Three things I hate

1. The N.F.L.
   
2. Video games
   
3. APA style documentation
   

In Defense of the Liberal Arts: The therapeutic Left and the utilitarian Right both do disservice to the humanities.

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.

Come On Eileen - Dexy's Midnight Runners (HQ Audio)

Quite possibly, the best song of the 1980s.

literary quote of the day (11/26/10)

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

literary quote of the day (11/22/10)

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!

Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

literary quote of the day (11/21/10)

"There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings."

Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

literary quote of the day (11/17/10)

Let me state that without my notes Shade's text has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

CHARLES KINBOTE

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

literary quote of the day (11/14/10)

My commentary to this poem, now in the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me.

Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

literary quote of the day (11/6/10)

"This can't be," I stammered, my voice hadly recognizable as my own.

"It can't be, yet it is," the Bible peddler said, his voice litte more than a whisper. "The number of pages in this book is literally infinite. No page is the first page; no page is the last. I don't know why they're numbered in this arbitrary way, but perhaps it's to give one to understand that the terms of an infinite series can be numbered any way whatever."

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Book of Sand"

literary quote of the day (11/5/10)

In the heat of the party he exhibited his unusual masculinity on the bar, completely covered with tattoos of words in several languages intertwined in blue and red.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

literary quote of the day (11/3/10)

"I, too, am Ungit."

Robby Prenkert, "Constructing (Our)Selves With Words: A Story of a Lecture(r)"

Literary quote of the day (11/2/10)

"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"

literary quote of the day (11/1/10)

So the situation went on the same way for another six months until that tragic Sunday when Jose Arcadio Buendia won a cockfight from Prudencio Aguilar. Furious, aroused by the blood of his bird, the loser backed away from Jose Arcadio Buendia so that everyone in the cockpit could hear what he was going to tell him.

"Congratualations!" he shouted. "Maybe that rooster of yours can do yur wife a favor."

Jose Arcadio Buendia serenely picked up his rooster. "I'll be right back," he told everyone. And then to Prudencio Aguilar:

"You go home and get a weapon, because I'm going to kill you."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

READ THIS

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

literary quote of the day (10/31/10)

"The Lord is wonderful."

Marilynne Robinson, Home

literary quote of the day (10/28/10)

“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

literary quote of the day (10/27/10)

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

literary quote of the day (10/26/10)

"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

literary quote of the day (10-25-10)

The world of machines is running
Beyond the world of trees
Where only a leaf is turning
In a small high breeze.

Wendell Berry, "Sabbaths, 1988"

literary quote of the day (10/23/10)

He closed his eyes and the night ran together in his mind and he remembered the rifle in the corner and thought: I'll throw it in the creek tomorrow. I never want to see it again. He would be asleep soon. He saw himself standing on the hill and throwing his rifle into the creek; then the creek became an ocean, and he stood on a high cliff and for a moment he was a mighty angel, throwing all guns and creulty and sex and tears into the sea.

Andre Dubus, "The Intruder"

literary quote of the day (10/22/10)

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the windowpane"

John Shade, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov


and a bonus quote, since I missed yesterday...

"My commentary to this poem, now in the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me."

Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

literary quote of the day (10/20/10)

"It was a dark and stormy night."

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

literary quote of the day (10/19/10)

So let us leave. Let us get to the Plymouth with an impolite quickness--let us fly, as witnesses of eras past might say. Because at home, the hard and escalating war has paid a visit. And it's Swede, my darling sister, who has met it at the door.

Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

literary quote of the day (10/18/10)

I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

literary quote of the day (10/17/10)

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

literary quote of the day (10/16/10)

Every man has within his own reminiscences certain things he doesn’t reveal to anyone, except, perhaps, to his friends. There are also some that he won’t reveal even to his friends, only to himself perhaps, and even then, in secret. Finally, there are some which a man is afraid to reveal even to himself; every decent man has accumulated a fair number of such things. In fact, it can even be said that the more decent the man, the more of these things he’s accumulated. Anyway, only recently I myself decided to recall some of my earlier adventures; up to now I’ve always avoided them, even with a certain anxiety. But having decided not only to recall them, but even to write them down, now is when I wish to try an experiment: is it possible to be absolutely honest even with one’s own self and not to fear the whole truth? Incidentally, I’ll mention that Heine maintains that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to lie about himself. In Heine’s opinion, Rousseau, for example, undoubtedly told untruths about himself in his confession and even lied intentionally, out of vanity. I’m convinced that Heine is correct; I understand perfectly well that sometimes it’s possible out of vanity alone to impute all sorts of crimes to oneself, and I can even understand what sort of vanity that might be.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

literary quote of the day (10/15/10)

"...I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp."

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

literary quote of the day (10/14/10)

Crying, in the loneliness of the night
Dying, in the emptiness of this life

Sweet, sweet mercy
Shine on me.
Can you hear me?
Please, be near me

Michael Pritzl, "Sweet Mercy"

literary quote of the day (10/13/10)

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters

literary quote of the day (10/11/10)

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

p.s. The most beautiful novel I have read (three times now) in some years.

literary quote of the day (10/10/10)

"I just met a wonderful new man, he's fictional but you can't have everything."

-Cecilia, in The Purple Rose of Cairo

literary quote of the day (10-8-10)

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself alone in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.

-Dante, "The Inferno", The Divine Comedy

literary quote of the day (10-7-10)

“You cannot teach creativity -- how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.”

-Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel Prize Winner, 2010)

literary quote of the day (10/5/10)

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


-Billy Collins, "Introduction to Poetry"

literary quote of the day (10/4/10)

He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself.

-Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First"

literary quote of the day (10/2/10)

He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

Flannery O'Connor, "The Artificial Nigger"

october

October
And the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care
October
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on
And on

literary quote of the day (9/30/10)

Now that I'm dead I know everything. This is what I wished would happen, but like so many of my wishes it failed to come true. I know only a few factoids that I didn't know before. It's much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.

Since being dead--since achieving this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness--I've learned some things I would rather not know, as one does when listening at windows or opening other people's letters. You think you'd like to read minds? Think again.

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

song of the harlot

"When I read the Bible, I find that I relate to the sinners, more than I relate to the saints."

Michael Pritzl, The Violet Burning


"Ditto"

Robby Prenkert, 'everything and nothing'

literary quote of the day (9/29/10)

"Good!" Johnson said savagely. He thrust his head forward. "Listen here," he hissed, "I don't care if he's good or not. He ain't right!"

Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First" (Rufus Johnson speaking)

a second literary quote for today (9/28/10)

'Why is it that really beautiful people think everyone else in the world exists merely for their amusement?'

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad


p.s. Is it bad that my blog is made up now almost entirely of words penned by authors I force 19 year olds to read in my classes?

literary quote of the day (9/28/10)

you're so far away
and i won't see you any day soon
we came a long way
and now you want to fly to the moon
all alone going your own way
i thought i owned your love
and now you say

ache, ache beautiful for me
go along and ache
ache beauty babe

Michael Roe, "Ache Beautiful"

literary quote of the day (9/27/10)

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

—William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow


(Salvador Dali, "The Persistence of Memory")

literary quote of the day (9/26/10)

In the Palace at 4 A.M. you walk from one room to the next by going through the walls. You don't need to use the doorways. There is a door, but it is standing open, permanently. If you were to walk through it and didn't like what was on the other side you could turn and come back to the place you started from. What is done can be undone. It is there that I find Cletus Smith.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

literary quote of the day (9/25/10)

My younger brother was born on New Year's day, at the height of the influenza epidemic of 1918. My mother died two days later of double pneumonia. After that, there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

literary quote of the day (9/24/10)

Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.

-William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

literary quote of the day (9/23/10)

Yes it is the dawn that has come. The tithoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.

Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country


p.s. We might move in the direction of "emancipation from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear" if we shut off right wing talk radio and the Glenn Beck program and read good books and the Good Book instead. Or even just took a walk in the woods.

literary quote of the day (9/22/10)

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

literary quote of the day (9/21/10)

He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

literary quote of the day [9/20/10]

"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."

-Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych"

literary quote of the day (9/16)

Long ago, when I was a young man, my father said to me... "Norman, you like to write stories?" And I said, "Yes, I do." Then he said, "Someday, when you're ready... you might tell our family story. Only then will you understand what happened and why."

(Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It)

literary quote of the day

"How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?"

-JM Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

what do you want for a snack

Sydney: "I want popcorn and ice cream."

Mama: "How about one or the other."

Sydney: "No, I think I want both."

burning things

Burnt up a big brush pile in my back yard last night. Why is there so much pleasure to be had watching a big pile of sticks burn? Especially in the dark.

Jimtown pizza

I like the "Cook's Special."

Probably going to need a ride an extra twenty minutes on the bike tomorrow morning—I ate a whole small pizza myself tonight. Man, it was good.

200th post all time!!!

This is my 200th post on this blog.

Big woop. Check out my nephew Calvin's blog. He's got like 8 gazillion posts and he's only 9.

bear grylls

Let's hope it never comes to this.

p90x

"If you abide in My word [hold fast to My teachings and live in accordance with them], you are truly My disciples. And you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free." Jesus, John 8:31-32

Tony Horton says something like the same thing. If you DO what I'm telling you, you're a real student of muscle confusion. THEN you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

I watched the infomercial two years ago, and I got the facts. After two years of holding fast to his teachings, living in accordance with them, I know the truth. It's liberating, dude. My body doesn't ache like it used to.

And as a bonus, when I asked Jeanie if she noticed any difference in the way I looked, she said, "Oh yeah, big time."

That's what I'm talking about. :-)

advice

Do not look for God in your story. Look for your story in God's.

We are (essential) sub-plot in God's meta-story.

the whole and the parts

"It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible." -Eugene Peterson,Eat This Book

I say, it takes the whole novel to read any part of the novel.

It takes the whole life to read any part of the life.

my two favorite nba teams

Have I mentioned lately how little I care about NFL preseason garbage? Truth be told, I care very little about NFL season garbage as well.

If we must talk about a meaningless season long before it starts, let's talk about the upcoming NBA season. This year, my two favorite NBA teams are any team that Steve Nash plays for and whoever is playing the Miami Heat.

Actually, the only thing better than the Heat losing would be Lebron James coming down with a season ending injury and the Heat going on to win the championship without him.

And then never returning to a championship with him healthy and in the line-up.

question

Does it take anything away from my achievement of 200 posts for the year if many of them say very little, if they are very short, and if I post more than once in a day. Like, today, for instance. Like, this post, for instance.

See?

please...

Please doubt me... you've no idea how much trivial drivel I'm capable of writing and posting. I dare you.

post stats

In the year 2009 I had 107 blog posts. To date in 2010 I have 33 (counting this one). What does this tell me?

1. If I hope to catch up to last year's number I better get busy.
2. Maybe I should write shorter entries.
3. There's really not much to say that hasn't been said a thousand billion times before.
4. I should set a goal.
5. That goal will be 200 posts in the year 2010.

You doubt me? Please say you doubt me.

my dog morgan

He walks with a limp now—arthritis in both a front and a back leg give him the creaks when he stands. He does not chase the ball in the yard more than once these days, preferring to chase it down, chomp it in his labrador's soft mouth, and then rest, triumphantly with his prize in the cool grass. He sleeps more than he used to. When he runs, which he still does every time the UPS man drives anywhere near the neighborhood, or the cat next door saunters across the neighbors back deck, or I turn on the waffle ball pitching machine to take a little BP, he runs noticeably slower than he did a year ago.

But he is still graceful in the water, and he will swim for as long as I am willing to throw the toy into the lake for him to retrieve.

For this reason, too, we will spend a few more days at the beach in Ludington this summer.

I wonder if he dreams, like I do, of a heaven—perpetually sunny and sixty-five—where no one would think to put up a sign saying “no dogs allowed” on any beach?

eat this book

"Lectio divina is not a methodical technique for reading the Bible. It is a cultivated, developed habit of living the text in Jesus' name. This is the way, the only way, that the Holy Scriptues become formative in the Christian church and become salt and leaven in the world. It is not through doctrinal disputes and formulations, not through strategies to subdue the barbarians, not through congregational programs to educate the laity in the "principles and truths" of the Scriptures--not in any of the ways in which the Bible is so commonly and vigorously promoted among us as an impersonal weapon or tool or program. It is astonishing how many ways we manage to devise for using the Bible to avoid a believing obedience, both personal and corporate, in receiving and following the Word made flesh." --Eugene Peterson

I have been trying, lately, to "eat this book." Peterson has done more to help me--both with his wise counsel in the book above and with his marveoulous translation of the scriptures--The Message--than anyone else.

I often want to make my own spiritual formation more complicated than necessary. But it can be as simple as Read, Pray, Live.

God's camping instructions

"Mark out an area outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourselves. Along with your weapons have a stick with you. After you relieve yourself, dig a hole with the stick and cover your excrement." (Deut. 23:12-13)

softball

Last week I drove to Benton Harbor to play in a church league fastpitch softball game, and ever since then I cannot get out my mind this impossible hope of someday having a local church fastpitch league to play in again.

When I was fourteen, I played in my first fastpitch softball game, on my dad's church team at the Prairie Camp. In those days my church could field two full fastpitch teams. Because men who played softball played fastpitch softball. Since then I've had an overwhelming passion for the game. I love watching it played by the best players in the world where the pitching is virtually unhittable. I've played a few games with and against world class competition, but more often, these days, I play regularly on a travel league team that's middle of the pack.

But that's not my hope for the future of men's fastpitch. Playing in that church league game in Benton Harbor, which could only be described as the lowest levels of men's fastpitch, reminded me again that the lowest level of men's fastpitch--like a local start-up church league I daydream about--is both more fun and simply better than the highest level of slow pitch softball (where enormous, steroid charged, beer-chuggers hit blooped in pitches three hundred feet with $400 bats--how stupid).

Last night playing church league slow pitch softball at Cedar Road Missionary Church, all I could think about was how much more fun every player on both teams could be having if we stopped the game right where it was and declard that for the rest of the night and for the rest of the season we'd be playing fastpitch.

So what that no one really knows how to pitch; we'd learn. So what we don't have helmets--no one wore helmets to play softball until the late 1980s. So what we don't have any catchers gear...okay, maybe we'd need some catchers gear. And we'd need move the bases in to the correct distance and the pitching rubber would have to be moved forward.

None of these are impossible obstacles to overcome. All we need is the will to try it.

I'd even settle for a happy medium called "modified fast pitch".

ludington

It wasn't great body surfing, but it was body surfing nonetheless. Three days in a row on three different beaches in Ludington, Michigan. Sweet.

from The Herald Palladium

Smalltown Fastpitch captures invite title

Smalltown Fastpitch of Benton Harbor beat the Munger Firemen 3-2 in the championship game of this weekend's Rich Plangger Fastpitch Invitational.

The game was a rematch of last year's Class D state championship, also won by Smalltown Fastpitch.

Browning Chabot was the winning pitcher, throwing a four-hitter with five strikeouts. Robby Prenkert's RBI single in the top of the seventh inning drove in Brent Chabot with the winning run.

Smalltown was 4-1 in the tournament, losing to Munger in a pool play game on Saturday.

The team won its other two pool play games to advance to Sunday's single elimination round.

Smalltown beat the Goshen Gators 3-2 in one semifinal and Munger beat DC Current of Bremen, Ind., in the other semifinal.

Rich Plangger and his son Rick were honored for their long time contribution to local fastpitch softball.

http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2010/06/22/sports/1519867.txt

Jamaica Gleaner News - Jamaica needs more, Bruce - Lead Stories - Monday | June 21, 2010

Jamaica Gleaner News - Jamaica needs more, Bruce - Lead Stories - Monday | June 21, 2010

This is my friend Courtney, who speaks the truth with conviction. There is a serious crime problem in Kingston, but the solution cannot simply be "lock 'em all up."

"We're gonna take you on back to the Caribbean"

what ever happened to offense?

They're supposed to be the two best basketball teams in the league playing in a seventh game for the championship. But they look awful on offense. They miss shots; they fumble the ball; they stand around; they dribble too much.

My assessment: The Lakers and the Celtics are tired of each other and just want this thing to be over with.

Crying out loud, it is the middle of June.

Morning

1. Wake up, watch soccer--Chile v. Honduras.
2. Drink juice, take vitamins, check e-mail and facebook (while watching soccer).
3. French Toast and newspaper.
4. 25 minute bike ride.
5. P90x Chest/shoulders/triceps while watching soccer--Switzerland's huge upset of Spain.
6. Discover leak dripping into basement from kitchen plumbing, rig dehumidifier and fans to blow dry.

Who knows what the afternoon may hold. Bet on soccer, though.

My favorite sporting events to watch on tv

5. Notre Dame football (just because it's local--not because I'm an avid ND football fan)
4. Women's college softball world series.
3. Chicago Cubs baseball.
2. Any basketball game where Steven Nash is playing.
1. World cup soccer.

The most hopelessly boring sports to watch on television:

5. The Winter Olympics
4. The last two minutes of 95% of NFL football games
3. Poker (why is this even on tv, and why is it on ESPN?)
2. Cars driving around in circles (I think they call it Nascar?--is it even a sport?)
1. All but the last two minutes of any NFL football game.

I blogged this from my phone. How cool is that? Call me Dr. Technology.

free throws and the daily office

Most days I take a few minutes to either go out to my driveway or into the gym at Bethel and shoot some free throws. I almost always shoot other shots, but sometimes I don't want to jump and break much of a sweat.

Yesterday I hit 51 in a row in my driveway. The day before that I made 39. It's not entirely about the free throws. It's about taking a few minutes away from whatever else seems pressing and finding a rhythm. Some people pause for a few minutes several times every day to pray or to read scripture or to center down and meditate. I guess I do that, too. But my most effective practice of the "daily office" couples with the shooting of free throws.

new phone arrives monday

Cool feature:

Wireless hotspot for up to 8 devices--so now we have Internet when when we're at the cabin.

Next coolest feature:

Sprint TV so I can watch World Cup soccer from pretty much anywhere. And since there's no TV at the cabin, now we sort of have TV.

Of course who knows how long it will be until 4G actually comes to our area.

Tivoli Speaks

colbert on beck

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/309295/may-13-2010/glenn-to-the-mountaintop

in 33 days, little else matters

in the zone

Two words....

GORAN DRAGIC.

wow

http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20100502/News01/5020310/1129/News

I play softball against and sometimes with this guy.

http://http//laporteassemblyofgod.com/components/com_sermonspeaker/media/041810%20Jeff%20Kling.mp3

God is good.

On Nietzsche’s “The Anti-Christ”

R. is not an avid blog reader, but he does read one blog religiously. Not many days ago his favorite blogger posted the following brief entry.

"One difference between Glenn Beck and me: while we both assume people are greedy, I happen to think that greed is evil." (http://robbyprenkert.blogspot.com/2010/03/compare-and-contrast.html )

He--that is, R.--has been reading Nietzsche, as well. He thinks that he could write a reply. "One difference between Nietzsche and me: while we both assume people are greedy, I happen to think that greed (the will to power) is evil."

Which leads him to a related and obvious thought, of course. It is not so much the fact that Nietzsche and Beck share a worldview that troubles him. It is the masses of unthinking evangelical Christians who have so blindly devoured Beck's Nietzschean, 'anti-Christ,' rhetoric that worry him.

walk in the woods

Four kinds of flowers, two ducks, new leaf buds, and two butterflies.

Morgan took a little dip in the Baugo Creek.

Sydney picked flowers for people she loves.

compare and contrast

One difference between Glenn Beck and me: while we both assume people are greedy, I happen to think that greed is evil.

three observations

1. Amare Stoudamire is playing like a man possessed right now. Unfortunately, Jason Richardson can't make a wide open dunk.

2. I'm very glad that my parents never acted like some of the Spring Arbor parents I sat near at the Bethel game on Saturday. Yikes. Can you say long future in counseling for those poor children?

3. Speaking of that Spring Arbor vs. Bethel game, one of the stupidest calls I've ever seen--a double foul on a drive to the basket. Charge on Ryne Lightfoot; block on the guy trying to take the charge. On the radio afterwards, Ryne joked that the refs called a "blarge." Dumbest call in the history of basketball. Looked like a block from where I sat, but that's not the point. Has to be one or the other--it can't be both.

Happy last day of February, everyone. I'm on spring break.

interesting fact of the day

A bee gets nearly 5 million miles per gallon of honey.

If only my 1999 Ford Escort would run on honey.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123289433&ft=1&f=1025

sydney whistles

Sydney has been teaching herself to whistle. Every so often I'll hear an airy whistle from the other room. It usually takes me a second or two to realize that "hey, that was pretty good."

I like that she keeps practicing and slowly but surely she seems to be getting better at it. Most of the time she just blows air out her (incredibly cute) puckered lips, and there isn't much of a whistle. But every now and again she nails it. She's not "working" at whistling--you couldn't call something that one does with such a spirit of leisurely indifference, work. She's just learning to do something for the pleasure of it, simply because she can. I don't know why she decided she wanted to whistle. She never asked to be taught and never announced that she had a plan. She just started trying.

I love that.

x-files

Splendid news. A couple days ago I discovered that we actually get the SciFi channel. Call me "Mr. Observant." Anyhow, the splendid news is that every few days this channel shows reruns of "X-Files." So now I can DVR "X-files" and get my conspiracy theory/paranormal/"the truth is out there" fix every now and then.

On a related note, I'm also recommending my readers try tuning into this late night talk show called "Coast to Coast" sometime.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

Not that I'm a regular listener by any stretch of the imagination--I think I heard a part of the show one time while driving home from New Jersey in the middle of the night many years ago. So "the truth is out there" but apparently so are the crazies.

It was this article that got me intrigued.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/coast-to-coast

in praise of pull-ups

Pull-ups are hard. Some varieties are easier than others, of course. Reverse grip chin-ups are, for me, easier than wide grip or close grip overhand pull-ups. Corn-cob pull-ups are brutal (pull up, chin to the left, chin to the right, chin away from bar, and then back down again).

But I like them because they're hard and because after I have done six or eight sets of them I can tell I've done something good for my body.

A professional physical trainer once told me that if you could only do two strength exercises, pull-ups would be one of them.

Squats would be the other.

I can't say anything in praise of squats.

Tonight at 9 p.m.

Man vs. Wild Urban Survivor TV-PG, CC In a special edition of Man vs Wild, Bear Grylls finds himself in a new kind of jungle -- a concrete jungle. Bear uses the same wilderness survival techniques to stay alive in a city post-disaster.

in praise of acai berry juice

So I wake up in the morning and I drink a cup of 1/2 water 1/2 acai berry juice. Eight ounces of this stuff has 1000% (that's right, 10 times what you need) of your daily value of vitamin B12 and 200% of your daily value of Vitamin C--this among other things. Supposedly this stuff is loaded with antioxidants. Who knows. All I know is that I feel energized within a few minutes of drinking the stuff and hopping on the bike.

Here's the downside of waking up each day, drinking a big cup of watered down acai berry juice, and then riding a bike for a half hour. Riding a bike in the morning makes me very thirsty, so I drink a lot of water while and after I ride the bike--which is healthy, yes, but drinking that much makes me pee a lot. A lot.

Like, I went to the bathroom four times between 7:30 a.m. and the start of my class at 9:00 a.m. In fact, I went to the bathroom at Syd's daycare after I dropped her off around 8:25. I went to my classroom to log on to the computer and double check if the song I wanted to play would work from that computer, and by the time I finished that little test run and started to walk to my office I had to go again. After a few minutes in my office, I headed back to the classroom. On that walk I felt the urge again. Fortunately, this rate of bathroom visits does not continue throughout the day.

And so I would like to give a shout out to acai berry juice, a morning bike ride, and a lot of water. Flush the system, loosen up the creaky joints, crank up the metabolism, and energize my aging body.