A few thoughts on Pope Francis — lux aeterna luceat ei — and his successor.
Yet one thing that is true about the Haggadah is that it is emphatic about liberation being in God’s hands. That’s why the text very nearly erases Moses from the story. Over and over, the text says, liberation from Egypt was something God did for me, not something I won or that was handed to me by some lesser mortal savior. In this populist era, where both Trump and Netanyahu style themselves kings and messiahs, that’s one reason I can still put forward confidently for clinging to the traditional text, even at the risk of being irrelevant.
Holy Week recommendation: the Netherlands Bach Society performing the St Matthew Passion. ✝️ 🎵
Brad Mehldau’s cover of “Little Person” is just sublime. 🎵
My friend Jim Beitler on Tolkien, Lewis, George Herbert, and trees.
Not really interested in the Bauhaus Clock screensaver, but if it were based on John Harrison’s H4 I’d be saying TAKE MY MONEY.
I’ve got a post up on Harvard’s argy-bargy with the Administration — mainly quotations, which I’ll probably be adding to.
If my favorite MTV Unplugged has always been 10,000 Maniacs, that may be because they look like a band started by my fellow graduate students.
“Hey, that’s the dress Natalie wore to the English department Christmas party.”
“Yeah, but she finally got a good haircut. You know, I’m pretty sure that the lyrics to ‘Candy Everybody Wants’ come from something I said in our Modern American Lit seminar.”
“Wow. How do you feel about that?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I guess so…. Um, is it just me or are … are they really great?”
“Yeah. Yeah, they are great.”
🎥 I recently watched The Last of the Mohicans (1992) for the first time since it came out, and my main thoughts are
- The best actor in the movie, by miles, is Wes Studi.
- MERCY, did Peter Jackson go to school on this movie. Scene after scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, and some in The Two Towers, are almost directly copied from this film.
- Michael Mann is such a “city” director that it’s constantly surprising to see how beautifully he films forests and streams — and, in one memorable case, people crossing a bridge:
Great to see this from my friend Sara Hendren AKA @ablerism — I’ve seen it and it’s both fascinating and moving.
I wrote about stumbling over a word in a Japanese movie.
Ta Hio: The Great Learning, translated by Ezra Pound (1928):
If the rulers of states think only of amassing riches, they will be surrounded, surrounded ineluctably, by mean men, and the depraved. And these mean men will make the ruler think they are great ministers, and the depraved men will manage the state, and moreover calamities will descend out of heaven, and vengeance rise from the people. And if, when things have come to such pass, there be a just man come to rule, he will be helpless against the evil; for private gain is not prosperity, and equity is the treasure of states.
On my recent trip to Illinois I continued to experiment (mostly ineptly) with film photography.
Among the American journalists who covered the Second World War, the best writer was A. J. Liebling. Here is he describing his efforts to get to the airport to take a flight to Lisbon:
At that period — it sounds like talking about stagecoach days — the Clippers still left from a yacht-club setting at Port Washington, Long Island. A friend of mine named Fred Schwed … had asked to drive me out to my plane in the early morning. Passengers were supposed to be at the plane with their luggage at eight o'clock. Schwed picked me up at an hour I never had experienced while sober, at the door of the house where I was living, and headed in what I took to be the direction of Long Island because the sun was rising over it. He drove me over one bridge, which was all right, and then around a wild farming country, in which I distinctly saw a hen and on another occasion what I took to be a cow — in one jump more I figured he would have me among the coyotes and Republicans — and then over another bridge, which was all wrong because it landed us in Westchester County. By then I had only an hour or so to catch the plane, so I began to curse, which I do well. The secret of good cursing lies in cadence, emphasis, and antiphony. The basic themes are always the same. Conscious striving after variety is not to be encouraged, because it takes your mind off your cursing. By the time Schwed got me to the landing he felt what a proper swine he was for having gotten up early in the morning to take me to the plane, and if the experience had broken him of volunteering to do favors for people it would have been worth while.
And he’s Liebling, some time later, at work in rural France:
