I am having some thoughts about the connections among the above and at some point will write them down. I am more and more struck by what is best called a culture (or subculture) gap and some would call the culture wars and by the way it plays out both in the Episcopal Church and U.S. politics, in some of the same ways. Hearing Sarah Palin (bits - I was at work all evening yesterday till very late but listened to radio later and this a.m.) also reminded me, as does the larger religious and political scene, of a very helpful book that came out two decades ago, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhoodby Kristin Luker. It is as much about the cultures behind and around the abortion divide as about the divide and the subject itself. (The reviews on Amazon.com don't really note that.)
More when I can on this topic. Stay vigilant.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Mahmoud Darwish, R.I.P
A humane and heartstrong poet has died, of consequences of heart surgery. His physical heart had been ill for some years. Mahmoud Darwish was the leading Palestinian poet.
The BCC story is here from the Agence France-Presse (AFP). One learns more about Darwish there.
I'll try to find a poem later and post it.
Photo: AFP, 2005.
Later:
"I Come From There and Remember"
*****by Mahmoud Darwish
I am from There:
I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is born, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the ken of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there. I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the
sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts
in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home
(Translated by Tania Nasir for publication in Marwan’s 1998 exhibit catalogue: “An Die Kinder Palästinas”, published in Berlin by the Goethe Institut.) H/T: Annie's Letters
A video of a song by Marcel Khalife, "Ummi" ("My Mother" in Arabic) whose words are a poem by Darwish. H/T: Annie's Letters
Here's the info about a book of selected poems by Darwish published by the University of California Press, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.
And here is a review of a Hebrew edition of a book of poems (Mural in English) by Darwish in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The review is titled "Palestine as Poetry." Its author is Sami Shalom Chetrit, who teaches literature and politics in the film department at Sapir College in the Negev (Israel) and at UCLA.
I am from There:
I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is born, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the ken of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there. I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the
sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts
in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home
(Translated by Tania Nasir for publication in Marwan’s 1998 exhibit catalogue: “An Die Kinder Palästinas”, published in Berlin by the Goethe Institut.) H/T: Annie's Letters
A video of a song by Marcel Khalife, "Ummi" ("My Mother" in Arabic) whose words are a poem by Darwish. H/T: Annie's Letters
Here's the info about a book of selected poems by Darwish published by the University of California Press, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.
And here is a review of a Hebrew edition of a book of poems (Mural in English) by Darwish in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The review is titled "Palestine as Poetry." Its author is Sami Shalom Chetrit, who teaches literature and politics in the film department at Sapir College in the Negev (Israel) and at UCLA.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Beijing business
...Most disgraceful of all is the fact that six of the 12 worldwide Olympic partners are American companies. This has to heart-sicken any patriot. These companies will reap the full exposure of the Summer Games, swathing themselves in the flag, and rationalizing that their business is helping uplift the Chinese people. Don't buy it -- or them. You should know exactly who they are: General Electric (which owns NBC), Coca-Cola, Visa, McDonald's, Kodak, and Johnson & Johnson.
******* Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post
Read more at janinsanfran's place, Happening Here, and see a picture of Beijing's air.
******* Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post
Read more at janinsanfran's place, Happening Here, and see a picture of Beijing's air.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
What the Web Hath Wrought
Even as I ponder a blog slowdown (you'll notice I am still writing at least once a day, so I haven't exactly slowed, and +Maya Pavlova did ring from England to say yes, there will be more pictures, but not quite yet) and my need for thought, prayer, and a break from Perpetual States of Distraction, I received in the (e-) mail a perfectly timely piece.
Beloved Elder Sibling of Acts of Hope, once again, has tapped into his sister's psyche and sent in just the right thing. And he doesn't even read my blog. Or does he?
I'm posting below the beginning of the article he sent, and you can read the rest via the link to the magazine. Please read everything I posted here. Don't do what we all seem to be doing, which is skimming and jumping around.
I have been wondering for months and months, really a few years (pre-blogging), what is the internet doing to concentration? to contemplation? to reading? I even wrote about it in the New Preface by the Author which will be out, with the Old Book, in the fall.
It's not as simple as "the internet has wrecked our brains." It's much more complex and not all negative. But it does make one think, and I am thinking.
No, I'm not going to stop blogging. I am just pondering how to blog, and live, more mindfully.
Apparently I'm not the only one. My friend Chris is about to change his blogging habits.
Have a read and see what you think.
Oh, and the salsa was very good. The food co-op was out of cilantro today and said "come back tomorrow" but driving four miles just for cilantro is a bad idea, so cilantro-less we shall remain. But there was very fine basil and I bought some and there is pesto in my near future.
Speaking of distractions.
Okay, now read:
What the Internet is doing to our brains
by Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Link to full text here.
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets-reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances-literary types, most of them-many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."
Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking-perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
There's more. Read on. Link to full text here.
Beloved Elder Sibling of Acts of Hope, once again, has tapped into his sister's psyche and sent in just the right thing. And he doesn't even read my blog. Or does he?
I'm posting below the beginning of the article he sent, and you can read the rest via the link to the magazine. Please read everything I posted here. Don't do what we all seem to be doing, which is skimming and jumping around.
I have been wondering for months and months, really a few years (pre-blogging), what is the internet doing to concentration? to contemplation? to reading? I even wrote about it in the New Preface by the Author which will be out, with the Old Book, in the fall.
It's not as simple as "the internet has wrecked our brains." It's much more complex and not all negative. But it does make one think, and I am thinking.
No, I'm not going to stop blogging. I am just pondering how to blog, and live, more mindfully.
Apparently I'm not the only one. My friend Chris is about to change his blogging habits.
Have a read and see what you think.
Oh, and the salsa was very good. The food co-op was out of cilantro today and said "come back tomorrow" but driving four miles just for cilantro is a bad idea, so cilantro-less we shall remain. But there was very fine basil and I bought some and there is pesto in my near future.
Speaking of distractions.
Okay, now read:
What the Internet is doing to our brains
by Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Link to full text here.
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets-reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances-literary types, most of them-many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."
Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking-perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
There's more. Read on. Link to full text here.
Monday, July 14, 2008
July 14 blog flashback #2: secular France, with affection, wit, and charm
Blog flashback: last year on this date....
Thoughts on France, with pictures. Note the artistic dog poop disposal and the dishy firefighters.
Thoughts on France, with pictures. Note the artistic dog poop disposal and the dishy firefighters.
Monday, July 7, 2008
July 7: birthday of Marc Chagall (and of beloved nephew)
Today is the birthday of the Russian-French painter Marc Chagall, one of my favorite artists.
I have a small lithograph of the above in my study. (Back in the 1970s, you could find 'em cheap in a French art magazine called Derrière le Mirroir.) 
Chagall is not all flowers and flights of fancy. The painting below, "White Crucifixion," was occasioned by his reflection on the Shoah (Holocaust) and the decades of persecution and pogroms suffered by Chagall's Jewish neighbors and kin in his native Russia.
One also wonders whether the story of the Jewish artist in Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev (am I remembering the right book?) and his use of crucifixion as a symbol in his painting was in any way inspired by Potok's viewing of this painting. Just a speculation, but it's possible. 
Today is also, by happy coincidence, the birthday of Nephew the Younger, who is 35 years old!
(Brother of Acts of Hope, father of Nephew the Elder and Nephew the Younger, is a decade older than his baby sister, Ms. Acts of Hope here, which accounts for the adult nephews.)
Nephew the Younger, to the delight of everyone in the family, is in the wine biz. Alas, he lives in Italy (and is not to be confused with Nephew the Elder, who lives in Portugal) so it's a little hard for Auntie Jane R to bop on over and mooch freebies from him. He is also a cat person and Her Grace Maya Pavlova and I have sent him love and feline vibrations on this auspicious day.
And a couple more...
This next one is part of Chagall's series inspired by the Song of Songs.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
(Older) lesbian wisdom
In honor of San Francisco, Paris, and many other cities' Pride Day, Acts of Hope brings you the wisdom of our friend janinsanfran, who has written two essays that will interest many of you.
1. Jan's monthly essay for "Gay and Gray" reflects on the changes among elders in the lgbt community following the advent of gay/lesbian marriage.
2. "Obama: a dyke's eye view" is Jan's essay on her blog for this Pride Weekend. A must-read for persons of all genders and sexual orientations. And not just for U.S. citizens, but for folks abroad as well.
As a hetero woman who loves men but is also highly suspicious of overly charming and good-looking men who know they are charming, I found this essay helpful. Even with my hermeneutic of suspicion of both handsome men and politicians, I need a dose of lesbian political wisdom from my friends. Jan says she suspects her post will not be popular. I think her analysis is right on.
P.S. * SF Pride story and photos here.
1. Jan's monthly essay for "Gay and Gray" reflects on the changes among elders in the lgbt community following the advent of gay/lesbian marriage.
2. "Obama: a dyke's eye view" is Jan's essay on her blog for this Pride Weekend. A must-read for persons of all genders and sexual orientations. And not just for U.S. citizens, but for folks abroad as well.
As a hetero woman who loves men but is also highly suspicious of overly charming and good-looking men who know they are charming, I found this essay helpful. Even with my hermeneutic of suspicion of both handsome men and politicians, I need a dose of lesbian political wisdom from my friends. Jan says she suspects her post will not be popular. I think her analysis is right on.
P.S. * SF Pride story and photos here.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Martin Smith on time to pray
Martin Smith writes about prayer and time in yesterday's Episcopal Café.
The permanent link is here.
We're singing the same song, or at least related tunes.
Thank you, Martin.
...To have a prayer life at all now is usually a symptom of considerable courage, the chutzpah to swim against the tide. And perhaps that is how it should be, since Jesus’ teaching, is about learning to swim against the tide of conformity. And prayer itself is a paradoxical activity. It requires leisure to be opened up by unplugging from the pressures of everyday demands. But it isn’t itself leisurely; it isn’t a pious version of stress management that temporarily recharges the batteries for a return to the fray. It is itself a kind of inner work. ...
****************************Read the whole thing here.
The permanent link is here.
We're singing the same song, or at least related tunes.
Thank you, Martin.
...To have a prayer life at all now is usually a symptom of considerable courage, the chutzpah to swim against the tide. And perhaps that is how it should be, since Jesus’ teaching, is about learning to swim against the tide of conformity. And prayer itself is a paradoxical activity. It requires leisure to be opened up by unplugging from the pressures of everyday demands. But it isn’t itself leisurely; it isn’t a pious version of stress management that temporarily recharges the batteries for a return to the fray. It is itself a kind of inner work. ...
****************************Read the whole thing here.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Inclusive church and YSL's funeral
Francophile that I am, I read all the reports about Yves Saint Laurent's funeral today and looked at several dozen news photos.
Picture this in the U.S. (though it would never happen here):
Top fashion designer dies after long suffering from brain tumor and other ailments, at the age of 71.
Fashion Designer was gay and had business and life partner of several decades, older than he.
President of the Republic and (third) Wife, former model who had worked with Fashion Designer, attend funeral, which is conducted with state military honors because Fashion Designer had been recipient of highest state honors, the equivalent of a knighthood.
Funeral is a Roman Catholic Mass.
President and Wife sit with Business-and-Life Partner of Fashion Designer, after meeting him on the steps of the church, embracing him, and offering condolences.
Partner of Fashion Designer sits in front row with President and Madame, and with Mother of Fashion Designer, astoundingly chic and shapely at age 95.
Catholic priest presides at funeral liturgy, acknowledging the relationship of Fashion Designer and Partner. He helps Partner up the steps before the processional, holding him by the hand, and accompanies Partner at the recessional, as the pall-bearers carry the casket toward the door.
Priest is former Diocesan Chaplain to Artists. (Yes, there is such a thing in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Paris.)
Partner of Fashion Designer, President of the Republic, and Madame walk down church steps together.
Partner of Fashion Designer and Fashion Designer had recently entered into a Civil Union (described in France by the acronym PACS).
Among the several eulogies (and yes, there was a proper homily about the Resurrection) are some words from Partner, who speaks of his admiration (admiration) and love (amour) for Fashion Designer. As he walks away from the ambo, weeping, the musicians play Jacques Brel's "The Song of Old Lovers." ("La Chanson des Vieux Amants.")
After the liturgy, when the pall-bearers carry the casket out of the church, the 800 congregants, and 1,000 more people standing in the street, burst into applause, then pause for a moment of silence during the military honor guard, then clap again.
In an interview, a model of African descent praises Saint Laurent for having opened the way for Black women to be fashion models and lauds his sensitivity and love of women.
* * * * * * * *
The news stories said all this. The photos showed all this. (And more, including Catherine Deneuve weeping for her old friend and reading aloud a poem by Walt Whitman, presumably in French translation. But that is not the point of this post.)
Yves Saint Laurent was born in Algeria when it was still a French colony. His body will be cremated and his ashes taken to Algeria's neighboring Maghreb country, Morocco (also a former French colony) where he and his partner Pierre Bergé owned a property in Marrakech. His ashes will reside in a botanical garden, where Bergé says he will join Saint Laurent when his time comes.
Picture this in the U.S. (though it would never happen here):
Top fashion designer dies after long suffering from brain tumor and other ailments, at the age of 71.
Fashion Designer was gay and had business and life partner of several decades, older than he.
President of the Republic and (third) Wife, former model who had worked with Fashion Designer, attend funeral, which is conducted with state military honors because Fashion Designer had been recipient of highest state honors, the equivalent of a knighthood.
Funeral is a Roman Catholic Mass.
President and Wife sit with Business-and-Life Partner of Fashion Designer, after meeting him on the steps of the church, embracing him, and offering condolences.
Partner of Fashion Designer sits in front row with President and Madame, and with Mother of Fashion Designer, astoundingly chic and shapely at age 95.
Catholic priest presides at funeral liturgy, acknowledging the relationship of Fashion Designer and Partner. He helps Partner up the steps before the processional, holding him by the hand, and accompanies Partner at the recessional, as the pall-bearers carry the casket toward the door.
Priest is former Diocesan Chaplain to Artists. (Yes, there is such a thing in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Paris.)
Partner of Fashion Designer, President of the Republic, and Madame walk down church steps together.
Partner of Fashion Designer and Fashion Designer had recently entered into a Civil Union (described in France by the acronym PACS).
Among the several eulogies (and yes, there was a proper homily about the Resurrection) are some words from Partner, who speaks of his admiration (admiration) and love (amour) for Fashion Designer. As he walks away from the ambo, weeping, the musicians play Jacques Brel's "The Song of Old Lovers." ("La Chanson des Vieux Amants.")
After the liturgy, when the pall-bearers carry the casket out of the church, the 800 congregants, and 1,000 more people standing in the street, burst into applause, then pause for a moment of silence during the military honor guard, then clap again.
In an interview, a model of African descent praises Saint Laurent for having opened the way for Black women to be fashion models and lauds his sensitivity and love of women.
* * * * * * * *
The news stories said all this. The photos showed all this. (And more, including Catherine Deneuve weeping for her old friend and reading aloud a poem by Walt Whitman, presumably in French translation. But that is not the point of this post.)
Yves Saint Laurent was born in Algeria when it was still a French colony. His body will be cremated and his ashes taken to Algeria's neighboring Maghreb country, Morocco (also a former French colony) where he and his partner Pierre Bergé owned a property in Marrakech. His ashes will reside in a botanical garden, where Bergé says he will join Saint Laurent when his time comes.
Monday, June 2, 2008
YSL, RIP
This was a designer who liked women. They don't all.Rest in peace, Monsieur Saint Laurent.
The scoop in French is here and here.
A chronology of YSL's life and work is here.
And, again in French, some quotes from the master. I shall translate a few of them tomorrow once I have had some rest from my travels and given the proper attention to Mademoiselle Maya Pavlova, who is elegant in slender grey with white gloves and boots.
As promised:
High fashion [couture] is a mistress who costs a lot of money; she only has seven years to live. (1974)
Nothing is more beautiful than a naked body. The most beautiful clothes a woman can wear are the arms of the man who loves her. But for those who have not had the good fortune to find that happiness, I am there. (1983)
I have always thought that style was more important than fashion. Those who have made an imprint with their style are rare, whereas fashion-makers are legion. (1993)
I have participated in the transformation of my era. I did so with clothing, which is certainly less important than music, architecture, painting (...) Be that as it may, I did it. (2002)
Friday, May 23, 2008
More writing: friends at the Episcopal Café
Luiz today (Friday) on the front page! Permanent link here.
Luiz's essay is titled "Religious Freedom in a Diverse, Secular Society."
Yours truly tomorrow (Saturday) with link coming in the morning.
*******Sat. -- It's morning and here it is!
*******"Reclaiming the Sabbath" is what it is.
I may make two separate posts at that point. Some of the labels at the bottom of this post are about Luiz's column, others about mine, though "these United States" fits both. We'll see.
Luiz's essay is titled "Religious Freedom in a Diverse, Secular Society."
Yours truly tomorrow (Saturday) with link coming in the morning.
*******Sat. -- It's morning and here it is!
*******"Reclaiming the Sabbath" is what it is.
I may make two separate posts at that point. Some of the labels at the bottom of this post are about Luiz's column, others about mine, though "these United States" fits both. We'll see.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Mothers' Day
As you may have noticed a couple of posts below, we have a new feature at Acts of Hope, "blog flashback." I was inspired by my friendly colleague Jennifer, she of the fine food blog and priestly ministry. She calls her flashbacks "archive alerts."
Usually I will post these flashbacks at the bottom of posts and not devote a full post to them, but occasionally I will just post a flashback, as I am doing here. I had more wisdom to share a year ago than I do now!
This evening we bring you a couple of Mothers' Day flashbacks.
Blog flashback: Last year at this time:
Mothers' Day: Peace, Not Hallmark
A little late with your Mom's Day greetings?
Usually I will post these flashbacks at the bottom of posts and not devote a full post to them, but occasionally I will just post a flashback, as I am doing here. I had more wisdom to share a year ago than I do now!
This evening we bring you a couple of Mothers' Day flashbacks.
Blog flashback: Last year at this time:
Mothers' Day: Peace, Not Hallmark
A little late with your Mom's Day greetings?
Thursday, May 1, 2008
A year ago, part II (calendar year: International Workers' Day - Labor Day)
A year ago according to the secular calendar I was pondering labor and lilies of the valley.
And, in another post, honoring Mother Jones.
Later in the month, I posted a May 1-related post I had promised back then, on the origins of Labor Day and the link between labor and lilies of the valley in the land of my birth.
Italy: a view from Turkey, in English
Latest in our continuing series of international and intercultural insights by Brother of Acts of Hope.
This one is called "Italy -- a new kick for the boot!" and is, once again, from the Turkish Daily News, Istanbul's English-language paper.
Previous articles are here, here, and here. All have some kind of Italy/Turkey angle.
This one is called "Italy -- a new kick for the boot!" and is, once again, from the Turkish Daily News, Istanbul's English-language paper.
Previous articles are here, here, and here. All have some kind of Italy/Turkey angle.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
A gift for a departing bishop
Many of you will love this, I think.
It comes to us from The Episcopal Majority. Read it and hoot, and appreciate the multiple levels of meaning.
Non-Anglicans will appreciate it too, so this isn't just for the in-group, though it will have particular resonance for them.
Happy Back To Work Day, all.
It comes to us from The Episcopal Majority. Read it and hoot, and appreciate the multiple levels of meaning.
Non-Anglicans will appreciate it too, so this isn't just for the in-group, though it will have particular resonance for them.
Happy Back To Work Day, all.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Sixth Day of Christmas: Latin American reflection and appeal
The appeal: tonight, a soft sell, since I went hard sell last night. Or was it the night before? Please give to our Brazilian friends in Cidade de Deus, at the Anglican congregation of Christ the King. Details of the OCICBW Community Christmas Appeal are here.
And a short reflection tonight, because I preached this morning and wrote this afternoon and I am a little tuckered out.
But, happily, it is by a Brazilian Anglican.
He speaks of the Brazilian Episcopal Anglican Church as "a valiant venture of being that church [the Anglican Communion] in a non-English world."
The liturgical life of the church is always related to a particular culture... The problem is that non-English Anglicans have inherited their liturgical forms from a very distinctive culture, which is English.... Whereas the church in Brazil has had some awareness of the situation, it has been unable to experiment at the national level [Note from Jane: this does not mean that there is no creative experimentation at the local level, e.g. at Cristo Rei and in other congregations.] with autochthonous and creative forms of cultural expressions in liturgical life. We still hold to a poor translation of portions of the Book of Common Prayer of the American church.
I once proposed a liturgical moratorium for our Province. Bishops would release clergy and lay people from our regular bondage to the Book of Common Prayer to experiment and create. I was called subversive and irresponsible. I still think that this is one of the things we need. Liturgists would organize that moratorium , and the resulst would be analyzed by committees all around the country. ...
... Music is a crucial element in any liturgical experiment. When I speak on the liberation of liturgy from old bondages, I am thinking of the liberation from English and American hymnals currently in use in Brazil. Happily there are already some experiemens with Brazilian music, like samba, modinhas, and bossa nova; but our congregations still think that in order to be sacred, music has to be English. Although Brazilian music is important, I do not think that we should limit the music of the liturgy in this part of the world to our own music. There is a marvelous richness all around the world, ancient and contemporary, that we should share for the sake of beauty and pleasure
Any liturgical reform should also be related to mission, and should be based in a new theology relating mission to joy and freedom. Liturgy and mission are sisters dancing together in the direction of the beauty of the kingdom of God.
*****Jaci Maraschin
******"Culture, Worship, and Spirit"
******in Ian T. Douglas and Kwok Pui-lan, eds., Beyond Colonial Anglicanism: The Anglican Communion in the Twenty-First Century (2001)
This essay was originally presented at the symposium "Unbound! Anglican Worship beyond the Prayer Book" hosted by the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, in January, 1999.
Jaci Maraschin is a priest in the Igreja Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil, Diocese of Sao Paolo, a professor, author, songwriter and poet.
Tomorrow: Xico!
And a short reflection tonight, because I preached this morning and wrote this afternoon and I am a little tuckered out.
But, happily, it is by a Brazilian Anglican.
He speaks of the Brazilian Episcopal Anglican Church as "a valiant venture of being that church [the Anglican Communion] in a non-English world."
The liturgical life of the church is always related to a particular culture... The problem is that non-English Anglicans have inherited their liturgical forms from a very distinctive culture, which is English.... Whereas the church in Brazil has had some awareness of the situation, it has been unable to experiment at the national level [Note from Jane: this does not mean that there is no creative experimentation at the local level, e.g. at Cristo Rei and in other congregations.] with autochthonous and creative forms of cultural expressions in liturgical life. We still hold to a poor translation of portions of the Book of Common Prayer of the American church.
I once proposed a liturgical moratorium for our Province. Bishops would release clergy and lay people from our regular bondage to the Book of Common Prayer to experiment and create. I was called subversive and irresponsible. I still think that this is one of the things we need. Liturgists would organize that moratorium , and the resulst would be analyzed by committees all around the country. ...
... Music is a crucial element in any liturgical experiment. When I speak on the liberation of liturgy from old bondages, I am thinking of the liberation from English and American hymnals currently in use in Brazil. Happily there are already some experiemens with Brazilian music, like samba, modinhas, and bossa nova; but our congregations still think that in order to be sacred, music has to be English. Although Brazilian music is important, I do not think that we should limit the music of the liturgy in this part of the world to our own music. There is a marvelous richness all around the world, ancient and contemporary, that we should share for the sake of beauty and pleasure
Any liturgical reform should also be related to mission, and should be based in a new theology relating mission to joy and freedom. Liturgy and mission are sisters dancing together in the direction of the beauty of the kingdom of God.
*****Jaci Maraschin
******"Culture, Worship, and Spirit"
******in Ian T. Douglas and Kwok Pui-lan, eds., Beyond Colonial Anglicanism: The Anglican Communion in the Twenty-First Century (2001)
This essay was originally presented at the symposium "Unbound! Anglican Worship beyond the Prayer Book" hosted by the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, in January, 1999.
Jaci Maraschin is a priest in the Igreja Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil, Diocese of Sao Paolo, a professor, author, songwriter and poet.
Tomorrow: Xico!
Friday, December 28, 2007
Casaldáliga and Ratzinger
This is a short P.S. to the post below.
Dom Pedro Casaldáliga, recently retired bishop of São Félix do Araguaia, Brasil, in 2005, on the then new pope:
I had direct personal contact with Ratzinger when I was summoned to go to Rome when I refused to comply with the ‘ad limina’ visit. In a fraternal admonition, he reproached me on account of my attitude to liberation theology, of my celebrating Mass for the intentions of the Indios and for the intentions of the black populations, for my journey to Central America as acts of solidarity, for the insertion of cultural elements in the way pastoral care is exercised and the liturgy is celebrated among us. There was even a moment of humor in the course of our discussion. I had written in Nicaragua that it was necessary that each and every one of us should all undergo a conversion, and that we, the Church and the world, would also have to be converted. When I suggested at the end of our discussion that we should pray the ‘Our Father’ together, Ratzinger asked me, with a trace of malicious irony whether is was ‘so that the Church may be converted’? And I answered: ‘Yes, so that the Church may be converted. And I continue to be of the same opinion that we all must be converted.
Source: CCFMC.
Dom Pedro Casaldáliga, recently retired bishop of São Félix do Araguaia, Brasil, in 2005, on the then new pope:
I had direct personal contact with Ratzinger when I was summoned to go to Rome when I refused to comply with the ‘ad limina’ visit. In a fraternal admonition, he reproached me on account of my attitude to liberation theology, of my celebrating Mass for the intentions of the Indios and for the intentions of the black populations, for my journey to Central America as acts of solidarity, for the insertion of cultural elements in the way pastoral care is exercised and the liturgy is celebrated among us. There was even a moment of humor in the course of our discussion. I had written in Nicaragua that it was necessary that each and every one of us should all undergo a conversion, and that we, the Church and the world, would also have to be converted. When I suggested at the end of our discussion that we should pray the ‘Our Father’ together, Ratzinger asked me, with a trace of malicious irony whether is was ‘so that the Church may be converted’? And I answered: ‘Yes, so that the Church may be converted. And I continue to be of the same opinion that we all must be converted.
Source: CCFMC.
Pakistan news and bloggy resources
Just one for now, but I'll be adding to this. Or maybe not. I'm writing something theological, plus a sermon (which may or may not be theological) and trying to stay off-line.
I heard an interview with the blogger from All Things Pakistan on NPR. (Every time I go into the kitchen, I turn on the radio.)
All Things Pakistan, in its own words:
Founding Editor: Adil Najam
Managing Editor: Owais Mughal
Contributing Editors: Darwaish, Adil Najam, Bilal Zuberi
We hope that ATP (All Things Pakistan) will be about discussion, not rants.
Our aspiration is to indulge in a conversation with others - Pakistanis and non-Pakistanis - about Pakistan as a living, breathing, vibrant, vigorous, multi-dimensional, complex society. This is in direct retaliation to the dominant discourse on Pakistan that tends to be about various versions of ‘Pakistan - the cardboard cut-out’.
The most recent post as of this writing is "Pakistan After Benazir: Choosing Our Future." Have a look.
The Byzigenous Buddhapalian also has some thoughts worth reading (and information) about Benazir Bhutto's assassination and aftermath.
I heard an interview with the blogger from All Things Pakistan on NPR. (Every time I go into the kitchen, I turn on the radio.)
All Things Pakistan, in its own words:
Founding Editor: Adil Najam
Managing Editor: Owais Mughal
Contributing Editors: Darwaish, Adil Najam, Bilal Zuberi
We hope that ATP (All Things Pakistan) will be about discussion, not rants.
Our aspiration is to indulge in a conversation with others - Pakistanis and non-Pakistanis - about Pakistan as a living, breathing, vibrant, vigorous, multi-dimensional, complex society. This is in direct retaliation to the dominant discourse on Pakistan that tends to be about various versions of ‘Pakistan - the cardboard cut-out’.
The most recent post as of this writing is "Pakistan After Benazir: Choosing Our Future." Have a look.
The Byzigenous Buddhapalian also has some thoughts worth reading (and information) about Benazir Bhutto's assassination and aftermath.
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