Tag: lists
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Religion Blogs: Too Many to Count
Lately I’ve been waking up with these terrible cold sweats. Reptilian reflexes bounce me out of bed and to my laptop across the room, where my fingers pull up a familiar spreadsheet. I’ve forgotten a blog! How could I leave that one out? Now I’ve got to spend half the morning revising the whole thing…
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Agee on the Artist At War
Three-quarters of the way through his masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee takes a pause in his account of a summer spent living among Depression-era, cotton-picking tenant farmers for an “Intermission,” subtitled “Conversation in the Lobby.” The overall thrust of this portion, phrased as a furious response to questions posed to writers…
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Notes on Bodega Engineering
If $2 bodega umbrellas are really so crappy, how did mine manage to self-destruct so exquisitely the moment I stepped into the rain today? “I bow to the economic miracle,” says the narrator in Chris Marker’s film, Sans Soleil. And now I throw it in the trash. ‘I am proud that we Chinese have the…
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The Great Wallet Spike
It’s kinda bad. I’m obsessed with The Row Boat’s traffic. It has become a daily (eek!) ritual-cum-addiction to troll over to Google Analytics in the morning and see how many people have been looking at me and from where they are coming. In some way or another, the Google oracle can set the tone for…
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Must One Describe?
The air here is always dry. Thin, but also thick. A white pipe the width of a soda can reaches from floor to ceiling, making the never-ending music of a rainstick. From it comes enough heat that even on the coldest days of winter I’ve had to keep the window open at least a crack…
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25 Random Notes on Ash Wednesday
I woke up early to my roommate putting away the silverware in the kitchen, then fell back asleep. When I woke up the wooden rosary that I fell asleep with wrapped around my hand was lost in the sheets. Last night I was asked if I keep any symbolic hidden things on my body, like…
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Searching for Truth-Force in Pragmatism
Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club was a happy discovery for $1.50 at the otherwise frustrating Salvation Army at Bedford and North 7th in Brooklyn. As my bedtime reading for the last few weeks, for better or worse, it has been more thought-provoking than sleep-inducing. It tells the early story of pragmatism as a distinctly American…
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The Sounds of San Cristóbal
Early tomorrow morning, after almost two weeks here, I leave San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, for a few days in Washington, D.C. It has been a very peaceful trip and such a gift to be with family here. To share a sense of what I’ve been experiencing all this time, here is a list…
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List of Human Sacrifices
Yesterday I had the great privilege of visiting for the first time the Mayan ruins at Palenque, in Chiapas, Mexico. Astonishing. Part of the conversation among my family as we walked through these stone shells of palaces, temples, and dwellings only recently unveiled from the rainforest was about whether the people who lived there were…
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Living in Lists
Do you make lists? Are you one of those people who, according to caricature, have no rest until the things of their lives rest in a list? Who don’t feel even their own being until being properly listed—be it by Google or by Post-It? Or else, perhaps, are you one of those who so valiantly…