Then:
Now:
Putting Christmas Back in America
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
Comments on this entry are closed.
Girard,
You know what’s the coolest thing about Christmas? It’s the way Christmas just is. Nowhere — nowhere — in the Bible are we commanded to observe Christ’s birthday. We’re just given the bare facts concerning his birth, the manner of it, its place in man’s history and its implications for man’s destiny. But the facts are so astounding and the implications so profound — nothing less than our deliverance from sin and death — that this birthday has literally brought joy to the world, and inspired some of the greatest and most beautiful music, art and literature in all of human history. Christmas is something that, once you know about it, you just want to celebrate. That’s what’s so cool. Merry Christmas!
TGTW
sigz are kinda pointy
Beautiful. But Barron should learn script for his sig. Kinda’ like his parents.
Barron’s mother will have to teach him cursive; schools don’t do it anymore. I discovered my daughter couldn’t sign her own name in cursive when she was about 13, so I just made up some exercises and taught her how to do it myself. She’d still be printing her name if I hadn’t done so.
I remember taking penmanship classes in 4th and 5th grade and didn’t particularly care for them. My cursive writing quality was OK but I seen no need for it. We already learned how to make all the letters in upper and lower case so what what the cursive stuff for? There was a proper way of doing penmanship but might it be different across the country? Were 4th graders in Phoenix taught the same way as those in Gettysburg?
As the years rolled by the cursive writing we were taught had morfed into other things through convenience, speed, and other reasons. While some adhered to the old methods most modified their writing to suit conditions. As an architecture student I was introduced to “Upper Case Gothic Lettering” and quickly converted to it full time. From about the age of 16 on my handwriting became what most people would call “printing” and in architecture was called “lettering”. It was more comfortable, faster, and much more legible than cursive.
Over the years I have seen many types of cursive writing and much of it was either unreadable or difficult to read, and a few were very artsy. How many “mistakes” had been made over the centuries by people interpreting other people’s cursive writing? By this time I no longer did cursive except in my signature but even that dropped of drastically over the past 20 years. Now, the only time I use a cursive signature is when I can’t get out of it, like when signing that slick surfaced tiny screen on the card swiper in places of commerce. That fake pen goes skating all over the place on that plastic surface and in no way matches the sig on say, my drivers license, which in no way matches the sig on my CCW. None of my sigs match, so what’s the point? Resistant conventions.
I imagine, probably due to laziness, expediency, and technology, signatures and even cursive writing in general, will be mostly eliminated and will only be seen in things like greeting cards and other artsy endeavors. Me, I won’t miss it. As far as I’m concerned it is already gone. Though I don’t like it, when I occasionally due a text on the phone I find myself sometimes sliding toward 1337.
It appears as though people who don’t like cursive don’t much like grammar and spelling either.