Prayers of Adoration

A toddler fools the art world, or at least one ghetto within it.  Actually, I kind of like his stuff.

The kids and I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the other night so I finally got to read Alan Jacobs’ review. I had been saving it and all other Harry-related stuff to avoid spoilers. Professor Jacobs’ review is very good. He passes over J. K. Rowling’s many shortcomings as an author and celebrates her strength, her ability to weave a moral universe. He pulls in Chesterton and his celebration of “penny dreadfuls” and says Harry is the same sort of thing, only better.

Here is J. K. Rowling herself saying she made the epilogue vague on purpose and then filling in some detail. It’s kind of an epilogue to the epilogue and most welcome.

Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie make fun of Shakespeare.


You ain’t never seen nothing like this.

Chesterton says that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.  I can do that!

New York City bycicle messengers oozing and squirting through traffic like oozy, squirty things.

I’m not really qualified to judge but I’m pretty sure no one who likes poetry will like these much.   I wrote Athesist, Tramps and Theives when I was a kid of twenty one or so and a new Christian.   I had been reading Tim Lahaye about the evil and pernicious agenda of the secular humanists (he seems to have been right about that.)  Then in a single day I had conversations with three different atheists and the poem kind of wrote itself.  It just leaped out of me as if it were great art or something.

This other poem is a parody of Sweet Home Alabama so you know it can’t be serious (not that the cultural allusions in the first one are any less low brow: Cher, beer commercials and football!)  I had moved from the South to Massachusetts shortly before the 1988 presidential campaign and got my political awakening.  It was not pretty.  It seemed clever to put a redneck boogie in the mouth of Michael Dukasis.

I just noticed a pattern: experience a wrenching conversion and then write a poem.  I think I’m done.

From JumboJoke.com.

Wait for it…

Bert & Osama!