Google Books

This may be old news to some, but I just discovered Google books.  It has all sorts of full version books available if they are over 100 or so years old.  It also has preview versions of more recent works.  Good stuff if you have an interest in the classics- Austen, Dickens, Hawthorne, ect are all there for free.

Advent Odds and Ends

I feel a smattering of posts coming on, but this one is going to deal specifically with Advent. 

Advent is one of my of my favorite times of the year.  In South Louisiana the weather is cold enough to be a nice change and make you feel "all Christmas-y" but isn't nasty and wet like it typically gets later in the winter (with the nastiness invariably reaching it's peak during Mardi Gras no matter if it comes early or late).  That said and with the risk of sounding like Charlie Brown in his Christmas special, I don't like Christmas before Christmas day, all the commercialism and crappy music (a Bob Dylan Christmas album? I mean really, is that necessary?), the whole month long parade of terrible Lifetime movies being shown on tv and traffic filling the roads as parents buy far too much for their little darlings at home.  Anyway Advent is one of the places where I feel the Baptists are missing out the most by not really using the church calendar.  You may get a four week sermon series on "Reclaiming Christmas" or an occasional diatribe about the evils of abreviating the season X-mas, but as for putting things in context where things make sense and anticipating the Second Advent, you are largely on your own.

So, I thought I'd post some links and things here about Advent and resources you might could use.  I'll probably post more later.  If you find something you would like to share through this blog, feel free to put it in the comments section (I'm not sure if you can hyperlink or not there, if not, I can copy and paste the link into a post).
1. First a good article from First Things about how Advent saves us from the  month long exhaustion of ballooning commercial Christmas.  First Things will probably have much more in the future, good catholic magazine that they are, but you might also want to check up on Christianity Today periodically, I remember them having a good Advent calendar last year.

2.  Let me first say that I usually do not like most Christmas music I hear.  It is usually cheesy, campy, or just plain, good ol' fashioned awful.  The more Santa Claus is involved in a song, generally the worse the song becomes.  I feel like Christmas albums are probably very easy to make, but they are hard to make well.  Adding to this problem is the sheer number of albums out there; artists feel like they need to make their album unique to stand out from the rest of the pack and this can lead to some spectacularly bad decisions.  With that lengthy disclaimer out of the way, I will now proceed to plug a Christmas album.  I really like Sufjan Stevens Christmas album.  I'm not proud of this, but I listened to a few songs before Thanksgiving this year, something I am generally oposed to.  There are moments when the album reaches just about the perfect tone.  And this is because its a weird album, and Sufjan is a weird sounding artist.  The Incarnation should sound mysterious, and that is why we always feel something when we go to a candlelit Christmas Eve service and sing songs like "What Child is This?"; God become man needs to cause wonder or you really don't understand what is going on.  Sufjan's cd has moments like this.  It also has ridiculous but fun songs like the wonderfully titled "Get Behind Me, Santa!" or "Come on! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance".  Anyway you can listen to it online here ("What Child is This?", "Three Ships", the first version of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel", and "Star of Wonder" are standouts).

3.  Finally something I did intermittently last year and hope to be more consistent about this year is reading the Daily Office.  These readings come from the Book of Common Prayer and are divided for separate morning and evening readings if you desire to do so, but I usually read it all at once. Typically the Psalms are read first followed by two readings in the morning and one in the evening.  If you split it up, the Gospel is usually read in the morning every other year, flip-flopping with the other New Testament reading. The bracketed portions are considered optional extensions of the reading.  It is good to remember that these are simply the suggested readings, you may extend them as you wish. I'll post the first week here and hopefully will remember to put the others up later.  The reading starts with this coming Sunday, tomorrow.

Sunday Psalms 146, 147 * 111, 112, 113    
                           Isa. 1:1-9   2Pet. 3:1-10    Matt 25:1-13
Monday             1,2,3  *  4,7
                           Isa. 1:10-20    1Thess.1:1-10   Luke 20:1-8
Tuesday             5,6  *  10,11
                          Isa. 1:21-31    1Thess. 2:1-12   Luke 20:9-18
Wednesday        119:1-24  * 12,13,14
                          Isa. 2:1-11    1Thess. 2:13-20   Luke 20:19-26
Thursday          18:1-20  *  18:21-50
                         Isa 2:12-22   1Thess.3:1-13     Luke 20:27-40
Friday              16,17  *   22
                         Isa 3:8-15    1Thess.4:1-12     Luke 20:41-21:4
Saturday          20, 21:1-7(8-14)   *   110:1-5(6-7), 116, 117 
                         Isa 4:2-6   1Thess.4:13-18    Luke 21:5-19

Tintern Abbey

Here’s an excerpt from Wordsworth’s wonderful poem with the wonderfully long and typically British title, “Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.”  If you understand what he is talking about when he writes about the mood “In which the burden of the mystery/ In which the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world,/ Is lightened,” then you can come camping with me anytime.  If not, I don’t know what to tell you.  Go take a walk through the woods or something and rethink your life.

In this passage he talks about how the memory of his last visit to the banks of the Wye has served him.  This probably should remind you of C.S. Lewis if you’ve read him talking about Joy or Beauty (which he always capitalizes).

            These beauteous forms

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration: - feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love.  Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burden of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:- that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,-

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things

Freedom in Obedience

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom: Defend us, thy humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in thy defense, may not fear the power of any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.- Collect for Peace, Book of Common Prayer

I want to look at the phrase in this collect "whose service is perfect freedom".  It interests me (as the italics I inserted probably should've tipped you off to).  It seems counter-intuitive, how is service freedom?  James says something along same lines in his epistle speaking of the "law that gives freedom" or "the law of liberty" depending on what translation you're looking at.  This is what I want to discuss, and to do that I want to go back to Genesis and the Garden.

After creating man, God gives him three commands: to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth and have
dominion over its creatures (both Gen. 1:28) and not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Now this last command stands out from the rest for several reasons, not least of which is that it is the one Adam and Eve fail to do.  It is the only prohibitive command, the other two are positive in that they tell man what he should do.  But more than that, and here is where I begin to steal from C.S. Lewis' wonderful novel Perelandra that reimagines the Fall in a different setting,  the command not to eat is the only one not immediately recommended to them by their own nature; man naturally desires to be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth and thrive upon it (and we still don't seem to struggle too much with these two).  This prohibitive command is actually the source of their freedom however, because in it they have the freedom to choose obedience, to love.  If God had simply made obedience completely congruent with their natural desires, love for Him could not be shown through obedience as it would merely be acting in self-interest.  It is what seems at first to be the arbitrariness of the command, because after all, the fruit is "good for food and a delight to the eyes and the tree was to be desired to make one wise," it is this arbitrariness of asking obedience outside of one's appetites that makes true obedience out of love possible.  Which of course brings up a big problem- is the command, in fact, arbitrary?

Well the short answer is no, but it is important to see how and why we get there.  You could perhaps argue that the choice of that particular tree was arbitrary, that the act of disobedience rather than some special property of the tree is what imparted the knowledge of evil to those who had previously only known the goodness of God and of His Creation, but that is not the core of the issue (no apple-related pun intended).  We can see that obedience is not arbitrary by the effects of the Fall if nothing else.  Man as "priesthood of all creation", to use Maximus the Confessor's term, affects the whole of Creation when he falls. N.B.- I realize that the sin-related account for natural evil raises alot of problems, for example, didn't hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, ect. all exist before the Fall since that is a function of how our planet regulates itself (as this clip from the Muppet Babies explains around the 6 min mark), but that is the subject of another post, one which I probably won't ever get around to writing. Obedience and the love of God is anything but arbitrary just as sin, it's inverse, is not arbitrary.  Dante says something very interesting in the third canto of his Inferno, on the Gates of Hell is an inscription which reads in part,

 "Justice moved my Great Maker; God Eternal
Wrought me: the Power, and the Unsearchably
High Wisdom, and the Primal Love supernal"

Charles Williams gives the following explanation in The Figure of Beatrice, "If there is God, if there is freewill, then man is able to choose the opposite of God.  Power, Wisdom, Love, gave man freewill; therefore Power, Wisdom, Love, created the gate of hell and the possibility of hell." So then God in allowing us to truly love, also allows for the possibility of disobedience, of sin.

So, all that to say that obedience allows for us to love.  I could've probably just told you to go read 1 John, but then the link to the Muppet Babies wouldn't have made much sense, would it?

A Cormac McCarthy Interview

The Wall Street Journal has an interview up of Cormac McCarthy, the guy who wrote, among other things, No Country for Old Men.  McCarthy's writing has been described as Flannery O'Connor without God, but the interview shows at least some interest or openness to the idea of God.  Now the interest seems to be confined to at most a vague "spirituality", but still makes for an interesting read.

A quote from W.H. Auden

Over at Alan Jacobs blog, there is this wonderful quote from W.H. Auden's excellent book, The Dyer's Hand:
"All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. (Bertrand Russell). If so, then infernal science differs from human science in that it lacks the notion of approximation: it believes its laws to be exact. [. . .]

The first anthropological axiom of the Evil One is not All men are evil, but All men are the same; and his second — Men do not act, they only behave. [. . .]

One of our greatest spiritual dangers is our fancy that the Evil One takes a personal interest in our perdition. He doesn't care a button about my soul, any more than Don Giovanni cared a button about Donna Elvira’s body. I am his “one-thousand-and-third in Spain.”

One can conceive of Heaven having a Telephone Directory, but it would have to be gigantic, for it would include the Proper Name and address of every electron in the Universe. But Hell could not have one, for in Hell . . . its inhabitants are identified not by name but by number. They do not have numbers, they are numbers"

The rest of the post, which is itself in reference to a First Things post, can be found here.  Jacobs' blog is worthwhile if you are interested in literature and how technology is affecting the dissemenation of knowledge. And of course I hardily recommend reading Auden, but that goes without saying.

Strange Civil War Metaphors by Chinese Diplomats

From First Things.  A Chinese diplomat compared pre-occupation Tibet to the antebellum South and said that Pres. Obama, being black and admiring Lincoln should support what they are doing.  Tibet was a thoroughly imperfect feudal society before Chinese occupation.  It is hard to imagine however that the Tibetans are all itching for freedom so they can re-impose feudalism; the government in exile in India democratically elected a prime minister in 2006.  Maybe this kind of questionable logic works in China where state-run press and repressive policing gives people no chance to express their opinions.  But not here in 'merica; we have Lee Greenwood and his fringed leather jacket, dang it.

Congnitive Mapping and Wickedly Swerving Free-Kicks

Watch the video before you read the post. It's less than a minute long.

Something came up in a book I'm reading, Shopclass as Soulcraft, about currently en vogue models of brain function.  The rise of computers has led cognitive scientists to conceive of the brain in terms of computing power, carrying out calculations at a rate of speed that is inferior to modern computers. (Interestingly enough the study of the brain has influenced computer design as well with artificial neural networks that make connections of varying strengths based on repetition of pathway usage similar to the way neurons function.)  This modern conception of the brain as computer has some significant gaps I feel, failing to account for the intuitive use of the intellect by experts in their fields.

The video is a case in point.  Either Roberto Carlos is a genius, making an incredible amount of calculations to hit a ball with the right amount of force,  perfect initial direction, and sufficient spin to make the ball clear the wall and then curve back into the goal or something else is going on.  As a former soccer player, I can tell you without a doubt something else is happening.  When you go to strike the ball you look at the spot you want to put the ball and then look at the spot that you know you need to hit the ball; if all proceeds as planned you get a sense of having kicked the ball well, not of having carried out complicated computations.  The brain and body seem to be intimately connected in this process somehow with practice creating the muscle memory, leg strength and the "knowledge"  of how to hit the ball.  When we conceive of the brain as simply an impressive, if now somewhat inferior, data processor, we really can't account for what Roberto Carlos is doing when he scores on poor Fabian Barthez (the French goalie in the clip).  Man is not however an autonomous conscience that inhabits a body.  One of the problems with Descartes separation of the conciousness from the body is that it uses the language of an embodied existence to describe a state in which the senses that supply our language are discarded in his program of radical scepticism.  Language is built upon the senses.  Even Helen Keller when learning language from her teacher Annie Sullivan thought in tactile terms: "This wetness running through my hand is related to the signs being made into my palm- water."  Conciousness, if by nothing else than language, is tied to the body.

This is all to say that I really don't know what is going on with how the brain works in relation to the body in performing tasks that are accomplished intuitively, but I don't think the computational model is adequate.

Catholic Bishop on Abortion Debate

This from First Things.  A Catholic bishop calls out a senator who says disagreement with the church on abortion doesn't "make him less of a Catholic".  First Things is a good, fairly ecumenical magazine that tends to be center-right for the most part- check out Alan Jacobs or David B. Hart articles if you go to the site, they're usually pretty good

The Mix-Tape Revolution

One of the most saddening and deplorable developments in modern society is, indubitably, the fall from prominence that mix-tapes have experienced from their lofty perch atop the courtship ritual food-chain.  In the golden days, before these new-fangled computers, and napsters, and what-not made music so readily available, suitors would spend hours manually recording the newest Bon Jovi songs onto cassette.  Those days have sadly left us, and now prospective targets must be wooed by other means such as personal conversation, without recourse to the eloquence of modern poets like Celine Dion or the 2 Live Crew- but how else can I communicate that (Everything I Do) I Do it for You except through the tender croonings and smooth sounds of Bryan Adams?

But all is not lost.

While in the shower mourning over the loss of the mix-tape as courting ritual and simultaneously celebrating my newly minted compilation of various artists of a country bent, I came to a startling revelation: I have a blog.

I have a blog.

A blog with a readership that must run at least into the half-dozens.

I could start a grass-roots campaign that would bring the mix-tape method of courtship back into national, nay, international prominence (I hear the cassette is still big in Eastern Europe and rural Canada, so that's a start).  This will not be like other grass-roots campaigns however; Fox News will not create it, seemingly out of whole cloth, promote it daily on telecasts and through websites and then be shocked when their coverage of the completely spontaneous "movement among the people" fufills all the expectations they had placed on it as they orchestrated it over the course of several months- no, it will grow from the ground up like... like... grass... no even lower than that, lower than the grass, it will start at the roots of the grass!

And that's where you come in.  Now you may say, "I already have a significant other," or "I'm really not looking," or "I'm female and not that aggressive, in-your-face, I'm-gonna-get-me-my-man type, I like the guy to come after me", or "I actually hate the idea of mix-tapes, it's a weird thing to do, couldn't you just go about it in a normal way that doesn't depend on cheesy top-40 hits"- but let me tell you something, "None of that matters".  This is a grass-roots campaign and you, my friend are thinking at a grass level.  We won't actually be making mix-tapes for people to try and get them to associate all the romantic feelings that "On Bended Knee" produces in them with us, instead we will be promoting mix tape awareness.  The important thing is not that mix-tapes are used by musically sensitive singles to woo prospective mates, but that they are aware of the idea of using mix-tapes to woo prospective mates . You don't get rootier than that.

Let's start this thing.

Would Montaigne be a blogger?

Instead of adding more frustrated/bitter post-game comments to facebook (because I've done enough of that already), I thought I'd put up a quick post here. 

This isn't really something I've thought about much- for one thing because I don't think much about blogging, as any number of my posts will attest- but I'm wondering if in the rise of blogging we may be seeing a return of the essay. The classic essay, pioneered by Michel de Montaigne, a French guy, in the 16th century is basically a short  article written by someone who is usually a non-specialist and from a personal point of view.  The term comes from the French essayer through Montaigne, and means "to attempt".  These attempts to grapple with a subject from a layman's perspective are more easy to understand than scholarly articles, able to cover more ground, and, with a good essayist, actually enjoyable to read.  Essays kind of went out for most of the later 20th century with the rise of the cult of specialization.  While this specialization and, I would say, fragmentation of knowledge is still for the most part in place, to the point that specialists in their respective fields are largely unable to converse with specialists in other fields (see for instance the opinions of your typical department head of some branch of science at a local university and their inability to speak to or even see the value in other fields of study), the rise of blogs may signal a sort of re-integration of knowledge, at least at a popular level.  This is I think potentially a very good thing.  The specialist culture creates two significant problems, I feel.  One either is at the mercy of whatever the current opinion of the experts are ("12 servings of carbs a day huh?  Well if the pyramid says so...") or one elevates one's own area of specialization to an all-encompassing world-view that fails to account for other areas or types of knowledge (see Dawkins, Richard). 

Which all leads me to the question would Montaigne (or Hazlitt, or Emerson, or...) be a blogger?  Is this medium one in which the essay may return to exert some kind of influence on society?  Or does it just allow anyone with an internet connection the ability to air their thoughts without the annoying responsibility of having to get someone to listen to them?

Seventy Year Old Man Beats Up Journalist over Bad Article

From the American Scene.

Here's a fun story as far as journalistic fisticuffs go. Henry Allen, a  nearly seventy year old feature editor for the Washington Post Style section, got into a fist-fight with feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia, who, I'm assuming based solely on his hyphenated last name, is a pretentious jerk.  The fight apparently centered around a lazily put together "charticle" about inadvertent disclosures, drawing on a congressman recently letting slip that several colleagues were under investigation for ethics violations.  The story was said to contain several factual errors- stating, for instance, that Robert E. Lee's battle plans were found wrapped around cigars in Virginia, when the event actually occurred in Maryland- but must have been quite spectacularly terrible to elicit the response it did from Allen.  Upon reading it, he was said to remark, "This is total crap.  It's the second worst story I've seen in Style in 43 years."  This has led to much speculation as to what the worst story may be.  Reports say it was a story on Paul Robeson (who has the improbable occupational listing of athlete/actor/orator/concert singer/lawyer/social activist on wikipedia, someone get that man a "Slashie").

Another Post writer gives his take on it here and gives a link to what is for his money the worst article ever to appear in Style.  I was curious and took the time to read it.  Without having ever read any other Style articles, I can say that this must surely be the worst thing the have ever published; it reaches impressive depths of utter crapitude.  This is the type article that it actually takes a somewhat talented writer to create: a large, sprawling, nauseating mess; as if someone found a fresh steaming dog turd on the sidewalk in front of their house, took a fancy to it, and decided to spend the next week crocheting a neon orange sweater for it to wear, and then upon closer inspection of the finished product decided to screen-print it with a brightly colored image of a family of gay, effeminate, bejeweled dolphins  surfacing before a field of frolicking unicorns and so bring the level of crappiness to new, unimagined heights.  Words really fail to describe how awful this article is, it has everything: mazes; visions of Native Americans dispensing vague, feel-good proverbs; lens flares that are perhaps profound spiritual experiences; ridiculous new-age associations between walking through a labyrinth and improving your child's standardized test scores; and a "moving Native American funeral flute solo and song and dance."  Click the link, entertain yourself, you deserve it.