March 2012

Your thoughts on Adrienne Rich, please

by David Alm March 29, 2012

I first learned about Adrienne Rich, who died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, CA, at the age of 82, in college almost 20 years ago. I was 18, and many of my professors adored Rich. They taught entire courses about her, or at least included her poems on their syllabi, and by [...]

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A Guild of Vergers

by Crista Cloutier March 21, 2012

Photo by Crista Cloutier Because I am weird this way, I crashed the Annual Conference of the Church of England Guild of Vergers at the All Saints Pastoral Centre in the English town of London Colnay. The Guild is not a trade union, not a club, nor is it some sort of sect, instead it [...]

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The urge to write meets the blue day

by Annie Murphy March 18, 2012
Lahiri-image

“The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response.” – Jhumpa Lahiri, “My Life’s Sentences,” NYT 3.18.12 Perhaps it is presumptuous to agree with the eloquent words [...]

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Whistleblowers, More Whistleblowers!

by David Alm March 16, 2012

When Greg Smith resigned from his position as an executive director in the London office of Goldman Sachs on Wednesday, most people didn’t know who he was. He was a midlevel investment banker at one of the largest investment banks in the world, with more than 30,000 employees. Apparently, in the I-banking world, “executive directors” [...]

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Oranges and Lemons

by Crista Cloutier March 14, 2012
The Keys of St Clement Danes by Crista Cloutier

Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement’s You owe me five farthings, Say the bells of St. Martin’s When will you pay me? Say the bells of Old Bailey. When I grow rich, Say the bells of Shoreditch. When will that be? Say the bells of Stepney I do not know, Says the [...]

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Confessions of an American freak out

by Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein March 11, 2012

I should have seen it coming – every time I fly from Zanzibar to the United States, a wild range of cravings start roaming my mind and body, eventually holding me hostage with desire. Thoughts of various kinds of cheese keep me up at night. I spend my afternoons on Google researching varieties of maple [...]

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Dandy in the Underworld

by Crista Cloutier March 9, 2012

The gallery is small but not the crowd for the “Private View” of exhibition Dandy in the Underworld: Portraits of Adam Ant. He really was beautiful. Chrissie Hynde is here! Walking around as if she were a mere mortal. And there are rows of mohawks, as the punks have come out too. Companion tells me [...]

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Where the Cowboys Pray

by Crista Cloutier March 8, 2012

First in a series of Worship Reviews I usually win on the horses. I have an instinct. But I should have known better than to follow the “hot tip” I received at church that morning. My horse came in third. Turf Paradise Race Track on a warm Arizona afternoon is the place to be. But [...]

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It’s a digital world. What should we let go?

by David Alm March 5, 2012

If it can be digitized, it will. And once it’s digitized, what good are copies? Look at Google Books, which has already scanned some 15 million books and intends to digitize every volume in the world by the end of the decade — 130 million unique texts. Once a book’s on Google, you can chuck [...]

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