I find that my fine generalities have dashed themselves to pieces against the six very concrete children that I have. I live surrounded by a mixture of violence and loveliness, of music and insensitivity. I take my meals with clods and poets, but I am seldom certain which is which. Nowhere is my life less reducible to logic than in my children; nowhere are my elegant attempts at system ground more violently to powder than under the stumbling stone of the next generation. Far from having advice to give you, I am dumbfounded by them and admit it. And yet I rejoice too, for nowhere is there so much to keep me sane. I apologize in advance but I know only one word to describe it: It is absurd.
– Robert Capon, Bed and Board
Projecting our own problems onto others
Anyone who has spent much time in introspection has probably realized that we are most critical of other people that are the most like us. We see something in ourselves that we hate – something we put a lot of effort into to overcome, and when we see this same thing in another person, we are quick to jump on it. It’s the thing about them that bothers us the most. We may be able to easily brush off other annoying or offensive things that person does, but if it’s one of our own issues too, rather than feel sympathetic, we are more likely to find fault.
In his book Simply Christian, N.T. Wright brings this up at points out how it can pollute our charity and good intentions:
I remember the shock when I saw an old “cowboys and Indians” movie and realized that when I was young, I – like most of my contemporaries – would have gone along unquestioningly with the assumption that cowboys where basically good and Indians basically bad. The world has woken up to the reality of racial prejudice since then; but getting rid of it is like squashing the air out of a balloon. You deal with one corner only to find it popping up somewhere else. The world got together over apartheid and said, “This won’t do”; but at least some of the moral energy came from what the psychologists call projection – that is, condemning someone else for something we are doing ourselves. Rebuking someone on the other side of the world (while ignoring the same problems back home) is very convenient, and it provides a deep but spurious sense of moral satisfaction. (p.7)
Capon on onions
Robert Capon was an Episcopal priest and author, usually writing about theological matters. He also loved to cook, so he wrote a very unusual cookbook called The Supper of the Lamb. It does have recipes in it, but also many pages of steam-of-consciousness writing that ranges from kitchen techniques, natural beauty, theology, and so forth.
In the first chapter, he begins to tell us how to slice up an onion:
Next take one of the onions (preferably the best-looking), a paring knife, and a cutting board and sit down at the kitchen table. Do not attempt to stand at a counter through these opening measures. In fact, to do it justice, you should arrange to have sixty minutes or so free for this part of the exercise. Admittedly, spending an hour in the society of an onion may be something you have never done before. You feel, perhaps, a certain resistance to the project. Please don’t. As I shall show later, a number of highly profitable members of the race have undertaken it before you. Onions are excellent company.
And he goes on like this for 3-4 more pages before the onion is actually cut up and we can move along to the taters. Seriously. I guess that is why he says to set aside an entire hour for this the first time around.
A fascinating book, but you have to be in the right mood!
Excursions in baking
I’ve been enjoying our new kitchen quite a bit lately. There is enough counter space to actually work and our new Kitchen Aid mixer makes a task that used to seem complicated and messy into a pretty simple exercise. I’ve also been striving to throw less cash at the grocery store. So when in need of yummies, I’ve found I have most of the ingredients here at home! I’ve ended up baking three times already this week.
I started with some soft ginger cookies. I took some to the church picnic and also to the office and they were quickly devoured. Next, I tried something a little more unusual with these nutmeg currant butter cookies.
All growing up I never made anything but chocolate chip. It was fun to try something off the beaten path. I even ground the nutmeg fresh from a “nut” (or possibly “meg”) instead of using the stuff from the jar. I did have to procure some currants though, which thankfully only cost me $1.00 for plenty of them at the Co-op. My wife consulted the dictionary and informed me that I had been pronouncing currant incorrectly. It’s not cerr-ONT, but rather a homonym to current (as in up-to-date) and also current (of the ocean or river variety). If you’ve never had them before, they are like miniature raisins, though with not as strong of flavour.
I thought they were pretty good, though not something I would like to have that often. My son has munched through quite a few of the crumbs, since I keep handing them to him instead of (less healthy?) M&Ms when he comes into the kitchen snooping for goodies. My daughter on the other hand declared the nutmeg to be “spicy” and promptly spit out the bite a gave her. Oh well! These went not-as-quickly at the office.
Finally, last night I baked bread again. This time I used freshly-ground hard red flour from my own childhood farm in Oregon. My mother bought a bag of it to me while visiting last week. The taste of the loaf was incredible, but I still haven’t found a good recipe for whole wheat. I tried so hard to avoid a dense loaf this time that I overdid the rising and wetness of the dough. It was really light and fluffy, but fell apart when trying to slice it. I’ll keep trying.
Too many cooks spoil the art
I enjoy design work (web design, graphic design, page layout design, arranging furniture, etc.) but only when there are not too many people to please. One other person is good (like my wife). Two others starts to cause trouble. A committee of five meeting on what the new web site should look like is guaranteed to turn out something ugly, even if everyone on the team is perfectly competent in and of themselves, possessing reasonably good taste and design sensibility. And so, though I’m capable of navigating the social waters of such a meeting, the resulting product is often so disappointing, that I’d rather just butt out. I’ll let someone else have their way with the design. Even if I know of a way to improve upon it, to try and synthesize that with their ideas would actually make it worse.
The artist works best alone, or maybe with an assistant to bounce ideas of.
This is a another poem by Billy Collins called Instructions to the Artist.
It’s fun to imagine the evolving expression on the portrait painter’s face as his subject rattles off this list of parameters!
I wish my head to appear perfectly round
and since the canvas should be of epic dimensions,
please trace the circle with a dinner plate
rather than a button or a dime.
My face should be painted with an ant-like sense of detail;
pretend you are executing a street map
of Rome and that all the citizens
can lift thirty times their own weight.
The result should be a strained
but self-satisfied expression,
as if I am lifting a Volkswagen with one foot.
The body is no great matter;
just draw some straight lines
with a pencil and ruler.
I will not be around to hear the voice
of posterity calling me Stickman.
The background I leave up to you
but if there is to be a house,
lines of smoke rising from the chimney
should be mandatory.
Never be ashamed of kindergarten-
it is the alphabet’s only temple.
Also, have several kangaroos grazing
and hopping around in the distance,
an allusion to my world travels.
Some final recommendations:
I should like to appear hatless.
Kindly limit your palette to a single primary color, any one but red or blue.
Sign the painting on my upper lip
so your name will always be my mustache.
Though I fail to see how it is related to the rest of the poem, my favorite line is certainly:
Never be ashamed of kindergarten-it is the alphabet’s only temple.
There is a whole nother story wrapped up in that one.
Merton on being yourself
It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city? -Thomas Merton
What has God created you for and intended you for? It may not be what your parents thought, or what the preacher says, however good or rational-sounding those things may be at times. I think this quote can also pertain to jealousy. What someone else is doing is probably not your goal or your path.
Excellent Prose
I finished reading Peace Like a River by Leif Engle not long ago. My wife had told me it was really good after devouring it in one day during a trip to Seattle last year. In fact, it’s been one of the only books I’ve ever purchased for her as a gift that was a big hit. I’ve often misjudged. Tonight, she started reading it again and commenting on how good the prose was. Good compared to what? Compared to the amateurish writing in one of my favorite fantasy novels when I was a child, that’s what. And a lot of other things too.
I used to eat up in everything in Raymond Feist’s many volumes detailing the lives of kings and wizards in his world of Midkemia. That all started with Magician. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the writing in those books is incredibly bad. I’m not talking about the story. It’s pretty cool. Some of the characters are pretty interesting too. But the actual writing, the prose, the descriptions, the dialogs, the imagery – it’s junk. I could write that stuff. If I did try to write a novel, I probably would end up writing that stuff. But not Leif Enger. His writing is amazing.
OK. So just about anybody is better than the writing of a lesser-known fantasy smith who used to design board games. How about the famous Umberto Eco? His The Name of the Rose is held up as a masterwork of contemporary literature. And it’s really good. But it’s got nothing on Leif Enger’s stuff. He can turn a sentence in such a way that makes you feel like you are there – like you are looking into the heart of the character, even though he is just describing them eating their oatmeal in the morning. To cut Eco some slack though, I realize that he wrote the book in Italian before it was translated…
Anyway, back to Peace Like a River. It’s a novel. It takes place in the midwest U.S. during the 1950s. It has the feel of a western. The story kicks off really well but then stalls about halfway through. It picks up at the end though. The plot and characters are OK, but that’s not why the book is great. The book is great for passages like this, where the protagonist’s young sister is introduced:
And then to school, where I swam upstream through geography and grammar and where Swede, who disliked long division, tried to win her teacher’s favor by composing heroic verse. What was Miss Nelson supposed to think when Swede, dimpled and blond, coming up on nine year old, handed in a peom like “Sunny Sundown Delivers the Payroll”?
The men who worked the Redtail Mine were fed up with the boss.
They swarmed around his office door like blackflies round a hoss.
“No wages these three months!” one cried. “Let’s hang the lousy rat!
He’ll starve our very children, boys, while he himself gets fat!”
And true enough, behind the door, a fat man shook and wept;
The wobbling bags beneath his eyes said this man hadn’t slept.
A messenger had brought him word that made him feel his age:
Valdez, last night – the third straight month! – had robbed the payroll stage…Swede had lost her heart to the West early on, something that gave Dad no end of delight. He supplied her with frayed Zane Grey paperbacks thrown out by the school library, Wilderness Trek and Robber’s Roost and of necessity Riders of the Purple Sage. Swede popped them down like Raisinets. You have to admit she learned the language.
Now, if it was Fiest writing at the beginning of his career, it would have come out like this:
Reuben’s sister Swede wasn’t good at math, but she liked to write. She had a Clint Eastwood poster on her wall and was always asking her mom for a horse. When she didn’t get one, she took up writing about horses and the things that went with them. Like cowboys. Cowboys with +2 attack six-shooters and 100 hit points. She was in the fourth grade.
Eco might have put it this way:
Reuben descended the stairway in good humor. While waiting for suppertime, he came upon his beloved sister, seated at the kitchen table, having procured several cookies from the larder. “I’ve written an opening to my new epic, brother.” she pronounced. Swede was young, not yet in her tenth year, but well versed in the lore of the horse lords across the sea. Regrettably, her enthusiasm to travel there had been dampened by her father’s being summoned to the synod of 1482 in Wiems, where a great many heresy’s were bought to light…
(About six pages of largely irrelevant back-story later…)
She threw back her blond hair as she cleared her throat and began to speak.
An improvement, of sorts. I guess.
So check out Peace Like a River. You’ll dig it. Read it slow so you don’t miss the wonderful words. I think Enger has a new book out too. Maybe I’ll pick up that one some time. I wouldn’t have known what I was missing beforehand.
Skewing up online news
A few years ago, before I had a regular set of blogs to read every day, before I used a feed reader, I was a complete Digg junkie. Digg is a news site that lets users vote for what stories to promote to the front page or to bury. Now I haven’t used the site in years, largely because the quality and relevance of the stories that were promoted fell sharply as the site became popular. This recent commenter (“Samual Iglesias”) at Tech Crunch articulated remarkably well my own thoughts on the matter.
I think if anything hurts Digg, it’s the abundance of sensationalist headlines that simultaneously lead to spottily fact-checked and poorly written articles (suggesting that people don’t READ these things, just “digg” the sentiment expressed), and also alienate users of minority demographics with respect to the Digg community. A story that casts Bush in a positive light? A story that criticizes iPhone? A positive story about religion, or the (possibly detrimental) politicization of scientific communities? If Digg expands, it’s into its fixed demographic of h4×0rs and mostly left young male adults, and I’m not sure what conquering this self-informed, heavily participatory group will mean for the future of the internet. Is this revolutionary in the grand sense?
On Jeolousy
I’ve been thinking about jealousy quite a bit lately. Along those lines, here is one more piece by Billy Collins before I have to return the library book.
The Rival Poet
The column of your book titles,
always introducing your latest one,
looms over me like Roman architecture.It is longer than the name of an Italian countess, longer
than this poem will probably be.Etched on the head of a pin,
my own production would leave room for
The lord’s Prayer and many dancing angels.
No matter.In my revenge dream I am the one
poised on the marble staircase
high above the crowded ballroom.
A retainer in livery announces me
and the Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella
Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari.You are the one below
fidgeting in your rented tux
with some local Cindy hanging all over you.
What people actually remembered about Jesus
I couldn’t pass up reposting this quote about Jesus:
But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus’ love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn’t that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.
For those of us really excited about miracles and also to those really excited about theology, maybe we ought to just touch the lepers.