Dayhoff Carroll

Dayhoff Carroll: www.kevindayhoff.org Westminster Md Online - The Winchester Report, by Kevin Earl Dayhoff: Runner, writer, artist, fire and police chaplain Mindless ramblings of a runner, journalist, and artist Westminster, Hampstead, Manchester, Taneytown, Union Bridge, Mount Airy and Sykesville in Carroll Co, Maryland... and Frederick Co. Westminster Fire Dept., Firefighters, police officers, Carroll Co Sheriff's Office, Md St Police. Chaplain duties, Religion, Grace Lutheran Ch.

Showing posts with label Art Library. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Blaming History by Michael Tomasky, The American Prospect

Blaming History by Michael Tomasky, The American Prospect

Hat Tip: Truthout

Blaming History Friday 19 December 2008

Michael Tomasky explains how Milan Kundera's The Joke changed his view of politics.

So the assignment is "a book that changed my view of politics." Harder than it sounds. I will confess that when I was a younger man, I was far more likely to think of records, as we used to call them, as life-changing, and if pressed, I could probably to this day defend the proposition that The Basement Tapes taught me as much about America as did, say, either John Steinbeck or V.O. Key.

I could name something predictable by Schlesinger or Hofstadter, or one of those seminal works on the 1960s or Watergate that I and most other American liberal males of my generation display on our shelves and in select cases have actually read to completion. But the idea of "life changing" led me to reach into the memory hole for those rare occasions when reading a book so fired my mind that, while I was immersed in it, I could think of nothing else. You know the feeling: You can't wait for work or class to finish so you can plow back into the book; as you near the end, you actually slow down because you don't want it to stop and can't imagine not being able to read it anymore.

It turns out that it's a novel, Milan Kundera's The Joke, that met for me the above criteria: The book is quite political and contains within its pages lessons about how people adapt to the larger political contexts in which they live. These are lessons that were and are more universal than one might assume - given that Kundera was assaying totalitarian society - about what can happen when the stirrings of the soul are thwarted by the imperatives of the state.

Read the entire essay here: Blaming History by Michael Tomasky, The American Prospect

20081219 Blaming History by Michael Tomasky for The American Propsect
Kevin Dayhoff Westgov.Net: Westminster Maryland Online

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Westminster's sacred places are shrines of community life

My Sunday Carroll Eagle column is up…

Westminster's sacred places are shrines of community life

EAGLE ARCHIVE By Kevin Dayhoff Posted on www.explorecarroll.com on 7/25/08

Since this is a Sunday column, I do hope it's fitting to talk about sacred places.

Not necessarily houses of worship, mind you, though those are most often considered sacred places.

I'm thinking of the sacred public places as described in a 1981 book by Dr. Ira Zepp [pictured here in a 1996 file photo] and Marty Lanham, "Sacred Spaces of Westminster."

I thought of the book as I sat in a recent Common Council meeting at Westminster City Hall -- a building that many consider one of the true sacred places in Carroll County.

At the beginning of the meeting, Mayor Tom Ferguson read a proclamation recognizing July as Recreation and Parks Month, and paid tribute to the city's recreation and parks director Ron Schroers, as well as other employees who work tirelessly for our benefit.

One of the recreational facilities that Schroers oversees is the popular Westminster playground in the heart of the city.

The playground is one the first pictures, taken by Lanham, in that 1981 book.

Moreover, toward the end of the book, the authors discuss one of the overlooked sacred landmarks in Westminster: the Memorial Gateway to the Westminster playground off of Center Street.

Zepp and Lanham explain that the "gateway was given to the city by H. Peyton Gorsuch in 1937. Its primary purpose was to acknowledge the community's debt to Carroll Countians who had served in the nation's wars."

The book goes on to highlight public places such as Belle Grove Square, various other parks, gardens, memorials and monuments.

Read the entire column here: Westminster's sacred places are shrines of community life

When he is not watching the ducks at the Westminster Community Pond, Kevin Dayhoff can be reached at kdayhoff@carr.org. Please don't feed the ducks ... or the Dayhoff.