One day in 1980, I was at my desk on an upper floor of a way-past-its-prime hotel that had become a staff office annex for the U. S. House of Representatives. My boss — Congressman Pete McCloskey of California, wanted some information about an obscure part of a not-so-well-known energy bill: say, Section 227D of … Continue reading Wanna Call John Dingell? Don’t Ring Through Hell
In both places, and along innumerable roads between, beginning mid-spring of each year the orange daylilies gawked and mocked at me from their roadside strongholds. I grimly respected their endurance, but it was clear my death stares failed to faze them.
And finally there was some relief, even during the tough southern summers: my mail delivery days were behind me. I had scrabbled over the threshold into the large category of southerners who wisely regard central air to be fully as vital to survival as water, barbecue or even Duke’s Mayonnaise.
Maybe it was only after I became re-acclimatized, several years into this southern sojourn, that I was ready to take in a startling revelation: turning a corner in some verdant neighborhood, I beheld a familiar green stalk, but one topped by a bloom of an unfamiliar hue.
Logan’s target here is The Flame [“Poems, Notebooks, Lyrics, Sketches”], which he says, “has a little of everything for Cohen fans and nothing for anyone else. . . .”
And he goes on from there, to trash Cohen’s verses, his singing, the music, his many romances, etc.
The poems are monotonous scribbles of the moody-undergraduate school, what young Werther would have sung had he been Canadian.
(Of course he had to work in a sneer at Canada.) But I smiled all the way through Logan’s snide harangue, remembering the night I saw Cohen in late 2013 in Brooklyn, in the waning days of his endless tour.
As a journalist, I mostly have the “Quaker beat” to myself: Friends are a tiny sect, known mostly for being “quaint,” the inventors of oatmeal, riders in buggies, and extinct. (Never mind that the last three are not true; they’re still what we’re “known” for, by many in what the elders used to call “the world,” when such folk bother to think about us at all.) So when I report on Quaker stuff, it’s rare that I have to compete with “normal” reporters.
But sometimes I get scooped; and that happened again today, and in no less an outlet than the New York Times. (But hey, if you’re gonna get scooped, it might as well be by the best.)
And why would the Times bother with us? If you don’t already know, think for a minute: The Times’ base constituency is the affluent (and up) of the nation’s largest city. And what artifact of Quakerism are such moneyed folk most likely to bump into? (Hint: nothing to do with oatmeal.)
Yesterday I spent a few hours hunched over my laptop screen, waiting for a number to arrive: the 250,000th hit on this blog. 250,000: A quarter of a million. Imagine. The hit counter said that number was near, and it felt like a major milestone for me. Sure, I realize that big time blogs can … Continue reading 250,000 Hits Later: Taking Stock of a Quaker Blog