Food unites and food divides. It both marks us into tribes and gives us opportunities to reach past our societal limits. From chicken barbeques to vegetarian‐dominated potlucks, what we put on the table says a lot about our values, and how we welcome unfamiliar food choices is a measure of our hospitality. How do kitchen‐table spreads of tofu and chickpea dips reinforce certain stand‐apart cultural norms? Are Friends who like barbecue ribs less Quaker? What about meetings that still host the annual chicken dinner or clambake?

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

Google’s approach cleverly stitches together multiple photos. It uses a process much like their 360-degree photo app: you start with a overview photo. Once taken, you see four circles hovering to the sides of the picture. Move the camera to each and it takes more pictures. Once you’ve gone over all four circles, Google stitches these five photos together in such a way that there’s no perspective distortion.

What’s remarkable is the speed. I scanned 15 photos in while also making dinner for the kids. The dimensions of all looked good and the resolution looks about as good as the original. These are good results for something so easy.

Check out Google’s announcement blog post for details.

Here’s the example: a lot of my photo stream is endless pictures of cute kids. Facebook friends who have friended me for other topics have to wade through that collection. Some actually like them–our friendships aren’t single issue and they appreciate glimpses of the rest of my life. But with G+ it’s my job to figure out which issue friends might want to be kid picture friends. I don’t want to put them on a list they don’t like and essentially spam them. Is there any G+ features I might use?

Google+: View post on Google+

We expect today that when we set out to accomplish something it will get done. But there are always unexpected currents to contend with, uncooperative winds, sandbars and shoals and God may well be involved in these blocks. Our duty as people of faith is to get on the boat. We might not get to our Ireland and that may not be the real purpose of our leading. Maybe our job is to learn to catch fish from the boat. Perhaps our faithfulness in apparent failure is a lesson for the disbelieving sailors on board. And maybe the lesson is for us, to remain faithful in the mystery and confusion of God’s roadblocks.

The modern impulse is to win, to accomplish, to neutralize dissent, problem-solve and succeed. As Friends, we’ve inherited some of this attitudes and often want to take our spiritual leadings and run with them as if
God’s part is over. We set up committees, write mission statements,
hire staff: we lock our ship’s course in a particular direction, crank
up the engines and plow ahead. These can be useful tools, certainly, but somehow there’s a lesson for us in that little boat going around in circles.

I walk around, tears in eyes, looking looking for a changed world. See students in goatees, so beat, but they’re smiling, they don’t know, don’t care, you’ve been reduced to a fashion. But you’re here, in the air we breathe, that smell of liberation, of just stand up and laugh and prank and listen to the soul sex spirit bursting within. Smile through the solitary puritanism that keeps everyone apart.

But where are you remembered? Where’s the drum circles? Needing something now, I buy the latest Waldman anthology in bookstore, thirtieth street train station, full of time magazine, hustler, romance novels, lottery tickets. Cashier looks at book, says someone else just bought it too. Oh joy, no drum circles but at least other lost souls not knowing how to share the loss but to remember the immortal words, the words now history, set forever in twelve point times to be read as another Dead White Male poet.

I tell cashier, friendly middle aged black woman that he—points to your out-of-focus head in photo of Corso, the Orlovskys, Kerouac—is dead. “Who is it?” “Allen Ginsburg.” “Oh, that’s him, hmm?” I say, I hope, that there’ll be a lot of people buying these books now, but know yet another illustrated history of Vietnam will be their best seller.

Nightime now. I can’t help it, I look to the sky to see if there’s a new star in the firmament. But overcast, smoggy, orange-skied Germantown doesn’t open to the cliché.

I miss you. You taught so much. How to combine poetry and liberation and politics and the search for wondrous lovely spirit. Since I first saw you speak—1988 Rutgers, Radical Student Conference—I’ve become activist nonviolence publisher, Quaker seeker. You spoke to me, told me I could spin my own life of joy if only I could be open and humble, ready to laugh, but also ready to take lightening bolts upon my head for standing up in row-after-row movie theater America, watch us perform, give us six bucks America.

In new book you say prescription for this America is:

more art, meditation, lifestyles of relative penury,
avoidance of conspicuous consumption that’s
burning down the planet.

To that I say merely, ‘a‑okay,” let’s get back to work. I love you Allen. Peace be with you.

Recovered via Archive.org cache.