CJR‘s Campaign Desk has an interesting post today about widespread interest in the U.S. elections in Europe. I had heard about the Italian Democratic Party’s slogan being “Si Puo Fare,” but I had no idea the Dutch were also glued to their Internets. O readers of Turkish and residents of Cyprus, how has U.S. campaign coverage affected you?

I have a memory of being awakened early this morning by a pair of barred owls calling to each other very near the bedroom windows—which is to say very near my head. But I also dreamed last night that the Iowa City Audubon Club was hosting an owl watch party in my driveway, blocking all passage, and generally making a nuisance of itself for the sake of the owls that happened to be using my yard as an owlery. Now I haven’t a clue whether the owls were real or a dream.

SHELL

At night the monks sang softly
and a gusting wind lifted
spruce branches like wings.
I’ve never visited the ancient cities,
I’ve never been to Thebes
or Delphi, and I don’t know
what the oracles once told travelers.
Snow filled the streets and canyons,
and crows in dark robes silently
trailed the fox’s footprints.
I believed in elusive signs,
in shadowed ruins, water snakes,
mountain springs, prophetic birds.
Linden trees bloomed like brides
but their fruit was small and bitter.
Wisdom can’t be found
in music or fine paintings,
in great deeds, courage,
even love,
but only in all these things,
in earth and air, in pain and silence.
A poem may hold the thunder’s echo,
like a shell touched by Orpheus
as he fled. Time takes life away
and gives us memory, gold with flame,
black with embers.

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

George McGovern, October, 2007:

“I’d sure like to see
a black man in the White House,
but folks, ladies first!”

George McGovern today.

Here a poem by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Renata Gorczynski

Lightening
for Adam Michnik

We lived understanding little and craving
knowledge. As plants do, when they grow toward
light, we sought justice
and we found it only in the plants,
in the leaves of the horse chestnut, enormous
as oblivion, in the fern shrubs which swayed
slowly and made no promises.
In silence. In music. In a poem. We sought
justice, confusing it with beauty.
We turned our backs on cruelty
and boredom. There’s no solution, that much
we knew, there are only fragments, and the fact that
we spoke in complete sentences seemed to us
a strange joke. How easy it was to hate
a policeman. Even his face seemed to us
a part of his uniform. The errors of others
reflected mountains, clouds. Life then was
round like a balloon when it gets going.
Spruces stood still, filled with shadows
and stillness like the depths of an ocean. Green
eyes, your wet skin,
my lizard. In the evening, mute lightening
flickered in the sky. It was other people’s thoughts
burning down safety. One had to
pack in a hurry and go further,
east or west, mapping out
an escape route.

If you’re fed up with everyone whining and moaning about the state of the newspaper industry, if you think the way to get more readers is to be creative and thoughtful about giving them something they actually want to read, if you like the idea of putting together content for some of the smartest people in the state, and if you’re interested in being a leader, rather than a follower, then we might be the match for you.

Or maybe not. I find the copy overdone, but maybe somebody would be intrigued. Kudos for this, though: “if you think the way to get more readers is to be creative and thoughtful about giving them something they actually want to read.” If they follow through, then maybe they’re doing something right.

A year ago, the Roots did 13 minutes of awesome to “Masters of War,” and I never knew:

Clearly, I don’t hang out in the right corners of the Internet.

This story about a New Jersey transgender couple worried about the status of their legal marriage reminds me of the days when I regularly contemplated gender determinism in the Church of Christ. I wanted very much to believe that someday, somewhere a congregation would need to respond to a transgender man who would want to serve communion and lead singing and, vice versa, to a transgender woman who refused to relinquish her public role at the front of the sanctuary. To wrestle with the question would be just desserts, I thought, for all those years spent hiding behind legalism and willful misconstruings of the incredible splendor of humanity.

I would still be interested to know if anything like that has happened, but I no longer hold my breath for it. I mean, what man who knows himself well enough to have gone through gender reassignment surgery, what woman who knows herself likewise, would still want to remain in a faith community as unreflective as the Church of Christ? No one that I can imagine. But people always surprise me, so who knows?

I would make it a regular feature to have book challenges:

1. Take two readers’ current reading lists. Preferably, each reader has divergent tastes.
2. Swap their lists.
3. Solicit reviews not just of the books, but of the other reader’s taste.

Think Robert Birnbaum versus James Wood. The same could be done for movies.

The copy would be dynamite!

The young man, no doubt a seminary student, or quite possibly a religion major, glad he doesn’t believe the stuff any more, got up and proceeded to ask the speaker, who up that point had been referred to as your Grace, Immanence, Reverend, Bishop, and Mister, a question.

In your talk you criticized the Enlightenment as having a counter narrative to Christianity and the Christian claim of the resurrection, but you use Enlightenment principals to restore and reread Scripture in the context of a past you have reconstructed.

N. T. Wright responded…

I have no problem with the Enlightenment and the tools of historical investigation and science that came out of the Enlightenment project, I have a problem with the fact that the Enlightenment tries to set itself up as “better than” the past, especially when we as Christians believe that the culmination of history happened 17 centuries after the event that defines our faith.

This, of course, is my faulty memory and hasty transcription of his response. To defend his not having beef with the Enlightenment, he said…

I have always said that I do not want a pre-modern dentist working on me… give me high-modern science… in fact, I’d prefer to be treated by a post-modern dentist either. What ever excesses may be attributed to the Enlightenment project and the belief in science, there are advances that we must recognize…