Here I am writing about Dr. King on the day AFTER MLK Day, something you won’t be reading until almost a week after the official commemoration. The fact that I have to comment on this timing is another reflection of the ghettoization of Black lives, much like the often-criticized relegation of things Black to the month of February. Much of what I’m about to say and what columnists said yesterday...
Did you read the title and declare, “Oh no, he’s on his death kick again?” If so, you have my permission to take the week off and hope for something sunnier next week.Yesterday a group of us flew to Minneapolis to support a friend whose father had died. The funeral was held in the chapel of a well-known Catholic university in Saint Paul where he had taught. The snow was piled high in the streets...
Note: Happy Sunday. I’m posting a day early because I have to be out of town tomorrow to attend a funeral. I’ll be back on track next Monday, MLK Day. One of the forerunners of SNL was a show called That Was The Week That Was (TWTWTW), a satirical review of current political events that aired for a couple of seasons. I’m not setting out to expound on TV history, but the title of that long ago...
My wonderful son-in-law Peter Cole has a new book of poems called Draw Me After. It’s an unusual combination of his own original poems, including a series of poems about each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and some translations of contemporary Hebrew poetry. My style of reading books of poetry is to savor them slowly, a few poems each day. For me, this kind of reading requires a level of energy...
If your high school curriculum included a course in physics, you have at least a passing knowledge of Newton’s Laws of Motion. One of those laws, commonly known as the law of inertia, in its simplest form states that objects in motion tend to stay in motion and objects at rest tend to remain at rest. In other words, unless acted on by some force, objects continue to do what they were doing in the...