literary quote of the day (1/7/2011)
“By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes."
-2nd Witch, Macbeth, Shakespeare
“By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes."
-2nd Witch, Macbeth, Shakespeare
Today was the…
1. First MERT meeting of the semester.
2. First class of the semester: “Sermon on the Mount & Story."
3. First office hour of the semester.
4. First time sledding this year.
5. First day of the rest of my life.
“Papa, I just had to come in and say I love you."
I guess it couldn’t wait until I finished my shower. That’s okay; I’ll let it slide. This time.
Number of of posts on this site in 2008: 47
Number of posts on this site in 2009: 107
Number of posts on this site in 2010: 96
Number of posts on this site so far in 2011: 3
Number of posts the author of this site has set for himself as a goal this year: 300
Number of days this year the author of this site will likely have absolutely nothing to say: 365
Number of entries this year in which the author will reference p90x: 93
Percentage of entries in the history of this blog that have been fictional or semi-fictional: 89
Percentage of entries in 2010 that were simply quotations from other authors: 62
Percentage of entries in the history of blog that have been true: 99.44
Number of times the author of this entry has fabricated a statistic: 5
Percentage of Bethel College students who should faithfully read this blog: 0
Number of walks in the woods author of blog has taken with his dog this year: 1
Percentage of those walks in which he accidentally trespassed onto private property: 100
Number of other human beings encountered during those walks: 0
Perfect temperature in Celsius for walking in the woods during January: -3
Favorite number: 33
Number of homeruns by author during 2010 fastpitch season: 11
Year of career high in homeruns (18): 2008
Number of times author has been runner-up in the World Series of Wiffleball: 2
Number times author has been world champion in the World Series of Wiffleball: 0
Most free throws author has ever made in a row: 125
Next best: 89
Most three pointers author has ever made in a row: 37
Shoe size: 11
Number of books read cover to cover in 2010: 49
Number of episodes of the Wonder Years author watched today while working out: 4
Age as of today: 40
Age as of tomorrow: 41
Reason #1:
Because if I don’t workout hard on a regular basis, it becomes painful to play basketball and nearly impossible to concentrate while trying to read and comment on essays.
Reason #2:
Because I like being able to do more than five pullups without feeling like I want to pass out.
Reason #3:
Because I can’t help myself; it’s a habit now.
Reason #4:
Because I like bringing two guns and a six pack to the party.
Reason #5:
Because if those people on the commercial can do it, why can’t I?
Reason #6:
Because I like sweet baby ray’s barbecue sauce way too much, and if I didn’t burn A LOT of calories virtually every day I might be ginormously fat.
…. to be continued….
Today, Sydney hit the longest homerun of her relatively short wiffleball career, a towering bomb to left-center field. I tossed one to her at the knees and out over the plate and she let go with the smoothest left-handed swing I’ve seen her make, head perfectly to ball. Crack! Papa laughs.
Not just because it’s January and we’re playing wiffleball, not just because Sydney is four and requested wiffleball, but because his daughter cackled as she raced around the imaginary bases in our frozen backyard.
“Good pitch, Papa!” she said, as she picked up the bat. “If we played for the Cubbies, we’d be stars.”
In Defense of the Liberal Arts: The therapeutic Left and the utilitarian Right both do disservice to the humanities.
Victor Davis Hanson
December 16, 2010 12:00 A.M.
The liberal arts face a perfect storm. The economy is struggling with obscenely high unemployment and is mired in massive federal and state deficits. Budget cutting won’t spare education.
The public is already angry over fraud, waste, and incompetence in our schools and universities. And in these tough times, taxpayers rightly question everything about traditional education — from teachers’ unions and faculty tenure to the secrecy of university admissions policies to which courses really need to be taught.
Opportunistic private trade schools have sprouted in every community, offering online certification in practical skills without the frills and costs of so-called liberal-arts “electives.”
In response to these challenges, the therapeutic academic Left proved incapable of defending the traditional liberal arts. With three decades of defining the study of literature and history as a melodrama of race, class, and gender oppression, it managed to turn off college students and the general reading public. And, cheek by jowl, the utilitarian Right succeeded in reclassifying business and finance not just as undergraduate majors, but also as core elements in general-education requirements.
In such a climate, it is unsurprising that once again we hear talk of cutting the “non-essentials” in our colleges, such as Latin, Renaissance history, Shakespeare, Plato, Rembrandt, and Chopin. Why do we cling to the arts and humanities in a high-tech world in which we have instant recall at our fingertips through a Google search and such studies do not guarantee sure 21st-century careers?
But the liberal arts train students to write, think, and argue inductively, while drawing upon evidence from a shared body of knowledge. Without that foundation, it is harder to make — or demand from others — logical, informed decisions about managing our supercharged society as it speeds on by.
Citizens — shocked and awed by technological change — become overwhelmed by the Internet chatter, cable news, talk radio, video games, and popular culture of the moment. Without links to our heritage, we in ignorance begin to think that our own modern challenges — the war in Afghanistan, gay marriage, cloning, or massive deficits — are unique and not comparable to those solved in the past.
And without citizens broadly informed by the humanities, we descend into a pyramidal society. A tiny technocratic elite on top crafts everything from cell phones and search engines to foreign policy and economic strategy. A growing mass below has neither understanding of the present complexity nor the basic skills to question what they are told.
During the 1960s and 1970s, committed liberals thought we could short-circuit the process of liberal education by creating advocacy courses with the word “studies” in their names. Black studies, Chicano studies, community studies, environmental studies, leisure studies, peace studies, women’s studies, and hundreds more were designed to turn out more socially responsible young people. Instead, universities have too often graduated zealous advocates who lacked the broad education necessary to achieve their predetermined politicized ends.
On the other hand, pragmatists argued that our 20-year-old future CEOs needed to learn spreadsheets rather than why Homer’s Achilles did not receive the honors he deserved, or how civilization was lost in fifth-century Rome and 1930s Germany. But Latin or a course in rhetoric might better teach a would-be captain of industry how to dazzle his audience than a class in Microsoft PowerPoint.
The more instantaneous our technology, the more we are losing the ability to communicate. Twitter and text-messaging result in economy of expression, not in clarity or beauty. Millions are becoming premodern — communicating in electronic grunts that substitute for effective and dignified expression. Indeed, by inventing new abbreviations and linguistic shortcuts, we are losing a shared written language altogether, in a way analogous to the fragmentation of Latin as the Roman Empire imploded into tribal provinces. No wonder the public is drawn to stories like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, in which characters speak beautifully and believe in age-old values.
Life is not just acquisition and consumption. Engaging English prose uplifts the spirit in a way Twittering cannot. The anti-Christ video shown by the Smithsonian at the National Portrait Gallery will fade when the Delphic Charioteer or Michelangelo’s David does not. Appreciation of the history of great art and music fortifies the soul, and recognizes beauty that does not fade with the passing fad.
America has lots of problems. A population immersed in and informed by literature, history, art, and music is not one of them.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXLHUThBib8?fs=1]
Quite possibly, the best song of the 1980s.
One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels.
Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
God help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, haealthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguised old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between two figments. Oh, I may do many things!
“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.
Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/10/go-with-god
“To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible. Whatever the practical source, the end result is the same. You are privileged to enter a time—four years!—during which your main job is to listen to lectures, attend seminars, go to labs, and read books.
It is an extraordinary gift. In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college. You may well be thinking, “What is he thinking? I’m just beginning my freshman year. I’m not being called to be a student. None of my peers thinks he or she is called to be a student. They’re going to college because it prepares you for life. I’m going to college so I can get a better job and have a better life than I’d have if I didn’t go to college. It’s not a calling.” …
You cannot and should not try to avoid being identified as an intellectual. I confess I am not altogether happy with the word intellectual as a descriptor for those who are committed to the work of the university. The word is often associated with people who betray a kind of self-indulgence, an air that they do not need to justify why they do what they do. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is the dogma used to justify such an understanding of what it means to be an intellectual. But if you’re clear about your calling as a student, you can avoid this temptation. You are called to the life of the mind to be of service to the gospel and the Church. Don’t resist this call just because others are misusing it.
Fulfilling your calling as a Christian student won’t be easy. It’s not easy for anyone who is serious about the intellectual life, Christian or not. The curricula of many colleges and universities may seem, and in fact may be, chaotic. Many schools have no particular expectations. You check a few general-education boxes—a writing course, perhaps, and some general distributional requirements—and then do as you please. Moreover, there is no guarantee that you will be encouraged to read. Some classes, even in the humanities, are based on textbooks that chop up classic texts into little snippets. You cannot become friends with an author by reading half a dozen pages. Finally, and perhaps worse because insidious, there is a strange anti-intellectualism abroad in academia. Some professors have convinced themselves that all knowledge is just political power dressed up in fancy language, or that books and ideas are simply ideological weapons in the quest for domination. Christians, of all people, should recognize that what is known and how it is known produce and reproduce power relations that are unjust, but this does not mean all questions of truth must be abandoned. As I said, it won’t be easy.”
–Stanley Hauerwas
“The Lord is wonderful."
Marilynne Robinson, Home
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esx916cb2Rs?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]
“And besides,” he almost writes, “This book is my mentor. Don’t you see? For you to want to throw it out the window is like saying you want to hurt one of my nearest and dearest friends. I met a Jesus I never knew in this book; the one who says, ‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross!’ (171). Can’t you see I need a Jesus who says such words? How desperate I am for the Jesus who suffers beside me through my dark night of the soul.”
Robby Christopher Prenkert, On the Wonder of Mentors Never Met: A Memoir of a Reading Life, Part I
Rage:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon–
The Greek warlord–and godlike Achilles.
Homer, Iliad
“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine."
Alex, in Everything Is Illuminated