Having been alerted to the Evangelical Manifesto by both GroshLink and John Stackhouse, I decided it was probably worth reading. I generally shun labels other than "Christian," if I can, and "Manifesto" sounds a little radical to me, but there's a lot I can identify with in this document. I greatly appreciate its even-handed, moderate, dare I say Christ-like approach. It may sound ho-hum to some, but I suspect that a clear and courteous statement of basic beliefs and principles is more necessary than we'd like to believe. Others apparently read the Manifesto as a wimpy effort not to be identified with Fundamentalists, though what I see is not one-sided, but a true effort avoid both Scylla and Charybdis.
If Christians are to have any reasonable voice in the public square we need to get out from under stereotypes and "past watchful dragons." The Evangelical Manifesto seems to me to be a reasonable attempt so to do.As my father would say, we were sloppin' up culture like a hawg yesterday. (I believe the reference was to a L'il Abner comic strip, although it may have been Pogo.) It all started when the Orlando Magic (local basketball team) advanced to the playoffs, thereby causing a parking problem for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra concert since the Bob Carr Auditorium and the O-rena (it keeps changing its name based on sponsorship, so since I can't keep track of it I generally call it by its original appellation) share parking facilities.
In order to help alleviate the problem, the OPO delayed its concert by half an hour. We figured that still wasn't going to be good enough, since one never knows how long a basketball game is going to last, so we decided to expand the evening.
We left for downtown at 4:30, and found our usual parking garage already filled to capacity. On to Plan B, which involved parking some distance away but near the free downtown bus line. We could have then taken the bus to our first event, dinner at the Napasorn Thai restaurant, but decided instead to enjoy a walk in the lovely weather. Mmmmm, tom yum gai, beef with basil, and pad Thai. :)
Our next stop was an easy walk away, for an Orlando Cabaret Festival show at the Mad Cow Theatre. This was our third year at their popular It Was a Very Good Year series (see last year and the year before, and our choice of year was made easy by the fact that 1951 was the one that made it possible for us to see it and still make the OPO concert afterwards.
Actually, 1951 had been my first choice this time, anyway, it being close enough to my birth year I thought it might be especially interesting. It turned out to be my least favorite of our three years, not so much because I recognized fewer of the songs as because the singers often didn't take them seriously enough to make them sound authentic. Well, okay, there's only so much you can do with I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat.... The songs from various musicals were the best, and the most convincing.
No lingering allowed after the show; it was time to run to the next event: The Orlando Philharmonic and the Bach Festival Choir presenting Verdi's Requiem. We didn't run, exactly, but having just missed a bus we decided to walk the nine-tenths of a mile to the Bob Carr, moving as quickly as we could against a flood tide of basketball fans in various states of depression, elation, and/or inebriation. Arriving on time to the concert was necessary because the Requiem was performed without intermission. Not only is it rude (and often forbidden) to enter the hall after the performance has begun, but we had also consumed many large glasses of water with our fiery Thai food....
This was, as far as I remember, the first time I'd heard Verdi's Requiem, and though I go into OPO concerts predisposed to enjoy whatever they present, I must confess I found this oddly disagreeable. The orchestra and chorus were splendid; it was an excellent performance. But it felt less like a requiem mass and more like an opera without costumes. Actually, supertitles would have helped, since it was too dark in the hall to read the words printed in the program. One of the advantages of being in a liturgical church, however, is that I was familiar enough with the words to follow fairly well anyway.
Perhaps it wasn't that much of an advantage, because often the music did not seem to fit the words. A mental shift, not without effort, did enable me to envision someone (not seraphim) singing the light, dancing Sanctus around the throne of God, but it was a far cry from my usual Isaiah 6 inspired image. Verdi did the Dies Irae well, however, with Carl Rendek and the men of the chorus providing a relentless, driving energy to the terrible words.
One or two of you might understand when I say that the absolute highlight of the delightful evening was the few minutes we shared with our table-mates at the Cabaret. Turns out they were from France, and though as always in such situations my very limited French vocabulary took rapid retreat, nonetheless we did manage to communicate some in French before reverting to English. It's always a thrill to me when someone actually understands my French, and, gracious woman, she said my accent was very good....
This took much longer than I had expected...I guess Pentecost and Mother's Day will have to wait till tomorrow. But I did get the coolest Mother's Day present.
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Category Reviews Everyday Life
The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)
I'm finally reading the book I first wrote about a month an a half ago. This post is no more a proper book review than the earlier one, since I'm only through the introduction and 3/4 of Chapter One. I can feel Mr. Keen's keenly disapproving I Told You So look: yet another example of amateurs doing things badly. So be it. I just experienced a perfect example of why I have a problem with some of his assertions, and want to share it with you, my minuscule but beloved audience. Otherwise, distracted amateur that I am, I'd probably forget the illustration before finishing the book.
While I am reading The Cult of the Amateur, Porter is enjoying a G. A. Henty novel, In the Reign of Terror, and tonight he came upon a word with which he was unfamiliar: louvetier. Naturally, he asked me about it, since for years I have been the family's reference-book-of-choice. If Mom doesn't know, she'll look it up and save the rest of us the trouble. Well, I didn't know, so I went to my handy dictionary. This is no pocket-sized or student edition, but a thick, heavy Webster's with its own dictionary stand—but it failed me. On to the next room, and my online references. BabelFish: No. Answers.com: No. Merriam-Webster: No. Encyclopedia Britannica, surely: Not at all. Yet the combination of Google and Wikipedia, very much maligned in that first chapter I had been reading when Porter's question interrupted me, gave me the answer in a matter of seconds. I should have tried them first, but I was under the influence of the book. A louvetier, for those of you who are panting to know, is a French wolfcatcher, master of the wolfhounds and responsible for organizing the wolf hunts. Wikipedia may indeed be amateurish and prone to bias and error, but it answered the question swiftly and—confirmed by Porter from the context of the book—accurately.
More to come. I can see there is more to appreciate about Keen's insights than I was expecting, as well as plenty with which to disagree.High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver. (HarperCollins, 1995)
My sister-in-law gave me this book about a year ago. I started it on vacation, but didn't get very far before we returned home and it got lost in a pile in my office. That turned out to be a happy accident: I'm not sure I would have finished it had I not been prepared by Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I love the way Barbara Kingsolver writes; as I said about the first book, even if I had found the subject dull—which I didn't—I would have enjoyed reading it.This one was a little harder. None of it was dull, but a great deal of it was maddening. With a few exceptions, such as her love of nature and her attitude towards clothing and fashion, Barbara Kingsolver and I apparently stand at opposite poles on every issue. Having read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle I know this is not entirely true, but High Tide in Tucson manages to flush out many areas of extreme disagreement. One critical example: while we share a love of and respect for children, hers leads her to support passionately governmental programs and family situations that I think, with equal passion, are downright harmful to children.
What is most frustrating is that she can be so well-educated, so intelligent, and have obviously done much research, and yet be so blind. I don't mean she's blind because she doesn't agree with me, but because she apparently can't see the humanity of her opponents. The person who excuses tobacco farmers on the grounds that they are human beings who are supporting their families in the only way they know how, nonetheless sets up her enemies as straw men and proceeds to demolish them without taking the time to get to know the reality of their lives and logic. For someone who clearly wishes to be liberal and accepting and open to new ideas, her world is curiously black and white. One either accepts every aspect of evolutionary theory lock, stock, and barrel, or else believes the world was created in six 24-hour days back in 4004 BC. One either embraces all possible combinations of people as equally legitimate forms of "family," or restricts that term to a husband and wife with two children, a boy and a girl, living isolated lives in suburbia with no room for a community of friends and neighbors or even grandparents. In Kingsolver's mind, there is apparently no substantial difference between a mother working long hours in corporate America with her children in day care, and a mother working long hours on a farm with her children (and husband) close by. And that women without "careers" have so much time on their hands they take cleaning and home decorating to unheard of heights just to keep themselves occupied! All forms of religious belief are valuable, held by reasonable people, and have something to teach us—except Christianity. Every group that calls itself a "family" is a blessing, unless that family happens to be a husband, wife, and two kids living in suburbia, with the mother working at home, in which case it's likely to be toxic and conceal child abuse and a woman on tranquilizers. Every culture is beautiful, except for Western Europe's, every country admirable except America. I'm exaggerating slightly with that last example—Iraq and Kuwait are also evil empires in her mind.
In the hands of a lesser writer, such sentiments would caused me to throw High Tide in Tucson across the room and miss the valuable parts of the book. (Really, there are some.) Fortunately, Barbara Kingsolver is not a lesser writer. Her arguments are not convincing, even when I agree with her, because her ignorance about things of which I know does not give me confidence when she covers areas in which I am clueless.
But there's no doubt the lady can write!I’ve been a fan of the Mars Hill Audio Journal since the early 90s, though only an intermittent subscriber. I enjoy and appreciate its insight into life and culture, but generally prefer to receive information in printed, rather than spoken, form. Plus I was tired of finding places to store the cassettes.
Recently I re-subscribed, because they now offer an mp3 version. This I can take with me on my walks, and it takes up no physical space in the house. Works for me.
Mars Hill also has more free resources, audio and print, than I have time to handle. Here’s one that came to my inbox recently: A Culture of One, a review of a book by Andrew Keen entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. I’ve ordered the book from our library, but haven’t yet read it, so this post will not be commentary on the book, per se, but on some of the ideas expressed in the review, which I believe to be worthy of comment and on which I seek your opinions.
Although he doesn't use the phrase, Keen's book is about the loss of cultural authority. He believes that the survival of the very best forms of cultural expression, in journalism, music, fiction, and other disciplines, requires a network of mediation and accreditation. Cultural institutions that nurture the production of the best cultural artifacts maintain teams of editors, critics, producers, and teachers who have advanced in their careers through years of training and evaluation within a guild or tradition. Over time, some of those institutions earn more trust and respect among their peers than do others, their expertise and ability are acknowledged through an organic process of accountability and recognition. Those cultural institutions can be corrupted and standards can become debased. But without some form of institutionalized judgment established over time in communities of expertise, without, that is, some knowledgeable person to tell you your work isn't good enough to be published, cultural expression easily becomes mere self-expression.
I would respectfully cry, au contraire! Perhaps I’m being a bit defensive here, as I am one of those who “can self-publish by putting up a few bucks for a website, [and] don't have to face the humiliation of rejection slips.” He’s talking about blogging, but also about amateur music and other forms of cultural expression. In this and all of life I fear the Cult of the Professional much more than the Cult of the Amateur.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a strong proponent of excellence, and of training our children (and ourselves) to appreciate the best in music, art, literature, and life in general. I readily admit that developing such taste usually requires deliberate effort; scattering random seeds on unprepared ground is not equivalent to planting and tending a garden. In a world dominated by Doritos and Coke, children will not naturally prefer edamame and milk. Similarly, much that is excellent and worthy of appreciation does not immediately captivate us, but must be assisted by experience and education. Keen’s concern that the true ore is being buried in a flood of dross is valid, but the solution does not lie in letting a guild of professionals control access to the mines.
Professionalism is good, and professional certification is good when it provides information about minimum standards to those who otherwise would be ignorant. When choosing a surgeon I would want him to be board certified; when purchasing raw milk I would like the dairy to have a governmental imprimatur. However, the freedom to choose outside of official sanction is equally important; all the obstetricians in the world should not be able to stop a midwife from exercising her skills, and no state should make it illegal to buy milk from my neighbor’s uncertified farm.
We are too much overwhelmed by the professional in all of life. We blindly trust our health to our doctors and our children’s education to their schools. We watch; we do not do. We watch professional sports; few of us play. More of us watch the productions of professional actors, directors, set designers, and sound technicians, and fewer of us participate in amateur theatrical troupes. We pay large sums to hear musical superstars perform, but who of us—besides Irish seisiún participants—gathers with friends to make joyful, informal music? Mothers hardly sing to their babies anymore! Professionalism has also put its mark on the amateur performances we do indulge in, and not always for the better. Well-organized, scheduled, and rule-laden children’s sports may have their place, but they’re not a substitute for neighborhood pick-up games.
By all means, let’s encourage the development of excellence, discernment, and good taste in ourselves and our children. (“By all means”—what an odd expression, when you think about it, because I don’t really mean “by all means”; I’m about to state an exception.) But don’t close the door. Above all, don’t assign as porter those in whose interest it is to keep others out of the business.
There’s a lot of junk on the Internet. Some wicked, some dreadfully bad, some merely insipid. And I’m not even going to talk about American Idol! (There’s another odd expression; I just did.) But to the extent that YouTube, blogs, amateur music publishing sites, and yes, even American Idol encourage people to become participants rather than observers, they are providing an important service. Life is to be lived, not handed over to others and watched.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2007)
When we were visiting Janet, a friend of hers was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The friend wasn’t totally happy with it, but it sounded intriguing enough that I borrowed it from the library when we returned.I’m not totally happy with it either. Kingsolver apparently doesn't know much about capitalism and corporations other than the standard leftist line, so every time she ventures into politics she becomes more annoying than enlightening. She also seems to have a vendetta against anyone who doesn't believe in evolution (she has a master’s degree in evolutionary biology, which may explain a lot) and can't resist making totally unnecessary snide comments in which she reveals how little she really knows about most people who don’t accept the entire package of evolutionary theory. She likes to point to microevolutionary changes and say, in effect, "See, take that! You ignorant creationists!" when in fact that is not a part of the theory creationists generally have a problem with. She also misquotes the Bible at one point, which ought to have been caught by a proofreader, but that merely rankles; it doesn’t affect any of her arguments.
Be that as it may, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is well worth reading. As a writer, Barbara Kingsolver combines a poet’s ear for language with an entertainer’s sense of presentation. Even if I had found the subject dull, I believe I would have enjoyed reading this book.
The subject is by no means dull. Kingsolver, her husband, and her two daughters decided to move to rural Virginia and dedicate a year to eating only what they grew themselves or that was grown nearby (with a very few exceptions, such as coffee and some spices). In the process of following the family’s adventures, the reader learns too much for comfort about the sad state of eating in this most food-wealthy of nations.
For quite a while now I’ve been becoming increasingly uncomfortable with our “factory farming” methods of producing food, but my concerns were generally limited to two: Cruelty to the animals and the associated pollution of their meat and milk with stress hormones, not to mention antibiotics and other unwanted chemicals; and the loss of flavor in our food.
These are certainly important issues, but there are many, many more. I’ll mention here only one, perhaps the most frightening, though the book doesn’t give it as much prominence as I think it deserves: Our food supply is no longer self-sustainable. Plants and animals have for years been bred for many characteristics, but those which encourage reproduction, by seed or by sex, are not among them. Those who sell seeds have little interest in plants that will allow the farmer to save seeds from his current crop rather than purchasing new seeds for the next year. Characteristics that make animals successful reproducers are not generally compatible with the technique of keeping animals in close confinement, and besides, artificial insemination is more reliable and predictable, so that’s the way our agricultural animals are reproduced. I find the idea of a food supply that can’t last beyond the current generation without artificial intervention to be very, very scary. Closely related is the way we have bred variety out of our food plants and animals. Ninety-nine percent of the turkeys we eat, for example, are of a single breed, the Broad-Breasted White. All I can think of when I hear numbers like that is the Irish Potato Famine. We may end up owing our lives to heritage and heirloom plant and animal breeders like our friend at the Claude Moore Colonial Farm.
This family’s year-long experiment could be considered a time of deprivation, but it was a time of abundance and joy. They would be the first to say it would not have been so joyful had they been trying to earn their living as farmers. With their living secured by outside employment, their farm work, onerous and time-consuming as it was, was more in the nature of a hobby—albeit one that bore primary responsibility for putting food on the table—than a job. They only had to feed themselves, not figure out how to sell food to others. The work of raising, harvesting, and preserving their plant and animal crops was hard, but also worthwhile, meditative, and restorative.
I don’t believe the author would recommend their course for everyone, but she rightfully and strongly believes everyone should know a lot more than we do about where our food comes from, how it grows, and how it gets to us. Most of us could benefit from planting small gardens of our own, be it only a window box-full. Buying whatever we can from local farmers’ markets would improve our eating while supporting small farmers, and some of us might even consider encouraging our political leaders to transfer some of the government’s farm subsidies from mega-conglomerates to small-scale farms and individual farmers, as an investment in a more sustainable (not to mention flavorful) future.
Two years ago, Andy F. alerted me to a National Review article by Rod Dreher entitled Crunchy Cons. This was actually a reprint, the original having been published 'way back in 2002. Andy suggested I might enjoy both the article and the opportunity to turn it into a blog post, and he was right. It's not his fault it's taken me so long to write.
Despite having been a card-carrying Democrat from the day I filled out my first voter registration form, I've never fit well with any political party. I learned quickly that the Democratic Party and I differ in significant respects on many crucial issues, not the least of which is the definition of words such as "liberal" and "conservative." Yet the Republicans haven't won me over, although I confess it's been many years since I've been able to stomach voting for a Democrat at other than the local level. I consider myself a Liberal Conservative—on some days a Conservative Liberal—when I think of labels, which I rarely do, and feel very much alone.
Yet Crunchy Cons lets me know that I am not alone after all. I'm not the only one who shares interests and convictions with people of drastically diverse political persuasions. A number of those who hold conservative views on economic and family issues also realize that homeschooling, home birth, organic farming, locally- and humanely-raised food, recycling and composting, freedom of choice, and putting family and community before profit are inherently conservative activities, important ground not to be ceded to the political Left. By following our desires and beliefs in these areas we often find ourselves side by side in common cause with those whose views on other issues we find appalling, as they do ours.
This is a good thing. It's far too easy to demonize an unknown political enemy, but when that enemy has a face and meets you each week at the farmer's market, or works with you to make home birth legal in your state, then is the soil tilled for planting seeds of peace and understanding and hope.I am so tired of being grumpy about the movies we've seen recently in our Oscar-winning Best Picture Odyssey. I should mention that, although we've beeng going roughly in chronological order, we haven't been watching them all. Some of the early ones aren't available, and of the later ones we've skipped those Porter had already seen. Our next one is Gladiator (2000), and of all those remaining, the only one I'm looking forward to is A Beautiful Mind. We recently discovered, however, that we had somehow skipped Driving Miss Daisy (1989).
At last I can report a positive experience! So many of the recent movies have been downright revolting, or at best blah and dissatisfying. Driving Miss Daisy was delightful from beginning to end. The PG rating, I have decided, is far too broad. This movie was rated PG; as far as I can tell, the cause being one, brief instance of bad language (ask me if you care to know what it is) that was appropriate to the context. There are plenty of other PG movies I've found much, much more offensive. There is one scary scene on which I won't elaborate, but it wouldn't frighten anyone ignorant of Alabama history. Not that the movie is appropriate for young children anyway. It is an adult film, but only because it's about characters, not action.
One of makers of the movie (I don't remember whether it was producer, director, or writer) said that one of the most gratifiying things was all the letters he received from old Southerners thanking him for making a movie that was so true to the South they lived in. I suppose one of the reasons I like it was that it brought back memories of my own grandparents—they didn't live in Georgia, where Driving Miss Daisy is set, but Florida was much more of a Southern state in those days. My grandparents weren't rich, and they weren't Jewish, but there was still much to recognize about the people, the town, the language, and the lifestyles.
If you haven't seen Driving Miss Daisy, do. It's a delightful story about people who seem as if they really could have existed—in fact, they did; the writer modelled them after people in his own life. The seamy side of the historical South is not ignored by any means, but the goodness and humanity that shine through make it more realistic, not less.
I am on an Andrew Pudewa kick. I first discovered his Institute for Excellence in Writing through an online forum for early childhood education, and—as usual—once I'd heard of him, his name started coming to my attention in other ways. A friend of ours is the principal of a private Christian school which emphasizes academic excellence as well as a solid Christian worldview, and she and her teachers waxed so enthusiastic about his program for teaching writing that she even sent me a sample videotape of one of his lectures. It didn't take me long to get hooked. For the first three minutes, I found Pudewa's voice to be annoying; after that I was so intrigued by what he was saying and how he was presenting it that it didn't matter.
Now I'm not averse to spending money on educational materials for our grandkids, but they're not yet old enough for the writing materials, which are a bit pricey to buy on speculation, especially since there might well be a subsequent edition or two by the time they would be used. Fortunately for my curiosity, one of our favorite homeschooling families was impressed enough to try it out, and I'm looking forward to hearing about their experiences.
Some of Pudewa's other materials are financially more accessible, and since I couldn't interest anyone else in his poetry memorization program, I bought it for myself! I think I'm going to enjoy it. It came with a bonus DVD of his lecture entitled Nurturing Competent Communicators, which I highly recommend. As a writing teacher, he has been appalled by the lack of writing ability very much evident today, and has come to the conclusion that you can't get out of a mind something that's not there in the first place. Today's children (and those from a generation or two before, as well) simply have not had sufficient input of good language vocabulary, structure, and style; this hinders not only their ability to write, but also their ability to think. Rather than spend much time berating the negative influences on language (peers, media, lack of reading, stress and fast pace of life), Pudewa suggest two positive solutions.
Read good books (especially poetry) aloud. This is still critical well after children are competent readers. One can read aloud books at a much higher level of sophistication than a child can (or will) read for himself. Moreover, even very good readers will often mispronounce words they've only encountered in print, and will often read so quickly as to get the meaning of the words while missing their music; hearing them read aloud corrects both these errors. A cosy family situation is best for such reading, but Pudewa acknowledges the time crunch many families suffer and the value of books on tape. He also suggests enlisting grandparents in the project, suggesting we create heirloom recordings of our own. Reading aloud is more critical to language development, says Pudewa, than much of what we give higher precedence. I'm grateful that Porter knew this instinctively and for many years ended each meal by reading aloud to us. He even began with poetry—and no, it wasn't just a way of getting out of helping with the dishes, though I must say it did make doing the dishes much more interesting.
Memorize poetry and other examples of good language. Memorization itself promotes brain growth, and memorization of good language provides the brain with a stock of good language patterns. Pudewa tells a story close to my own heart for reasons most of you will recognize. As a Suzuki violin teacher, he had lived in Japan for three years, studying under Shinichi Suzuki himself. Naturally he wanted to learn the language, and had reached the point where he could communicate reasonably well, and yet was frustrated by knowing that he wasn't really getting things right. Drawing on his Suzuki training, he devised a plan: He asked his sensei to record himself reading a Japanese children's book version of Jack and the Beanstalk. This Pudewa practiced and practiced, phrase upon phrase, until he had it completely memorized. As a result, his ability to speak Japanese took a significant leap forward; through a simple children's story he had given his brain many of the patterns and cadences of the Japanese language. Plus he became a great hit with the little Japanese children he met. He would have loved the HIPPO Family Clubs! No wonder my dad was so smart: when he was young, he walked a lot, and when he walked, he memorized poems.
At the same time that I purchased the poetry program, I couldn't resist getting a couple of CDs containing his lecture, The Profound Effects of Music on Life. I'm anxious to hear my favorite musician's take on this lecture (if she ever has time to listen to it). I know he has greatly oversimplified things for his lay audience, but much of what he says rings true to my ears and I'd love to have an expert's opinion.
And I wonder why everthing takes me so long! It was to clean my office that I set out to do, but I couldn't just put the CDs on the shelf, I had to enter them into my library software, and I had to rip them to mp3s so I could listen to them when I go out walking. In the process of ripping I discovered that one was a DVD, and since I couldn't rip it I listened to it then and there. And that inspired me to install another piece of software that I was going to install "sometime," and then of course I couldn't stop but had to write about it all. Now I'm done and can finally put the materials away. But there's still the rest of the room to work on, and where did the day go???
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Category Reviews Education Children & Family Issues Everyday Life
Has anyone here seen the movie, The English Patient? If so, did you like it? If you did, why?
It was the latest in our Academy Award Best Picture quest, and I had been looking forward to it, largely because I had remembered positive reviews of it. I obviously had not paid enough attention to the reviews. It wasn't the worst movie—I knew enough not to join Porter in watching The Silence of the Lambs—but afterwards I felt I had been walking about in slime to no purpose.I appreciate Heather and Jon's zero tolerance policy when it comes to objectionable elements in movies, but I'm not that strict myself. If a book or movie has enough good in it, I will often put up with the parts I don't like. There's a moment I would like to cut out of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, for example, but that doesn't stop it from being one of my favorite movies of all time. His Much Ado about Nothing has two scenes that are even more objectionable, but it's right up there in my estimation as well. I've been far more unhappy about some of the Oscar winners we've been watching, but still able to say afterwards, "I didn't like the movie, but so-and-so acted the part really, really well." Or, "There's a lot about this movie I don't like, but I can't help admiring the way it was crafted."
Not so The English Patient. Perhaps my view was colored by it being not at all the movie I had thought it was, but I found nothing redeeming about it at all. My mind is left scarred by disturbing images and sounds, and I find myself none the richer. Did anyone out there get more from the movie than I did?
Why, I wonder, do people watch disturbing films? Am I just unusually fussy? I understand that there are times when a book or movie has become so embedded in the culture that it is probably a good idea to know them, even if they are otherwise objectionable. The Lord of the Flies is an unpleasant book, yet what it says and the effect it has had probably make it worth reading, if only for understanding of the many subsequent references to it. On the other hand, I believe I have learned quite as much as I need to know about Hannibal Lector from crossword puzzles!
I find it hard to believe that I'm the only one dramatically affected by what I read or watch. Words and images make their mark on my brain and soul and cannot be undone. (I wish I remembered names and faces that well, or even history dates. It would be much more useful.) I must be very careful about what I allow into my mind, because it changes me. "Garbage in, garbage out" applies to more than computers. I suppose I could become inured to it all with more frequent exposure, but that's not exactly a comforting thought.
Then again, maybe I'm just being grumpy. Forrest Gump was better, but I was still less than impressed. I'd seen it before and hadn't cared much for it, but it was actually worse than I had remembered. (I must have seen a version that had been edited for television.) It was okay, and I supposed it's good to know the context for "Life is like a box of chocolates," but the sixties were a very unhappy time, and reliving them is not high on my list of what consitutes a good use of a couple of hours.
So, what do you think? Do movies (and books) leave an indelible impression on your soul? Can you appreciate the craft of a movie if you don't like the content (and vice versa) or does the one spoil the other? What makes a movie worth the time it takes to watch it?
Note to Janet: I may not have liked these movies, but I stayed awake! :) I must not be as sleep-deprived as usual.They say trying new things keeps your mind young. I should be in good shape, having recently ventured into two areas I was sure I'd never touch, finding them useless at best. One is Facebook, which I had classed—along with MySpace and LifeJournal—as boring, yet time-wasting websites for teenaged girls to gossip and bully each other, and for sexual predators to troll for victims. But Janet was invited to join by her oboe professor, so how could she say no? Then she had so much fun finding people with whom she'd lost contact that I decided to see what it was all about.
No doubt it is a good place for teenaged bullying and dangerous liasons, but it doesn't have to be, and I've been surprised at how many friends I've found or been found by already. I love sending Christmas letters, because it keeps us in contact with friends whose lives for the most part no longer intersect with ours. I sense that this logic has no appeal to the Facebook generation, which may never lose that contact. Perhaps the greatest danger (predators and bullies aside) is in being overwhelmed by trivial, shallow contact. The signal-to-noise ratio is rather poor. At least in a Christmas letter one is forced by space limitations to keep to the more important issues.I've been enjoying my Facebook experience so far, mostly for the contacts I've made with people. It will never replace this blog—I haven't yet figured out how to say something of substance there; I'm sure there's a way, but it's not obvious. And I doubt I'll get into many of the "applications" that abound; most seem like silly time-wasters to me. But so far it's been a good experience.
So, too, with my venture into another young persons' game: SMS, aka texting, aka sending text messages via my cell phone. I never saw the point, prefering either direct phone calls (faster, easier, clearer) or e-mails (definitely easier to type). But then Janet discovered that she can receive SMS's for free, and it suddenly became a great way to send her long-distance hugs. Short messages that don't need to have much substance, but tell her I'm thinking of her. I can send them when I'm away from my computer, and she doesn't have to wait to get home to her computer to receive them. I'm funny about it, though. I hate those texting abbreviations and refuse to send "u" for "you." I'm slowly being weaned from my need always to start sentences with upper case letters and to include all proper punctuation; I'll let that slip and will even abbreviate some wrds whn im in a hrry. But it pains me to do so, and thus I'm a very slow texter. So what? It still works for me.
However, today's Drabble was irresistable:
[Part 3 will be the last, at least for a while, since the book must go back to the library. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.]
[The best state of mind to promote if you want to encourage someone to be successful is] a fully realistic assessment of the difficulty of the challenge ahead of him, and, at the same time, an unrealistically optimistic belief in his ability to overcome it.
This one is suprising, and no doubt controversial, yet resonates so well with my experience that I am compelled to write about it.[C]onventional wisdom tells us that self-awareness is a good thing; that people who have a realistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses outperform those whose assessments are inflated.... [C]onventional wisdom is misguided. Current research suggests that accurate self-awareness rarely drives performance, and that in many circumstances, it actively retards performance. Only self-assurance drives performance, even when this self-assurance turns out to be unrealistic.
[For example, researchers] selected two groups of people, one a group of anxious and nervous types, the other more socially active, and measured the social skills of each group—how well did they remember names, how comfortable were they at introducing themselves to a stranger, and so on. To their surprise they found virtually no difference whatsoever in the actual skill levels of each group.... They then asked the members of each group to rate themselves on their social skills. Here the two groups differed dramatically. The anxious, nervous group assessed their skill levels accurately, whereas the more socially active group gave themselves inflated ratings. They thought they had more skills than they actually did.... Their overly positive view of themselves didn't trip them up; instead, it pushed them to apply the skills they imagined they possessed. [That reminds me of a school principal's statement to a friend of mine: "Your daughter is working above her ability." Sounds like nonsense, but Buckingham would understand.]
As the research reveals, people who have a slightly unrealistic confidence in their abilities outperform those whose self-assessments are more realistic. These overconfident optimists are also more persistent and more resilient when faced with obstacles—"I'm not giving up now because deep down I believe I have what it takes to succeed." So if you want a person to achieve his utmost and to persist in the face of resistance, reinforce his belief in his strengths, even overemphasize these strengths, give him an almost unreasonable confidence that he has what it takes to succeed.
Buckingham describes self-assurance, or self-efficacy, as a combination of self-confidence, optimism, positivity, and a feeling of being in control during an activity. At this point in the book, I was beginning to wonder about my disdain for the self-esteem movement as I saw it played out in schools, where more effort seemed to go into training children to chant variations on "I am great!" than into promoting actual accomplishment. But Buckingham quickly distances himself from that.
Self-efficacy is not the same as self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to your general feeling of worthiness, and, while having high sefl-esteem must, in some general sense, be a good thing, unfortunately a recent nationwide study sponsored by the American Psychological Society revealed that high self-esteem predicts nothing at all—not resilience, not persistence, not goal-setting, and certainly not achievement.
Self-efficacy is not a general feeling, but rather is always tied to a specific activiity. You might have feelings of high self-efficacy for selling comptuer software, or for administering injections safely, or for analyzing corporations' annual reports. And, in contrast to self-esteem, your level of self-efficacy for an activity does an excellent job of predicting your subsequent performance. It predicts how quickly you wil lbounce back from failure at the activity, how forcefully you will persevere at the activity when you meet obstacles or setbacks, how high your goals for that activity will be, and, most importnat of all, the likelihood you will actually achieve these goals. When it comes to performance, sefl-efficacy is one of the most powerful of mental states.
Although your self-efficacy is tied to specific activities, it does come in very handy when you are confronted by new challenges. According tto research..., how well you face new challenges is determined by your ability to transfer your self-efficacy from one activity to another. The best way to do this is to look deliberately for simliarities between the new challenge and previous challenges where you have succeeded in the past.
But here's the catch: Self-efficacy isn't enough. It can lead to nonchalance, overconfidence, and arrogance if not combined with sufficient challenge. Not, Buckingham emphasizes, in the areas of weakness, of but strength.
[D]on't try to bring [an overconfident person] down to earth by detailing his many weaknesses and telling him he'd better set about fixing them. At times this may be tempting, particularly with your most arrogant prima donna, but you must resist. You will be fueling his self-doubt, and although self-doubt may occasionally serve a purpose, it's unlikely to spawn excellent performance.... Instead, to combat nonchalance, build up the size of the challenge. Having detailed the outcomes you want, tell him how hard it's going to be to achieve them. Emphasize their scope, their complexity, thier "no one has ever pulled this off before" quality. Do whatever you can to get his attention and make him take his challenge seriously.
Lately a great deal of time and money has been focused on redesigning educational material in order to make it more relevant and accessible for kids—less boring tests, more fun-but-educational television shows and video games. The underlying theory is that kids will learn more from this kind of edutainment.... Unfortunetly, it's not true. [Shows like Sesame Street and Blue's Clues] don't seem to teach very much. In the Journal of Educational Psychology, in a paper titled "Television Is 'Easy' and Print Is 'Tough,'" researchers revealed their finding that "children...invested high cognitive effort and learned much from instructional media they considered difficult," i.e., written tests, "but invested less effort and learned less from the same information conveyed by media they believed to be easy" i.e., television shows.
What strikes me so about these ideas is how much they correspond to the most successful efforts of one of the most gifted choir directors it has ever been my privilege to observe. She worked incredibly hard with us, adults and children, with amazing results. She turned timid singers into soloists, morphed monotones into beautiful voices, taught children to sing difficult classical choral works, and brought our church choir to musical heights I've never seen in an all-amateur church choir, before or since. She excelled at holding the bar high and convincing us we could jump over it, using Buckingham's techniques—though I'm sure she's never heard of him. She praised us extravagantly, and made sure we knew how difficult the task was. As I gained more experience and sang in other choirs, I came to be suspicious of her praise, and to take it with a grain of salt, especially as it became obvious that even she didn't believe all she said. I even accused her of lying to us....
But now I'm wondering if this kind of prevarication is more akin to the "lies" parents must tell to raise healthy children. The world can be a dangerous, frightening place—but if we want our children to grow up confident, competent, and with sound minds able to deal with the terrors and dangers that come, we can't tell them much about that. If we let them grow up fearful, they won't learn well, and the world will be for them more dangerous still.
In any case, the system worked. Magnificently. When I was told the choir music was difficult, but that we would work hard on it and I would be able to do it—I did! And I loved it! In contrast, when we started singing pop-music "praise songs" instead of Bach, Handel, and Haydn, we hardly worked on them at all, because "they're easy." Well, I didn't find them easy. Still don't, though I'm getting better. The music has tricky rhythms that are very difficult to read, and no one ever seems to sing them the way they are written anyway. Being told to ignore the written music and sing "by ear" was like being dropped off a cliff and told to fly. If our director had taken the same approach she had with the "hard" music, telling us that it was difficult and would require hard work and a new way of thinking, but that we could and would be able to do it well—I'm certain I would have learned much faster and better.
Many will claim that my decided preference for the music of Bach, Handel, and Haydn over "praise songs" is the greatest factor in making the former easier to learn. I'll admit there's some truth to that. But what most of those who blithely assume it's the whole cause don't know is that when I began singing in choirs, traditional choral music was as foreign to me as praise songs, possibly more so. I'm now convinced that the "high confidence/high challenge" experience played a much greater part in the development of my musical preferences and abilities than I knew.
I'm curious. Have you had a coach, teacher, manager or mentor who used this approach with you? What was your experience?The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2005)
[This is Part Two. Part One is here.]
The mediocre manager believes that most things are learnable and therefore that the essence of management is to identiry each person's weaker areas and eradicate them.
The great manager...believes that the most influential qualities of a person are innate and therefore that the essence of management is to deploy these innate qualities as effectively as possible and so drive performance.
I find Marcus Buckingham's belief in the essentially unalterable effect of our genetic makeup on our abilities to be disturbing, to say the least. However, that doesn't change my appreciation of his observation that we spend too much time and effort trying to shore up our areas of weakness, and not enough building on our strengths. True, we can't afford to ignore our weaknesses, and well-directed efforts at overcoming them are often in order. Spending the majority of our energy on our strengths, however, generally leads to the most progress, the most satisfaction, and the most achievement.
There's a reason we're strong where we are. Buckingham didn't put it this way, but God created us as unique individuals, with our own special strengths, and it's reasonable to think he had a purpose in mind. Why say to one's creator, "You made me good at X, so I'm going to ignore that and work on Y, where you weren't so generous."
Strength builds on strength. Buckingham indulges in some hard biological explanations of why this is so, but the short version is also obvious: It's easier to multiply knowledge and skill in an area related to those in which one is already knowledgeable and skilled. Progress in areas of weakness requires a greater investment of effort and time—often just to get to the point of being mediocre. Building on one's strengths is a more promising path to excellence.
Concentrating on weaknesses also comes, for most people, with a huge psychological burden.
[I]f you really want to ruin your chances of sustained success, ponder your weaknesses, ruminate on your past failings, chew on your flaws. Pretty soon you'll wonder why it's worth getting out of bed in the morning.
[Y]ou will be more likely to be resilient, persistent, self-confident and effective in those areas where you have developed some mastery, and you will transfer these powerful feelings to new challenges [that] are substantially simlar to your existing areas of mastery.
I'll bet that if you can name someone in your life who consistently inspired you to do be better than you thought you could be, that person focused on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Couldn't it be that one of the reasons most children dislike school is that the classroom is a place where their weaknesses are always in focus? Where teachers are rarely concerned with building on their strengths once they've reached an acceptable level of mastery?
There's wisdom in The One Thing You Need to Know that applies far beyond the business world.
The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2005)
Reading, for me, is not a luxury but a necessity, like eating. Ideally, meals should be eaten slowly, savored, and appreciated, preferably in the company of good companions and interesting conversation. So it also should be with books. All too often, however, under the pressures of the day, we gulp a hasty meal and move on. Alas, I have not done justice to The One Thing You Need to Know, but when I read about it on the Prodical Kiwi(s) Blog, I knew I had to grab what I could from it now, and hope to give it a better reading later.Still, I can't resist giving you a few high points, and in this post I'll begin with his insightful classification of learning styles, and I'll quote almost directly quite a bit because he says it so well. His caveat: I am not suggesting that these three styles are mutually exclusive. Certain [people] may rely on a combination of two or perhaps even all three styles. Nonetheless, keep your ear attuned to each of these three styles and you should be able to focus your coaching with greater accuracy.
Analyzing Analyzers understand a task by taking it apart, examining its elements, and reconstructing it piece by piece. And since in their eyes, every single piece is important, they crave information. They need to know all there is to know about a subject before they can begin to feel comfortable with it.
If they don't feel they have enough information they will dig and push until they get it. They will read the assigned reading. They will attend the required classes. They will take good notes. They will practice.
The best way to teach an Analyzer is to give her ample time in the classroom. Role-play with her. Post-mortem with her. Break her performance down into its component parts so that she can then carefully build it back up into a total performance. Always allow her time to prepare.
Remember, the Analyzer hates mistakes. A cliché about learning is that "mistakes fuel learning," but for the Analyzer this just isn't true. In fact the reason she prepares so diligently is to minimize the possibility of mistakes. So whatever you do, don't expect her to learn much by throwing her into the middle of a new situation and telling her to wing it.
Doing In direct contrast to the Analyzer, the absolute best way to teach a Doer is to throw him in the middle of a new situation and tell him to wing it. The most powerful learning moments for the Analyzer occur prior to the actual perforrmance, whereas for the Doer they occur during the performance. The dead ends, the trials and the errors are all integral parts of his learning process.
The Doer learns most in the act of figuring things out for himself. For him preparation is a dry, uninspiring activity. Only the task inself, with its inherent possibility of real failure or real success, is intense enough to get him to concentrate and to apply himself.
If you want a Doer to learn, do not ask him to role-play with you. Role-playing is fake and therefore uninteresting to him. Instead pick a task within his role that is simple but real, give him a brief overview of the outcomes you want, and then get out of his way. Once he has figured out how to complete this simple task, gradually increase the level of each task's complexity until he has mastered every aspect of his role. Sure, he may make a few mistakes along the way, but for the Doer, mistakes are indeed the raw material for learning.
In one sense Doers can be frustating students because they won't give your advice much credence. They have to experience a bad or good outcome themselves before they believe that it's true. But in another sense, they are wonderful to have around. They will always be the first to jump into a new challenge and attack it with spirit.
Watching Watchers won't learn much if you break a task down into its component parts and ask them to practice each part or if you ask them to role-play with you. Since most formal training programs incorporate both of these elements, Watchers are often viewed as rather poor students.
They may be poor students, but they aren't necessarily poor learners. Watchers can learn a great deal, but only when they are given the chance to see the total performance. Studying the individual parts of a task is about as meaningful for them as studying the individual pixels of a digital photograph. For them what's important is the context of each pixel, its position relative to all the others, and they can see this, they can "get" this, only when they view the completed picture.
If you're trying to teach a Watcher, by far the most effective technique is to get her out of the classroom, take her away from the manuals, and make her ride shotgun with one of your most experienced performers.
As with all such categorizations, nothing is 100% for anyone I know, but it's clear to me that Porter is an Analyzer, making all the more amazing how well he has adapted to IBM's continually throwing him into new situations where he must "wing it." And Janet, who favors "learning to swim by drowning," has plenty of Doer characteristics. I see Heather and myself as a less obvious mixture of all three.
[Note: Despite Janet's chosen phrase describing her learning preferences, she did not learn to swim by drowning. Before she was 18 month old she was as joyful, confident, and competent in the water as a porpoise, but the YMCA program under which she (and Heather) learned to swim was as gentle and enjoyable as can be. We did not drown nor even scare the kids! Just in case someone from Child Protective Services is listening....]
I hope this post generates some comments, as I think there's a fair amount of value in Buckingham's analysis.I just posted my complaint that the movies are getting weirder and less enjoyable now that we've reached the last quarter of the 20th century in our Academy Award Best Picture survey, but the very next year (1979) gave me hope. Kramer vs. Kramer is a great film, and not just because it followed on the heels of the horrible Deer Hunter. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep deserved the acting Oscars they won, and I strongly suspect the only reason Justin Henry did not win Best Supporting Actor was reluctance on the part of some to give an Oscar to an eight-year-old child. But he was awesome.
Kramer vs. Kramer works so well, I believe, because of the dedication on the part of director and the cast to making a true story. In The Deer Hunter, truth was sacrificed for the sake of the story; here the director, someone else whose role I forget, and Dustin Hoffman spent months setting the foundation for the movie, in order to tell the truth about divorce.They succeed magnificently. It's all there: the dismal heritage of the self-centered 60s, which demeaned motherhood and encouraged people to "find themselves" at any cost; employers who demanded the sacrifice of family on corporate altars and the workaholics who willingly paid that price; and above all the tragic struggles of the children to survive their personal 9/11. Yet the story is told with such realism and sympathy and understanding that the truth is a surgeon's scalpel, not a bludgeon, and thus far more effective.
Parental warning: In most cases I detest the phrase "for mature audience" on the grounds that anything bad for kids is probably bad for adults as well. However, there are a few movies that I think worthwhile but definitely inappropriate for younger folks, and this is one. Don't be fooled by its PG rating. There's nudity, a sex scene, and objectionable language. It's all brief, appropriate, and in one case even funny. Most of my readers know it doesn't take much of the above to ruin a movie for me, but that was not the case with Kramer vs. Kramer. Still, PG is too low a rating in my opinion, especially since the effect of the nudity, sex, and language on a child would pale to utter insignificance compared with the devastation of the story line itself.
That aside, Kramer vs. Kramer is a powerful movie, incredibly well designed and acted. Even more so when you realize that many of the best scenes were actually improvised. That's not lack of planning—that's the result of thorough preparation and a team working together magnificently.
