Religion

Going out and playing with God

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One of the recurring irritations of my life has been one of my brothers. This brother, from an early age, made it his constant purpose to try to get me to go outside and do stuff.

My idea of a good time is to stay in the house with a book. A house to be inside of, a good book, and chocolate are about all I need for perfect contentedness.

This was, naturally, highly frustrating for my brother, who loved the outdoors and wanted somebody to play with, but was stuck with me for a sibling. As a playmate I left much to be desired. Experience had taught me that if I yielded to his importunities, the result would be 1) some game in which he’d beat me, and then, 2) a fight in which he would beat me again. This was a programme whose charm wore off at a pretty early stage.

For my brother, of course, as a normal human being, going outside and playing was a good thing in itself. My refusal to help him out with that was a major frustration in his young life. Continue reading Going out and playing with God →

Authors

The Poe I Didn’t Know

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I just read that Dostoevsky said E.A. Poe was “an enormously talented writer” and based his detective in Crime and Punishment on Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know this:

Poe wrote most of his greatest works while living in Philadelphia. Tell-Tale Heart. Fall of the House of Usher. Black Cat. Murders in the Rue Morgue. Mystery of Marie Roget. Masque of Red Death. Gold Bug. Pit and the Pendulum. It was the city that transformed his genius into the greatness we all know and love. And I’m not talking about all that Liberty Bell, Birthplace of Independence crap. It was Philly’s gothic, chaotic environment in the early 19th century that had an indelible impact on the style and content of Poe’s work.

The doomed family of the House of Usher was conjured by Poe in Philadelphia. William Wilson and his evil doppelganger took form there. The madman of “The Tell-Tale Heart” made his murderous confession under the dark skies of the Quaker City. C. Auguste Dupin, the prototype of Sherlock Holmes and all fictional detectives to follow, sprung from Poe’s fertile pen while the author was reading the daily criminal mysteries that plagued the city. The detective/mystery story was invented in Philadelphia! (Why a mystery writer convention is held in any city but the one that invented the genre is beyond me, too.)

What did they teach me in school?

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Games and Quizes

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Also from the Drexel PG blog, a link to a loaded game site, Sporcle. I’m proud to say I could not name all of the U.S. Presidents, and the ones I couldn’t remember are the ones no one else could either, except Chester Arthur. I knew him, and most people don’t apparently. Others people couldn’t name are Pierce, Buchanan, McKinley, um, Taylor . . . Harding . . . Here’s the test, so you play yourself.

Blogs, Socials

New Blog and City Words

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The Drexel Publishing Group has a new blog in which students will be contributing. Prof Stein has the details.

Today’s post from Jen Fromal is interesting. She talks about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and the idea that every city has a word that defines it.

Rome’s word is “sex” and Naples’ word is “fight.” Gilbert’s Swedish friend says that Stockholm’s word is “conform,” and Gilbert concludes that New York City’s word is “achieve” (as opposed to Los Angeles’ word of “succeed.”)

What do you think of this? I wonder if Washington D.C.’s word is “control.”

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The Friday Fight: Losing a Shield

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You should know that I scanned YouTube for other videos, live steel combat with knights or other non-vikings, but what I found was sorry. I almost posted a video with some bold language in the sidebar from the video’s sponsor, but it wasn’t a fight–it was an instructional talk.

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Heads and tails

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All these years I thought I was going gray. Turns out I’m a peroxide blonde.

Which just goes to show that one of my Viking friends was right when he said, “I’m not getting grayer. I’m getting blonder.”

And here’s a story about a woman in New Zealand, an amputee, who got the Weta special effects people (the folks behind all the neat stuff in “The Lord of the Rings”) to make her a prosthetic mermaid’s tail.

Part of me thinks that’s a little creepy. But most of me thinks it’s pretty neat.

What bothers me is that the tail the technician is shown sculpting in the pictures doesn’t appear to be the same tail the woman is wearing in the photos. Perhaps there were alpha and beta versions. Or perhaps they’re making them available to the general market.

Tips on both stories: Fox News.

Bookselling

The Economy is Up

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At least, it is for sales of Any Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and guns.

“‘Americans are flocking to buy and read Atlas Shrugged because there are uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day’ said Yaron Brook, Executive Director at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.” I haven’t read the book. Is it a tragedy? I keep thinking about buying a gun too, but I haven’t. I hear the supply is down because demand is so far up. No need to fear, Americans. Nancy Pelosi said she wasn’t interested in restricting second amendment rights for the time being.

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The Economy Is Down

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Humanities departments are among the hardest hit. In this post, Joel Mark comments:

The recession is not what is hitting the humanities departments of most of our major universities. Intellectual poverty and dishonesty are what is hitting them, in the name of such ideologies as postmodernism, neo-Marxism, socialism, political correctness, multi-culturalism and sheer selfish and immature anger (especially in the arts).

I love the humanities and have taught for several years in the humanities department of a university in California. The best place to study and learn about what we call the humanities today, however, is often as far away as possible from a major modern university.

If humanities departments in universities do suffer, that constitutes our best hope for a future rise in our actual learning in the real ‘humanities’ far from the angry ivory towers. So, I am optimistic.

Religion

Ash Wednesday thoughts

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Over at Patrick O’Hannigan’s The Paragraph Farmer, he quotes Peter Kreeft’s response to the question: “But is not God a lover rather than a warrior?”

A: No, God is a lover who is a warrior. The question fails to understand what love is — what the love that God is, is. Love is at war with hate, betrayal, selfishness, and all love’s enemies. Love fights. Ask any parent. Yuppie-love, like puppy-love, may be merely “compassion” (the fashionable word today), but father-love and mother-love are war.

Read the whole thing. It’s not long.



In a somewhat related vein, I had reason to consult one of Sigrid Undset’s novels today (The Axe, the first novel of her less-famous tetralogy, The Master of Hestviken, which the author preferred to the more famous Kristin Lavransdatter, and I think I agree). Here’s a speech from one character:

“It is an easy matter, Olav, to be a good Christian so long as God asks no more of you than to hear sweet singing in church, and to yield Him obedience while He caresses you with the hand of a father. But a man’s faith is put to the test on the day God’s will is not his. But now I will tell you what Bishop Torfinn said to me one day—it was of you and your suit we were speaking. ‘God grant,’ he said, ‘that he may learn to understand in time that whoso is minded to do as he himself wills will soon enough see the day when he will find he has done that which he had never willed.’”

Olav looked earnestly before him. Then he nodded. “Aye. That is true. I know it.”

Book Reviews, Creative Culture