Midsummer nightmare

Many of us tittered when we heard about iguanas falling frozen from trees in Florida earlier this week. Weather which had no business there was tripping up an invasive species which, likewise, was out of place! (Besides, they may not have died.) But while we've been freezing, Australia has been experiencing record-breaking high temperatures, some of which have been lethal to indigenous species. I read that thousands of flying foxes have fallen from the sky, dead of heat stroke when temperatures topped 47˚C in Campbelltown, NSW - with who knows how many more elsewhere.

This grieves me in all manner of ways. Flying foxes are who Deborah Bird Rose writes about in the piece of hers I reference in my piece on religion and the Anthropocene, the joyous fertilizers of eucalypts overflowing with blossom, an invitation to "say yes!" to the mad lovefest of precious precarious life. These creatures of wonder are also ones I know. Indeed I first encountered them in an enchanted glade - in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Melbourne Botanical Garden almost eleven years ago. They are not resilient reptiles like Florida's interloper iguanas. While flying fox carers like those Rose writes about rescued some of the flying fox pups, most are dead, victims of the Age of Man. 

New School founders

Meanwhile in New School history, a friend found a 1967 letter in an archive in Philadelphia with this rather vertiginous logo on the letterhead. I asked our archivist about it. She quickly ID'd it as the New School Founders' Medal introduced in 1962, with the heads of the school's first directors Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson (who resigned after three years) and Alvin Johnson (who served 1922-46). She also directed me to the press release about it (a draft!) and the New School Bulletin about the medal and its first recipient, architect and 1956-61 chairman of the New School Board of Trustees, Ralph Walker.

Turns out the New School Archives have just digitized 1800 of these Bulletins for any and all to peruse online, a treasure trove for understanding New School history as it happened. Said special issue of the Bulletin, for instance, gives us a telling snapshot of what the New School thought it was and should be at a crucial juncture. America's First University for Adults, it bills itself, and offers the following interesting historical overview. Here you notice both that many of the New School's presidents have been historians - Beard and Robinson, but also Bryn Hovde (1946-50) and Henry David, whose stint as president had just begun in 1961 - and would be ended by the board soon thereafter!

我是到北京回去的！

Exciting news just in... I'm going back to China! This time it's not Shanghai but Beijing, where I'll be teaching for a month at Renmin (People's) University's International Summer School. This is something I wanted already to do last summer - Renda was a place I felt a strong affinity when I visited back during my year in China - but schedules wouldn't permit. More details as they become clear!

Epiphany

The twelve-day feast of Christmas has come to its conclusion: the Magi have arrived at the crêche, the connection to us gentiles has been made. (This is the nativity scene at Holy Apostles. The figures of the Magi and their camels were just put in place this morning.)

The Christianity MOOC in the HDS series we did in "Theorizing Religion" uses Nativity scenes to show how religious tradition synthesizes disparate scriptural sources into a single narrative, indeed a single scene. There's no single gospel in which all we see in a standard nativity takes place: star, manger, ox and ass, shepherds, magi (let alone kings) - and certainly not all at once. And even in the church calendar, there's almost a fortnight between the angels appearing to the shepherds and the arrival of the star-led Magi.

I've long known that Epiphany is more important for some cultures than Christmas itself, but I sort of assumed they just assembled the shepherds and kings at the end of the twelve days, rather than at the start. This is the first year I've noticed the pause. Why? It's because of the MOOC, surely. Also because in response to the attempt by the forces of barbarity to claim "Merry Christmas" for their ethnonationalism, the interim rector at Holy Apostles suggested we might keep saying "Merry Christmas!' to people throughout the twelve days, even as they dumped their Christmas trees on the sidewalk and hurried into the new year.

During that period after the 25h of December, the secular world hurries noisily into a new year, perhaps, "Christmas carols" no longer looping cynically at the mall. But the babe is still a babe, sleeping quietly. The news is held by animals and shepherds. Those seeking him are still seeking. His parents still feel safe in their land. 

Blue

Snow on the skylight in our building's stairwell.

After the blizzard

Bright and beautiful today, yesterday's snow, still crystalline, sparkling in the air as the strong winds of the bomb cyclone blow them about.

Snowy

The blizzard redecorated our window box... Bomb cyclone next!

If He lets it loose

Rereading Raymond Scheindlin's translation of the Book of Job (the one I'm recommending to students in the upcoming course on Job and the arts) after many months. I thought a refresher was in order. But there's always something new in this book, something you hadn't noticed. Like God's killing nations for his sport.

Ring in the true

At the Church of the Ascension's Service of Meditation and Sacrament which we often attend of a Sunday night - including this past one, new year's eve - we were treated to a lovely setting, soprano and organ, of a poem of Alfred Lord Tennyson's from 1850 which inspires still:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
  The flying cloud, the frosty light:
  The year is dying in the night;
Ring out wild bells, and let it die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
  Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
  The year is going, let it go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
  For those that here we see no more;
  Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to humankind.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
  The faithless coldness of the times;
  Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
  The civic slander and the spite;
  Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
  Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
  Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
 The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
 Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Not quite ready for a new year

After weeks and months of gloom, compounded by tallies of the past year's presidential carnage and premonitions of its likely continuation, it's almost confusing to find myself believing, feeling, that something new is likely, at least possible in 2018, that 2017's harms might be undone, even redeemed. Is it just the lengthening days, which my body senses? Is it the peer pressure, from cultures around the world acting out a new start? (Rituals and sacred time!) Or little baby Jesus, just a few days old... a few more days before the flight to Egypt.

Seeds of hope

The balloon plant joins us in hoping the new year brings new blessings.

What's for dinner?

Dry pot!

Cross country

Valley of the winds

Torrey Pines State Reserve, looking a little extraterrestrial today... with those grid lines the sandstone looks like the remains of a spacecraft - even a little "風の谷のナウシカ/Nausicäa of the Valley of the Winds."

43 miles east of Del Mar

A walk up Volcan Mountain, perfectly timed in mid afternoon, was a bit more strenuous than anticipated... these pictures are thrown together more or less in sequence. Among them you'll see manzanita, redwood and several kinds of oak trees, and commanding views to the east - with the Salton Sea a pale light blue band near the horizon - and to the west - with the Pacific Ocean shining through a white gold marine layer.

Colors without names

Christmas prayer for safe passage

In case you've not been following the century-old movements of my great grandfather, the journalist Don Martin, at Soldier of the Pen: 100 years ago today he was six days into the voyage across the Atlantic

that would take him to London and, eventually, to embed with the Americans fighting in France. The ship (the S S St Louis) were approaching Ireland. He penned a Christmas letter to his daughter describing the mysterious appearance and even stranger subsequent disappearance of Santa Claus - along with the mood on a ship whose crew and passengers alike were on the alert for mortal danger.

At least one of the children on board knew the nature of the danger. Martin recounts she asked the man "dressed in a red coat and fur hat, with big boots and a white beard" if “Santa Claus came in a submarine.”

Happy Christmas!

Pine not

I'm entranced by this pinecone simulacrum, part of a holiday display at Peet's Coffee - so convincing a cone because it's so happily cardboard!

 

not photoshopped