A radically different image for today’s fight:

Rembrandt’s The Blinding of Samson, painted in 1636. Click the image to see the whole composition.

And Delilah said to Samson, “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me these three times, and you have not told me where your great strength lies.” And when she pressed him hard with her words day after day, and urged him, his soul was vexed to death. And he told her all his heart, and said to her, “A razor has never come upon my head, for I have been a Nazirite to God from my mother’s womb. If my head is shaved, then my strength will leave me, and I shall become weak and be like any other man.” When Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sent and called the lords of the Philistines . . .

Mark Swed says Obama is probably an arts president, so he should do better than the “hokey” quartet by Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Gabriela Montero, and Anthony McGill.

If he really wants change, he will have to have the courage to listen to artists who can’t be controlled, whose vision is greater than his and his handlers. We need artists not merely to sing our achievements but to communicate new ideas and to spread our voice through the land and the world. Obama must mobilize the arts to help him change the mood of our nation and raise our energy.

“Artists who can’t be controlled”? Politicians don’t usually go for lack of control.

I still haven’t finished the Schulz biography, so what to write about tonight?

Further memories of the AFLC Service Section, I suppose (see yesterday’s post). It was one of the more colorful places I’ve worked.

The Service Section (shipping and mailing) was to the America Lutheran Church Headquarters what The Weird Brother We Keep Locked in the Basement and Never Talk About is to some family living next door to a Flannery O’Conner story. The suits (and clerical collars) worked in a tall, pale building on the south side of the block, above Augsburg Publishing House. We SS guys* toiled like orcs in an ancient, creosote-stained, low building on the north side of the block. In order to physically pass from the Shambles to the Tower, you had to either go around outside, or take a freight elevator down to the basement, then follow a tunnel through the rumbling presses of Augsburg’s printing department, to another elevator back in a corner. Continue reading Service Section memories →

Delancy’s Place has a couple excerpts from how Washington’s and Lincoln’s inaugurations went. At one point for Washington, “a chorus of white-robed girls tossed flowers from their baskets in his path while singing a tribute to ‘The Defender of the Mothers, The Protector of the Daughters'” For Lincoln, he wore a soft felt hat instead of his trademark stovepipe hat to avoid recognition while he slipped out of Harrisburg for the trip to Washington.