Category: General

Writing with honey

Oh, I eat my peas with honey,
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes them taste real funny,
But it keeps them on the knife!

Apparently, I can only write about something for 3-4 hours at a time before my brain cramps up. I’m on the verge of finishing up this sermon for tomorrow, but I got run out of Starbucks by the sound of a women’s couponing circle. Now I’m at Panera, but it’s going to take a minute for my mind to get back in gear.

So, I always write out my sermons word-for-word, which I understand is Not The Thing To Do. But I’ve always been unable to do anything other. I’m not a very good extemporaneous speaker. That is to say, I talk faster than my mouth can carry me, and then I stumble and either mumble or stutter. Furthermore, with a little adrenaline in my system; the brain starts to revving; the transmission slips, and I start chasing down every little rabbit trail. That’s not what I want to listen to, so it’s not what I want to speak.

Not so my writing. Nice and clear it is. And if I meander, well it’s because I meant to. Every flourish nailed in place. That’s the way to go!

And if it takes me seven hours to write out an hour’s worth of speaking. Well, it isn’t due to my slowness at typing. That’s how long it takes me to actually think out what I want to say. Do you think the use of my hands or my mouth affects how fast I actually think? Of course not. So if I don’t write out every word, what do you think will happen? I’ll tell you what will happen. I’ll rip through that outline like a little piece of tissue paper, in fifteen minutes, not having said half of what I meant to, and then I’ll stand there silently, wishing I could go back to point three and say that other thing I meant to say, but inconveniently forgot to.

Well, put that important thing in the outline, and leave the rest out. My dear fellow, you really don’t understand these things, do you? Which important thing? They all need to be in there. I need all the extra words to hold the outline down, like honey to keep the peas on the knife.

And really, what’s the difference between a 12 page outline, and a 12-page manuscript? So long as what you’re writing doesn’t sound like what someone might be reading.

Nightmare

So I had a dream last night. We were vacationing somewhere where it snows, and David was with us. And we ran in to some people of the type that, when you just meet them, you think that maybe you are already dear old friends.

Anyway, I had brought with me my leather-bound copy of The Hobbit, and I was considering whether to let David read it, but I was nervous about him handling such a high quality binding. So I acquired somewhere some thick cardboard that I wanted to use as a book cover. My friend happened to have a circular saw, so I asked him to cut the cardboard to fit the book. He took the book and the cardboard and said, “Oh, about this size?” and then he proceeded to cut my leather-bound edition of The Hobbit into a square.

And then I woke up.

You see, of course, my dilemma.

So I’m listening to the Writing Excuses Season Capstone, and I’m starting to realize why I’ve never become a professional writer: I have too many hobbies. I have a lot of things I’m interested in and I do well enough at them naturally that I could have chosen any one of them to pursue professionally, but only at the expense of dropping all the others. I sing and dance; I play guitar; I write fiction and non-; I study theology and economics… but none of those turn into money, except at a very high level of development.

Developing one means dropping all the others and taking a gamble, and it’s a gamble I’ve never been willing to take. Which is odd, because I’m not particularly risk adverse. But I am proud. Too proud, for instance, to stay in my parents house for a decade, pursuing a career that might not work out. To proud to risk being accused of failure to launch.

So what have I done instead? I picked the one interest that had low barriers to entry, and easy to monetize early: sitting at a desk, organizing stuff. Small fame there, but a decent paycheck. And that’s how I became the Army Sustainment Officer I am today. It turns out my most lucrative calling is to be a bureaucrat.

That doesn’t erase the itch to accomplish something more… refined? with my life. It just steals a certain chunk of my time. So I am even now looking into refining the roughage out of the remaining hours that I have, so I can set aside time to do pursue one of my old affections. I’m going to have to shove aside one or two of my big three weekend and evening pursuits: church involvement, Facebook, and being a dad.

What’s Sex Got to Do With It?

I have just learned that the finale of the Legend of Korra is supposed to establish Korra as a lesbian. Or: sort of.

I haven’t been watching the show. I’ve watched maybe three episodes, and left the rest on the list of things I really meant to get around to. I’m not a big TV guy to begin with, and most of my media consumption lately has been catching up on iTunes with the Disney shows of my childhood… and my mother’s childhood. With this announcement, Korra has been pushed a good deal further down the list, together with Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings.

As I say, I haven’t seen the show, but my understanding is the big cue was that Korra and her girlfriend walk off into the sunset holding hands. It was vague enough that the creators had to blog about it so people would understand exactly what the author’s intent was. As an aside, explaining what the art means in a little note is how you do painting. Literature has plenty of opportunity in the text to communicate meaning. Doing your own interpretation is basically a failure to communicate. I think that may be all to the good. If they had made explicit exactly what the characters were going to engage in behind closed doors, I could safely scratch the show completely off my list. Yik.

Honestly, my problem isn’t the homosexuality, per se. Same sex attraction happens. Addressing it in a realistic way is probably beyond the scope of our paper maché culture, but not impossible. We’ve got some other issues to deal with first. My problem is the complete identification of love with sexual identity. This is why people can’t hold hands any more. Once you start, our whole civilization lunges in to make sure you see it all the way to the explicit end.

So I’m asking: what’s sex got to do with it? What’s wrong with Korra just loving Asami, and not committing adroit bedroom scenes after the fall of the final curtain?

I read Huxley’s Brave New World at a too tender age. One of the scenes that terrorized me as a middle-schooler was the love scene, where John confesses his undying love to Lenina, who responds with something to the tune of, “Well, why didn’t you say so!” and begins to strip. The famous phrase is, “off came the zippicamiknicks.” It turns out that John was living in a Shakespearean sonnet, and Lenina was living in something cheaper than a paperback romance.

The Vanity Fair article about the anouncement concludes, “[the] cannon is firing in celebration of a brave new world.” Brave New World, indeed, that has such people in it.

Reminiscing

My youngest son woke up this morning at 6:00 and demanded chips, would not be consoled with cereal. I put him off with a Blue’s Clues DVD. But it made me think of one of my stranger memories about TV, strange mostly because of how disconnected it is:

I think it must have been when I was in either first or second grade. But there was a kid I always fought with. I don’t know why we fought, or what we fought about. I don’t remember fighting him, or anything much else about him. But when I saw him coming at me from across the playground, I knew it was on, and I started powering up. I’m not sure what powering up involved, but it must have looked very threatening, because he put his hands up and said he wasn’t here to fight. I stood down.

Instead, he wanted to talk about culture. Have you ever seen The Snorks? he asked. I said I hadn’t. He told me it was a great show and that I should try it. It came on at 4:00 in the morning. I was intrigued, and so I tried it. I got up at 4:00 the next morning, turned the TV on, and there was the show, which I have loved ever since..

There is so much to this story that doesn’t make sense! If I didn’t know that The Snorks was a real TV show, with episodes I still remember, I would doubt that any of the story was true. First of all, I don’t remember anything else about the guy who told me about the show. I don’t know how we knew each other. We weren’t in the same class at school. I don’t remember ever talking to him again.

I very precisely remember that the show was on weekdays at 4:00 am. I’m sure this stuck out to me because watching the show necessitated getting up before my parents did, which is a kind of sly thing to do. But it creates problems in my memory. I remember the time, and I remember being told the time, and I remember thinking that 4 am was a weird time for a children’s cartoon. How many kids are up at 4:00? But there it was. Proof that my friend was my friend, because he was telling the truth instead playing of a weird practical joke on me. What I don’t remember was him telling me what channel the show was on. Yet I found it. I’m also pretty sure I didn’t have an alarm clock at that age. I have no idea how I contrived to get up at the right time. I suspect I used the tried old method of looking at a clock before going to bed, and deciding to wake up at the appointed time. It’s worked for me on occasion.

Equally strange for me, looking back, is that we had a working TV at all. My mom was notorious for not having a working TV when we were growing up. On several occasions, grandparents intervened, and either bought us a TV, or paid for cable, so that we wouldn’t grow up deprived like that. But when the TV broke, or the subscription ceased, we were back to no video at all. But at that time, apparently we had cable, and I was able to get up at 4 in the morning and watch whatever came to mind.

My kids – probably not. We gots TV, but no cable, and no Netflix. But lots of purchased movies and TV. Theoretically, any kid could get up at an ungodly hour and sit down to watch a pre-approved TV show, but currently nobody ever gets up all that early. And if they did, it wouldn’t be incognito. I’m still getting up most days close to 4 am.

Casey Newton on the future of reading:

Today Borders has been liquidated, the location I used to visit replaced by an electronics store. Between the web and social media, I read more than I ever have — and yet I read fewer books than ever. Reading over all my notes about the future of reading, I see I have reported it out of hope that books will evolve to repair what other technologies have started to break: my ability to concentrate over hundreds of pages. I think of a line from The Tender Bar, by J. R. Moehringer: “‘Every book is a miracle,’ Bill said. ‘Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly — and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake — and tried to tell us the rest of the story.”

I’ve never actually read The Tender Bar — I just saw that when someone shared a screenshot of the passage on Twitter.

Mind your Thees and Thous

Here’s a little etymology I learned while digressing from my morning Bible reading:

In English, pronouns come in three cases: Nominative (for the subject of a sentence), Objective (for direct and indirect objects, and the objects of prepositions), and Possessive (to indicate, you know, possession).  Originally, for the second personal pronoun, those forms looked like this:

case singular plural
Nom. thou ye
Obj. thee you
Poss. thy/thine your(s)/yourn

In other words, the word you was objective plural, and that was it.  If you’re having a hard time remembering how ye and you used to go, a little King James Bible might help. Matthew 5:21-22 – “Ye (Nom. pl.) have heard it said…. but I say unto you (obj. pl.)”

Then, one day “You” got tired of being king of all it could survey in its own little pond, and started calling for more a taller throne.  In other words, for some reason people started using “you” as the singular form of the word, but only in formal circumstances.  So at home with the wife and kids, it was thee and thou, but at public ceremonies and in court it was you and you.  If that sounds bizarre and backwards to you, there’s a reason.  Wait for it.

Religious folks, of course, objected to this.  We have our Bibles; words are important to us.  Quakers, for instance, were famous for using their thees and thous far into the 19th century.  But when we finally did start to cave on the formal use of you singular, we wanted to retain the sense of intimacy from the informal use of thou.  And what could be more intimate than a Man’s relationship with God?  So when Martin Buber wrote his famous book, Ich und Du, the English translation was “I and Thou,” not “I and You.”  In the American Standard series of Bible translations, the formal you is used for human conversation and the more intimate thee and thou are used for prayer.

And that’s where pietism broke the evolution of the English language, because prayer in the Bible isn’t intimate and personal.  Nearly every recorded prayer in scripture is from a public or instructional event.  How could it be otherwise?  That’s the way prayer works.  Even your most private, pious prayers eventually find expression in public, if you ever pray in public.

But the American Standard and the King James versions taught us that thee and thou belonged in prayer, even if they didn’t belong in our day-to-day speech.  And since public prayer is the formal, not informal,  we began to think of thee and thou as very formal and officious, and began to think poorly of people who push God away by praying in officious sounding, stiff grammatical forms.

And, of course, putting thees and thous only in public prayers served to shove them further out of our normal conversation.

Incidentally, I also learned that the old letter for “th” – Þ (lowercase, þ) is called “thorn.” (One imagines that calling it “þe” would have been confusing.) I haven’t yet figured out how to put it in the song…

The Dream is Certain

And its interpretation is sure.

Reading Daniel 2 in my devotions this morning (October 17, on the M’Cheyne calendar – I’m only 2 months behind!), I am always profoundly struck by Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and Daniel’s interpretation.  I know a lot of people like to focus on the different levels of the image in the dream.  But two other things always stand out to me:

  1. The mountain covers the whole earth and never goes away.
  2. The first thing that Nebuchadnezzar does after having his dream interpreted is build a statue of his own, presumably something like what he saw in the dream.  Only his statue is gold all the way down.