Saturday, May 02, 2009

Blog or Twitter?

Not sure which way to go.

Quite like short, not necessarily grammatical, notes with hyperlinks.

Went to a lecture Thursday night at Manchester Cathedral. Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry. Not the best lecture so far. I was left feeling not very clever, certainly not as clever as the speaker, and afterwards not much wiser. Especially horrified by the way he praised Rowan Williams' initiative on Sharia Law, one of the few things I think he has, as Abp of C, got catastrophically wrong.

Disturbing account in the Church Times of how serious religious violence in Nigeria is being ignored. Might cause the Abp to have second thoughts.

Carol Ann Duffy's appointment as Poet Laureate has been widely welcomed. In the past her lesbian stance might have prevented it, but, as she says, “I think we’ve all grown up a lot over the past ten years. Sexuality is now celebrated. It is a lovely, ordinary, normal thing.”

There's probably a philosophical label for this but I'm struck by how much trouble we make for ourselves by using nouns rather than verbs. Two have just occurred to me - depressive and failure. To be either a depressive or a failure is to be stuck in or with something, something you have to be cured of or delivered from. To be depressed sometimes, or to fail, is part of being human and of itself no big deal. I think, for example, the political left have wrongly judged that failing makes you a failure, and diminishes your worth as an individual, something you must be protected from, by state intervention if necessary. Is this the "all must have prizes" philosophy?

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