Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
For some reason, I got interested in the history of Southeast Asia a year or so ago. Mostly I was interested in learning more about a part of the world that was completely neglected in my schooling. Below are brief summaries of three of the books I’ve been reading.
Reviews of three books I’ve read recently.
This romance novel from 1848 begins with Gilbert Markham, the male protagonist, telling how he saves a small boy from falling off a high wall. The boy’s mother, the widowed Mrs. Helen Graham, sees him do this; but instead of thanking Gilbert, she treats him coldly and with suspicion. Nevertheless — or perhaps precisely because she treats him so badly — Gilbert falls in love with Mrs. Graham, abandons his previous sweetheart, and pursues this mysterious widow despite her attempts to keep him at arms’ length. So ends the first part of the book. Gilbert manages to portray himself as weak-willed and foolish, and thus not the typical hero of a romance novel.
The second part of the book consists of entries from Helen Graham’s diary, whose real name turns out to be Helen Lawrence Huntington. Helen has given this diary to Gilbert so he can understand her better. In the diary, Helen tells how she fell in love with Arthur Huntingdon, a weak-willed and unscrupulous man. She foolishly marries him. To her astonishment — but not to ours — after their marriage, Arthur reveals himself to be abusive, irrational, domineering, and nasty. Helen puts up with him until she sees that their son is beginning to imitate his father. This she cannot stand, so she flees the marriage with her son, and hides in the country under an assumed name, where she meets Gilbert Markham. So ends the second part. Will her life improve in the third part?
Continue reading “Reading list”(I wrote this a few days ago, then forgot to post it. Here it is now….)
On February 22, 2005 —twenty years ago last Saturday — I wrote my first blog post. If you want a summary of this blog’s boring history, try here, here, and here. But I don’t want to look at the past, I want to think about the ongoing role of independent blogs like this one.
Twenty years ago, most blogs were a mix of day-to-day trivia, snarky commentary, and a few more serious long-form posts. All three of these have now migrated to other platforms.
The day-to-day trivia gets posted to social media outlets like Facecrook, TikFok, YouCrude, Instacrap, etc. Much of it consists of images, graphical memes, and videos. There’s no longer much interest in text-based day-to-day trivia.
Snarky commentary has also moved to social media outlets. Again, there’s been a movement away from text-based snark to videos, graphical memes, and images. Snark has also declined in intelligence, creativity, and kindness; I wouldn’t even call it snark any more, I’d call it Rage Porn.
Long-form text-based posts have moved to outlets that cater to that format, such as Substack and Medium. This move is generally a good thing; writers can focus on writing, and they can stop worrying about the technical challenges of publishing online.
In short, most of what appeared on independent blogs twenty years ago has now moved to other platforms. There’s a good reason for these moves: it has become increasingly challenging to stay current with web technology.
Take, for example, WordPress, the blogging platform I use. I started out in 2005 using WordPress 1.5, when it was simple and uncomplicated blogging software. Today, WordPress has morphed into a major CMS capable of running today’s most complex websites. I no longer have the time to stay current with its capabilities. That’s one of the reasons I still use a nine-year-old theme: I don’t have the time to make the move to a new theme. Sure, I could hire a WordPress consultant to do it for me; but that gets away from the DIY ethos that I found so appealing about blogging back in 2005.
Whatever platform you choose, web security has become increasingly difficult, as the evil hackers get bolder and more skilled. I’m lucky I have a good web host who helps me keep current with security issues. But it’s getting harder and harder for me to stay current with web security. I can thoroughly understand why writers would want to move to a platform like Substack or Medium.
Beyond the challenge of staying current with technology, I don’t think there’s much of an audience for independent text-based blogs any more. Most of my early readership long ago migrated to social media platforms. Once you’re hooked in to a social media platform, there’s not much reason to go visit an independent website. Potential new audiences tend to prefer audio or visual podcasts; they don’t want to read text, they want to watch or listen to content.
The only reason to write an independent text-based blog like this one is because you like to write. That describes me. I enjoy the process of writing, and I write all the time. As long as I’m writing something, I might as well publish it. And even though publishing a blog has gotten more difficult in the past twenty years, it’s still far easier than the printed fanzines I used to publish in the 1980s and 1990s.
So what if the audience for independently hosted blogs is tiny? I’m still having fun, which has always been the point of this blog. I hope you’re still having fun, too — and thank you for continuing to read.
From “The American Taboo on Socialism” by Robert N. Bellah in The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd Edition (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992), chapter 5, pp. 112-138:
“Inevitably when a dichotomy becomes magnified in such a way that both sides of it are distorted, one begins to suspect the presence of the psychological mechanism of projection. The ‘rugged individualist’ decrying every form of collectivism, above all atheistic communism, as the very embodiment of evil, may be projecting his own dependency needs and needs for community, ruthlessly repressed and denied in himself, onto his alleged enemies. Even granted the unspeakable crimes committed in the 20th century by Communist nations (a close inspection of the history of the century, however, would disclose that such societies have had no monopoly on unspeakable crimes) the morbid anti-Communism of the American right, and the tendency to assimilate every kind of socialist or even liberal position to that of Communism, indicates, I believe, some serious failure to come to terms with the balance between dependence and independence, solidarity and autonomy, that are part of any mature personality or society. This morbid obsession may be a symptom then, not of the genuine Americanism that it claims, but of its distortion and pathology.”
February 2 is “World Play Your Ukulele Day.” This holiday was established in 2011 by Mike Lynch (a.k.a. “Ukulele Mike”; see below). In the original announcement, Mike Lynch kept his expectations low. “Take your uke out of its case,” he said, “and play it.”
Simple enough.
OK. I did that.
What else can I do?
Mike had a suggestion: “Find someone who needs a smile. You might take it to an elder care, you might take it to a shut-in….” In other words, try to make the world a better place by playing your ukulele. But I went on a field trip with teens from our congregation’s youth group, which didn’t leave time for ukulele excursions. Maybe next year.
Michael B. Lynch (1945-2018) was a career music educator and an accomplished ukulele player. As a youth, he played in a ukulele ensemble led by the legendary ukulele educator Chalmers Doane. Beginning in 2009, he produced a popular series of instructional Youtube videos under the name “Ukulele Mike.” He also published a number of instructional CDs and books, still available through his website that his wife continues to maintain.
I’ve been spending too much time online for the past two decades. But recently I’ve been reducing my screen time, and — surprise, surprise — I feel better. That’s why I’ve reduced my posting schedule to about once a week.
But back in 2007, I lived way too much of my life online. I spent way too many hours writing daily blog posts, commenting on other people’s blogs, hanging out on Twitter, producing a weekly video, watching other people’s videos (back then, blip.tv was the place to really hip creative videos), and on and on.
I also created several random websites, just for fun. Recently, I found the HTML code for a whimsical website I created in 2007. What happened was this: Carol had a website called fishisland.net which she used to publicize ecological projects. Last year, that site got taken over by malicious actors. Our web host shut it down for us. I told Carol I’d restore it but never got around to it (I’m limiting my screen time, remember?).
Well, this week I came down with a nasty head cold. I couldn’t sleep last night because my cough kept waking me up. So I wrapped myself up in a sleeping bag, and tried to resuscitate the hacked web site. And lo and behold, I discovered what I had forgotten — that fishisland.net had originally been my website, that I had hand-coded it in HTML 3.0 with state-of-the-art CSS. The hackers had trashed everything else, but plain old HTML is pretty robust, and I was able to resuscitate the website pretty much as it looked in 2007.
Here’s the resuscitated website. The only real problem I ran into was that the full-size photos had disappeared; I had to take the 200px-wide thumbnails and scale them up in GIMP. Actually, the whole website looks so primitive today, but back then it looked pretty slick. If you’re into HTML, check out the CSS — can you believe how few lines of code it required?
However, don’t try to look at this website on your phone — it will look like crap. And that’s really the big change in the web since 2007. Back then, no one looked at websites on their phones. Now, more than half of all web views are on phones.
A little bit of thought and research revealed that it is in fact possible to have a static HTML website render reasonably well on different sized screens (e.g., laptop, smartphone) without building a responsive site using Javascript. In the case of this website, my CSS originally had an ID selector that styled the second nested div (the first div sets the background color, this div sets size on the screen) as follows:
#wrap {width: 42em; margin: 0 auto;} I simply changed that to:
#wrap {width: 95%; max-width: 42em; margin: 0 auto;}Duh. So obvious. Of course I also had to change padding and margin for various other CSS elements so the site would look OK on a smartphone, which took some time. I also added the following line to the header:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">Now the site works reasonably well on various sized screens. Is it as good as a responsive website? No. And I’m sure I’ll find more problems. But I had fun, and I like that the CSS is compact and manageable.
And now I’ve spent waaaaay too much time staring at screens today.
…I’m helping organize a free ukulele workshop. The online registration form is now live. Here are the details:
What: Free ukulele workshop led by Anne Ku. Anne says: “I’ll teach you the 20% you need to know, to play 80% of what you want to play.”
Who: Anne Ku is a well-known Boston-area ukulele teacher and workshop leader.
Where: Location: 23 N. Main St., Cohasset, Mass. Parking map (PDF).
More info about the Cohasset ‘ukulele circle, who are hosting this event.
2 p.m.: Fun with Ukulele — for all levels, but especially useful for beginners.
3 p.m.: Common Chord Progressions — what you need to know to play your favorite songs.
Doors open at 1:40 p.m. Be ready to start at 2 p.m. with a tuned ukulele. Need help tuning? Show up early and we’ll help!
Bring your ukulele, music stand (if you have one), and water bottle. Tea and snacks will be provided.
Please register at the link below. This workshop is customized to workshop participants, catering to all levels. The more you describe yourself, the better the fit.
Sometimes I wonder why the religious right, and the political conservatives, express so much disdain for “Marxism” and “socialism.” It kinda makes sense that the religious right might dislike “Marxism” and “socialism” so intensely, because Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses,” and because many Marxist-Leninists promote a crusading atheism that wants to get rid of religion entirely.
But wait. The definitions for “socialism” and “Marxism” are not always the definitions you’ll find in the dictionary. For an example of what I mean, let’s go back in time to 1963.
Not long after Martin Luther King, Jr., was released from the Birmingham jail, White terrorists bombed the house of King’s brother. This violent act provoked a violent response from the Black community, which in turn prompted the infamously racist Governor George Wallace to respond with even more violence: he sent in state troopers who mercilessly beat Black people. Jonathan Riedler takes up the story in his book Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the Struggle That Changed a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 124:
“The violence of the state [of Alabama] was the physical expression of an ideology of white supremacy…. George Wallace had sworn to the Alabama State Assembly that he would squelch ‘agitators’ and ‘integrationists’ who aimed to ‘destroy the freedom of Americans everywhere.’ Twenty-one times the legislators applauded him. Not long after the bombing, when President [John F.] Kennedy moved federal troops to Alabama bases, Birmingham’s lame-duck mayor, Art Hanes, fulminated against ‘bayonet brotherhood’: ‘They gonna tell the people of Birmingham, “You’ll love this nigger at the point of a bayonet, whether you want to or not” … This is Socialism of the rankest sort.’…”
Note that in the above example, Art Hanes is not using the dictionary definition of socialism. For him, “socialism” has an alternative definition: it is government action that prevents him from committing acts of racial violence. He perceives this as infringing on his rights as an American, and he defines anything that infringes on his rights as an American as “socialism.”
This helps me understand some of the visceral emotion I sense when people reference “Marxism” and “socialism” in today’s political debates. There are times when opponents of “socialism” and “Marxism” are not using the dictionary definitions for those words, but rather more emotionally-loaded meanings pertaining to race.
An entry under the category of Niche Hobbies: handbell change ringing.
If you’ve read Dorothy Sayers’s murder mystery Nine Tailors (or watched the TV version), you know what change ringing is. It’s very English: you have a tower with eight or so bells, and a bunch of people stand around and ring the bells in certain defined patterns. If you don’t have a tower full of bells? Then you can use handbells, and you get handbell change ringing.
One musician describes handbell change ringing like this: “A series of 4-12 bells are rung in a series of mathematical permutations. Remember work with 12-tone tone rows in 20th-century music theory class? This is similar in practice, but with diatonic notes.” Also, to my ears it sounds much better than most twelve-tone music.
Click on the image below to see a video of handbell change ringing in action.
This is the kind of niche hobby that’s going to appeal to a certain kind of person: someone who likes mathematical patterns, someone who likes cooperative efforts in small groups, someone who likes the meditative effect of intense concentration, and so on. OK, I admit it: that someone could probably be me. Since the last thing I need right now is yet another niche hobby, I’m fortunate that there’s no handbell change ringing group near me.
General info on handbell change ringing:
handbell change ringing blog — links to change ringing websites
Math and change ringing:
a bit about math and change ringing — Prof. Sarah Hart of Gresham College gets into group theory and change ringing
Instructional materials:
quick overview for conventional handbell ensembles — the cross-and-stretch technique — the ringing on bodies technique (ringers move, not bells) — instructional book — handbell change ringing for beginners (booklet) — change ringing for handbells (more advanced) — instructional website — handbell change ringing online simulator (for solo practice) — methods for three bell ringing (with a tenor behind, that would be 4 bells = 2 handbell ringers) — cross and stretch demonstrated (the video with stuffed animals is particularly clear, believe it or not)
Performance videos:
3 people (easy to follow the changes) — blindfold handbell change ringing — 4 person cross and stretch (watch closely) — 6 person cross and stretch
I have to spend a lot of time thinking about music for my job. Honestly, though, much of what passes for sacred music in Unitarian Universalist circles these days is pretty dreary stuff. To avoid dreariness and boredom, this will not be a post about UU sacred music. Instead, here’s some of the more obscure music I’ve encountered this past year.
I’ll start with the ‘ukulele. This under-appreciated instrument still gets no respect, but there are some stunning players out there. Like jazz great Benny Chong, now in his eighties and still going strong. Here he is with bassist Byron Yasui on “Just the Way You Are.” Chong is also a fabulous solo player. Here he is playing “My Romance.”
I’ve also been listening to Carmen Souza, who mixes traditional Cape Verdean music with contemporary styles. Here she is with “Amizadi” from her latest album. Souza writes: “For this song, I composed a Funaná [a traditional Cape Verdean genre] based on the story of Francisco Cruz, a.k.a B.Leza. This genre promotes fun and social interaction, so I called it Amizadi (Friendship).” Next, here she is solo, singing “Confiança & Bonança”, a video released on International Women’s Day 2024.
One of my musical obsessions this year has been handbells, because I started playing in our congregation’s handbell choir. Sadly, much of the handbell music you find online tends towards dreary Christian sacred music. Yawn. But if you look, you can find more interesting stuff. Like the Double Mallet Ringers, based in Hong Kong. Most of their ringers are professional music educators, they commission compositions, and they even have a resident composer. In addition to more serious music, they also do goofy covers like this.
Finally, So Percussion and Caroline Shaw released another new album together this year. What they do could be described as singer-songwriter meets avant-garde. Do their lyrics actually mean anything? Whatever, it’s incredibly refreshing music. Here’s the title track from their new album Rectangles and Circumstance.
There’s a lot of great musical creativity out there, from a variety of different cultures, in a variety of styles. Maybe the new year will bring some new creativity and variety to UU sacred music….
Addendum: I just have to throw in this piece I found today, by Kenyan sound artist Nyokabi Kariuki, “Raw Sugar” performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.