Writing

Is It Related to Killer Tomatoes?

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Toby Young criticizes a recent book-length critique of snark. Not The Snark, but being snarky, as in mean and harsh or witty, mean, and harsh. Apparently, the book on snark doesn’t correct for bias. “Thus when Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly attack Hillary Clinton, they are guilty of snark, but when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert attack George W. Bush they are appealing to civic virtue.”

Now, I’m feeling poetic. I must look up that Lewis Carroll poem:

The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.

“If only you’d spoken before!

It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,

With the Snark, so to speak, at the door! Continue reading Is It Related to Killer Tomatoes? →

Uncategorized

You Believe That Because You’re Crazy

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Stuart Buck analyzes an argument on education: “Knowing a lot of stuff may seem harmless, albeit insufficient, but the problem is that efforts to shape schooling around this goal, dressed up with pretentious labels like “cultural literacy,” have the effect of taking time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to think.”

Mr. Buck points out the odd idea that learning things doesn’t aid a person in thinking. He says, “The real problem with Alfie Kohn’s argument here is not just that he’s wrong, but that he assumes that he’s so obviously and indisputably right that no one could possibly disagree with him. To Kohn, trying to get kids to learn facts somehow prevents or precludes critical thinking — and this is so obvious that no one could really think that it’s important for students to learn facts.”

Poetry

“Outside the inn” by Andrew Hudgins

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On the way out, I gripped his arm, squeezed, let go.

He was talking to another black suit

—we were all black suits for the funeral—

and his bicep shifted in my grip,

lax. (Had he been ill?) We smiled, nodded.

That was all, and, for old friends,

sufficient. Outside the inn, peonies, those

great nodding heads, unstable bobbers, climbed

the wall and spilt onto the roof, storming the inn.



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Music, Religion

Not in praise of praise music

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I note that the bloated plutocrats who run television have chosen to put “House” opposite “Chuck” on the schedule tonight. Thus am I torn between two monosyllabically titled series that I especially enjoy.

I’ll have to go with “House.” “Chuck” is great, and even has a hot girl character named Walker, but Gregory House is the one character on television with whom I most identify. The pain of losing “House” will be greater than that of losing “Chuck.”

Someday (probably when I’m old, blind and deaf) I’ll get Tivo.

I went to a different church this past Sunday. Actually I’ve gone to this different church for the past two weeks. I was contemplating changing my membership (same national church body, different congregations).

As you may have noted from occasional blog posts of mine, my mild enthusiasm for what is called “praise music” in church has cooled over the years to indifference, and has now settled into plain loathing. Some people hate the music, but I can live with the music. It’s the lyrics that scratch my chalkboard. There are exceptions (I can think of exactly one, which we never use in our church anymore), but praise song lyrics are pretty generally amateurish, banal in sentiment, incoherent in theology, and repetitious. Some of them are like a slap in the face to anybody who’s ever attempted to write a decent song lyric. Continue reading Not in praise of praise music →

Religion, Writing

When Is a Biblical Quotation Not a Quote from the Bible?

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This afternoon, my good wife asked me a simple question. “Where does it say God is a father to the fatherless and a husband to the widow?” As I was sitting at the computer, tethered to that fount of all knowledge, the InterWeb, I looked it up. “A father to the fatherless” comes from Psalm 68:5, but the phrase that follows is either a judge or defender of the widow depending on your translation. Looking up the Hebrew word in question, I see that judge, advocate, and defender are the ideas at hand, close to but not actually a husband. A couple verses in Deuteronomy speak of God the Father’s intent to protect widows and bring justice to those who would harm them. Where is the phrase “husband to the widow?” It doesn’t appear to be in the Bible, unless it came from an old translation which is no longer in use.

More irritating than not finding a quotation you felt strongly about is finding a couple articles which claim to have read the verse. A couple writers said, “I came across a verse that said that God is a husband to the widow and a father to the fatherless.” No reference, of course, but how can people write so carelessly that they don’t double check or reference their biblical quotations?

Or did I just not find the right verse? Any idea where this phrase “husband to the window” came from?

Religion

Herding Norwegians

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Some days a blog topic leaps out at me and takes me by the proverbial throat. Other days I’m like a wallflower at a dance, watching all the topics foxtrot past; everyone else in a couple and me the odd man out.

Not that I ever went to a dance.

So I shall free-associate. The thing I heard today that impressed me most was something a pastor said at the meeting of the board of the Georg Sverdrup Society, which I attended in my capacity as Journal Editor.

He was talking about the history of Scandinavian Lutherans in America.

In general, he said, there were two kinds of Swedes in America—those who belonged to the One Lutheran Church (called the Augustana Synod), and those who left Lutheranism altogether and became Baptists or Evangelical Free Church or nothing at all.

And among the Danes there were also two sorts—those who belonged to the One Lutheran Church (called, I think, the Danish Synod), and those who left Lutheranism altogether and became Baptists or Pentecostals or Salvation Army (for instance) or nothing at all. (My mother, who was half Norwegian, half Danish, was raised a Methodist, and some of her family were Baptists). Continue reading Herding Norwegians →

Authors, The Press

More Horror: Books and Salt!

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Over 100 writers are begging the Washington Post to keep Book World in print. You must, you must, you must, they said. If you don’t print, we won’t be read.

The Post said it needs to cut costs, so the stand-alone book section must go. Current circulation for its Sunday edition is 866,057; daily editions are read by 622,714 (Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations FAS-FAX Report – 9/30/2008). I wonder what ideas they bandied about. Scott Karp has a good marketing idea:

“It’s Sunday, time to unplug, shut off the Blackberry, and take a break.

Relax, kick back, and catch up with The Washington Post Sunday Edition”

I wonder if WaPo thought of cutting the gossip/tabloidish stuff. Or the reverse idea, adding gossip to the books section. “PHOTO ESSAY: Skinny Celebrities, how revealing can you get when you don’t have anything to reveal? And Journalist Megan Basham’s new book argues that women would rather stay at home than join the work force.”

And now, more horrific news: New York leadership is murmuring against the perceived excess of salt, suggesting that restaurants volunteer today to use less salt or they may be forced to volunteer tomorrow. Scott Stein says, “If I wrote that, readers would recognize it as satire, an exaggeration of government bullying, and maybe even accuse me of being unsubtle.” (via Books, Inq.)

Uncategorized

The Friday Fight: Hold the Line

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Let’s return to the fight, this time from our sideline camera. I wish we could bring you the action close up, but our close up camera was axed in a manner of speaking–not due to budget cuts. This is a longer fight than we had for a few weeks, and it’s a fascinating display of tactics.

Fiction

The horror! The horror!

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Our friend Loren Eaton writes about the horror genre today over at his blog, I Saw Lightning Fall. He argues that conservatives ought to embrace the genre, quoting Stephen King saying that horror is intrinsically conservative. He also embeds a trailer for a horror film that seems to have a pro-life message (it appears to have been out since August last. Has anyone heard of it? Did it go straight to DVD, as one would expect would happen to a conservative flick?).

Now, as you know, I don’t care for horror at all myself, largely because I’m a fraidy-cat. Life is already scarier than I like; why should I pay somebody to make me afraid?

But you folks out there; normal people–what do you think about horror?

Book Reviews, Creative Culture