Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, by Michael Ward (Oxford University Press, 2008)
It is hard to overstate the excitement with which I read Planet Narnia. I'll return shortly to Michael Ward's discovery of the pattern and scheme under which C. S. Lewis wrote all seven of his Narnia books, but it's also worth noting that Ward's writing itself was a delight to read. I am so very, very tired of the recent trend of informal, conversational writing that appears to have been put together in haste, without benefit of editor or even proofreader. That style is good for blogs, but in a book the lack of consideration for sentence and paragraph structure, the grammatical mistakes, the impoverished vocabulary, and what often comes across as a condescending tone detract significantly from the message proclaimed. (More)Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a simply made but powerful German film (with English subtitles) about a young woman arrested for treason after distributing some anti-Nazi leaflets. Don't expect a happy ending; the setting is Nazi Germany, where happy endings were few. Nonetheless I recommend the movie highly. Such depictions of goodness and heroism are rare—much less without resorting to graphic violence or sentimentalism.
Four things struck me in particular: (More)Confessions of a Medical Heretic, by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M. D. (McGraw-Hill, 1979)
A quick review of this so I can get it off my desk and back on the bookshelf: There's no doubt that modern medicine has lengthened and improved our lives; the underside of that story is that modern medicine has also shortened our lives, and in many ways diminished their quality. If you're not already half convinced of the second part of that statement, you'll find Dr. Mendelsohn's style hard to get through. I believe him, and I still wanted to scream by about the 40th time he beat to death his otherwise illuminating analogy of modern medicine as a religion. (More)I love student recitals. Our kids attended the Suzuki Music Institute of Central Florida for nearly 10 years, so I think I've heard more than my share of recitals. Granted, the quality of music and musicianship was nothing compared with the Eastman School of Music recitals we subsequently enjoyed, but I can honestly say I was never bored, not even by the beginners, nor by hearing the same beginning songs again and again. It was fun hearing the differences, not only from one child to another, but particularly as each child grew and advanced from one recital to another.
Nonetheless, I know that to many people the phrase "student recital" evokes horrifying thoughts of squeaks and off-pitch notes and shaky rhythms, over and over again as student follows student in a seemingly endless parade of classical or modern pieces the audience doesn't know and doesn't understand. (More)Last night we enjoyed an outing to the Texas de Brazil restaurant. This is not what I would normally call my kind of restaurant: although I find salad bars, buffets, and all-you-can-eat establishments appealing for their wide variety and options, the high price and the encouragement of overeating make them generally unattractive to me. However, our friends had two-for-one coupons, which brought the $45-per-person price down from the outrageous to the merely ridiculous-but-acceptable-for-a-special-occasion. So we celebrated Father's Day one day late. (More)
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)
It's past time to get this book back to the library; I actually finished it quite a while ago, but have been putting of this post because I haven't known quite what to say. It's a complex book, probably an important one, but it covers so much territory I'll never do it justice. The book is far more than a diatribe against amateurism, but I will skip over the sections on Internet gambling, Internet pornography, privacy concerns, and the demise of an iconic record store. Except for Tower Records—it's hard to mourn the disappearance of something you never knew existed—I'm aware of the other issues and tend to agree that they are, indeed, serious problems. Whether or not the proliferation of amateur voices is boon or bane is a bit more complex. (More)I'm chronically bad at making decisions. Not that I usually make bad ones; actually, most of them end up being pretty good. But whether the decision is big or small, buying a house or choosing from a restaurant menu, I agonize over each decision and often experience second thoughts as soon as it is made. Porter tells an old joke about a man ordering dessert: The waitress informs him that they are offering apple pie and cherry pie, and after considering the matter for a while, he chooses the apple. A few minutes later she returns to his table and say, "I'm sorry, sir, I forgot to tell you we also have coconut cream pie." "Oh!" the diner exclaims, "In that case I'll have the cherry."
The point of the joke is the man's irrational behavior in changing his mind after the addition of irrelevant information, but I understand him completely. Coconut cream pie has nothing to do with it. He couldn't decide between apple and cherry, and when he finally closed the door on the cherry pie, it suddenly seemed the more attractive. The waitress's return gave him a chance to change his decision.
With that in mind, you can see why I was attracted by the headline of a New York Times article by John Tierney called The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors. It seems I'm not the only one who likes to keep her options open: In a series of experiments, MIT students playing a game chose to take what amounted to a 15% penalty in their earnings (cold, hard cash) in order to keep unnecessary doors from closing.
The researcher, Dan Ariely, is a professor of behavioral economics at MIT, and at his website, Predictably Irrational, you can find not only this game but others, and much more on the subject of how we often act contrary to our own best interests. I'm sure some of his experiments violate a research code of ethics somewhere, such as the experiment in which male college students were asked questions about sexual behavior before and after viewing Internet porn sites. Nonetheless, even that research revealed some unexpected and frightening results. Ariely has a book by the same name, which I would order from the library if I didn't already have a backlog of five library books pining away in the not-ready-to-be-returned state.Prince Caspian, One Sentence Review: Not a bad movie, but several times I had to wonder where the story line came from.
A few more thoughts: (More)Having finished watching all the available “Best Picture” Oscar-winners—all except for one or two he decided early on weren’t worth the wasting of his time—Porter is catching up on the James Bond movies he’d missed, which was many if not most of them. Not feeling any lack whatsoever for having missed them myself, I’ve generally elected to indulge in what to me are more profitable activities, such as reading, writing, or sleeping.
Every once in a while, however, I’ll find myself sucked into the story, never long enough to see the entire movie, but enough to provoke a few of thoughts. (More)Having been alerted to the Evangelical Manifesto by both GroshLink and John Stackhouse, I decided it was probably worth reading. I generally shun labels other than "Christian," if I can, and "Manifesto" sounds a little radical to me, but there's a lot I can identify with in this document. I greatly appreciate its even-handed, moderate, dare I say Christ-like approach. It may sound ho-hum to some, but I suspect that a clear and courteous statement of basic beliefs and principles is more necessary than we'd like to believe. Others apparently read the Manifesto as a wimpy effort not to be identified with Fundamentalists, though what I see is not one-sided, but a true effort avoid both Scylla and Charybdis.
If Christians are to have any reasonable voice in the public square we need to get out from under stereotypes and "past watchful dragons." The Evangelical Manifesto seems to me to be a reasonable attempt so to do.As my father would say, we were sloppin' up culture like a hawg yesterday. (I believe the reference was to a L'il Abner comic strip, although it may have been Pogo.) It all started when the Orlando Magic (local basketball team) advanced to the playoffs, thereby causing a parking problem for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra concert since the Bob Carr Auditorium and the O-rena (it keeps changing its name based on sponsorship, so since I can't keep track of it I generally call it by its original appellation) share parking facilities.
In order to help alleviate the problem, the OPO delayed its concert by half an hour. We figured that still wasn't going to be good enough, since one never knows how long a basketball game is going to last, so we decided to expand the evening. (More)
The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)
I'm finally reading the book I first wrote about a month an a half ago. This post is no more a proper book review than the earlier one, since I'm only through the introduction and 3/4 of Chapter One. I can feel Mr. Keen's keenly disapproving I Told You So look: yet another example of amateurs doing things badly. So be it. I just experienced a perfect example of why I have a problem with some of his assertions, and want to share it with you, my minuscule but beloved audience. Otherwise, distracted amateur that I am, I'd probably forget the illustration before finishing the book.
While I am reading The Cult of the Amateur, Porter is enjoying a G. A. Henty novel, In the Reign of Terror, and tonight he came upon a word with which he was unfamiliar: louvetier. Naturally, he asked me about it, since for years I have been the family's reference-book-of-choice. If Mom doesn't know, she'll look it up and save the rest of us the trouble. Well, I didn't know, so I went to my handy dictionary. This is no pocket-sized or student edition, but a thick, heavy Webster's with its own dictionary stand—but it failed me. On to the next room, and my online references. BabelFish: No. Answers.com: No. Merriam-Webster: No. Encyclopedia Britannica, surely: Not at all. Yet the combination of Google and Wikipedia, very much maligned in that first chapter I had been reading when Porter's question interrupted me, gave me the answer in a matter of seconds. I should have tried them first, but I was under the influence of the book. A louvetier, for those of you who are panting to know, is a French wolfcatcher, master of the wolfhounds and responsible for organizing the wolf hunts. Wikipedia may indeed be amateurish and prone to bias and error, but it answered the question swiftly and—confirmed by Porter from the context of the book—accurately.
More to come. I can see there is more to appreciate about Keen's insights than I was expecting, as well as plenty with which to disagree.High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver. (HarperCollins, 1995)
My sister-in-law gave me this book about a year ago. I started it on vacation, but didn't get very far before we returned home and it got lost in a pile in my office. That turned out to be a happy accident: I'm not sure I would have finished it had I not been prepared by Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I love the way Barbara Kingsolver writes; as I said about the first book, even if I had found the subject dull—which I didn't—I would have enjoyed reading it. (More)I’ve been a fan of the Mars Hill Audio Journal since the early 90s, though only an intermittent subscriber. I enjoy and appreciate its insight into life and culture, but generally prefer to receive information in printed, rather than spoken, form. Plus I was tired of finding places to store the cassettes.
Recently I re-subscribed, because they now offer an mp3 version. This I can take with me on my walks, and it takes up no physical space in the house. Works for me. (More)
