Photos: Orlando

iPhone pix | treated with camera bag

R. Crumb, "The Book Of Genesis"

"The cover of R. Crumb's newest work, an illustrated version of The Book Of Genesis, contains a warning label: "ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS." Crumb says that he wanted to preven tpeople from thinking, Oh, a Bible comic book; I'll give it to my kid! . . . Crumb was brought up Catholic and was familiar with the basic Bible stories. . . . Crumb, who says he suspects that God exists, is broadly curious about the spiritual forces in the universe. He occasionally turns to Ecclesiastes and the Gospel of Thomas for spiritual guidance, but he thinks it would be crazy to try to find any spiritual meaning in Genesis: 'It's much too primitive.' "


Francoise Mouly, The New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2009

Robert Iger, "My Quiet Time"

"Q. What are some things you do to manage your time effectively?
A. I get up at 4:30 every morning. I like the quiet time. It's a time I can recharge my batteries a bit. I exercise and I clear my head and I catch up on the world. I read papers. I look at e-mail. I surf the Web. I watch a little TV, all at the same time. I call it my quiet time but I'm already multitasking. I love listening to music, so I'll do that in the morning, too, when I'm exercising and watching the news."

Robert Iger, C.E.O. of Disney
New York Times, May 2, 2009

anthony lane | not a mike leigh film

If you arrived late for TERMINATOR: SALVATION and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize you were not watching a Mike Leigh film? I would nominate the scene in which a rusty tow truck, armed with a wrecking ball, is pursued by a riderless robot motorbike, armed with automatic machine guns . . . The business of the film is not to tell a cogent story or earn the devotion of our sympathies but to analyze alternatives and, when in doubt, pick whichever is loudest . . . 

Take John Connor, played by Christian Bale as a scar-nicked warrior, consumed by a messianic belief that he can save the world by shouting. After the opening battle, he answers his radio with yelps of "Here!" and "Connor!" as though introducing himself to a befuddled and very deaf grandmother . . . 

When, and on what possible ground, did someone decide that the Terminator franchise should be no fun to watch? It's surely not a good sign when time travel gives you a sense of deja vu. . . . 

The title is unfortunate, giving the impression—which is more than borne out by the film—that something must be done to save the franchise . . . 

With a brief cameo by a C.G.I. version of Arnold Schwarzenegger; or maybe this is him, and the virtual one is governing California.

Anthony Lane, 

The New Yorker, June 1 and 8, 2009

Ron Reed, "YOU STILL CAN'T as Oblation"

I love the idea of oblation. Fact is, I live by it.

The moment in a worship service when the priest takes common elements, bread and wine, lifts them up to God with words of thanksgiving, and they come down blessed. Transformed, somehow. By the simple act of noticing and lifting up, by the thanks, by being held up in the presence of something holy.

That's what "You Still Can't" is, to me. An act of oblation. Many acts of oblation, in fact – hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny pieces of the world around me, noticed and celebrated and offered up.

My friends, my family, my enthusiasms. Common elements, to be sure, but somehow sacred. And rendered all the moreso, for me, by the simple act of noticing, and taking up, and reshaping into something new.

So many of the characters in the play are themselves enthusiasts, lovers, gatherers, priests. Seeing that what's around them, the stuff of the ordinary world, is shot through with the grandeur of God. I love the way they let other more mundane considerations drop away in single-minded pursuit of what they love – and in so doing, I think, taste something of the Kingdom of God.

If that seems too much to lay on so slight and silly a play, I'm okay with that. If we can give you a couple enjoyable hours, a few laughs in the presence of friends, that'll be plenty.

And you'll forgive me if I consider that something sacred.

Ron

You Still Can't, written and directed by Ron Reed, runs until June 13 at Pacific Theatre. It's a 50-years-later companion piece to You Can't Take It With You, but just so you know - you don't need to have seen the Kaufman and Hart original to thoroughly enjoy this stand-alone sequel.

B. Smaller, "Most Spiritual"

Barbara Smaller, The New Yorker, May 11, 2009

John Updike, "Plot and Theology"

What if you think that the narrative art derives its value and importance - its ethical status - from its imitation of reality, from its truthfulness to our mundane human condition? Then plot is justifiable only to the extent that reality itself can be said to have a plot, a design: plot becomes a philosophical and,indeed, a theological question. For the Greeks, plot traces the vengeance of the gods, often working their will through human passions. For Christians, plot echoes divine Providence and its ultimate justice. In "My Literary Passions" Howells recalled his youthful reading of Dickens:

While I read him, I was in a world where the right came out best . . . and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will yet attend it in our daily life . . . In that world of his, in the ideal world, to which the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the shows of things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right.

Howells' fiction, however, reveals little instinctive belief that merit will in fact be corwned with success and that the real world must conform itself to the ideal. Raised rather haphazardly as a Swedenborgian, in an Ohio saturated with Protestant piety, he slowly but thoroughly became an agnostic, and , in his middle life, turned to Tolstoy and socialism in lieu of a supernatural faith. Purposefully, then, and not from any mere aesthetic disdain of flashy effectism, his fiction is formless, and was sensed as such by his contemporaries.

by John Updike
from a critical essay on William Dean Howells, July 13, 1987

William Hazlitt on style in criticism

"Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts. But to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task."
William Hazlitt

Walton Ford on Art and Illustration

Ford said that he was interested in fudging the line between art and illustration; a lot of great art was illustration, and vice versa, depending on the degree of skill and imagination the artist brought to it. But there was another factor, too, and it involved the viewer's participation. "Norman Rockwell wanted to tackle civil rights," Ford said. "So what does he do? He does a painting from the point of view of a little black girl in a perfect Sunday dress, and there's a tomato splashed on the wall right near her head, and two U.S. marshals' legs on either side of her, and you have only one place to go - you're stuck with Norman Rockwell's interpretation. Some people love it, because you're off the hook, everyone understands it right away. Illustration can be a starting point, but to become art it has to open up and allow for other interpretations - then you get the kind of work I love most."

from "Man And Beast: The narrative art of Walton Ford" by Calvin Tomkins
The New Yorker, January 26. 2009

Norman Rockwell, "The Problem We All Live With"

Balanchine: Only God, Only a Flower

One of the most celebrated Banachinisms, "God creates, man assembles," is an adaptation of a saying attributed to Glinka, "Nations create music, composers only arrange it," and it is a question whether Balanchine or Stravinsky said it first. The word "assmelbe" is a synonym for "compose," which literally means "put together." Balanchine was speaking not only for composers and choreographers but for all "creative" human beings. We put things together that already exist; we cannot creat out of nothing - only God creates ex nihilo. It is the thought expressed in John 1:3: "Without Him was made nothing that has been made."

In countless interviews, Balanchine deplored the tendency of some members o f the audience to attach meanings to dance gesture, and he always used the same metaphor: "When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, 'What do you mean? What is your significance?' Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing."

These statements were all loose renderings of the Acmeist manifesto, one of the prime documents of Russian symbolist poetry. The Acmeist poets rebelled against the previous generation's use of prepackaged symbolism. Sergei Gorodetsky, 1913: "For the Acmeists, a rose has again become beautiful in itself, for its petals, fragrance, and color, and not for its purported likeness to mystical love or something else."

from "Balanchine Said" by Arlene Croce
The New Yorker, January 26, 2009

Billy Collins, "The Afterlife"

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals--eagles and leopards--and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.


from "Questions About Angels" by Billy Collins

Ron Reed, "Orchid Thief, from Susan Orleans: Part One"

Orchid Thief

from Susan Orleans

Part One

a tall guy, skinny as a stick,
pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome.
he is missing all his front teeth.

passions arrived unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs

the posture of al dente spaghetti
the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games

the late-sleeping, heavy-smoking, junk-food-eating, law-bending type
folding virtue and criminality around profit

a shrewd bastard.

*

"swamp" and "orchids" and "Seminoles" and "cloning" and "criminal" –
I arranged to go down to Naples to see if this ball of paper might bloom.

New York, the dead center of winter.
In Naples it was warm and gummy.

a frayed Florida bungalow

"When it rains here, cars start to fly."

the creaking of wooden benches
the sound of some guy in the front row gunning his throat

*

the Fakahatchee Strand
the Big Cypress Swamp
the Loxahatchee
Brighton
Immokalee
Tampa
Big Cypress
Hollywood.
Hollywood is the most urban of them all.

a beautiful spruced-up golf course
grass as green and flat as a bathmat
hedges precision-shaped and burnished
the whole thing as civilized as a tuxedo
LADIES! BEWARE OF THE GATORS ON THE GREENS!

Miccosukee Indians
Buster Baxley
Vinson Osceola
Chief Billie, James E. Billie
John Laroche:
"I'm really on the side of the plants.
I'm a shrewd bastard.
I could be a great criminal."

mannequins
canoes
Styrofoam mountains
actual furniture
a talk show about how to keep pet snakes and iguanas happy
Carpet-Marts and
Toy-Marts and
Car-Marts and
the turnoff for Alligaor Alley
dreamy-sounding Florida towns like
Plantation and
Sunrise and
Coconut Creek and
Coral Springs

Laroche was encouraged by both the palm fronds
and Chief Billie's panther.

Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe.
Then I find myself in Florida.

*

"I really have to watch myself
especially around plants."

hoyas:
tough, rubbery leaves and
long, loopy vines

enormous tropical trees
with pimply bark and flowers the color of bubble gum

Peruvian odontoglossums

Cryptanthus, a genus of Brazilian bromeliad

a spectacular six-foot-tall Anthuriaum vietchii
with weird, corrugated leaves,
"a gorgeous, gorgeous son of a bitch"

spiral juniper bushes
cracker roses
confetti shrub
teddy bear palms

"weird-ass vegetables":
spinach that grows on vines
African pumpkins that can be trained onto trellises
carrots that grow in pots
Chinese fuzzy gourds
yard-long green beans
pink Zairean hot peppers shaped like penises
"Screw wax myrtles!"
"Screw saw grass!"

Live wild or die.

*

orchids:
a German shepherd dog with its tongue sticking out
an onion
an octopus
a human nose
the kind of fancy shoes that a king might wear
Mickey Mouse

"Orchids appeared to have been modelled in the wildest caprice."

One looks like a monkey.
One looks dead.
There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies' handbags, bees, swarms of bees, female wasps, clamshells, roots, camel hooves, squirrels, nuns dressed in their wimples, and drunken old men.
Some look like the results of an accident involving paint.

The genus Dracula is blackish-red and looks like a vampire bat.
The texture of human flesh.

*

Orchids grow slowly. They languish.

seeds blown from South America to Florida
will drop in swimming pools and barbecue pits
and on shuffleboard courts and gas stations,
on roofs of office buildings and on the driveways of fast-food restaurants,
and in hot sand on a beach and in your hair on a windy day,
swept away or stepped on or drowned without being felt or seen.

"They are hot and moist in operation,
under the dominion of Venus,
and provoke lust exceedingly."

*

Polyradicion lindenii,
the ghost orchid.

Polyrrhiza lindenii
the Fakahatchee's ghost orchid,
looks like a ghost but has also been describes as
a bandy-legged dancer,
a white frog,
a fairy
"They look like a man,
like a woman,
sometimes like an austere, sinister fighter,
sometimes like a clown who excites our laughter.
They represent the image of a lazy tortoise,
a melancholy toad,
an agile, ever-chattering monkey."

"Should one be lucky enough to see a flower,
all else will seem eclipsed."

*

thirty thousand orchids belonging to a man in Palm Beach all died.
He began what his family called "a downhill slide."
He was arrested for attacking his father,,
then for firing a sixteen-gauge shotgun into a neighbor's house,
then for carrying a concealed knife,
pistol,
and shotgun.
"It was the death of his orchids. That’s where it all began."

Live wild or die.

drowned on a collecting expedition on the Orinoco River
fell to his death while hunting in Sierra Leone
lost while orchid hunting in Panama
died of dysentery in Bogota
murdered in Mexico, killed in Madagascar, shot dead in Rio Hacha.
died of fever in Ecuador, gunned down by locals in Brazil,
vanished without a trace in Asia
murdered

Live wild or die.

eaten by a tiger
drenched with oil and burned alive
vanished into thin air
walked for fourteen days through jungle mud and never was seen again
fever or accidents or malaria or foul play
trophies for headhunters

or prey for horrible creatures:
flying yellow lizards
diamondback snakes
jaguars
ticks
stinging marabuntas
other orchid hunters

*

On my first walk in the swamp
I saw oaks and pines and cypress and pop ash and beauty-berry and elderberry and yellow-eyed grass and camphor weed

I saw strap lilies and water willows
and sumac and bladderwort,
and resurrection ferns springing out of a fallen dead tree

The Fakahatchee Strand
hot and wet and buggy
cottonmouth snakes and diamondback rattlers and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and wild hogs and things that stick into you and on you and fly into your nose and eyes

bromeliads:
bright red and green and shaped like fright wigs
some were spider-sized, some were as big as me
sheeny leaves
like a crowd of animals, watching everything that passed.

heavy sweet smell
standing water
stillness and darkness and thickness
trees sweaty
leaves slick
whatever isn't wet is blasted.

a carpet of lubber grasshoppers so deep
the variety of squirrels
the number of charred Model T's
the crackling of the gravel paths
the mumbling of leaves in the wind, the squeak of doors
the abstract tropical animal sounds of ticking and cheeping and crying
like sounds inside a covered bowl

The light was flattening out.

"The place looked wild and lonely.
About three o'clock it seemed to get on Henry's nerves
and we saw him crying,
he could not tell us why,
he was just plain scared."

The air has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet.


by Ron Reed, 

from "The Orchid Thief" by Susan Orleans

Charles Bukowski, "Alone With The Gods"

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery -- isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."

Charles Bukowski

Sex & Zen & A Bullet In The Head

I am so damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.

Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.

Noodles? Forget it! Try my fist!

Gun wounds again?

Same old rules, no eyes, no groin.

Sex fiend, you'll never get reincarnated!

A normal person wouldn't steal pituitaries.

Damn, I'll burn you into a BBQ chicken!

I'll cut your fats out, don't you believe it?

Take my advice, or I'll spank you without pants.

Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?

Quiet or I'll blow your throat up.

We are nearly blown up in pieces. You deserve that. It's because you're civil servants.

Suck the coffin mushroom now.

You're petulant, but not concentrated enough.

You always use violence. I should've ordered glutinous rice chicken.

I'll fire aimlessly if you don't come out!

He's Big Head Man, he is lousing around!

You daring lousy guy.

You bastard, try this melon

Beat him out of recognizable shape!

I have been scared shitless too much lately.

I got knife scars more than the number of your leg's hair!

Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.

How can you use my intestines as a gift?

Damn you, stink man

The bullets inside are very hot.
Why do I feel so cold?

Hong Kong film subtitles
collected in "Sex & Zen & A Bullet In The Head"
Stefan Hammond, MIke Wilkins, editors

Stephen Adly Guirgis, "Judgement Day"

"God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame,
reciting by heart the poems you would have written,
had your life been good."

from The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Matthew Parris on Africa and God

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

Matthew Parris
The Times Online, December 27, 2008

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Luci Shaw, "December"

December

A forty-eight hour fall with more to come.
Our life suspended. The flakes, heavy and

discrete, grow on roof and rail to loaves of snow.
The generous sky meeting with ground’s gratitude

breeds a pearly light with no shadow. We up the heat
against the forecast’s drop. Voices on the phone agree,

it’s beautifully dangerous. Stay close to home.
Somewhere the repeated, muted sound—a shovel

shifting its soft, square load from a sidewalk—
each scrape a single word in a white poem.

Luci Shaw
12-21-08

Brian Doyle, "Some Thorny Questions About The Resurrection"

And I don't mean theological or ontological or scriptural or hermeneutical questions, I mean real questions, like did He have to pee like a racehorse after three long days? And what's the first thing He said when He woke up, did He say where's my wallet? Or did He say sweet mother of the Lord, that is absolutely the last time I drink wine? Or where is my posse? or who are these two men in white at my head and at my feet, Are they hospital orderlies or nurses from the nuthouse or navy midshipmen or what? And when Mary of Magdala didn't recognize Him, and thought He was the gardener, Did He want to say, my God, Mary, the gardener, do I look like a shaggy botanist? And did He think, boy, I would give my left arm for some fresh grilled fish and bread, Or man, when a guy gets wrapped for the tomb do they use enough linen and spices? And between you and me I am sure that there are also many other things Jesus thought The which if they should be written every one I suppose that even the wild world itself Could not contain the books that should be written. Like where did He get a decent cup Of coffee that morning? And who paid for it? And why was He razzing Peter so much? And when He saith unto Mary, woman, touch me not, was that a personal space issue? Or was she one of those people who when they touch you it tickles even if they do not Try to tickle you? You know what I mean? And when He appeared along the lakeshore, And on the road to Emmaus, had He, you know, borrowed a shirt and a pair of pants? Of all the hints and suggestions in the Gospels that Jesus may have had a few brothers, That's the tiny hint that seems revealing to me, don't you think He might've swung by His brothers' apartment and nicked a shirt and left a note: dude, I'll make it up to you... 

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine

Tim Anderson, "Skipping Stones"

Yesterday I taught my daughters
To skip stones
At a place where they were heaped up
Smooth and flat.

We sent them spinning onto the water
Each one telling the same little life story
The first explosive contact
And in success, a second, then a third

Footprints in the wavelets
Describe a tightening
arc as the steps slow to a shuffle
Some go on and on and fade like it’s on purpose
Some make it fast with a plop
But it’s all the same sad comedy
Of resistance


Today the smooth ones are harder to find.
My twelve year old finds
A rock that marks the others
And scratches her name on a skipping stone

Will this one skip?
Oh, yes

She scribes my name on a stone
Presents it to me
and it moves me – seeing my name in her hand
The letters definite and jaunty
Like tiny bones of the self

Inspired now
She kneels by the water
Scribing the names of each of us

Skip us she says
Make us skip
And hesitant at the omen

One by one I turn these tiny children over in my hand
Send my beloved over the waves
hurl my stone self in this little proxied life

How we move!
We dodge the wavelets
Spank the water with a sunny grin

But the same story forms with every skipping beat
The shortened step

The direct purpose becomes a convex decay

And our skittering lives slide
Until, still spinning
We sink back to the formless deep
Soundless beneath the unfeeling wind

And we are only a name etched upon a stone
A life written in water

She kneels there, watching the place
Where our destiny quietly swallowed us
where we lie silent
And the wind rustles the fine hairs
At the nape of her neck

I want to tell her
She is something holy
Someone beautiful
But my tongue suffers under its own weight
My language cannot stay straight

In a task where the essence
Is to be light as light
I must fail, like stones

Only this heap of heavy words remains
A marker of what I knew just then

Hilton Als, "Less An Actor Than A Monologuist"

Mandy Patinkin became something of a star in the early eighties, when the De Niro-Pacino era—ordinary Joe becomes leading man and finds love with Meryl Streep or Michelle Pfeiffer—had already been established, and ethnic-looking leading men were still in fashion. Patinkin, who is Jewish, had an appealing quality on film in those years: sturdy, fighting his way around whatever obstacles society put in his way. But onstage he is odd to watch. In this production, he doesn’t seem to connect with the other actors or with the text; he is isolated in the part. Elisabeth Waterston, for example—she has the kind of fine, melancholy features that Ingres loved to draw—pays close attention to Patinkin as he speaks, but he barely seems to register her. And whenever he has a speech to deliver he bellows and races through it. Prospero is angry about the past, of course, but not all the time. It’s difficult to tell whether this interpretation—which reveals little about Prospero’s progression from spurned nobleman to wise artist—is due to Kulick’s direction or to Patinkin himself, but you can certainly feel that Patinkin is more relaxed when he sings, or stands alone onstage addressing the audience directly, than when he is called upon to respond to the other performers. In short, one suspects that Patinkin is less an actor than a monologuist, interested mostly in his song of the self.

The only actors who seem to connect are Elisabeth Waterston and Stark Sands. In the lovely scene in Act III when Ferdinand professes his love, we’re given a glimmer of what this production might have been had all the actors interacted: a kind of homage to forgiveness.

by Hilton Als
The New Yorker, September 29, 2008
from "Stormy Weather," a review of The Tempest at the Classic Stage Company

C.S. Lewis, "Adjectives"

In writing, don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you’re describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was terrible, describe it so that we’ll feel terrified. Don’t say it was delightful; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read your description. You see, all these words ‘horrifying’, ‘wonderful’, ‘hideous’, ‘exquisite’, are only like saying to your readers, “please, would you do my job for me?”

C.S. Lewis, "Letters To Children"

Shepherd, "Rivers And Tides"

A year ago, beginning to find my way out of a very difficult year and a half, a fresh view of Psalm 23 became very important to me. Sweet, cuddly pastoral images had always come to mind.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

But late in 2007, I wasn't feeling like life was very sweet and cuddly, and mostly I felt like I was left wanting, no still waters to be found.

When I was presented with this psalm, I became curious about the rod and staff, feeling the need of some of that shepherdly comfort. Turns out the rod is a club that the shepherd uses to attack predators; little David beating back wolves with a stick. And the staff a shepherd's crook, but not just meant for decoration alongside a bathrobe in the Sunday School Christmas Pageant, or to prop up kindly, aging sheep herders.

Something hooked up in my memory, and I pulled "Rivers And Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time" from my dvd shelf.

Here's the sequence.


















A fierce comfort, that. As he maketh me down to lie. But there's bloody purpose in it, and, eventually, goodness and mercy.

*

PS Since posting this, I found the following in my journal, from November of 2007. At the risk of over-explaining...

I have been dwelling on the "Do not be afraid" texts. "Do not be alarmed."

This morning I was wondering what the shepherd's rod and staff might be. "I will not be afraid, for Thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me." Learned that the rod is maybe a club to drive away predators, while the staff is just what we would think, the shepherd's crook. But "comfort" doesn't so much mean "to make us comfortable" as it means... Well, to keep from harm, something like that? Like when the sheep wanders toward a deadly dangerous valley, the shepherd can use the staff to grab the stubborn, stupid little guy and haul him back.

My enemy is more often panic than other sorts of fear: I wind myself up and scramble around.

Thinking on this, I flashed on a scene from RIVERS AND TIDES, which I re-watched the other day preparing for a talk I gave in Langley. A sheep is tearing madly about the stone sheepfold. The shepherd moves in on her resolutely, his staff held out with the business end toward her. (We always think of the picturesque shepherd holding that thing at his side, safely planted on the ground, crook skyward, like a picturesque little boy in his father's bathrobe in the Christmas pageant. We forget that it's not so much a walking stick as a tool.) A sudden grab as she races past, he's latched onto something around her neck, she's jerked to a stop and flung to the ground. And a baby lamb comes out of her. The shepherd lets her up, and she practically tramples her new baby in her scramble to get away from the shepherd. He retreats so she can calm down and tend to her baby.

Needless to say, I saw myself in her, racing around in panic, having to be hauled to the ground so I could get on with the simple, quick, good thing that needed to happen, that would inevitably happen as soon as I calmed down. That's how the shepherd comforts the sheep. This one, anyhow.

Ron

photos | pink girls

pink girls

central park, new york

sep 17 2008

Photos: Shea Stadium