Yep. Mine too. Showing our ages here I guess! I was surprised to hear one of my students at school recognize the song by title because … she recognized it as one of her dad’s go-to repertoire.
That and “Dust in the Wind” are two of my favorites of theirs. (or more accurately, the only two songs by Kansas which I remember enough to name.)
Our pastor today preached on how we drift away from God, not realizing our being caught in the current, using Hebrews 2:1 as his text:
We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.
Naturally, I had Simon and Garfunkel running in my mind during the sermon:
Whoah God only knows, God makes his plan
The information’s unavailable to the mortal man
We’re workin’ our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we’re gliding down the highway, when in fact we’re slip sliding away
Slip sliding away, slip sliding away
You know the nearer your destination, the more you slip sliding away
The sneer runs deep in their music and resonates with teens eager for their turn. One of those where the mood/point of the song doesn’t require hearing all the lyrics. The Who had several songs like that, most notably Won’t Get Fooled Again and [Summertime Blues](https://the who summertime blues youtube)
We did fancy ourselves (generationally) as pretty special, maybe even the very dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
I wore out my The Who- Who’s Next cassette tape.
Same. Boy, that summer I worked at Safeway between 11th and 12th grade, Summertime Blues was my anthem:
Well, I’m a gonna raise a fuss, I’m gonna raise a holler
About workin’ all summer just to try an’ earn a dollar
Everytime I call my baby, to try to get a date
My boss says, no dice, son, you gotta work late
Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do
'Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
Well, my mom an papa told me, son, you gotta make some money
If you want to use the car to go ridin’ next sunday
Well I didn’t go to work, told the boss I was sick
Now you can’t use the car 'cause you didn’t work a lick
Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do
'Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
Ow
I’m gonna take two weeks, gonna have a vacation
I’m gonna take my problem to the United Nation
Well I called my congressman and he said quote
“I’d like to help you son, but you’re too young to vote”
Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do
'Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
Well, I’m a gonna raise a fuss, I’m gonna raise a holler
About workin’ all summer just to try an’ earn a dollar
Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do
'Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
Yeah, sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do
'Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
No, there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
Just came across this poem by William Carpenter. My wife taught weaving workshops three times at the Haystack School of Craft located on the coast at Deere Island, Maine. It is a beautiful campus and I have many pleasant memories from those weeklong stays. In addition to good simple food served family style three times a day preceded by the ringing of a triangle the director would always read two poems by Carpenter at an opening ceremony on the first evening, this one inspired by a painting taken in the famous Gardener Museum theft and another titled California. Not sure how much my valuation of this is shaded by the location, views, food and creative people, but I find it takes me away every time.
A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard’s ear.
I haven’t got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can’t
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don’t worry, the thief says, we’re both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
“Girl Writing a Letter.” The thief knows what he’s doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn’t hear this, she’s too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn’t notice him until too late. He’s
in the picture. He’s already seated at the harpsichord.
He’s playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She’s worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man’s here, and though he’s dressed in some weird clothes,
he’s playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there’s no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that’s running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she’s only known for a few minutes, but it’s
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard’s mouth
so he’ll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it’s the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that’s not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don’t matter, she’s got a beer
in her free hand, she’s on the road, she’s real and she’s in love.
– from The Best American Poetry 1995 edited by Richard Howard
I adore Vermeer. I adore letters. I adore writing letters. I adore the poet’s story telling. I adore the letter-writing-reading girl in love, drinking beer and driving 80 down the freeway in a van full of Dutch masters and her liberating thief.
Such an odd flight of fancy. I love it too. His California poem is a hoot. I may break my rule and by a copy of the book that has it. Pretty sure his estate could use the help judging from the last few posts on his Fb page.
So much for being bored riding a cloud with a harp, pie in the sky by-and-by.
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses
We are conscious of our own weakness and of the strength of evil…
Being a sinful man and maybe not conscious enough of that fact, thankfully I know I’m forgiven and don’t need to beat myself up but can maybe grow instead and hopefully become more habitually victorious.
“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown
BY ROBERT FROST
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
An absolutely gorgeous light snow this afternoon with some largish flakes slowly falling and a squirrel nibbling tender bark at the ends of twigs, parts of it and its tail bright rusty especially when it was against the white background. A “Live” photo doesn’t do it justice in its depth of field and contrast, missing the smaller flakes completely and the nearer ones appearing diminished in size.
(The squirrel is in the center left pane camouflaged somewhat by the tree trunk, not standing out like it was when against the sky.)
I ran across this on Amazon (I think) when I was Christmas shopping and downloaded it last week from Bookshare. I was listening to it the other day on the way home from work, because my phone refused to play Darwin’s Radio for a while, even though it was downloaded. I listened to a bit more of this with Youngest Daughter on the way home from errands this afternoon. I thought she might enjoy what I had heard so far. I hope the rest is as good as the first few chapters have been.
HOW A MEGACHURCH VIDEO PROJECTOR CATAPULTED RYAN INTO ANOTHER REALITY
No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.
—Stephen King, The Stand
There’s nothing worse than visiting a new church and getting sucked into an interdimensional wormhole.
Precisely twenty-eight minutes before Ryan Fleming found himself pulled through the floor of Ignite Christian Collective, he was pulling into the church’s parking lot in his Honda Civic—an automobile only two decades old, though humans seem to regard any car more than a few years old as ancient. (It was new in the grand scope of eternity, but entropy in your universe works quickly.) Its engine whined and groaned, protesting as he screeched into the lot, clearly in some kind of hurry. The paint was flaking off the hood. The passenger window seemed to be held up by some kind of hanger wire and a heavy helping of duct tape.
The Postmodern Pilgrim’s Progress (Chapter 1)
The pastor was flummoxed. Clearly, no one had contradicted him before, at least not since he’d taken the helm of this church. It was also quite clear no one had insulted his haircut before, either. And especially not in the middle of a sermon.
He paused and looked at Ryan thoughtfully. He slowly raised his microphone to the side of his mouth, much in the style of the musicians who perform “rap,” a genre of human “music.”
The pastor cracked a sly smile as if he were about to drop a killer verse. Right on cue, the thrum of the bass resumed. A bolt fell from the projector mount above, and it shuddered, causing the song lyrics on the screen to vibrate ever so slightly. No one noticed.
“Give this young man a microphone!” the pastor said. “I believe today is a divine appointment for him.”
Scattered applause from the congregation, who still didn’t know what to think.
“Come on. We don’t bite. I believe God has a divine plan for you, and I want to find out what it is.”
A beefy security guard with an Agent Smith-style earpiece 8 walked up and tensely handed Ryan a microphone, apparently ready to bear-hug him and drag him out of the building.
“What do you have to say for yourself son? And please—no bad language.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “I mean… I just… Look, life sucks, OK? Life is suffering. It’s not a fairy tale. The rest of the world, we deal with that. We try to process grief and tragedy and… and family members dying in hospital beds even though they’re the nicest people in the world. You’d think you all could accept that, but no. Not you. You build this stupid Willy Wonka place so you can pretend the real world doesn’t exist, but it does! God doesn’t exist. We are on our own. If He does exist, He’s either powerless, or—or else He’s just a huge jerk. My little brother died a horrible death for no reason. There’s no plan here. We’re animals. We live and we die, and that’s it, and it sucks. You people are delusional.”
Ryan wasn’t sure if he was making sense. The words just kind of poured out of him. He was trying to hold back tears but couldn’t. The audience just stared at him, a thousand eyes in the dark. The preacher still stood there—clearly, he had gotten more than he’d bargained for. Finally, he eyed another security guard who began to close in on him from his left.
Well, I guess my time’s up , Ryan thought.
The projector fell.
The Postmodern Pilgrim’s Progress (end of Chapter 1)
SUMMING UP ON THE BOOK:
Ok. A few final thoughts on The Postmodern Pilgrim’s Progress:
Pros:
Fun cultural references (movies, and books; great reminder I want to read and watch a great number of things I have yet to)
I like the sense of humor, smart-alecky, ironic, quirky, sometimes bizarre.
More relatable than Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Cons:
Not all that PoMo after all. The story-telling after the first few chapters is straight-forward, linear. (See Paper Girls for a very PoMo story structure and aesthetic.)
If one is expecting an anti-Pilgrim’s Progress, this is not that book.
If one can’t deal with the original being tinkered with, this is not the book for one.
If one is put off by cultural references, this is not the book for one.
@jpm I’m tagging you, since you had mentioned this book in the 2022 Christmas wish list thread.
I listened to the Language of God Podcast interview with Mónica Guzmán, “The Gift of Curiosity,” and found a few of her points worth posting here.
These are heavily edited for clarity and brevity. Pulling things straight from the podcast transcript can be no fun to try to read. You can find the full transcript at the link I included above.
The Sense of Devience in Discourse
Things that would have previously been seen as being in the sphere of legitimate discourse, are now in the sphere of deviance. This tends to happen at our political extremes, where people say, “Man, if at this point, you believe that,” (this legitimate thing, 20 years ago) “then you’re crazy, you’re deviant. I don’t want to engage with you because I dismiss you, I condescend to you, something’s wrong with you.” Now, there are deviant beliefs that lots of people do accept, right? Something about racism seems pretty darn deviant, right? Something about being a Nazi. You know, you can put a lot of these things in there. But for some folks too, there’s a fear that deviant beliefs are coming into the sphere of legitimate discourse when they ought not to.
How to Approach Discussions
A lot of us are in these situations where you get the sense, “I don’t want to approach that invalid idea, what to me is an invalid idea, therefore, I don’t want to approach people who might hold that idea.” And the key distinction here is you don’t think of approaching an invalid idea. Think of approaching a valid person.
Focusing on the Meaningful Brings Persuasion Back from the Dead
There are three types of conversations across disagreement: the conversation about what’s true, the conversation about what’s meaningful, and the conversation about what’s useful. Because it’s ultimately all about people, where there’s a disagreement about what’s true, and it is strong, it feels like we have two options. Either I sit here and yell and convince you to change your mind and agree with what I see as reality, or I walk away, right? It’s worth remembering that you can also have the conversation about what’s meaningful, and that, in fact, that’s the more important conversation to have, at that moment. People’s fears, concerns, hopes, that is what builds trust. And once you build trust, hopefully, you can get to a point where you calibrate your perspectives enough that you can begin to say, “Okay, thank you for sharing that with me. It makes sense why you see things this way. Can I tell you why I see it differently? Can I tell you what I mean?” That’s what brings persuasion back from the dead. Because basically, the persuasive ability of the society to keep talking up the good ideas, is endangered when there’s so little trust. We need to build that back by talking about what’s meaningful, not requiring each other to agree first with what’s true.
The Surprise of Curiosity
Curiosity is contagious. People cannot hear unless they are heard. People cannot hear unless they feel heard. So when you give somebody the gift of your interest in them and it is not accusatory, it is curious, you know, it is not cold, it is warm. For most people most of the time, that’s a surprise. It depends on your relationship obviously. Hopefully they don’t think you’re playing some agenda, you’re playing some game.
Thanks, @Terry_Sampson, for bringing my attention back to the podcast. I had almost forgotten I wanted to write this post.
Given today’s date I found this article Today is Tommorow: Groundhog Day & the Postmodern Parable. Hadn’t thought of it that way before but it really is the quintessential PoMo movie. Holy Irony, Soren!
Which I have yet to see.
Content moved to its own thread, “A Review of The Matter With Things”.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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