Sounds Tranelike

From R. Panikkar, original version, mid-1950s. Take away the "if" at the beginning, and you essentially have the liner notes to A Love Supreme (1964). And when you listen to the final movement of A Love Supreme, it is the words below he is playing through his sax. You can read along and listen.

If there is a God, there is nothing above, outside, or even below him. Nothing independent of God. Nothing exists without being an existence, a consequence, an effect of God. Nothing is disconnected from Him. All that is, exists in God, from God, and for God. All beings not only proceed from God and go toward God but also are in God.

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A Love Supreme

I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank you God.
Peace.
There is none other.
God is. It is so beautiful.
Thank you God. God is all.
Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses.
Thank you God.
In You all things are possible.
We know. God made us so.
Keep your eye on God.
God is. He always was. He always will be.
No matter what...it is God.
He is gracious and merciful.
It is most important that I know Thee.
Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,
fears and emotions – time – all related ...
all made from one ... all made in one.
Blessed be His name.
Thought waves – heat waves – all vibrations – 
all paths lead to God. Thank you God.

His way ... it is so lovely ... it is gracious.
It is merciful – thank you God.
One thought can produce millions of vibrations
and they all go back to God ... everything does.
Thank you God.
Have no fear ... believe ... thank you God.
The universe has many wonders. God is all. His way ... it is so wonderful.
Thoughts – deeds – vibrations, etc.
They all go back to God and He cleanses all.
He is gracious and merciful...thank you God.
Glory to God ... God is so alive.
God is.
God loves.
May I be acceptable in Thy sight.
We are all one in His grace.
The fact that we do exist is acknowledgement of Thee O Lord.
Thank you God.
God will wash away all our tears ...
He always has ...
He always will.
Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday.
Let us sing all songs to God
To whom all praise is due ... praise God.
No road is an easy one, but they all
go back to God.
With all we share God.
It is all with God.
It is all with Thee.
Obey the Lord.
Blessed is He.
We are from one thing ... the will of God ... thank you God.
I have seen God – I have seen ungodly –
none can be greater – none can compare to God.
Thank you God.
He will remake us ... He always has and He always will.
It is true – blessed be His name – thank you God.
God breathes through us so completely ...
so gently we hardly feel it ... yet,
it is our everything.
Thank you God.
ELATION-ELEGANCE-EXALTATION
All from God.
Thank you God. Amen.

JOHN COLTRANE - December 1964 

American Education and Publishing: Some Things Never Change

“It is lamentable that many of our children,” he wrote, “leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket.”

And later from the same volume:

"One editor warned would-be poets that there was 'postage to pay, paper to waste, and patience to weary' with the piles of submissions he received" (emphasis added).

Sentence of the Day

"Yes, I’ll face the contradiction that time can bring about a change, but until that day comes, I choose to engage in sweat equity with a penis on my own terms."

Panikkar's Getting Close

After reading a few million words of Raimon Panikkar's output over the last six years (three more years to go) and after working on maybe close to a thousand books on religion and theology over the last eighteen years (and if I had an intern with hours to kill, I'd have that person catalog my reading over that time), I finally came upon a statement that just about sums it up for me (emphases added):

Though with no attachment to the word “theology,” I would like to use it in the sense of expressing any possible reaction of Man in front of the Ultimate Mystery. . . . But if theology is understood in our above-described sense of any possible reaction of Man in front of the Ultimate, then the name logos stands for a symbol that transcends its commonly accepted concept. 

Sample Queries for Offensive Content

From a social club's history, the first blurb is the massaged version of the original text; the italics are my response.

Freelancer's hint: Send correspondence like this in a separate email, so the recipient doesn't, hopefully, foul up and forward it to the client.

> “had worked as a volunteer tutor for the primarily Appalachian students at the community after-school center.”

I have severe problems with their use of “Appalachian” as a euphemism here, and for what, I’m not quite sure. The Appalachian Mountains stretch from Maine to Georgia and include a lot of highly gifted students, and a lot who live in poverty. If what they mean by “Appalachian” is poor white trash from Eastern Kentucky, they need to find another way to say it than they have.

> “To form a collective to promote educational, social, artistic, and literary growth, and work to meet to the city's best interests . . . ” Updated in 2018 to reflect more contemporary language, the current mission statement describes the group as “organized to enrich lives through philanthropy and education.”

I call complete bullshit: Should read, “Updated in 2018 to placate the conservative Christian Trumpsters among them so that they can disavow any need to live up to helping society or the arts one bit, except when it suits their purposes.”

> “They have seen a Torah up close and toured a museum with Jewish cultural artifacts.”

Well, bully for them. Do they just want to come right out and say they do not now, nor will they ever have Jewish members? Oh, [city named here] . . . full of German descendants . . . right. If they have a Jewish member, they’d do well to change this bit of content. 

The Tubez, the News, the Blues

The suggestion has come forth that if I'm not finding enjoyment on the Internet, it's my own damn fault. Well, one way or another, everything in my life is my own damn fault, so I guess I can own up to it.

I grew up with five newspapers under my arm: New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and the Staten Island (NY) Advance. News and sports junkie from early on, and I learned a lot about music from the Voice and a little about life from reading its personals columns, back in the pre-AIDS days. Each publication served its purpose.

So that's my frame for entertainment or information of the visual variety. But now . . .

* The news is intolerable.
* Moving slowly down the sports food chain as far as major markets as I've aged, I've lost all interest in keeping up with sports, and it's been that way for about 20 years (accompanied by a lifetime aversion to college athletics). Bobby Thompson and I went from Staten Island to Bristol. Eventually he made it back to New York.
* Musically, I don't keep up either. Silence is preferred. Most of what I listen to, when I listen, are ad-free albums on YouTube that suit my need for background sound that's not white noise. No lyrics. And I'm finding that I no longer want to hear a lot of the music I grew up on. Just so tired of it.
* Other entertainment? If there's a hint of violence or tension, I really don't want to be there.

[We have Amazon Alexa in the house. My main request for her is, "Alexa, white noise." That, and the occasional multiplication problem when I'm not close enough to a calculator.]

On the other hand, I was at a local bakery that occasionally has live music. It usually is awful. You can't imagine that every song played by a bluegrass band sounds like "I'll Fly Away." (I've got a rant-worthy history with that tune. Someday.) But last week, the bakery had a very good bluegrass band with a delightful selection of songs (except for America, "Horse with No Name." "The heat was hot"?). One was Norman Blake's "Ginseng Sullivan," an old favorite that I'd not heard in a long time. Upon hearing that, I dropped a $2 bill in the jar.

Then I went home and listened to the original version. The result? Catharsis. The salty taste of lost youth. And now I can't get the song out of my head, but far worse songs have held that position. But the ear bug, or whatever it's called, is heavy laden.

The suggestion has also come forth that there's something wrong with me. Good lord, has there ever been a doubt?

Gotta get to work. Signed an NDA, so no specifics. Yet.

Word of the Day

presenteeism = decreased productivity while at work.

Fill in your own memories at the comments section. The phrase "while at work" seems to indicate under the umbrella of paid W-2-type employment (aka "sap with a day job," which is an increasingly attractive status for me), not just slacking off while a freelancer. If that were the case, one could chalk up this entire blog as a testament to presenteeism.

Doubling Down on the Lattice

I'm working on a book -- without giving away too much -- about student poetry, and regular visitors to this space are well aware of my feelings about most verse, even that written by adults. Frankly, I'm not a fan, once you leave the canon (Western or Eastern). Sorry to say it, but there it is. I'm convinced that much of the poetry that appears in the New Yorker, for example, would never receive an airing if not for the contributor's name.

I also work not infrequently (a construction, I've come to learn, that baffles nonnative English speakers) at a local 24-hour bakery that must have Pandora's Great American Songbook on repeat, because I hear the same music every two hours, including what seems like thrice-hourly versions of "Mack the Knife." The bakery also presents serious distractions that earplugs can't cancel out, such as coeds from the local universities. One is about eight feet from me right now, blissfully unaware of the letch typing near her.

But down the row of tables I see another student agonizing over a laptop. As I just went to replenish my coffee, I noticed one of the books he is working from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Poetry. I can't quickly formulate a witty response to that setup, but trust me, it's not for lack of material.

Ah, well. Back to the coed -- uh, I mean, work.

Thanks, Merriam-Webster's

Main Entry:hip*hop
Pronunciation:*hip-*h*p
Function:noun
Etymology:perhaps from 4 hip + 1 hop
Date:1983

This Year's Word Apparently Is

Imaginaries.

Every. Damn. Book.

It's like the 1980s, when I couldn't turn a page without running into Maslow's needs hierarchy. Enough already.

Another Sign of Reverse Time Travel

I'm copyediting a book in which the author spelled the word as "marihuana."

Case in Point

[Please reference first full paragraph of previous post]

I just received a request to index a book titled The American Nonvoter. I know a gentleman who has been politically active forever (he was in the Peace Corps when I was in diapers, with a roommate in Tanzania who was eaten by a lion [true story]), who worked the polls in this last election, as he usually does. People were coming out of the hollers who hadn't voted in 30 to 40 years and were amazed at the new-fangled voting machines. I wonder if the author is referring to these American nonvoters?

Word of the Day

irredentism: a political principle or policy directed toward the incorporation of irredentas within the boundaries of their historically or ethnically related political unit.

Uhhh . . .

irredenta: a territory historically or ethnically related to one political unit but under the political control of another

I'm surprised I've never seen this word. My vocabulary ain't too good, but I'll remember a word if I've seen it, even if not the definition. And I certainly won't remember this one.

From a surprisingly easy-to-read (and -index, so far) monograph on the treatment of religious minorities in Pakistan -- not that I care a lick about the topic. But I am very happy for cutting and pasting subcontinent names. Any spelling errors, courtesy of the author

Word of the Day

meatspace

noun

[mass noun] informal The physical world, as opposed to cyberspace or a virtual environment.

Sentence of the Day

Provisions would be provided for him there.

I understand that the author might have been a bit persnickety, but still. . . .

You Read It Here First

Or maybe not. AP sez "internet" is lowercased as of June 1, 2016.

A lot's actually happened since the last post. In no particular order, trip to Chicago that included seeing son no. 1 perform, a few other wild cultural events, and a trip to the Baha'i Temple north of Chicago, which is simply breathtaking.

And it's also possible to experience peace. I know because I've had the same feeling in two similar but wildly disparate places: the Baha'i Temple and -- can you guess, longtime readers -- the Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist, KY. Tere and I were walking very slowly around the outside of the temple in the dormant gardens area (probably exploding soon) and I leaned over and said, "Feel that? . . . That's what Gethsemani feels like." And she said, "I get it."

Don't want to jinx anything, but I've felt oddly peaceful since that day. I'll take it lasting a while longer.

Good news is rumbling on the Fred Neil front. Just saying.

A fascinating linguistic moment in Chicago. We were at a staging (not exactly a performance) of The Last Defender, which entails a team of 16 working together to prevent nuclear annihilation. Without giving anything away (I hope; the show has been extended five or six months from its original date), at one point people need to line up and hook themselves together. The young woman (say, 30 years old) next to me said to everyone else, "Those of you with the receptive end, get ready."

I leaned over (I do a lot of leaning over and talking to women, I guess) and said, "Very good. 'Receptive.' I never would have come up with that." And she said, "I had to say something, and that was the best I could do."

Folks, a few years from now electrical outlets or tools or what have you won't have a male and a female end anymore.

Oh! Younger son and fiance will be teaching outside Denver in the fall. Haven't even graduated yet. Everyone is most pleased and proud. Son no. 2 is going to be teaching 11th-grade English. His kids are in for a ride.

I think I got on here to do something else.

An Interesting and (So Far) Relatively Easy Index

The letters between the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip. Covers a lot of the history I lived through while coming to political and social consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Quite a few mentions of Merton (well, before, uh, dzzzzzt), and some interesting poetry from Daniel Berrigan that's not awful to read, which is rare in my checkbook. And it's only a names index -- charging less, but not as taxing on the brain. Providing subentries for the two brothers, though.

Anyway, the point is that much of their writing in these letters is informal shorthand that would pass very easily for texting or messaging today.

As regular readers know, I rarely shill for my clients, but if you're interested in this kind of stuff, buy a copy. Support an indexer.

UPDATE (1/19): The index has proven to be less than a romp.

Twice a Year, for Eight or Nine Years: 150,000 Words of This

Well, in fairness, not all of it:

“This thou art”; a thou who responds to the calling of the I that constitutes it as a thou, who in turn “allows” the I to be I. 

Problems Continue in Our Nation's Capital

Washington Post Style Guide Accepts Singular They

Word of the Day

relume

Main Entry:re£lume
Pronunciation:(*)r*-*l*m
Function:transitive verb
Inflected Form:re£lumed ; re£lum£ing
Etymology:irregular from Late Latin reluminare, from Latin re- + luminare to light up — more at  ILLUMINATE
Date:1604

 archaic   : to light or light up again  : REKINDLE

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Well, the Beverly Hillbillies thing ended up being a bust -- as was most of this seemingly promising book. Easy proofread, disappointing content.

Y'all come back now. Ya hear?