Egregious Reader

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind, This furtive age, this age endowed with power To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find What swims before his prow, what swirls behind — Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Falls from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined . Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun; but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric ; undefiled Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still Upon this world from the collective womb Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.                                 Edna St. Vincent Millay This is from a book of poetry published in 1939. In 1934 the first man went into space and it wasn't until 1969 that man was able to "wake the moon with footsteps." The talk must have been very alive and real then. But here is the profound questions of the ...

On Friday coming home from work I caught this interview on NPR: ( here ) Its an interview with the Atlantic Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his cover article "A Case for Reparations." This question and Coates answer really stood out to me and point to the clearly larger and more complex issues that get lost in focusing on individual conscience issues: CORNISH: MTV had this survey on millennials and their attitude toward racial inequality and one of the things they found that millennials overwhelmingly see racism as a problem for older people, right? And then they aspire to colorblindness. Are you essentially trying to introduce this idea, which has like come and gone in many iterations over the decades to the Obama generation? COATES: Yeah, that makes me very, very sad. I think what happens is that those young people are the inheritance(ph) of an unfortunate idea, and that is that what really needs to happen to solve the - quote-unquote - "race problem" is to ...

Really awful story about the really awful things men do to those who are weak or different: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/12/victimised-blind-body-worn-cameras-abused It was supposed to be the start of a new life, but after moving to Stevenage Old Town in Hertfordshire last November, I found myself a target of haters and abusers in public. I still don't know why.  It began with a group of young lads attempting to guide me in to a lamppost before laughing and running away. Not long afterwards, the situation grew worse, with groups of mainly younger males circling me, swearing, and in one harrowing case, telling me they were filming for YouTube as they urged me to "trip over the curb you blind b@!%#" and "f@$% off back to blind land". Tom Waits sings in his song "God's Away on Business": There's a leak, there's a leak in the boiler room The poor, the lame, the blind Who are the ones that we kept in charge? K...

Underwhelming syntax      of my narrow expressions Hollow-hearted words      from liminoid spaces Border lands make for brave faces      or indecisive ones. Broken hand gone jellyfish      waiting for depth, but,                  lacking a solid floor. Pretty ok means sub par       and pretty good means               awesome or simply ok. Impoverished expression       made for stoic abstractions that seem to portray       sober self-control but to those who are heart-close       it looks like self-doubt              and lack of commitment.

The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.              -- GK Chesterton Lunacy and Letters Good sermon called Theology of Sleep by John Baillie: http://www.luc.edu/faculty/pmoser/idolanon/BaillieChristianDevotion.html#sleep