I stumbled across a new band this morning and read these lyrics. I haven’t even heard the music yet but I already love them:

church taught me how to hold a grudge
my brother taught me how to let it go
he learned from his father
we learn from our father
isn’t that the way that this is supposed to go?

Hello Everyone. My name is Cliff.  Levi was kind enough to tell me about this group. Now that my finals are over, I can put to print a post or two.  Before I march on to posting, I thought it would be a good idea to get to know all the contributors to G-Soma. To do that, I’m going to enlist the help of the creepiest film star interviewer James Lipton.

Lipton always ends his interviews on Inside the Actors Studio with the same 10 questions. When I was interning at Southwest Airlines, I got to know everyone in the People (HR) department through personal interviews, and I always included a couple of these questions. So, without further adu about something:

What is your favorite word?
It’s always changing but right now it’s peripatetic. I’ve been reading some David Foster Wallace essays and he seems to enjoy this one quite a bit as well.
What is your least favorite word?

What is your least favorite word

I’m not sure if I have a least favorite word, but I find it quite funny when people are repulsed by the word ‘moist’. Things are going to get moist, and I think it’s hysterical when people’s faces gyrate when they run across this word.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

The little idiosyncrasies that typically go unnoticed in everyday life. I feel like many people need a film or a good book to document such things, but Broadway is right in the public’s eye. You just have to look for it.

What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

People using the phrase ‘that’s what she said’, and a lack of sleep. The former has been a bit overused and I feel that the all too harangued cliche makes me as bitter as grandmothers instant coffee. Lack of sleep also seems to weigh on the creative generator in that noggin of mine.

What sound or noise do you love?

In my current residence, the sound of my feet hitting the wood floors causing the symbols of my roommates drumset to clinker. It’s an unintentional percussion and I always enjoy hearing it.

What sound or noise do you hate?

The roaring of a semi truck’s engine when I’m driving down I-35.  My car doesn’t have air condition and when a truck is passing me (or vice versa), the noise drowns out the NPR playing in my car.

What is your favorite curse word?

The F-bomb is quite flexible. It can be used in quite a few different contexts. For that reason, I just might have to go with it.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Well currently, I’m a librarian, Barista, and Night Manager at the Ronald Mcdonald House, so I’d say a teacher. It’ll be awhile, but I’m quite excited to have the chance to be a performer in front of a classroom. Hopefully I can make the student’s learning by being just the right amount of absurd to sink into their memory.

What profession would you not like to do?

Lawyer. As Tom Hanks said, it’s like doing homework for a living. Plus, a job that’s more or less based on copying for a living (copying old court cases and applying to the present one), would put quite the drain on me creatively and spiritually.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

A good fart joke. It’d be the last thing I’d ever suspect.

Look forward to hearing the G-Soma community’s answers.

All the best,

-cliff

In lieu of Jfo’s Wendell Berry post, this might be the greatest poem ever written. It also inspired my moniker, madfarmer. Not that I am one, but that I aspire to be one someday.

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

 

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, copyright © 1973 by Wendell Berry

Micah threw out a link to a great New York Times piece on Wendell Berry. The NYTimes piece linked to this … Mr. Berry was the Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. It’s longer than an average magazine article, but it’s so worth it.

A couple parts have been rattling around in my brain. The first, where Berry quotes from Howards End, speaks of the inspiration and wonder of living a life of connectedness and scale:

 It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?

Learning to love the intricate details of a simple life is something I need more practice with. Which leads to another part of the lecture that really inspires me to do this. Berry proposes that “high art” debases itself by excluding the “making of the human household upon the earth”:

No doubt there always will be some people willing to do anything at all that is economically or technologically possible, who look upon the world and its creatures without affection and therefore as exploitable without limit. Against that limitlessness, in which we foresee assuredly our ruin, we have only our ancient effort to define ourselves as human and humane. But this ages-long, imperfect, unendable attempt, with its magnificent record, we have virtually disowned by assigning it to the ever more subordinate set of school subjects we call “arts and humanities” or, for short, “culture.” Culture, so isolated, is seen either as a dead-end academic profession or as a mainly useless acquisition to be displayed and appreciated “for its own sake.” This definition of culture as “high culture” actually debases it, as it debases also the presumably low culture that is excluded: the arts, for example, of land use, life support, healing, housekeeping, homemaking …

… But I would insist that the economic arts are just as honorably and authentically refinable as the fine arts. And so I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.

J-Fo

Greetings all,

A Breakdown of Posts

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Sappy Stuff

The type of man I enjoy spending time with is the one who has aspirations of excellence. These men don’t necessarily aspire to be “successful” as the world seems to define successful and often make choices that prevent that type of success in order to pursue the virtuous life. They choose to be excellent fathers and husbands and friends and coworkers and sons and citizens. This is a website that a small group of us have started. We want it to be a dialogue between men who have similar aspirations. If you are or aspire to be that type of man please join the conversation. We want this small group to grow. I want to be just like these men when I grow up. And ladies are welcome too because these are the types of men you want your daughter to marry.