Tag: becoming
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The Feast of Father Louis
In the Catholic Church, it is traditional to celebrate a saint not on the day of his or her birth, as we do for American presidents, but on the day of death. Part of the reason is that so many of the saints were martyrs, whose status depends precisely on the way they died. They…
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What You Mess with When You Mess with Star Trek
The following is cross-posted at Marc Andreottola’s excellent new moving pictures blog, CINEMA IS YOUR SYMPTOM. Keep an eye on that one, believe me. The trailer for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie came out last week. My RSS feed lit up, as they say, like a Christmas tree. No fewer than three Facebook…
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The First Journalist
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus came to me as a birthday present in the beautiful Adirondacks in August. Not till the last couple of weeks, while traveling in Turkey and Jordan, did I get the chance to read it. The timing, as it turned out, was just about perfect. I wouldn’t call it a great…
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Empathy in Action
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been an ongoing back-and-forth over in the comments at a recent post, which have forced me to explain more fully some earlier statements about empathy as a political virtue and skepticism as an intellectual habit. Joel, who has been patient enough to draw me out on these things, has…
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Fame, Sainthood, Personhood, Failure
I’ll begin with a commentary on a commentary on a commentator of texts. Last night over noodles in a food court in Flushing, Queens, a friend told me about an Egyptian poet who probed the connections between commentary and silence. In the September 29 New Yorker, Louis Menand has a piece on the literary critic…
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Learning to Be Heard
The New Yorker has a remarkable piece in today’s issue by the composer John Adams, a tear-jerker for any creator trying to get somewhere. Adams follows the course of his early career as he moves from avant-garde esotericism and bad reviews to orchestral works that interested both him and audiences alike. If you’ll read the…
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Clarify Your Position
This passage from Henry Miller’s late book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, has long spoken to me. I first found it when I was eighteen, the summer of a month-long solo road trip across the United States and back, the climax of which was the discovery of Big Sur. Those were my…
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A Questioning Teenager
For the last few months I’ve been playing around with this article for a popular (and rather self-helpy) religion website. The editor has stopped returning my messages, so I figure the deal is dead (this happens sometimes). So I sez to myself, why not share it with my Row Boat friends? It is more of…
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An Exercise in Becoming
For the last three posts I have been exploring the process of becoming. An outgrowth of that, as far as the site goes, has been a rather radical transformation. Rather than being hosted at Small’s Clone Industries, where The Row Boat has lived since it began in 2005, it now lives at www.therowboat.com, a home…