How to Calculate a 15% Tip

I remember the day I learned how to calculate a fifteen percent tip. I was having lunch at the 15th Street Diner in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with my mom, when I overheard a woman at another table explaining it to her teenage daughter. First calculate ten percent, she said. Ten percent is easy. It sounds complicated when I say that all you have to do is move the decimal point back a space, but you can probably make that calculation without hardly trying. Then you divide the ten percent in half to get five percent, and add the two together. However she explained it was very clear and simple, and I'm afraid my explanation isn't nearly so.

Here's an example: Say you spent $32.82 on your meal, and you're on a tight budget so you only want to leave a fifteen percent tip. 10% of $32.82 is $3.28. Half of that 10% is $1.64. Add the two together ($3.28+$1.64) and you wind up with $4.92. $4.92 equals 15% of your total food bill. If you're dining with my husband you're going to tip more than that. To quote My Blue Heaven, "I don't believe in tipping; I believe in over-tipping," though what we do can hardly be referred to as over-tipping. My brother, who has worked in food service for a time, suggests a $3.00 minimum tip.

Once you know how to calculate 15%, 20% becomes easy.

Thoughts on God and us

Sometimes I only want to tell you everything I did today. Sometimes I don't want to expose myself to criticism. Sometimes I'd rather not talk about it. Sometimes I cannot shut up. I learned a useful prayer from reading Elizabeth Elliot, useful when you need to pray but don't know what to pray, useful for praying for anyone, in any situation.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.

This has become part of my prayer today and every day:

Have mercy on us, Oh Lord, have mercy. You know the secrets of our form, how weak we are, both how much we can endure and how little. The mysteries of our human existence are no mystery to you. Be gentle with us, Lord, we beg you, but at the same time make us more aware of your limitless grace.

I appreciate that we are never useless tools in the hand of a mighty God. I liked this quotation, very much, as shared by Elisabeth Elliot in Keep a Quiet Heart:

Say not you cannot gladden, elevate, and set free; that you have nothing of the grace of influence; that all you have to give is at the most only common bread and water. Give yourself to your Lord for the service of men with what you have. Cannot He change water into wine? Cannot He make stammering words to be instinct [inbued, filled, charged] with saving power? Cannot He change trembling efforts to help into deeds of strength? Cannot He still, as of old, enable you in all your personal poverty 'to make of many rich?' God has need of thee for the service of thy fellow men. He has a work for thee to do. To find out what it is, and then to do it, is at once thy supremeist duty and thy highest wisdom. 'Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it.'" (Canon George Body, b. 1840, exactly as quoted by Elisabeth Elliot.)

I quote it here because in my prayers right now I have nothing but stammering words. When I meet with my friends to discuss what seem like important things I have nothing but stammering words. When the Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door I have nothing but stammering words. Have mercy on us, Oh Lord, have mercy.

Shakespearean Intrigue, and a Place Where Some Very Bad Ideas Can Come From

I am not a Shakespeare scholar. Heck, I'm not even much of a Shakespeare fan. I usually come back from a Shakespeare performance (I've seen a few) knowing that I was supposed to enjoy it, but didn't. I spend the majority of the play wishing it would be over soon. Sorry. The best, most entertaining production I ever saw was A Midsummer Night's Dream performed by teenagers. I hated the movie.

I'm not incapable of enjoying Shakespeare, but I prefer the bard in small doses. On the other hand, I did spend many hours last summer watching the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC's) Playing Shakespeare, facilitated by John Barton. I enjoyed Stage Beauty and the Shakespearean parts of My Own Private Idaho. I think Much Ado About Nothing, and the musical, Love's Labour's Lost, were delightful movies. I like the Zeffirelli Hamlet starring Mel Gibson, the Baz Luhrman Romeo + Juliet. I watched the David Tennant Hamlet over the summer, but didn't enjoy it in spite of the awesomely charismatic and compelling (not to mention very good-looking) David Tennant. I like the Shakespeare episode of Doctor Who (ep. 3.2, “The Shakespeare Code”). I did think it was cool when Brick started quoting him in a recent episode of “The Middle.”

Anyway, all that is to say that I have had exposure to the bard, but I don't love him. I was, on the other hand, intrigued when I started seeing advertisements for the upcoming movie, Anonymous, on goodreads.com. The byline is “Was Shakespeare A Fraud?” When I watched the trailer online I thought the idea was hardly revolutionary, but when I read this article, published in The New York Times, I realized that all I know about the controversy surrounding Shakespeare's identity was gleaned from the pages of another work of fiction, Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next Series. I learned from Thursday herself that some scholar's argue Shakespeare's oeuvre was written by Christopher Marlowe. This just goes to show how influential even fictional media can be, which is part of Stephen Marche's point. The general public does in fact believe a lot of what it sees. Sometimes the things it sees are a matter of responsible scholarship. Sometimes they are not.

I like this line from Marche's article: “Along with a right-wing antielitism, an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness and relativism have also given lunatic ideas soil to grow in.” I am not smart enough to draw any conclusions from that statement, but I am storing it away for consideration at a later date.

Poetry, Philosophy, Buechner: Have I No Restraint?

If I have any sort of an addiction, it's to books and television. Richard Foster, I believe, would induce me to kill my addictions by purging my world of accumulated books, a notion I fiercely resist, thus proving his point. Television? I don't know what he'd tell me about television. Considering he is a Quaker, I can make a good guess. When I started thinking about the two things that mastered me today, Richard Foster's name came into my mind because he writes about the discipline of simplicity in his book, Celebration of Discipline, which my husband and I read together with our friend Damon last year.

Another trip to the library today, and I came home with even more books. I kept the two Stephen Hawking's from last week, as well as Physics of the Impossible and the Surprised by Oxford memoir. Again, I don't have time to read them, won't get to them this borrowing session, will probably renew them, but I couldn't give them up just yet. Odd since they sit in a bag in the corner of my dining room day-in and day-out. I made two mistakes this afternoon. I glanced at new non-fiction books shelf, and I set foot in the Friends of the Library Bookstore.

On the new non-fiction books shelf, and yes that is books, plural, on purpose:


The cover of Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds caught my eye. I picked it up. I put it down again. I picked it up; I put it down again. I thought about that book all the way out the door and to the car. I totally want to read a book about pop culture's addiction to its own past. I also liked the feel of the paper cover and the way the back matter was formatted. Nope. Didn't find out anything about the book while it was in my hands. I only know that it will be coming home with me at some future date. For reasons I can't fully explain, I have a bit of an obsession with pop culture. Maybe it's an anthropological interest; maybe I just like to be entertained. I think it's some sort of combination of the two, probably going back to my urge to understand this world we live in, this world I'm not entirely comfortable with. Some of it is the best and safest way I know to engage.

Next to Retromania on the shelf I saw a book with an oddly familiar cover. I look at it now and see only the slightest similarity to James K.A. Smith's Who's Afraid of Postmodernism, but the name Derrida does occur on the cover. And there's a strong vertical and horizontal element in the design. The book is Derrida, Myth and the Impossibility of Philosophy by Anais Spitzer, from the Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory series published by continuum books. So both books are from a series. They have that much in common, right? I like the feel of the book. I like the cover. I like the fact that the book is brand new. Beyond that I'm basically a pretender. The word "Philosophy" draws me in. I've made this same complaint before. Just because I want to read a book, doesn't mean I'm equipped to read or understand it. And I'll have you know that reading and understanding can be two separate events.

As soon as I arrived a the library this afternoon, I noted that the book store was open and wanted to go in, but I held myself back long enough to get the DVDs my children had asked for. I was afraid this would happen. I was afraid that even though I was looking for a particular book they were unlikely to have I'd probably spend money on more books I don't have room to store.

I purchased three books, and looked at more:

The Life of Graham Greene Volume I: 1904-1939 by Norman Sherry. I adore Graham Greene as a writer, and I wonder how many volumes there are in this series. Maybe only three? Of course the inside flap of the book doesn't say. I am slightly alarmed by the blurb on the cover in which Margaret Atwood claims Greene's times are described "in Proustian detail." How much detail could Sherry possibly go into?

Poetry: An Introduction by John Strachan and Richard Terry. Just this morning I was lamenting the fact that I didn't know or remember any of the poetical conventions. I remember what an iamb is, I think, but not what is it's opposite. This book claims to help students understand the technical details of poetry that tend to trip them up, in a way that is accessible, with plenty of examples from existing poetry. It's definitely academic, but it also looks like it will be both interesting and useful. I hope to pick up a copy of Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse by John Hollander some day.

And then I found Son of Laughter: A Novel by Frederick Buechner. I read a bit of it tonight and it was wonderful. It tells the story of Jacob the patriarch, with Jacob himself as narrator. The part I read described Laban's trickery as sort of an after-thought, an action he didn't mean to make until he made it. It told of Jacob's own machinations to cheat God, who he refers to as the Fear, out of his victory. It was vivid in the matter of only a few pages...

...and I think: This is why I can't be an academic. Because I want to read what I want to read, and it isn't all on one unified subject, and it won't wait until I'm finished studying whatever it is I think I want to study.

So what do you say to that?

Motivism and the differences in Motives

I'd been reading Wayne Booth's Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent over the last couple of weeks, and though I haven't been able to continue reading past the first chapter, that first chapter sparked a line of thought.

According to Wayne Booth we have fallen prey to a modernist dogma known as motivism. From what I've understood, motivism means an underlying and ardent belief that statements of motivation, or reasons given, are always a rationalization constructed to mask an underlying motive. A couple of days ago I was reminded of an example from television.

There's an episode of Friends where the friends set out to prove that Phoebe's altruism is actually based on purely selfish motives. She is kind to people only because there's a payoff: she gets to feel good about herself.

I don't remember the outcome. I don't care a bunch about what happens on Friends, if only because it was such a popular television show when I was in college. Wayne Booth seems to say that this modern dogma is specious. It is wrong to claim that a person's stated motives could not possibly be their actual motives. It is an assumption that may be true under some circumstances, but that cannot be accurately applied to every situation.

I had a conversation about this with Michael just a few nights ago. We were talking briefly about a friend of mine named, who I'll call Vickrum (another Friends reference), who told me, back when Michael and I were contemplating marriage, that I wasn't ready to get married because I didn't know who I was or what I wanted yet. I immediately qualified this statement to Michael by saying that of course that wasn't the real reason he objected to our engagement. The act of making that statement stopped me short.

Now it's true that Vickrum had a second reason for objecting to the engagement. It's true that Vickrum had a stake in my remaining unattached, but that does not mean that the reason he gave for objecting to the engagement wasn't a real reason. There were at least two levels of coexistent reasoning going on. On the one hand if I were to marry Michael, I would no longer be available toVickrum . On the other hand, Vickrum was correct that I didn't really know who I was or what I wanted. This not knowing could be a liability in marriage, and marriage would put a definite spin on the answer, might possibly even remove the question entirely.

Theory of the Novel: A Continuation from 9/28/11

One morning, as I was sitting at my dining room table and the children were otherwise engaged, I started making notes about the paper I would write, this paper concerning the theory of the novel. I was thinking about the paper in two respects, working out some method that would allow me to get the job done, and working out some ideas about the novel genre, ideas that had already begun to dominate my thinking on the subject.

Having read McKeon's general introduction to Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach and introductory notes to the first section, I take you back in time to the hand-written notes I made that morning. Note: I'm giving you access to my mind as I set about the beginnings of the project.

I don't know whether hand-writing my notes here in my notebook will serve me better, or typing away into my computer. I expect it will be a combination of the two. Right now Parker has co-opted my computer access, so pen and paper are all I've got (and Susan Bell's The Artful Edit indicates, this may be a good thing). I wonder if I will be able to work outside to some extent and how I need to plan my schedule. If I'm going to write a seminar paper for Fred, I'm going to have to dedicate a reasonable amount of time to it, balancing the work with my other obligations. What is a seminar paper, anyway?

• What is a seminar paper? And how do I, as serious as I am, avoid “monumentalizing” it?

I looked up “What is a seminar paper” on google, and this guy's webpage seemed to give the most useful response. I don't expect to have to use the little trick he recommends near the end.

What do I know, or believe, about the novel here and now, today, without re-reading a bunch of theory about it? This is something Fred tried to do with us in class the very first day, but I didn't feel that I knew any more at the end than I did at the beginning. McKeon does something similar at the beginning of his anthology.

• What are my premises or claims?

• Novels are usually, maybe not always(?), narrative, which means they have a plot, even if only a very basic or concealed one, they are told, and they are told from a particular point-of-view.
  
• Usually they are fictional which means they are imaginative, but imaginative in what way? Because even non-fiction can engage the author's and the reader's imagination.
  
• It is a more intimate form than those that preceded it in that it deals with the doings of individuals, and invades, in a sense, their private lives, often even their private thoughts. The novel form, then, probably originates in modernism when the importance of the individual first (first?) came to prominance. How and why was the pre-modern world different, and how and why did this change? Something to do with the enlightenment? Need to think a bit about the time-line. It all comes down to philosophy, doesn't it? What is philosophy? It is anthropology which is the study of man, right? Philosophy has to do with common experience per Adler, my absent reading-tutor. What do first order questions and second order questions have to do, if anything, with the emergence of the novel? But I am getting off track. Or am I?
  
• The novel privileges the author's voice, doesn't it? Privileges individual modes of expression? Or is this contested ground? Maybe it privileges narrative voice more than the author's. These don't have to be the same thing. And it may be that the privileging of the voice is a relatively late development. Certainly the novel does not privilege narrative voice as much as does certain forms of modernist and contemporary poetry.
  
• Postmodernism, which James J.A. Smith claims is actually pre-modern, is, or can be, extremely narrative in that it recognizes the narrative nature of perception. Does this have any bearing on, or reveal anything about, the emergence of the novel in the modern era? How has postmodern philosophy changed the novel from its origins?
  
• The novel is a modernist phenomena.
  
• The novel is more likely to be a popular narrative form. (More likely than what?) It is generally accessible to the masses, and does not necessarily imply an author's mastery of narrative technique.
  
• Are there any non-narrative novels? Can there be a novel without a plot? I think of Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient. The melieu story, the idea story, the character story, and the event story. Would these categories be applicable to novels as well? This gets into a question of ways in which the novel may be categorized. I was just reading an excerpt from Marthe Robert that touches on categorization, and the limitations of trying to categorize a novel based on plot elements.

There's got to be more, but those are my initial thoughts. I notice I have asked a lot of questions, and the reality is most of my premises are actually questions. As I was writing, a few notes from my reading of the McKeon introduction popped into my mind. And as I typed the same notes later the same thing happened with items from The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi. They're gone now. I hope that I can reclaim them later, maybe after my shower if the children don't need me too badly.

And of course on this day in October I look back on it and know that the children indeed needed me too badly to get back to those notes. I was pleased that day, in fact, with how much I was able to get down in such a small amount of time. It felt like a good beginning. Pathways of thought were already opening up. Where will those pathways lead?

A List of Books

A list of books I brought home with me from the library yesterday, even though I won't have time to read any of them. This is what happens when I wind up wandering the non-fiction aisles. Please note, I've rarely in my life read any physics or natural history. I've had very little exposure to linguistics. These books caught my eye. It's all Stephen Hawking's fault because I couldn't remember the call number to the book of his that I was curious about and many of these were nearby.

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow
Color: A Natural History of the Palette Victoria Finlay
The Physics of the Impossible Michio Kaku
A Briefer History of Time Stephen Hawking
Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid Wendy Williams
Surprised by Oxford: A Memoir Carolyn Weber
What Language Is (And What It Isn't And What It Could Be) John McWhorter

and from the Friends of the Library Book Store:

How to Study Your Bible: The Lasting Rewards of the Inductive Approach Kay Arthur
Logic for Philosophers Richard L. Partill
Essays in Existentialism Jean-Paul Sarte

I keep hoping I'll find The Girard Reader in the library book store, but yesterday I was looking for Perfecting Ourselves to Death by Richard Winter. If you are familiar with any of these books, please tell me what you think of them. As I indicated earlier, there is little chance that I'll ever actually read any of them, but still I had to hold them in my hands and bring them into my home.

More about the blogging plan--making it up as I go along

It's that time. It's early in the morning, though my children are likely to rise from their beds at any moment. I've made a list of things I want to get through today, everything that came into my mind to distract me in the early hours this morning, hours that I'm afraid were not quite early enough. An hour and a half is so little time to collect my thoughts.

I don't collect them. It's more like I settle down into them, at least, that's what I'm telling myself this morning.

I think I'm going to start following Rebecca Brown's plan, in which the blogger shoots for two to four blog posts a week instead of trying to get something in every day. My fear is that this won't go the way that Brown (among others) describes. Two to four well-written blog posts per week? Well-written and spell-checked? The idea is that you can put more time into a post, focus on producing a more polished (and consistent...consistent?) product that will mean more to your readers than five to seven slap-dash posts every week. But here I am typing this out only an hour and a half before my self-imposed deadline.

Yup, that's me.

The Trouble of Locating Beauty and Joy in Housework

I've been reading about work in Elisabeth Elliot this morning, three articles in a row concerning an area of my life in which I greatly struggle. I don't fully understand the problem.

I have a bad habit of only doing as much work as I feel like doing on any given day. And yet, in principle, I like work. I like the idea of being productive, taking care of my family, providing a pleasant and fun living environment, doing paperwork for the church, assisting my husband. I like the idea of getting down to the hard work of reading and writing, and going after it with a will. When I had a job outside the home, I was up and down out of my chair all the time, always looking for the next thing I could do, the next way I could get a little exercise. So why is it that I don't enjoy doing the work at home?

Meal planning is like paperwork. Going to the grocery store is an outing which involves using my muscles to move products from one location to another, stretching my legs as I move from aisle to aisle, running with the cart exuberantly, and as it happens, serving the parking attendants by moving my cart, and other stray ones, to the appropriate cart receptacles is the part of the outing I most enjoy, yet I hate going grocery shopping. I'll put it off as many days as possible, until the milk runs out. In truth there is no form of shopping that appeals to me more than any other, though looking for books at the thrift store brings the best rewards.

Vacuuming doesn't please me, nor does making dinner. Laundry can be enjoyable if I get it started early enough in the day.

As I say, I don't understand what is this problem I have with work? It isn't that domesticity is beneath me, yet I experience mostly confusion when asked to help with preparing or cleaning up food. I'd like to be energized by house work. I'd like for my children to see it being done, to absorb the making and execution of a schedule, the joy that can be had in mastering an arduous task. I'd like to be more grateful for my work, to do it as unto the Lord, to put my intellectual tasks in their proper place, and progress in them, though not at the expense of the housework. I'd like to enjoy those times when I am at my leisure heartily and not with ennui. These times should be meaningful. I should come to know my children through the time I spend with them. Be ever mindful of, and curious about, my husband's interests and concerns.

I should walk the dog in the morning. I should worship the Lord at night.

I wish it would happen naturally. I wish it wouldn't take so much work. What would be required for such a momentous change to occur? How do you find the balance between finding the modes of expression that are yours, and imposing the discipline of the every day? How does one become good without also becoming a perfectionist? How does one serve God properly and well?

I'll Pretend This Post Was Sponsored By Annie Dillard's *Living By Fiction*

Slept late this morning, staying in bed until almost 6 am. Slept hot and didn't sleep well. Forwent (is that a word?) the Bible reading this morning. Hoping the children will stay in bed a while longer, long enough for me to knock out some sort of blog post. Hoping I'll get to take my dog for a walk before Michael goes down to work, hoping I finally make it to the bank today after five days of failing-ailing expectation. Reading Annie Dillard this morning, trying to make sense out of her arguments concerning the lack of interpretative possibility in the natural world, that all things must be interpreted as though they were art objects, and that, in the end, this requires the positing of an artist. She isn't making a creationist argument or anything. Whatever it is she says, she says it well. The trouble I have in making sense has to do with the limits of my understanding, my lack of patience in untangling the threads, to borrow a metaphor from Dillard, and the fact that I am not as widely read in every area as I would prefer to be.

It's sort of funny, that, this idea of not being widely read. I read a lot, and my tastes are rather eclectic, if limited to particular themes. I try to expand those limitations and find that every area of different reading brings up the painful recognition of further limitation. I imagine that I could read every book in the Tuscaloosa Public Library, or better, Gorgas Library at The University of Alabama, and still feel that I hadn't read enough. This plays into Dillard's arguments concerning meaning, I think. Read Living By Fiction for me and see if you can explain to me how.

I was already convinced that the things we apply our reasoning to are based ultimately in faith. I know (and how do I know, I cannot tell) that God is a reliable guide to the universe. It is, as Dillard might point out, a tremendous leap of faith to believe even that the universe exists. I have often imagined, spontaneously, that everything I know and see and touch and taste and experienced is a dream. It is actually possible in some abstract way to imagine that these things don't really exist. Maybe this imaginative ability is a peculiar blessing of this age, or maybe it isn't peculiar at all. Philosophers claim, and I include literary critics under the heading of “philosophers,” that interpretation is the only thing our brains can use to make sense of the universe. I think the reality is that it all comes down to faith, a word that many have misunderstood and will continue to misunderstand until as the Bible promises, faith has become sight.

In no way can I abandon metaphysics, because reason in its essence is a metaphysic, and even if you choose not to believe in God, or choose not to believe in anything, you still wind up putting faith somewhere. Humanism, from what I've seen, is the one that makes the least amount of sense.

Do I know if I've said anything true in my ramblings above? Nope. Sure don't. But I'm not going to let that stop me. Luckily, since rarely does anyone comment on here anyway, I don't have to worry about being challenged on an argument half made or half explored.

Television Glut and a Podcast

One morning I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote down every conjecture or assumption I could think of concerning the novel as a genre. Probably took me thirty minutes. That week I had several bouts of inspiration in which I was able to make notes, actual, useful, convertible notes, on what I was thinking and reading. I hope that sort of inspiration will come back soon, because somehow in the last week and a half I have lost it. I can hardly tell I think at all, except these thoughts keep coming. Today after some weeks of exercising discipline I engaged in a television glut, as if the shows I hadn't been watching were going somewhere: Castle, Warehouse 13, The Lying Game. I finally dropped Eureka from my queue because after the first couple of episodes of those aired in the last two months, the show lost all appeal for me.

For inspiration I shall begin listening to Writing Excuses again. I adore their slogan: Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart. Their podcasts actually vary in length. I make that observation based on listening to two of them, their first episode ever, and one more recent one. The podcasts, I believe, are geared toward the writing of science fiction, which is fun, but most of their advice is applicable to other efforts. Writing Excuses. Now there's an idea.

Some further notes about my reading, as none of my other ideas have been coming through

It's Monday night as I write, and my husband is in bed because he's sick. I suppose you've noticed already that it is very important to me to identify when it is I am writing whatever it is I am writing.  I prefer to schedule these posts a day or two in advance, and when I do, I try to adjust the tenses I use based on when the material is going to be published. For instance, in my journal I may say that "so-in-so happened this morning," but if I prepare the same material for the blog, to be published the following week, I'll changed it to "so-in-so happened last week."

Today I've been reading Ian Watt in my anthology, and as much Annie Dillard literary criticism as I can absorb. I've also been trying to make way in The Brothers Karamazov, a book I began well before I took on this seminar paper project. I think I've decided I'll feel better of I finish it before moving forward in The Living. Sometimes it is hard for me to know if I am doing things in good order or not. I'm at a point in The Brothers Karamazov that is really giving me trouble, at a point where one might expect the narrative to pick up, the point where Dmitri Karmazov is guilty of murder. Honestly I don't understand his motivation. I don't understand why he would be moved to rapture at the idea that the object of his affection loved him for a single hour at the hight of their original spree. I'm actually having a hard time making out what is going on at all, but I know an investigation is about to begin because I've been looking at the section titles. I'm right around half-way through. The Brothers Karamazov is a novel anyway, so reading it isn't quite a waste of precious study time, even if catching on Warehouse 13 online possibly is.

I was at a similar point in The Living when I broke away from it, where one major section had ended and a second had begun, and I was having trouble getting acclimated to what is apparently a different set of primary characters. This is one of the reasons I didn't use to enjoy short stories. You have to acclimate quickly in a short story, and that process often takes me a little bit of time. At the same time I will tend to skip the first two chapters of any Stephen King novel in order to jump-start the very same process of acclimation.

Part of the problem I have with my reading is that I am impulsive. I watch more than one television show at once, I argue, and when I was in college I had to read at least two or three different works simultaneously at any given time, so why should my personal reading be any different? In fact my personal reading isn't any different. This is one of the reasons I need to begin to force myself to slow down.  I say begin because I never quite reach that point of making a beginning.

What Else Was In That Box?

Receiving a box of books in the mail makes me giddy, like Pete Lattimer when his ex-wife brought his comic book back. It's a Warehouse 13 reference, from an episode I finally saw last week.

What else was in the Amazon box you ask?

The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea, by David Dark, which I borrowed from the library several months ago in a short-lived flurry of Christian/political literature reading. The book isn't about politics, rather it is about American culture, and how we need to examine our assumptions in every arena of thought, including the political, not only examine them but talk about them too. Dark engages all manner of American culture. I read his book in a week, fell in love with it, and knew I had to have it for my own.

I didn't fully understand the book, and I didn't take notes on it, which is one of the reasons I wanted it for my own. I want to study it, figure out what Dark did and how. Though I don't think I would agree with Dark politically (if I understood politics well enough to know what I thought), I would like to emulate his methods. I'd like to know what his arguments are so I can engage them more fully. I'd like to do the sort of work that he is doing. David Dark writes a blog, called Peer Pressure is Forever, which he shares with his wife Sarah Masen, whose music I adore. I wrote an imaginary letter to David Dark after reading his book, which you can read if you really want to, by clicking here.

The Gospel According to America is sort of hard to read, not because the language is complex, or because the ideas are too highly specialized. It's hard to read, for some strange reason, because of Dark's highly personalized style. I believe that the difficulty is totally worth it.

Who's Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church by James K.A. Smith. I've written about this book on here before, and now I have at last my very own copy. This makes me very happy. Smith somehow manages to demystify postmodernism, explaining it in a way that I can finally understand, and then shows how postmodern ways of thinking are not entirely antithetical to our Christian faith.  This is a valuable service. Smith also give some pointers on how the church could adapt some of these ideas to become even more itself instead of less, more kergymatic is the word he uses. The church can be more bold in its presentation of the gospel because we get to be more transparent about where we are coming from. I wish I could describe it better. All I can really say tonight is read the book. I look forward to tackling it again once I've completed some of these other projects that are eating up my reading-time. Smith has a blog that can be read here.

The last book in the box was Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent by Wayne Boothe. I don't know much about this one, only what I have read online, and that it was recommended as a book I might read to understand the rhetoric of argumentation better. I've read an essay by Boothe in The Norton Reader, and have read bits and pieces of his book The Rhetoric of Fiction. I know I like his writing style already. I just discovered via Wikipedia that Boothe died in 2005. I look forward to reading as much of his work as possible, and wonder if I can incorporate him into some of these other projects.

Yes, it's true I have a lot of reading to do. And I look forward to it. If you are interested in seeing what titles I am reading now, take a look at the rightmost column on this page. As always I fear I have gone a little overboard with the reading.