I was going to review a book tonight, but I forgot my Kindle at work, and so can’t re-check my highlights. Ah well. This is the busiest bookselling week of the year, and I’m training a new assistant. That about exhausts my multitasking skills.

Our friend Ori Pomerantz directed me to this music video (sorry, embedding disabled) by a Quebecois musical group. I suppose I read my own beliefs into it, but it seems to me a succinct post mortem on the whole social history of the 20th Century.

Of course it’s a good thing that we have more options in our lives than our ancestors did. I take great pride, as a Christian pietist, in the part we played in creating an order where a man (or woman) doesn’t have to be exactly what his father (or her mother) was.

But I think we all sense that something has gone missing, too. We’re plants uprooted from the soil. We aren’t sure what we are, or where we fit in the scheme of things.

Something has been lost. Our great disagreements in this culture (I think) consist in deciding what particular things out of the past we need to carry with us as we go forward.

By the way, Ori lives in the Austin, Texas area, as does our friend Aitchmark. Let’s pray for everybody down there in the midst of the fire danger.

From our interdisciplinary desk for art and current events, we ask you to consider the chilling, almost fantastic photos in this essay, Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline.

Somebody on Facebook shared this YouTube video, which just pleases me no end.

It’s a digital reconstruction of the city of Bergen, Norway around the year 1350 AD. No doubt it means more to me than to you, because I’ve been to Bergen several times, and recognize the general outlines. (It’s Sissel’s home town, though I’ve never had time to properly stalk her.) Some of the stone buildings are still standing, and the row of buildings along the wharf still exists in principle, though the structures have burned down and been replaced several times in the interval. It’s called Bryggen, “the wharf.” Used to be Tyskebryggen, “the German wharf,” until the late unpleasantness of the 1940s. Shortly after the time of this video, the German Hanseatic league took over Bergen’s trade and established its Norwegian headquarters on that location.

I love this stuff. One of my Facebook friends noted that there are no people, but then he remembered that it was about this time the Black Death came to Norway. So everybody was probably either dying or in hiding.

Maybe the fact I grew up with backyard gardens compels me to plant vegetables of my own, but I’m not very good at it. I haven’t studied techniques or seeds much, and when we have an abundance of zucchini or tomatoes, I don’t necessarily know what to do with them. I’m trying to save my tomatoes from the birds lately, and my dwarf okra seems to be going well so far—no okra crop yet. In the last three years, I’ve planted herbs in what used to be a wildflower garden. The rosemary was a great first choice, being a hearty grower. I finally got basil to grow this year. Apparently, I don’t have the knowledge or knack for growing food from seed, so my previous attempts at growing basil never “took root”—snort! I crack me up.

We have thyme, sage, mint (a vicious weed), and oregano now. I thought the oregano would die at the end of the year, Continue reading Flowering Oregano →

Getting back to more serious matters now, take a look at these stunning sculptures cut from the pages of books.

On July 30, The Wall Street Journal published an excellent interview with English psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, who writes splendid stuff under the pen name “Theodore Dalrymple,” about Anders Behring Breivik and the Norwegian murders. Dalrymple worked for many years with criminals in English prisons, and so is well qualified to discuss murder in the context of European society.

The human impulse to explain the inexplicably horrific is revealing, according to Dr. Dalrymple, in two respects—one personal, one political. First, it says something about us that we feel compelled to explain evil in a way that we don’t feel about people’s good actions. The discrepancy arises, he says, “because [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau has triumphed,” by which he means that “we believe ourselves to be good, and that evil, or bad, is the deviation from what is natural.”

For most of human history, the prevailing view was different. Our intrinsic nature was something to be overcome, restrained and civilized. But Rousseau’s view, famously, was that society corrupted man’s pristine nature. This is not only wrong, Dr. Dalrymple argues, but it has had profound and baleful effects on society and our attitude toward crime and punishment. For one thing, it has alienated us from responsibility for our own actions. For another, it has reduced our willingness to hold others responsible for theirs.

This year’s winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for Bad Writing is the shortest entry to win in 30 years. Here are the 26 winning words Suzanne Fondrie submitted for this profound, profound honor:

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

Also of note, this year’s runner-up is a local man, Rodney Reed of Ooltewah, Tennessee. See what he wrote here. (via Books, Inq.)

I have nothing, nothing, nothing, tonight. I’ve been fairly productive this week, but I’ve felt as if I’ve been slogging through Redi-Mix every day. Depressed about Norway, I guess, plus a personal anniversary coming up that I’d just as soon ignore.

Anyway, First Thoughts comes to my rescue with this link–a masterful article from The Atlantic on Introversion, by Jonathan Rauch. Introversion is only one among my sparkling constellation of personality quirks, but I always like to see someone trying to raise the consciousness of all those extroverts out there, running around slapping people on the back and never meeting strangers.

Are introverts misunderstood? Wildly. That, it appears, is our lot in life. “It is very difficult for an extrovert to understand an introvert,” write the education experts Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. (They are also the source of the quotation in the previous paragraph.) Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

Thomas Cole, Alfred Bierstadt, and other painters who tried to recreate western American in the 1800s are exhibited in the Seattle Art Museum and reviewed by Laura Haertel for the California Literary Review. Ms. Haertel points to Cole for the exhibits theme:

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden. The wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.” -from Thomas Cole’s Essay on American Scenery, 1836

I’d wear sackcloth if I had any.

It appears I was wrong, and need to apologize to all Muslims.

Current reports tell that the vile, despicable murderer in Norway (current death count 91) is Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian national. He has variously been described as a Freemason, a radicalized former supporter of the conservative Norwegian Fremskritt (Progress) Party, and (according to some accounts) a “conservative Christian.”

If this is true, it makes this already unspeakable act of infamy a cosmic one. It is likely to spell the end of historic Christianity in Norway.

The precise opposite of the burden of my prayers for many years.

Even if it turns out, as in the case of Timothy McVeigh, that he’s not actually a Christian believer, we can expect the “Breivik was a Christian” meme to take hold, as it has with the self-worshiping McVeigh.

This is horrible. Horrible.