The Books of 2013: February.


James Baldwin.  Another Country.  1962.  (again)

India Knight.  Comfort and Joy.  2011.

James Baldwin.  Giovanni’s Room.  1956.  (again)

Josephine Tey.  A Shilling for Candles.  1936.  (again)

James Baldwin.  Go Tell It On the Mountain.  1953.  (again)

Baldwin on Bette Davis


“A little woman and not pretty, with a lewd, brutal swagger, saying to the whole world: ‘You can kiss my ass.’ Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, or scorn, nor hatred, nor love. She had never thought of prayer. It was unimaginable that she would ever bend her knees and come crawling along to anybody’s altar, weeping for forgiveness. Perhaps her sin was so extreme that it could not be forgiven; perhaps her pride was so great that she did not need forgiveness. … Go on, girl, he whispered. … Go on, girl.  One day he would talk like that…

Baldwin, Robinson: Resurrection


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“Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life.  But that life contained so many others.  And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song.  

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Martin Luther King Jr. Day


For everyone who struggles and fails with their dissertation and goes on to live a useful life. For everyone who doubts. For everyone who says the risky loving thing. For everyone who hears the prophetic utterance in the voices of people who cannot read, who are not presentable, who are not white or male or straight or citizens. For everyone who refuses to align the boundaries of their care with the boundaries of their home or nation. For everyone who has their control and privacy stripped away. For everyone who lives at the mercy of American bombs. For everyone who fears a phonecall that will tell their children’s death. For everyone who is bullied and threatened. For everyone who is bruised and shackled. For everyone alone in a cell. For everyone who writes. For everyone who drinks in secret. For everyone who climbs the pulpit stairs. For everyone who walks when they’re tired. For everyone who lives with the knowledge that their life will not be long, but keeps working and loving anyway. For dreamers. For insomniacs. For everyone. We need such saints.

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Under the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, 2006

The Movies of 2013: January


Border Incident.  1949.

Silver Linings Playbook.  2012.

Feeling Right: Note #1


Linked above, a reductive and cynical account of the ethics of feeling from the New York Times.

Last night I was talking to a friend of mine who is a chaplain at Yale-New Haven Hospital— the trauma hospital where they bring all the region’s deadly accident and violence victims, with the usual oncology and so on mixed in. Sometimes my friend is paged to respond to several deathbeds in a night. This is her job five or six days a week.

The point is that you can’t allow yourself be flooded with care every time you encounter suffering (even if you wanted to, even/especially if responding to suffering is your job): you would dissolve, you would be useless, and you would wear yourself out. But you can still choose to show up over and over with a glass of cold water and a box of Kleenex and all the faith at your disposal, and you can rise to the occasion and perform empathy as a service. You can provide material care to the suffering, listen to them, advocate for them. Because beyond and beside the immediate rush of mammal emotion you are simply committed to care for others and keep caring.

This is not to say it’s easy. But of course empathy is a concept, and a choice, and an ethical practice.
Does anyone even remember emotion recollected in tranquility? And its cousin, tranquility recollected in emotion?  This is what the ethics of feeling entails, the skill to move between the feeling and its recollection, the skill (if you are responsible for others) to let yourself feel enough so that the tears might rise in your eyes but do not spill over, the skill to summon tranquility so that you don’t cease to be useful in the moment. You time your own “system breaks” for later when there is someone else to put you back together. That is a learned skill that humans have.


AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE FOR ALL.

(thanks to my friend Tim for first posting this article) 

Produce and Productivity


My New Haven family-of-choice and I are sharing a CSA!  Connecticut veggies for your reading pleasure:

arugula, beans, beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, collards, sweet corn, cucumbers, eggplant, garlic, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, onion, okra, peas, peppers, potatoes, pumpkins, radishes, yellow squash, zucchini squash, butternut squash, acorn squash, sweet potatoes, Swiss chard, beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, turnips 

The Books of 2013: January


Josephine Tey.  The Singing Sands.  1952.  (again)

P.D. James.  A Mind to Murder.  1963.

India Knight. The Dirty Bits for Girls.  London:  Virago, 2006.

Sarah Dunn.  Secrets to Happiness.  New York:  Little, Brown, 2009.  (again)

Something Sensational to Read on the Train


Reading Tatler on the train. I should subscribe; every sentence is quotable. From “150 People You Might Like to Sleep With”: on Benedict Cumberbatch: “He’s a fan of fruit bats— and looks a bit like an otter.” On Lily Robinson: “She hunts— a lot— and does very good impressions, including an uncanny take on Miss Havisham.” On Idris Elba: “Well aware of the effect he has on women.” On Carlo Carello: “Looks fetching in a kimono. An immense sense of gaiety follows him wherever he goes.” On Glenn Haybittle (the names!): “Glenn is one for those who like white-faced, black-haired, slightly Draculean men with writing talent who live in garrets in Florence.” On Harry Mount: “Sometimes called ‘Harry Dismount’ due to the large number of girls he gets through.”

Briallen on HuffPost Live


A Mormon, a Muslim, a Jew, an evangelical Christian, and a liberal Protestant walk into a HuffPo television segment…