Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Philander Smith College:

On April 11, the president of Columbia University announced that it had received a $400 million pledge from alumnus John W. Kluge, who in 2006 was 52nd on the Forbes list of the wealthiest people, earning his fortune through the buying and selling of television and radio stations. This gift, payable upon the 92-year-old’s death, will be the fourth largest ever given to a single institution of higher education.

With such a massive transfer of wealth, the accolades poured in, justifying such a gift to an Ivy League university. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, said: “The essence of America’s greatness lies, in no small measure, in our collective commitment to giving all people the opportunity to improve their lives… [Kluge] has chosen to direct his amazing generosity to ensuring that young people will have the chance to benefit from a Columbia education regardless of their wealth or family income.” Mayor Michael Bloomberg indicated that investing in education produces returns that can’t be matched. Rep. Charles Rangel said the gift would ensure greater numbers of students can afford a first-class education.

Oh please! Continue reading →

I suppose the idea of fake wedding cakes has some merit. At least when compared to the exorbitantly expensive weddings that seem to be the norm these days. My only quibble with the article: real wedding cake is tasty?? I must not have ever had any, then.

Sydney

Three wholly unrelated inanities that caught my attention this morning:

1) A judge is in a Washington D.C. court as a plaintiff, having sued a dry cleaner for losing his pants. For how much is he suing them? $54 million. We mustn’t forget that these pants were really dear to him. While testifying to the court, the judge broke down and had to ask for a break. So sad. What could be dearer to a man’s heart than his trousers?

2) Biblical scholar Gerhard Delling on the apostle Paul: ‘Indeed, Paul says [in 1 Cor. 7:5] that the Holy Spirit cannot be in people during sexual intercourse’. This was news to me, but then, sometimes there are odd biblical passages and sometimes I don’t remember them. So I looked up 1 Cor. 7:5: ‘Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control’. Sometimes scholars amaze me.

3) In Canada, food can be labelled ‘Product of Canada’ if 51% of the production costs are Canadian. So, for example, a company can import mango juice concentrate, add water to it in Canada, and then sell it as Canadian mango juice.

Sydney

Here are a few pictures from the excursion to Highland Park that Erin and I made a couple of weeks ago. Both of us were quite taken by the trees with interestingly different bark. Never mind leaves, flowers, and such. So the here are pictures of some of the trees that I intend to plant as soon as I settle down and manage to get my hands on some land that will stay in my possession for a good while.

Gold Birch (Betula ermanii). This is not your standard birch, though it looks quite similar. Notice the gold shading even on the main stems.

The Paperbark Maples (Acer griseum) were also really lovely.

The most amazing bark was on the Amur Cherry (Prunus maackii). Not only did the bark look like burnished copper, it felt like it, too.

Perhaps I’ll post some more pictures soon. Some of them might even be of something other than bark.

I’m wading through some technical reading (yeah, I know, a family car trip is not the best time for that), but I wanted to post a comment about the great reading I’m going to be doing very shortly.  I’m signed up to teach a course on “The Women of Southern Fiction,” a course I offered to teach since there seem to be interesting female figures writing fiction and in fiction of the South.  William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, etc.  So my summer reading (I LOVE MY JOB!) is to read and prepare class notes for the novels I’ve assigned my students in the fall.  I’m reading some other works by the authors I’ve assigned, and it’s incredible fun.  So nice to have control over the course I’m teaching and the books I’m teaching.

Oh, and in cleaning out my trunk of memories and papers I’ve saved from childhood, I stumbled across some really funny pictures of me in 5th grade, 10th grade, etc., when I had my hair up strangely, I looked uncomfortable, or I tried (failing miserably) to strike a serious and “thoughtful” pose.  So nice to grow up and realize you don’t have to be painfully self-conscious forever, smiles really are the best way out of the situation, and though all fashion fads pass, some favorite shirts in the closet seem determined to stick around forever.

Erin

I tried out a new church yesterday, and learned a few things about what I like a church to look and sound like.  I agreed with much of the service: they used a Bible, they referred to God the Father without getting tripped up in “the great energy force above all” or some such language, and they seemed to have the care of others at heart.

But I definitely had some issues with their musical style and the image they were projecting. When service started there were some young guys onstage with a trap set, guitars, and a keyboard, fronted by a set of five miked singers. The music was incredibly loud; I couldn’t actually tell when the congregation was supposed to sing without watching the mouths of those around me. Forget about actually hearing them!

Alright, now the question is: why did this make my spine stiffen? I grew up with rock and still like it. But my gut reaction was that this simply wasn’t church. I was tempted to try head banging and see if anyone thought it was inappropriate, hoping to find some boundaries.  Most of us identify church by what it looks, smells, and sounds like, and for me this just wasn’t it.

That gut reaction got me thinking, and then I started putting my finger on issues that weren’t quite as easy to dismiss.  Though I like the music, I like it in the kind of rush-filled, head-banging sort of way I’ve known from being a metal fan as a kid. It’s the kind of feeling you get from hearing a blast of another person’s voice, but not at all the same kind of rush you get from singing and feeling part of a large congregation, lifting voices up in celebration. Although I really like to sing and will do it given half a chance, I didn’t feel at all compelled to sing today; I couldn’t even hear myself when I did (given how loud I am, quite a feat). Why would I sing when those five amplified voices can easily blow all the rest of us away with their stellar sound system? To put it as crudely as possible, I was getting the sense that it was the opinion of this church that God only wanted the best music, and so they had procured good singers for that purpose.  Coming from the other direction, singing no longer seemed like something one had to or should do in church, a part of one’s churchly responsibilities like praying and reading and such.  In a weird kind of way, those people up front had turned from song leaders to entertainment for the congregation, and I have a difficult time seeing how that is productive for the church body.  We get entertainment everywhere else in our lives; is that what we’re supposed to get from church?

I also couldn’t help but notice that there was definitely a celebration of youth and youth culture going on, from the music choice to the clothes everyone wore onstage.  I can’t fathom why any of the elderly people would attend such a church.  To be quite honest, it was a bit creepy that the people up front made me feel old. Capris, tans, blond hair that was spiky or flipped out, jeans and T-shirts or polos–there was a lot of emphasis on being and looking young. I get a bit tired of the media bombardment that is so outrageously youth-focused, and it was startling to get the same thing in a church.

Alright, now you know that Sydney and I deserve each other, with our four-part hymns in one hand and old-fashioned dress clothes in the other. I just thought I would put this out there, even though I’m now running off for a week of extended family time in Oklahoma and won’t get to read comments for awhile.  Still feeling pretty new to church, leaning heavily on my memories from childhood, this just seems to be a very different animal from the church that I knew as a kid, and I’m having a hard time understanding how both can be church.

Erin

It’s been interesting seeing the eulogizing of Richard Rorty after his passing away on Friday. As one might have expected, the philosopher who was dismissed as crazy (at least by most philosophers) before his death, seems to have become upon his death a leading philosopher with whom we must grapple.  The Maverick Philosopher provides a perhaps more honest note.

Most of the newspaper obituaries point out that Rorty’s ‘work was read not just in philosophy departments but also in classes on literature and political theory’. It might be more accurate to say that his work was read in literature and social science departments and occasionally by philosophers as well.

The most interesting tidbit comes from Russell A. Berman of Stanford who notes that Rorty ‘rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints’. Really? I thought most Anglo-American philosophers working currently identified themselves as analytic philosophers and proudly so. Continental Europe has traditionally been a bastion of other kinds of philosophizing, but I thought that even there more and more people were turning to analytic philosophy. Perhaps Berman uses ‘analytic’ in its older, narrower sense to refer to philosophers of the persuasion of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. In that case, it would probably be true that most philosophers are no longer engaged in the analytic programme. But this would hardly be thanks to Rorty. So I’m still a bit puzzled as to exactly who got rescued from what.

Sydney

Now that Mom, Dad, Adam, and I are all away from work, the vacation mentality is finally sinking in.  One stays up late, so the others end up doing it too, and we all wake up late the next morning and take a leisurely breakfast that delays any thought one might have of productivity.

While I’m here I’m trying to clean out anything in my bedroom that I might have left behind, because my parents will be bringing my furniture out to Ithaca later this summer.  It’s kind of fun to rummage through drawers that I’ve looked through a thousand times, reading papers and remembering events.  For those of you who know me well, there’s no reason to worry: Mom’s standing guard over me to make sure I don’t just throw everything away, neat-freak that I am.  Between Mom and Sydney, I always have a memory-preserver around to keep me honest 🙂

I made home-made pizza for my family last night, which seemed to go over well.  This afternoon my dad and I rode out on the bike trail near our house, through beautiful trees, over bridges, and out in the sun.  Absolutely gorgeous day.  Also ran some errands and picked up a pair of nearly-flat sandals.  Ithaca is having an effect on my heel height, that’s for sure.

Erin

This morning Nelson and I went to Selkirk Shores State Park. It’s a potentially nice park. We had lunch under a beech tree from which we had a great view of Lake Ontario framed by beech leaves. Sadly, the effect was spoiled somewhat by hordes of flies. They were made all the more disturbing by the fact that we suspected them of having first visited the piles of rotting fish on the beach. Oh, and yes, the wafting odours did not help with lunch.

After lunch I dropped Nelson off at the airport in Syracuse. On the drive in we saw a sign that said that the current temperature was 100 degrees. It was blazing hot; still, I think it was a tad less than 100. Low 90s would have been my guess. Not that it makes much of a difference: either makes for misery.

And I needn’t have bothered dropping him off. He just called to say that it turns out that he will be flying tomorrow, thanks to the computer problem and thunderstorms that have messed up the airports in NYC today.

Meanwhile, I am hoping for a thunderstorm or two here. It would be nice to be able to breathe again.

Sydney

Today was Nelson’s last day here. We managed to get quite a lot in. In the morning we went to my garden and planted my tomatoes (all 18 varieties: from Beam’s Yellow Pear to Aunt Ruby’s German Green to Black Cherry). In the process, we managed to get ourselves rather burned by the sun. After a couple of days of November-like weather, we’re back to blazing sun and heat.

After the garden work, we walked along the Cayuga Trail for a few hundred yards (the Monkey Run natural area is adjacent to the gardens) and had lunch on the edge of a steep sand back a couple of hundred feet above Fall Creek. Lunch was lovely: sandwiches made by the chef, along with mangoes, kiwi, and apricots. From where we were sitting we could look down into a Red-tailed Hawk nest on the other side of the creek. There was also a House Wren nest twenty feet to our left, one of whose residents periodically regaled us with song. Most exciting, though, was the Scarlet Tanager that serenaded us the entire time from a couple of oak trees nearby and offered a few gorgeous glimpses of himself.

Once satiated, we continued hiking along the trail for a good ways. We spotted several green tiger beetles. I love the incandescent green of these beetles. From an insect’s perspective, of course, tiger beetles are rather ferocious, as this wonderful photo shows.

Nelson also spotted a spectacular ichneumon wasp. I think she was a good six inches long, including her ovipositor. She was certainly the largest ichneumon that I have ever seen. (I was also wondering what effect a wasp like this flying around in the living room would have on Erin — unfortunately, she is too far away to be subject to my experiment.)

While following the wasp around, we stumbled across a female Scarlet Tanager finishing up her bath in a little stream, with male consort up in the trees. Three tanagers in a day is not bad at all.

On the hike back, we noticed a big patch of some kind of mycotroph. The flowers certainly looked odd. I haven’t been able to find an image yet that looked exactly like what we saw, so, to my frustration, I’m not sure I have the plant identified. I do know that it’s one of the Ericaceae, though!

After the hike, we watered the garden, got thoroughly hot and sweaty, and went home and gorged on a watermelon. Somewhat refreshed, we spent most of the rest of the day ensuring that we would have a good dinner, i.e., roasting portabellas, making bruschetta, and so forth.

Finally, an hour ago, we walked down the road to some open fields and watched fireflies. I have never seen so many before. The fields were foaming and shimmering with hundreds of them.

A fitting close to a rather pleasing day, I must say.

Sydney