Month: December 2012

A trip across the country, filled with delightful detours:

G. Murphy Donovan argues that proper meals are what hold civilization together:

Culture begins and ends on a plate. A proper wake is followed by good food and drink for good reason; a testament to life even without the guest of honor. We eat to live and then we live to eat. From the earliest times, food played a key role in the spiritual and literal growth of families and a larger society. An infant bonds with its mother while nursing; families bond when they share food. We define hospitality with friends by inviting them to break bread – or share a refreshing adult beverage. Alas, eating plays a central role in both civility and civilization.

He laments the decline of home-cooked family meals – and the array of negative consequences he believes their absence has produced:

Literature on food production and retailing usually has two villains; industry or government. Rachael Carson and more recently, Margaret Visser and Michael Pollan are significant contributors to this popular genre. Unfortunately, critics are seldom candid enough to place responsibility where it belongs; on shoppers and parents. Self-indulgence and limited attention spans have come home to roost – in eating habits and the way we care for children.

 

This week the Dish marked the death of the jazz musician Dave Brubeck, rounding up a wide-range of remembrances of his life and music. Patrick Jarenwattananon covers another aspect of Brubeck's legacy – his religious music:

When he disbanded his classic quartet in the late 1960s, Brubeck had more opportunities to explore large-scale compositions. Much of his late career was spent developing pieces for chorus, orchestra, ballet and sometimes jazz combo, often in collaboration with his wife Iola. Several of these works were meditations on social justice; some overlapped with his interest in writing sacred music, including a Mass. 

An older piece by PBS explores what inspired Brubeck's spiritual compositions:

'Joy in the Morning was composed in the hospital at Yale, the night before I was going to have an angiogram,' Brubeck explains. 'And so I had my binder with me, and my doctor, Dr. Cohen, I didn't expect to see him at 10:30 at night, and I was writing away. And he came into the room, and he said, 'What's this?' And I said, 'Well, I'm writing something.' And he said, 'I've never had a patient the night before they're going to go downstairs early in the morning and have an angiogram, be writing music.' And I said, 'Oh, I'm writing this because I feel it would be the right thing to be doing, and I'm not able to sleep. I might as well be writing music.'

'But what I didn't tell him, is I'm writing about the operation. It was a Psalm that said, I'll paraphrase it, 'What can you do, O Lord? Can the dust praise Thee if you bury me six feet under? Who will praise Thee if you put me down in the pit? And joy will come in the morning.' It's all in the Psalm, and I'm looking at the Psalm, and writing the music, so that I'll have a good operation. And he, as the doctor, will do a good job. So then I dedicated that piece to Dr. Cohen, because it had all the things in that Psalm that I was worried about, and wanted to get over with.'

In Joy In the Morning, Brubeck literally transcribed the heartbeat inside of him. The opening section reflects the erratic beat of Brubeck's own arrhythmic heart and his trepidation before the operation. Then it moves to a joyous crescendo with a steady, strong new beat – representing his healthy heart and the new lease on life that Brubeck will have after the successful surgery.

Harvard professor and poetry critic Helen Vendler considers the way Ive League admissions can systematically exclude brilliant, if unconventional, artists and writers:

The truth is that many future poets, novelists, and screenwriters are not likely to be straight-A students, either in high school or in college. The arts through which they will discover themselves prize creativity, originality, and intensity above academic performance; they value introspection above extroversion, insight above rote learning. Such unusual students may be, in the long run, the graduates of whom we will be most proud. Do we have room for the reflective introvert as well as for the future leader? Will we enjoy the student who manages to do respectably but not brilliantly in all her subjects but one—but at that one surpasses all her companions?

Will we welcome eagerly the person who has in high school been completely uninterested in public service or sports—but who may be the next Wallace Stevens? Can we preach the doctrine of excellence in an art; the doctrine of intellectual absorption in a single field of study; even the doctrine of unsociability; even the doctrine of indifference to money? (Wittgenstein, who was rich, gave all his money away as a distraction; Emily Dickinson, who was rich, appears not to have spent money, personally, on anything except for an occasional dress, and paper and ink.) Can frugality seem as desirable to our undergraduates as affluence—provided it is a frugality that nonetheless allows them enough leisure to think and write? Can we preach a doctrine of vocation in lieu of the doctrine of competitiveness and worldly achievement?

Amir at Beautiful Decay has the story behind the captivating image:

Built in 1995 in the Austrian village of Wattens, Swarovski World is perhaps the worlds most unusual Flagship store/theme park. Designed by multimedia artist André Heller, the site features 14 underground chambers of wonder dedicated to the versatile artistic interpretation of the material crystal.

Lonely Planet has more:

A giant’s head spewing water into a pond greets you in the park. Inside you’ll find Alexander McQueen’s crystal tree, zebras drifting past on ruby slippers in a twinkling theatre, and the world’s biggest crystal, weighing in at 62kg. Terence Conran’s shop by the exit is where, depending on your budget, you can buy a bejewelled pen for €1.30 or splurge on a €14,800 crystal-studded iguana. Decisions, decisions…

(Image from Swarovski World)

The LDS recently launched a site by that name (intro seen above):

[The site is] dedicated to starting a "discussion" on gays and lesbians within the church, or as they say, people with "same-sex attraction." "When people have those (same-sex) desires and attractions, our attitude is, ‘stay with us,’” Elder Todd Christofferson says in a video on the site…. "Here more than anywhere, it’s important that there be love, that there be hope. We want to be with you and work together," explains [Elder Todd] Christofferson.

McKay Coppins puts the new site in historical context:

The church maintains [its] longheld position that it is sinful to "act on" homosexuality, a range of actions that runs from romantic hand-holding to gay sex. But the church's unqualified statement that "individuals do not choose to have such attractions" represents a departure from past remarks by church officials…. More broadly, the new website … is the clearest illustration yet of the church's effort to soften its tone and reach out to gay Mormons and others who may have been hurt by its institutional support for getting gay marriage banned in California.

Zack Ford is unsatisfied:

According to the new guide, gay Mormons can only stay members of the Church if they practice chastity, forcing a choice between a life with love and a life with faith. The acknowledgment that sexual orientation is not malleable is worthless if individuals are still shamed by “sin” to repress that sexuality — often through ex-gay therapy — and spend their lives alone. There’s also something insulting about the Church’s suggestion that maybe gay people will be lucky enough to marry someone of the opposite sex in the next life … This reliance on reincarnation does not take accountability for God’s inherent cruelness requiring such a “test.” Instead, the Church merely encourages individuals to have hope that “God will work out all the confusion and contradiction.” It is sadly ironic that the Church is using the frame of love to justify depriving individuals of love, and even sadder that this can be called an improvement over its previous position.

Maria Popova praises John Homans' new book, What’s a Dog For?. An excerpt:

It’s not that a dog accepts the cards it’s been dealt; it’s not aware that there are cards. James Thurber called the desire for this condition ‘the Dog Wish,’ the ‘strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.’ This is a dog’s blessing, a dim-wittedness one can envy.

In an interview, the poet and memoirist Mary Karr describes the spiritual practices that bring her sanity:

Our autonomic nervous system breathes for most of us, and a priest friend told me once, when I asked him how I was supposed to know God’s will for me, that I should see what is. If you’re breathing, just presume you’re supposed to be alive and start looking around for some way to make yourself useful.

If you’re suicidal, your mind is actually the keenest threat to your survival. Yet depressed people still listen intensely to their minds even though said minds NEVER have anything good to say. Think of it, you try to employ the diseased organ to cure itself! If someone outside your body were shouting those awful things you say to yourself  in such times, you’d plug your ears and sing lalalala. You have to stop that mind or die. A simple meditation practice I started twenty-three years ago involves counting my breaths one to ten over and over. Pure hell at first. I evolved through various practices — some Christian and Ignatian spiritual practices taught to me by a Franciscan nun and a few Jesuits along the way. I came back to breath last year. For me God is in the moment, and I tend to do everything I can to avoid being in such a stalled, unproductive place as the present. The ego has to stop inventing its reality and notice what’s actually going on, which process kills it (the ego) a little if you’re lucky.

For more on Karr's religious life – and long struggle with alcoholism – read her remarkable memoir, Lit.

Silas House reveals his writing habits:

The No. 1 question I get at readings is: “How many hours a day do you write?” I used to stumble on this question. I don’t write every day, but when I first started going on book tours I was afraid I’d be revealed as a true fraud if I admitted that. Sometimes I write for 20 minutes. Other times I don’t stop writing for six hours, falling over at the end like an emotional, wrung-out mess, simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated. Sometimes I go months without putting a word on the page.

One night, however, I was asked that question and the right answer just popped out, unknown to me before it found solidity on the air: “I write every waking minute,” I said. I meant, of course, that I am always writing in my head.

The rest of Bill’s videos are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.