Gold All Through

New Digs

2009-02-09T22:21:00.001-05:00

...because WordPress is shiny. See you over at suzania.wordpress.com.

On Sacramental Worlds

2009-01-26T21:52:00.003-05:00

So before I was a Christian, the angst-unit that I was perpetually dealing with went like this: "Here I am, full of potential and surrounded by innumerable possibilities for self-expression and having adventures and experiencing pleasure of all kinds, but...what's the point?"

Even if I had a life that was maximally fulfilled with amazing friendships and a husband and children and...Pottery Barn furniture, and writing, and striding through airports in Europe on my way to, um, maybe an International Women of Mystery conference, and even if said life went on (hypothetically) forever, and even if my neurotransmitters were all hopping to attention and saluting such that I was never ever depressed and in fact in constant low-grade ecstasy...

...what was the point? There was this disconnect between all of the above-- the "is," the stuff of experience and matter, both good and bad, and the Other Realm.

The Other Realm was the place that existed in stories, especially quest stories, where good was really good and not just the maximum pleasure for the maximum number of people, and bad was really bad and to be defeated. That Other Realm was where "ought" lived, and actually the BEST kind of other-realm stories were the kinds where "is" and "ought" intersected in some way, so that a physical thing-- a ring, say, or a baby, or a place that you got to through a door in a hedge-- was actually charged with real meaning, real good or real bad.

I wanted a reality that demanded something of me beyond fulfilling my potential.

In other words, I wanted a sacramental world.

And whatever else I have now, I have that.

Ali, trying to convince Nate that the beverage on offer is acceptable:

2008-11-11T19:53:00.002-05:00

"Black tea! It's like coffee...but tea!"

2008-03-04T20:30:00.003-05:00

"He's been inducted as, from what I can tell, a knight of cheese. They have knights of everything in France... Fish are funny. I mean, snails are sad, and so are frogs, but fish are just funny. You use them to hit people with...there aren't a lot of foods that aren't novelty foods that are just funny. Fish are funny. And then there are sardines and anchovies and kippers. Kippers are funny."

--emma goes on what is an almost beat-poet-esque stream of consciousness rant while reading a Peter Mayle book.

Real life?

2008-03-01T22:52:00.003-05:00

How confusing it is not to be in San Jose dancing with Persian aunties. What is all this cold whiteness on the ground? Where are the huge mounds of saffron rice? Why is Maria not laughing at my cell phone? Why is Todd not explaining local flora, and why is James not asking if they are edible? I am a little sad.

Outstanding week. God bless Ali and Rachel Hadiashar!

Here is Oscar Wilde, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Lord Peter Wimsey.

2008-02-01T20:26:00.000-05:00

Ali, luckily, whipped out her camera and got a picture-- not of Lord Peter actually carrying the Oscar Wilde doll downstairs in his jaws, but of the immediate aftermath. Lord Peter dropped Oscar Wilde in the middle of the kitchen floor and then went to sit on the rug in front of the kitchen sink. It was a very peculiar situation all round. The picture will be posted when Ali emails it to me. There's now a cat toothmark on Oscar Wilde's left eye.

Poor John Harmon.

2008-01-22T21:09:00.000-05:00

He needs to formulate a Cunning Plan.

From the Department of Massive Understatement

2008-01-21T21:03:00.000-05:00

"The Blitz makes me nervous."

--Emma (she's not the only roommate I have who makes blogworthy comments-- she's just dominated that catagory recently.)

You know what would make election week more fun?

2008-01-19T21:53:00.000-05:00

If, after all the results were in, everyone got invited to Washington to a feast, in which we acclaimed the president-elect as our lawful chief, and were fed on roast venison and frothy tankards of mead. That'd be pretty sweet.

Emma's interpretation of

2008-01-18T23:28:00.000-05:00

what's going through Eugene Wrayburn's head when he first sees Lizzie Hexam:

"Hey! You're cute, and surprisingly clean for your station in life."

Emma, while ordering tea catalogues:

2008-01-09T19:18:00.000-05:00

"Twinings is too exciting for _words_!"

So I came home, and

2008-01-03T19:13:00.000-05:00

Emma had some troubling news for me.

Apparently Lord Peter Wimsey has figured out how to get himself up on top of our fridge.

I guess it makes a little more sense if you know he's a cat.

A little bit shameful

2008-01-02T21:14:00.000-05:00

I've joined Facebook. Not very hortus conclusus, is it, this blogosphere?

OK, got to write this even though v. sleepy

2007-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

So I just got finished writing my comment in response to Leslie's comment in response to the post below, and I got into bed and picked up my current bedtime book, which is one of these big Ignatius Press editions of Chesterton (shocker), and I run within the first page into the following line:

"...those questions about the will to believe and the operation of grace, and the fact that something more than reason is needed to bring any of us into the most reasonable of all philosophies."

"The righteous will always accept logic"-- but which one of us is righteous?

It is too late at night to argue Pelegianism. Now I am going to bed.

PS yes, Leslie, I know you're not a Pelegian.

The article this is from is called "The 'Short Story' in Germ"

2007-05-21T23:14:00.000-04:00

"Steele writes like a man at one with his audience. He does not feel the need to argue or convince; it is enough to appeal to the sense of right and wrong. As he said himself, when exposing the tyranny of husbands, 'touching upon the malady tenderly is half way to the cure; and there are some faults which need only to be observed, to be amended.' His business was not so much to create sentiments as to awaken them by a vivid description, and teach his readers to recognise their own principles in some poignant situation."

--The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IX. From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift.

Okay, so this is the moral center of the domestic novel. Good to know. Query: can we cross-apply it to Jane Austen-type comedies of manners?

I'm nervous, posting this.

2007-05-03T18:13:00.000-04:00

Okay. Let’s talk about abortion.

I’d rather not. I am not a controversialist. I’d much rather stay at home in Bag End and smoke my pipe and eat large, rich dinners. But there are times when we must venture forth.

When I was fifteen or so, one of my favorite books was The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I’m not actually a hundred per cent sure I ever finished it, but I fully embraced its vision. Plus I definitely saw the movie, which had Natasha Richardson in it.

Atwood’s dystopia was my dystopia: her worst case scenario was mine, pretty much. And here was her worst case scenario: conservative Christians (exagerations or extrapolations of conservative Christians, as Orwell’s party was of the Communist party) have come to power in America. They have remade it as she imagines they would really secretly like it to be: a place where women have no rights whatsoever, and where men have wives and also official concubines who are breeders, because most of the upper-class, or wife-class, women are infertile. In this world, women’s bodies are instruments that the male conspiracy uses to play its games of power. It’s as though men were the European powers of the late 19th century, and women’s bodies were the contested continents-- Asia, Africa, South America-- terrain only valuable if it has value to its colonial overlords. And a key instrument in their domination was, of course, the absolute prohibition of abortion.

The golden past that the main character cannot quite remember, the past before the zealots came to power, was the woman’s movement of the 1970’s and 80’s, and a key feature of that past, it is implied, was free access to abortion.

I don’t know if Atwood actually believed that this scenario is what They-- the Christians, the conservatives-- really want. Probably not: it’s satire, reducto ad absurdam and all that. I’m pretty sure, though, that I believed it-- that on some level, a level where I enjoyed being the prospective victim of such a conspiracy, enjoyed the guilt-capital that would give me, I did buy it. I believed, or played with believing, that that’s what a lot of men, maybe most men, certainly most conservatives, were really hoping for.

Look, I was fifteen.

This is what I meant, if I meant anything, when I went to the pro-abortion march on Washington in 1992. That’s what I was thinking of, I think, when I talked about a woman’s right to choose, when I wanted the bumper stickers that said “Keep Your Laws Off My Body.”

Well, that was a piece of it, anyway. I don’t want to oversimplify.

And that’s why I think that one of the best things we can do as human beings who disagree with other human beings is to understand our opponents’ worst case scenarios, the wacky far fetched chilling things they picture when they imagine what would happen if we “had our way.” Don’t judge a man till you’ve walked a mile in his boots-- that’s the idea, except that in this case, it’s Don’t judge a man till you’ve spent an afternoon wearing the tinfoil helmet he uses to keep the Council on Foreign Relations from beaming his thoughts up to the mothership.

You may not end up agreeing with each other. I can never think that it is right to abort a baby, and on that subject I will have an irreducable disagreement with someone who does think that it’s okay. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about having a right to do something that wrong. (If, God forbid, it comes down to a choice between the life of the mother and the life of the baby...I can only pity anyone in the position to make such a choice, and pray that I’m never there.)

So, you might not end up agreeing. But you might end up seeing that at least in some cases, your minds are not as alien to each other as they seem at first glance. No conservative Christian I know-- no one I know-- could react with anything other than horror to the society described by Atwood. I do not, as a conservative Christian, have the same view of men’s and women’s roles as I did when I was a liberal. But no Christian can deny women’s human dignity, their part in bearing God’s image, and still remain orthodox. No one I know could look at anyone being treated as the women in The Handmaid’s Tale were treated and judge that a good thing.

The lie I believed when I marched on Washington in ‘92 was, then, twofold. The first part was that people who believed that abortion should be illegal actually secretly wanted to subject women to slavery. I don’t think I really believed this, not on the deepest level. But here’s the thing about conspiracy theories: the emotional weight of things you don’t really totally with your rational mind believe can be nearly as great as the emotional weight of a well-considered, well-reasoned and accurate beliefs. The oomph, the fear, remains as energy: energy that wants to be used against The Conspiracy, even if you don’t actually believe The Conspiracy exists.

The second part of the lie was that the choice in front of us, as a society, was between enslaving women and denying their humanity, or being pro-free access to abortion. I wasn;t in favor of the first option, so I figured I was in favor of the second.

But if you think about it...this is crazy. None of us has the right to do whatever we want with our own bodies, let alone with other people’s bodies. We’re not allowed to hurt other people, even if they are utterly dependent on us for survival-- indeed, we have a sense that it’s when a child is utterly dependent on us that we have the greatest connection to her, the greatest obligation and also the greatest delight in caring for her. Calling us to affirm the dignity of all human beings, their right to life and to respect, does not diminish our own dignity or chip away at our own sense of our value as human beings. On the contrary: seeing the value in all other humans, however dependant, however undeveloped, allows us to see our own value more clearly. What we do to others, we implicity say it’s okay for them to do to us, just as when we call something that someone else does wrong, we implicitly say that it would be wrong if we did it as well.

Anyway. That’s what’s been going through my head lately, among other things. I really like getting along with people, and I really don’t like acrimonious debate. I’m not writing this to start a debate, acrimonious or otherwise. I’m writing it because it’s been on my mind and heart. I would like to know what other people think about this, but please don’t yell at me. Or use all caps, which is the internet version of yelling.

Classic Heather and Susannah Quote

2007-05-01T21:48:00.000-04:00

S: Heather, you want to play bocce?
H: I’d rather eat hay.

2007-04-23T22:33:00.000-04:00

To clarify: Spring is not getting redone; Spring is wonderful.

I'm Back

2007-04-23T22:23:00.000-04:00

...from France, and from new-apartment craziness, et cetera. I am now sort of settled in Florence (not the Italian one. The one next to Easthampton) in a funky place with a huge, great kitchen and two fabulous roommates (although I'm not sure where Adam is; I haven't seen him in days) and a currently impaired bathroom. It's getting redone, which is wonderful.

And so is Spring, which has finally arrived.

95 hours, 34 minutes till plane leaves for France. Whooooeeee!

2007-02-18T18:42:00.000-05:00

Come to a Night of Appreciation, Emulation, Infiltration, Obfuscation and Literary Discussion

2007-02-08T21:07:00.000-05:00

Think of a British Christian version of the Superfriends, and you've got a--well, a not entirely accurate idea of the Inklings. JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Charles Williams, and their friends used to meet, semi-weekly, at a pub in Oxford called the Eagle and Child, where they'd read bits from their works in progress, drink beer, and talk about everything in the world. This upcoming Tuesday, there will be a gathering at Packards in their honor. RSVP to akascriptores@gmail.com, or just show up. Everyone welcome.

Topics to be covered may (or may not) include:

Aquinas, Beekeeping, Chesterton, Distributism, Elves, the Fall of Man, Grace, Homebrewing, Irenaeus, Jacobitism, Kant, Lions, Mythopoeia, Natural Law, Organic Farming, the Person from Porlock, Quixotic Enterprises, the Romance of Lost Causes, Sherbet, the Trivium, Unusually Good Coffee, Virtue, Walter Scott, the X-Men, Yentas, and Zoological Gardens

Tuesday, February 13, 7:30 p.m.
Packard’s
(in the back room called the Library)
Masonic Street, Northampton, Massachusetts

This Event Brought To You By
AKA Scriptores
www.akascriptores.com

Yup

2007-02-06T20:08:00.000-05:00

Leslie wrote (in his comment below) about "..how we used to argue about whether the Metric or Customary was better"

That is exactly what I'm talking about! Another example: in, um, three weeks I'll be going to France for a fortnight (score one use of the word "fortnight"), and I'll be using Euros! Feh. J'aime le franc. J'aime also les dodgy currency changing booths around every European train station when I was Eurailing it in 1998, and it's so sad that they're not needed anymore.

2007-02-03T23:31:00.000-05:00

Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.

-- Rod Dreher

Classic Melodie Foster Quote

2007-02-03T23:28:00.000-05:00

"I love cake! It's my favorite texture!"

2007-02-01T21:20:00.000-05:00

Theoretically. And I'm not saying that's all there is to it. But water is good!

2007-02-01T21:18:00.000-05:00

A well-hydrated writer is a productive writer.

more cat

2007-01-27T17:22:00.000-05:00

so there are just enormous numbers of kittens in my life now. There's the one at home. Then there's Hermione, who is on my lap lounging over my right arm as I type this, and Ron, who climbed up my back and as I was starting this post. (Now he's crouched next to me and Hermione is trying to use my mouse pad, or something.) And then of course there are Deacon Chapin and Betsey Ross, who belong to my dad and are making him and Barbara act very extreme and kitten-centric...What is this? Are there certain seasons in one's life when it's Kitten Time?

cat

2007-01-23T20:35:00.000-05:00

Our household has a new member. His name (for reasons that are a little unclear to me...for which read, It was Rachel W's idea) is Todd-Joplin Sebastien Henry. This sounds to me like a name late-80's yuppies would have given their kid. He is about nine inches high and fifteen inches long, not including the tail. He's also very quick, and has escape artist skills.

He has already tried to fall into the toilet once. We feel that this is behavior that he will grow out of.

so this baby walks into a coffeehouse...

2007-01-21T14:05:00.000-05:00

at woodstar last night I ran into Miles (aged, I think, 11 months) and his parents (miles was attached to his father's ventral side with a snugli.) His parents and I say hello and chat for a minute, and then everyone kind of looks at Miles, to include him in the socializing, and there's this tiny pause, and he tips his sippy cup towards me, offering me some of his juice. The body language was unmistakable-- like he was thinking "man, if my parents aren't going to offer this chick anything to drink I guess I should." "I'm all set, but thanks," I said, and his father said (something like) "I think she's good, honey."

How polite these children are. And Ella's downstairs now getting her picture taken...

ALL RIGHT

2007-01-20T19:19:00.000-05:00

Here, fabulously, is the Scriptores site, up and running. Soon it will have subpages, and links out, and Aaron's Zombie Bronte poem, and possibly an Upcoming Pioneer Valley Christian Geek Events Listing of some sort. Thanks, girls!

So I somehow stayed up till like 2:30 last night reading this vampire novel...

2007-01-04T18:44:00.000-05:00

and here's my thought: if there were actually vampires, I bet a major social/psychological problem within the vampire community would be procrastination. It would be like the ultimate extension of that phenomenon where it's harder to get stuff done, even stuff you want to do, when you haven't got a job to go to. Think about your typical vampire: he's unemployed, he has no deadlines (so to speak)...other than a couple of self-directed Martha Stewart/Type A vampires, as uncommon in the vampire world as in the human world, who would actually be the ones to get around to organizing world conspiracies, you'd basically have a batch of people with none of that sense of the ticking biological clock that gets so many of us to actually get around to writing books and so forth. I bet they would be major slackers.

You know?

Melodie, on the couch next to me, just said the following sentence:

2007-01-01T15:56:00.000-05:00

"Ooh. Soul patches are such a bad idea, Brian Boitano."

Also see this article. Happy New Year, people.

good to know.

2006-03-15T19:44:00.000-05:00

An Employer Must Compensate Employees For Time Spent Donning And Doffing Protective Gear But Not For Pre-Donning Waiting Time

--title of an article on a legal information website.

When Napoleon

2006-03-01T18:14:00.000-05:00

and Tsar Alexander I met up in Tilsit in 1807 to discuss the potential alliance of their two nations, they ended up (according to Napoleon's valet) spending a long time discussing cures for baldness.

I'm just saying.

Can I quote a friend's blog on my blog? or is that too digitally derivative?

2006-03-01T18:09:00.000-05:00

This is from Rachel's blog, and I liked it so much that I didn't want to just link to it. Also her layout made me think that it was like something Don Marquis' archy would have written, if he had been an Evangelical.

saying "I'm spiritual but not religious"

to me
is like

being thirsty but not getting something to drink

best quote of the weekend. Had heavy competition, too.

2006-02-22T20:14:00.000-05:00

Me: Oh, you know what? Major Winters wrote an actual autobiography that just came out.

Miss F (gasps): Is it called "I'm So Swoony"?

FYI here is the book.

I woke up Tuesday morning and started laughing before I got out of bed, remembering this.

when you come across a sentence like this in life it must be shared.

2006-02-17T21:30:00.000-05:00

Developed by the Graffiti Research Lab a division of the Eyebeam R&D OpenLab, LED Throwies are an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood.
from notmartha.com

Everything I Need To Know In Life I Learned From Charles Dickens*

2006-02-17T20:57:00.000-05:00

If you meet a mysterious and unhappy woman who looks at you as though you were a ghost...

...it may be that she is your long-lost mother who had been told that you died at birth. Ask her!

If you have never learned housekeeping or deportment because your mother is in the habit of practicing Telescopic Philanthropy and only employs you to help her write letters...

...don't use this as an excuse not to respect her. She is still your mother, and you will learn housekeeping skills from someone else before you marry the dancing master.

If you are sitting with a friend in your furnished room and notice that there is a terrible and ominous smell coming from the rag-and-bone shop on the ground floor as well as a strange oily soot in the air...

...it's probably because your landlord has spontaneously combusted. Call the Bow Street Runners.

*n.b. this is not true.

Have you ever...

2006-02-14T20:27:00.000-05:00

...polished your shoes with hand lotion?
...had an anxiety dream involving McGill University, which you did not attend?
...owned a cat who habitually carried a stuffed dinosaur around in her mouth?
...worried that you are gradually but thoroughly destroying your knees by jogging, but the only sign of this will be that one day, when you are running down South Street, your kneecaps will just fall off?

ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three

2006-02-08T19:41:00.000-05:00

Wednesdays at 6
Northampton Center for the Arts
Waltz lessons
Fun!

I love the fact that

2006-02-06T19:43:00.000-05:00

part of my job today involved dealing with a haiku-related emergency.

Big Ol' Caveat

2006-02-04T11:07:00.000-05:00

So I've been thinking about the previous post and I think it needs clarification. Because actually, obviously, I do believe that we are equal in our souls before God-- he shows no partiality. And we are told that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free. And the idea of a caste system where your "place in the world" has anything to do with your virtue or favor in God's sight is deeply alien to Christianity, I think-- unless you want to talk about what's been called God's "preferential option" for the poor and powerless. Our God is a God who champions the underdog-- not because He doesn't love the overdog, so to speak, but because the underdog needs it, among other reasons.

So what's left of CS Lewis' quote and my previous post? Well, read the third link, the one to Mere Comments, in that post. That explains it better than I seem to be able to, partially because I have as yet had no coffee, and it's already almost 11:15 in the morning. It has to do with what mutual submission actually looks like. No, I don't think I'm going to be getting any more coherent than that at the moment. Maybe later.

Just to stir things up...

2006-02-01T19:30:00.000-05:00

So this conversation has been going on over at James' blog (with this followup), both of which kind of touch on a previous post-a-thon at another blog in response to this from way back in November.

Are you with me?

Now. The following is from That Hideous Strength, the third in CS Lewis' Space Trilogy. And it's getting at the same question, from a slightly different angle. Well, a related question: we were talking at James' blog about church authority. But it's tied together somehow.

"You were saying, my dear?" resumed the Director.

"I thought love meant equality," she said, "and free companionship."

"Ah, equality!" said the Director. "We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another's greed, because we are fallen...Equality is not the deepest thing, you know."

"I always thought that's just what it was. I thought that it was in their souls that people were equal."

"You were mistaken," said he gravely. "That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law; equality of incomes; that is all very well. Equality guards life; it does not make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a
blue-book."

"But surely in marriage...?"

"Worse and worse, " said the Director. "Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that?"

--and it goes on. Page 148 in the MacMillan edition with the '60s graphic on the cover.

He's not talking about class inequality. Jane, the woman speaking, is later taken aback at the lack of servility that Ivy-- who cleans Jane's house-- shows, when they're both under the Director's roof. And of course he's not saying that some people are more valued by God than others, or anything like that. Almost the opposite: if he's right, and if you cross-apply this idea to the James-blog-debate, it means that while the world-system only values the strong, the leaders, those in authority, God genuinely values those who genuinely don't have authority, or who have less authority.

I, for example, "am a person also under authority." My editor is called Steve. And part of his job, what he may do every day to the glory of God, is to is tell me what to do. And my job is to obey him, as long as he doesn't tell me to do something immoral or illegal. He genuinely has authority over me, and depending on how we each fulfill our separate roles-- in love, to God's glory-- God is pleased, I think. Steve would be delinquent in not telling me what to do next as much as I would be delinquent (and have been, truth be told) in goofing off rather than doing it. It's like symbiosis. It's like the Little Drummer Boy.

You may froth at the mouth below.

2006-02-01T19:08:00.000-05:00

Oh, lovely, lovely interlibrary loan! Huzzah!

Very Good Things, in no particular order.

2006-01-29T14:21:00.000-05:00

Pour yourself a glass of this.
If you haven't yet seen this, you've got to.
Put your feet up and read this.
Get yourself some tickets for this.
Go in here and order a half of porter...
...or here on (as I vaguely recall) Wednesday and Sunday nights. (That's for the live music. I totally forget when quiz night is.)

Just some suggestions.

Oh...

2006-01-29T13:33:00.000-05:00

...excellent. By the way, has anyone seen my first volume of Kirsten Lavransdatter? It's bound in brown cloth. I finally want to read it, and now I can't find it.

2006-01-21T15:00:00.000-05:00

this + this = a good time

useful Latin phrase for the day

2005-12-19T09:39:00.000-05:00

Hoc est armarium valde magnus.

I know there's a way to decline adjectives to make them comparative, but I don't know what it is. Please include translations and corrections as comments. The answer will be supplied presently.

Best quote from Tom Keehn's 90th birthday bash this past weekend:

2005-12-14T08:44:00.000-05:00

Tom (at the podium, into the microphone, with deep satisfaction): "All the really well-dressed ones are my grandchildren."

We did look sharp. Mom said he'd given up on getting his kids to dress formally sometime in the late '60's, and suggested that he'd appreciate fanciness. Photos here.

Blizzard Haiku

2005-12-09T10:05:00.000-05:00

Driving to work. Kids
towing sleds along Route Nine,
waving at the plow.

Job joy

2005-12-05T15:02:00.000-05:00

I recently had a conversation in the kitchen at my office about how, in a nuclear reactor, the cadmium rods are like a time-out chair for the electrons. "Go sit in the buffer!" said one of my co-workers sternly. "No cascade reaction for you!"

I love these people. It's great to be around geekiness in general even if it's not identical to one's own geekiness.

To do:

2005-12-05T13:30:00.000-05:00

1. Make your house fair as you are able.
2. Trim the hearth and set the table.

Sometimes even when organizations are doing good work, their slogans are still funny.

2005-11-22T20:51:00.000-05:00

In the parking lot of the strip mall near my office there's a clothing collection bin, like those ones you see around from the St. Vincent de Paul society or the Salvation Army. This one is sponsored by something called "Kiducation." Their slogan, as it appears on the side of the bin, is "Turning Old Clothes into New Kids through Education."

Now, I've heard of social engineering-- is this social tailoring?

Another possibility: "Turning Old Boots into Good Taxpayers through Operant Conditioning"

On a similar note.

2005-11-22T20:49:00.000-05:00

Starbucks now sells "Ethos" spring water-- actually a really good idea; part of the price of every bottle goes to some clean-water program somewhere-- but it got me wondering whether there's a complimentary water brand somewhere-- less popular; more of a niche market-- called Pathos.

Excellent combination of books.

2005-11-22T14:25:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Ronald Knox' The Hidden Stream-- a collection of lectures on Catholic doctrine-- and at more or less the same time Penelope Fitzgerald's collective biography of her family. Now, it turns out that Ronald Knox was Penelope Fitzgerald's uncle. (Ronald Knox! Was Penelope Fitzgerald's uncle!) And so, after reading Monsignor Knox' thoughts on "Our Knowledge of God Through Analogy"-- complete with Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur-- I read about Ronnie, aged six, picking flowers to give to his new stepmother. He seems to have been a bit Ferdinand-the-Bull-ish, and prone to wander off during games of cricket.

"I think all day, and at night I think about the past."
--Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, aged 4, when asked what he liked to do

A conversation with my associate Miss Cole

2005-06-09T02:25:00.000-04:00

H: "I have twenty-one records now!"
S: "Ooh! Did you get them at that place on Eightieth and Broadway that used to be Griffin?"
H: "I got three of them there, but the rest of them I got at a Mennonite thrift shop in Pennsylvania. My taste in records is more similar to the Mennonites' than the Upper West Siders'"

Evangelical Tsuris

2005-06-08T21:22:00.000-04:00

Maybe the problem is the mixed messages. On the one hand you have Dr. Agatston writing in calm, matter-of-fact sentences that build into paragraphs that leave you with a cooperative and alert sort of feeling, ready to renounce white bread and sugar for most of forever, and FRUIT and ALL GRAINS for the next two weeks, because his logic is just so CLEAR. C.S. Lewis has a similar effect on me: the clarity, the logic, the excellent grammar, the direct address.

And on the other hand you have the American Heart Association, and their poster that's posted up in every school cafeteria in America. I mean, the Food Pyramid is public education, practically. It can't be wrong. Six to eleven servings of grains per day, period. "Don't be silly," says the AHA, brisk with authority. The AHA is lined up in my mind--perhaps unfortunately-- next to Joshua Harris and John Eldridge: Eat plenty of fruits and whole grains. Don't date, court. Let the man initiate: concentrate instead on cultivating low cholesterol and a lack of covetousness.

And Dr. Agatston and Henry Cloud, I assume, meet after work at a Starbucks to have great conversations with people of both sexes, and drink coffee with Splenda. "Dating is not about marriage!" says Dr. Cloud, snacking on a turkey and part-skim cheese roll-up. "It's a chance to discover more about yourself!"

Clearly we need a tiebreaker. I offer this: somewhere in Volume II of the Complete Letters of C.S. Lewis, which my dad got for me last Christmas, he mentions that, having gotten a little fat, he's been told to stay away from too much bread, and from sugar in his coffee.

The dating thing might be a little more complicated.

Weird

2005-04-02T18:56:00.000-05:00

So, Jesus was decended from Leah, not Rachel.

Recent WebFinds

2005-04-02T17:33:00.000-05:00

Brandywine Books

and

The Thinklings

Help: If what I'd like ideally is to be able to erase C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength from my mind so that I could read it again for the first time, what should I read instead?

Spam backwards is maps

2005-04-02T17:30:00.000-05:00

Charles says: I'd rather eat a map than eat Spam.

The time: This past New Year's Eve

2005-02-25T13:50:00.000-05:00

The place: a hotel room in Paris
The people: me, and my 17-year-old brother

Toby, commenting on the fact that he's taking his 3rd bath of the day: "It's also probably a good idea, since I'm sharing a room with you, just to bathe constantly."

Explaining himself: "Not, like, in general. I'm not saying you're a filthy person. I just mean now."

(The background: I had a disgusting cold)

Another quote from Mystic, last year

2005-02-24T02:51:00.000-05:00

No one and nothing with fluffy ears can intimidate me.

--Heather takes a firm line on a little yappy dog that lives near us.

I had a dream

2005-02-24T02:47:00.000-05:00

on the bus on the way back to Boston from New York, and in the dream Elliot Gould had this plant, some sort of succulent like an aloe, that ate cookies. You would drop Chip Ahoys into the bottom of the pot, and the plant's roots would munch on them.

What's up with that?

Something mostly true

2005-02-24T02:37:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up my father kept a mezuzah in his sock drawer. It wasn't the only thing he kept there. My father's sock drawer was amazing. It was, by volume, only about sixty-five percent socks. The rest of the space was taken up by various items of importance-- our passports, his cufflinks, a pocket watch, a pocket knife with "Old Timer" written on the handle. I remember gold bars in there, but that could be fantasy.

I think that some of us are secretly worried

2005-02-23T03:22:00.000-05:00

that once we finally get our sin gotten rid of, we will become boring. Our writing will be uninteresting, our wit will not sparkle. We will stand alone at parties by the yogurt dip, and no one will invite us to dinner. This is of particular concern if we hope in our lives to make at least some of our living by our pens: a byproduct of sanctification will be unmarketability.

There is some truth in this. A mature Christian would not write a trashy romance novel, and trashy seems to be very popular. I see no reason, however, why one might not write a really good romance novel. And here's the thing: once we get there, we will find that holiness is more interesting and compelling and fun and solemn and merry than anything we'd encountered before. What you used to think of as interesting-- or rather, the feeling you used to call "being interested," will look like a pale imitation of something that you're now seeing in full color. Your mind and your curiosity, your imagination and your sense of humor, were built into you by God. Don't you think they're there for a reason? The devil's first lie is that there's a legitimate desire in us that God can't or won't satisfy: that to be fully human, fully engaged, to experience the full range of emotion, we've got to go it alone-- we've got to grab life (or whatever) for ourselves, and not allow God to give us the good, or point us there. This is, or course, fully bogus. The adventure, the information, the joy, the fun He has for us are beyond what we could ask or hope.

A quote from last year in Mystic

2005-02-22T21:34:00.000-05:00

Maybe it'll eat the mouse.

--Heather's rationale for not killing the centipede.

The beauty of guys

2005-02-04T13:38:00.000-05:00

So, riding the T two nights ago, I became aware of raised voices to my left. Not angrily raised, but just...differently modulated than is usual for rapid transit. Turned out to be two guys-- as I looked over one of them jumped up from his seat to make his point more expansively. These two guys had, as far as I could tell, met on the T thirty seconds before, and before thirty more seconds had passed a third guy had joined the discussion. It was intense. Again, not angry, although my first reaction was "scary, don't lose your temper, calm down," and once I realized it was a friendly debate my second reaction was "rrr...just be quiet and sit down." But my third reaction, which I shared with another woman via grins and obvious spectatorship, was "this is great."

The debate was on the topic of Alewife station, and what happens at the end of the red line. Guy A took the position that the trains come into the station, then simply reverse direction and go back out, with their back end becoming their front end. Guy B thought that this was absolutely ABSURD, and that the trains turn around in a circle somehow. Guy C brought in a voice of moderation and claimed that there was an extra "secret track" (his words) where some trains branched off and maybe somehow turned, but maybe not. It was unclear to me.

Anyway, these guys decided to ride to the end of the red line, to go to Alewife right then, and SEE. Beer was mentioned. I'm not sure if Guy C was in on the wager, or if any of them actually did it. I got off at central. But it was a really excellent moment in my day, and made me love Boston, and cities in general, and public transportation. And guys.

An evening in the life of a blizzard.

2005-01-23T20:25:00.000-05:00

This is what the world is like now

And my boss called to say work was off tomorrow.

Cynthia, on her way to bed:

2005-01-23T19:43:00.000-05:00

[in a strange booming voice]: "Well, ladies...it was nice bein' with ya. [in her normal voice, somewhat sadly] I can't do it...sound like that guy. James Earl Jones? No, the other guy. Indiana Jones? He's sort of grizzly."

Christie, helpfully: "Grizzly Jones?"

Why I Am No Longer Freaked Out By Neurobiology: A Post About Gnosticism

2005-01-23T19:26:00.000-05:00

Because once upon a time it did freak me out. It deeply disturbed me that the levels of chemicals in my brain could have an effect on my perceptions and feelings. What could it mean except that, yes, all we are is chemical soup, and the sense we have that there's a self there, a little guy swimming in the soup, is delusion.

Often one's first inclination on starting to think about "spiritual" things was that the spiritual world ought to be completely separate from the physical world. But the picture the Bible paints is of human beings as bodysouls, naturally occupying space and time, made as matter and spirit. It's not the case that our bodies are afterthoughts, simply (as Anne Lamott says) little earth suits we put on to clothe our souls, which will be discarded when we return to our original state of innocent nakedness.

Rather, the Judeo-Christian understanding of humans is that they were, in the original intention of the Author, a twofer. We are body-souls. And though the two can certainly be separated-- and at death in fact are, at least temporarily-- this state of affairs has always about it the reek of unnaturalness. Like death itself, this separation is not plan A, and will eventually be corrected.

Cynthia's Dowry

2005-01-23T19:18:00.000-05:00

Cynthia, 25, on looking at her very first retirement account statement, for $54, speculates on her improved chances:

"Maybe this will make me more eligible as a spinster. 'I have an IRA...how do I look to you now?'"

A Poem I Wrote on the T

2005-01-19T02:09:00.000-05:00

I know an inn where the board is fine
and the goodman host keeps the door unbarred
Where the table is spread with bread and wine,
and the horses stamp in the stable-yard

Over the door hangs a wooden sign
The sign of the man hanging on the tree
The goodman host bellows "Come and dine!
"Dine on me, dine on me."

The tootsie roll factory

2005-01-18T20:48:00.000-05:00

I live a couple hundred yards from the tootsie roll factory. In my head, at least, it takes the definite article: it is the tootsie roll factory. All tootsie rolls come from here: they leave here and go to all corners of the world. When I walk home from the market I walk under the Chocolate Mint Vent. It is a large, galvanized-iron vent fifteen feet off the ground, and if you stand under it you can smell the chocolate cooking. Only once did it smell of chocolate mint, and as I know of no chocolate mint tootsie rolls I can only assume that that night there was someone inside experimenting.

Asparagan?

2004-12-01T03:20:00.000-05:00

I just misread a line on someone's site: the "agrarian lifestyle of our ancestors" became the "asparagan lifestyle." Those wacky asparaganists, with their asparaganism...

Music

2004-11-30T21:31:00.000-05:00

Baroque music

Medieval music

Friendly blogs

2004-11-30T20:13:00.000-05:00

Rachel's blog records our recent journey to my hometown, including the strange affair of the American Girl Store.

It seems to me that the beauty of blogging is that you never ever need to be finished. There's never the moment when you tear yourself away from editing, when the mailbox thingy clangs shut over the paper you're mailing in.

Which is why I can modify this post to include this link. It's about London during the Second World War.

Highlights

2004-11-30T19:39:00.000-05:00

Thunderstruck

Relevant

Christian Thinktank

Reasons to Believe

Leadership University

Tekton

Chesterton

Society of Christian Philosophers

Evangelical Philosophical Society

Matt Sellers' blog

The Thinklings