Month: September 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I collect unpaid British court fines, mostly for the Magistrates Courts. The fines are mostly for vehicle offences, public transport fare dodging, and small crimes such as assault, shoplifting, etc. What people do not understand is that there are virtually no repercussions if they refuse to pay. The collection process is outsourced to private contractors such as myself and theoretically we have powers to seize goods and initiate arrest. However this never happens. I have done this job for a long time and have never seized goods or gotten anyone arrested, as it is just not worth it. I am paid on cash collected – nothing else. So if someone is minimally difficult I just move onto the next debtor.

by Zoe Pollock

Walt Whitman does humility like no one else; the entire poem is like walking into the ocean and immersing yourself in something greater. Here, an excerpt from “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life:”

As I wend to the shores I know not,

As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,
Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
        have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
        untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
        bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
        object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart
        upon me and sting me,

Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

by Zoe Pollock

The Catholic cover-ups continue, this time captured in a conversation between Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels and an unnamed 42 year-old victim of childhood sexual abuse who secretly recorded his meetings with the Cardinal.Two Flemish-language newspapers, De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad, published the texts last Saturday and Faith World reports, providing one of the better English translations available online:

“What do you really want?” asks Danneels, cutting the victim off by saying he already knows the story and doesn’t need to hear it again. When the man says “I give you the responsibility, I can’t decide … you should do what you think should be done, because I don’t know how this whole system works.”

“Do you want this to be made public?” the cardinal asks. “I leave that to you,” the victim responds. Then Danneels begins his effort to convince him to keep the lid on the problem: “The bishop will step down next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait.”

“No, I can’t agree that he takes his leave in glory, I can’t do that,” the victim replies…

A little later, [the Cardinal] says:  “I don’t think you’d do yourself or him a favor by shouting this from the rooftops.”

by Zoe Pollock

David Schneider meditates on maps, both literal and metaphorical. It's an abstract post, bordering on free-form poetry, but also a nice summation of how we view place and our surroundings:

The furniture upon the floorplan upon the block upon the 'hood upon the subway upon the commute upon the city upon the work upon the mapping, the mapping, the remapping. Look homeward you cannot look home. The past is a different country.

How could we not go mad?

"I'm lost," you say. "I only know the neighborhood while driving."

"Yeah," I say, "the streets go both ways when you're walking."

by Zoe Pollock

Bill Taylor responds to a disturbing statistic about the disparity of obituaries written about men and women in the New York Times:

What really matters? As a society and business culture, we still tend to equate money with success. If someone is rich, the thinking goes, he or she may or may not be a no-good SOB, but a fortune is evidence that someone is smart, or at least shrewd, and no doubt a success. Which helps to explain why so many wealthy males get New York Times obituaries, while women who died with smaller bank accounts, but who may have led richer lives, don't get the attention they deserve.

If we've learned anything from the boom-and-bust cycles over the last 20 years, it's that money is a pretty empty (and fleeting) metric of success.

The women over at Slate fact-check the debate over a similar problem in the books reviewed.

by Zoe Pollock

Randall Balmer points out the hypocrisy of Franklin Graham's recent (and these days all too ubiquitous) claims that Obama must be a Muslim because his father once was:

[O]ne of the mottoes of evangelical Christianity, the faith that Graham espouses, is that “God has no grandchildren.” I heard that refrain many, many times as I was growing up within evangelicalism in the 1950s and 1960s. The purpose of that statement was to impress upon young people in particular, but everyone in general, that a person’s religious identity derived from claiming the faith for himself and was not ascribed by birth…

Paradoxically, Franklin Graham’s family provides powerful evidence of the importance of conversion, even within evangelicalism. Very early in his career, Billy Graham, Franklin’s more famous father, made a decision to break with the starchy, separatist fundamentalism of his own childhood in favor of a broader, more capacious evangelicalism. The key to understanding Franklin Graham is to recognize that Billy Graham’s son made precisely the opposite conversion: Having been born into an evangelical household, Franklin elected to become a fundamentalist.

God has no grandchildren.

by Zoe Pollock

Mark Vernon has a lovely rumination on the philosophy of Emily Dickinson's poetry:

What she realizes is that the truth which is beyond us, which is discerned only indirectly, is the only truth that is truly worth seeking. That which we can readily grasp and manipulate is too easy for us. It’s humdrum. It leaves life too small for us, the creature with an eye for the transcendent. But look further, and what you are offered is what she calls truth’s ‘superb surprise’. That’s why success lies in circuit. Our humanity is spoken to, from a direction – a source – that we had not expected. And our humanity expands as a result.

 

(Image of Iguazu Falls, Brazil by Flickr user: SF Brit)

by Zoe Pollock

The 18 places to feel dwarfed by nature.

by Zoe Pollock

The Believer's Alex Carp interviews Robin Nagle, anthropologist-in-residence at New York City's Department of Sanitation. The entire read is both utterly obvious and totally fascinating for how little we think of our collective trash:

It’s an avoidance of addressing mortality, ephemerality, the deeper cost of the way we live. We generate as much trash as we do in part because we move at a speed that requires it. I don’t have time to take care of the stuff that surrounds me every day that is disposable, like coffee cups and diapers and tea bags and things that if I slowed down and paid attention to and shepherded, husbanded, nurtured, would last a lot longer. I wouldn’t have to replace them as often as I do. But who has time for that? We keep it cognitively and physically on the edges as much as we possibly can, and when we look at it head-on, it betrays the illusion that everything is clean and fine and humming along without any kind of hidden cost. And that’s just not true.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 11.30 pm