(Thomas Lynch, poet, undertaker, Obama fan)
RANDOM NOTES FROM BENNINGTON, VT
I just this minute returned from a lecture by a remarkable poet and essayist named Thomas Lynch. Lynch, who also happens to be a funeral director, talked about death, life and language in a way that had the usually more sedately-behaved Bennington audience whooping and whistling when he finished.
The lecture he gave was primarily about poetry and the art of finding one’s writer’s voice, yet near the end of the talk Lynch couldn’t resist bringing up the event that is so attracting our attention today—namely the New Hampshire primary.
I thought you might enjoy reading that particular fragment of Thom Lynch’s lecture:
“….. if all the stars align as I hope they might, today in New Hampshire they may take another step towards putting a reader and a writer in the White House next year; someone who knows the power of words to heal and help and uplift and unite. Some one who knows the pain and pleasures of the page, someone who sounds like one of us:
“‘Like most first time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book’s publication—hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming.’.
“That’s from the introduction to Barack Hussein Obama’s first book. And I want you know know he is one of us, a reader who has gone karaoke [found his voice]. A writer, a thinker, a man who knows the feast of language is a common table to which all Americans are invited because we are all the same but different, all the God’s children, all one of a kind…..”
“gone karaoke” – what a great line, acknowledging the risk and absurdity in assuming anyone else would want to read what one might write and honoring even the lowliest of aspirants.
Wow – if you want to see the decline of a respected “wordsmith” into the depths of desperately amateurish “karaoke”, read this piece of pathetic and embarrassing drool.
http://www.slate.com/id/2181460/
(admission – I couldn’t make it past 2 paragraphs)
BTW, the “gone karaoke” remark referred to an earlier theme in Lynch’s lecture about how one first finds one’s voice by reading copious amounts and noticing which works and words of other writers “light up your nervous system.” That in this way writers are readers “who go karaoke.”
He showed examples of how great poets have borrowed rhythms from each other and that those rhythms have been borrowed from old prayers and children’s rhymes. When I explain it here the point sounds a bit obvious. But in Lynch’s telling of it the point wasn’t obvious at all, but rather a grand and glorious dance. And I intend to borrow pieces of it nearly immediately for my literary journalism classes.
With all her giddiness and gaga moments about Barack Obama, Celeste is starting to remind me of a teenage girl with a crush on Barack Obama. Michelle Obama better stay close to her man if Celeste is ever anywhere near Barack.
Hey, LA Res, it’s a political crush, okay?????
(I know, I know. I am a little gaga. My connection to reality isn’t helped by the fact I’m suddenly surrounded by all manner of word-happy folks of various ages and genders who seem equally gaga. Maybe it’s something the cafeteria people are putting in the coffee here at Bennington. God knows we’re drinking enough of the $&^%$#@ stuff.)
All kidding aside, in many ways the enthusiasm is, I think, not so much about Obama specifically, but about the fact that a person who seems quite decent and has a genuinely nuanced intelligence could get this far.
Added to the mix is the fact that Obama’s one of those political figures who is charismatic enough to move people to action, a very handy trait.
Thanks, reg, for the link in your #2. If you’d managed to get past the first two paras, you’d have gotten to the links for Obama’s “Trinity United Church” whose tag line is, “We’re Unashamedly Black and Unashamedly Christian,” “true to our African roots” etc. etc. — a really pentecostal, wacky place that hands out creationist lit and makes Romney and Huckabee seem downright mainline Protestant — like the buttoned-up and toned-down Presbyterian or Episcopalian “establishment elite” like Reagan, the Bushes, and so on.
The author you describe so disparagingly is, as one would expect from anyone you malign, right on the money and dares to write the truth about the hypocrisies in which Obama’s candidacy tangles the well-meaning, PC generation — and why people are afraid to say this kind of thing about him, while they’ve made religion and views on race the first vetting of white, even female, candidates. It says a lot about how our country and how far we still need to go.
Maintaining giddiness – though when classes start up next week, I sense that it may begin to fade…
You don’t know a goddam thing about Trinity or the United Church of Christ. My dad was a UCC minister – VERY liberal – and I’ve watched lots of Jeremiah Wright and Trinity on cable. This is a bullshit rap and Hitchens is a dogmatic idiot. If you want to mire yourself in this idiotic, willfully ignorant narrative, fine. The UCC is one of the most overtly liberal, gay-friendly, social-justice oriented, non-biblical literalist denominations one can find this side of the Unitarians.
You’re entitled to your opinions but not your own set of “facts”, nor is Comrade Hitchens. He’s become a fucking loon. I could make the same arguments for atheism as he does when I was fourteen – and in fact did with my dad, who took it reasonably well and we both learned from each other in the course of my youthful tirades. If you want to understand what the United Church of Christ is about on an intellectual and moral level historically, read some Rheinhold Niebuhr who was the most prominent theologian out of that particular Protestant tradition. If you want to know how far they – and Trinity in particular – are from Huckabee, et al, go to the websites. There fact that Trinity ministers and speaks most directly to the African-American community is because of that’s where they are immersed. Oprah Winfrey has also been a prominent member of Trinity. The reason Rev. Jeremiah Wright pisses off Hitchens is because he excoriates the Bush administration for launching the war in Iraq, which is one of Hitchen’s personal projects. Hitchens is a besotted buffoon who’s made a total ass of himself clinging to the neo-con line. AndI don’t believe there’s a grain of honesty left in the old fool.
PS: “Maggie” I presume.
God spare me this woman’s endless stream of foolishness…
Maggie – I’d suggest that you might be the one to gain most from going back to school. It would be useful for you to put a bit of experience, perspective, analytical skill and sophistication on that “fine education” you parade. It might also help out with the obvioiusly fragile ego…
Incidentally, Hitchens raising the fact that there’s a “shop online” link at Trinity’s website by which a percentage of one’s online purchases get kicked back to the church as evidence of …something…shows just how far out of the mainstream this intellectual eunuch exists. Anyone who inhabits the real world knows that families routinely use rebate deals from banks, grocery stores and other retail venues to donate a (small) percentage of their purchase dollars to their childrens’ schools, favored non-profits, churches, etc. This guy is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel, as is most of the anti-Obama hysteria. Challenge the guy on his (rather detailed and extensive) policy proposals, his political assumptions or the notion that he’s far too untested for the Presidency, i.e. equally unable to exercise good judgment, make wise decisions and credible appointments appointments as George W. Bush. Make the case the Hillary Clinton, running as a two-term Senator and a President’s wife with a pretty lousy record when she dipped into policy and one of the most polarizing political figures in the nation would bode better for the nation – with an ex-President at her side that most of us are tired of and consider, at best, a disturbingly self-indulgent man. But most of the crap I’m hearing against Obama at this point is either utterly petty or absurdly ill-informed.
I also find it bizarre that folks might be so ignorant of the African-American religious tradition that they would consider the emphasis on a prophetic liberation theology and the assertion of a unique role for an enslaved people ripped from the African continent embracing the Judeo-Christian narratives in the diaspora for sustenance and some hope for redemption as illegitimate, yet the Jewish claim of a “chosen people” of God who have a claim on Biblical land of the forefathers is entirely reasonable and deserving of a nuclear umbrella, no less. The Mosaic narrative of slaves delivered from bondage and the New Testament morality of the Sermon on the Mount are powerful spiritual metaphors for black people in America, who are probably the most consistently Christian-believing, church-going ethnic demographic in the U.S. The literature of black spirituals and gospels is one of the most powerful testamants to authentic religious experience that exists in any faith tradition. This is pretty basic stuff, unless one is willfully ill-informed or so hopelessly ethnocentric that the black experience has totally eluded one’s consciousness.
“gospels” should have been “gospel music”
I cannot stop laughing at this, the funniest statement in a while!!!!
Proof that you’re an ill-informed bloviater: Trinty is a “wacky place that hands out creationist lit and makes Romney and Huckabee seem downright mainline Protestant  like the buttoned-up and toned-down Presbyterian or Episcopalian ‘establishment elite’…” which easily qualifies as one of the most bogus statements even you have made in your manifest ignorance.
Incidentally, Rev. Jeremiah Wright has a theological degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School, which makes your characterization of his theology and practice in relation to the extreme fundamentalist Huckabee and the “culty” LDS Romney an obvious “faux pas” at best to anyone with one whit of knowledge about such things.