyboard shortcut strokes is agonizing. The only real shift I am struggling with is using the Command (or Apple) key instead of the Control Key, and for other features, the Alt (or Option key) instead of Control. Control! Interestingly, I do feel like I've lost control. Macs determine for you what it is you want to do. If you have already made your own determinations, their choices seem a bit creepy, at times. But I am discovering some cool things. I will accomplish this and teach my hand/brain interface new tricks.

Nightmares wrapped in dreams

We climbed the stairs at the museum to see a featured exhibit: the display of an arm that had been severed from its body. This was a political statement. But I worried it would cause nightmares. And to prove it, I could see them. This woman dreamed of her daughter’s arm being severed. Then she was an arm, waving goodbye.

Don't get out much

Doing all one's work online can lead one to do strange things, such as sit on the sandy floor of an attic-like bookstore, near people who smell like their dogs sit on way too many of their clothes, to watch some one-act plays, the final one being Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. I had forgotten that I was a character in a Beckett play. Any of his plays. Back in New York, I remember seeing the Public Theater’s production of Happy Days, in which a woman named Winnie rooted around in her purse for things, while sitting on top of a garbage heap. After that, the man I was seeing at the time aptly referred to my purse as my "Winnie Bag." In this play, Krapp first deals with his filing system and has some things fall of his desk. That is a day in my life. Then he listens to a tape of himself talking on his 39th birthday. While I do not have tapes, I have my diaries, and while I have not made a ritual of retrieving them, I know they are there, awaiting me. In fact, just today I had an idea about a story culled from the letters a beach bum I met in California when I was eighteen wrote me for a while. {Funny that I think first of taking someone else's words. But I am curious as I try to remember what on earth that drifter had to say in so many letters.} I realize I have reached the point where the accumulation need not continue. Now is the time to shape the material into something. But I feel dread, like Krapp, who felt disgust at listening to his younger self, yet then proceeded to speak again into the tape recorder. He is so pitiful and so typical. One doesn’t want to just pronounce alone in one’s room. One must record: imagine a listener (the listeners he actually has, because he is a character in a play; the listeners we don’t have, but imagine because we write). I blog, therefore I am! The imaginary listener gives some meaning to the meaninglessness: the confrontation with one’s washed up dreams of grandeur.

I don't even know who the actor was, but he was good. The performance was free, and very low budget, but that in no way matters to a Beckett play. As far as I know, this was it: the whole performance. All the work, all that talent, for a room of about forty people, to see once.

It kind of reminds me of last weekend. We went to a party up in the Live Free or Die state. "Pyroman" provided the fireworks. He spent the entire day setting them up. The introduction began before dark. He stood on the platform he had built, in a vinyl, boxy like costume. He began dancing in a robotic fashion to “Relax, Don’t Do it” playing on a boom box. (Interestingly, a search for that song title turns up the lyrics on “One Hit Wonders.” It’s kind of a theme here.) . Fireworks shot forth from his arms. He was a living fireworks display! He turned around, and his back presented a spiral item that spun and spewed white light. He stepped back and forth, no major dance moves, but it was clear that he was in bliss: dancing in the showers of sparks. When you thought he was done, two big blasts of fire and smoke that went up behind him, like the ones that appeared before the Wizard of Oz. What a delight to see an artist at work, focused and rejoicing in his creation, temporary though it may be.

Repurposing

Don't you hate that word--repurposing? I do. Nevertheless, that is what I will do. Rather than start a new blog, I will continue this one, though it no longer contains the ramblings of a crazed parish administrator, but a deranged online adjunct college professor. Contain your excitement.

Guess what's back in style?

The Jerusalem Post provides some information I don't hear much of in US media:

On Tuesday, Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari'a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion.

Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad. Here, too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn't feel neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday, Hamas lobbed a mortar shell at the Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.

Time is strange and all that

Everytime someone says "only 10" or "only 9" more days till the election, I think, "what election?" That's in November, this is only October. October what? I can't believe how autumn is slipping past.

Today we had a reminder of sunshine and warmth. I had no idea how much it rained during the night, and didn't know that was why there were strips of leafless areas down my driveway, until, on my run, I saw the stream roaring by. I ran in a tank top, and then went into a sunny spot in my backyard and stretched in the sun. I even felt too hot to lie there in shavasana! The birds were very active. Why do that blue jay's feathers seem a much brighter blue than in the summer?

Those ads for some phone that features Google are aimed just at me: all those random questions you want answers to right away! Fortunately, I'm usually close enough to my computer.

Today is a day of recuperation after the academic conference it was mandatory for me to attend at the local college where I adjunct. They have to appease the accreditors by assuring them they are making sure all the adjuncts are toeing the line. So I had to listen to them proclaim as recent discoveries the facts about online teaching that I am practicing every day. I kind of feel dirty.

it's the space between

I grew up listening to vinyl. One by one, I added to my record collection, and played my favorite albums over and over. Now there was a thing this technology would do. Any little scratch in the vinyl would cause it to skip and the record would repeat a musical phrase over and over again. Sometimes you could stop it by stomping hard on the floor, but mostly you had to get up and tap the needle arm. It would reach the point that the skips became a part of the song. To this day, there songs from Janis Joplin's "Got Dem Old Kozmic Blues Again" that startle me when I heard them blasting right through the place where it was supposed to get stuck.

In the same way, record listeners grew to expect that songs would come on in a certain order, after a three or four second hiss of silence. That was their proper order. Some musicians created albums with this in mind. Some people still prefer to listen to music this way. I have to admit, I am not one of them.

That was always the appeal of radio, after all. The fortuitious playing of the song you really liked, or needed at that moment. The juxtaposition: both those songs mentioned pumpkins and it was like totally mind-blowing!!!

I tried listening to an old mix tape I had made (it was in the car and there was nothing but commercials and pledge appeals on the radio) and found myself listening just to hear what the next song was, rather than to enjoy the current song. I realized it then. It's the juxtapositions I like. The connections. The links I make in my own mind, when one song comments on another and turns it upside down. Does that mean I'm just an unreformed modernist, shoring fragments against my ruin? Or too post-modern to bother actually listening to a simple song?

None Dare Call it Islamofascism

But I don't know what else to call it when the threat of violence prevents a book from being published. Censorship in America, pure and simple. I can't really blame the publishers cowering, after all, I stay happily anonymous in my blog. But please, I can blame the Islamic "scholar" who started the fuss.

In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a "very ugly, stupid piece of work." The novel, for example, includes a scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha: "the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion's sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life." Says Ms. Spellberg: "I walked through a metal detector to see 'Last Temptation of Christ,'" the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "I don't have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography."

Excuse me, how is depicting the marital relationship that everyone agrees occured (and which I presume is in the Koran) playing with history, and depicting a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalen which contradicts the Bible not playing with sacred history? Ms. Spellburg is willing to go through metal detectors to see any film which denigrates any religion EXCEPT her own.

I would probably never read this novel, but I believe it should be published, just like The Last Temptation of Christ, Lady Chatterly's Love, Huckleberry Finn and all the other banned books. This is a very chill wind that blows through American freedom of speech.

Letters from camp 1970

I am still in the arduous but interesting process of sorting through a huge box of letters, mostly written between my mother and her sister, but others to my father during the war (more about that later) and some from and to me. I guess I learned from my mother that what one does with these things is put them in a box and store them in the attic. I found the letters I wrote from camp. They were worth keeping and they revised my recollection. I thought I was miserable from day one until the end. Enduring homesickness, hiding tears, reading Jane Eyre ("how do you pronounce Eyre" I asked in my first letter) and suffering through playing awful sports in searing heat. That is all I remember. But in fact, according to the letters, the homesickness was fleeting and I had fun a lot of the time. My poor parents! They were all set to pick me up early, after they enjoyed their vacation in Lake Placid and Queechy Lake without me. Then I wrote more anxious letters begging them not to come early.

Day 2's is so funny, I'll copy it here:

Dear Mommy and Daddy,
I hate to spoil your vacation but you'll have to come and get me. I'm dyeing of homesickness. It's not the camps fault or the counselors they're both really great. It's just that I can't bear being away from home. It's even worse than last year because its 4 weeks. I am sick to my stomach of homesickness. I feel like killing myself for being mean to you. You could make up some excuse that I could tell the girls I'd be embaressed to tell the truth and they're all so nice. I've started crying, I just can't hold it in. So tell me when you can get me, because you have to, I've tried every method in the book but it is just inevitable. Your homesick and loving daughter, xxxx. (in the margin, with a musical note, "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.") Then. P.S. This is later. I reopened the letter. At the moment I'm having a good time. I don't know what to do. Call me up.

Mr. Crackles thought it was hilarious and said I hadn't changed a bit. That is disturbing, because it sounds to me like he is taking my mother's attitude, that I'm "Sandra Bernhardt" a term she always used, which suggests that I'm exaggerating for effect and that is not true. I am deeply feeling what I feel and doing my best to express it so that others may understand. No one ever really does, it is still apparent. Hmph.

Really, we tried

We tried to go to St. Jonah's this past Sunday, really we did. Since the step-daughters are now way too old and sophisticated to be willing to be counselors, we'd forgotten that the prior week had been the week of Going Medieval camp for kiddies. (The eldest is off on her jaunt of Germany and the 15-year-old would rather spend her week on facebook and text messaging and getting ready for her sleep away camp. Can't really say I blame her.) If we remembered about the camp and that the kids would be more than participating in the main service we might have gone to the early service or else to that outpost in a neighboring industrial city that we discovered a couple weeks ago. Both would have required waking up early, but we were up late enjoying Lucinda Williams at the Green River Festival. And we didn't even make it at 10:30 on the dot. I knew we were rather late since I didn't even hear the organ as we walked up the side street by the flower garden. The first lesson was in progress: we could hear a voice speaking. But what we saw was a child placing a ladder beside the altar table. Wha? I recognized the words as telling of Jacob's dream and understood the ladder but Mr. Crackles hovered in the doorway, gesturing to me. Psst, let's go. He'd been worried about the heat in the church anyway, and this was just the last straw. If you don't want to believe the altar is sacred space, then don't tell me it matters if I go to the service or not, sayeth he. Turning it into a jungle gym. He really hates what he calls "child worship." Of course it pervades St. Jonah's since all the up and coming families with potentially large incomes for a good number of years have kiddies. I can see how allowing the children to take over one service in the summer is a useful teaching exercise for them, even if it does subject the adults to listening to their prayers for their pets and their echoings of politically correct oversimplifications about how we shouldn't bomb nice people who are different from us. I can also see how for Mr. Crackles, who is so alienated from his children that worship of them does not reflect his glory the way it does for other parents, it is a painful thing to watch, as it is for me as well. So, we left. We went to the beach and worshipped with our bodies the God who made the vast seas and Leviathan, just for the sport of it.

Not quite getting it

Nothing like a corpse swap to improve neighborly relations. Hey guys, when we said hold a swap meet, this isn't exactly what we meant.

A rough mail day

The mail brought an end to my hopes: my first attempt to get the young adult novel published have failed. Form rejection. I know, do not despair, send it out again. I wasn't really surprised, despite my fervent attempts to visualize success. Failure after all is familiar.

Then, looking at my credit card bill I discovered charges from ValueMax and DealMax which I had never heard of. Calling them up they said that someone at the email address andylander@mac.com had purchased a gas card and membership in these companies. (Yes, you can bombard his email if you like, it probably is a dead letter box by now. I haven't bothered.) The companies acted all innocent and said they'd refund my membership. I think they are in on it with these fictitious people who "sign up" for free gas cards. But how did they get access to my credit card? The credit card company says to wait and see. Of course I feel assaulted and violated. Warning everyone: check your bills frequently. Do not sign up for "free gas" cards.

Literacy and its discontents

I turned the radio on yesterday and caught a snippet of someone speaking on Democracy Now. I'm not a fan of this program since it generally seems utterly paranoid, but this caught my attention and I was able to find out from their site today that the speaker was Buckminster Fuller. He said, "When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans themselves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to universe. We’re at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do. It’s a matter now of humanity getting to the point where it’s now qualifying to make some of its own decisions in relation to its own information. That’s why we’ve come to a new moment of integrity." This awareness of the importance of literacy clicks with the issues I've been struggling regarding Episcopalians' approach to Scripture and authority, as well as the current presidential campaigns. What do we really want in a leader? I have probably noted before that St. Jonah's is conflicted to the marrow about this. We desperately want it both ways. We really want a leader who supports and affirms what we already think and feel, and maybe pushes us just a teensy bit further in that direction (and pushes those who aren't there a whole lot further in that direction). Which is why I think more and more that the very idea of a congregation choosing its own pastor is ill-founded and we should return to the idea of the hierarchy appointing people (I hear even the Methodists do this). But why, I ask myself, am I so ready to believe a hierarchy, a magisterium, is going to be more capable than we are? Aren't I just longing for pre-literacy days when us folks just had to listen to authority with humility and obedience? Isn't it natural that those two virtues would fade away now that we are all empowered to read and learn? And yet, and yet, this is no longer really the era of literacy that Fuller heralded. It is the post-literate era. No, that doesn't mean that fewer people can process letters and words in a textual form, and it doesn't just mean that fewer people choose to do so, particularly outside of the internet. It means that we now realize that each and every one of us derives a different meaning from those letters and words, and even one person derives a different meaning at different times. Yes, big revelation: that's the message of Derrida et al. and has been subsumed into the general postmodernist view, and all I'm really doing here is calling it the postliterate reality, because I think that is a more accurate term (and calling anything an accurate term in this context is, I suppose, an exercise in futility). Yet, it sheds a ray of light that reveals things are not really so different after all from the pre-literate era. Maybe now, more than ever, we need a magisterium.

The beach, life, death, etc.

The local news has been all about Ted Kennedy since his seizures and diagnosis of a brain tumor. I take great interest in hearing the medical details and seeing how well he is doing, happy he gets to go home and be with his dogs, his boats. I realize that even though I don't always agree with his positions, he is such a familiar figure and face here in Massachusetts. He's a fixture. It is getting on a year since my father's diagnosis of his cancer having metastasized to his brain, so I feel that connection too. Also strange, because when I think back to my earliest childhood memory of this Senator's brother being assassinated, I understand that this first intimation of the mortality of fathers has marked me in a deep way, so that I feel connected to Ted, the lesser brother, the one who screwed up bad at Chappy. On Memorial Day weekend, Mr. Crackles suggested we go to the Cape for the day and just check it out, so we wake up early, see the Teddy news and hear about the Fugawi boat race that he will not be racing in. First we go to Harwich, because that is where Mr. Crackles's family always went. It is nice: the parking is free till June, we walk on the beach, then head into town and find a restaurant and have a nice lunch. Then we decide to drive on to Hyannis, where there's more of a town, walk around have coffee and a snack at the twelve tribes coffee shop. Traffic is starting to get a bit more crowded, and the beautiful day is getting on. When we drive to another beach, where they are charging to park, the girls say "why don't you come back in 15 minutes when it won't cost you 15 dollars?" so we drive on and find a place where we seem to be able to park on the road and there's just a little spot of beach we bring our chairs to and sit down. Mr. Crackles is looking at the boat that has pulled up to the pier and saying it looks like Teddy's boat. How can you tell, I ask. Sailboats kind of look alike to me. It's got two wooden masts, like his, he says. And then we notice, there are about a dozen people gathered on the beach besides the pier and sure enough, that's him and his family, walking off the boat down the pier. And the two dogs! (One runs back towards the boat then follows along.) Apparently, he did go for a sail, though he was sitting out the race. He seemed jovial, walking in that strange way of his along the dock. Mr. Crackles is amazed. I actually feel like this is normal in some way. Like I said, I've felt this connection and this awareness of Ted as a familiar and local figure so it seems just kind of right that we should end up there, seeing him disembark.

Today he had brain surgery.

Princess & Goblin

I have just finishing listening to a recording of George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, a book which was apparently very influential on folks like Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. I was struck by a comment the great grandmother makes in chapter 22 (the text is available on Gutenberg).

'You are right. Curdie is much farther on than Lootie, and you will see what will come of it. But in the meantime you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.' 'What is that, grandmother?' 'To understand other people.'

My, this sounds a lot like the prayer attributed to St. Francis. Macdonald's book was written in 1872, so no, he couldn't have simply known the prayer, because it isn't really by St. Francis and doesn't appear until the second world war. It is actually possible that this is one of the sources for that mysterious prayer of unknown authorship!

bird update

The nest over the back door now emits a peeping sound. The mother bird still flies off when the door opens. The father bird gathers food. Cool!

spring notes

Sycamores are the last to admit to spring
trunken nakedness makes them hesitate
still just dressing
while maples send off spinning emissaries

Reading Addict

I would rather be reading. I just finished the last of Susan Howatch's Christian novels and when I read them even though I can see their literary flaws I am in totally addictive mode. Unlike the sugar coated Mitford books, these depict some pretty dark struggles that people go through. And unlike literary fiction their problems get solved. They have deliverances and come to terms with the demons from their past. Unlike real life?

Those clergy designated as wise come out with lengthy explanations, such as the following:

"But let me merely say that St. Paul didn't think resurrection involved the flesh. It all depends how you define 'body' and in this case the word 'body' is probably a codeword for the whole person, a pattern produced by a certain mind, spirit and body all working together. This pattern--a pattern of information you could call it--would be capable of being lifted from its original context and replayed in another environment. Like written music which gets to be played in the concert hall" (Heartbreaker 424).

It's an interesting way to come to a workable understanding of resurrection, though I'm not sure its quite orthodox.

Then there's also the insight from Gavin, the former prostitute's, point of view:

"I'm seeing us all as victims who got mown down in one of God's messier creative splurges and mangled by the splurge's dark vile bits, the bits which haven't yet come right. But I know now that God's not just out there lolling idly in front of his canvas. He's in a muck sweat, painting away to save the picture, and although my family was blasted apart by the thwack of the creative process, the creator himself can't rest until he's brought us into the right pattern" (447) .

This image does reflect the character, who is just coming to terms with the idea that there is a caring God, but I do feel somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of God's creativity being out of control… though the world does seem to testify to that…

Splanations requested

I'm sure most of you have seen them, the mossy phoebe's nests that are built in the eaves of houses. I have googled and googled and cannot find an explanation for why they always build them right over the door. At my house, for instance, there is an extended expanse of eave with all the same features as the spot above the door, with the advantage of there not being a door there. And yet, they always seem to choose the spot through which humans and cats come and go. Why?

Derby Day

Why do I always try to watch the Kentucky Derby, donning a silly hat and drinking something that resembles a mint julep? I don't have much to do with horses the rest of the year. I'm carrying on a tradition that for me dates back to the 80s. Back in my NYC days, a guy I was enamored of made a big to do about the Derby, having people over for real juleps and walking them over to the nearby OTB to place bets. It was fun, and perhaps its just my way of holding on to some good times from my twenties that I watch the race. My husband and I turn on the tv and place pretend bets: he went for the favorite (boring!, says I) and I went for the filly (break that glass ceiling baby!). We're good! If I'd bet her to win place or show I would have won something, and so would he. But then there came the equine ambulance and they said that Eight Belles broke both her ankles and was euthanized in less time than it took to run the race. Unlike other sporting events involving injured humans, they had the decency not to show the fallen animal, but it was hard to watch the exultation of the winners, knowing that this beautiful creature was dead. Dead because she was overbred to the point of such fragility she couldn't manage to do the thing they had bred her to do, and yet they asked her to anyway. I felt dirty for watching. "If I had won real money," I said, "I'd give it all to the Humane Society." Sad.