Today's subject line is from one of the hymns we sang at church this past Sunday:

Creative love, our thanks we give
that this our world is incomplete
that struggle greets our will to live
that work awaits our hands and feet.

Since what we choose is what we are
and what we love we yet will be,
the goal may ever shine afar
the will to reach it makes us free.

- original words by William DeWitt Hyde; adapted by Beth Ide

The epigraph on the order of service (and the text that inspired "Now is the Time," a new anthem composed by Jason Shelton and Connye Florance):

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow,
not some more convenient time....
It is today that we fit ourselves
for the greater usefulness of tomorrow.

W.E.B. DuBois

I've been flirting with designing a t-shirt with the declaration "Ars fucking longa," but I don't really need more t-shirts, never mind profane ones. Notecards, perhaps. It does sum up much of the past ten days, which have included a fresh revision of a years-old poem (as in, one originally drafted four or five hard-drives ago) and a new off-the-cuff poem, and a couple thousand words of Sayers-fic. I also finally got around to reading a New York Times Book Review essay by Stephen King (9/30 issue; the fine print says it's an excerpt from his intro to The Best American Short Stories 2007:

What happens when [a writer of literary short stories] realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless, because it's what God or genetics (possibly they are the same) has decreed, or out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe because it's such a kick to spin tales. Possibly a combination. And all that's good.

...Talent can't help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. If [the stories he chose for BASS 2007] have anything in common, it's that sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out amazement.

Speaking of emotional involvement, YouTube has had a clip from Standing in the Shadows of Motown in which Joan Osborne and the Funk Brothers perform "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted." I'll be searching everywhere... [ETA: link no longer active 1/2008]