— 1 — I wanted to make sure that if you read only one of my links this week, you saw the story about the nurse at Guantanamo Bay who is refusing to participate in forcefeeding the hunger striking prisoners. Word of the refusal reached the outside world last week in a call from prisoner Abu Wael Dhiab to attorney Cori Crider of the London-based legal defense group Reprieve. Dhiab, a hunger striker, described how a nurse in the Navy... Read more
This post is one in a series on friendship, explored through the lenses of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. In Merrily We Roll Along, composer Frank loses his friendship with his writing partner, Charlie, but their mutual friend, Mary, manages to stay close to both of them for a while afterwards, before she and Frank have their final fight. But, as Lewis would argue, Mary is impoverished by her friends’ falling out, even though she continues... Read more
This post is one in a series on friendship, explored through the lenses of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. When my friends gathered to discuss friendship, we kept reaching for analogies drawn from families — both biological links, like siblings, and chosen families, like the women who settled down in Boston marriages. More than once, the people chatting at my party, when looking for a word to describe what a friend meant to them, said, “He’s... Read more
This post is one in a series on friendship, explored through the lenses of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. The trio at the center of Merrily We Roll Along aligns fairly naturally into C.S. Lewis’s definition of friendship in The Four Loves. Frank is a composer, Charlie a playwright, and Mary an author/critic, and, when they start working together in “Opening Doors” (below — somewhat schmaltzy staging), they move from companionship to true amity: Friendship arises out... Read more
Today, I turned 25, which I am pretty sure makes me even more officially an adult than when I first got paid employment and my own apartment. I look forward to shamelessly exploiting the dignity of being old for rhetorical force in arguments and at ending a bit of a streak of dull ages (now I’ve got a square number, next year is eh, but then I have a cube and then a prime). In case anyone is interested in buying... Read more
This post is one in a series on friendship, explored through the lenses of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. In high school, I took a survey history course on the Middle East, which ran in reverse. We started at the present day, and worked our way backwards, with a sense of suspense to discover the cause of the war whose consequences we had learned in the last lecture. Merrily We Roll Along follows a similar format,... Read more
After a little more than four years of blogging, last night is the first time I got called a c-word online. And then it happened again. And then again. What provoked this? These two tweets: Not going back to the convenience store on the corner after clerk aggressively asked for my number (but not my name) #YesAllWomen I really don’t like that sketchy clerks, etc can de facto bar me from places, since it’s imprudent to return & keep saying... Read more
— 1 — You still have time this weekend to watch Merrily We Roll Along this weekend and letting me know you want to participate in my Sondheim Symposium on friendship. I’ll be readying my posts, and, in the meantime, I thought you might enjoy seeing the cake I baked for the in-person symposium. — 2 — The lyrics of the opening song from Merrily pose the question: How did you ever get there from here? How does it happen? How does... Read more
A couple weeks ago, PEG replied to my post on objections to universalism with a post of his own titled “Struggling With Apocatastasis.” In my original post, I wasn’t affirming universal salvation, but replying to a common attempt to prove it impossible or unjust. In his reply, PEG raised another objection that I’d like to take a crack at. (I’m excerpting pretty briefly, so go check the whole thing). I think Leah is looking at human freedom only through the... Read more
Elaine Stritch passed away today, so I just wanted to share this video of her performing “I’m Still Here” at the White House a couple years ago. And here she is, years earlier, recording “Ladies Who Lunch” for the cast album of Company. Everybody rise! Read more
Unequally Yoked
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