He is looking for someone or something that no one will discuss, that he has only inferred, for the unnamed person of thing whose advent or presence has been troubling the company all day.

Then a hand as massive and hard as an elk’s horn, lashed by tough sinews to an arm like the limb of an oak, grabs the boy by the shoulder and drags him back to the wings.

“You know better, young man,” says the giant, well over eight feet tall, to whom the massive hand belongs.

Nicholas Negroponte’s dream to bring cheap laptops to the children of the world will begin with Libya.  Imagine what the world would be like if every child had a wireless connection…..

No, not National Parks (though they seem to be for sale to loggers and oil companies these days), but Rosa Parks. It seems that corporate America has decided to capitalize on the the Civil Rights activist most frequently (and somewhat erroneously) credited with launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So now we can add Rosa to the likes of Malcolm, Che and Mao.

What did insomniacs do before the internet?  I’m half convinced that if I didn’t have an internet connection, I’d be most of the way to the great american novel.  Or, maybe only part of the way, because I seem to be waffling between nights of 9 or 10 hours of sleep and nights with nada.  But, more likely than not, I’d be sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of the X-files.

It’s the season when leaves and loves slowly make their way to cold storage. And that means that it’s time for the MLB division playoffs. And small confessions. I’m a person of distant and torn loyalties this fall — none of them having to do with my secret (and most likely now permanent) soft spot for the Red Sox.

Rather, my beloved Yankees are playing the Tigers — calling up my childhood allegience to Jim Leyland, former manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Of course, in the other AL contest, Minnesota is in play — yet another year when I might have to choose between the Bombers and the Twins, which was a frequent and troubling dilemma when I was in graduate school.

But, in the midst of all of these conflicting loyalties, one thing is never in question: The Mets don’t have any right to exist as a Major League team, nonetheless to win the World Series.

So, I’ve switched over to wordpress…. but because most days I only half know what I’m doing, I installed the stuff in a new directory.  So, the address of this blog is changing.  Come visit the shiny new site http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/sharon/bracket/, and update your RSS feeds.

My very first literature course as an undergraduate was with a man named Paul Betz in the fall of 1993. Now, Prof. Betz’s life work was the study of the British romantic poets, in particular William Wordsworth. That first semester of my college experience, we read a lot of things — Coleridge, Hardy, Hopkins, Strindberg, Kate Chopin, but Wordsworth more than anything else. And, I have to say, even though I wasn’t very good at English literature (I know that this is a totally relative statement, but I didn’t feel like I was any good at it), I loved it. The Prelude just held me transfixed through that fall. We’d go sit on the lawn in small groups and discuss Wordsworth’s coming of age in the Lake District–for something like 4 hours a week. Bizarre, I know, but I truly loved it.

So, our friend Wordsworth describes these instances that he calls “spots of time” in which all of the elements of experience and sense and memory come together to take a person back through their lives. (All of you English lit scholars out there, sorry if I’ve butchered this in the shorthand….) At anyrate, spots of time show up in Book XI of The Prelude:

There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating Virtue, whence, … our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired

Pretty great, right? I thought so, and I had to wonder whether he was secretly friends with Proust and really liked cookies (think time-travel). But, that’s beside the point.

The Point. Right. So, lately I’ve been consciously spending more time with my music collection than usual — not just letting it float in the background as I usually do, but really listening. In part, I’m doing this to try to pull out some iconic pop culture from the 80s and 90s for a friend. But, really, it’s been a tremendously interesting autobiographical journey. I know exactly where all 3000 songs came from and why I bought them. More importantly, I keep having these crazy sensory experiences that are the closest thing I’ve ever known to spots of time. If Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” can put me in a beat-up Mustang on a country road at 14, and The Cure’s “Pictures of You” can put me in a convertable Rabbit a little more than 10 years later, what would Wordsworth have done with an ipod?

On a less serious note, I seemed to have missed the fact that Waterford/Wedgewood bought All-Clad in 1999. Now, not that I can afford either of these things, but it warms my heart that an Irish company owns the best cookware manufacturer in the United States–in fact, cookware that is manufactured in Canonsburg PA (which is about fifteen minutes from where I grew up).

So, according the the NYTimes, Waterford hasn’t been doing so hot lately. When the Irish CEO stepped down recently, the head of All-Clad took over. Here’s hoping they lower their prices on all counts…..
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Reading the newspapers lately, and Sheila’s posting the other day, about the tragedy on the gulf coast reminded me of something that seemed worth relaying….

Just about a month ago, Fr. McFadden (the voice of Hoyas basketball, and the man who taught me my first formal theology) gave a pretty great homily about water. Now, Fr. McFadden can tell a story, and he usually does. On this Sunday the gospel was about Peter walking out to meet Jesus on the water, and then getting scared, and starting to sink.

Rather than starting here, Fr. McF. began with the wonderful imagery from Gilead, where John Ames is recalling walking to his church one morning when he comes up behind some young lovers out for a walk. He sees the young man jump up and shake a tree branch, showering the young woman with glistening drops of water from the leaves. Rev. Ames is overwhelmed with the pure joy of this interaction, and comments that, “it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.” It’s this infusion of the holy into the mundane that makes Gilead such a great book.

But, Fr. McF’s point was altogether different–though he loved the imagery–we know, as Peter knew and the folks in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas know, water can be a tremendously dangerous and scary thing. It’s hard to see how this water could be a blessing. But, I suppose, it’s our chance to pony up some serious support, ’cause these folks are sinking.

• American Red Cross — (800) HELP-NOW
• America’s Second Harvest — (877) 817-2307
• Catholic Charities USA — (800) 919-9338
• United Jewish Communities

So, on Monday as I was driving back to DC from a weekend in Pittsburgh, I spent some time listening to some low-on-the-dial radio as I made my way through Western Maryland. At first I thought I was listening to an all news network, but eventually it became apparent that I was listening to an evangelical station. I usually skip over the Christian rock when I drive, but often I stop to listen to the Christian talk material–it’s sort of an anthropological exercise.

So, this time I ended up with a broadcast from Focus on the Family Radio. Very interesting stuff. The main broadcast, aptly titled “From Jihad to Jesus,” was a testimony, given shortly after September 11 by a Dean from Liberty Theological Seminary (Jerry Fallwell’s institution), Ergun Caner. Though this fellow teaches systematic theology and church history, he isn’t your average evangelical Christian. Rather, he was raised as a Muslim and his father was a prominent mwazien. So, he addressed a Texas congregations in an effort to explain to them how the 9-11 terrorists, and other suicide bombers, could do what they did. Of course, he was also testifying about his conversion.
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