Lift Up Your Hearts!

Eight Rick Brant Science-Adventure Stories:  The Rocket's Shadow,  Sea Gold, The Caves of Fear, The Electronic Mind Reader, The Scarlet Lake Mystery, The Pirates of Shan, The Flaming Mountain, and The Flying Stingaree by John Blaine (Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 1947-1963)

The Mystery of the Timber Giant (A Tom Quest Adventure) by Fran Striker (McLoughlin Bros./Clover Books, New York, 1955)

Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X (The New Tom Swift Jr. Adventures) by Victor Appleton II (Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 1961)

The uncovering of a box that had been mostly ignored since our move (yes, that was eight and a half years ago) transported me back to early childhood, on the wings of these books that simply had to be read to help make the agonizing decision:  keep? give away? ebay?  (Note I said "help."  The decision has still not yet been made.)

As a child, I never cared for Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys; I was hooked on a less popular series:  Rick Brant's Science/Electronic Adventures.  And do you know?  I still am.  There are plenty of times when I look back on things I liked/believed/wrote/said/did and am flooded with embarrassment rather than nostalgia.  But even though the science in the Rick Brant books is dated—they were written between 1947 and 1968—the value of the stories is undiminished.  The science, although somewhat futuristic, was believable then, and so the human elements still are.  There is just one aspect that I find embarrassing now, as I did 50 years ago:  the female characters, specifically the teenage girls.  No wonder I almost always identified with the boys in my childhood books.  Looking back, I can see that the girls are more intelligent and less flighty than in many books of that time, but still!

I'd like to be able to finish reading the Rick Brant series, and hope efforts to republish them will be successful.  But, unlike the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, these are rarely carried by libraries.  Looking back, I'm frustrated with myself for not having bought all the books, or at least made stronger requests for them at Christmas time.  It's hard to believe today how unusual it was to buy books back then.  We read an awful lot, fetching armloads of books regularly from the library, but buying books was an unusual expense.  It was not until after I graduated from college that I broke away from that attitude.  (And then with a vengeance; our house has more books than square feet of living space.)

Reading The Mystery of the Timber Giant was the final installment on a very old debt.  The book was the thoughtful gift of a friend, and I'm sure I received it with due thanksgiving at the time.  But I never read it.  I was a picky child when it came to books, and back then was especially suspicious of anything recommended to me by someone else.  (I drove my mother crazy; thank you, Heather and Janet, for being more reasonable.)  But I kept the book, out of some weird sense of duty.  I dragged it, and an accompanying portion of guilt, through five moves, still unread!  But now, the debt is paid at last.  And guess what?  I enjoyed the book.    Perhaps if I had known as a child that Fran Striker had also created The Lone Ranger, I would not have been so hesitant to open the book.  I'm not likely to seek out more of the series at this point, but it was an interesting story.

The Visitor from Planet X was my first encounter with Tom Swift, Jr., as this book was from Porter's childhood, not mine.  Whether or not I would have liked it as a child, I can't say for sure, but I think not.  I liked science fiction (and still do), but unlike in the Rick Brant stories, the science here is too unbelievable to be enjoyable.  Even fantasy worlds must be credible in their own way, and having your hero avert world-destroying disasters with inventions he thinks up in an hour and builds in a day is further than my credulity will stretch.

Reading all these books within a short span of time, what struck me the strangest was how much all the characters, villain and hero, relied on fist-fights to settle their difficulties.  There's not all that much violence otherwise, but that was an era when playground scuffles were not uncommon and boys could exchange black eyes one day and be best friends the next.  It's not something you see much in children's literature today.

Shakespeare:  The World as a Stage (Harper Perennial, London, 2007) by Bill Bryson

Once again, a hit for Bill Bryson.  (Thanks, Stephan!  You'll get the book back in January.)  This time he tackles, with his usual wit and excellent writing, what we know (and, importantly, what we do not know) about the greatest English playwright.

Actually, it is arguable that Shakespeare was not, in truth, the greatest English playwright, but to their undeniable status as great works, his plays added the stellar quality of survival, most playwrights of that era not having had the benefit of compilers Henry Condell and John Heminges, who with unusual foresight put together a collection of most of Shakespeare's plays after his death.  We don't know what we are missing.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
(not Shakespeare)

On the other hand, we have certainly been spared a mountain of dreck.

To prosper, a theatre in London needed to draw as many as two thousand spectators a day—about 1 per cent of the city's population—two hundred or so times a year, and to do so repeatedly against stiff competition.  To keep customers coming back, it was necessary to change the plays constantly.  Most companies performed at least five different plays in a week, sometimes six, and useed such spare time as they could muster to learn and rehearse new ones. ... What is truly remarkable is how much quality the age produced in the circumstances. ... For authors and actors alike, the theatrical world was an insanely busy place, and for someone like William Shakespeare, who was playwright, actor, part owner and probably de facto director as well ... it must have been nearly hysterical at times.  Companies might have as many as thirty plays in their active repertoire, so a leading actor could be required to memorize perhaps fifteen thousand lines in a season ... as well as remember every dance and sword thrust and costume change.  Even the most successful companies were unlikely to employ more than a dozen or so actors, which meant a great deal of doubling up.

And you thought your life was crazy?  Most of us, whatever our field of endeavor, like to think that we, too, could produce high quality work if only we had the time.  But true geniuses, like William Shakespeare and Johann Sebastian Bach (whose job required him to write a new cantata every week, in addition to his other considerable responsibilities), create their great works in spite of, if not because of, tremendous pressure to produce.

It wasn't only work that was insane.  If Hawaii's kapu system, abolished two centuries ago, oppressed its people with strange and oppressive rules, our Elizabethan ancestors were not much better off.

Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.  A person with an income of £20 a year was permitted to don a satin doublet but not a satin gown, while someone worth £100 a year could wear all the satin he wished, but could have velvet only in his doublets, but not in any outerwear, and then only so long as the velvet was not crimson or blue, colours reserved for Knights of the Garter and their superiors.  Silk netherstockings, meanwhile, were restricted to knights and their eldest sons, and to certain—but not all—envoys and royal attendants.  Restrictions existed, too, on the amount of fabric one could use for a particular article of apparel and whether it might be worn pleated or straight and so on, through lists of variables almost beyond counting. ... Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status.  A cardinal was permitted nine dishes at a meal while those earning less than £40 a year (which is to say most people) were allowed only two courses, plus soup.

Bryson's stories of the times in which Shakespeare lived and worked are at least as interesting as those about Shakespeare himself, and indeed they are necessary, as a book that simply reported what we know for sure about the man would be a very short story indeed.  I suspect, however, that Bryson did more careful research on Shakespeare than on his era.  Although it may  be true, given those plague-ridden times, I suspect that his assertion that most of the inhabitants of Shakespeare's London were young people merely repeats the common life-expectancy fallacy.

By the peak years of Elizabeth's reign, London was one of the great cities of Europe, exceeded in size only by Paris and Naples. ... But survival was ever a struggle.  Nowhere in the metropolis did life expectancy exceed thirty-five years, and in some poorer districts it was barely twenty-five.  The London that William Shakespeare first encountered was overwhelmingly a youthful place.

Be that as it may, Bill Bryson's Shakespeare is an easy, delightful, and informative 195-pages to read.  I recommend it highly.

 Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture, by Adam S. McHugh (IVP Books, 2009)

(I wrote briefly about this book based on a Mars Hill Audio interview with its author; now I have finally read it myself and can do it more justice.)

Hello.  My name is Linda, and I'm an introvert.

(Hi, Linda!)

That's the way I once thought about this aspect of my personality type, as many people still do.  At best it's an affliction, a disease—if not evidence of weak character or even mental illness.

Rare is the book that will make me cry, unless it's in frustration over poor writing, but Introverts in the Church brought me to tears in the early chapters, as I recognized again and again how many of the characteristics of my own life fit into the introverted pattern.   "I am not alone" is a most powerful emotion.  I was also reminded of Marcus Buckingham's assertion that we spend too much time and effort trying to shore up our areas of weakness, and not enough building on our strengths.  Somehow we have been sold on the idea that introverts should work hard at being more like extroverts, rather than applying our strengths for the common good.  What's more, I discovered that in trying to act more like an extrovert (and doing it rather badly), I have myself misunderstood and hurt fellow introverts.

McHugh's focus is on how this dynamic plays out in the church, so the remainder of the book was not as emotionally moving as the beginning, but it, too, was revealing, as I gained insights into why introverts are often uncomfortable in modern churches, and why their unique gifts are just as important as those of extroverts—and may be especially valuable because we live in such an unbalanced time.

My comment that I should probably buy a copy of Introverts in the Church just so I could lend it out provoked the response, "Would you lend it to your introvert friends or your extrovert friends?"  The obvious response is, "To both."  To the introverts, so that they might experience the affirmation that their weaknesses are the flip side of strengths of which our world is in much need, and to the extroverts—exactly the same thing, actually, and so that they might understand, appreciate, and encourage the introverts in their lives.

As usual, there's no way a few quotes can do justice to the book, or give an adequate picture of what the author presents.  What's more, long quotations are discouraging to most blog readers, myself included, I am somewhat embarrassed to say.  Nonetheless, here is a small sampling of ideas that struck me, culled from the bookmarks that bristle all over the book's 200-some pages.

There are three primary characteristics of introversion, and the first has to do with energy source. ... Introverts are energized by solitude.  We are recharged from the inside out, from the forces of our internal world of ideas and feelings. ... The second classic mark of introversion is internal processing.  In our culture we are continuously bombarded by stimuli, in the forms of information, images, conversation, and a multitude of other data and experiences.  In order for introverts' lives not to degenerate into disassociated states of confusion, we need to process these stimuli and integrate them into our lives. ... A third distinctive of the introverted temperament is the preference for depth over breadth [in relationships, interests, and our understanding of ourselves].

I can identify with nearly every one of McHugh's list of common attributes of introverts:

• Prefer to relax alone or with a few close friends
• Consider only deep relationships as friends
• Need rest after outside activities, even ones we enjoy
• Often listen but talk a lot about topics of importance to us
• Appear calm, self-contained and like to observe
• Tend to think before we speak or act
• May prefer a quiet atmosphere
• Experience our minds going blank in groups or under pressure
• Don't like feeling rushed
• Have great powers of concentration
• Dislike small talk
• Are territorial—desire private space and time
• May treat their homes as their sanctuaries
• Prefer to work on own rather than with a group
• May prefer written communication
• Do not share private thoughts with many people

Any introvert who finds himself trapped in an airplane seat next to a talkative neighbor will appreciate this quotation McHugh offers from Type Talk at Work:

"One of the big mistakes Extraverts make is to assume that if someone is not engaged with another person, that individual is simply not busy.  So, it's okay to interrupt someone sitting and reading because that person is probably reading only because there's no one else with whom she can talk.  You can only imagine what an Extravert thinks of someone who is sitting there not even reading but merely reflecting.  Clearly that person needs to be put to some more useful task—such as listening to the Extravert's thoughts of the moment."

It's even less possible to summarize all McHugh has to say about how the church can nourish introverts and vice versa, but here's a sampling:

[I]t is a temptation for churches to define spiritual maturity as attendance:  regular worship, participation in a committee or leadership team, and involvement in a small group.  The implicit thought is that the mark of true, progressing discipleship is participation in an increasing number of activities.  Along with attendance should come a steady increase in the number of people you know and who know you. ... Because of these assumptions in many churches about what constitutes participation, we can become convinced that the faithful word in the Christian life is always yes.  When we are asked to participate in an activity or group or sharing time, if we are really committed to community, if we truly trust God, we think we must answer "yes." ... Yet no is an indispensable word for introverts who need solitude and space to refuel and reflect.  Saying "no" at times enables us to wholeheartedly say "yes" at other times.

People in our culture need models of self-reflection, leaders who will teach them how to look inward and evaluate their motivations and choices. ... As Henri Nouwen said, "Our task is the opposite of distraction.  Our task is to help people concentrate on the real but often hidden event of God's active presence in their lives.  Hence the question that must guide all organizing activity in a parish is not how to keep people busy but how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks into the silence."

In my interactions with pastors over the past decade, I have been confounded by how few of them were adept in the discipline of listening.  What should be an absolute prerequisite for entering ministry has been subordinated to the all important evangelical qualities of speech—teaching, persuasion, correction—or relegated to specific "side ministries."  Our seminaries subject hopeful pastors to rigorous communication and preaching classes, but I have never seen a class or seminar offered on listening.

What a person in pain needs, on the deepest human level, is to not feel alone.  What helps someone is people who will simply be there and help carry the burden without always trying to fix the situation.

When I was a college pastor, the students who came onto campus with the greatest maturity, spiritual depth and understanding of the gospel were invariably those who'd had a youth pastor or other mentor from their communities of faith take a special, personal interest in them.  Moreover, many of those students had been the beneficiaries of a movement toward contemplative youth ministry, in which the primary role of youth pastors is less about creating entertaining programs and more about helping students cultivate an awareness of God's presence.  Contemplative youth ministry is a promising new direction both for introverted youth workers and for the introverted students they lead.

"Contemplative youth ministry" instead of activity and entertainment?  Where was that when our kids were of youth group age?  I might have actually felt that the youth leaders were supporting our family instead of tearing down what we'd been faithful and at great pains to build.

[I]ntroverts often feel more freedom in worship services that feature traditional liturgy than they do in ones that feature more open, informal, unstructured styles of worship.  Introverts often appreciate the depth of liturgical prayers and hymns, as well as the rich symbolism that fills traditional churches. ... Some introverts decry the shallowness of contemporary worship songs and their repetitive refrains, which can feel emotionally manipulative.  They say that loud music disrupts their internal dialogue with the Spirit.

I never thought of worship-style preference as an introvert/extrovert distinction, and it's certainly not universal.  Our own introverted pastor seems happiest with loud, rock, and demonstrative.  But it does offer an explanation of many of my own worship experiences.

My hope is that churches will begin to recognize when their worship services are communicating to introverts that their ways of living and relating and worshiping are inferior or unfaithful. ... I would like for my fellow pastors to understand that hourlong sermons may overwhelm a sizable demographic of their congregations, and a two second silence for personal confession may feel like a mere hand wave at people who want to interact with God in a quiet way.  In fact, as we find more balance in our worship, it will not only be introverts who benefit.  Extroverts too will learn to listen for God in the cracks of their speech and grow in understanding that "in quietness and in trust shall be your strength" (Is 30:15).

At Home, by Franz Hohler (translated from the German) (Bergli Books, Basel, Switzerland, 2009)

Franz Hohler observes the same situations you or I might, but sees them quite differently.  He sees stories.

At Home was a Christmas gift to Porter (thanks A&M!), and he found it the perfect book to read for his hectic life:  the stories are for the most part very short, and thus the book can be read in bits and snatches, here and there.  Not that you'll want to put it down if you can help it.

Some of the stories are a bit on the weird side (though not nearly as weird as Ray Bradbury's), but most show a very interesting perspective on life, and nearly all are enjoyable.  The tale of the man who inadvertently brings a baby devil home from the pet store is fascinating, perceptive, and frightening (though not at all in the modern gross-out horror film sense).  I, of course, enjoyed reading about and recognizing aspects of Swiss life; Hohler is Swiss and lives in Zurich.

Because it's very short, and because of its steel connection, I'll quote in entirety the final story in the book, hoping Herr Holner would consider it "fair use" and good advertising.  It's called The Mailbox, and provides a good snapshot of his style.

"I wish I were a racing bike," said the mailbox to the garden gate, "and could flit through wide plains and conquer mountain passes."

"You and your wishes," croaked the garden gate, "when you don't even meet the official postal regulations."

"One can always wish," sighed the mailbox, and continued to swallow bills, magazines, advertisements and postcards.

A little later he was unscrewed and replaced with a new one.  He was melted down.  Then together with old metal chairs, torn wire fences and bent screwdrivers, he was processed into light steel, landed in a racing bike factory, and was soon flitting across wide plains and conquering mountain passes and could hardly believe that he had stood for years in the same place and every day nearly choked on the mail.

The Longevity Project:  Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, by Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin (Hudson Street Press, New York, 2011)

In the early part of the last century, Dr. Lewis Terman began a long-term study of children identified by their teachers as particularly gifted academically.  Although Terman was interested in intelligence and intellectual leadership, his study left behind a great collection of sociological data, which Friedman, Martin, and their colleagues have mined for information on the factors that predispose human beings to long and productive lives.

The authors expound at length on why the data and their studies are valid, and the results applicable to most people, not just intellectual geniuses.  And the results—no surprise—are much more complicated than conventional wisdom would lead one to believe.  So interesting and complex are the relationships that it would be an insult to the researchers to attempt to distill their findings in a simple review.  But I will note a few items of interest.

• Conventional wisdom often confuses correlation with causation.  For example, although it is commonly believed that happiness promotes good health, and vice versa, the relationship is not in either direction cause-and-effect.  Rather, the same underlying factors promote both happiness and health.
• The best personality predictor of longevity—as children and as adults—was what the authors call conscientiousness:  people who were prudent, persistent, dependable, thrifty, detail-oriented, and responsible.

  It is not only that conscientious people have better health habits and healthier brains, but also that they find their way to happier marriages, better friendships, and healthier work situations.  That’s right, conscientious people create healthy long-life pathways for themselves.

• Another key factor is social network, but as usual, it’s more complicated than simple sociability.  Being an extrovert, having many friends, and abundant social activity do not presage a long life.  Sociability itself, the authors say, is “a wash.” An active social life is a two-edged sword; how it cuts depends on the quality of the friends and of the activities.

  Social ties, however, are critical:  having a large support network is directly correlated with longer life.  Interestingly, feeling loved and cared for did not improve longevity, but helping and caring for others did.

• The death of a parent during one’s childhood, while difficult, had no measurable effect on longevity.  Divorce, on the other hand, was devastating—although for severely dysfunctional and drastically unhappy families, divorce was sometimes the healthier path.

  Parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death, many years into the future.

• It is decidedly unhealthy to be a “Chicken Little,” seeing impending doom everywhere and interpreting misfortunes as larger than life.  Good health is not simply a matter of thinking positive thoughts, but those who lived longer had the habit of  thinking of downturns as temporary and viewing problems as limited and specific rather than long-lasting and pervasive.
• I quote the following because I was so excited to find in print what I have been saying all along about life expectancy, inspired by my genealogical research.  The oft-expressed belief that our ancestors could only expect to live to age forty (for example) did not square with the many sixty- to ninety-year olds in my family tree.  (Emphasis mine)
  

  The average life expectancy of an American born around the time of the Terman participants (about 1910) was forty-seven years.  The average life expectancy of an American born in recent years is about seventy-nine.  Still, it is totally incorrect to conclude that today’s middle-aged adults will live many, many years longer in retirement than did their predecessors.

  The error arises from the fact that the average life expectancy is computed from birth.  For the Terman subjects’ generation, many children died at birth or shortly thereafter.  Many others died of childhood diseases.  The twentieth century saw tremendous advances [that led] to a dramatic plunge in deaths during infancy and childhood.  So-called modern medical cures have played a relatively minor role in increasing adult life span, something most people do not understand.

• An active lifestyle is conducive to a long, healthy life, but the benefit comes not from forcing yourself to visit the health club three times a week or going for a daily run if those activities are miserable and boring for you.  Get active, the authors say, but in ways that you enjoy and which will thus become not a chore but part of your overall pattern of living.

  There is a dirty little secret known to health professionals that they do not usually much talk about.   Let’s assume that you follow the recommendations of a health authority and get out there most days to go jogging, even though you would much rather be doing something else.  Say you get ready, warm up, jog, and cool down for about an hour a day, which is a modest regimen.

  Over a year, you will spend bout 360 hours doing this, and during 40 years (say, from age twenty-one to age sixty-one), you will spend about 14,400 hours.  Assuming that most of us are awake for about 16 hours a day, this means that you would be spending the equivalent of about 900 days jogging.  This is about two and a half years spent exercising.

  How much longer would such an active person live?  How many extra days of life would this diligent jogger gain in which to pursue other well-loved hobbies?  We do not know for sure, but anything that increased average longevity by more than two and a half years in a generally healthy adult population would be considered a very large effect—a striking phenomenon.  So, with two and a half years spent on the pavement, there is not likely to be much of a net gain in available time for our poor jogger.  Anyone who exercised even more would gain even less, winding up with a net loss of time.

  But it gets even worse.  Note that in this contrived example, the unhappy jogger is trading away thousands of hours of youth for perhaps a few extra years in old age. ...

  Of course, the real picture is somewhat more complicated. The jogger might really enjoy jogging and so might consider the time well spent.  Or the jogger might be warding off a diagnosed tendency toward a debilitating chronic disease such as diabetes.  Still, for many reasonably healthy and active individuals who are out running every morning because some advice list or some friend is pressuring them to try to improve their health, the results are not necessarily going to be what they expect.

Perhaps the best news from The Longevity Project is that most of the unhealthy tendencies the researchers identified from their analysis of the Terman data are within our power to change: they are attitude and lifestyle choices, and the time to get onto a healthy path is now.  Of course it's better to start young, but the benefits are measurable at any age.

Across the life span, many predictors emerged as to who would do better and who would do worse, who would live longer and who would die younger.  It was not good cheer or being popular and outgoing that made the difference.  It was also not those who took life easy, played it safe, or avoided stress who lived the longest.  Rather, it was those who—through an often-complex pattern of persistence, prudence, hard work, and close involvement with friends and communities—headed down meaningful, interesting life paths and, as we have illustrated, found their way back to these healthy paths each time they were pushed off the road.

The qualities and lifestyles cultivated by people on these long-life paths reflect an active pursuit of goals, a deep satisfaction with life, and a strong sense of accomplishment.  That’s not to say that these people possessed a giddy sense of happiness—we described how cheerfulness doesn’t necessarily lead to a long life.  But having a large social network, engaging in physical activities that naturally draw you in, giving back to your community, enjoying and thriving in your career, and nurturing a healthy marriage or close friendships can do more than add many years to your life.  Together, they represent the living with purpose that comes from working hard, reaching out to others, and bouncing back from difficult times.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves:  The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss (Gotham Books, New York, 2003)

Many thanks to DSTB for giving me this book, and thereby redeeming a past mistake on my part, made in response to a mistake on the part of our library.

I’d heard that Eats, Shoots & Leaves was a good book—though I knew little about it, as you will see—and so one day when I found it on tape at our library, I checked it out.  I obviously was not paying attention when I put the cassette in our player, because apparently the wrong tape had been returned to the Eats, Shoots & Leaves packaging.  What I heard was so uninteresting to me that I didn’t even finish the book, and don’t remember it now; it certainly wasn’t about punctuation.

“What?”  you ask.  “There’s something more boring than punctuation?”

Read Eats, Shoots & Leaves.  You’ll never call punctuation boring again.  You’ll laugh, and you’ll also learn.

One thing I learned is something I’ve suspected for a while now:  the rules change when you cross the Atlantic.  It’s not just the spelling (and pronunciation) of that metal out of which we make soda cans and “tin” foil.  Truss encourages us to be sticklers for proper punctuation (hear, hear!)—a difficult enough task when bad examples surround us—but also cautions that sometimes what looks incorrect may be merely a cultural difference.

Be that as it may, the only thing that annoyed me about this short and pleasant book—and only as much as fingernails on a blackboard—was this British author’s persistent use of the British way of combining punctuation and quotation marks.

Many words require hyphens to avoid ambiguity:  words such as “co-respondent”, “re-formed”, “re-mark”.

I would have called that plain wrong, but it turns out that putting the punctuation inside the quotation marks (<ahem> where it belongs!) is an Americanism.

Many words require hyphens to avoid ambiguity:  words such as “co-respondent,” “re-formed,” “re-mark.”

I see the logic of the British system, but it still grates.

I also learned that there’s a reason for another annoyance ; this one is found in my beloved collection of George MacDonald books : What ?  Colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points ! find themselves preceded as well as followed by spaces.  Truss provided the answer to my puzzlement:  these books are facsimile editions, and that now strange punctuation procedure was at one time the Way Things Are Done.

Are you confused by the Way Things Are (or Should Be) Done Now?  Check out Eats, Shoots & Leaves for some seriously amusing enlightenment.

A headline recently provided by my Google News feed illustrates the importance of correct punctuation.

Ratko Mladic arrested, Hillary Clinton in Pakistan

Imagine it now, without the comma:

Ratko Mladic arrested Hillary Clinton in Pakistan

Punctuation matters.  So read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest—and enjoy!

It had been a few years since our last visit to a concert of the Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra, and I couldn't help thinking throughout that I wish this had been the orchestra of Janet's experience.  Orchestras, as well as people, can develop much in fifteen years!

After very creditable performances by the Overture Strings and Prelude Orchestras, the Philharmonia took the stage.  Back in Janet's day, students looked forward to graduating from the Phil to the top orchestra, the Symphonic, in order to play the "real" version of major orchestral works rather than reduced arrangements; now the Philharmonic plays the full versions, also.  They did a great job with Tchaikovsky's March Slave, Shostakovich's Festive Overture, and—my personal favorite of this concert—Carried Up in the Fields, by John Dupuis.  John is now the conductor of the Phil, but in our day he was one of the FSYO's best flute players, and played with Janet in their wind quintet, Quintessence.  (We knew him when....)

Best of all, though, John is a composer.  I knew that when he was still a teenager, and the FSYO premièred his Atlantis.  Universal Studios acknowledged the same by featuring an excerpt from Atlantis at the grand opening of their Islands of Adventure theme park.  Here's a link so that you can hear Atlantis for yourself.  The oboe solo always makes me tear up; you can guess who played it at the première.  If you like that, check out more of John's works on his site.

Shostakovich was featured heavily on this program.  After intermission, the Symphonic Orchestra took the stage, beginning with Concerto Competition winner Giancarlo Licitra, playing the first movement of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1.  Their final piece was the fourth movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5.  In between they played another new work, LocoMotion by Stella Sung.  I 've almost always liked Dr. Sung's music, and this was no exception.

Both the Philharmonic and Symphonic orchestras played excellently, and Giancarlo Licitra superbly.

But back to John Dupuis.  After conducting, Carried Up in the Fields, John commented that even when he tries not to write movie music, it comes out sounding like movie music.  I don't know how true that really is, but I say,

Go for it, John!  Movie music is your destiny. 

Back in 1999, after hearing Atlantis for the first time, I wrote in my journal, "Move over, John Williams and James Horner.  (I don’t say Patrick Doyle yet, though!)"

Feel free to make me change my mind about Patrick Doyle.

I dislike shopping.  (Those who know me, also know how understated that is, but "loathe" seems too strong a word to use about something so trivial.)  On top of that, I have an aversion to adding "stuff" to our home.  Until proven otherwise, if it takes up space, it's as welcome as an undocumented worker in Arizona.

It only took me a couple of years of waffling before opening the door to this immigrant, but it immediately proved itself a trustworthy and productive citizen:  a Cuisenart hand blender.

Why buy a hand blender when you have a perfectly good regular blender already?  That nagging question also postoned this purchase, but the answer soon became obvious:  despite the similarity of their names, the two appliances serve different purposes, and the hand blender is far superior for making sauces, soups, and—our favorite—smoothies.

The blender itself takes up little space.  (The accessories take up a bit more, and I actually haven't used them yet.)  No more laborious transfer of hot sauce bit by bit from the pan to the blender:  in a few seconds the hand blender delivers a smooth sauce right in the cooking pot.  Throw some frozen berries, yoghurt, milk, orange juice concentrate, and almond flavoring (for example) into a quart measuring cup, whirl it around with the blender, and—voilá!—an easy, healthy smoothie.  Best of all, the hand blender is an absolute snap to clean.

Okay, so I'm lazy.  Is it that much trouble to use the regular blender for these things?  Maybe it shouldn't be, but with the hand blender I actually do them.  These days, I'm very much into arranging my life for success.  Glenn Doman's philosophy, "We arrange for the child to win," works for adults, too.  Our new hand blender has turned out to be an effective addition to that toolbox.

I Am David (2003, PG)

Six years ago, my sister-in-law informed me that one of my favorite books, Anne Holm’s North to Freedom, had been made into a movie called I Am David.  Let this serve as an encouragement (?) to those who think I’ll never follow through on their recommendations:  Last week, we finally saw the movie.

Let me get the standard litany out of the way:  The movie isn’t nearly as good as the book.  It takes the plot, the setting, and the characters, but loses most of what makes the book sublime.  To be fair, translating David’s thoughts and transformations to film is probably impossible.  This may explain why I rarely find watching a movie to be an exalting experience.

That said, I Am David is very much a worthwhile movie to see.  It is the story of 12-year-old David’s escape from the only life he can remember:   the Communist prison camp in which he was raised, primarily by a man named Johannes.

(Johannes, incidentally, is from the Alsace region of France, and in consequence David’s journey takes him through Basel, a fact that escaped me on previous readings of the book, since at the time Basel had no particular significance for me.  That part is missing from the movie, however, so don’t be looking for shots of the Münster.  In fact, all of the movie—with scenes in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and Denmark—was filmed in Bulgaria.)

Ben Tibber, who plays David, does a better job than many adult actors I’ve seen; his face got him the job, and he makes great use of it for wordless expression.  Jim Caviezel plays Johannes so movingly that I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that he also played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.

The PG rating is because of some violent prison camp scenes, but the movie does a great job of suggesting the horror without being unnecessarily graphic.  My primary complaint, other than the loss of the most important parts of the book, is that several of the movie’s characters are less pleasant than in the book—the Italian sailor demanding a bribe, rather than simply helping David, for example.

Naturally, I strongly suggest reading North to Freedom rather than watching the movie, but if you’re not going to read the book, I Am David would be a great addition to your video experience.

Daniel May: The Tall and the Small
Sibelius: Symphony No. 1
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto

Christopher Wilkins, conductor
Joshua Bell, violin

The first work on the program was a tribute to Jonathan May, onetime director of the Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra, who died unexpectedly last year.  The Tall and the Small was composed by May's brother, and his wife, Maureen, played the solo cello parts.  I was impressed that she was able to perform this without breaking down.  The most exciting aspect of the piece, however, was that it was composed for double string orchestra, the "Tall" orchestra being the OPO, and the "Small" orchestra made up of student musicians.  I'm sure that performing with the OPO was quite a thrill for them—not to mention sharing the program with Joshua Bell.  At the risk of making some of my readers feel old, I'll mention that they had auditioned for the job via YouTube!

I like Sibelius, so perhaps if I were more familiar with his first symphony I would have enjoyed it more.  As it was, I confess I found both pre-intermission works rather soporific.  Looking around, it was apparent I was not the only one.

But only a terminal narcoleptic could have slept during the second half.

I've spoken before of my concern about the superstar phenomenon that destroys the "middle class" in music, sports, and many other fields.  Yet there is no doubt that Bell's superstardom is deserved.  As is that of the Stradivarius he plays.  Never have I heard so many textures come from a single instrument.  And what high notes!  What harmonics!  Years ago, when I asked one of Janet's violin teachers how he knew where to place his finger when leaping to the far reaches of the fingerboard, he replied, "You stab and hope."  Bell stabs and knows.  What's more, despite his appearing to have put in his 10,000 hours on this concerto alone, the performance conveyed an almost playful delight.

As an encore, he began with what sounded like a reprise of the magical cadenza from the first movement, but which quickly turned into a fiery cadenza for Yankee Doodle.

The full-house audience was appreciative and enthusiastic, with many unable to restrain themselves from a premature standing ovation after the first movement of the Tchaikovsky.  I confess:  I applauded, too.  You just had to; it was that transcendent.  Joshua Bell made the news four years ago for being decidedly under appreciated when he played the part of a street musician in a Washington, D.C. Metro station.  As unobservant as I can be when focussed on the goal at hand, I like to think I could not have passed such music by without standing, transfixed and open-mouthed.  Then again, I've always had a soft spot for street musicians.

Whatever it cost the OPO to bring Bell to Orlando, I'm glad they did.  His performance of the Tchaikovsky was like a meal at the Cheval Blanc in Basel.

How can you take a book without one single battle scene and turn it into an action movie?

"How" is actually quite well answered by the makers of the most recent attempt to bring Narnia to Hollywood, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  But what I really meant by the question was, "Why would you want to do so, and where do you get the audacity?  If you want to tell a different story, why take someone else's character names and setting?"

But I've sung this same song a lot recently, most notably for The Lord of the Rings and the first two Narnia films, and it's getting wearisome.  If I'm tired of movies that rip the heart and beauty out of a book and try to pass their new creation off as the real thing, then others are surely tired of me whining about it.  Perhaps the action film, bratty teen, and self-esteem genres are the "heart language" of today, and the filmmakers should be commended for speaking to people in a language they can hear.  Maybe the door will open a crack for what I see as the true beauty and wonder of the books.

What I liked:

• Technically, the film is well done; I especially admire the way Reepicheep is animated. 
• Eustace, hardly one's favorite character in the book, is well played; the actor does a great job.
• The ending is reasonably depicted, despite passing over the wonders of the Last Sea, and eliminating the scene with the Lamb.

What I didn't like:

• The pervasive, dark creepiness.  For a story filled with sunshine and light, light so real that by the end of the book it is "drinkable," this is more than strange.  The center of the movie is not the bright goodness of the sun and the journey to Aslan's country, but a quest to conquer the evil of the Dark Island.  (In the book, Dark Island is but a short episode, and it's not conquered, but fled from, after Lord Rhoop is rescued.)
• As in the other movies, the children have lost their admirable innocence in favor of an egotistical self-centeredness.
• The re-taking of the Lone Islands, accomplished in the book by chivalry, loyalty, and intelligent action, without a drop of blood shed, is turned into a battle.  What's more, the point is completely missed that the evil of slavery is made possible by a collusion of profiteering and bureaucracy.
• As in Prince Caspian, Aslan comes across as a rather tame lion who drifts in and out of the story without affecting it much, rather than the point on which many of the episodes turn.
• The mysterious story in the magician's book, "about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill" is missing altogether, as is the point that Dark Island is "the land where dreams come true."  Also Ramandu, the retired star, being made younger by the fire-berries from the sun, and Caspian's battle with himself at the end of the world, along with many other stories that could easily have been fit in if so many battle scenes had not been added.
• The lesson Lucy learns from her struggles with the magician’s book has been changed from the perils of eavesdropping to the importance of self-esteem.
• The "un-dragoning" of Eustace occurs out of sequence, and is given short shrift.
• The significance of the Stone Knife at the table on Ramandu's Island is passed over completely, the enchantment of the lords being reduced to a punishment for fighting in a place where violence is not permitted.

The more I think of it, the odder the fighting in Dawn Treader appears.  Unlike Prince Caspian, in which battles are essential to much of the story—though even so I think the movie overdoes the point—Dawn Treader, the book, includes example after example of battles averted.  To name a few:

• Caspian is able to make the voyage because all Narnia is at peace.
• When approached by the slavers, Caspian insists on not being identified as the king, and resists Reepicheep’s suggestion of battle as being unwise in their disadvantageous position.
• The Lone Islands, as mentioned above, are retaken, and the slaves freed, with a show of (assumed) force and a strong will, but without a fight.
• Eustace, in dragon form, was indeed very useful to the others, but not as a fighter.  He explored the island, took his friends on rides, brought them a tree to replace the broken mast, and re-provisioned the ship by hunting wild goats and pigs.  “He was a very humane killer too, for he could dispatch a beast with one blow of his tail….”
• The sea serpent is not conquered by battle, but by cleverness.  “Others would have joined [in fighting] if at that moment Reepicheep had not called out, “Don’t fight!  Push!”
• The appearance of Aslan breaks the spell of Deathwater Island just as Caspian lays his hand on his sword to fight with Edmund.
• There is no battle with the Dufflepuds, although the Chief does once send his spear flying into a tree.  Reepicheep explains, “If we had any assurance of saving [Lucy] by battle, our duty would be very plain.  It appears to me that we have none.  And the service they ask of her is in no way contrary to her Majesty’s honour, but a noble and heroical act.”
• As mentioned earlier, after rescuing the Lord Rhoop, Caspian orders the ship to flee Dark Island with all speed, much to Reepicheep’s disappointment.
• The quarrel of the three lords at Ramandu’s Island is prevented from escalating to violence when one of them grabs the Knife of Stone, “a thing not right for him to touch,” sending them into the enchanted sleep.
• Reepicheep is distracted from answering the Sea King’s challenge to combat by his discovery that the water they are sailing in is no longer salty.
• As Reepicheep, the mighty warrior, heads off to Aslan’s country, he flings away his sword, saying, “I shall need it no more.”  (The inclusion of this scene is part of what makes the ending of the movie better than I had by that point come to expect.)

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie tells an interesting story, better than most these days, and if I did not know the book, I might have liked it.  I hope it is (has been?) successful enough to encourage the production of the rest of the Narnia series, even though I know I will continue to be disappointed.  I can’t recommend it to those who have higher hopes that their children will discover the glories of what C. S. Lewis wrote.  And yet …  I also can’t help thinking … hoping … that maybe the movies are a good thing for those whose alternative will not be the books, but something darker, more violent, and with less heroic goodness than these films have to offer.

Outliers:  The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown & Co., New York, 2008)

Malcolm Gladwell’s books always turn my mind upside down.  He may not always be right, but he’s always exciting.

What makes a superstar?  What differentiates Bill Gates from the average computer geek, the Beatles from a garage band, the top athletes from the wannabes?  Talent, certainly, and hard work—but Outliers reveals that the most critical factors are often surprising, even random.

The 10,000 hour rule  Talent, we generally believe, is something we are born with.  Intelligence, musical ability, athletic skill:  you either have it, or you don’t.  There is more excuse than truth there, however.  There is a threshold of talent required in any field, but beyond that, experience is the all-important key.

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.  It’s the thing that makes you good.

Study after study has shown that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve world-class expertise in any field.  That’s 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of a full-time job—for five years.  The opportunity to get those 10,000 hours, at the right place and time, makes superstars.  For Bill Gates it was a series of unusual circumstances, beginning in middle school, that gave him access to computers that even most college students did not have.  Before he dropped out of Harvard to make history, Gates had been programming for well over 10,000 hours.

Thanks to a chance encounter—and some illicit incentive—the Beatles found themselves in a set of gigs that required an extraordinarily long performance commitment:  up to eight hours per night, seven days a week.  It was the making of the group.  By the time they came to America in 1964, they had some 1200 live performances under their guitar straps.

Or, as Shinichi Suzuki said, “Skill equals knowledge plus 10,000 times.”  Another gem from the Suzuki world (though I’ve seen it attributed in several ways, most commonly to Vince Lombardi):  Practice doesn’t make perfect.  Only perfect practice makes perfect.  Clearly one must put more into those 10,000 hours than just time.

Inequities  When it comes to sports, astrology would appear to rule:  the month of your birth will make or break you.  Because children’s sports leagues are sorted by age, and because a year’s growth makes a tremendous difference in a child’s physical strength and coordination, the oldest members of a team have a considerable advantage over the youngest.  They appear more talented, and are moved to the better leagues, where they get better coaching, and, significantly, more playing time.  The effect is cumulative, with the “rich” getting richer at each step.

In school, another institution segregated by age, the same effect is devastating to those who start kindergarten less mature than their classmates.  The achievement gap that appears then rarely closes.

At four-year colleges in the United States…students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6 percent.

Such systems are tremendously wasteful of talent.  Potential hockey stars—and Nobel Prize winners—are being squandered merely because they were born at the end of the year.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

— Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

How much genius is necessary?  Christopher Langan is arguably one of the world’s most intelligent people, a genius from infancy—talking at six months, teaching himself to read at three—and he was not only intellectually gifted, but artistically and musically as well.  Yet his dysfunctional family left him without the life skills necessary to succeed in college and become the superstar he might have been.

I include this quote from Langan for Porter, who dreamt solutions to programming problems, and for Janet, whose hand would write the answers to math problems without apparent help from her brain.

I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question when I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. … Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page.

Above-average intelligence is a good predictor of academic success, but beyond a certain level, other factors become more important for success.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold.

…

In 2008, 27,462 of the most highly qualified high school seniors in the world applied to Harvard University.  Of these students, 2,500 of them scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test and 3,300 had a perfect score on the SAT math exam.  More than 3,300 were ranked first in the high school class.  How many did Harvard accept?  About 1,600, which is to say they rejected 93 out of every 100 applicants.  Is it really possible to say that one student is Harvard material and another isn’t, when both have identical—and perfect—academic records?  Of course not.  Harvard is being dishonest.  Schwartz is right.  They should just have a lottery.

What about art?  Surely some people are born with musical or artistic talent, and the rest of us left out.  Well, no.  It’s like intelligence.  Yes, there is a range of abilities, but apparently many more of us could be really good if we were willing to put in the time.

Studies done in the 1990’s of violinists at an elite music school, and of amateur and professional pianists revealed the one critical factor in success was simply how much practice time the musicians put in.

[The researchers] couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.  Nor could they find any “grinds,” people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.  That’s it.  And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else.  They work much, much harder.

This is incredibly good news:  We can all be much greater than we think.  But it comes with important questions (mine, not Gladwell’s):  Are we willing to do the work necessary to achieve greatness?  What must be sacrificed to reach that level?  Is it impossible for a Christian, or a parent, or anyone else with broad responsibilities, to be this good at anything without “gaining the whole world and losing his soul”?  Must the needed time be stolen from more important activities, or can it be reclaimed from wastage?  The average American watches 34 hours of television per week.  If we give up television for six years, could we all become excellent in some area?  Is there a level below the top at which we can all be much better at many things than we are now?  At what level is “good enough” better than perfect for most of us?

The language advantage, part 1  Why were so many Korean Airlines plane crashing?  Intensive analysis revealed no mechanical problems, and no lack of skill on the part of the pilots.  The source of the disasters was something called a Power-Distance Index.  Safe flying requires the cockpit crew to feel free to inform and correct the captain, and the input necessary to keep unusual situations from becoming critical was not coming forcefully enough to the Korean pilots from crews that had bowed to them before the flight.  They key to the airline’s remarkable turnaround?  Insisting that English be the language of the cockpit.

Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country’s cultural legacy.  They needed an opportunity to step outside those cultural roles when they sat in the cockpit, and language was the key to that transformation.  In English, they would be free of the sharply defined gradients [of formality in the Korean language]:  formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain.  Instead, the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different legacy.

The language advantage, part 2

[T]here is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.  In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

…

The number system in English is highly irregular.  Not so in China, Japan, and Korea.  They have a logical counting system.  Eleven is ten-one.  Twelve is ten-two.  Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children.  Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty.  American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five.  By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily.  Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22).  Only then can she do the math….Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equations is right there, embedded in the sentence.  No number translation is necessary:  It’s five-tens-nine.

Meaningful work  What advantage did the late-18^th century New York garment industry confer on the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and how is that related to rice farming in Asia?  Independence, meaningful work, and the conviction that success is a direct result of effort.  (Read the book to find out why.)

[A]utonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward…are, most people agree, the three qualities work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Virtually every success story we’ve seen in this book so far involves someone or some group working harder than their peers.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world.

…  [The students] also have to fill out a questionnaire.  It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like.  It’s not a trivial exercise.  It’s about 120 questions long.  In fact, it’s so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.

… As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. … [C]ountries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

The rankings aren’t just similar:  They are identical.

[W]e could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish [in a hypothetical Math Olympics] without asking a single math question.

I can’t agree with Gladwell on everything—for one thing, he has far too much admiration for the institution of school.  But Outliers is well-written, easy to read, and challenging.

It is not the brightest who succeed. … Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf.  It is, rather, a gift.  Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

… To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success … with a society that provides opportunities for all.

Those who would create their utopias at the level of society more often create dystopias, it would seem.  But at local, particular levels—school, community, soccer league, and most especially, family—it might be accomplished.

Sabbath, by Dan B. Allender (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2009)

Mystical poets who enjoy attempting to express the inexpressible may find working through Allender's Sabbath a productive exercise, but those looking for a practical, rational discourse on how to honor the Sabbath Day will find themselves banging their heads in frustration.  I know I did.

It's clear that Allender has experienced an otherworldly delight in his own celebration of the Sabbath; unfortunately, like many mystics of old, his attempts at sharing that experience fall flat.  First, there is a language barrier.  Poetical prose as a literary device can work, but like straight poetry it takes effort to make out the sense, and even then you're not sure you've got it right.  When you're expecting an informative book, the attempt at poetic language quickly becomes annoying.

Second, Allender appears to inhabit a different world from me.  When he diagnoses a problem, and recommends a cure, he loses me at the first step.  How can I trust his cure when he seems to be describing a different patient?

Finally, he persists in using the term "sensual" when his meaning would be better served by "sensuous."  I'll admit I'm nitpicking, but he uses the word so frequently that it presents a significant distraction.

Sabbath is not without merit, and what were stumbling blocks for me may be stepping stones for others.  Even I found some worthwhile ideas, especially the question with which I am still wrestling, "What do I find delightful, and why?"

The Sabbath is the day to experiment with beauty that teases your hunger to know more glory.  It is a day of study and silence on one Sabbath, a cutting out of a new kite pattern to fly on a wild breezy Sabbath another. It is crawling through wetlands below your home like hunters stalking big game in Patagonia or an exploration of string theory and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as it relates to quantum physics on the next.  What intrigues, amazes, tickles your fancy, delights your senses, and casts you into an entirely new and unlimited world is the raw material of Sabbath.

If the Sabbath sends us anywhere, it is to nature.  To spend the day entirely inside on the Sabbath is to forget the sounds of bird twill, the rush of the wind, and the warming fragrance of the dawn.  It is to forget God even if we are indoors thinking about him.  We must enter the earth to be struck dumb by the beauty of the Trinity.  Our task is to plan to be near the face of God, in his creation, and then allow our plans to take shape as we are made alive by the surprise of his world.

Even in the nonhuman kingdom, play is part of the creational mandate.  Diane Ackerman says, “The more an animal needs to learn in order to survive, the more it needs to play.”

To play in the fields of God will vary from Sabbath to Sabbath.  There will be countless Sabbaths spent indoors in front of a fire, reading a novel; and there will be others on the side of a stream watching a bull trout meander with feckless disregard as fleeing cutthroat escape their most potent rival.

An example, though far from the most egregious, of the language that makes my head spin.

We are divided, and the day of reconciliation seems farther away than the bright moon that still shines in the early morning sky.  Division always enlists, forms, and feeds new communities.  Division breeds new alliances that provide us with the ability to survive the heartache.  We tell our story to a friend who suffers the injustice with us.  This friend sides with us to some degree, and as a result he judges the one who brought the pain.  The new alliance spills out to others through gossip, and deeper fissures are created in relationships much the same way that an earthquake tears a landscape to bits.

And one of the "diagnosing the wrong patient" problem.  Say what???

Envy is the craving to possess what another owns in order to fill our desperate emptiness….  And it is usually not enough to have something similar or slightly less than what they own—it has to be bigger and better….  When one looks deeper into the dark hole of envy, it is far crueler than merely the desire to better oneself….  The deepest envy desires to take from the other what they possess in order to bask before their humiliation.  We have determined that our destitution will only be resolved if we can simultaneously deprive our rivals of their goods and possess what they own.

How do we articulate the difference between labor that gives life and work that extinguishes hope?  It may be as simple as saying all labor is done to create something that goes beyond the completion of a task—it seeks as connectedness to someone for something greater than mere compensation.  Work is painting a wall; labor is starting a painting business so that one can choose how a job will be finished with integrity.  Work is taking a literature class; labor is writing a poem to address the death of one’s parent.  Working allows us to control the outcome and therefore achieve our manageable dreams.  Labor calls us to risk our dreams without much control to create something that goes beyond what we can imagine.  It is labor, not work, that we hate.  We prefer to kill the hope of what labor may bring forth rather than to risk so much for possibly so little.

Allender does tie in (though not expressly) some of the ideas I gleaned from Josef Pieper's In Tune with the World, for me a needed reminder of good ol' New Year's Resolution #2.

David Ford writes, “All the senses are engaged in a good feast.  We taste, touch, smell, see, hear.  Salvation as health is here vividly physical.  Anything that heals and enhances savoring the world through our senses may feed into a salvation that culminates in feasting….Jesus went to meals, weddings and parties and had a feast-centered ethic….That combination of sharing and celebrating is, perhaps, the most radical of all the implications of the teaching and practice of Jesus.”  Jesus is the presence of superabundance.  The Sabbath is the weekly entry into a taste of lavish, sensuous delight.  [Note here the use of “sensuous” rather than “sensual”; thank you, Mr. Allender.]

One Sabbath night in Ethiopia, my wife and I had the privilege of being at the home of our translator….  It was abundantly clear that we were eating an extravagant meal that may have cost what the family would spend on food in a month.  The sacrifice of the family was part of their joy; there was no way to reciprocate other than to join in their joy and to add to their immense sacrifice, our humble gratitude in being so undeservedly blessed.  Jesus’ way of being with others was a feast ethic.  All meals, and all joy around a table, are a reminder of the feast of the coming kingdom.

The Mother Tongue:  English and How It Got that Way (first published 1991, reissued by Perennial 2001) and Troublesome Words (first published 1984, revised 1997, reissued by Penguin Books 2009), both by Bill Bryson

My father and my sister-in-law became hooked on Bill Bryson as a writer; perhaps it is now my turn.

For the first twelve chapters, The Mother Tongue is an accessible, page-turning look at the English language:  where it came from, why it’s so popular, and how it came to be simultaneously one of the easiest and one of the hardest languages to learn.

Unfortunately, the book peters out a bit after that, with a few less interesting, apparently random diversions.  The chapter on swearing, for example, was dreary.  As a child I would have devoured it, such words being the kind with some magical power that required one to step over the square on the sidewalk where one occasionally saw them scrawled.  Graffiti was my only contact with profanity then:  no one I knew used such language, and it was certainly not in any books, movies, or TV shows of my experience—not even the dictionary (trust me, we looked).  But that was then, and this is decidedly now.  There is no longer anything rare, titillating, or even informative about bad language—at best it is irritating, and keeps me from giving The Mother Tongue the wholehearted recommendation it otherwise deserves.  With that caveat, however, this is still a delightful and worthwhile book.

One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees.  It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries.  To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will put new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.

But at the same time, it seems to me, there is a case for resisting change—at least slapdash change.  Even the most liberal descriptivist would accept that there must be some conventions of usage.  We must agree to spell cat c-a-t and not e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, and we must agree that by that word we mean a small furry quadruped that goes meow and sits comfortably on one’s lap and not a large lumbering beast that grows tusks and is exceedingly difficult to housebreak.  In precisely the same way, clarity is generally better served if we agree to observe a distinction between imply and infer, forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and disinterested, and many others.  As John Ciardi observed, resistance may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth.

We in the English-speaking world have often been highly complacent in expecting others to learn English without our making anything like the same effort in return.  As of 1986, the number of American students studying Russian was 25,000.  The number of Russian students studying English was four million….  In 1986, the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung  investigated the studying of German as a foreign language around the world.  In the United States, the number of college students taking a German course was 120,000, down from 216,000 in 1966.  In the Soviet Union, the number was nine million.  The problem is unlikely to get better.  Between 1966 and 1986, 150 American colleges and universities canceled their German programs.  In 1989, some 77 percent of all new college graduates had taken no foreign language courses. 

A presidential commission under Ronald Reagan called the situation scandalous.  In 1987, in an effort to redress the balance Congress voted into law the Education for Economic Security Act, which provided an extra $2.45 million to promote the study of foreign languages—or a little over one cent per person in the country.  That should really turn the tables.

Granted, these figures are old—but somehow I doubt there’s been significant improvement since.  Personally, I think we need an Education for National Security Act, which would forbid going to war against people who speak a language for which we do not have a strong base of fluent translators.

Not only are we not doing terribly well at foreign languages, we’re not even doing terribly well at English.  The problem was well voiced by Professor Randolph Quirk, president of the British Academy and one of that country’s leading linguistic scholars, when he wrote:  “It would be ironic indeed if the millions of children in Germany, Japan and China who are diligently learning the language of Shakespeare and Eliot took more care in their use of English and showed more pride in their achievement than those for whom it is the native tongue.”

We might sometimes wonder if we are the most responsible custodians of our own tongue, especially when we reflect that the Oxford University Press sells as many copies of the Oxford English Dictionary in Japan as it does in America, and a third more than in Britain.

For those who care to be better custodians of our language, I can recommend Bryson’s Troublesome Words.  Although written in dictionary format, I found it enjoyable to read cover to cover.  Do you want to know when to use “fewer,” and when to use “less”?  Or how to spell the name of that pleasant airport in Amsterdam?  Or the crucial difference between “sensual” and “sensuous”?  Troublesome Words will let you know, and entertain you at the same time.

 (Thanks, Janet and Stephan!)

Music is such a personal, touchy subject—as is worship.  Put them together and you might as well be mixing sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter.  Nonetheless I will boldly go where too many have gone before, in order to draw attention to “Pop Goes the Worship,” an interview in Christianity Today (March 2011) with T. David Gordon, author of Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns:  How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal.

I wasn’t expecting much when I began the article (who writes these titles, anyway?), but was quickly drawn in.  A sure way to my heart is to say what I’ve been saying myself, or wanted to say, only much better and with authority.  The article is worthwhile in its entirety; here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite—or raise your blood pressure.  [Emphasis in the following is mine]

T. David Gordon argues that modern worship choruses have trumped hymns in many congregations because for decades, we have been inundated with pop music—to the point that many of us don't know better. If you eat nothing but Big Macs, Gordon says, you will never appreciate a filet mignon.

Regarding church music, Gordon says, media ecologists should ask how music, "once a participatory thing, became a passive thing. What happens when people who used to sing folk music around the house are now surrounded by Muzak? How does that alter our sensibilities of music?"

Many are promoting an "aesthetic" that it is our duty to patronize living artists and not artists who are dead. Should we also not read books that are more than 50 years old, or enter buildings that are more than 50 years old? Christians aren't abandoning their buildings, and they haven't stopped reading Spurgeon or Edwards or Luther or Calvin. We haven't rejected other art forms that are not new. We've done so only with music.

Unless an individual chooses to listen to different kinds of music, the only thing that individual will hear (most of the time) is pop. Sure, one's sensibilities can be shaped deliberately, and many of us have developed tastes that we once did not have. (I spent years cultivating a taste for Brahms, whom I now love, and I spent about two years cultivating my appreciation for jazz.) If I did not believe that sensibilities could be cultivated, I wouldn't have written the book; it is, in some senses, a plea to shape them differently from the way commercial pop culture shapes them. But for people who do not take ownership of the cultivation of their sensibilities, other cultural gatekeepers will shape them for them—and in this case, they will shape them to prefer pop.

In the book, I candidly state that many traditional hymns are outright dogs—just terrible. I never give specific examples, however, because there are always some people who love those dogs, and if I call their beloved song a dog, they will never hear anything else I say. I also think some contemporary hymns are very good; I especially appreciate Getty and Townend (e.g., "How Deep the Father's Love," "In Christ Alone").

Hymns should be easy enough to learn for people who do not read music, so people can pick up the melody quickly. When I was a young child and we'd take drives, the family would sing folk music or hymns. If Mom or Dad started singing "Fairest Lord Jesus," we sang along, and before long we were harmonizing. And we couldn't read music. Hymns aren't too difficult to sing; most of them are easier to sing than the contemporary stuff.  I find it ironic that if I'm attending a blended service, the hymns will have the full musical score, though they don't need it, while the contemporary stuff, which is unfathomable without the musical score, doesn't have it. It's just lyrics up on the screen.

[Modern tunes] are not really easier to learn than hymns (unless they are profoundly simplistic). They seem easier to some people whose sensibilities have difficulty with anything that is not pop. But musically speaking, they are not, as a genre, substantially easier; they just sound more familiar to our culture. When people describe them as "easy," what they mean is "familiar-sounding."

Thank you, Dr. Gordon.  I am so tired of people telling me that "praise music" is easy.  Now I know there are at least two of us in this world who find it "unfathomable" without the music.  (I'm getting better, with practice, at muddling through when I can get my hands on the sheets the band uses, which have chords as well as lyrics; that's rather fun, actually.  I'm still hopeless in the congregation.)

What Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns will contribute to the ongoing music and worship conflagration discussion, I can't predict.  All I know is that the article cheered me up.