A Catholic Calvinist

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday February 09, 2012 · 1:07 PM PST

2012/02/09 · 13:07

The other day my BFF and I (over 50 years of friendship ought to qualify as forever) were discussing the Komen debacle, and I mentioned that it didn't bother me that Komen had jumped the shark since I never donated to them anyway. Because I am a 15 year breast cancer survivor I guess he thought I might have some interesting reason for this, but when I told him why--that I thought all "pay to run/walk" charity events were a stupid waste of human energy that could be used for something productive, like cleaning up streets--he laughed and said, "You are SUCH a Calvinist!"

I was struck dumb by this statement for two reasons: culturally speaking I was raised as an Irish-American Catholic, and I had a chilling feeling that he might be right. Who would want to be a Calvinist? After all, the Puritans were Calvinists, and no one thinks of them as having any fun. Indeed, they were sorta the embodiment of not-fun.

Two Puritans, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards

pimutant

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday February 02, 2012 · 1:05 PM PST

2012/02/02 · 13:05

Or perhaps more appropriately, since I'll be talking about the 19th Century: Free Love, Absinthe, and Poetry.

It seems there has long been a connection, in Western Civilization at any rate, between avant-garde art, social deviance, and progressive/liberal/radical politics. Think of Lord Byron (1788-1824) who wrote lots of poetry, had a very...umm..."interesting" sex life, and went off to fight for Greek independence. That revolutionary act cost him his life, albeit from disease rather than a bullet--although I think that until the 20th century most soldiers died of diseases rather than military action. He was famously described as "mad, bad and dangerous to know"--but then poets and painters generally had rather scandalous reputations.

As late as the 1950s the connection persisted, with the Beatniks famously partaking of drugs and drink, writing and reciting poetry, and voicing their perception of the hopelessly stifling middle-class world of America. As Allen Ginsberg declaimed:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix...

By the sixties poetry had been eclipsed by music, and the only poetry most of the bohemian artistic types, now called hippies, were really interested in was that of singer/songwriters such as Bob Dylan. There are still a few poets here and there who aren't also musicians, and a bit of poetry gets published, but almost none gets talked about in the wider world. Indeed, Ginsberg may have been the last of the outrageous, and famous, avant-garde poets.

pimutant

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday January 26, 2012 · 1:04 PM PST

2012/01/26 · 13:04

For my first diary I have thought about various topics and discarded them over the course of the last year or so, while feeling increasingly guilty about enjoying everyone else's diaries, but not writing any myself. I've decided it is time to change that, and the way to begin is to just start writing something, and the easiest something is probably to discuss what it is I've been doing lately.

I have been immersed in the American Civil War for some months now, and it occurred to me that this might provide the material for an acceptable diary. But then, I'm no sort of expert on the topic, and lots of people around here probably are. However, perhaps describing how I came to be reading all these things, and looking at all sorts of Civil War pictures, and where and how I am finding all of this just might make for an interesting diary. So here is a little essay about Accidental Learning in a Digital Age, because my current immersion in the Civil War was not really a choice, but came about by purest accident.

Newer
Older

RSS

A Catholic Calvinist

Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll

Accidental Learning in a Digital Age