No Coward Soul Is Mine

No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's
storm-troubled sphere

Emily Bronte, from "No Coward Soul Is Mine"

the truth

There's nothing wrong with stretching the Truth. We stretch taffy, and that just makes it more delicious.

- Stephen Colbert

... all the sad young literary men

"She had enormous green eyes and held her back straight and walked like a ballerina, the heel just in front of the toe, and she spoke English with such a proper, old world reserve that Mark wanted to help, to put his arms around her, to tell her it was OK."

- Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men

paglia on palin and abortion rights

Camile Paglia ruminates on the Sarah Palin pick, explains the ensuing Democratic freak-out, and wonders if abortion rights need necessarily be wedded to the women's movement. I like Paglia's thinking, and appreciate her ability to step outside feminism and survey the political landscape in its entirety.

Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thoma(admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer ....

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

ugandan preacher boy

Muwanguzi's name means the victor or conqueror.
But is his message getting through?

A gentleman sitting at a bar nearby says: "We need to dig down a bit, and find out exactly what inspired him to come out onto street. "Is it divine? Is he trained to do that? Or indoctrinated?" the gentleman asks, sipping on a beer.

A woman cuts in, saying: "You wonder what makes a young person like him come onto the street and preach like he does? He's so strange but I think that people might take him seriously."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7561512.stm

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry--
the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis

- e. e. cummings

here is my secret. it is very simple.

"Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."

My rough translation: "Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince