Category Archives: Arts – Poetry

Henry Taylor: A Quaker Poet Departs — A Holiday Read

Late  one spring morning in 1986, I was creeping along the edge of Ox Road, Virginia route 123, driving with one hand, and shoving mail into the boxes on posts with the other.  I was a substitute rural mail carrier,  working a route just south of the seemingly nonexistent town of Fairfax Station.

FairfaxStation-VA-Sign

Beyond the mailboxes, prefab McMansions were going up on every side, as fast as the builders could hammer them together.

It was the second year of Ronald Reagan’s second term, and the woods along Ox Road were swarming with smalltime winners in the stampede for the billions  that the Gipper and his cronies were shoveling into a grand military buildup. The new settlers were devouring the woods along Ox Road like nuclear powered termites. Their contract profits were  pouring with the concrete under the rows of McMansions, markers of their status as suburban arrivistes.

My Malibu wagon, for postal work. (I didn’t wear a tie delivering the mail.)

Reagan’s frantic rearmament was meant to drive the Evil Empire of Communist Russia into bankruptcy and oblivion trying to match it.

The bankruptcy drive was ultimately successful, but the big plan soon capsized like the Titanic after the iceberg, sunk by the unexpected vigor of the aftermath:  who could have suspected that the Commies’ dark oblivion would turn out to be a den full of new monsters?

Continue reading Henry Taylor: A Quaker Poet Departs — A Holiday Read

New Issue of a Quaker Arts Journal — Now Online

Can art help us get through (and bear witness in) hard times? 

The Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts (aka FQA) thinks so. A new example is the just-published issue of FQA’s journal, Types & Shadows, (aka T&S) online right now, right here.

T&S was launched in 1996, the new issue is #101, for Autumn 2024. In its pages you’ll find stunning color photography, striking poetry, a historical Quaker novel excerpt and arts reporting.

For a long time, Friends shunned the arts (more on this here, in FQA‘s free online pamphlet Beyond Uneasy Tolerance ).
But today the arts seem to be thriving among us.

This is always good news. (An archive of earlier T&S issues back into the 1990s is here.)  But it could be even better in hard times. In 2017, FQA sponsored a project, “The Art of Fearlessness,”  as a response in a similarly turbulent period. Continue reading New Issue of a Quaker Arts Journal — Now Online

Dog Days Diversions — Nursery Rhymes: A Scholarly Sampler

Washington Post — archive

Humpty Dumpty. Jack Horner. Miss Muffet. You knew them as a child, and if you have youngsters of your own, chances are they know them, too. Mother Goose and her nursery rhymes are old friends. Seems as if they’ve been around forever, and with the tenacity of Golden Oldies, they’ll stick with you for life.
But where, you might wonder, did the fragile Humpty and the arachnophobic Miss Muffet come from?
Like many nursery rhymes, they are centuries old.

Continue reading Dog Days Diversions — Nursery Rhymes: A Scholarly Sampler

Weird Thursday/Friday

Real headline, major paper:


Okay — I can believe Santos didn’t perform “45 minutes ago.” But on his way to Congress, it was one long costume performance, and a total drag. I can’t wait to see his version of the Orange Jump Suit Perp Walk Two-Step. (Now, how do you say that in Portugese?)

Continue reading Weird Thursday/Friday

Harvard, Affirmative Action, “Reparations,” & Me

An earlier exposés of legacy preference/WASP affirmative action, from 2006.

One of the most shopworn and least shocking of discoveries about USA higher education Is that of Ivy League “affirmative action” (aka preferential admissions) for the non-genius children of wealthy donors or powerful alumni (mainly WASPS). This “exposé” (which, to be fair, is also found at many other non-ivy schools) has been around about a century or so, and has since been repeatedly documented by many scholars, novelists, biographers, pretend radicals — and news editors who have not read much or got out enough.

Someone fairly high up on the editorial ladder at The Guardian — normally relatively up to date on such matters— evidently fits into one of these dim categories. At least they thought the scandal of legacy preference needed to be disclosed back in the unenlightened times of fourteen months ago, and then worth repeating, at least online, in January 2023. Continue reading Harvard, Affirmative Action, “Reparations,” & Me