Just Thinking

The shape of a life

How does a person decide which book to remove first from a stack to open and begin to read? It seems as if I should be able to provide a rational defense for an ordered choice involving an investment of hours of time, but absent the need to read a certain book to complete a project, I admit the volume is picked by movement of whim or gut or ease of access.

From among the books I brought back from Calvin, I first chose Jacobs' book (Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life). Don’t ask me why. Jacobs writes about many things, including the importance of the individual vs ecclesiastical narrative, the role of Protestant theology in the individual narrative and conversion as sight to see such narrative, the conveying of wisdom as an essential, or at least historical, component of storytelling, and the primal place of hope in narrative of the Christian life. All of it has set me thinking and could feed a blog for weeks were I a blogger that posts more often than my current once per month frequency.

I’ll pick one thing: life genre.

Jacobs writes about how there are different genres of life, just like genres of writing or genres of speech. By genre of life he means the shape of a life, the connection between the inner and outer life. He didn’t name life genres, as if we could quickly categorize ourselves like “ENTF“ or ”Autumn“ or ”Sanguine.“ But rather he suggests that there are similarities among certain people, across time, in the shapes of their lives and in the way they connect their inner and outer lives. These similarities take some imagination to perceive because time and culture cause these traits to be manifest in different ways. For example, a person with the inner life a medieval saint born in 1100 would look quite different than a person with the inner life of a medieval saint born in 1900, or 2008.

This suggests a compelling thought exercise.

I wonder now about role models and how at times I’ve thought historical role models may be less than helpful because clearly a person can’t superimpose one’s life on another from a different time and place and find a match or derive an action plan. I think of some historical figures I feel a resonance with but could never justify labeling them as my ”role models“ because of how badly my figure would line up with theirs, and even how little I really know about them.

Jacobs’ insight here gives me a huge imaginative boost, however. That person I think of from centuries ago or decades ago--how would that inner life of mind and soul look like today? (No, we’re not talking reincarnation.) Is this a life shape that feels a fit? Does it people my imagination with a communion of saints so to speak, providing camaraderie and insight as to why I do what I do or as to what is possible to do?

More importantly, does it help me see people in another light? Take for example the ”check-out girl“ at my local grocery store who is cool and calm even on Thanksgiving Day, who remembers to tell me they now have the product I couldn’t find last time I was in, who is a single mother managing to survive on that job in this economy. What shape is her life and what saint or heroine or queen might have been just like her had they been born into her time and place?

"The beauty of the world...

...is the mouth of a labyrinth.”
Simone Weil, Waiting for God

The guide for last Saturday’s tour of labyrinths in the northwest corner of where I live told us there are more public labyrinths in this metropolitan area than in any other in the world. I was surprised to hear that because I’ve never come across even one. Where were they, tucked away behind hedges or walls or lying so level with the ground that a person might pass them every day and not see their paths rising up ever so slightly above the lawn or pressed down below? The team of tour guide and bus driver showed us.

Here’s a labyrinth hiding in a sandbox.

Idea saturated and book laden

Calvin College hosted the 2008 Festival of Faith and Writing on April 16-18 and I was one of the 2000+ attendees. Spending a couple minutes on Google should link you up to many fine reviews of the conference and of specific presentations. Personally, I recommend the reviews on Life In the Slow Lane as a good place to start. I’ll not reinvent the wheel here and so will take a different tack, because I don’t want to let the event go wholly undocumented on this site.

At this conference, the exchange of ideas is so massive--as evidenced by the multitude of presentations to choose from and the stacks of books and periodicals in the exhibit hall--it is amost paralyzing. Like a tourist in New York City, one could never hope to sample all the offerings. It must be sufficient to absorb the overall milieu and pick a few paths to explore at closer range.

The milieu to be absorbed was one of reading, writing, thinking, and studying. Despite the fact that multiple presenting authors made a point of saying their work and life were about the heart/soul and not the mind, no one translates life--personal or universal--onto the page with integrity without generous application of mental power. And self-discipline. The joy was in seeing such an outpouring of work, from multiple faith traditions, that was an organic product of mind and heart/soul. I came home with a fresh supply of role models.

A major tenant of modern literary writing is ‘no ideas but in things,’ but I find ideas/concepts in and of themselves exciting. Here are some ideas or snippets of ideas from various presentations that I brought home like souvenirs: the deep and necessary connection between prayer and writing (Mary Karr); what makes writing moral? (Mary Gordon); confession alone does not equal truth (Leslie Leyland Fields); living and finding meaning in life is to bear the burden of mystery (Elizabeth Strout); whether or not your dreams come true, God is God (Uwem Akpa); stillness, silence, waiting (Haven Kimmel); "narrative theology" in the lives of the many instead of the headlines of the few (Krista Tippett).

I also came home with five new books, all but one purchased from the Eighth Day Books table: Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett; She Got Up Off the Couch, Haven Kimmel; Outlands, Robert Finch; Thirty Days, Paul Mariani; and Looking Before and After, Alan Jacobs.

The conference’s website offers links to author websites, lists of publications, and other resources.

Bookstore tourism

This weekend I was in Chicago, the city that dyes its river green for St. Patrick’s Day. They tossed the dye in a few days early this year due to the Vatican’s worldwide request that celebrations take place on the weekend rather than during Holy Week. Besides stopping on Michigan Avenue next to the Wrigley Building to peer down into the river, thick and shiny like “Lucky Charm Green” poured from a can of Benjamin Moore, my husband, son, and I stopped at a few other city sites, maybe not as eye-popping but certainly equally or more gratifying.

In Wicker Park, we stopped at Myopic Books, one of Chicago’s oldest and largest used bookstores and one of my son’s favorites. Three floors of little alleys and aisles and cubbies formed by wooden shelves. The upstairs had a great reading room in front of a large window overlooking North Milwaukee Avenue, with wooden tables set up like an old library where you could hunker down and read and read. While we were there a man had fallen asleep at one of the tables and eventually an employee came and gently awakened him, telling him they were ready to settle on the books he’d brought in to sell. In an abbreviated form of bookstore tourism, I love finding places like this in cities I visit.

Online virtual bookstores are great when you know the book you want and you just want to get it without too much fuss. But that convenience can never match the serendipity or grace that allows real books to jump off real shelves as if someone is tossing them right to you, matching a present need, use, desire, or interest, or anticipating one yet to come. A used bookstore has the added benefit of extending that pool of books to find--or that find you--into the netherworld of out-of-print books and other books that for whatever reason can’t command a place on a trade bookstore shelf.

Of course I bought some books, including a book of essays on Georgia O’Keeffe, one on pseudonyms of Christ in the modern novel, one by Alfred Kazin on writers and God, a book for my father (“The Introspective Engineer”), and if he’s reading this he’ll know about the book before I even give it to him, a book on transcendence and the gospel of John, another by de Chardin with a great title, “The Divine Milieu”, and a book about an unnamed topic, which I’m going to set aside as a resource for a future essay. None of the above had I looked for or even heard of, but suddenly there they were and they were for me. Lucky, lucky.

Struck chord

A week and a half ago, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova received the Oscar for best original song for "Falling Slowly" from the movie Once. I watched them receive this award, listened to their acceptance speeches, and was so taken with Marketa's that I was going to write a post about it the next day, a post about one phrase in particular from her speech. But I didn't get around to it. Days passed and by then it seemed old news. What happens at the Academy Awards seems to have a short shelf life interest-wise and so if it's not used right away, best not used at all. By the following Friday, I decided to say good-bye to my intended post once and for all. Surely the same thing had already been posted online in numerous places, I thought. So I googled the phrase from her speech that had interested me: "...fair play for those who dare to dream." The result of that and subsequent google searches is a story in and of itself about how that phrase is resonating throughout cyberspace.

Here are the stats. On Friday, February 29, the total number of google links for that phrase was 1,210. The next day, February 30, the total number of links for that phrase had risen to 1,560. By today, March 4, the figure has increased more than eight-fold to 13,600. That phrase, in particular, and their speeches, in general, have really struck a chord. I just can't help but contrast this Oscar phrase with another that sticks in my mind, but for completely differerent reasons. "I'm king of the world," pronounced an Oscar recipient (whose name I can't even remember) about ten (??) years ago as he victoriously raised his golden award, striking a completely different chord.

Listening to ...

Gretel: Folk/Experimental/Americana

ht: a friend

Talking with fellow blogger Paul Martin

Paul Martin, of the Original Faith blog, asked me to stop by his blog for an interview about Just Think and the graduate program I just finished. I "met" Paul several years ago when he was writing on his original blog, A Spiritual Diablog, but lost track of him when he took some time off and then transitioned to another blog. I was happy to hear from him again when he asked for the interview and to learn that his own writing was progressing. His book, Original Faith, will be available later this year.

You can read the interview here.

Hampl's The Florist's Daughter

I've just finished reading The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl. It's a memoir about growing up in St. Paul, in her family. I read a review somewhere that suggested this book is really a love story about St. Paul--which I agree with and I envy her in the deep sense of place she grew up with--but the primary descriptive and narrative focus is on being a daughter.

Here's a great line, although maybe you have to be a midwesterner to appreciate it:

"Nothing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life."

I enjoy Hampl's writing for many reasons, but here are two. Her writing is elegant, always. And her writing is earnest. I suppose "earnest" is one of the least coveted adjectives for a literary writer, but I use this term in the best possible way. I mean to say that underneath her elegant language, there is something solid, something worthy of being wrapped in beauty. It seems to promise that it will be worth the reader's time, that in the end the beauty will not have been just smoke and mirrors. I was trying to think of how to say this when I remembered a passage in this book that I marked. She is writing here about her father, a florist, who was often frustrated with the shallow idea of beauty held by some of his customers.

"He wanted a certain kind of formal, purchased beauty to exist, and especially for this elegance to mean something--something good, something hopeful. It was important to him that all this be there...This surface loveliness was the outward and visible sign, as the nuns taught us about the sacraments, of an inward and spiritual grace..."

From that passage and more, she is truly her father's daughter. But from other passages, she is truly her mother's daughter. If she had written a bulleted how-to book on being a daughter, on being an adult yet a child, on being cared for by and giving care to parents, I don't think it would have opened as many streams of thought as she did in these 227 pages.

I wish I'd thought of this

Speaking of being well-read, here’s an admission: I’m not.

I came to this realization when perusing the pages of Rachelle Knight’s Read, Remember, Recommend: A Reading Journal for Book Lovers. This newly released reading journal includes 2000 book titles organized according to award lists, such as Pulitzer Prize winners, and Notable Lists, such as the Hungry Mind Review’s 100 Best. Each list features nifty labeled columns where you can check off which books you own, would recommend, or have on your to-read or wish lists. Scanning the lists I was humbled by how many of these award-winning books I haven’t read. The book titles are even cross-referenced between lists so you can see where you can get the most bang for your reading buck. For example, did you know that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Britain’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize? There are pages for reading notes and to record titles of books you’ve loaned out, and features that make it easy to use, like spiral binding and section dividers of heavy colorful cardstock.

I wish I’d thought of this.

We're cold but well-read

Minneapolis has regained its title as most literate city in the United States, moving Seattle once again to the number 2 spot. Every year, measures of reading behavior are compared among U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or more, measures including newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources. Minneapolis and Seattle traditionally bounce back and forth year after year, exchanging the number 1 and 2 spots. St. Paul, our sister city, is a strong third. Interestingly, Minneapolis, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Denver, and Washington, D.C. have been in the top 10 every year the study has been conducted

In a subanalysis, Seattle ranks number 1 in the bookseller category, followed by San Francisco at 2, Minneapolis and Cincinnati tied for 3, and St. Paul at 8. This category ranks the number of retail bookstores, number of rare and used bookstores and number of American Bookseller Association members per 10,000 people.

Find the report here.

The Gate of the Year

Three years ago I wrote a post about the poem "The Gate of the Year" by Minnie Louise Haskins. Interestingly, that post continually generates many hits, no matter the time of year; lots of people apparently are googling for bits and pieces of this poem. Here's the link.

A platform for thought

From Mary Oliver's Long Life:

And here I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have a bedrock from which to descend.

For Oliver, the platform is the physical world, nature, but I'm thinking that such a platform for thought could be any number of venues, different for each person really. A place--real or metaphorical--chosen because it is rich and evocative or perhaps even just because it is where one has been set.

A heaping cup of Marjorie

Marjorie Johnson, master baker, mom of my good friend, frequent guest on Jay Leno, and subject of this blog post on this blog, released her cookbook, Blue Ribbon Baking, several months ago. If you're looking for a last-minute gift for someone who likes to bake, this may be the answer. It is filled with the recipes that won her Blue Ribbons in competition so every recipe is--quite literally--a winner. You can order it from her website or find it at most bookstores in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.

Songs of healing

Good friend and fellow recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program, Mary Van Denend has three poems in the current issue (06: Epiphany) of Ruminate magazine. One of the poems, “What Saves Us,” is featured on the magazine’s website. Read it here.

Doors into Advent

Visual artist and writer, Jan Richardson, offers an Advent blog worth visiting, The Advent Door. Each day's post includes a collage, like a door, created to open up something from the scriptures and stories of Advent. I only discovered this blog today through a blurb in Image Update, but hope to set aside time to catch up on her meditations that started on Advent Eve. Jan is the author and editor of a book I purchased a number of years ago, Sacred Journeys: A Woman's Book of Daily Prayer. I didn't know anything about her at the time I bought the book and hadn't tracked her since. Looking at her website this afternoon I see that she's been busy!