AssignmentZero | An Experiment in Pro-Am Journalism

Love Bids You Welcome To New Social Action Poetry Blog

Posted March 15th, 2008 - 20:51PM by Jabez Van Cleef

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Culture: Art, Music and Film

I started a new blog aimed at raising consciousness by writing poetry about world hunger and liberation theology. People are asked to contribute comments in the form of poetry at:

http://lovebademewelcome-newark.blogspot.com/

Hope to see you there!

Jabez L. Van Cleef

3/15/08

Who wrote the Book of Beasts?

Posted March 20th, 2007 - 09:50AM by Jabez Van Cleef

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The English author T. H. White, who wrote a series of novels based on the Arthurian legends, also translated and published a medieval bestiary under the straightforward title The Book of Beasts.

Although his name is on the jacket, he doesn't really take credit for the content, except to mention that the book is being retranslated and republished in English for the first time in several hundred years.

Bestiaries were everywhere in the Middle Ages. They purported to gather all that was known about various plants and animals into a book; however, the descriptions of the creatures in each entry were rather freely edited over time, usually by religious people, so that the contents were larded with symbolic meanings and extended metaphors intended to show the pervasive and fundamental influence of Jesus in worldly affairs.

I have never seen a bestiary with an attribution, except a kind of long distance advice, like "Pliny tells us..." People in the middle ages seemed content not to own ideas, just to express themselves and perhaps qualify each other's anonymous contibutions. The assembly of the contents of the Bestiary over several hundred years was quite similar in its mechanics to the assembly of Wikipedia.

Who is the voice that speaks?

3/20/07

Why can't the true believers understand each other?

Posted March 19th, 2007 - 11:13AM by Jabez Van Cleef

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A lot of contemporary news coverage is based on an assumption that people have to belong to different camps and engage in struggles with each other for the triumph of one set of ideas over another. I don't believe this is true. I think many people share an affinity for the sensation of being entrained in the rhythmic or musical expression of ideas, even ideas that are almost universally thought to be frozen in official prose, such as legal documents.

I have been engaged in a project to reinterpret foundational religious, spiritual, and human rights texts into the common form of rhythmic verse. I believe this form provides a better basis for common understanding and mutual respect among the various traditions from which these documents have sprung.

New technology permits wide, comprehensive and relatively easy dissemination of these texts via podcasting. I hope people can find ways to listen to them.

SUBJECT CATEGORIES

Human Rights and Civil Disobedience

The Song of the Captives (testimony of detainees at Abu Ghraib)
The Palimpsest of Human Rights (writings of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King)
All One Family Sing (verse interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Mysticism in the Anglican Tradition (14th c. English mystics)

The Song of Angels (Walter Hilton)
The Cloud of Unknowing (Anon.)
The Fire of Love (Richard Rolle)
Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich 2

Verse Interpretations of the Christian Gospels

The Song of John
The Song of Luke
The Song of Matthew
The Song of Mark
The Saxon Gospel

Verse Interpretations of Gnostic Texts

Thunder, Perfect Mind
The Song of Thomas

Verse Interpretations of Other Sacred Texts

The Book of Ashes (Hebrew, Book of Job)
Song of Judith (Hebrew, Apocrypha)
Igbo Singing (West African)
Song of Confucius (Chinese, Book of Change)
The Navajo Creation Story (Native American)
The Unstruck Drum (Hindu/Muslim)

Poetry and Music

Choral Explorations
Painkillers
Church of the Sentient Machine (CSM)
About Jabez L. Van Cleef

LINKS TO PODCASTS

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2069337...
one hundred painkillers

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2070068...
book of ashes

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2069398...
CSM

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2069404...
igbo singing

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2062277...
all one family sing

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2062517...
choral explorations

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2062282...
song of Judith

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2062294...
thunder, perfect mind

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2062287...
the fire of love