Wednesday, October 7, 2009

“St. Artaldus - Catholic Online” plus 3 more

“St. Artaldus - Catholic Online” plus 3 more

St. Artaldus - Catholic Online

Posted: 07 Oct 2009 12:01 AM PDT

Feastday: October 7

Artaldus (also called Arthaud) was born in the castle of Sothonod in Savoy. At the age of eighteen, he went to the court of Duke Amadeus III, but a year or two after, he became a Carthusian at Portes. After many years, being a priest and an experienced and holy religious, he was sent by the prior of the Grande Chartreuse to found a charterhouse near his home, in a valley in the Valromey significantly called "the cemetery". Here Artaldus established himself with six of his brethren from Portes. The community was no sooner well settled down, than there buildings were destroyed by fire, and St. Artaldus had to begin all over again. He chose a fresh site on the Arvieres River, and his second foundation was soon built and occupied. But a Carthusian cell could not contain the ever-increasing reputation of Artaldus: like his master St. Bruno, he was consulted by the Pope, and when he was well over eighty, he was called from his monastery to be bishop of Belley, in spite of his vehement and reasonable protest. However, after less than two years of episcopate, his resignation was accepted, and he thankfully returned to Arvieres, where he lived in peace for the rest of his days. During his last years, he was visited by St. Hugh of Lincoln, who had come into France, and who, while he was prior of the charterhouse of Witham, had induced Henry II to become a benefactor of Arvieres. The Magna vita of St. Hugh records a gentle rebuke administered by Hugh when Artaldus asked him for political news in the presence of the community who had turned their backs upon the world to give themselves entirely to God. The cultus of St. Artaldus, called simply Blessed by the Carthusians, was confirmed for the diocese of Belley in 1834. He was 105 years old when he died and his feast day is October 7th.

Doug Clark: Men can enjoy books without women - Greensboro News & Record

Posted: 06 Oct 2009 11:54 PM PDT

 

Why aren't there as many book clubs for men as for women?

1. Men don't read as much.

2. They do, but they don't care to talk about books.

3. Their wives don't believe they're really going to a book club meeting.

Librarian Steve Sumerford has addressed the question in his Decimal Points column on our Books page. Sunday he reported hearing from retired textile executive Watts Carr about Carr's book club of 10 men who cover "most anything and everything from historical novels and biographies to detective who-done-its, mysteries and international intrigue."

Meetings begin with conversations about "all things male before getting down to the book at hand."

I've never attended one of those meetings, but I'd guess the discussion of the book at hand also reveals attitudes of "all things male."

Men and women are different, and that's often reflected in what they read and how they talk about books.

My wife, for example, is an avid reader. She likes murder mysteries but also enjoys good novels like Pat Conroy's "South of Broad," which she's encouraging me to read.

The trouble is, I read very little fiction. I prefer biographies and books on history, travel and certain arcane topics such as polar exploration, which she derisively dismisses as "ice books." Our reading interests don't intersect much.

Of course, that won't be true for all married couples or all men and women in general. There are women who write ice books, and good ones. Some men are big fans of Agatha Christie.

Still, there are enough gender variations in literary tastes to create a need for a few book clubs for men only.

I belonged to one many years ago. It was begun by the late Stanley Shavitz, who loved books and libraries.

"So many books," he said in wonder once when we ran into each other at the High Point library. "I only regret I'll never have time to read them all."

Stanley assembled a number of his friends and acquaintances -- all men -- for a monthly gathering to talk about books. Others started tagging along, and before long each meeting drew a good turnout of fellows who represented various backgrounds and professions.

There were only a couple of rules. You could discuss any book you liked -- there was no assigned reading -- and women were not invited.

Not that women would care, anyway. We didn't serve refreshments, plan social engagements or gossip (much), and some of the books discussed were anything but popular literature.

One fellow had a passion for travel diaries from the Middle Ages. And you know about the ice books.

Whatever our individual reading pleasures, we developed an easy rapport. There was no locker room talk, no off-color jokes, no griping about wives. Just a group of guys who felt comfortable gabbing about books in an atmosphere that might not have been quite the same in mixed company.

We did have one concern.

We met in the administrative board room of the High Point library.

The public library.

Which we understood very well to mean that we had no right to exclude a woman from attending.

"If a woman comes, I'm out of here," one man said, hitting on the best response any of us could think of.

Eventually, it happened. Word had gotten around and finally landed in the wrong pair of ears.

I'll call her Agnes. She was a nice elderly lady but a gadabout with a reputation for showing up at wedding receptions and other events where her presence was not necessarily requested.

Which was the case at the fateful meeting of the men's book club. Agnes made herself perfectly at home despite the looks of consternation on the faces around the table.

There was none of the usual banter or camaraderie. Nothing impolite was said, to be sure, but the meeting was awkward and shorter than usual. Agnes seemed to understand she didn't quite fit in, and she never returned.

The club soon found itself in decline anyway. It had a good run for several years, but interest was beginning to wane. Maybe everyone knew each other's reading habits too well. Talking about books should be a process of new discoveries, not reciting familiar refrains.

Ironically, women's voices would have helped that problem, but then we still would have lost our men's book club.

No matter. When it comes to reading, everyone can be a book club unto himself.

 

Contact Doug Clark at dgclark@news-record.com or 373-7039.

I was cyberbullied: a virtual victim fights back - The Independent

Posted: 07 Oct 2009 12:01 AM PDT

Fashion models' after-lives can take them to unexpected places, as Liskula Cohen found out. She made headlines in August after she sued Google for the email address of an anonymous author who slagged her off as "#1 skanky superstar" and "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" on a Google-hosted blog.

By ruling in the 37-year-old Cohen's favour, Manhattan federal justices have set new guidelines: no longer will bloggers be able to lob insults from the safety of assured anonymity.

The unmasked blogger turned out to be a faint acquaintance from the Manhattan nightlife scene – namely 29-year-old Rosemary Port, a fashion student who had created the Skanks in NYC site. Though she apologised, Port until recently maintained her privacy was violated and threatened a $15m counter-suit against Google for giving her up.

The case has helped to clarify which terms of insult are libellous, such as "ho", which are merely wounding, like "skank", and along the way offered New York tabloids front-page news of two attractive women in cat fight. "Secret Grudge of NY Skankies" blazed the New York Post.

While it's tempting to view the case as a girlfight that spilled out of a nightclub and into a courtroom, it's illuminated genuine privacy issues and given Cohen, a Vogue model, a voice fashion alone never offered. She's joined a growing chorus of commentators who say the internet, or specifically blogs, are an increasingly unreliable place to find information and used for cyberbullying.

But the justice presiding in the case rejected the blogger's defence claim that individuals cannot be libelled online because blogs "serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting", and should not be treated as factual assertions. The court sided with Cohen, citing defamation "concerning her appearance, hygiene and sexual conduct".

Last month, in her new role as cyberbullying spokesperson, Cohen participated in a panel at the University of Tennessee on internet privacy that featured John Seigenthaler, the journalist and former Robert Kennedy aide who was subject to a false Wikipedia entry claiming he was a suspect in the assassination of John F Kennedy, a representative from AP and a bloggers' rights advocate.

In the increasingly busy area of internet rights, cyber policy pundits fret that censorship efforts, privacy mandates and regulations threaten the original cyberspace "presumption of liberty". A competing concern is how to limit the dissemination of poor or incorrect information and to curb bad or even threatening behaviour. Clearly, Cohen has hit an issue of gathering importance. The insight Cohen has been granted through her experience and actions has placed her now at the forefront of the cyber-bullying issue. She says she had no doubts she should take up the cause after she received a message of support from the mother of Meghan Meier, a 13-year-old girl who killed herself in 2006 after being cyberbullied by a friend's mother posing as an online boyfriend.

"We do have the freedom of speech but we don't have the freedom to defame," reasons Cohen. "If the internet is just supposed to be the Wild West, a do-what-you-want, say-what-you-want place and no longer a reliable source of information – which is what I think it was intended for – then I want no part of it.

"It's been very frustrating for me. Now, I find myself limiting my internet use to just going to reputable sites," she continues. "I used to surf all over the place and make the assumption that what I read was truthful. Now it's a case of, well, who knows?"

In one sense, Cohen is becoming part of a growing movement of internet users who now find the medium too chaotic. Information moves so fast, with distortions added at each rewrite, that a counter reaction may be growing that will bring surfers back to more reliable sources and perhaps place a premium value on good information.

Liskula Cohen's online ordeal began when a client on a modelling job drew her attention to a "horrible" posting about her. The blog featured pictures of Cohen simulating sex with a black DJ friend and said that she was performing oral sex "again and again". Cohen, who is Jewish, detected an undertow of racism.

"It was one of the things I found most hurtful. To sue someone over being called a "ho" alone would be ridiculous. I don't have a think skin – I've been a model for 20 years so I've dealt with rejection." But when her case came to court, Port's lawyer cited a picture Cohen herself had posted on the internet. The lawyer counter-claimed that the drama was due to Cohen's love of the spotlight and said she had brought this notoriety on herself.

Cohen's tale suggests – at a minimum – the life of models in New York nightclubs is fairly toxic environment, the darker side of Sex and the City if you will, and features dependent relationships of promoters and louche types, models and dealers, bouncers, DJs, second-tier royalty and middle-aged playboys.

Not surprisingly, the experience has soured the Manhattan demi-monde for Cohen, a Canadian. "There are very few places I'll go now," she says. "I won't just go anywhere. I need to know there are friends there, otherwise I get freaked." And as for the internet, Cohen believes there should be some form of control.

It's a view Wikipedia recently adopted when it instituted a layer of editorial oversight of biographies of living people. "If you're using your computer to do positive things, more power to you," Cohen says. "If I can use my voice for positive change then I will. But if you're on your computer to spread bullshit, get a life."

Web of evil: What is cyberbullying?

Sexting

"Sexting" might sound like naughty teenage fun – the term refers to teens taking nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and sending them to others via mobile phone. But out of their hands, pictures can easily be uploaded to social networking sites, or forwarded to other mobiles. And if an underage teen gets caught sending explicit images, they run the risk of being convicted as a sex offender. Jessica Logan, an 18-year-old from Cincinnati, Ohio, sent a naked picture of herself to her boyfriend, which wound up being seen by hundreds of teens who then taunted Jessica online, calling her a "slut" and a "whore" on her Facebook and MySpace pages. After several months of abuse, in June 2008, Jessica hanged herself. In Greensburgh, Pennsylvania, six teens ended up in court, facing charges of child pornography, after three underage girls shared sexual images of themselves with male classmates via their phones.

Anti-social networking

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, which have tens of millions of users worldwide, have revealed a dark side as potential tools for cyberbullying. Several suicides cited online bullying as a contributing factor, and teens are even facing criminal charges for conducting web-based hate campaigns. Keeley Houghton of Malvern, Worcestershire became the first Briton jailed for online bullying in August, after the 18-year-old posted death threats on the Facebook page of a schoolmate, Emily Moore. In July this year Megan Gillan, 15, of Macclesfield, Lancashire, died from an overdose of painkillers after poisonous messages were posted by fellow students on her Bebo page, and 13-year-old Sam Leeson hanged himself at his parents' Gloucestershire home in June 2008 after being mocked online for his musical taste.

Happy slapping

Violent attacks can be easily captured on mobile phones, providing a record of the event that promises kudos for gang-members. Filming such attacks is a prosecutable offence. In a landmark case in February 2008, a 17-year-old girl was found guilty of aiding and abetting the death of Gavin Waterhouse in Keithley, West Yorkshire, after she filmed her friend delivering the fatal beating.

Twitter imposter

Politicians may embrace social networking site Twitter as a chance to broadcast their opinions via the ultimate soundbite: the 140-character tweet. But a surge of imposter tweeters have been causing trouble, and quotes from fraudster politicians, celebrities and even the Dalai Lama have been quoted by a credulous media. Conservative blogger Donal Blaney is attempting to take his Twitter imposter, @blaneysblarney, to court over the issue. Last week, in response to a petition filed by Blaney, the High Court sent the first ever injunction via Twitter, as a message directing @blaneysblarney to a web page commanding they desist from posting misleading tweets.

Holly Williams

How Barnes got from there to here - Philadelphia Inquirer

Posted: 07 Oct 2009 12:08 AM PDT

Today - the day the Barnes Foundation, long of Latchs Lane in Merion, unveils the design for its $200 million gallery on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway - is one that many in the art world will regard as infamous, and many in Philadelphia will applaud.

The incomparable Barnes collection won't be moving from its home of 84 years just yet; the city Art Commission, which oversees Parkway construction, will review the concept this morning and is expected to endorse it, with final approval to follow.

The opening is not scheduled until 2012. But today's action is evidence that the move has overcome all legal and political efforts to block it - not that evidence matters to partisans in the endless squabbling over the fate of a rich patent-medicine maker's aesthetic accretions.

A new documentary film, director Don Argott's The Art of the Steal, lays out the case for move-as-infamy - the tale of how the collection of Renoirs, Cezannes, Matisses, and other early modernist works has been stolen by its covetous enemies and moved to an urban cultural corridor.

All this was done, says the film, with indifference to the foundation's singularity and contempt for the desires of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, friend of the "plain people" and avowed opponent of what the movie calls "WASPy" local elites (led by Walter Annenberg, once owner of The Inquirer, and Raymond Perelman, former chair of the Philadelphia Museum of Art).

In this view, the Barnes move, a decades-long, slow-motion action adventure, is the result of an immense conspiracy. Yet the forces leading to it are far more human, contradictory, and mundane than any Manichean conspiracy theory would have it. Barnes needed no vast collection of enemies; he had himself.

As even a cursory reading of the many Barnes-related biographies and memoirs makes clear, he was a man who zealously pursued money and its trappings, then contemptuously dismissed the wealthy (excluding himself) as effete butterflies.

He championed African Americans, but tried to block development of lily-white Merion by threatening to remove his paintings and use his buildings instead as residences for black students.

He desperately sought affiliation with area educational and art institutions, particularly his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, he stipulated that Penn - despite the fact that it studiously ignored him for decades - would ultimately control the foundation, a position he did not formally change until shortly before his death. The rest he repeatedly, savagely excoriated, particularly the Philadelphia Museum of Art, calling it the "House of Prostitution of Art and Education on the Parkway."

Fiske Kimball, director of the museum, publicly praised Barnes' aesthetic tome, The Art in Painting, and sought to establish a relationship with the foundation, but was cut off when he sought admission for a few friends. Barnes seized every chance to bash the museum, once cheating it out of a Matisse tryptich - though he denied any double-dealing - and buying it for himself.

He loved to snap up paintings on the cheap, whether he was bamboozling well-stuffed gallery owners or desperately needy artists, many of whom loathed him. Of impoverished painter Chaim Soutine, Barnes once said, "I caught him when he was drunk, sick, and broke and took the contents of his studio for a pittance."

In 1951, a few months before his death at 79 in a car crash, he finally turned his back on Penn and gave Lincoln University, the historically black Chester County college, control over the foundation's board of trustees.

A school affiliation was important to Barnes, who conceived of his foundation as an educational institution, not a museum, a distinction largely maintained by severely limiting visitors beyond the students attending Barnes-designed classes in aesthetics.

(Evidence exists that Lincoln was about to be written out of the foundation as well. "This year the experiment with Lincoln failed in practically all . . . requisites," he ominously wrote just before his demise froze the ever-shifting trust indenture's terms.)

Ultimately, it was Lincoln's control, not greedy city elites, that led to the fateful 1990 decision to install prominent attorney Richard Glanton as foundation president, which launched the series of events leading to the Parkway move.

Glanton, a Lincoln trustee, immediately proposed selling 15 paintings - a violation of the trust indenture's stipulation that nothing in the collection ever be moved or sold - and sought Annenberg's support for the fund-raising ploy.

For his part, Annenberg took advantage of the situation to undercut Barnes' aesthetic discernment: Why not sell off the second-rate Renoirs, he wondered. (Under Annenberg, The Inquirer initiated a lawsuit in 1952 seeking to pry the Barnes' doors open for the public; the court threw it out. Annenberg no doubt was annoyed, but the paper dropped the matter. Deputy state attorney general Lois G. Forer, a zealous advocate of the public interest, eventually reopened litigation and won less restrictive admissions a decade later.)

In 1990, Annenberg clearly saw controversy in Glanton's sale effort and wanted no part of it. After getting in his public licks, he severed all connection with the Barnes.

When the idea, criticized from virtually all quarters, was abandoned, Glanton then proposed an international art road show - a lucrative proposition that violated the trust indenture just as much as the proposed sales would have.

Proceeds of the tour, the Barnes argued, were necessary for a top-to-bottom renovation and installation of adequate climate controls. The rationale satisfied the courts, and off the paintings went.

When they returned, Glanton sought to maximize attendance, and the "plain people," as Barnes had called them, began flocking to Merion. Neighbors were appalled by the buses and crowds. A zoning dispute mutated into suits and countersuits.

By the late 1990s Glanton was out and the foundation was bleeding money. The trust indenture barred most investments; Glanton's litigious excesses took a spectacular toll on the dwindling endowment. The Barnes, then run by Kimberly Camp, cast a wide net seeking solutions.

Beginning in the Glanton era, when financial issues began to press sharply, casual talk of a possible move to Philadelphia had ricocheted around the foundation and was discussed by many interested parties. In early 2001, Perelman, then chair of the art museum, openly speculated about it in the New York Times and The Inquirer, as did former Mayor Ed Rendell - now Pennsylvania's governor - and others.

That political and cultural leaders welcomed the notion of the Barnes in Philadelphia was no secret at all, and three major foundations, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lenfest and Annenberg foundations, ultimately devised a plan to make it happen. Their proposal was announced in September 2002.

Virtually simultaneously, the state legislature authorized use of up to $107 million in capital funds for move-related construction - if the state money ever became available, and if state lawmakers decided to spend any of it.

At the time of the authorization, no Barnes move had been approved by the courts. But then again, no money was appropriated. The authorization/appropriation distinction seems lost on those whose criticism of supposedly secret funding has supplied grist for the conspiracy mill.

Yet it was Barnes himself who set the highly restrictive terms of the trust indenture; who incorporated no penalties for the foundation should trustees violate the indenture's terms; who failed to resolve tension between a supposedly public facility and exclusionary admissions practices; who staffed the board and foundation with apostles to ensure his will in perpetuity.

Instead, for nearly 20 years the Barnes has been the subject of rancorous dispute and litigation, leading to what some would call farce and others, tragedy. No conspiracy has been necessary.

Contact culture writer Stephan Salisbury at 215-854-5594 or ssalisbury@phillynews.com.
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