What I have read fills my mind.

It feels like a big cotton ball. I've been stuck on modern authors for the past few weeks, and I've noticed that it's like dining solely upon peanut butter crackers and skim milk. I want my Chesterton, my Blackmore. My steak and potatoes. With butter. Lots, of course. That'll be the poetry. And I cannot, must not, forget the bread. I'm allowed to eat this bread as much as I like.

Here's what I've read since June. It's positively shameful.

Four books by Ellis Peters ("good fluff"):
Brother Cadfael's Penance,
Death and the Joyful Woman,
The Rose Rent, and
The Knocker on Death's Door.

Seven (Yes, seven) books by Joanne Harris, a modern authoress whom I have resolved never to read again:
Chocolat,
Jigs and Reels,
Blackberry Wine,
Coastliners,
Holy Fools,
Five Quarters of the Orange, and
Gentlemen and Players.

1, 2, and 3 were actually good, but by the time I got to 7, she had degenerated into complete modern-ness and vulgarity.

Also, I read Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck, which was interesting and not a complete waste of time, and Reformed is Not Enough, by Wilson, which was great. The lonely Really Good Book. How sad.

And now for my big mistake: I borrowed some books from a certain RUF minister I know; a Chesterton, a Wendell Berry, and another modern book which looked interesting at the time, but turned out to be vulgar and obscene. It's called The Time Traveler's Wife, and I highly recommend that you never ever read it or buy it. If it were mine, I would have thrown it away already. It is terrible. It is why my brain seems very small right now. I feel the need for some good old Real Life and then a long session with my old friends on my shelves.

Also, I've resolved to never again pick up a book that I don't know from that man's shelf. I will not talk to strangers. I will not talk to strangers. I will not talk to strangers. Gaah. I'm babbling.

Garage Saling is Oh, So Profitable

Recent purchases:

The Lord Peter Wimsey Cookbook--recipes based upon meals eaten in the book series. (An early birthday present from my mother.) (hardback)

The Instant Ethnic Foods Cookbook--recipes for herb & spice mixes from various culinary families: Greek, Italian, French, etc.

The Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck (hardback)

The Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff (hardback)

The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World, in two volumes (hardback)

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten boom, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill (hardback)

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury--an excellent and intriguing modern author- my favourite, if ever there was one.

And something that is not a book--a soft cheese strainer! On Monday, I will buy yoghurt and make cream cheese & whey. Then I will make salsa! Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.... ;)

Wordsworth on Faith and Gratitude

I'm reading Q's On the Art of Writing today, hoping to finish it before I must give it back to the library on Monday. I came across this example of 'prosified verse' and the subject matter struck me--this is a call to be grateful and take God's gifts with faith, else they turn upon you and become burdens.

These times strike monied worldlings with dismay;
Ev'n rich men, brave by nature, taint the air
With words of apprehension and despair;
While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray,
Men unto whom sufficient for the day
And minds not stinted or untill'd are given,
Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven,
Are cheerful as the rising sun in May.
What do we gather hence but firmer faith
That every gift of noble origin
Is breath'd upon by Hope's perpetual breath;
That Virtue and the faculties within
Are vital; and that riches are akin
To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?

Now, just take the meat and leave the bones: the last line makes one wonder if he really understands God's gifts, but look at the line that begins, "That Virtue.." and the section that begins, "Men unto whom...". Wordsworth praises those who are thankful for what they have, and exhorts men to follow their example. How interesting!



P.S. Also, the phrase "tens of thousands" coupled with "Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven" reminds me of Rebekah's marraige blessing from her sisters:
Our sister, may you become
thousands of ten thousands,
and may your offspring possess
the gates of those who hate them.

Odd, I know.

Cosset: to pamper.

Corset: An extremely tight undergarment, which some women have compared to instruments of torture.

--------------

When I awoke this morning, I was thinking to myself, 'Have you ever noticed that the words cosseted and corseted sound and look so similar, but they mean completely different things?'

Aesthetics & Writing

Greg Wilbur of Kingsmeadow Study Center writes this list of medieval aesthetic principles:

Order: tradition, following models
Craftsmanship: attention to detail; skill and learning; mastery of technique
Rooted: firm foundation in biblical truth and culture; rooted in faith and community
Inventive: creative; seeking new ways to express old and eternal truths
Anonymous: workers who created for God’s glory; the aim of the work is more important than who created it
Interdependence: communal; artists worked in community for the edification of the greater community
Spirit: worked within the framework of a Christian culture seeking to convey biblical and theological truth
Eternal: eternal truth more important than realism; stories out of time; timeless truth
http://kingsmeadow.com/wilburblog.html

He writes of art, but it occurs to me that this list applies also to writing (as well as every other part of life). I would appreciate having some guidelines for good writing; I never thought that was what I was learning from reading all of these classics. I suppose I never thought of it at all.

There are so many things to think of...where will I ever find the time?

Technopoly

I've been toting around Neil Postman's Technopoly for the past few weeks, and reading it here and there when I have nothing else to do. It's quite interesting. I've gotten to the third chapter- he's in the middle of an overview of our journey from a tool-using culture to a technopoly. Technopoly is a word which Postman coined, meaning a society in which technology reigns; in which tools control us instead of vice-versa. One of the most intriguing ideas he's written on so far is the concept of theology as the Queen of the Sciences, and how that way of thinking has changed so much and at the same time as the great technological advances of the past centuries. It seems that as man became more dependent on his inventions he became less aware of his dependence on his Creator. Here's an actual quote from chapter two:

Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo put in place the dynamite that would blow up the theology and metaphysics of the medieval world. Newton lit the fuse. In the ensuing explosion, Aristotle's animism was destroyed, along with almost everything else in his Physics. Scripture lost much of its authority. Theology, once the Queen of the Sciences, was now reduced to the status of Court Jester. (page 34)

What's actually happened is that Biblical theology has been replaced as Queen by television's theology; where we once controlled our use of tools with our theology, now our theology is controlled by our tools, which also control us. I don't mean subliminal messaging, although billboards, commercials, and magazines are quite good at that sort of thing; I mean that we do not think Biblically any more. Theology provides a paradigm for thought about all of life, and instead of learning our theology from the Bible, we've been learning it from television. Instead of learning from the Master, we've been learning from the tools.

Just as Jesus is and must be the King (of everything), Biblical theology is and must be the Queen of the Sciences. If not, we lose our understanding of the fundamental way the world works, and we're just blind men leading other blind men. And we all know what happens when the blind lead the blind.

Horticultural Lessons

Go to this site and read the posts entitled "--- Horticulture". There are five, I believe, and they are either very funny or very sad.

I've been reading...

...a book that isn't on the list of Most Important Books to Read First Before Any Others So Don't Even Think About That One Over There!

It is called "Reformed" is Not Enough. It is excellent. Here is a quote for your enjoyment:

The Lord's Supper is first a memorial of Christ's self-sacrifice; secondly, a sealing of all the benefits of Christ's death unto true believers; third, a spiritual nourishment of all true believers who partake; fourth, a covenant renewal on the part of those who partake; fifth, a bond from Him of the fact that He is our God and we are His people; and sixth, it is communion with our fellow believers, fellow members of the body of Christ.

Page 110

Do you know where the author gets this information? Yes. It was gleaned from the Westminster Confession of Faith. I, for one, had no idea that there was anything that good in it. O, me of little faith in the Divines! I repent in dust and ashes. Off I go to read the Confession...

I was going to post something here, but it turned out to be inappropriate for public consumption. So, I'll leave you with this: God's glory is still a good reason to do things.

A Sonnet, being the twenty-sixth, by Wm. Shakespeare

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it:
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tattered loving,
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
Till then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me.

Hm.

Resurge, Domine.

I am still alive, and I am still reading.

I finished Amusing Ourselves to Death last month, just in time to read it with my friends for book club.
I finished Moll Flanders last month, too; it had a surprisingly redemptive ending.
I bought Technopoly by Neil Postman; I couldn't help it. It's quite good so far.
I have 13 books checked out from the library. And 5 borrowed from the Badgermum's library. Will I never learn?

On a slightly different topic, I have decided that my favourite place to be is at R & C's house, sitting on the front porch with E in my lap. On the porch swing, of course. Porch swings and rocking chairs are my favourite items of furniture.

To end, here's something I found in my e-mail archives:

When R & C were here we had a long argument about whether or not Jane Austen was a Christian. R was very passionate, and I was angry, until I asked him if he had ever even read any of her books. When he said no, I had to laugh. After that, he had nothing to say that would sway me. And when he began to rail against Rev. Leithart (re: his book on Austen), I asked if he had bothered to read that one either--no again. I was triumphant. That's what he gets for arguing from ignorance.
_________________________
In Defense of Jane
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 21, 2005 at 08:22 PM

Reformed writer Andrew Sandlin is taking on Jane Austen:
"I first saw with Jim West the 1995 theatrical permutation of Sense and Sensibility (starring Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson) at its initial release. I disliked it then and deplore it now. In seeing this movie again on TV yesterday I was reminded how I've come increasingly to abominate much of the Victorian era — its conventions, sleights, artificialities, prejudices, scientism, formalism, class structure, hypocritical morality, and sublimated ferocity."

I suppose it's a sign of my own enthrallment to Victorian sensibilities that I rise to the lady's defense. But I am constrained. For starters, Austen was safely in her grave before Victoria came to her throne, so her books do not qualify as Victorian. She lived through the era of romanticism (which Sandlin endorses in his short discussion) and she was not untouched by its sensibility. She writes like Samuel Johnson, but there's a romantic spark running throughout her work.

Besides, one should hardly form an opinion about Jane from those who put her novels on film. Her best qualities as a writer are her wit, style, and social commentary - not things that translate easily to an hour-long visual medium. More importantly perhaps, no one can read far in Austen without recognizing that she abominates conventions, sleights, artificialities, prejudices, etc, etc. She is one of the best social satirists in English - far more devastating and subtle than Dickens (who actually was Victorian).

One of the oddest bits in Sandlin's discussion was this: "I have come to believe that there is no substitute for simple, immediate, unadorned, direct, blunt, bottom-line living." Surely, Sandlin has read deeply enough in postmodernism to know that someone who chooses to live in a simple and unadorned and direct manner has not foregone conventions; the simple and unadorned man simply chooses another set of conventions, a different ordering that is no less artificial than Edwardsean or Victorian refinements. Nakedness is a sartorial choice.

To all of Jane's detractors, I say: Unhand the lady.
__________________

Books, of course.

I'm not doing much better on the book-reading front...I finished five books in May, and I still haven't finished Lorna Doone. But it's a new month, and I'll try to read more so I can catch up to last year.

Last month I read St. Ives, by R.L. Stevenson, which was a very good story about a French prisoner of war held in Edinburgh; Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry; Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, which our ladies' book club will be reading; Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe, about a harlot who repents, kinda; and The Hermit of Eyton Forest (a Cadfael mystery), by Edith Pargeter.

This month I would like to finish reading Lorna Doone and The Marble Faun (Hawthorne), and work pretty hard on the books on my lists in the sidebar. We'll see how that works out.

I leave you with a quote from The Way of Ignorance, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry:

'The rugged individualism of the left believes that an individual's body is a property belonging to that individual absolutely: the owners of bodies may, by right, use them as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This supposed right is manifested in the democratizing of "sexual liberation"; in the popular assumption that marriage has been "privatized" and so made subordinate to the wishes of individuals; in the proposition that the individual is "autonomous"; in the legitimation of abortion as birth control--in the denial, that is to say, that the community, the family, one's spouse, or even one's own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one's body.'

My brother at his best.

"The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South."

Some quotes on one of my favourite subjects: the South.

"The biggest myth about Southern women is that we are frail types--fainting on our sofas...nobody where I grew up ever acted like that. We were about as fragile as coal trucks."
--Lee Smith

"...People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal...and nobody was ever let out of the house without the goodbye ritual..."
----Shirley Abbot

"Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well."
-- Florence King

"Recognizing that it certainly isn't true of all of us, I would propose that a Southerner is distinguished by a sense of neighborliness, a garrulous quality, a wish to get together a lot."
--from Charles Kuralt in "Southerners: Portrait of a People"

"Within the South itself, no other form of cultural expression, not even music, is as distinctively characteristic of the region as the spreading of a feast of native food and drink before a gathering of kin and friends."
-- John Egerton, from "Southern Food, at Home, on the Road, in History"

"What can be more Southern than to obsess about being Southern?"
--Elizabeth Fortson Arroyo

"Southerners can't stand to eat alone. If we're going to cook a mess of greens we want to eat them with a mess of people."
--Julia Reed

"In the South, the breeze blows softer...neighbors are friendlier, nosier, and more talkative. (By contrast with the Yankee, the Southerner never uses one word when ten or twenty will do)...This is a different place. Our way of thinking is different, as are our ways of seeing, laughing, singing, eating, meeting and parting. Our walk is different, as the old song goes, our talk and our names. Nothing about us is quite the same as in the country to the north and west. What we carry in our memories is different too, and that may explain everything else."
--Charles Kuralt in "Southerners: Portrait of a People"

"Those politicians are going up fool's hill on the slippery side."

"Be careful not to run your mouth before you put your mind in gear. You can apologise all you want afterwards, but it's like shutting the barn door after the horse gets out."

"Hungry is a mighty fine sauce."

"Folks who get all caught up in themselves sure do make small packages."

"It is easy to pick up and move when the culture you know is all McDonald's. But if you grow up the way I did in Louisiana, you don't in your travels find anything like it. Some of it is the cuisine, but mostly it is a mind-set." --Glenn Petre

Jael kills Sisera

Two Things

1. I've had an apostrophe. I thought of a great name for my pub: 'The Axe and Tree: the public house of St. Boniface'. Did you know he's the patron saint of brewers? I thought it would be neat to have part of that passage from John (you know, where the axe is laid at the root of the tree?) done up over the doorway. Isn't it great?

2. Quote from Wendell Berry. He makes me feel quasi-normal:
'She would do a man's work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time, she wore them long. The girls of her day, I think, must have been like well-wrapped gifts, to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. "Well! What's this?"'

Brave woman, that.

I've never heard anything like this before. I've heard the 'good stewardship' argument, but nothing this in-depth. And Mrs. Colvin is right: nowhere does God give mankind stewardship over mankind. Other than to command us to multiply and fill the earth, that is.

_____________
In other news, I'm reading Moll Flanders. She is, I think, what Mrs. Badgermum would call a 'shameless hussy'. I'm about sixty pages from the end, and so far: she's been married five times (once to her half-brother, accidently), a mistress twice, had 10 children (half survived childhood), and stolen enough to make a small fortune-- and she's only forty-five years old. The woman is incredible, in the original (Latin) sense of the word. On the other hand, I learned a new word for harlot: trull.

The English literature is sinking in...

I was just listening to an account of the life of Boniface (patron saint of brewers, by the way), and do you know what happened? I heard the lecturer say that Boniface refused his inheritance in order to become a monk and I thought,'He can't do that, he's the firstborn son!'

Ha! Take that, egalitarianism!

Books I've Read

So far this calendar year, I've read only 12 books. I am very disappointed, considering 1. that I didn't read any books in March (what was I thinking?), 2. that last year at this time I had read 30 books already, and 3. that the year before at this time I had read 22 books. I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Before I do that, though, I thought I'd post something interesting (to me, at least). So. Here's some book lists:

What I Read in April a.d. 2004
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass- Lewis Carroll
The Lord of the Flies- William Golding (this book was terrible)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and other short stories- Washington Irving
Coming Up for Air- George Orwell

What I Read in April a.d. 2005
Short Stories- J.F. Powers (bad author; uninteresting stories)
Henry and the Great Society- H.L. Roush
The Golden Key- George MacDonald
Miniatures and Morals- Peter Leithart
The Vanishing American Outhouse- Ronald S. Barlow
Dutch Colors- Douglas Jones
Scottish Seas- Douglas Jones
Huguenot Gardens- Douglas Jones
Summary of Christian Doctrine- Louis Berkhof
Memoirs of a Geisha- Arthur Golden
River Town- Peter Hessler
The Legacy of Biblical Womanhood- Susan Hunt and Barbara Thompson
The Ragamuffin Gospel- Brennan Manning
Future Men- Douglas Wilson

And...
What I Read April a.d. 2006
Q's Legacy- Helene Hanff
The Sunday Philosophy Club- Alexander McCall Smith (all the rage, but not really a good story)
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency- Alexander McCall Smith (ditto)
Right Ho, Jeeves- P.G. Wodehouse

There. Now, to read.