Another country heard from (times three)

Three of the four Massachusetts Democrats in contention for the US Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy sound off about the controversy involving Kennedy's son Patrick and his bishop.

Why don't they just shut up?

Quotation : Marianne Moore

Sympathizing with an experiment, we yet need not venerate the result.

The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Penguin, 1987), p. 586

Eelworks

A poem by Seamus Heaney.

Via Steven Riddle's excellent blog A Momentary Taste of Being.

Dialogue on a bus

(By "girl" be it understood to mean "young college-age woman")

Girl #1: So what's your ethnicity?

Girl #2: I'm Brazilian.

Girl #1: Brazilian! I knew you were either Greek or Brazilian the first time I saw you. You're so pretty.

Girl #2: Thank you! And I knew you were Asian the first time I saw you!

The IHOP coffee incident, September 1997

You told a funny story
(Hilarious, not gory)
And it was mandatory
    To spew my coffee-quaff.
To Heather I say "Brava!"
Volcanoes belching lava
Can't beat my burst of java
    That time you made me lauff.

Quotation

A lot of people take the term free verse literally, with the result that there is more bad free verse written today than one can easily shake a stick at. Most of it hopes to recommend itself by deploying vaguely surrealistic images in unmetered colloquial idiom to urge acceptable opinions: that sex is a fine thing, that accurate perception is better than dull, that youth is probably a nicer condition than age, that there is more to things than their appearances; as well as that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were war criminals, that the C.I.A. is a menace, that corporations are corrupt, that contemporary history seems "entropic," and that women get a dirty deal. All very true and welcome. Yet what is lamentably missing is the art that makes poems re-readable once we have fathomed what they "say."

Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, revised edition (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 88

A nuisance

This is why it is important, from my point of view, to have discovered God. In a way I would say it is rather a danger, very often a nuisance. One could very well live with less trouble without a God than with a God because -- particularly with a God who has accepted solidarity to the point of death, love to the point of forgetting Himself and in addition to this, is vulnerable, helpless, despised, beaten -- God tells us coldbloodedly; this is the example which I give you -- follow it. Or he says, here are the beatitudes: you will be hungry, you will be thirsty, you will be beaten, you will be cast out, you will be persecuted -- and that is the best you can have. That kind of God is not always a discovery that brings ease in our lives. The point is not whether God will be useful, the point is whether it is true that He exists.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, God and Man (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004), pp. 93 & 94

"Why hast thou forsaken me?"

The Orthodox bishop Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) on one of Christ's seven last words.

Big time computer problems

Don't know when regular posting will resume.

An Orthodox churchman

Funny stories, etc. from Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia :

From the archives

November, a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge.

The poetry of autumn

David B. Hart at First Things' On the Square blog provides us with some of his favorite seasonal verse.

Vigilium nativitatis Dylan Thomas

To commemorate the occasion of the 95th anniversary of Dylan Thomas's birth, here is the voice of the poet reading "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London":

Catholic jokes

from fisheaters.com