“Author Stephen Atlrogge says that there’s a conspiracy affecting every person who has ever lived,” reported the publisher Crossway’s blog. Atlrogge has written The Greener Grass Conspiracy to explain the problem and recommend a solution. This photo, however, says he should have given his book another title.
Silence (with words)
I don’t often travel alone, and when I do, I don’t turn on the TV. Watching it isn’t how I want to spend the little time I have in the room, and since my on a working trip, I don’t think my managers want me to lollygag around the room for long, especially when I could be lollygagging right under their noses. (Lollygag is a distinctly American word from 1862, perhaps deriving from the old world loll meaning “to relax completely.”)
I know many Christians will approve of my habit of ignoring the hotel room TV, because it guards me from any temptation to watch the soft porn or worse which is usually available on premium cable channels. (Pornography, by the way, was first used as an English word in 1858. It comes from a similar Greek word which meant “writing about prostitutes.” I wonder how many models or actors would want to think of themselves as prostitutes.) I wonder if a growing number of other believers, those who vocally criticize “fundamentalists” for hiding from the world in their church-bunkers, would see what I do as hiding from the world also or maybe a lack of self-control due to a prudish morality.
(A prude is an excessively modest or discreet person. The word comes from an old French world, which meant “good, virtuous, modest.” The word had variations for male and female, the male version meaning “a brave man.”)
Regardless any criticism, I think leaving the TV off is one step in cultivating an acceptance of silence, a small detox from the constant noise in our media-saturated world. Doing that should help build contentment, self-control, and even purity. How can I surrender my indefatigable pride to the Lord of Life if I hide in a bunker made by the world markets? Isn’t that one of the many meanings of Psalm 119?
Herring shortage. Women, minorities suffer most.
The redoubtable Anthony Sacramone, most amusing of the Lutheran bloggers (OK, it’s a low bar) has done it again. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
His recently resurrected Strange Herring blog hasn’t been updated since March 27. And we all know what that means. Mr. Sacramone has lost interest again. He’s only been back at it since February, and already the Herring languishes like a dead… well, like a dead herring.
I suppose I ought to be grateful for what I can get. I try to be clever on this blog, but I’m seldom hilarious. I’m not capable of the consistent high level of mirth that Sacramone generates when he’s on. No doubt it takes something out of a fellow. Perhaps it causes an amusement deficiency in him, forcing him to retreat to a basement hideaway and read Sylvia Plath while depilitating himself with salad tongs, until his system regenerates itself.
At least Doktor Luther In the 21st Century is still tweeting. I don’t tweet myself, or follow tweets, but I read Doktor Luther’s here.
I shall note that today was the actual beginning of spring, for me. It was the first night I have taken my walk by the lake since last fall. The temperature was almost sixty, which is a little cold for me, but a real man would probably call it perfect. I returned home without any injuries that I’m aware of, so let the revels begin!
I shall wear the ends of my trousers rolled, I think.
The road has two shoulders
Two stories tonight, whose common thread is authors who do non-admirable things.
First of all, First Thoughts directs us to a Salon.com article by a woman who tells “How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood.”
My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously. She agreed, dissolving Sunday church and Bible study with one swift signature. Mom didn’t mind; she was agnostic and knew we didn’t need religion to be good people. But a disdain for faith wasn’t the only reason he wrote God out of my childhood. There was simply no room in our household for both Jesus Christ and my father’s one true love: Ayn Rand.
I was hoping for a story about how the author found her way back to faith, but she says nothing more about that. Mostly it’s the story of how her father used Objectivist principles as an excuse to neglect his children.
Then, from Instapundit, a link to a Reason article by a fellow who set about re-tracing John Steinbeck’s route in his book, Travels With Charlie (which was very big back when I was in high school). His conclusion is that most of what Steinbeck reports is impossible, or is contradicted by the record.
It’s possible Steinbeck and Charley stopped to have lunch by the Maple River on October 12 as they raced across North Dakota. But unless the author was able to be at both ends of the state at the same time—or able to push his pickup truck/camper shell “Rocinante” to supersonic speeds—Steinbeck didn’t camp overnight anywhere near Alice 50 years ago. In the real world, the nonfiction world, Steinbeck spent that night 326 miles farther west, in the Badlands, staying in a motel in the town of Beach, taking a hot bath. We know this is true because Steinbeck wrote about the motel in a letter dated October 12 that he sent from Beach to his wife, Elaine, in New York.
Two writers, one from the far right, the other from the left. Both weighed and found wanting, by at least one reader, but for very different reasons. These are the besetting sins of liberals and conservatives.
I, of course, occupy the exact Middle. I look on both sides with condescension. The extent to which some people see me as partisan is precisely the extent to which the values of our society are warped. (Ahem.)
I expect most people feel that way, wherever they sit on the political/philosophical spectrum. Do the real extremists do the same? Did Stalin ever look at anyone and say, “Boy, he’s taking this Marxist dialectic a little too far”? Did Torquemada ever look at somebody else and say, “Hey, brother, you need to apply a little grace!”?
90s TV Nostalgia
The last generation to have TV as their major media source is nostalgic for the good ole days of 90s programing. How could Nickelodeon turn down an opportunity like that?
This brief NPR report is interesting, because it states that 20-somethings are so deluged with media throughout the day they will relax in front of the TV with familiar programming, a single media source taking them to their childhood comfort-zones.
The wit of Stillman
On Sunday I watched my weekly Netflix rental, this one a movie I’d only seen once before—Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan.
I’m going to have to buy the whole Whitman trilogy, delightful films that yield increasing rewards with each viewing. Stillman is apparently a Christian of some kind (for years he’s been trying unsuccessfully to do a movie about believers in the Caribbean. Metropolitan opens with the chords of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”).
Stillman delights in turning cultural expectations on their heads. In Metropolitan, his first film, he portrays Manhattan “Yuppies” (one character insists they ought to be called “Urban Haute Bourgeouise”) as sympathetic and even mildly disadvantaged. In Barcelona, two American cousins, a businessman and a naval officer, deal with the European narrowmindedness and prejudice. And The Last Days Of Disco, set in Manhattan in a strangely ambivalent time period, celebrates the discotheque as a place of joy and a strange kind of innocence.
At one point in Metropolitan, Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) quotes a Lionel Trilling review of Mansfield Park to debutante Audrey (Carolyn Farina), in order to explain his dislike for Jane Austen. Audrey asks him what books of Austen’s he’s read. He says, “None. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.” The great joke is that the film itself is pure Jane Austen, though the comedy of manners has been transported to a small fortress of civility in a barbarian land. Continue reading The wit of Stillman
Luther on the Call
“Those who operate without a proper call seek no good purpose. God does not bless their labors. They may be good preachers, but they do [not] edify. Many of the fanatics of our day pronounce words of faith, but they bear no good fruit, because their purpose is to turn men to their perverse opinions.” – Martin Luther
Spiders in Pakistan
Here’s a story worthy of April Fool status, if it were not true. “With more than a fifth of the country submerged, millions of spiders climbed into trees to escape the rising floodwaters.” As a result, many trees are knit together with spider webs. The eery pictures look like a Ted Burton creation, but in a more positive light, the mosquito count is way down.
Harsh reality
DATELINE HOLLYWOOD: A spokesperson for the Me Too Channel announced today the addition of an exciting new reality to show to their fall lineup.
The program is to be entitled, “Reality Show Reality Show,” and will feature four teams of contestants who will be transported around the nation by livestock truck, following a route determined by a GPS device set on “Random.” The object of the competition will be to find some area of life that has not yet been covered in a reality show. Participants will have points deducted from their scores for any sign of taste, modesty, or empathy for others. Weekly losers will be forced to remain on the program.
In related news, attorneys in Los Angeles announced a class action suit on behalf of every person in America who has not yet been a reality show contestant. “We are suing because it’s obvious to the meanest intelligence that absolutely no talent, brains, or skill of any kind is necessary to be a reality show contestant,” said chief litigator E. Cleveland Weckmeyer. “Therefore all Americans, however feckless, ignorant, or maladroit have the same right to be on such a program as the people who’ve already made money off such appearances. Let me add that if anything ought to be a basic right in a great country like America, it’s reality. Our plaintiffs have been denied their right to reality, and we intend to redress that wrong. Additionally, they’ll get a full dose of reality once they see our legal fees.”
Old school
Every Thursday I get a copy of my home town newspaper, The Kenyon Leader, in the mail. It doesn’t take me long to read it. It wouldn’t in fact take long if I read it all through, but generally I just go to the back page and look at the obituaries, to see if any more of my classmates have died. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was reading about the deaths of my friends’ parents, but now it’s mostly us. Not that we didn’t lose some surprisingly early—a statistically significant number, it seems to me. There was the girl with juvenile diabetes who excelled at playing the piano (she was the first to go), and the most popular guy in class with the girls (whom I envied intensely); he died in Vietnam. And the foreign-born boy who was only with us the last couple years, and never quite fit in. I forget what he died of. The big, tall guy with the Czechoslovakian name we used to tease about being a “bohonk” (but admitted to our circle of friends, a group I personally consider the elite). I don’t recall how he died either. Another guy dropped dead of a heart attack in California, apparently without warning. All within the first decade. I may have forgotten some. Our original strength was only 68 people, mind you.
Come to think of it, I think the rate of death has actually slowed down in the last decade or so. Those of us who’ve made it this far seem likely to last a little longer.
No classmates died in time for this issue, but there was a death of sorts. Our old high school building suffered a major fire. Arson is suspected. Continue reading Old school