God’s Acrostic What if the universe is God’s acrostic? He’s sneaking bits of proverbs into seismic variations; Abbreviating psalms in flecks of snow. Try to read them, says a comet, If you dare. Fine print. What you’ve been waiting for. Twisted in the DNA of marmosets: Hermetic feedback to your tight-lipped prayer. Examine indentations left […]
Politics
The Peaceful Majority
Tom Friedman wrote an editorial in the Times on Wednesday titled, “Calling All Pakistanis.” His plea was for the average citizen in Pakistan to step forward and denounce this extremism—not just for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake as well: Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence […]
Mumbai is a Golden Songbird
Tree shrine in Mumbai, August 2008 As a follow up to my earlier posting about Mumbai, I am including a very moving op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times over the weekend. For those of you who are long time or newly converted Indiaphiles (I’m in the latter category) I think this piece […]
Thumbing Through the Dreams
Two of the five poems that appeared on the New York Times op ed page on Wednesday, November 5, the first day of this new chapter in US history: When the Fog When the fog burnt off this morning Outsize JumboTron screens were hanging off the clouds, Scores of them, huge, acres and acres of […]
YEAH!
I am speechless with joy. So is everyone in my world. A message this morning from my friend Thalassa said, “I’m in love with my country again.” I know what you mean, and it feels intoxicating. The crowd in Grant Park. The euphoric celebrations everywhere, even overseas. The newspaper headlines (The Morgen Post in Hamburg […]
Election Day Ponderings: Art, Empathy and Politics
Can you tell that I can’t think about anything other than this election? Until this contest is over, that’s the only channel I’m on. To continue on the theme of my posting below, here is a provocative piece by John Stoehr from the excellent blog, Flyover. This adds yet another dimension to the discussion of […]
A Nation Divided, In Perpetua?
Election Day, finally. I have lost personal access to the timbre of evenhandedness in this political season, so it was with fascination that I read Eve LaPlante’s feature piece in the Boston Globe yesterday. She explores current research that suggests the hard-wired, biological and somewhat predetermined nature of a political point of view. A correlation […]
Term Limits
Kyle Gann posted this note on his blog, PostClassic: Thank You, Sarah Palin We in American music owe a great debt to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Those two have so cheapened and tainted the word “maverick” that it will be at least a generation, maybe two, before anyone will be able to use the […]
In Search of Palliatives
OK. This is getting intense. Everyone in this house has become a political junkie of the worst kind. We start off the morning with a full perusal of the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Then after a day’s worth of work that gets punctuated with periodic flyovers of no less than 14 political […]
Lessons in Tenacity
The World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 This morning I excerpted from an article in the Chicago Tribune about Daniel Burnham on my Slow Painting blog. For those of you who have read The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, you will recognize his name. Burnham was the architect and visionary behind the magical Chicago […]