All posts by Phil

Music

Sunday Singing: Eternal Father, Strong to Save

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Events of this week put me this hymn in mind. “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” was written by William Whiting in the 1860s. In 1879, Charles Jackson Train, then Lieutenant Commander and director of the Midshipmen’s Choir, took up singing this hymn at the close of Sunday services at the U.S. Naval Academy. In this way, it became the Navy’s traditional hymn.

“And he said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?’ Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.” (Matthew 8:26 ESV)

1. Eternal Father, strong to save,
whose arm doth bind the restless wave,
who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to thee
for those in peril on the sea.

2. O Savior, whose almighty word
the winds and waves submissive heard,
who walkedst on the foaming deep
and calm amid its rage didst sleep:
O hear us when we cry to thee
for those in peril on the sea.

3. O sacred Spirit, who didst brood
upon the chaos dark and rude,
who badd’st its angry tumult cease,
and gavest light and life and peace:
O hear us when we cry to thee
for those in peril on the sea.

4. O Trinity of love and pow’r,
our brethren shield in danger’s hour;
from rock and tempest, fire and foe,
protect them wheresoe’er they go;
and ever let there rise to thee
glad hymns of praise from land and sea.

Goofing

Common Phrases for English Learners

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As an experienced English speaker, I thought I’d offer this list to beginners and those wanting useful phrases for conversational English.

  • Yankee Doodle — This is any American, especially a silly one
  • If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life. — This is how Americans encourage others to make good decisions and live their best life now.
  • I have two guns, one for each of ya. — A friendly greeting for border patrol agents
  • Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room! — A way of asking someone to repeat themselves, typically said forcefully
  • You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow. — One of many compliments for American women
  • Yellow-bellied, toffee-hearted, lily-livered — Also compliments
  • Why, Johnny Ringo, you look like somebody just walked over your grave. — A friendly greeting for any pastor, parson, or priest
  • We’re going to need a bigger boat — Americans often say this when food is placed before them.

All right. That’s all you get for today. Go have fun and don’t drive on flooded roads.

Music

Sunday Singing: O Lord, I Love You, My Shield, My Tower

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Edmund P. Clowney (1917-2005) taught practical theology and was the first president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He wrote this adaptation of Psalm 18 in 1989 using a tune by the great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.

It’s not a common hymn. Perhaps it’s completely new to you.

“I love you, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” (Ps 18:1-2 ESV)

The text is still under copyright, but I think I can copy the first verse here to help our understanding.

  1. O Lord, I love you, my shield, my tow’r,
    my stronghold, my rock, my saving pow’r,
    I worship you! Bless your holy name!
    What unceasing praise your mercies claim!
Uncategorized

The Word Salad Days of America

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The word salad comes to us through the fourteenth century Old French word salade, which developed from the Latin salata. The term was derived from the Latin word for “salt,” originally referring to salted vegetables. It may be an American habit to use this word to refer strictly to garden salads. Something like chicken salad was invented in the mid-1800s (but that’s an entirely different, um, animal).

The 1953 Webster’s New International gives salad an alternate definition of “an incongruous, heterogenous, or haphazard mixture or collection.” That could fit many things, and for the last couple years, you may have run across the curious term word salad in your esoteric reading. It’s an immediately recognizable term; no definition required. Its use has sharply increased over the summer. It comes from psychiatry referring to the incoherent speech sometimes observed in dementia patients. I found this example in a textbook of notes taken in 1914: “Then again he made extremely affected speeches of incomprehensible word salad.”

It would take a while to research how the term came into popular use before 2022. I found a 1999 Billboard review of a rap album that notes “the schizoid nature of his word salad.” A 1997 issue of New York Magazine mentions “word salad” as a psychiatric term. Perhaps the breach was made by the writers of Boston Legal, who released an episode on Mar 28, 2006, entitled “Word Salad Days” in which a character develops a gibberish-talking syndrome.

But today, when we think of word salad, it’s important to remember the significance of words and salads, okay? Words are the bits and pieces of our sentences, right, and salads, you know, salads are green. Like kale. And lettuce. And don’t forget collards. I used to be sought out for my collard greens recipes. It was the best of the neighborhood. I had a reputation for greens, okay? But word salads, word salads remind me of growing up middle class, just like the American voters who will be voting for me if they want to Democracy to live to fight another day. Democracy is what this is all about. And what it’s all about is voting for me.

Sorry. What was I saying?

By the way, “salad days” is a Shakespearean turn of phrase in Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra says at the end of Act 1, “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood …”

What links can we share?

Rings of Power: The second season of Rings of Power has been coming out, and I haven’t cared to give it chance. I found a new YouTube channel from a guy who says he can’t stand it anymore. That was for episode six. Here’s the review of the first episode.

Fighting the Terrorists: “Meet the people risking their lives to speak out against the brutal terrorist group. Today: A Hezbollah fighter who became a voice of resistance.” Here’s a trailer for it.

(Illustration by Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator)

Bookselling, Non-fiction

On Bookselling and Encouraging a Desire for Books

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In his book on the bookselling business, Joseph Shaylor notes Dr. Johnson’s recommendation for sharing sales revenue among all participants in the year 1776, saying “the country bookseller selling a book published at twenty shillings” should retain 3 shillings 6 pence from the sale. No less than that is possible, the good doctor writes, because booksellers operate on paper-thin margins (ba-dum-ching). Writing in 1911, Shaylor notes the same was true during his career and makes this important business principle:

All retail establishments exist either to create a want or to supply one. This applies equally to a bookseller — either he must help to educate the public to be lovers of books, or he must simply exist to supply such books as an educated public requires. The former is to be desired, and the greater the inducements held out to encourage men and women of intellectual aptitude to be distributors of books the better it will be both for themselves and for the trade they represent.

— Shaylor, The Fascination of Books with Other Papers on Books & Bookselling

Perhaps even more than publishers, booksellers need to cultivate a market both of readers and people who appreciate owning books themselves. In that vein, David Kern, proprietor of Goldberry Books in Concord, NC, reviews The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. “As recently as 1993, 13,499 independently run bookshops were open across the country,” and yet historian Evan Friss states, “Americans have never really been readers.”

Last week for National Read-A-Book Day, a Philadelphia Barnes and Noble invited two dozen authors “to come down to the store, sit in the leather chair in the window display outfitted with a side table and lamp, and silently read a favorite book.” The store manager said her staff thought it a crazy idea, but the authors loved it.

Of course, all bookshops should be as attractive and picturesque as we imagine ourselves to be. Scrivener’s Books & Bookbinding in Buxton, Derbyshire fits the bill. Liv Clarke visited the other day and called it magical. The shop boasts five floors of books with a cellar housing “the smallest Victorian Museum in Buxton . . . found next to the buildings’ original stove.”

Uncategorized

Historic Spacewalk Today, Major Advance in Reusable Spacecraft

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SpaceX, an American spacecraft manufacturer, sent four astronauts into orbit today to enable two of them to execute spacewalk maneuvers. That’s one small step for man . . . no, that’s a major advance in spacecraft and spacesuit engineering.

Eric Berger of Ars Technica explains this as an achievement in reusable spacecraft. The Falcon 9 “will launch more than 100 times this year, something no government or company has ever done before.” It is “the world’s first orbital class reusable rocket,” according to SpaceX. It has reflown 302 times.

Music

Sunday Singing: Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness

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Today’s hymn comes from a lawyer and poet from Brandenburg-Prussia, Johann Franck (1618-1677). A biographer praises his hymns as “distinguished for unfeigned and firm faith,” avoiding the objectivity and congregational character of the older German hymns” for “a more personal, individual tone.” Originally “Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele,” our hymn “Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness” was published in Johann Crüger’s Geistliche Kirchen-Melodien (1649) to the tune heard above.

“How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light do we see light.” (Psalm 36:7-9 ESV)

1 Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness,
leave the gloomy haunts of sadness;
come into the daylight’s splendour,
there with joy thy praises render
unto him whose grace unbounded
hath this wondrous banquet founded:
high o’er all the heavens he reigneth,
yet to dwell with thee he deigneth.

2 Now I sink before thee lowly,
filled with joy most deep and holy,
as with trembling awe and wonder
on thy mighty works I ponder:
how, by mystery surrounded,
depth no mortal ever sounded,
none may dare to pierce unbidden
secrets that with thee are hidden.

3 Sun, who all my life dost brighten,
light, who dost my soul enlighten,
joy, the sweetest heart e’er knoweth,
fount, whence all my being floweth,
at thy feet I cry, my Maker,
let me be a fit partaker
of this blessed food from heaven,
for our good, thy glory, given.

4 Jesus, Bread of Life, I pray thee,
let me gladly here obey thee;
never to my hurt invited,
be thy love with love requited:
from this banquet let me measure,
Lord, how vast and deep its treasure;
through the gifts thou here dost give me,
as thy guest in heaven receive me.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Publishing

Digital Lending Library in Trouble with Publishers

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The Internet Archive may have lost its struggle with publishing companies over the “Fair Use” legality of its Open Library service. It argues that by purchasing print copies of books, it could legally digitize them and lend them on a one-to-one basis to readers around the world just like a regular library.

This week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling against The Internet Archive, saying its practice of controlled digital lending does not fall under an application of the Fair Use of copyrighted materials, according to Publishers Weekly.

“We conclude that IA’s use of the Works is not transformative,” the decision states. “Instead, IA’s digital books serve the same exact purpose as the originals: making authors’ works available to read.” The practice effectively substitutes the original work, which specifically runs contrary to the intent of Fair Use.

I can’t judge whether this is an appropriate application of the law, but it doesn’t look wrong from what I’ve read. The Internet has gotten out of hand in various ways. Maybe Open Library’s concept doesn’t work, but a tweaked version of it would.

In other news of publisher lawsuits, six of the big publishers along with the Author’s Guild are challenging Florida’s new law that requires schools to remove books with inappropriate sexual content. The suit specifically claims the term “pornographic” is undefined and takes no consideration of a book’s context.

Janie B. Cheaney gives a broad view of this and similar efforts to, as the Florida bill put it, “discontinue the use of any material the [district school] board does not allow a parent to read out loud.”

Scopes Monkey Trial: Historian Thomas Kidd reviews a new book on the Scopes Trial and doesn’t recommend it. “Author Brenda Wineapple calls America a ‘secular country founded on the freedom to worship.’ But various Christian demagogues in American history have tried to force people to worship God in a narrow-minded way, she warns.”

Reading: Brad East in “The Reading Lives of Pastors”— “It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. . . . Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?”

Ye Old Shoppe: Here’s a little bit on old business cards and store signage.

(Illustration by Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator)

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

Correcting Bad History is a Perpetual Task

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This week, Tucker Carlson once again gave us a sophomoric take on world events by producing an over two hour interview with a podcaster and historian who appears to emphasize minor views. He introduces the video this way: “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.”

I listened to portions of it. The two men pressed the point that you can’t ask certain questions about this part of history, can’t try to understand the Nazi’s point of view. Cooper says he thinks Churchill is the main villain of WWII, because Hitler’s goals were limited but he was pressed by Churchill’s lust for personal glory. He also painted the killing of Jews and other prisoners of war as a logistical problem. “We can’t keep feeding these people; wouldn’t it be more humane to kill them quickly?” he says, citing a German commander who suggested this.

Victor Davis Hanson calls him out. Hitler believed he would wipe out the Soviet Union and accomplish a few goals in the process.

True, some of the invading Wehrmacht officers may have been disturbed at the sheer mass of captives and Germans’ inability to offer even the bare essentials of humane treatment. But they quickly learned from Berlin’s doubling down on earlier eliminationist directives that they were not to worry about the millions of doomed Russian prisoners or the murders of Jews, given their deaths were consistent with prior Führer directives for the future resettling of western Russia. 

At Nuremberg and after the war, many veteran generals of the Eastern Front claimed they privately opposed Hitler’s orders of total war that entailed liquidation of communists and Jews and assumed the mass death of Russian POWs. But very few could prove that they had not received such orders or had bravely opposed their implementation.

Fiction, Reviews

Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

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I’ve never been inclined to pick up books based on movie franchises. The movies have been enough for me, but the Disney Star Wars list of sorry productions provoked me to seek out Star Wars novels. I learned Timothy Zahn’s trilogy was the best set, so I picked up Heir to the Empire, published in 1992.

“Now, for the first time: the authorized continuation of the legendary Star Wars saga . . .” The story picks up five years after Return of the Jedi, with the Rebel

forces trying to put together a new republic. Princess Leia is the leading figure in every diplomatic endeavor, which is increasingly difficult for the soon-to-be-mother of two. Her husband, Han Solo, is also working too much to make the new government as functional as it needs to be. Luke Skywalker has the smallest role of the three, that of friend, security guard, and last living Jedi. What can he do to train Leia and the children when the time comes?

What they don’t know is that an Imperial Grand Admiral has survived. They know the Empire still has loyalist planets, stormtroopers, Star Destroyers and other ships, but they don’t know that a gifted military strategist is rebuilding a fleet. Raids on Republic outposts look like mere harassment, but Grand Admiral Thrawn is working a long-term plan to bring every Republic planet to its knees, if not its grave.

Two things stand out about this novel. First, the characters sound like their movie representation. Some of that is probably fan-service, callbacks to movie dialogue, but it’s thrilling to read good characters in a good story. Second, it’s a solid story—coincidences or contrivances. Everyone has proper motivations, making reasonable decisions, and conflicting with each other naturally. At one point, the heroes get caught up in an Imperial raid, and they naturally conclude they’re being followed, but they aren’t. The bad guys were there for other reasons. No one acts like an idiot. No motivations shift inexplicably. And Luke comes through like a hero.

I’ll let you know how the next one goes when I get to it.