Dancing the funeral dance

Funerals are supposed to be sad? I suppose if someone dies prematurely, yes. But when the deceased has lived a full life into old age, it is different.

I just attended such a funeral. Rather than everyone crying their faces off, it was an uplifting celebration of a life. And more than that, it was an intimate gathering of family and friends who might not see each other as often as they'd like.

I know a funeral for the 35 year-old cancer victim would be all mourning. No one wants to experience that. But the pain in this funeral was minimal.

I've been dying to see the HBO movie Game Change, adapted from the Sarah Palin chapters of the John Heilemann and Mark Halperin chronicle of the 2008 presidential campaign. I don't have HBO and I'm not splurging just for the movie, so I picked up the book. I figured that if the screenwriter can focus exclusively on the Palin part, I don't have to read beyond that section either.

The book describes Palin as just plain stupid. She can memorize lines and read a teleprompter as good as anyone, and she has no trouble appearing confident before a huge crowd. So perhaps with a little more prep, she could have come across as competent. But otherwise she's an incurious fool who thinks Saddam Hussein orchestrated 9/11 and had to refer Obama's running mate as Joe because no matter how many times her McCain's staff reminded her, she couldn't help but call him O'Biden.

I couldn't help but also read the parts about John Edwards' bizarre self-destruction. Now here is a guy who is by all accounts intelligent. Pre-politics, he was an extremely successful trial lawyer. But he acted extremely stupidly. I never liked the guy in the first place. I remember people talking about his good looks and nice hair, while I thought he looked like a young boy whose mother cut his hair for him. And how many times did he tell us his father worked in a mill? Anyway, he imploded personally and professionally and won't be running for office again.

I'll still watch the movie when I can because I have a guilty addiction to political theater.

I should have started here

One hour interview with the author.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/66144-1

Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Huge Bore

I made it about halfway through Richardson's Emerson: A Mind on Fire before giving up and reading Emerson's Wikipedia article. I suppose I chose the wrong book. I didn't need over 500 pages chronicling every month of the man's life and every book he read and when. My goal was to learn about some of the intellectual heritage of Unitarian Universalism. The actual result is a need to take a long break from reading. Perhaps it is time to pick up a novel or two.

Emerson quickly outgrew the confines of what was still in the 19th century a quite christian Unitarian church.. He produced all sorts of stimulating thoughts. He thought historical religious revelation was unimportant in the face of the direct religious experience we can have ourselves in the present day. He thought god was in all of nature. He shocked believers and never apologized for saying Jesus was just a man.

That's literally it. I should have started with the Wikipedia article. Among every tiring detail of Emerson's life, I learned that though he was as avid a reader as one could possibly be, he advocated reading only what excites and interests you. If a chapter doesn't stimulate you, skip it. If a book is a bore, read something else. I took his advice a couple hundred pages too late.