Invisible Foreigner

"Anyway, be honest. When was the last time you really listened to an album all the way through, from..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:54:49 -0700

“Anyway, be honest. When was the last time you really listened to an album all the way through, from start to finish, without interruption? The keywords here are “without interruption.” I listen to entire records all the time, but almost never manage to make it through one without stopping multiple times.”

- Do You Really Listen To Full Albums? : All Songs Considered : NPR

"It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:04:00 -0700

“It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

"Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:10:17 -0700

“Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.””

- Genesis 32:26

"And it’s what fueled the show’s essential story line for the best years of its life: the..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:16:00 -0700

“And it’s what fueled the show’s essential story line for the best years of its life: the gradually romantic evolution of Jim and Pam from work spouses to actual spouses. Yes, the ham-fisted shenanigans of the final season made it plain that The Office had punted for years on the inevitable flip side to this fairy tale: Jim and Pam had gotten each other but they’d given up their hopes and dreams in the process. But I think it’s worth remembering just how bracing and essential those flirty looks and missed connections once felt, how understated and remarkable Jenna Fischer was in a role that so easily could have rankled with cuteness or veered into doormat. The end of Season 3 remains one of a handful of perfect television moments from my lifetime: Pam is doing a talking head to the camera assuming Jim, whom she’s lost to the wiles of Rashida Jones’s Karen, has gotten a corporate job in New York. Then Jim bursts into the room, a little flustered and a lot excited. He asks Pam out on a date. She accepts. He leaves. She turns back to us, asking “I’m sorry, what was the question?” And her skyscraping smile fills the screen in a way that standard sitcom laughter never could.”

- The end of ‘The Office’ - Grantland

"Not the round natural world, not the deep mind, The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss Collects it..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:59:35 -0700

“Not the round natural world, not the deep mind,
The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss
Collects it not; our arrows sink amiss
And but in Him may we our import find.
The agony to know, the grief, the bliss
Of toil, is vain and vain: clots of the sod
Gathered in heat and haste and flung behind
To blind ourselves and others, what but this
Still grasping dust and sowing toward the wind?
No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead,
But leaving straining thought and stammering word,
Across the barren azure pass to God:
Shooting the void in silence like a bird,
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed.”

- Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Sonnet XXVIII

"Maybe the coolest thing about being a teacher is just this: Everything that’s worn and familiar to..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 06:15:12 -0700

“Maybe the coolest thing about being a teacher is just this: Everything that’s worn and familiar to me is new to my students. I’ve been through the ins and outs of Ulysses dozens of times, which is precisely what makes it fun to be in a room with thirty people who are encountering it for the first time. It’s easy for me to forget that experience — to forget all the ways that book can disorient (and even delight) a reader — unless I make a point not of explaining but of asking: What confused you? Where did you run aground? Was there a point when you were tempted to give up? (And no, I won’t ask you whether you yielded to that temptation.) What do you make of this passage? What about that one?
And it’s wonderful to see how some people discover that they were confused by something they didn’t even realize they were confused by until someone else raised a question — how a question from one student generates quite another question from a different student, how nodes of puzzlement — or excitement, or understanding — form during a class session. I lecture all right, but my lectures arise from where I discover that my students are situated in relation to a text.”

- Once More Around the MOOC | The American Conservative

"I don’t have to be told that Americans are sentimental, earnest, boastful, narcissistic,..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:45:03 -0700

“I don’t have to be told that Americans are sentimental, earnest, boastful, narcissistic, inarticulate, inelegant, literal-minded, acquisitive strivers who speak in euphemisms. Some of this stuff I’m glad to be away from even as I remain a boastful, narcissistic striver myself. But it’s good to have some definitions of terms that have perplexed me. ‘The British,’ Eagleton writes, ‘“muddle through”, meaning that they achieve their goals but don’t quite know how, and might just as easily not have done.’ It’s a strange phrase to hear, as I have, from the mouth of a banker, but then I suppose public subsidies are just that sort of thing. And then there’s the weather – something I’ve never paid attention to. ‘The subject,’ Eagleton writes, ‘appeals to the deep-seated fatalism of the British people, since there is no way of stopping a thunderstorm. This … is a secret source of self-lacerating joy among the citizenry. The British rather enjoy feeling helpless, as the Americans do not. The thought that there is absolutely nothing one can do is regarded by some in the United States as defeatist, nihilistic and in some obscure sense unpatriotic. In Britain, it brings with it a strange, luminous, semi-mystical kind of peace.’ To think of all those grey drizzly days I’ve spent looking out the window in despair without knowing that everyone around me was concealing their semi-mystical masochistic glee beneath a cover of shyness and ironic grousing.”

- Christian Lorentzen · Short Cuts · LRB 9 May 2013

"Intriguingly, when we look at the ancient evidence for the treatment of early Christians a very..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 19:05:26 -0700

“

Intriguingly, when we look at the ancient evidence for the treatment of early Christians a very different picture emerges. The vast majority of our ancient sources for persecution in the first century were written in the second century and beyond. The stories about the deaths of the apostles, for instance, were written as late as a hundred years later and modeled on the fanciful genre of ancient romance novels.

Even the earliest, most ostensibly trustworthy martyrdom stories have been edited and reworked. The authors of these accounts borrowed from ancient mythology, changed the details of events to make the martyrs appear more like Jesus, and made the Roman antagonists increasingly venomous. The motivations of these later authors and editors, who have gone unheralded by history but who shaped our understanding of the world, are arguably more fascinating than the martyrdom stories themselves. No doubt there are kernels of truth at the heart of some of some of the stories, but we do not have evidence of persecution.

”

- Candida Moss: The Myth of Christian Persecution

"Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 14:45:29 -0700

“Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

- T.S Eliot, “East Coker”

"Do not let me hear Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:48:00 -0700

“Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.”

- from T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

"People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:34:56 -0700

““People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. The lady who only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course—and a hopeless one. She’ll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she’ll know mighty well that something is happening to her.””

- Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (via habitofbeing)

Apparently this has gone mini-viral since I last checked my Flannery O’Connor tumblr.

"If you think, as I obviously do, that we have more than enough Sanford-style religion in America,..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 23:08:35 -0700

“

If you think, as I obviously do, that we have more than enough Sanford-style religion in America, then the way he used the megaphone afforded by victory to do a little creative scriptural interpretation illustrates the problem with just bracketing a politician’s private life and saying “vote the party, not the man.” When that private life is already woven into the public narrative, a vote for the man is often a vote to ratify that narrative, and to lend one’s support not only to particular policies, but to a larger view of human behavior and affairs — encompassing, in this case, a theologically bankrupt and socially destructive understanding of what real redemption actually involves.

Yes, politicians are neither angels nor philosophers, and sometimes the political stakes are high enough to warrant voting for a man with Sanford’s baggage and beliefs. There’s no absolute rule for these things; they have to be navigated case by case. But a special election to fill out a term in a reliably-conservative seat seems like exactly the kind of high profile, low stakes contest where it makes sense to put moral and theological principle ahead of party. Unfortunately the voters of South Carolina disagreed.

”

- Mark Sanford’s God - NYTimes.com

"Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind - now for the whole of his life and..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:12:02 -0700

“Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind - now for the whole of his life and unto ages of ages. He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter, steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very moment of his ecstasy.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 12:54:00 -0700

“Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear.
A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.”

- Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles

"As we fear, so we write. Fearful writing is different from covering the bases. It’s building a..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:30:23 -0700

“

As we fear, so we write. Fearful writing is different from covering the bases. It’s building a glass wall around one’s project so that the reader can look at but can’t disturb the pleasant scene within.

It’s no surprise that the snow-globe book doesn’t do much. It can’t. There’s nothing to grab onto, no space for the reader to get into the text and texture of the argument. There may not even be an argument, or a thesis, or a claim, or even a very good, almost entirely coherent half-an-idea.

Academe has been in the snow-globe business for years. The problem here is not the specificity of research but the intention of the finished product. Inward-looking, careful to a fault, our monographs have been content to speak to other monographs rather than to real, human readers.

What happens if we imagine writing—and I include scholarship here—as a tool rather than as an artifact? As a mechanism instead of a brainy objet d’art? What if a scholarly book were, in other words, a machine?

”

- Do We Dare Write for Readers? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"The same aunt who introduced me to my xiao gu gu was the only child old enough to accompany my..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 06:15:12 -0700

“The same aunt who introduced me to my xiao gu gu was the only child old enough to accompany my grandfather on his trip to the schoolteachers’ house. As the story goes, my grandfather held his youngest daughter in one arm and his eldest with the crook of the other. When he handed over the baby, swathed in threadbare hand-me-downs, in exchange for the grain, his other daughter asked, “When is it my turn to be sold?” My grandfather, more leathery and grayed than he should have been at fortysomething, looked down at her, and at the twin bushels of grain in his other arm, and laughed. And then he wept.”

- The One-Child Policy and the Children of China : The New Yorker

"Part of what helped the church to draw in so many people, Wilford argues, has been a strategy that..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 15:16:00 -0700

“

Part of what helped the church to draw in so many people, Wilford argues, has been a strategy that has upended another commonly held assumption about centers and peripheries. While it’s common to speak of contemporary religious life in terms of “seekers,” such a usage typically refers to the individual, not the institution, as the one who is doing the seeking. Wilford suggests that Saddleback has reversed this scenario; by catering to individuals’ tastes, needs and preferences, the church, in effect, becomes the seeker. “It is not a matter of churches presenting their organization to the ‘seeking’ masses,” he writes, “but rather of actively seeking the masses out.”

This insight may press the point about “inversions” a little too hard; after all, if churches are trying to cater to “consumer” tastes, and consumers find the church based on those tastes, aren’t both parties doing at least some seeking, much in the same way consumers and producers in any marketplace seek one another out? Nevertheless, postsuburban megachurches, according to Wilford’s argument, have been more flexible and more receptive to their constituents’ needs and tastes than have their mainline or Catholic brethren, and this flexibility is largely responsible for their enormous growth. At Saddleback, this institutional seeking of the “religious customer” has taken a number of forms, including the development of a vast array of tastes: several alternative rock services, a “Spanish-language adult contemporary service,” an African American gospel service, a service featuring traditional hymns. If this menu seems to echo various spaces of consumption—a mall, perhaps, or a tourist resort that has lots of various dining and activities options—that’s quite literally by design. Wilford notes that Saddleback’s campus is intended to “mirror the architectural design of its surrounding environment,” a landscape well known for the prominence of its shopping spaces and opportunities for consumption. The line between consumption and religion—and, moreover, between what has been “sacralized” and what hasn’t—frankly seems so porous as to be nonexistent.

”

- The Postsuburban Gospel | The Revealer

"To paraphrase Douglass, a writer is worked on by what she works on. If you spend your time raging at..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:23:00 -0700

“

To paraphrase Douglass, a writer is worked on by what she works on. If you spend your time raging at the weakest arguments, or your most hysterical opponents, expect your own intellect to suffer. The intellect is a muscle; it must be exercised. There are cases in which people of great influence say stupid things and thus must be taken on. (See Chait on George Will’s disgraceful lying about climate change.) But you should keep your feuds with Michelle Malkin to a minimum.

In the interest of exercising that intellect, I would add something else: Write about something other than current politics. Do not limit yourself to fighting with people who are alive. Fight with some of the intellectual greats. Fight with historians, scientists, and academics. And then after you fight with them, have the decency to admit when they’ve kicked your ass. Do not use your platform to act like they didn’t. Getting your ass kicked is an essential part of growing your intellectual muscle.

To do all of that, you have to actually be curious. You have to not just want to be heard, but want to listen. Brooks makes the point that the detached writer’s role should be “more like teaching than activism.” I would say that it should be more like learning than teaching. The stuff you put on the page should be the byproduct of all you are taking in — and that taking in should not end after you get a degree from a selective university. Keep going. You must keep going.

”

- How to Be a Political-Opinion Journalist - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic

"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:23:51 -0700

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

"Second: if you’re an academic leader, if you’re the incoming president of a university, then please..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:34:00 -0700

“

Second: if you’re an academic leader, if you’re the incoming president of a university, then please do not tell academics that they can succeed only by walking some narrow tightrope, keeping to an impossibly precise Aristotelian Golden Mean, erring neither on the one side nor on the other. That’s nonsense. All such advice does is to multiply the apparent causes of failure and give people more reasons to blame themselves. Given the apparently crumbling economic foundations of the modern academy, people in that environment are not going to succeed by maintaining “a pleasing uniformity of decent competence.” Instead, if they’re going to succeed at all they’re going to succeed by doing something really extraordinary, by stretching their abilities and pushing against the limits of their disciplines. And there are many ways to do this, not just one: some are in teaching, some in scholarship, some in alternative-academic careers. But in any of these fastidiousness is no virtue. Now is not the time for faint hearts.

No one has ever achieved anything of real value by striving to avoid excesses: there must be a positive goal toward which you strive. That’s why, as I said on Twitter yesterday, it doesn’t help to tell people to avoid this or avoid that. Better, tell them to swing for the fences. We might as well.

”

- A Word of Exhortation Prompted By Yesterday’s Twitter Feed | The American Conservative