Lift Up Your Hearts!

This started as a comment to the Sockdolager post on Daley Ponderings, but it turned out to be long and off-topic, so I migrated it here. The article in question is a thought-provoking one, but it had one unintended consequence.

I've been having an ongoing conversation with our rector, who insists on frequent use of simple "praise choruses" at all our services, even the most traditional, so that they will stick in our heads and we'll have them handy in times of need.  I understand the motivation:  this is why I memorize Scripture, hymns, liturgy, poetry, anthems, and other useful and helpful works.

But because I know he does not set out to torture his congregation, I know his brain processes music in a different way from mine.  By this I don't mean that he likes different music from me, although that is certainly true.  The issue is not a matter of style or taste, but of processing.

Music sticks in my brain.  I wish it were only the best music that sticks in my brain, but it's not.  The simpler and more banal it is, the more it sticks.  And it won't go away.  Round and round and round it plays like a track on eternal "repeat," until I manage to kick it out—often by substituting something else—or go crazy.  So far I've managed not to reach the latter point...quite.

This can be a useful affliction, as it does help with learning choir pieces.  But it doesn't stop after we're done with the anthem.  A little of that can be enjoyable, but even my favorite anthems can get stuck, and I have to work actively to stop the process so I don't end up loathing them.  And if I don't like a song from the beginning, you can imagine what I think of it by the 455th repetition.

The more complicated the work, the less likely it is to annoy me, which is why the simple praise choruses are more than usually troublesome.  But complex music is not exempt:  the other day I had part of Mozart's g minor symphony stuck on "repeat" and it was driving me nuts, even though I really like the piece. Fortunately, I know enough of that one that I was able, by effort of will, to kick it over into the next section.

It's not only music that does this to me, but words—though usually only if I'm writing them.  I tend to compose paragraphs while walking—often they later become letters or blog posts.  That can be an efficient way to think, but sometimes I'll get stuck going round and round with the same phrases and thoughts, and that's when I know it's time to pull out the mp3 player and let someone else's words into my brain.

Does anyone else share this blessing/affliction?

But the point of all this is what happened after I read the article, which is about Davy Crockett and the Constitution.  So far, writing this post has been the only thing able to stop my endless mental repetitions of The Ballad of Davy Crockett.  I never saw the movie, nor the television show, but as a child I had a record of Disney songs, of which that was one.  Despite 50 years or so having passed since I last heard that record, I could still sing it to you.

I won't, though.  You can watch this instead.

Our greatest involvement in our children's public schools came during the heyday of the self-esteem movement, and I recall the frustrations of being a lone voice crying out that easy success is as much an inhibitor of learning as repeated failure.  Those who sail through their early educational encounters with too much ease are often surpassed by their supposedly less able compatriots later in life, because they've missed the important lessons taught by failure.

With a hat top to Free-Range Kids, here's a Wall Street Journal article on why that college rejection letter, that teacher's put-down, and even our own weaknesses can be agents that propel us to success.

Warren Buffett was devastated when Harvard Business School rejected his application.  Buoyed by his father's "unconditional love...an unconditional belief in me," he looked for Plan B, squeaked in under Columbia University's application deadline, and was accepted, later donating some twelve million dollars to the institution whose investment in Buffett turned out to be as savvy as Buffett himself.

"The truth is, everything that has happened in my life...that I thought was a crushing event at the time, has turned out for the better," Mr. Buffett says.

Columbia's current president, Lee Bollinger, grew up in a small town with limited educational opportunities.  He, too, was rejected by Harvard, and the shock taught him to take responsibility for his own education, to realize that "it was up to him alone to define his talents and potential."

His advice: Don't let rejections control your life. To "allow other people's assessment of you to determine your own self-assessment is a very big mistake," says Mr. Bollinger, a First Amendment author and scholar. "The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you."

Success has many lessons to teach, too, and frankly I prefer that classroom.  But for grit, determination, perseverance, responsibility, and hard work, failure may be the better teacher.

Cleaning out old things, found this Hagar the Horrible comic, probably from last October.  (The link is to the current comic; if you can't see the image below—some feedreaders strip images—you'll have to click through to the original post.)

Take it any way you want.  I see it mostly as a statement of how weak and selfish we have become to care more about prosperity than freedom.  But it also bears a hint of the truth that without economic freedom, the higher liberties are endangered.

Beer, bread, cheese...and now musical instruments.   Jan Swafford's recent Slate article, In Search of Lost Sounds, mentions that in Europe, artisanal craftsmen are creating reproductions of period instruments for those interested in more flavors than the standardized, homogenized, modern sound.  This comes as no surprise, since Janet owns at least three such instruments.

The article is long, and some of my readers will be tempted to skip it, but please don't.  Skip the text if you wish, but don't miss the recorded excerpts, which are Flash objects that I can't reproduce here.  Hear Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy on the pianos of their day, and compare the sound to the same music on today's instruments.  Whichever you like best, you'll agree that the older instruments have a different and often exciting flavor.  (They also occasionally sound out of tune to me, and I'm wondering if it's my ears, the recording, or a different tuning of the pianos—though I thought equal temperament tuning was common by Beethoven's time.) (More)

What drives spam?  Money, obviously.  And sin.  Sin on both ends:  the sin of greed on the part of the spammer, and the sin that the spammer is hoping will entice his victim to throw money his direction.  Spam, therefore, may be a diagnostic tool, an x-ray scan revealing the broken and diseased places of our society.

If the spam that hits this blog (and is mostly filtered out before you see it) is any measure, the sickest area of our society is sex, although that observation is a bit like peering at an x-ray and announcing that the patient's leg is broken when anyone can see the jagged bone protruding from the flesh.  Porn of the worst kind, body part enhancements, "performance" drugs:  "greed meets lust" is a terrible combination. (More)

Someone else posted an enthusiastic link to Michael Hyatt's Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog?  That I am not so enthusiastic is probably due to having a serious problem with the first sentence, which reads, 

Assuming you want to increase your blog traffic, there are certain mistakes you must avoid to be successful.

After reading Hyatt's article I realized that not only do I make several of the mistakes, but I often make them on purpose.  That's when I realized the real problem:  I'm not convinced I want to increase my blog traffic. (More)

Is there a word, in any language, for "my daughter's husband's cousin's husband"?  That's what Kevin Michael Johnson is, and I'm proud to claim the family relationship, however distant and awkwardly-phrased.  Kevin is an actor, living in New York City with his lovely singer-songwriter wife, Steph Shaw.  One of his recent triumphs was in the show Wild Black Yonder, which a number of members of our family (but, alas, not I) were privileged to see at "The Kate" in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Kevin's latest venture is The Raid, a documentary about the tremendously popular online game, World of Warcraft.  Everything I know about WOW I learned form the Foxtrot comic strip...at least until I watched Kevin's promotional video.  The embedded video below is from YouTube, but the link will take you to a video on the official, more informative site, where you can also get involved in the project if it excites you.  You can also check them out on Facebook.

I have three further reflections on what I learned from It Happened in Italy, which didn't fit nicely into my review.

The first is some thoughts on why the story of Jews in Italy during World War II is so little known.  These are my speculations only, and not from the book.

"Relative comfort" is perhaps one key idea.  Holocaust survivors from Italy would most likely feel a bit uncomfortable in a gathering of Holocaust survivors from anywhere else.  Can one talk about lost homes and possessions to one who has seen his children murdered?  Of wasted days to slave laborers?  Of hiding in a neighbor's cramped shed to those whose neighbors betrayed them?  There is a fellowship of suffering:  Amongst those who survived German concentration camps, I'd imagine those from Italian camps might feel they had not suffered "enough."  (More)

The Occasional CEO is one of my favorite non-family blogs, not only because Eric Schultz is a good writer, but also because he is a good compiler:  He's great at weaving into a coherent essay the common threads from varied sources I'd never find on my own.  His most recent post, with the unassuming title of Odds and Ends, led me to Paul Campos's excellent Wall Street Journal article, "Undressing the Terror Threat."

Both essays are well worth reading in their entirety.  The first quote box below is from Mr. Schultz; the rest are Mr. Campos's words.

[W]e are buried by data, and are constantly searching for ways to separate signal from noise....Someone wants to take flying lessons: that’s noise.  Someone wants to take flying lessons but doesn’t want to know how to land the plane: that’s signal.  Similarly, someone gets on an international flight, pays cash, and checks no bags—that might be signal.  Someone sews explosive into his underwear: Signal.  Panic.

The question is, how much do we pay to find out?  What’s the real risk of dying at the hands of a terrorist in America?  And if 1,900 Americans [under age 65] die today from a variety of preventable causes, how much are we willing to invest to save those lives?

 (More)

Jennifer at Conversion Diary is turning 33, and asked her readers what they would say to their 33-year-old selves if they could.  That's the kind of challenge I can't resist, and neither can I resist recycling what I wrote as a blog post.  It's pretty much just off the top of my head, and in no particular order, but here are a few of the things I wish I could have told myself.

• Have more kids.  There were some good reasons why we didn't, but a very bad reason was buying into the "you can't afford it and neither can the world" mentality.  If you haven't lived through it, I don't think you can fathom how much pressure there was in those days to have no more than two children.
• Expect much more from your children than society does, on every level.  From the day they are born, your children can learn more, do more, and behave better than you will be told is possible.  Don't limit them with your low expectations.
• Homeschool.  Homeschool.  Homeschool.  From the beginning, and never look back.  This is one of the best decisions we ever made, and I wish we had never subjected our children to the "school mindset."  But when I was 33, school was "the way things are done," and I never questioned it till years later.
• "Bloom where you are planted."  Make the most of your present situation, because you never know when it will change. 
• Keep a journal, take pictures (and label them!), make recordings.  Concentrate on people and places dear to you—there are plenty of professionals documenting the rest of the scenery.
• When you videotape your children's performances, be sure to include their friends as well.  You may not care, but your children will!
• Talk with older family members about their childhoods and their life stories, and get everything you can from them about your ancestors and family history.  Make sure their pictures are labelled!
• Take care of yourself.  When you have young children at home, it's very easy (and seems virtuous) to shortchange yourself when it comes to sleep, exercise, education, and the care of your soul.  Make yourself make time for these things.   Enlist the aid of your spouse—I don't mean to tell you what to do, but to make sure you get the time to do it.  Your children will thank you later.
• If you are too busy to get organized, you are too busy not to get organized.  Make the time (and again, get your spouse to help).  There is no moment better than now; that mythical time "when I have time" will never come.  Never give up; experiment with different systems till you find one that works for you.  Be prepared to alter it as needed, however, when your circumstances alter.

I'm not that good at taking advice, so I'm not sure I would have listened.  But I wish I had.

John C. Wright is a science fiction writer, but his essay, On Writer's Block struck me for its wider applicability in his assertion that even the best advice can be counterproductive if it doesn't fit the personality of the recipient.  [The emphasis below is mine.]

Each writer approaches his craft in a different way, and advice from one writer to another is useful if and only if you happen to be a writer of the same method and temperament as the first.

Robert Heinlein famously used to advise would-be writers never to rewrite their first drafts, except at an editor’s suggestion. Unless you are a ditherer, that is, someone who wastes his limited writing time rewriting scenes that are already saleworthy, this advice is not useful, or indeed may be counterproductive. Heinlein was warning against the pitfalls of perfectionism. But if you are not a perfectionist, and not a ditherer, the advice is counterproductive, because writers who should rewrite are being told not to. Heinlein was a First Draft man: he could breeze off printable copy his first try. His books sold on the strength of their wittiness, readability, and speculative ideas: one strongly suspects he never went back to his first chapter to set up some plot twist he invented for the last.

If you do not write like him, merely able to breeze off finely crafted copy in your first try, then do not take his advice. Frankly, I thought this one of the worst pieces of writing advice ever, because I suffer the opposite vice. I write impromptu and I like to stick with my first instinct, and therefore I do not rewrite often enough. Hence Heinlein’s advice was the opposite of what someone like me should be told.

Every bit of writing craft advice is only good for you to the degree that it applies to your situation. In this example, Dithering Perfectionists should follow Heinlein’s advice, and never rewrite except at an editor’s suggestion. Impromptuarians should follow the opposite advice that all writing is rewriting.

The catch, of course, is that Impromptuarians are inclined to snatch at the advice best for Dithering Perfectionists, and vice versa.  Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, we were frequently urged to do less driving and more walking, advice that I followed with alacrity and even a bit of pride.  Alas, there was no virtue in my environmentally-correct response, since at the time getting behind the wheel of a car tended to bring on panic attacks.  What I needed to do, at that particular moment, was to walk less, drive more, and conquer my phobia.

Know then thyself.

RootsMagic, my favorite genealogy database program, has released RootsMagic Essentials, a version you can download that is absolutely free!  In case anyone is wondering, I don't get a thing for this endorsement; I just like RootsMagic, and I like encouraging interest in genealogy.  It looks as if one can do a lot with Essentials, and it might be a great, commitment-free way to keep track of family information even if one doesn't have (yet) a desire to delve any further.  Sadly, one of my favorite features, color coding of families, is not part of the stripped-down version, but—tanstaafl—if there is, sometimes, a free lunch, the full-course dinner always costs.

If any of my family members decide to download RootsMagic Essentials, I'll be happy to send along a copy of my database.  :)

In Forgetting the Unforgettable, I remarked on how ordinary were my diary entries when the Berlin Wall was breached.  In a subsequent comment, Stephan mentioned that he barely remembers the event, despite living so close to Germany.

Soon thereafter, while taking my customary walk and listening to a history lecture on my trusty mp3 player, I was reminded that the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred when I was the age Stephan was when the Wall fell.  I have no memory of the event whatsoever, nor of any particular anxiety because of the imminent threat of nuclear war.  We had "air raid drills" in our elementary school, but that was nothing new; they were a normal part of school, like the equally-frequent fire drills.  If the adults in my life worried about the situation, none of that filtered down to me.  My life comprised surviving fifth grade, playing with my friends, and enjoying my new baby brother.

Curious, I delved into the journals that my father had kept, hoping there would be entries for October 1962, and there were.  I looked forward to hearing how he and my mother had dealt with the fears that, I'm told, caused families eating breakfast to wonder if they'd still be alive at dinnertime. (More)

This day in 1918 marked the end of the War to End All Wars.  Less than a handful of veterans of that war remain to be honored.  But where there are people, there will be wars; where there are wars, there will be veterans; and where there are veterans, they deserve honor and respect.  In any conflict there will be some, to be sure, who serve dishonorably, for their own gain, with evil intent, or with twisted logic, as recent events attest.  The hanging scene in Shakespeare's Henry V is intense, and shocking to our modern sensibilities, but makes the point that in a civilized society wrongdoing in members of the armed forces is even more offensive than civilian crimes.

Horrendous exceptions to the contrary, soldiers and sailors, be they enemy or ally, are standing "between their loved home and the war's desolation."  As J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us in The Return of the King:  "It must often be so ... when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them."

Thank you, veterans and current members of our Armed Forces.

Where were you 20 years ago today?

My own journal entry is remarkably filled with the mundane details of life with two young children.  There is one exclamatory sentence, "Would that every day could be like this!" but it was referring to Heather's having awakened with her alarm clock, showered, dressed, made her bed, cleaned her room and finished all her chores before school.  Not as momentous as events on the other side of the world, but a personal triumph. (More)