I heard a great interview on the Mars Hill Audio Journal with David Smith on his book, Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy, which deals with the subject he writes about here. Is the National Endowment for the Arts for the purpose of granting artists a bit of freedom or livelihood to create new art or is it to promote community involvement in the arts? According to Mr. Smith, Lyndon Johnson and the congress who voted for the NEA’s creation didn’t really know what they were doing or how contentious artists are.
Impossibility
Poet Donald Hall asked sculptor Henry Moore about the secret of life. Here’s his answer, posted for your comment: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do!”
Must We Always Fight?
Why Do We Take So Much for Granted?
I hesitate to write this because it’s such a common thought, but then I am a simple man, so if I rule out the common thoughts I won’t write about anything.
Last night, I heard a developing leak in a pipe beneath my kitchen. I’ve had a leak in that pipe twice before, so fixing it today will not convince me that something is not wrong with my water heater or something else that is causing this particular pipe to spring leaks. Of course, I tried to cast that care on the Lord and avoid worrying about it. This morning, I turned off the water main before leaving the house for a small group meeting.
At the meeting, we read a devotion by Frederick Buechner about hearing God’s voice in everyday living and hearing him in silence. It ran along the lines of considering the lilies.
Buechner writes, “God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day . . .” Continue reading Why Do We Take So Much for Granted?
Green Before Red, Earth Before Blood
Early morning on June 4, 1989, the Chinese government murdered many of its citizens because they cried out too loudly for democracy. In 2009, the current U.S. administration cared more for Chinese action on environmental issues than accountability on human rights.
“If the United States really wants to keep its status as a stronger power, they cannot just make friends with the Chinese government but also make friends with the Chinese people,” said a Tiananmen Square leader this week.
I don’t know the words, but the tunic is familiar
Here’s the tunic now:
Looks kind of like Mr. Spock’s shirt, doesn’t it? (That is, if Mr. Spock had gained about 300 lbs.)
It will look less logical (I hope) once I add the trim around the neck piece. That’s a job that’s beyond my skill to do with the machine. I’ll be sitting with needle and thread tonight, so the thing will be ready for the weekend.
Tomorrow I drive down to Story City, Iowa for their Scandinavian Days festival. It’s a small Viking encampment; no fighting will be done. But Story City is the town where my angelic grandmother was born, and also (interestingly) where the grandfather of my publisher, Jerry Nordskog, was born a few years earlier.
Clearly all this was fated from before the foundations of the earth.
So don’t blame me that I won’t be able to post anything tomorrow.
If You Cannot Read This Post
Then do not follow this link to an article on warning labels and their intent to save us from ourselves.
David Carradine: Dead at 72
Actor David Carradine, best known for the “Kung Fu” TV series and the “Kill Bill” movies, has been found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok, apparently by his own hand.
Tiptoe through the tunics
How in the name of Helge Ingstad did it get to be the beginning of June already?
It feels like it was winter a couple weeks ago.
Actually, that’s not far from correct. It’s been a hard-fought spring.
Deborah asked for pictures of my tunic project.
Encouraging me is the first mistake. Continue reading Tiptoe through the tunics
When I’m a celebrity, I won’t forget the little people, however contemptible they may be
What a day it’s been in blogdom!
First, the immortal Hunter Baker (author of the soon-to-be-released The End of Secularism), plugs West Oversea over at Mere Comments.
Then “Mike” at Threedonia (one of the best blogs in the world for sheer fun) posted about Hunter Baker’s post.
If we can just keep this momentum going, I’ll soon be hobnobbing with Jonah Goldberg and refusing to return Ann Coulter’s calls.
(Just a joke, Ann. Call me anytime.)
The June Smithsonian includes a light piece entitled “Words to Remember,” by Miles Corwin, about Amanda McKittrick Ros, generally considered the worst novelist in history.
If I didn’t recall, from C. S. Lewis’ Collected Letters, that he and the other Inklings used to wile away the evenings reading passages from Ros’s novels, to see how long they could last before breaking up in laughter, I’d be tempted to suspect her whole story was a hoax.
What price prose like this:
“Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”
Sure, it’s bad. But is it really worse than Dan Brown?
I’m working on my new linen Viking tunic. Cut it out last night. Tonight I think I’ll tackle the neck hole, always one of the trickiest parts of a tunic.
There’s nothing intrinsically unmasculine about sewing (he insisted, his face nevertheless revealing his profound shame and ambivalence). A sewing project is essentially an engineering job. There’s lots of measuring and fitting stuff together, with (one hopes) the solid satisfaction of a well-constructed product at the end of the process.
I think the problem is that clothes just don’t matter as much to guys as they do to women.
Reenactors are different, though. We compare our trousseaus like debutantes.
In a manly, virile way, of course.