There's Beauty in the Bellow

I'm reading Richard B Sewall's biography of Emily Dickinson and I have particularly enjoyed the attention that he gives to her education. Dickinson may not have had a multitude surrounding her telling her that she could be anything she wanted but she was far better educated than most people today. Regardless of whether her father, Edward Dickinson (Sewell disputes this), cut a foreboding figure, he believed that his daughters ought to receive an education. He doesn't appear to be particularly unique in this matter. Emily attended Holyoke with her cousin. Sewall offers no hints that the young women at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke were a controversial presence. Emily had several textbooks written by women -- and not on embroidery either. On botany . Science . Emily and the headmistress of Holyoke College, Mary Lyon, probably received a more rigorous education in a shorter period of time than we, for all our 16+ years of schooling. When Mary Lyon died (only a few mo...

Currently reading: Economics in One Lesson , Henry Hazlitt. Assigned by my boss. Very cool. Obama is an economic dunce measured against Hazlitt's principles. The Book of Common Prayer . Why don't we pray prayers like these anymore? The BoCP is full of prayers for victory, for aid in "running after" God's promises. It seems that we pray only for our own advancement and blessings; we are continually praying for health (we have so many people ill and in distress!). But I'm also reading the book of Job. Why don't we pray for outcomes like Job's? The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy , Bryan McGee. About a pompous bore by a pompous bore. Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor , Robert Lacey. Fun read. God was very gracious to England in bringing George VI and the present Queen to the throne. England might not exist at all if Edward VIII had continued his reign into World War II. In other news, I have a diploma now. And the GRE is a week from this...

If we cannot control our appetites for food, then how are we to discipline our appetites for violence, sex, pleasure (caffeine, drugs, alcohol, etc) or the accumulative appetite? Obesity is entirely our own fault. We are individually responsible for whatever "conditioning" leads us toward this "disease."

Critics depend upon structured arguments to make their points. A novelist primarily structures not arguments for the reader but experiences. Unlike our more random encounters with the actual world, the experiences we find in a novel are entirely verbal in origin, and they are shaped by their creator specifically with us, the readers, in mind. As we progress through a novel, we live in its world with an intense, imaginative participation very rarely, if ever, generated in us by any kind of purely expository writing. Thus somewhere--exactly where, no artist and no critic has ever discovered--between the immediacy of a lived, concrete encounter, and the limited intellectual engagement created by expository prose, exists the mysterious participatory experience offered by imaginative literature. The Religious Dimension of Jane Austen's Novels , Gene Koppel, 122.

Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science. ~Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Like countless educated women in the late nineteenth century, Vinnie (Lavinia Dickinson, sister to Emily) faced the problem of vocation, as finance capitalism and the Industrial Revolution did away with the domestic economy that had dominated colonial and early national life. With the middle-class home transformed into a center of consumption by the mid-nineteenth century, the home because the "women's sphere," but what was a woman to do in it? If, as Vinnie said late in life, "Austin had Amherst" and "father believed," what were the women to do? In assuming her role as a poet with "title divine," Emily found her vocation and made her home, at least for herself, a center of production in a unique, new form of domestic economy. Mrs. Dickinson took upon herself the work of love, ailment, and complaint. That left Vinnie with the job of looking after all of them. ("I had the family to keep track of.") ...

I don't rebel at being a helpmeet, nor at being the glory or crown of the man. But I want my work to adorn his, not just inspire it (either as a muse or another reason to kill dragons), not just to nurture it (by cooking good food, creating a welcoming home, and building him up with praise). Can my work go beyond the domestic, beyond serving his appetites? Can the crown go with him, shedding glory in public places, beyond the energy and confidence bestowed by receiving respect at home or “sugar cake for you to take for all the boys to see”? I love stories of husbands and wives who are collaborators, where her research and knowledge strengthens, increases, sustains his project. In a sense I want to be a Deborah to a David—if it is possible for those two characters to create a peaceable union. Pagan religions at once deify sex and its offspring while also despising the woman herself, her organs and her blood. What dies the Church do? She is our Mother, she is Christ's Bride. She ...

I just came across an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times by Brent Staples on plagiarism in academia. Of course, blogger won't allow me to cut and paste it. The Irony. So I will most laboriously type out the passage I wanted to highlight: Staples quotes a professor-friend: Nonchalance from students towards plagiarism "represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind." Is this ideal of self-improvement and mental freedom unique to Western education? Eastern thought and pedagogy seems to strive for detatchment as opposed to independence . I could be wrong; I find Eastern philosophy rather convoluted and I retain only impressions and snippets of it. But I am thinking of the prominence of our Asian and Indian ("India-Indians...

While bagging for one of my fellow cashiers last week, we met a very interesting person. She is the mother of Patrick Warburton and an abstinence advocate and activist, beautiful, elegant, and passionate. She told us that she is always looking for young people to talk about abstinence and encourage parents to talk to their children: "they'll listen to you, they won't listen to me." But as a cashier in a grocery store, communication in families is frequently rude, ungracious, impatient and tense in very small matters like "what are we doing for dinner?" "did you get everything on the shopping list?" If grace and courtesy have become alienated from everyday discourse, why should it be any better in more serious matters? If I did do a talk for Ms. Warburton, I could say "Talk to your kids," but I'd also have to say, "Go to church, get right with God, improve your communication with God, else why should they listen to you?" Jus...

We are expected to be broadminded about literature, to put aside prejudice or conviction, and to look at fiction as fiction and at drama as drama. With what is inaccurately called 'censorship' in this country--with what is much more difficult to cope with than an official censorship, because it represents the opinions of individuals in an irresponsible democracy---I have very little sympathy; partly because it so often suppresses the wrong books, and partly because it is little more effective than Prohibition of Liquor; partly because it is one manifestation of the desire that state control should take the place of decent domestic influence; and wholly because it stems from custom and habit, not from decided theological and moral principles. Incidentally, it gives people a false sense of security in leading them to believe that books which are not suppressed are harmless. Whether there is such a thing as a harmless book I am not sure: but there very likely are books so utterl...

Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with one of the falsest first lines of literature; he writes that "happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." With novels and memoirs full of dysfunctional families of perverse individuals, perhaps we are congratulating ourselves in our unhappiness that at least we are not like those boring happy folks. But perversion, being parasitical, is capable of only so many permutations. Every happy family has found its own way of creating an organic being from a few vagrant individuals. "Dysfunctional family" must be a cliche by now. The "Books" section of The New York Times is probably the most boring part of the paper after "U.S. News." But I love invites to family dinners, to watch the members speak to, and listen to them speak of, one another, to see their different methods of life. Last night, I listened to a wife talk about her husband's annual spring itch to drive to Washing...

From a classmate's wedding, right before I left Moscow to come home. Dr. Leithart gave the exhortation. Song of Songs 2:16a: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; 6:3a: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”; 7:10: “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.” “How are you feeling today?” someone might have asked you. How can you answer? Happy? Excited? Overjoyed? Nervous? None of the normal words is big enough to express the magnitude of this day. You reach for something bigger, and you’re tempted to try something faux-German like “Uber-happy” or faux-Greek like “Hyper-excited.” The emotion of this day is best captured, I submit, by the word “ecstatic.” That’s big enough to get at the joy and delight of your wedding, and, more importantly, it highlights deeper dimensions of what’s happening today, and what you’re committing yourselves to for the unforeseeable future. Etymologically, the word “ecstasy” means “to stand outside,” and that’s what the English derivative meant f...

I suppose I'm technically being lazy since I haven't been posting much of my own writing, thoughts or pictures over the last couple entries. Technical life has gotten a bit more tricky since my computer has been out of commission over the last few weeks. But the quotes I've been putting up from my pastors and teachers have also expressed thoughts that I found wonderful and freeing and wanted to share. I have been writing short pieces for my teachers, but generally they need recontextualization to make them appropriate for a broader audience. So here's another from Dr. Leithart: Carey Ellen Walsh ( Exquisite Desire ) points to the difference between classical responses to desire and the account of desire in the Song of Songs. Using Odysseus and the Sirens as an illustration, she notes how this scene reveals the Greek instinct that desire “harbors danger by rendering its victim under its spell.” To counter desire, one needed to exercise rational management and...

To enjoy life rquires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attatchment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it. Montaigne, "On Experience."

says a writing teacher to his students. Let's see. Two weddings. Two funerals (and another one coming this week). My brother getting ready to leave home; for us, a complicated process. Many friends moving away. Difficulty finding a job (along with plenty of my peers). Biblical Horizons conference. A ridiculous number of engagements. A family reunion. Grandfather with cancer. His wife with a brain hemorrhage . A wrongful arrest. A suicide. Real life is not wished, it is lived; stories and novels, whose subject is human beings in relationship with experience to undergo, make their own difficult way, struggle toward their own relationships. Instead of fairy immunity to change, there is the vulnerability of human imperfection caught up in human emotion, and so there is growth, there is crisis, there is fulfillment, there is decay. Life moves toward death. The novel's progress is one of causality, and with that comes suspense. Suspense is a necessity in a novel because it is a mai...

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work , Matthew B. Crawford. From his essay for the New York Times, May 21: A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this. Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

From ND Wilson's blog: As is the case with most things that I say, this is stolen. But this isn’t stolen from another writer, this is stolen (and adapted) from a music video/film guy friend. If you want to be a writer (professionally and not just as a hobbyist), here’s a litmus test for your dedication. Can you get up early and write a short creative sketch of the sunrise (oh, say, 250 wds)? Then can you do it again tomorrow? And the next day? Can you write 30 descriptive sketches of 30 consecutive sunrises? The simple exercise in discipline is hard enough, and it will tell you just how much you actually want to write. But on top of that, the writing component is quite difficult as well. How do you see the sunrise in a new way every morning? How do you express it in a new way? Can you get through the verbal cliche-flailing, and actually create 30 distinct scenes? Adapt the exercise if you want. Stand in the same place every night and try to sketch 30 consecutive midnights. I have o...

A gem of wisdom from my Greek professor: In giving an answer, "if you don't know what the question is, you're just blogging."

From a discussion on the New York Times website as the value of a BA To the Editor: Charles Murray needs to recognize that the liberal arts degree, at its best, validates its holder as one who has skills needed for some of our biggest jobs. A good half of the liberal arts curriculum is about thinking analogically. The degree says this person has studied “humane letters” and so knows his or her way around a metaphor: how it opens up vistas, alters viewpoints, both frees and constrains thought and affects decisions. No one should try to motivate a work force, lead a corporation, plan military strategies or run a government who does not know how a metaphor works. Math and science, the other half of the liberal arts curriculum, develop skills that are scarce, yet needed, in our society. They are all about knowing a fact from a factoid, reasoning from data to underlying patterns and practical implications, all while feeding careful observation through the strainer of valid logic. The libera...