Maggie's Farm

I promised, a while ago, to do something on the Dark Side of God. But it is a tricky, teacherous path to walk, and I am surely not the person to blog on the subject. The Christian's God may be a God of love, but love is not a simple matter, is it? A God of love is no cuddly thing. Life isn't Sunday School, either. Nor did C.S. Lewis select the giant lion Aslan, to depict a divinity, casually.

So I will refer you to this site, with a weighty piece on the Dark Side of God, by Nysse at the Luther Seminary. Be forewarned - he does refer to the "cheap, trivial Grace so often proferred in our midst." Sadly, the site will not permit me to cut and paste some quotes. Powerful stuff for those who are interested.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

John Ciardi

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.

William Shakespeare

Bernard-Henri Levy's new book. He is an interesting and colorful French intellectual and psychoanalyst who considers himself to be "anti-anti-American." The book, his 30th, aspires to follow in de Toqueville's footsteps.

Quoted from the New York Magazine review:

American Vertigo, while somewhat adhering to the “footsteps of Tocqueville,” careers around, allowing him to drag the ironies out of Cooperstown (which he describes as a church), a suburban Chicago megachurch (“neo-paganist”), an anti-Semitic Indian leader, the Mall of America (“a church,” again), John Kerry (“a European at heart”), and a big retirement community (it reminds him of apartheid). He visits with clueless Hollywood liberal Sharon Stone (whom he manages to observe crossing her legs) and finds Las Vegas strippers mechanically standoffish (“the wretchedness of Eros in the land of the Puritans”). In Michigan, he marvels at the solidity of the American identity among Arab immigrants. (The book was finished before the riots broke out in Paris: “We have our crisis there, sure,” he says. “You had your riots in the nineties.”) In Dallas, at the assassination site of JFK, he wonders, “What is a myth that you no longer believe in that still functions?”

And amid all that is what seems to be his conclusion: that America is a curious sort of empire—not at all like Rome at its zenith or decline—with a particular character of individualism that he hopes will cause the country to do the good it could do in the world. He’s disappointed that we aren’t living up to our noblesse oblige responsibilities. “The reason I am so angry against neoconservatives is that they spoiled the very idea of intervention,” says the self-described Wilsonian. And he’s flabbergasted that the American left can be so accommodating to the puritanism of the right. There is, in fact, for a secular blue-stater, little in this book to disagree with: It has, at times, the reinforcement-of-a-worldview pleasures of a well-argued Frank Rich column, or, for that matter, The Daily Show.

Like many French writers, he may have a tendency to imagine that he is smarter than he is - but I would not put de Toqueville in that category. It's worth a minute to read entire review here.

Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons ev’rywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on ev’ryone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

From Joni Mitchell's Both Sides, Now. You only need to write one song like that in your life.

But this piece is about changing cloud cover, and how it effects heat balance on the earth. It seems to be a changeable thing. Scientists don't understand clouds very well.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.

Bob Dylan

A remarkable piece by Michael Mandelbaum in Foreign Policy. Opening quote:

The rest of the world complains that American hegemony is reckless, arrogant, and insensitive. Just don’t expect them to do anything about it. The world’s guilty secret is that it enjoys the security and stability the United States provides. The world won’t admit it, but they will miss the American empire when it’s gone.

I highly recommend the entire piece.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We do not allow our enemies to have guns, so why should we allow them to have ideas?

Joseph Stalin (quoted in response to Michelle's Amazon book piece yesterday)

Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial complex.

Frank Zappa

Saw this painting at the        
Metropolitan's Fra Angelico
show on Friday. It is a small
but intense special exhibition
of this late-Medieval/Early
Renaissance artist-monk.
A review of the show here. 

Advertising out of context might work. Hmmm. A VC

Australia's bad reputation? Huh? Tim Blair. Oh, because they aren't weeny defeatist Lefties? I can say that the Aussies' reputation around Maggie's Farm is very good - excellent.

The growing unrest in China. Am. Thinker

Where does John Kerry blog? Guess. Not at YARGB

Does Canada want conservatives, or just non-Liberals? Chequerboard

What does "INRI" stand for?

Mexican military continues to cross the border. BareKnuckle

Kelo comes home to NH for Souter. Yes, silly. But it dramatizes the main point: states and localities need to address Kelo.

Light in the Piazza, at the Vivian Beaumont (playing hookey from Aliyah In NY)

Leonard Bernstein in his Harvard Lectures on music, gave six criteria for judging good music: five were technical (beat, harmony and such); the sixth was does it hit directly to the heart. Light in the Piazza hits the heart, multiple times --despite its music and lyrics, because of its story of hope and its actors.
    I sat second row center. I saw the mother's, Victoria Clarke's, tears, quiet tears, sometimes noticeable as a glistening, or only as she touched her gloved hand to her cheek.  She appeared moved, as if living the story for the first time, despite performing eight times weekly.
    It's the story that can sound puerile if not performed well. When it is performed well, it raises hope, it touches heart.
    A mother and her young adult daughter visit Florence. Mother later tells the audience that she visited once before, with her husband before her only childm and warns us, never to visit Italy with dreams, for dreams can be dashed there.
    But in this tale, a dream is formed and brought to life.
    Her daughter, quite beautiful (Katie Clark, in her Broadway debut) receives distractedly, mother's guidebook lectures on Florence, on art, on the quality of light in Florence, which artists sought in order to see more clearly. Her daughter Clara, is seen clearly by a young man, Fabrizio (Aaron Lazar) in a Piazza, and he sees her as if
she were painted by a Renaissance artist. He falls in love, he stumbles through his English, falls backon his Italian and she gets it.  What he does not understand -- and her the language difference is a savior of love and hope -- is that Clara is a bit slow.  A head injury at ten left her a bit slower than others. She is bright enough to know, to feel this; perhaps she recalls a time when her brain worked better, as did a patient I once interviewed.  She demonstrates a naivete, a social simplicity in the way she approaches strangers, announces that this is their first visit, that she is from North
Carolina. Or in a frightening episode, she lights out to meet her Fabrizio at midnight, loses her way and is accosted by pimps and whores, then retrieved by her mother.

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

Mark Twain

This piece is making the rounds today:

Number 10 - Life is a sexually transmitted disorder.

Number 9 - Good health is merely a term for the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

Number 8 - Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.

Number 7 - Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they  won't bother you for weeks.

Number 6 - Some people are like a Slinky...not really good for
anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble  down the stairs.

Number 5 - Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Number 4 - All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

Number 3 - Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred
dollars and a substantial tax cut saves you thirty cents?

Number 2 - In the 60's, people took LSD to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

AND THE NUMBER 1 THOUGHT FOR 2006 - We know exactly where every cow with mad-cow-disease is located  among the millions and millions of cows in America but we haven't got a clue as to where thousands of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of immigration.

Was the American Civil War the first modern war? And what role did slavery play? New book by Stout: Upon the Altar of the Nation. NY Sun review.

The definitive new Beatles biography, by Bob Spitz. The author of the iconoclastic Dylan: A Biography spent years working on this Beatles bio, a magnum opus which has had excellent reviews.

And now it's...
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!
We're marching to a faster pace
Look out, here comes the master race!

Lyrics from The Producers, by Mel Brooks

The Bird Dog family did a comparison - the new Producers movie compared with the original with Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock and Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom. As you know, the Broadway show was based on the 1968 movie, and then the new movie was based on the Broadway show (!?!).

The 1968 version wins, hands down. If only on Mostel's amazing FACE. This is Marx Brothers-quality farce from the spottily-brilliant Mel Brooks.

Due to ferocious windstorms in southern New England (the second such storm in a week with gusts to 70 mph), Maggie's server in Connecticut was down until midnight Wednesday. Many trees down, power lines down, etc.

And FEMA was nowhere to be found! Sorry for any inconvenience. 

A liberal is someone who is so open-minded that he can't take his own side in an argument.

Robert Frost (H/T, Neo-neocon)

From Ten poor word usages which will expose our lack of education and could damage a career. Including "hopefully":

"Everyone uses "hopefully" as a shortcut for "I hope." It is not. Yes, the dictionary allows it, but that's just bending to popular usage. In my book, there is only one correct use for "hopefully." It's a synonym for "prayerfully"—as in, "She looked up hopefully and said, 'Dear Lord, please make it rain soon, or we'll have no harvest.'" Do you want to say "I hope"? Then say "I hope.""

Read all ten, including since and because, and .everyone and they.

12-23-05  Hermaphroditic Numbers: Learning Hebrew

Hebrew -- learning it -- I have said little about. I play in my head
what I might sound like if my Hebrew errors were in English.  I can
only approximate. In Hebrew, each verb has a connecting word following
it before  aproper noun; not entirely like English. One word, et, is
not translateable; literally it could mean 'to.' in some contexts.
But I might err in saying,  "I want to talk "on" you." Or, "May I ride
to you in your car."

I will try to sort out  a few more examples. But now to numbers.
Hebrew numbers are hermaphroditic, or perhaps have gender dysphoria,
or like some primitive life forms, change gender at puberty.  First,
Hebrew is a gendered tongue (unlike us simpler-minded English
speakers).  therefore, there are female and male numbers. Rather,
whena number is associated with a noun, it takes on the gender of the
noun.  Here, already we have a chameleon-like quality of numbers, a
readiness to take on the morphology of whom it is abutting.   But,
that's just the beginnig.  Feminine words generally end with ah, or et
--- unless they are numbers. Male nubmers generally end with ah; up
until they reach puberty -- eleven.  Then male nubmers lose their
ah's, a version of castration realization.  But, female numbers,  upon
reaching puberty, grow a tail, eh.  Perhaps a version of female penis
realization: hit puberty, get a tail.