More Classic Americana

W. D. Fard:

Qur'an 27:34

Classic Americana

Did He Say This?

Would it surprise you if he did?

The Capacious Lupe Fiasco

This young brother has unplugged from the Matrix. I just hope and pray he stays true.

Hamlet Act 2 Scene 2 Soliloquy (1996)

Act With Justice

The Latest Madness From The Commonwealth Of Virginia

Augusta County Virginia schools closed due to Arabic calligraphy homework assignment.

Thomas Jefferson studied the Qur'an in Sale's translation, but these Virginians cannot even study the calligraphy of the Qur'an without the fear that they will be converted to Islam. Perhaps they secretly believe that the Qur'an is a very powerful book or they secretly doubt their own Christian convictions or some combination of the two.

We've gone from being a country of bigots, to being a country of hysterical bigots. Heavily-armed hysterical bigots...

Great North Americana

And Even More Great Americana

Still More Great Americana

The Classic Every American Should Read

The Church Of What's Happening Now

An American Story

Muslims in Manhattan.

From Harlem To Xinjiang

Elton John - Ticking_Grimsby (Old Grey Whistle Test 1974)

Genius Is As Genius Does

Old Fashioned Thanksgiving

Frank Zappa In The Reagan Era

More Great Americana

Fr. William K. Hubbell Centenary

Today I celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of an old friend, Fr. Bill Hubbell of Lexington, Kentucky. I met Bill in August of 1978 and he and I became and remained friends until his passing in 2004. I cannot begin to explain our friendship--how it began or how it endured, mostly at a distance (I lived in Lexington only during the academic year 1978-1979); I can only say that despite distance in space and time and relative age (he was in his early sixties when we met, I was all of 18) we made some sort of connection--of sympathetic hearts and minds--that (though occasionally strained) would never break. I love him to this day, remember him frequently, miss him like a father or a brother--for, in many ways, he was both to me.

We come from Him/Her/It and we return to Him/Her/It. Rest in peace my friend.

Great Americana

Emmylou Harris.

T. S. Eliot Reading Ash Wednesday

WWFD?

There comes a time in every sane life when the question simply must be asked:
What Would Falstaff Do?

T.S. Eliot Reads

Dignity

Eliotic Religion

Although he was to be embraced by the ecclesiastical establishment, and in manner often seemed more priestly than the priests, he was not himself of that establishment. His central position was an orthodox one, but his stance within the English Church was critical and combative--his Thoughts After Lambeth...is marked by what is in places an ironic polemic against the fatuities of ecclesiastical utterance. His characteristic position remained the same: to adopt the tone and coloration of his surroundings, while at the same time preserving a skeptical detachment from them. In any case, he knew too much to be impressed by the conventional formulations which he attacked in his pamphlet, just as his own religion was so haunted by private obsessions that he could not accede to a conventional piety.

--Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984), p. 181.

Great Americana

Kent Williams

American painter.

Wendell Berry

How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry : Poetry Magazine

On The Deck Of The Pequod

The Quarter-Deck.

Christopher Lasch

A review.

Whatever Happened...

To the American Left?

FYI

Philosophy

"It gets late early out there."

Baseball

The reason America was invented.

Hank Williams

Credo

Because all men are brothers wherever men may be
One union shall unite us forever proud and free
No tyrant shall defeat us no nation strike us down
All men who toil shall greet us the whole wide world around.

My brothers are all others forever hand in hand
Where chimes the bell of freedom there is my native land
My brothers' fears are my fears, yellow white or brown,
My brothers' tears are my tears the whole wide world around.

Let every voice be thunder let every heart beat strong
Until all tyrants perish our work shall not be done
Let not our memories fail us, the lost years shall be found,
Let slavery's chains be broken the whole wide world around.

--Tom Glazer, 1947.

Peter Yarrow talks about Peter, Paul and Mary: 50 Years in Music and Life

My Leftist Education

Folk Music:

Dr. Seuss:

More Great Americana

Leftist Lit For The Younger Set

Swing Back Sweet Pendulum!

Leftward Ho!

More Great Americana

Great Americana

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie

October 3rd will mark the 48th anniversary of Woody's passing.

Hem

New memoir by A. E. Hotchner.

My Gnostic Education

My Gnostic education fell between the years 1975 and 1995--or, to put it another way, between Born To Run and The Ghost of Tom Joad.

Over the course of those two decades, I was alternately lulled to sleep by, and awakened to the predicament of, life in these Orwellian States of Amnesia.

Unlike the classical Gnostics, however, I never acquired a contempt for life in the body. If anything, I acquired a contempt for any mode of thought that would lead to contempt for life in the body.

In '95 I read Ghazali's Deliverance From Error and discovered there the entry way to the "third road" that (Martin Heidegger's student) Hans Jonas spoke of in the epilogue to his book The Gnostic Religion: one that avoids "the dualistic rift" that the classical Gnostics posited between the human being and inhuman nature "and yet [contains] enough of the dualistic insight...to uphold the humanity of man" (Jonas, 340).

Throughout those tempestuous, formative decades, Bruce Springsteen was not only the troubadour of wild longing for an embodied transcendence but also a consistent witness to the facticity of human suffering. As such, he guaranteed my dissatisfaction with any philosophy or religious theory that promised disembodied salvation or ignored human suffering on the ground that it was ultimately illusory. He helped me keep my eye "clear as the bleb of the icicle."

Mandean Baptism

Holy Wear

Looking For The Antidote?

Great North Americana

Great South Americana

Jorge Luis Borges.

A Philosophical Life

"Apprehending the world in terms of contexts of meaning is how Heidegger conceived of a philosophical life."

--Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger's Philosophy of Life, 31.

FYI

All Come To Look For America

Truly Great Americana

More Great Americana

Remembering McGovern, WWII Hero, Politician

Great Americana

An Indigenous Peoples' History

How the U.S. settler-colonial regimen reduced 15 million people to 3 million.

Back To Our Future

How the 1980's changed America for the worse.

Blues For Allah Indeed

The Grateful Dead's famous "skeleton and roses" image was lifted from an English language edition of the Ruba'iyyat of Omar Khayyam.

The original artist may have been Edmund J. Sullivan.

We Need More Of These Gentlemen

The Sanity Clause

Theodicy

WHAT IS MAN?

And Even More Great Americana

Still More Great Americana

Lucretius

"The great master of sympathy with nature, in my education, was Lucretius." --George Santayana, My Host The World, 134.

"A genius who warns you away from organized superstition and erotic frenzy might well be at a disadvantage these days. But Lucretius matters because no other poet teaches you so well not to fear death, a teaching in which Montaigne was Lucretius's follower. By bluntly dismissing survival and immortality, Lucretius seeks to bring you a freedom from dread and from melancholy, a freedom that most of us decline to accept...He confronts with serenity the violent world that his poem could not teach Vergil to bear serenely. His art is less varied than Vergil's, and its aesthetic effect upon me is not as great as Vergil's, but it does me more good to read Lucretius." --Harold Bloom, Genius, 68, 72.

Epicurus

"We must laugh and philosophize at the same time."

Still More Great Americana

More Great Americana

Fly In The Ointment

Le Marabout Errant also suspects a fly in the ointment--and hopes that he is it.