Graf Writers

This week it snowed so hard the trees groaned and broke. Heaviest snow I've ever seen. So heavy that some trees keeled over and their root balls ripped out of the ground. I wish I had a picture to post but I forgot my camera those days, and now it's rained over and melted.

I'm writing a paper about Abdul Karim Soroush, the Iranian secularist philosopher. People say he might be the 'Martin Luthor of Islam'. But according to Omid Safi (who Sandman opened up for last year, you can see the photo if you follow the link to his blog), they say that about someone new every 18 months, and on top of that, old ML hated Muslims, Jews and the Pope, so it's kind of a crappy analogy. Soroush thinks that there can be Islamic nations where law is based on a flexible combination of Islam and human rights. I can't follow everything he says, but I'm hooked on his ideas.

No interesting trash to speak of this week: all the snow put the kabosh on that. And nothing good in the barrels. In the summer it'll flow like the brook.

I discovered a blog on graffiti in Iran: http://irangraffiti.blogspot.com/, those Tehrani writers have talent. Here are some photos from the subway wall at the marsh behind the Blackwell path, at work. Our writers end up throwing their cans into the marsh and I'm trying to devise a plan to provide waste barrels for them. They don't want to get caught with cans if the jake finds 'em on their way out.