May, 2007 Books

Only two, but I expect the numbers to be much better for June.

* The Chosen by Chaim Potok - A beautifully written growing-up story about two teenage, Jewish boys in 1940's New York. Potok includes a good bit of Hassidic Jewish history, which was nice. This was one of the two books that I actually read all the way through for my Jewish studies course. Recommended.

* The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas- Finished the last 100 pp today so I could fit in May's booklist. :) The Musketeers themselves are hilarious and have great dialogue. The fact that the book revolves around court intrigues and extramarital affairs detracted from much of my enjoyment of it, though.

I never posted my March or April booklists. They were rather measly so I'm not going to bother. Most of my reading time was spent slogging through article listings on JSTOR. I probably should have kept an "articles read" list.
One book I did read that I *do* recommend is William Hague's William Pitt the Younger. If you want to know more about Britain's youngest Prime Minister, this is an excellent title to start you off on your studies. Hague writes well, has done thorough research, and gives a mostly comprehensive view of Pitt's life and politics.
For those of you who watched Amazing Grace, this Pitt is the same one in the movie. This biography also includes information on William Wilberforce, of course, since the two were close friends. Did you know that Pitt once dueled with someone on a Sunday, and that when Wilberforce heard of it he was so outraged that he motioned to have Pitt censured in Parliament for doing such a thing on the Sabbath. It didn't end up carrying through (Wilberforce dropped it, for one, after Pitt requested he do so) but it is a rather fascinating look at their rather different lives, no?

Chocolate is good for the memory!

At least, for mice it is. Hopefully it works for humans, too. :-)

It Could Happen Here? It Already Is....

Yesterday I posted about the Swedish government and its successful social program to indoctrinate school children so that 'freedom' primarily means sexual liberty and has nothing to do with religious, political, and economic issues of conscience. You will remember that was a PG 13 read. So is this one.

Here's something a little closer to home:

"I am going to encourage you to have sex and encourage you to use drugs appropriately."

That was the message preached by clinical psychologist Joel Becker at a recent mandatory high school assembly in Boulder, Colorado. Children as young as 14 sat captive in the audience while other school administrators listened in silent consent. (It is revealing to note that Becker is a part of the Lesbian and Gay Psychotherapy Association of Southern California.)

"Now, what is healthy sexual behavior? Well, I don't care if it's with men and men, women and women, men and women -- whatever combination you would like to put together," Becker said in an event labeled, "STDs: Sex, Teens and Drugs."

That's just an excerpt. An outraged parent wanted to read the entire transcript of the remarks to the Boulder Valley School Board. The board complained that the material was 'inappropriate,' which may be the most outrageous thing of all.

You can read more at Barbara Curtis' Mommy Life site.

And while there, you should read this post, too.

Barbara points out some uncomfortable truths:

Parents, you really need to know that there is a strong movement within the education establishment of this country to "teach tolerance" by beginning in kindergarten to normalize homosexuality and heap contempt on parents whose problem is not hatred or intolerance but a strong regard for what is appropriate in public schools.

If this sounds alarmist to you, you might consider that perhaps you need to be alarmed.

One of the favorite responses to those who object to this sort of indoctrination is that it's vitally important to teach children not to bully 'gay' children. Actually, no. It's terribly important to teach children not to bully any other human beings. They don't need specific subcategories, especially not in kindergarten. They need to know that there are NO 'subcategories,' a person is a person is a person, and that's more than enough reason to keep fists and hatred at bay.

Here's Barbara's take:

They say it's in the name of making sure homosexual kids are not bullied. While we can all agree that bullying is intolerable, it's not difficult to see that teaching compassion and kindness and building character in students is what is called for - not encouragement to experiment and pressure to declare their sexual status prematurely or as a ticket to rebellious chic - much like a tattoo.

And make no mistake, this sort of indoctrination widespread and you might be very surprised to learn who buys into it. I was shocked out of my shoes one day a few years back when I was discussing this very topic (because of a related memo a middle school teacher friend of mine had shared with me encouraging teachers to teach a curriculum encouraging children to experiment with their sexuality). I was discussing it with a fairly conservative minister of a fairly conservative congregation, and he dismissed my concerns by saying, "Yes, yes, but we have to teach this in the schools because we can't have children bullying each other."

That's ridiculous. There is absolutely zero reason to assume that this is the only way, and certainly not the best way, to encourage schoolaged children not to beat each other up in the schoolyard. My children are not to bully anybody, and that 'anybody' is as clear as it needs to be.

Barbara says this has been going on in California's public schools for ten years. But the memo my public school friend shared with me? That was in Nebraska. And it was at least ten years ago as well.

The Case of the Raccoon

The Equuschick, being only a small shy person with a fondness for animals, is often mistaken at a first meeting for one of those sweet sorts.

In point of actual fact, The Equuschick is a trouble-maker who takes a great deal of delight in the macabre and derives an extra special satisfaction from igniting chaos.


She took the children on a walk this morning, she did, the sweet little thing. The FYG and the three children who are currently in residence.

There was, you see, this raccoon. JennyAnyDots (who really is a sweet little thing) had found it on her walk earlier in the morning, and the young specimen was of an expired variety. The spirit was gone but the stench remained, etc.

At first all assumed that it was a comparatively innocent case of ingested mole poison and no particular interest was aroused and the viewing of the body was not, The Equuschick hastens to assure you, the purpose of the walk.

But they did happen to notice it as they passed along the trail in the woods, and small children are incapable of passing anything so interesting as a cadaver without pausing to poke it with a stick in horrified fascination.

(The Equuschick hastens to assure all parents that they touched it only with the stick, and that from the beginning The Equuschick forbid them all to touch it with their hands.)

They flipped him over, of course, to see if there was anything interesting on the other side.

Do not concern yourself dear reader, you shall be spared the details, but the raccoon had not died in times of peace. There was quite definitely a bullet involved.

The children squealed in mingled disgust and delight, and began to, how shall we say this? Examine the body more extensively. (All with the stick, of course.)

The Equuschick stood a few paces away herself (not being too fond of the gory details) and as she watched with amusement the pleasure and delight of the adorable blood-thirsty little golden-haired children, an idea occurred to her. She wanted things to be interesting.

It was foolish, perhaps, but The Equuschick couldn't really say she is sorry. The children would have thought of it on their own eventually anyway, and The Equuschick only hastened the inevitable.

Knowing full well the dangerous torrent of imagination and investigation she was about to unleash ( rather looking forward to it, in fact), The Equuschick placed her hands on her hips and solemenly proclaimed- "This, is a murder mystery."

Silence fell suddenly in the leafy woods. The children stood there, open-mouthed, and tangible thrills of rapture, joy, and suspense ran up and down their spines.

'Twas the FYG who spoke first, but even her voice then was hushed. She was beaming head to toe, her face that of a child given a box of candy. "Well, then." said she quietly, "we will solve it."

And so they set about, as the silence suddenly broke and four chattering voices began naming their favoured suspects all at the same time.

The walk was no longer a mere walk, but an investigative tour of every print, leaf, or stain, upon the ground, and the conversation no longer the mere complimenting of the landscape, but rather a busy and a quite logical (with a few exceptions) discussion of events, times, motives, and even firearms. (With what was it shot? Was it a strong shot, so strong in fact that a smaller person could not have wielded the gun without being thrown backward, in which case tell-tale signs of mud and dirt would be found on the clothes?)

The Equuschick, feeling helpful, volunteered to the sleuths that on Tuesday, when The Equuschick had gone trail-riding with Sky on this same path, there had be no raccoon.
The happy children proclaimed that, ergo, the raccoon had met his untimely demise sometime after Tuesday.

But The Equuschick could not feel helpful for long, plus, she felt it necessary to instill in these trusting little sleuths a sense of just how skeptical a detective is called to be.

"How do you know," she asked a little later, "that the raccoon did not die earlier?"

"Because," said one of the more golden-haired ones, "you told us. You wouldn't lie!"

"I would," said the trouble-making Equuschick, "if I were a murderer."

The golden-haired child turned back to look at the The Equuschick with narrowed eyes and a sly grin and crowed "YOU are now a suspect." She promptly added The Equuschick to the list and walked off, while The Equuschick practically hugged herself in her glee.

As it happened though, a second look of the body assured the investigative department of the force that, given the current heat, the death had probably occurred sometime on Wednesday after all. (At the time this goes to press, the status of The Equuschick is still undecided however.)

This conclusion was strengthened, in a fashion, by the children's discovery that the grass around the scene of the crime had been mowed recently, and Grandpa had mowed Wednesday, and Grandpa was a suspect. So reasoned the dear golden-haired children.

Upon the return to the house, every shoe was examined and a golden-haired child announced that it couldn't have been anyone in This house.

At the last consultation, a list of suspects was written up on paper and all were to be questioned.

The case at the moment has been filed away in favor of a romp on the newly purchased water-slide, so who knows how long the sad raccoon must wait for justice, but justice, no doubt, will be done.

News, Views

II favor legal immigration, and lots of it. I'm not a fan of President's Bush amnesty program. I don't think illegal immigrants should be rewarded for breaking the law. But I'm also not in favor of carelessness with facts, which, it seems, Lou Dobbs has been.
Do immigrants bring more leprosy into the country? Yes. Is it something like 7000 cases in three years? No.
Are one third of the prison inmates illegal aliens? No, it's more like 6 percent.
I would presume most violent offenders who turn out to be illegally here would be deported, and I'd like to know the figures on that.

Corporate tax cutting in the EU- something we might try here, given that, according the link, our current corporate tax rate is 35 percent.

The fertility gap between secularists and the religious hovers at around 41 percent, which must feel threatening if you're in the minority. Sorry about that.=)

Evangelical Outpost has an 'Open Letter to Fetal Humans:' It begins:

To my fellow humans who are entering that most precarious stage of human
development. Let me begin by congratulating you on making it through the
embryonic stage. Too many of our fellow humans don’t even make it as far as you
have now. Many died of natural causes. Others were cut down prior to
implantation by an abortifacient. Still others are trapped in the freezers of
IVF clinics, in suspended animation awaiting their fate. You have made it to the
second stage of life. But you're not out of the woods, as they say, until you're
out of the womb. In America there are roughly 250 abortions for every 1000 live
births, which means that you have (all other things being equal) a 1 in 5 chance
of still being aborted. Here are 4 reasons you might be aborted and what you can
do to avoid this gruesome fate.

Common Room Scholars may also find this post on climate models of interest.

So was this post with a list of books that futurists consider must reading.

Economic news is good.

Or maybe not so good.

And maybe it depends on who you are:

According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study released this month, the bottom fifth of families with children, whose average income in 2005 was $16,800, enjoyed a larger percentage increase in income from 1991 to 2005 than all other groups except the top fifth. Despite the recession of 2001, the bottom fifth had a 35 percent increase in income (adjusted for inflation), compared with around 20 percent for the second, third and fourth fifths. (The top fifth had about a 50 percent increase.)

Alleviating poverty requires economic freedom.

and perhaps some honesty:

This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed. But because it depends on—indeed is defined by—describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence—he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment—leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.

Meanwhile, the vilest sort of tyranny continues in China, as the one child policy continues to be enforced, as it has for decades, by forced abortions and sterilizations. Only now NPR finally seems to be noticing.

View of Our Front Gate

These two plants are on the left side of our gate as you come in the drive from the road.Picture is taken from the side, and you can see the corn sprouting just beyond our gate. It's supposed to be 'knee high by the fourth of July.' Obviously, we don't mow much around here, and this does differentiate us from all our neighbors. Thing is, Pip mows the Grandparents lawn and the lawn to the Rattery in town, so this lawn gets short shrift. And besides, we get better wildflowers by not mowing. Spiderwort and bladder campion are just out of range of the camera. Campion is showier at night, when the blossoms open.

The hanging basket came from a thrift shop having an 'all you can fit in a box for two dollars' sale. I got so much stuff I consider this to be free. In the hanging basket I have snapdragons, sweet alyssum, and moss roses or portulaca. The snaps weren't doing so well and the marigolds formerly in that basket died, so I added the portulaca later. It should do much better and I should have several more blooms very soon. It's very sunny there, and dry, too, and both those things suit portulaca.

Here is a frontal view of the planter below that basket. I love this. It's an old chicken waterer missing its top. I was hoping to find one of these and have been looking for a while and finally located one (gratis) at Granny Tea's homestead place. I had two at our house in Colorado, but we forgot to bring them with us when we packed up and moved.=( I have been kicking myself ever since.

I had flowers in them much like these, only I think my pansies might have been yellow. This is lobelia, johnny jump ups and alyssum. You either like alyssum or you don't, and usually for the same reasons either way- its smell, its spreading and encroaching habits, and its persistence.

The johnny-jump-ups like shade, and the basket above provides shade during the hottest parts of the day. Also whenever I water the basket, the excess flows down into the chicken waterer.




Close-up of flowers in the chicken waterer. This one you can enlarge by clicking on it- which I recommend.

In the language of flowers:
Alyssum means worth beyond beauty
Poor little lobelia means malevolence
Johnny-Jump-ups, also known by the prettier name of 'hearts-ease' means thought, like the larger pansy.

I don't know what sort of Marigold I have in the basket on the other side of the gate. A regular Marigold signifies grief, so we should have bucket loads of those.
The African Marigold signifies Vulgar minds, and I hope we have none of those here.
The French Marigold represents Jealousy.

This can be confusing, because the lowly (and very easy to grow) petunia, which I have growing in two other containers, can mean Resentment, Anger, or Your Presence Soothes Me. This last seems mutually exclusive of the first two, don't you think?

The snapdragon means presumption, according to one site, desire at another. I presume the site claiming it meant desire desired to sell more snapdragons.

The moss rose is a confession of love.

I confess I am immensely fond of my chicken waterer flower pot, but it's really kind of pathetic how much pleasure it gives me when compared to Mrs. Whaley's Charleston Garden.

I also have several potted geraniums, red, pink, and white, in several sunny windows. At least, the blossoms on the various plants will be red, pink, and white when they recover from their latest round with being completely neglected and ignored until all that was left of them was a green leaf or two.

It seems fitting that we have so many, as geranium, it seems, means:
Stupidity and Folly.

Ob la di, Ob la dah....

Panhandling for Politics

This is a few weeks old, but it's so rich with irony that I have to share.
Gryffilion Darkblade found himself accompanying some college classmate recently on an interesting venture. The SDS (Students For a Democratic Society) was going to be panhandling in Colonial Williamsburg, begging for money as a form of political protest because:

Apparently, the City--via the Police Department--gives bus tickets the homeless people that beg for money from the tourists that are constantly milling through the Historic Area--tickets to another town that is as far away as possible. This infuriated my friend. "That's just WRONG," she said vehemently. "The city should be appropriating funds to give them food and shelter, not paying them to go away."

Whether the city should be appropriating funds for any of these things is a different question. This post is about the attitudes of the SDS towards those homeless and the rest of us. It's heartless, selfish, socially irresponsible or something to object to having the homeless, many of whom are mentally ill, accost you on your vacation and demand money from you. Because since you are on vacation, obviously you can afford to help, and having the ability to give the unemployed a hand-out obviously means you have the responsibility to do this.

Unless, as Gryffilion learned, you are an enlightened member of the SDS protesting the heartless treatment of the homeless and demonstrating your solidarity with them by panhandling for money (under false pretences, too, I might add. They were going to claim they were collecting money for a 'Food, Not Bombs' fund). Because since they'll be getting this money for free, won't they have the responsibility to give it to the homeless? Well, no. So what were they doing with this money collected in protest of the sad condition of homelessness? Your thinking is, no doubt, not as elastic as that of members of SDS, as Gryffilion learned:

Naive idealist that I am, I assumed that the panhandled money she would be receiving would go towards some sort of program or activity to help the homeless, or at least towards a conference during the SDS convention focused specifically on homelessness. Not so. They were going to use the money to feed and house the SDS kids coming to Virginia from other states for the convention here in town.

But that's okay, because the SDS convention was going to work to help get people involved in the community. More active. Active, how? 'Helping them (these vaguely specified 'people' to communicate with local government.' Well, how?

Don't nitpick.

Come again?

The library recently got a letter from the office of a government aid program for underprivileged families. They're instituting a new program within their program: they want to encourage their families to visit library story times or actually show up for Doctor and Dentist appointments. So anytime a family in this program visits the library for story time, they'll present us with a form to sign proving that they were there.

At least, I think that's what this part of the letter meant:
"We have enclosed a sample of the form, to verify their attendance, we will provide them with."

*pats GrannyTea's hand, because I know she's hyperventilating over that sentence*

Well, hello.

The Equuschick has been rather absent of late, having first spent a week out of state for a wedding and then a week here with the company, managing both on a minimum of sleep and a maximum of coffee and chocolate.

The results were, um, interesting. She believes she is the only person she knows of who has attempted, after midnight, to take a tylenol while chewing gum. She swallowed the gum.

That last occurred on an evening famous for making idiots out of everyone trying to function at the time, but tragically, the funniest line of all cannot possibly be explained to anyone who wasn't there.

See look, she'll show you, and you won't get it.

"Because they're all purple linens."

Not much of a humourous ring to it all on its little lonesome, but to the three people who were there and followed at all the discombobulated, circular, and totally confused conversation in which that statement made its debut, it was hilarious.

(It was only a couple of mornings later when The Equuschick started hitting the bride over the head with the pillow and telling her she should have eloped and The Equuschick could have flown out and signed everything in a jeans and a sweater. The bride only groaned, as she curled up in the embryo position and said, for the fiftieth time that week, "I had no idea what I was getting into.")

Anyway.

The Equuschick is now weaning herself off the coffee, and is trying to convince her body that iced tea is an adequate substitute.

She was actually convinced to go off the Dr. Pepper too, and then jdavidb presented some of his Dublin Dr. Pepper and well, that didn't last very long. She only had half of one, but still.

Her plan for the coming few weeks is to remember how to sleep.


Speaking of which, she must go tuck herself in.

Weeds? What Weeds?

This container (and welcome sign) is outside the gate as you enter our drive from the road. Click on the picture to enlarge.
In the container- snapdragons, allyssum, marigolds, and a geranium in back that hasn't grown large enough to see yet. On the welcome sign- a finger print I fear was and is on my camera lens.

The Dangers of 'Equality'

We mentioned Fahrenheit 451 in a post below, and I just read a post at LaShawn Barber's blog and am reminded of it again.
Questions like this are supposed to be racist and/or ambiguous:

While operating at a fire, Capt. Green, the commander of the Ladder Company 999, was sent by Chief Brown to locate the exact location of the fire. The fire building was two stories in height with a basement. Capt. Green found that the fire was located in one corner at the rear of the basement. The best way for Capt. Green to write this information in a fire report upon returning to the firehouse was as follows:

A) “The fire was located on the lower level, in the rear.”
B) “The fire was located in the southeast corner of the lower level.”
C) “The fire was located in the southeast corner of the basement.”
D) “The fire was located in the rear of the basement.”

I am not a firefighter, have no training in the field and less experience than none, and I was able to instantly spot the correct answer. This is not because I am brilliant but because common sense indicates the best answer will be the least ambiguous one, and based on the information provided here that's C. The DOJ is suing the FDNY- that's the Department of Justice which feeds itself at the public trough of my money and yours, and this is what they think is an appropriate way to spend that money- lowering the bar so that fire fighters are less educated, less logical, and less capable of doing their jobs.

I'm sickened, but this has been going on a very long time. The only real exposure I've had to the fire department (other than school field trips) is from the time in high school when our Sunday School teacher was a fire chief. He was frustrated because the physical requirements for firefighters were being reduced so that more women could qualify. While formerly all fire fighters had been required to be able to lift 200 pounds and have a certain level of stamina, now firefighters didn't have to have the same level of endurance or strength. Unfortunately, neither the weight of many victims of fire nor the fires themselves complied with this new version of reality.

We do not need to lower the entrance bar. If you're not strong enough, quick enough, or smart enough to figure this out, you need to find a different line of work.

In Fahrenheit 451 we learn that the firefighter's new mission of burning the books (which followed after people stopped reading anyway) was founded on the premise that reading books might "allow one person to excel intellectually, spiritually, and practically over others and so make everyone else feel inferior." The schools exist not to foster excellence, but conformity, homogenization.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no moutains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

So says Beatty, the fire chief in Fahrenheit 451. And apparently so says our government.

Updated to note: I put 'equality' in scare quotes because this isn't really about equality at all. This is egalitarianism, which is something altogether different.

Ohhhh, the Pain

In Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451 books are illegal and firemen no longer put out fires, they start them by burning illegal books (and all books are illegal). In Kansas City at least one bookstore owner doesn't sell books, he burns them. Unable to sell or give away his collection of 20,000 books, the owner has taken to staging a monthly book burning:

On Sunday, Wayne began putting them to the torch, tossing scores of books into a burning cauldron to protest what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word.

“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.
[ ... ]
He said he had noticed a decline in customers and perceived more people getting information from television or the Internet. He pointed to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, which found that less than half of adult respondents reported reading for pleasure, a decline from almost 57 percent in 1982.

In the chapter called The Hearth and the Salamander in Fahrenheit 451 the fire chief explains how this happened- it was simply the natural progression of things. People themselves had stopped bothering to read long before the government got involved.
According to this Spark Notes summary:

...photography, film, and television made it possible to present information in a quickly digestible, visual form, which made the slower, more reflective practice of reading books less popular. Another strand of his argument is that the spread of literacy, and the gigantic increase in the amount of published materials, created a pressure for books to be more like one another and easier to read (like Reader’s Digest condensed books).
[...]
...eventually the public’s demand for uncontroversial, easy pleasure caused printed matter to be diluted to the point that only comic books, trade journals, and sex magazines remained.

It was an easy step from there to burning up the books.
And this is so apt a description of the world today that it gives me stomach cramps. Stem the tide of barbarianism and encroaching darkness- read a book and make it harder than the one you read before. Read slowly, reflectively.

And while I can sympathize with that bookstore owner's frustration with the world of non-readers by choice, I can't help thinking that it's not the non-readers he's punishing. It's people like me who read about his book burning and experience genuine pain over it.

God and Vending Machines

(This is another adaptation from an older post, prompted by a recent experience)

Recently a professing Christian told me that God had really blessed her because a piece of electronic equipment she bought at the store was not only on sale, but some employee had priced the box wrong, so they got it for nearly half the price they expected to pay. That sounded more like theft to me, but then I'm not part of the 'name it and claim it' "faith tradition," and so many teachings and practices coming from there actually shock me more than anything I've heard from a pagan/heathen unbeliever.

On another occasion she laughingly said something else that startled me into asking if she was practicing Christianity or witchcraft. I forget exactly what she said, but it had to do with stating something as a fact that wasn't really true. When I looked at her doubtfully, she said, "I'm not really lying. I'm speaking the truth into existence." She believed that by her words she could manipulate God into compliance.

A third example of this sort of thinking was related to me by the betrayed wife of a man who left her with multiple children (many of them adopted) for another woman. He lived adulterously for some time, waffling between doing the right thing and returning home (he acknowledged that this was the right thing to do) and living in sin with his paramour. And during this time in his life he carried around a little bottle of 'anointing oil' he'd picked up at the nearby Christian Kitsch store. He did this so that if he met anybody in need of prayer he could anoint them biblically and pray over them. Again, that's not Christianity. That's witchcraft. He wasn't interested in submitting to God and actually being obedient to God. He was interested in manipulating God's power into a tool he could use- while going right ahead with his own willful, sinful life. Sort of like Simon the Sorcerer.

He and his paramour also attended the same church his betrayed wife and children attended, and even went forward together, hand in hand, at 'altar calls' to pray over the penitent sinners. At no time did his church leadership confront him or the woman living with him about their behavior.

Shades of 1 Corinthians 5.

Those who hold to the 'name it and claim it' brand of theology, who believe that an error made by a store employee is God blessing you rather than an opportunity to practice honesty and bless the store owners are people who believe God's function in their lives is much like that of a giant vending machine in the sky. They plug in the order for what they want (or say the right words, and wave around the right oil), and God tumbles out the material item they desire.

If the praise songs your church sings are the kind where you could interchange the name of Jesus, the name of your favorite rock group, or the name of your lover without any noticeable difference in the meaning of the song- that is not an indication of a deep spiritual faith. And for some reason this seems to go along with the 'name it and claim it' brand of religion. I think it's because if your religious doctrine holds that God's power is there for your manipulation and physical enrichment, you don't take his Power, Majesty, and the 'omni' attributes (omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence) very seriously, preferring the lighter and fluffier version of "Jesus is my boyfriend and he wants to make me rich."


Where these people hear strong expressions of faith, I hear strong expressions of self-centered, materialistic, me, me, me centered, shallowness.

I've heard a lot of very good lessons about guarding our hearts, guarding our thoughts, guarding our speech, and this is true (another word for this is self-discipline. What we also need to guard against are the influences that make us complacent in our sin. We also need to guard against those influences that appeal primarily and sometimes only to the flesh.



As a culture, it seems to me, we Americans have a preoccupation with self-gratification, the quicker the better, and this means we are led by the nose (and gut and loins) and it is our feelings doing the leading. We live in a society that wants quick fixes and convenience, and so we do too. We want fast food, fast service, and fast answers and we want them from God just as much as we want them from anywhere else.

We need to understand that we are here on earth to serve and please God, not to be served and pleased by God.
We need to understand that how we feel about something is not a good indication of its rightness or wrongness.

Rather than merely following (being led by) our emotions, we need to learn to guard our hearts precisely because emotions are powerful, can be intoxicating, and are not the best guidelines.

And somehow we need to grow up enough to understand that it's not always easy, but doing the right thing rarely is the easiest path. So long as we view God as a big vending machine in the sky whose primary function in our lives is to gratify our whims and wishes, we are not only defenseless in this guarding of our hearts, but we are our own worst enemies.


2 Peter 2 says: The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished:
10 But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government [self-control, external discipline]. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, ...
12 But these,...
shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceiving while they feast with you;
14 Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children:
15 Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, ...
17 These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever.

When we view God as our vending machine, when we think our purpose on this earth is to be happy, we are exercising our hearts in covetous, greedy practices. We will never fully experience the deeper spiritual blessings of a mature Christian walk. Happiness is not the goal- it is a side effect. The goal is not me, me, me, what I want, when I want it, putting myself first. The goal is loving and serving God, the creator of the universe.

One of Life's Little Mysteries

Why is it that children think that if they wake you up:
1. by standing very close, breathing loudly, and staring intently OR
2. By whispering VERY LOUDLY (sibilants hissing like a broken gas main), "MOM? ARE YOU AWAKE? MOM? MOM?"

That this is somehow an altogether different category of Waking Mother Up then tapping Mom on the shoulder and saying, "Mom? Sorry to wake you, but I have a question?"

It's like that hissing thing isn't supposed to count as Waking Mother Up at all.

Curiosities

According to Yahoo, "easy banana bread" was one of today's top searches. I wonder why...

Not so Agarian Comedy

Frugal housewives know that when you go to the grocer's and buy ham hocks, they look kinda like this:

And according to Answers.com:

The hock is the lower portion of a hog's hind leg, made up of meat, fat, bone, gristle and connective tissue. In the market, ham hocks are often cut into 2- to 3-inch lengths. Most have been cured, smoked or both, but fresh hocks can sometimes also be found. Ham hocks are generally used to flavor dishes such as soups, beans and stews that require lengthy, slow cooking

And they are very good for flavoring a nice big pot of beans. They are also good with greens, and if you have German heritage, you've probably had them with sauerkraut and potatoes.

Some people do not buy their ham hocks from the grocery store (and yes, I know some of you do not buy them at all, or eat them either, but this is my story). Some people get a phone call from a farmer friend who fattened up a pig or two for you without mentioning it and then took it to the butcher and told you to call the meat locker to tell them how you wanted your meat cut. And the meat locker people say, "do you want the ham hocks?" and you think of ham hocks and greens or ham hocks and beans and say, "of course we do."
But what the meat locker people do not tell you is that their ham hocks are going to look something more like this:

Except not nearly so pretty.

So, imagine what happens when the mother of the house is thinking of the ham hocks cut into two inch pieces she used to buy at the grocery store back in the Day when the family was so poor they ate liver, ham hocks, and beans seventy two different ways, but the daughters of the house do not, any of them, remember this because back in that day they none of them were old enough to cook. So the mother, all unknowing, tells the daughters, even more unknowing, to set the hocks out to defrost and then put them in the roaster on low for several hours. The mother, of course, is picturing the first sort of ham hocks. The daughters are having to deal with the second set.

The daughters of the house, not remembering the ham hocks their mother used to buy, follow those instructions while wondering if the mother of the house has lost her everloving mind because this is nasty and disgusting and will take weeks to cook, not hours, and who would eat half a hog haunch anyway? They are a family of nine, after all, not ninety. But they do as they are bid and put the ham hocks (both of the monstrous things) in the roaster with sauerkraut and all its juices and it cooks and cooks and cooks and cooks.

And cooks.

And cooks.

And the daughters of the house inform the mother of the house that the meat is still tough and still raw in the middle and is not falling off the bones as she has promised them it would and furthermore, they think it is disgusting and unpalatable and they don't feel like eating anything after all, perhaps ever. Or maybe they will become vegetarians.

The mother says that perhaps the hocks weren't defrosted all the way through, but she doesn't understand it because they defrosted a very long time and have been cooking for six hours now and really ought to be done. Maybe, she suggests, if you stir them.

The daughters look blankly at the mother. Stir them? Stir them? How, they inquire, can two prehistoric sized pig drumsticks be stirred? They are the size of dinosaur bones. What's to stir?

And the mother opens her eyes wide and finally goes and looks in the roaster. Upon careful reflection over what she finds there, she orders four pizzas. And the daughters decide they are quite hungry after all. And the company, whom we have not heretofore mentioned but they were there all along, the company are too polite to say what they are probably really thinking but their relief is palpable and they laugh nervously when the Mother remembers aloud that last time they came she fed them frozen quiche (but not on purpose).

The ham hocks cook the rest of the night and by morning the meat is falling off the bone, salty but edible. We The daughters put a considerable portion in a crockpot of baked beans and this dish were the hit of the potluck on Sunday Afternoon.
We had good sandwiches from the meat on Sunday night.
And Monday morning.
And Monday night.
And Tuesday morning.
And Tuesday night it made a very good casserole with potatoes and sauerkraut and swiss cheese.

And we still have at least 16 tightly packed cups of meat in the second largest bowl we own in the refrigerator, looking pinkly at us every time we open the door.

And next time the meat locker asks us if we want the ham hocks, we will know enough to request that they be cut into two or three inch pieces. Or maybe we will just skip that step and go directly to the pizza.

Have you ever noticed...

That the majority of pop rock songs have pretty much the same basic chord progressions? Hmmm.

Carnivals

Beverly at About.com hosted this week. There are many, many worthy entries and if I listed them all I would just be recreating another carnival of homeschooling. That said, I especially liked Dana's discussion of how education became indoctrination.

I like the free resources from the National Gallery of Art, and Barb tells others how to use this program.

And I LOVED this comic about socialization.

The Make it From Scratch carnival is also up.

Our company is gone and I miss them.

At 1 a.m. the last night of their visit my friend and I looked at each other blearily and agreed that next time we got together, we would put ourselves in bed at promptly eleven each night.

It was rather dismaying that when younger siblings heard about this plan, they simply guffawed at us. I don't suppose we have a very good track record at that sort of thing.

CArnival of the REcipes

Farmer's Market Edition- and YUM!

What We're Listening To

Josh Groban in the laundry room (Equuschick).

Simon and Garfunkel and the Sound of Silence in the Common Room upstairs (Pipsqueak).

Vivaldi followed by the Henry V soundtrack in the kitchen (JennyAnyDots and HG).

Me humming occasional snatches of hymns in my room.

The youngest two sing a song the FYG made up as they fold laundry in the living room ("I wanta be a bird, bird, bird, and fly up in the sky, sky, sky, and never come down, down, down, and touch the ground.")

It's a little noisy, but that's how the housework around here gets done. It's our version of 'whistle while you work.'

The Interested Life

Title taken from this post and especially this point:

Live an interested life. I cannot put this in bold enough face. You are interpreting the world to your child. Is it fascinating for you? Are you engaged in creating, in thinking, in knowing people? Do you make music, take pictures, cook, teach yourself to sew, hike someplace new, learn to fish, eat at a new restaurant, take the back way into town? Are you reading about the history of mental illness, repairing furniture, learning to oil paint? *Show* your child how interesting the world is, and they will love to learn.

Engage. Do not sit back and wait for something to interest you enough to force your attention- be in charge of your attention. Direct it. Think about things. Don't be a passive recipient. Life is not a spectator sport. It's your responsibility to be interested, not entertained.

I combined that personal responsibility of living an interested life with being a mom by parenting my way, not by modeling my parenting on some glossy, Madison Avenue collection of advertisements disguised as a parenting magazine. I included my children in my studies of the things that interested me. Once I learned to think outside the covers of those glossy, Madison Ave driven parenting magazines, I was able to live and parent far more richly than ever.

Some of my acquaintances thought it was important for their children to spend most of their days with people who devoted the entire day to preschool level games, activities, and stories. They thought it was odd, even selfish and slightly neglectful of me to decide my little children would get involved in things like birdwatching, Shakespeare, calligraphy, or seashell collecting because that's what interested me. They thought I was dragging them along in the wake of my own interests when I should be sending them to school so they could have the interests they already had fed.

I worried about that. A little. But I kept on, keeping in mind that I was raising my children to some day be adults, not to be perpetual youngsters. Years later I can tell you that my children are all their own people and they are not my clones. They are not all interested in the same things I am. Somebody asked me once how I encouraged that and I said I didn't, it just happened. They are their own people whether you want that to happen or not, but it usually does take a bit of parental oversight (especially in this culture) for them to be interesting people capable of providing their own mental stimulation. So I think I shortchanged myself just a bit. They are their own people, certainly, with or without you, sooner or later. But I think Anna (above) makes a good point when she says you are interpreting the world for your child. I learned from my own childhood that the world is a fascinating place and that nearly any topic can be fodder for intellectual stimulation. Since I interpreted the world as an interesting place, my children saw it that way and found things to interest them beyond the confines of a 4 year old's limited experience. Not everybody does.

One evening at our house the children were occupied variously- paperdolls, puzzles, reading, sorting antique buttons into various patterns on the floor, listening to music, the usual, and a family member visiting us told me, "People just don't live like this. The twentieth century hasn't gotten to your house yet, it's like 1830 around here," and he took himself off to Hardees to get a newspaper, some intrusively bright lights, blaring music, and a package of curly fries, because in our house of several thousand books, dozens of tapes and CDs of an educational nature, collections to browse through (buttons, antique hymnals, rock, sea-shells, art books...) games, and more, he claimed that his brain was atrophying and that he was 'starving for stimulation.' The world is not something you discover by turning on the radio or picking up a newspaper (Thomas Merton). I like both these things, but if you can't be stimulated without them, your thought life needs some work.

I hear some reference about the need for more mental stimulation from people who really mean that they need somebody else to do the work for them.

And the reason they need somebody else to do the work of entertaining them may just be because their ability to provide their own intellectual resources was crippled in preschool by allowing pen and paper academic work to encroach on their free play:

Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.
“...By stressing the basics — reading and writing — and testing like crazy you reduce the level of cognitive stimulation. Children have the facts but they are not thinking very well,” says Adey. “And they are not getting hands-on physical experience of the way materials behave.”

Ginsburg says parents too can do their bit. “When did children stop playing with mud, plasticine and Meccano and start playing with X-boxes and computer games?” she asks. Parents should switch off the television and “sit children around the dinner table to debate issues such as ‘What should we have done about the whale in the Thames?’ ” says Adey.

Children, said an anonymous commenter to post of mine, "can't learn to reason about their world if they never interact with it. Watching Baby Einstein doesn't count.

Worse, without play, and with only a simulated world, it changes their expectations for entertainment and gratitude. They don't want to work hard, they don't learn the value of mastery. They learn how to cheat or mimic their friends who cheated to learn a special move or unlock a special key, but they didn't actually experience having to get better on their own."

As a friend once told me, she is "convinced that much of boredom in life is due to an appalling lack of interest in the wonders of human talents and creation around us!" They do not know how to entertain or educate themselves.

Children don't come this way. They come craving knowledge almost as much as they crave food. And just as you can ruin a child's ability and desire to try new foods by giving them too much junk food too often, you can blunt the sharp edge of their appetite for knowledge, their willingness to see the world as an interesting place, by giving them too much packaged entertainment. Children who are watching television for three hours a day are spending three hours a day doing something other than mucking about in puddles, scrambling through the bushes, sliding down hills, tramping through mud, skipping, hopping, and climbing, shimmying up trees, playing in the sandbox, going backward down the slide, and playing Poohsticks.

Include an hour a day for video games, time spent at the computer, and time in the car being transported from one organized extra curricular event to another, and it all adds up to less and less time spent on the vitally important activity of making mudpies. If we truly understood how important this play time is, we'd be as likely to let a day pass without letting our children be the little mudpuppies God meant them to be as we would to let an entire day pass without feeding them.

Charlotte Mason, writing after 'The Great War' when crippled and seriously injured soldiers were trying to pick up the pieces of their lives pointed out that "many of our young men and women go about more seriously maimed than these. They are devoid of intellectual interests, history and poetry are without charm for them, the scientific work of the day is only slightly interesting, their 'job' and the social amenities they can secure are all that their life has for them."

She considered it be a severe handicap to have any day where one neither nourished nor used ones intellect. It's not that nothing is ever inherently boring. I don't find it particularly stimulating to scrub a toilet or fold dish towels. There's nothing mentally engaging about sweeping up dog hair- or about a dozen routine tasks one might find in any job, no matter how much status it has. The key is to make yourself responsible for the life of your own mind, to work on the inner life, inner resources, and enriching that inner life we all share. Bring it above and beyond the level of an old Elvis Presley movie.

Much of this post gleaned from these previous posts:
'Only the boring are bored'.
'Why kids can't think.
Maimed Existence
Desperate housewives Employees
The Life of the Mind
Share Your Passions
Rewards and Prizes in Education
Why Children Don't Think

It Could Happen Here

It's hard to make these calls for other families, but I would consider the following to be a PG-13 read. The balance between innocence and ignorance is a delicate question, and while I am inclined to favor innocence, I recognize my culture is not, and this means assaults on that innocence are everywhere. I am not sure it's possible to equip oneself for self defense without some ideas about where the attack is coming from, hence the post below. Parents will need to make their own decisions, as ever.

Having heard Sweden held up as a model from most of my left leaning friends, reading the following explains why, and tells me something about what direction the crowd is pushing. Knowing that direction helps us to push back most effectively.

In a kindergarten in Stockholm, the parents were encouraged by the preschool teachers - apparently ideological pioneers - to equip their sons with dresses and female first names. There are now weeks in some places when boys HAVE TO wear a dress.

“My 13-year-old son had ‘equality day’ [in school] and had to listen to a transvestite. I have myself never encountered or talked to one during my considerably longer life. Why is this important? Today’s children know nothing about the crimes of Communism, but everything about the sexual orientation of transvestites.”

This last comment is quite literally true. A poll carried out on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag, although 95 percent knew of Auschwitz. “Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the findings,” Ander Hjemdahl, the founder of UOK, told website The Local. In the nationwide poll, 43 percent believed that Communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives. The actual figure is estimated at 100 million. 40 percent believed that Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world. Mr. Hjemdahl states several reasons for this massive ignorance, among them that “a large majority of Swedish journalists are left-wingers, many of them quite far left.”

“The State,” in the words of Ingvar Carlsson, then Minister of Education, “is concerned with morality from a desire to change society.” Mr. Carlsson, who was Swedish Prime Minister as late as 1996, has also stated that “School is the spearhead of Socialism” and that it “teaches people to respect the consensus, and not to sabotage it.”

As C.S. Lewis said, "C. S. Lewis wrote, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Successful indoctrination includes the redefinition of words and terms, as any careful reader of 1984 knows.

“Indeed, the word ‘freedom’ in Swedish has come to mean almost exclusively sexual freedom, product perhaps of an unadmitted realization that it is absent, or unwanted, elsewhere. Through sex instruction at school for the young, and incessant propaganda in the mass media for the older generations, most of Sweden has been taught to believe that freedom has been achieved through sex. Because he is sexually emancipated, the Swede believes that he is a free man, and judges liberty entirely in sexual terms. (…) The Swedish government has taken what it is pleased to call ‘the sexual revolution’ under its wing. Children are impressed at school that sexual emancipation is their birthright, and this is done in such a way as to suggest that the State is offering them their liberty from old-fashioned restrictions.”

I think it's a good idea to read the rest of this post and think about what you learned in school. Think about how much waking time children actually spend at home compared to school and daycare. Think about the shift that occurred somewhere whereby the school and not parents now has the authority to determine if an absence is 'excused' or not. Think about what would happen if you walked down to the local school and actually tried to have some influence on the curriculum being taught to your children.

I'm reminded of the time I was babysitting a young man in public school who told me that it would be wrong to chop down a tree to save your life if you were stranded on a desert island, but it was reasonable to make it illegal to say 'homosexuality is a sin' on the radio, because that would be discrimination.

Here's another good read on where we're heading.

Hawks and Doves

Yesterday we returned our friends to the airport, which is always depressing but especially so in the case of these dear people. Rick Saenz says the difference between true hospitality and entertaining is that real hospitality involves meeting a need you can't meet for yourself. With these friends, we provided the house-room, and they provided the hospitality, because by coming to see us and blessing us with their special brand of comfort, we surely felt like they were meeting a need, sating something we've been hungering after.

We, all sad and forlorn, watched them walk away at the airport. We decided to go pay a visit to the airport USO. We usually do when we are at the airport. We pick up a couple of sodas and a snack, leave a donation for the care and feeding of the active duty military, and sometimes play a game or two while there.

We hadn't been thinking about it being Memorial Day weekend, more shame to us, and the program playing on the television was a memorial to the recent war dead in Arington cemetary. An older soldier, grizzled, bald, cammies faded, looking tough and battle hardened sat in a chair wiping a tear from time to time. The USO volunteer started to clear a space at a table because we were standing, the two girls with me and I, and thinking it was because there were no seats, the older solder started to get up to give us his chair. We assured him that we were only standing because we wanted to be. He returned to his program and his private grief. I thought of the tendency among certain pacifists to dehumanize those who serve in the military, to recreate them as selfish, coldhearted, or blood thirsty monsters- and yes, this does happen- and I was very, very angry.

The USO volunteer was going through tissue at the rate of about a box every fifteen minutes. The HG looked at me as I stood rooted to the spot, swallowing hard as I watched the program where an actress quoted from the letter a mother had left at Arlington for her 20 year old son who died in Afghanistan. The HG suggested we leave, and leave soon, or I was going to be too weepy to see to walk to the van.

We gathered our things to go, leaving a larger and more inadequate than usual donation in the USO box. And I thought of this post, which has been languishing in my drafts file for months because I don't really know how to say what I want to say with it, and sometimes I don't even know what it is I want to say.

A while back Joe Taylor at Evangelical Outpost had an interesting post on the Iraq War and polls:

1) The object in war is to impose your will on your enemy.
(2) The will of our enemy is that we leave Iraq as soon as possible.
(3) Sixty five percent of the American public think we should leave Iraq within a year.
(4) The enemy has imposed its will on the majority of the American people.
(5) Ergo, the anti-U.S. insurgents have won the war in Iraq.

And so did Chuck Colson (I didn't go looking for these, they just came up, one in my inbox and one when I was searching for a totally unrelated post):

For better or for worse, the United States made promises and commitments to the Iraqi people. So the question now is this: Is it morally acceptable for U.S. forces to leave Iraq in the midst of the bloodshed?
I know what I’m about to say is not going to be a popular thing. But to pick up and leave would break the promises we have made to the Iraqi people, would leave hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians defenseless, would lead to massive chaos and bloodshed, and would be an act of moral dishonor. It would be akin to what the Allies did after World War II, when they abandoned Eastern Europe to the Soviets and returned millions of Russian refugees and POWs to lands occupied by the Red Army—even though the Allies knew that, for many, it meant death and, for the rest, tyranny. That was one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the West—an abandonment of our most fundamental moral principles.

Having quoted those, I have to say I both agree and I remain in a deep state of unknowing- I don't know what the right thing to do is, I don't know what the best thing to do is, and I hate war with all the passion of any military spouse, which is a greater and deeper hate than any professing pacifist can ever know. But there are worse things than war.

I come from a family with conflicting and proud traditions of both bizarre, leftwing liberals and strong patriotism and military service. Last week my mother's cousin died of cancer. He was a highly decorated Viet Nam Vet. I have relations who have marched for peace in San Francisco. Our previous minister is a diehard pacifist of the sort who believes it would be right to stand by and not lift a violent finger in defense of his wife or children if they were being attacked in front of him. We disagree with him, but we love him.

So I can take a lot of dissent under my belt, although hypocrisy really yanks my chain- as in, those who supported Clinton's non UN sanctioned military action in Kosovo have no standing for decrying Bush's actions on the basis that he didn't have UN Support.

I can even sympathize with some aspects of the pacifist mindset. I am an isolationist at heart, but my brain recognizes that we don't live in world where isolationism is possible. Personally, my preference would be to pull all our troops home, station them around our borders to keep bad guys out, use the Special Forces as a sort of Freedom Train/ Underground Railroad force to help oppressed people to immigrate legally, and let the rest of the world figure out how to get along without us. Then when they've killed each other off (and in the case of Europe, depopulated their countries due to the birth dirth), move in and recolonize. Except the Muslims will have repopulated all of Europe by then, so let's just stay home.

I am not at all in favor of war- no military spouse ever is. I understand the wishful thinking behind the idea that we should 'give peace a chance.' I also understand that it is just wishful thinking. I sympathize with those who didn't vote for Bush and now are 'stuck' with him. I didn't vote for Clinton, and I got 'stuck' with him, and I know how infuriating that is and how frustrated, voiceless, and powerless it makes one feel.

The war is personal for us, but it's much more personal for others. We have cried our eyes out over a personal friend going to nasty places to fight nasty odds. His wife described what he was going to be experiencing as something like the odds the Fellowship faced when surrounded by orcs in the Mines of Moria.
We have cried our eyes out over a young man I used to babysit being sent to Kuwait.
We cried our eyes out over another young man I watched grow from -boy-child to man, who it seemed was barely shaving when he was sent to Kuwait and then Iraq while his wife was pregnant with what we and they hoped would be their first surviving child after a heart-wrenching miscarriage. It wasn't. She went into labor alone and delivered a child who lived a few hours and died. Our young man experienced the anguish of receiving a phone call from the doctor asking his opinion on life support for his daughter while he was actually hunkered down under hostile fire, because his wife was unconscious and couldn't give hers. He asked the doctor if this decision could wait until he was no longer being shot at.

When this war began I cried my eyes out because boys I used to babysit, boys that are my daughters' peers, boys I fed on cookies and milk and scolded when they were naughty, boys I love like sons, are now old enough to go to war, and off to war they went. I remember watching news footage of a battleship during the Gulf War and having the shock of recognizing one of the Marines on board as a friend from our church at our last base.

I was worried about going into this war for all these reasons. But I had others as well. I believe the American public is fickle and trained on sit coms and television dramas, they are impatient for a speedy resolution and consider anything less a failure. They have no stomach for sticking it out and enduring through the long haul. Before we ever put a boot on the ground in Iraq I complained to friends that many of the same people so eagerly shouting for my friends and loved ones to go to war would be some of the loudest voices insisting that the war was a failure and we must come home before it was over, and it made me sick.

I don't really buy the argument that if we bring the troops home now (whevever and wherever 'now' is) we will be making a mockery of the sacrifices those who have already given their lives have made, because that's begging the question. That's a bad reason. If the cause is wrong (say, a German citizen in WWII was saying that), the country has already made a mockery of those sacrifices and throwing good lives away after good is no way to honor anybody. But I'm not convinced this cause was wrong. I don't believe these soldiers have died for nothing. I suspect that those who do think so are victims of biased news reporting from the same media that created the fifteen minute attention span in the first place.

I'm no strategist. I can't even figure out how to get everybody to and from music lessons each week without a great big head-ache and at least two vehicles, so I'm not going to second guess seasoned generals on the ground, and I don't trust most of those who do. I've seen little evidence that these naysayers are better strategists than I am. If I could beat you at Chess or Risk, in fact, if I could even hold my own, you don't have any standing to be criticizing the 'failed' battle plans of generals with more stars than you got on your high school papers . I don't watch television, so maybe that's why I don't share the country's fifteen thirty minute resolution mindset, either. I count it as a success that there have been no successful terrorist attacks on our soil since 9/11. I think those who think this is not a genuine threat and the fondest wish of Islamic terrorists with hate in their hearts and blood on their hands are dangerously naive, so dangerous they are nearly as great a threat as any terrorist wishing to dance on our graves.

I hate war, but, as I said, there are worse things than war. The reason I hate war is because of the consequences in lives lost, families amputated, good people maimed and broken. The problem is that avoiding war can have the same consequences, only women, children, and the infirm become the targets of deliberate, cold-blooded, violence by men who do not love their children as much as they hate those who do not share their religion. As John at Castle Arrrgh says, "avoidance for avoidance's sake is as bad in its way as rushing headlong and blindly into battle."

Today is Memorial Day. Do your kids know what that means?

Do you?

Sunday Hymn Post

Does Jesus care when my heart is pained
Too deeply for mirth or song,
As the burdens press, and the cares distress,
And the way grows weary and long?

Refrain:
Oh, yes, He cares, I know He cares,
His heart is touched with my grief;
When the days are weary, the long nights dreary,
I know my Savior cares.

Does Jesus care when my way is dark
With a nameless dread and fear?
As the daylight fades into deep night shades,
Does He care enough to be near?

Refrain

Does Jesus care when I’ve tried and failed
To resist some temptation strong;
When for my deep grief there is no relief,
Though my tears flow all the night long?

Refrain

Does Jesus care when I’ve said “goodbye”
To the dearest on earth to me,
And my sad heart aches till it nearly breaks—
Is it aught to Him? Does He see?

Refrain

Midi file, score, lyrics

No-Tomato Zucchini Spaghetti

2-3 T. olive oil
1 Large sweet onion, chopped large
2 stalks celery, strings removed, sliced medium
2 large carrots. Cut in julienne strips
2 small or 1 large clove garlic, minced
2 medium zucchini cut in thick slices, then slices quartered in pie-shaped chunks
2 medium yellow gooseneck squash cut in chunks as above
salt to taste
pepper (optional)
a little water as needed (added later if not juicy enough)
1 lb whole wheat or other whole grain spaghetti
Grated Parmesan

In deep skillet, heat oil, add chopped onion, celery, carrots, garlic. Saute over med. low heat 10 min. Add chunked zucchini and yellow squash. Add salt and pepper. Cover, and watch that it doesn't burn. If need be, reduce heat. Cook 20 to 30 min. covered. Check periodically and if it is not juicy enough, add water. As squash cooks down it will get soft and squishy and release a lot of th water that is in it, so don't add water until near the end if you can help it.
We spoon this over spaghetti and sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top. It is a great (almost) vegetarian meal.

I'm SO Amusing

We're listening to a CD.

Friend: Can you sing like her?

Me: Like Enya?

Friend: Yes.

Me: Enya dreams.

Science and Human Values, Commonplace Book Entry

The arts and sciences have changed the values of the Middle Ages; and this change has been an enrichment, moving towards what makes us more deeply human.

Science does more than compile an 'endless dictionary of facts:'

In the act of creation, a man brings together two facets of reality and, by discovering a likeness between them, suddenly makes them one. This act is the same in Leonardo, in Keats, and in Einstein. And the spectator who is moved by the finished work of art of the scientific theory re-lives the same discovery; his appreciation also is a re-creation.

The discovery of truth has less to do with distinguishing what is true from what is false, but is about distinguishing truth from:

'what is illusory; the hallucination of an illgrounded or a disordered belief. My method derived from the tradition of pragmatism which, since William James advanced it about 1890 (and Charles Peirce before that) has been the most original philosophical thought in America.

"...no fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate; a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field- a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it.

We organize our experience in patterns which, formalized, make the network of scientific laws, but science does not stop at the formulation of laws; we done of us do, and none of us... lives by following a schedule of laws.
...science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.

And speaking of connections, Charlotte Mason mentions William James in volume six, the book titled Towards a Philosophy of Education:

let us consider what Professor William James has to say of psychology in general.

"When we talk of psychology as a natural science," he tells us, "we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse. It means a psychology particularly fragile and into which the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint, a psychology all of whose elementary assumptions and data must be reconsidered in wider connections and translated into other terms. It is, in short, a phrase of diffidence and not of arrogance; and it is indeed strange to hear people talk triumphantly of the 'New Psychology' and write Histories of Psychology when into the real elements and forces which the word covers not the first glimpse of clear insight exists. A string of raw facts, a little gossip and wrangle about opinions, a little classification and generalisation on the mere descriptive level . . . but not a single law . . . not a single proposition from which any consequence can casually be deduced."

But Professor James went on and wrote his extraordinarily interesting book on psychology, and we must do the same though our basis is no more than the common experience of mankind so far as one mind can express the experience common to us all.

Some of us are more disciplined at this organizing our experiences into patterns, and some more self-aware of the process, but we all do it.

Illiteracy

Several years ago I collected these quotes and statistics from various websites in a discussion about homeschooling, public school, and literacy.

One of my reasons for insisting that the state has no authority to regulate homeschooling is simply that the state cannot ensure that an education is taking place in the schools it funds and operates, so on what grounds would an institution producing such a high illiteracy rate be justified in assuming any sort of control or authority to set standards for those with a much better success rate when it comes to teaching something so basic as reading? That's not, by the way, my best or strongest reason, but it is the reason most homeschooling opponents find hardest to dispute.

These stats are very likely outdated now, but these were the numbers around 8 or 9 years ago. But another topic of discussion that comes up frequently in homeschooling related conversations is how different things were then compared to now, and it's just not so.

And how could it be otherwise? There has been more than one generation of students brought up on whole language/look say, in the same era when teachers told their parents that they were out of date and didn't understand the 'new' pedagogy and they should mind their own business and let the teachers get on with their work without parental interference. Values clarification, situation ethics, the self-esteem movement- these all started in public schools and spread like a plague. Teachers now may be regretting the monster unleashed when toddlers are taught that yes, they actually are the most important and special beings in the world no matter what they do, but their parents learned this from a previous generation of teachers.

Those students grew up and became parents, and if they couldn't read they had at least learned well the lesson that what happened in school was none of the parent's business, and feeling good about yourself without reference to anything you actually did or accomplished was a good and healthy thing.

Here were the results a few years ago:

There are 27 million functionally illiterate adults in the United States today.
Of the U.S. work force, 13 percent are functionally illiterate--and more than 50 percent experience basic skills problems while on the job.
Each year,* 2.5 million new workers enter the work force unable to perform the basic skills needed to meet entry-level requirements.* This group includes 1 million immigrants and refugees, 700,000 high school dropouts, and another *700,000 high school graduates (annually) with inadequate literacy skills. (emphasis mine)

Are there good teachers? Absolutely, dedicated, hardworking, sincere, professionals are out there making great personal sacrifices to educate other people's children. But students are still graduating, diploma in hand, unable to read.

Frugal Fridays

Time to add your frugal tips to the list at Frugal Fridays!

Conversational Jaunts

I wrote this a few days ago ('this' being a post about the sorts of things great people talk about compared to the trivial sorts of things small people talk about), but figured I should hasten to assure our gentle readers that our conversational is not always so scintillating. Or intelligent. Or sensible. Or even easy to follow.

Last night, as best I can remember, the rabbit trails included:

The Equuschick and friends and siblings arguing at length with the Equuschick's unique entymological classification system. The Equuschick feels compelled to practice such unique classification because she doesn't believe in killing bugs, but prefers to catch them in the house and release them into the wild. However, she hates flies, ticks, and mosquitoes and will kill them with wild abandon without a single second of moral compunction. So, she says, they are not really, true bugs. They are parasites and that's different. Because if they were really bugs, of course, she wouldn't kill them. And since she dedicates a lot of time towards their extinction, they must not be bugs. Because if they were really, truly bugs, she wouldn't do that. So naturally.... (we can get off this merry-go-round now).

And that, said the HG wisely, is not logical and not only that, it is a complete violation of the scientific.....

....thingie.

We talked about the care and feeding of the old, with a great deal of personal interest as my friend and I informed our daughters that we intended to live nearly forever and be as troublesome as we possibly could. They remained resolute in the face of such dire threats, and my friend's daughter merely told her she was going to continue to live at home until things got to the point where things switched around so that her mother was living with her, and she had gradually been infiltrating for years so that now half the house was already hers. Muhahahahaha.

I believe that particular bunny trail began when my friend and I reverted to the lingo of our youth and informed our respective Progeny that something was way out, far out, groovy, and real gone, plus also outa sight. The way they looked at us was squaresville, man, squaresville. And that's when they began talking about dealing with the elderly.

There was a brief and confusing discussion of the guy who carries the horse feed around the college campus. And then we realized that wasn't what we were talking about at all.

This naturally led to the ubiquitous tendency of the menfolk around our neck of the woods (not my menfolk, but more generally speaking) to wear sleeveless shirts. We discussed the merits of sleeveless shirts on men, but this was a fruitless and shortlived discussion because there are none.

We decided Juniper and lamplight is a pretty phrase (at least, I decided that, and the rest knew better than to disagree with me) and so is something else that I can't remember.

We discussed ribbons and their respective colors and merits and decided that purple was the best ribbon of all, and better than all the others, unless it was pink, and both of these were better than blue, which was better than red, which was better than white, unless we were mistaken and white was better than red. If you can figure out what that was about, you might have gone to the county fair recently.

In addition we talked about the impending sense of doom the end of the semester brings to one of the two college students included in our scintillating late night conversation, and the impending sense of giddy release it brings to the other.

Which naturally brought us to waxed nose hairs (you probably should not ask).

Unless it all happened completely the other way around.

Blooming

Solomon's Seal- leaves like lily of the valley, except on a longer stalk and more of them. Pairs of cream colored blossoms down the stalk.

False Solomon's seal- leaves and stalk look just the same as Solomon's seal, flowers are tiny, waxy clusters at the end of the stem, and smell sweetly like lily of the valley.

Yarrow- leaves feathery and fernlike, blossoms tiny, bunched in white bouquets at the top.

Bladder Campion blooms at night, giving a soft, white moonlight reflection in the patches of weeds adn grass along the road and fencerows.

Wood Sorrel- clover like leaves, pretty blossoms

Blue-eyed grass

Columbine Intricately designed, orange and yellow, amazing

Red clover The Boy grazes on it, nibbling sweet pinches of blossom.

Dame's Rocket sweet smelling, purple

Crown vetch - pretty pink ball of beauty

Poppies are nearly done, roses are budding, Hawthorne is yellowing, time marches on, seasons come and go.

Look carefully then, how you walk
Not as unwise men, but as wise.
Making the most of the time...

Underwear Jokes and Homeschooling

(adapted from a previous post)

Underwear jokes have a lot to do with my views of homeschooling, education and the role of adults in the education of their children. You see, nobody has to teach children to enjoy underwear jokes. They just do. But it does require some effort on the part of the parents, some exposure and education, some encouragement towards maturity to learn to put underwear jokes aside and appreciate more sophisticated expressions of humor. Children are not going to be children all their lives, at least, not if we do our job right. They're going to be adults, and it's our job to be tour guides and teachers and help them find their way into this world of adults.

Of course, too many adult people are not really grown ups either, these days. one symptom of which is everybody's aversion for adult titles. If I had a nickle for everytime I've heard some version of 'Don't call ME Mr. Jones. That's my father... ' I'd be able to support my book habit with nickles instead of selling other books. I want to say, "No. Mr. Jones is not just your father. It's you, because everybody has to grow up some time. There's no shame in it. The shame should be in refusing to grow up. There's nothing admirable about choosing to remain a stunted child for fifty years.

We have a lot of chronologically grown men who are still making underwear jokes and chuckling loudly over basic bodily functions shared by any creature with a digestion system- they think this is 'male,' but it's not a 'male' thing. It's an indication of our celebration of an emotionally stunted culture thing. So the first step toward being the kind of tour guides we're supposed to be for our children is to do some growing up ourselves (when you are a man you put way childish things, said Paul). Being an adult requires something more of us than taking the path of least resistance.

There's a scene in the movie Mr. Holland's Opus where Mr. Holland, the music teacher, puts on a Rolling Stones record and says, "These guys... They can't sing, and they have absolutely no harmonics and they are playing the same three chords over and over again. And I love it.... Why?" His answer is because it's just fun. Which is logically known as begging the question, of course- in other words, he just said that he liked it because he liked it. And the real answer is because The Stones played easily acessible music, music that appeals to the lowest common denominator. It requires zero effort on the part of the listener. I'm not saying there's never a place for the zero effort entertainment, but it doesn't require much from us, and there is a place for requiring more of ourselves.

We see an example of that in an earlier scene, where Mr. Holland discusses Johanne Sebastian Bach with his bored class and points out for them the connection between a song by The Toys (A Lover's Concerto) and Bach's minuet in G. Both, he says, are prime examples of Ionian scale. Because of his role as tour guide and interpreter for them, they open up their eyes to a whole new world of music, one previously not easily accessible to them, a musical world that both requires and gives more to the listener.

Play a bouncy rock song to any two year old, and most likely the two year old will begin bouncing along to the rhythm. Rock music appeals to the lowest common denominator in all of us. I am not one of those who thinks that certain beats and styles of music are inherently of the devil. But I am one who thinks that we parents have a great responsibility to help our children expand their horizons and visit worlds of music and art that they probably wouldn't think of exploring on their own. We should not leave our children in the musical wasteland of pop culture, where all that is required of them is passive listening and all the music calls forth from them is a physical, emotional reaction rather than an intellectual, spiritual, thoughtful, engaged response.


We need to train our children in a few areas we might not have thought about. Children need to learn to stretch themselves beyond an appreciation for whatever instantly moves them on a physical level. We don't do them any favors if we let them dismiss our efforts to expand their horizons in music, poetry, literature, food, and, of course, spirituality, beyond what they already like without any effort at all. We don't do ourselves any favors, either.

Us and Them

Most of us like to think of ourselves as individuals, unique, different from the common herd. We all have some area where we go against the flow, seeking to reject some part of common living taken for granted by everybody else, whatever that may be and whatever our reasons. For some of us it's television, public school, pop culture, the sports idol, materialism, some form of politically correct thinking, some form of worldliness, or something else altogether.

It's a ticklish task to reject the thing, whatever it is, without also disdaining the people who don't do as we do, or in the current Christian vernacular, to hate the sin and love the sinner. We don't want people jumping to conclusions about us, making assumptions about who we are based on limited information, but we are all too prone to doing just this very thing.

Yes what we dread the most is that subhuman treatment, that unspoken or spoken assumption that We are not like Them, that We stand apart, that We are not Their brothers. The unkind word or glance it is, and not the punch in the nose, that kills us.

The less we know, in a personal way, the Other, the easier it is to dehumanize those people who don't do what we do, to dismiss them. And the more surrounded we are by the Other, in some ways, the easier it is not to know them.

And I mean to leave you with the consideration that it is far easier for this kind of dehumanization to occur in places where many folks live, and we are always strangers, than in other spots where humanity may not so thoroughly cover the face of the planet; and to suggest, as many have before me, that the human survival instinct includes a self-destruct clause applicable to overcrowded situations.

I think this is the reason for the popularity of the iPod. It provides a insulating cushion between the iPod wearer and the crowded commuter train of shoulder to shoulder strangers in the big city of millions of Us and Them. It soothes jangled nerves and raw edges created by two much rubbing together with strangers.

In the small towns and agricultural communities, there aren't so many strangers. People may be odd and strange, but these are the people you're going to have to put up with for the rest of your life, so you learn to get along in one form or another. It's not always easy (no simple life here, either), but it's necessary, so people do it.

And finally: when you can no longer see any real difference between We and They, you've made it to the New Age. I'm not yet there myself

I'm inclined to think such a place on earth is Erewhon, and I think there are real differences between We and They. The thing we have to remember is that there should be no differences so great that the Christian forgets that all humans are image-bearers, beings made after God's own image.

Quotes from Total Loss Farm, a Year in the Life

The Sadie-Lady

Sadie, under our piano bench, in a rare moment of peace and quiet.

A Boy's Mind

Is a puzzling thing. Males like to talk about how confusing females can be, but we're pretty straightforward, actually. We just want you to read our minds, that's all. Quite simple.

Thoughts apropos of nothing more important than the fact that the boy at our house brought me a glass of water (at my request) this morning, and as he handed it to me he remarked, "There are a lot of bugs in this cup."

But he still expected me to take and drink. He seemed quite astonished when I required him to rinse out the cup and bring me bug-free water.

Go Against the Flow

So much of the process of becoming free in my country, it seems, is in withdrawing from all the awful things we've been deliberately and systematically taught to need—everything from additives in the food to a car for every really "independent" person; so that a good deal of our manner and program must be negative rather than positive.

We are the folks who do not do all those corrupt things, etc. etc. But the positive, new, and forward aspects of the life are coming on strong now, and will exonerate us in the long run, I'm sure, from
any accusation that we merely drew back without pushing upward as well.

From Total Loss Farm, A Year in the Life by Ray Mungo, online as a PDF file here.

This tension between the need to draw away from, to reject, and the need to have a positive goal, something to embrace, the reactive versus the proactive, exists in any counter-cultural push.

The waking awareness that something is wrong, that the popular direction, the cultural flow, is not somewhere we want to go, that we're drifting in a current that flows counter to what we really believe and value in life is an important first step.

You cannot counter that current, decide to escape it, swim in a different direction, take charge of your own life and purposefully, deliberately, and thoughtfully examine the popular assumptions of the day without first noticing what's happening and in some degree rejecting to it- reacting to it.

Homeschooling is this way. Most of us begin by reacting, whether to the popular assumption that kids are a pain in the neck and we can't wait to see the backs of them come September, or to something specific in our local school, or to some growing awareness of the inherent immorality of picking other people's pockets for our pet social causes, or something else.

At some point you have to replace fighting the current with deliberately setting out with some positive goal in mind. Otherwise, you're just flailing in the water without any purpose, and you burn out.


You can begin by being reactive, by rejecting one option, but if you want to stay in any counter cultural direction for the long haul, you have to become proactive. You need to develop a strong philosophy about what you're in favor of, not just what you're 'agin.

Our family began homeschooling as reactive people, and planned to homeschool each of the kids for merely the first two or three at most years, and then put them in public school for the remainder. I couldn't decide when would be the best time to enter them in ps. I think my eldest was fifth grade before I realized that homeschooling for us was now a way of life, not just something we did in the mornings because the alternative was so bad, and I couldn't give it up.

It has been many years since we realized that we homeschool because it's a beautiful way of life, a lovely creation in its own right, a delightful way to live as a family. We don't plan to ever quit, with any of them.

I speak of homeschooling, but this is true of any rejection of common culture. When you're reasons and decisions are all reactive, you're still letting the common culture control what you do and why- you're still being pushed by that current and you're expending a lot of energy pushing back. That's exhausting, and in the end all you have to show for it is all the things you disagree about, and you sound disagreeable.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Melissa Wiley hosted this week and did a bang-up job! Go take a look at that 'democratic wasteland' of homeschooling bloggers writing away in spite of our lack of credentials, authority, or permission from the experts.;-)

Count the oases of intelligence and delight. Fie upon elitists experts.

How Dare We

Timotheus sent me this link yesterday, saying he thought I might find it interesting. I thought it both interesting and richly amusing, as Timotheus guessed I would. I printed it out and shared it with our family and houseguests yesterday, and we enjoyed a delicious half hour sitting in the seat of the scornful in order to scorn the scorner.

It seems Richard Schickel, film critic for Time magazine and book reviewer for The Times, has his elitist nether garments in a state of wrinkled discomfort because peons from the ranks of the blogosphere (that literary slum) are so ill advised as to think themselves competent enough to review a book now and then. In public, even. How Dare They:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Not to mention an exaggerated appreciation for and sense of the critic's own importance and intellectual gifts.

Reviewing ought to be, he claims, after the fashion of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Edmund Wilson (also here), George Orwell, and, one presumes he imagines, himself (compare and contrast, dear reader).

Schickel might hold up an Orwellian examining glass to his own work, particularly in light of his unblushing claim that Orwell's "defense of honest vernacular prose in the face of bureaucratic (and totalitarian) obfuscation remains a critical beacon." That is a beacon towards which Schickel might do well to steer.

I am, I confess, positively hugging myself in delight over the sheer hubris of this thinly veiled effort at self-promotion. I know such delight in the foibles of the smug and self-unaware is very naughty of me and not everybody enjoys my caustic sense of humour, but I share Mr. Bennet's delight in the follies of human nature. It's a shame that such delicious hubris is really only in the service of job protection:

And we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.

His own credentials are naturally obvious. Blogging itself is also obviously proof that one does not have a right to an opinion.

At the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, there was a fascinating panel featuring writers whose books were written in what time they could spare from their day jobs. Inevitably, blogging was presented as an attractive alternative — it doesn't take much time, and it is a method of publicly expressing oneself (like finger-painting, I thought to myself, but never mind).

And every savage can dance, said Mr. Darcy, but he regretted it later. Not all finger painting is the same, after all. Some book reviews are boring, lack any useful information whatsoever, and some are the equivalent of the lovely finger-painting to the left (click on the link above for more of this artist's remarkable work, mere finger painting).

So yes, while I am laughing, let me acknowledge that when we strip away the rudeness, the sneers, the elitist turf protection, the snootery, Schickel makes very valid points. If Schickel is no George Orwell, far less are most bloggers. Not all bloggy book reviews are alike. I have sometimes been disappointed by some of the reviews at, say, Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books because they don't actually tell me anything about the book. If it's a review by a blogger I know, whose writings and opinions I have some reason to trust, knowing that reviewer liked this book may be enough for me to go read it.

Sometimes, especially before I've even read the book, that's all I need- enough information about it to make a semi-informed decision about whether or not to buy it, seek it at the library, or read it at all. But in general, I am happier reading reviews that tell me something about the book itself rather than merely the reviewer's feelings on reading it.

Other times I'm impressed, interested, or spurred to add a comment to myself, provoked to thinking more deeply about what I've just read, surprised (but not really) by the insights of the members of this monstrous regiment of housewifely bloggers I tend to read.

But we don't have to be brilliant. Most bloggish book reviews are really just a printed conversation, much like what you would find verbalized in a book discussion group at the local library or bookstore. It's a conversation such as I might have with a book loving friend. Schickel almost recognizes this himself, but he can't wipe the supercilious sneer off his face. He says that one of the authors on that panel at the LA Times said that blogging was really a form of speech rather than writing, and Schickel:

thought it was a wonderful point. The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.

I guess one can never speak intelligently, logically, or reasonable about a book unless that speech is in printed prose, preferably paid for in cold, hard, cash. Actually, it's more like the difference between a letter you write to a friend or acquaintance and an essay you write for publication- one is not by nature more intelligent, more worthy, more responsible or reasonable a piece of writing than the other. They are just different types of writing for different purposes, and it's churlish and unperceptive of Shickel to dismiss nearly all blogosphere book reviews as 'mere yammering.'

After I've read the book there is a time for those thought provoking reviews that are written by those with a 'disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work,' reviews that bring out ideas I hadn't noticed, that make me think at a level I would never have attained on my own. They are different, these two sorts of reviews, but that's no reason to dismiss and belittle the sort of review that prompts me to read a particular book in the first place.

Maybe most reviewing, whatever its venue, fails that ideal. But a purely "democratic literary landscape" is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.

What a frightened man Schickel seems to be. Barbarians, it seems, are at his gates, yammering away. And to see the populace at large as a wasteland without oases of intelligence or delight is a failing indeed, and I cannot laugh at it.

Country Living and Reality

When we bought our house in the country in Nebraska, there was a wood stove in the downstairs parlour. Friends in town thought this was romantic. The HM bought a chainsaw and a truck and as he drove to and from work, whenever he saw the power company taking out a tree, he stopped and asked if he could saw it up and take the wood. Largely in this fashion, he supplied us with free wood to last every winter.

This man's work ethic and commitment to provide for his family has always been romantic, but as for heating with wood? Wood heat means stacking the wood where it keeps dry and carrying enough into the house everyday to keep the stove burning. It means bark, dirt, and twigs on the floor- and bugs. It means that evocative smell of wood smoke hanging in the air, which also means small particles of smoke in the air, sharply barbed molecules that claw their way through air passages, grapple hooks digging into the lining of the lungs, clogging up the lungs of the asthmatics who live in our house. It means being too warm in the room where the stove is and not warm enough in the back bedroom upstairs.

It wasn't particularly romantic, but it did keep us warm and mostly independent of the gas company. Since the electric company provided most of our wood, we can't be said to have been free of the electric company, but at least no money exchanged hands. It added a certain rhythm to our days, a grounding in something basic and real, something seemingly lacking in the asphalt world of the cities.

Like easy survival:

Every winter the hospitals in Vermont declare dead old men who just one evening neglected to light their stoves.

Living beyond the sidewalks also means living beyond the snow-plows:

...It hadn't snowed much before Christmas in Vermont, you know it's different every year, and folks were talking of Open Winter, that means you don't have to struggle with your life on the line to get to a pack of cigarettes, you can simply drive to town; but on Christmas itself it began to snow a snow that didn't quit for five days and left five feet behind. Everything you forgot to bring in got lost till April under the planet's new petticoat, and locomotion by all but skis (never use 'em myself) became difficult if not impossible...

Of course, lest the city dwellers feel smug this government publication reminds us that heat is a bigger killer in the cities:

Cities Pose Special Hazards

The stagnant atmospheric conditions of the heat wave trap pollutants in urban areas and add the stresses of severe pollution to the already dangerous stresses of hot weather, creating a health problem of undiscovered dimensions. A map of heat-related deaths in St. Louis during 1966, for example, shows a heavier concentration in the crowded alleys and towers of the inner city, where air quality would also be poor during a heat wave

In the 2003 heat wave in Europe, France had a death toll nearing 15,000 souls. If wintering in the country is no joke, summering in the city is no picnic either. Air conditioners mask the realities of the summer season, but the asphalt floors and concrete walls of a city intensify it, creating a heat sink that can and does kill just as surely as making stupid mistakes in a Vermont winter.

There's a freedom in country life not readily available in the big city- as many of you pointed out when we shared pictures of the earthworks the children are digging in our front yard. Our front yard can't really be seen from the road- trees and a small hill block that view, but it's certainly true that very few suburban children have the ability to create such elaborate tunnels and caves.
Keeping animals, especially dairy animals, will restrict you to a clock more than any city job. Horses like to be fed at the same times each day, and they thrive better with such a routine. Goats need watering, even if they're eating a diet of wild greens and domestic flowers. Gardens need weeding and watering. Fruits and vegetables require preserving in some fashion or other.
Acquaintances of ours (our main connection was mutual friends) once lived without electricity for a while in the country. The Amish do this by choice and by plan. Our acquaintances found it something of a sudden economic necessity. Under similar circumstances, the HM and I lived without electricity for a few months in an apartment in town. Both of us were surprised at how quickly our bodies adjusted to the circadian rhythm of the natural world.

While I was in the cities, I lived by night and slept all day, for the streets of town were always more bearable under thin cover of grey; their lights made it easy to walk, and all the enclosed spaces were brightly lit with fraudulent sunshine, so I had the impression that I was alive. In the woods, though, nightfall is literally the end of the day. The degree to which you may perform outdoor chores depends on variables like the temperature, the moon, and the stars. You must make your hay while the sun shines.

I'm sure I often seem to talk out of both sides of my mouth when it comes to country living and that's only because I do, I guess. When we first tried the agrarian lifestyle in Nebraska, we were a lot more starry eyed about our exciting return to simple living. I thought hard thoughts about 'simple living' sometimes over the four years we lived there. For me perhaps these hard thoughts were strongest the day I had to untangle an unhappy and very heavy buck from layers and layers of rolled fencing into which he had woven his horns and a leg. Or maybe it was when half of our expensive baby chicks died. For the HM it may have been the time he had to set a goat's broken leg- so broken, bone came through the skin. Butchering the kids was no picnic for him, either. Shivering under the blankets in an old farm house where the curtains billowed in the breeze when the windows were closed and covered with frost inside did not seem as simple to me as simply flipping a switch to get that lovely sense of being evenly warm from head to toe, either.

I think there are many beautiful and lovely things about living in the country and having animals and growing your own food, and I don't want to discourage anybody from trying it. The simplicity of it all isn't one of those beautiful things, though, and I do think having unrealistic expectations complicates life whether it's a country or a city life. I am not even sure what people mean when they talk about an agrarian lifestyle and the simple life.

Enthusiastic optimism leads its those incurable souls to spout what sounds like exuberant lies to those cursed with a more precise sense of reality, but I don't think people mean to mislead.

you can't rely on Americans these days to give you road or weather advice based on common sense; rather, you must filter and temper the advice of all strangers through some levels of
consciousness-consideration—viz., poor means rich, filthy means spotless, impossible often means difficult at worst. Naturally, too, there are some whose standards of possibility, convenience, and comfort are even more exaggerated than our own—the wandering freaks who insist it's easy to milk 40 cows a day and make $6,000 a year while working only two hours daily, etc.

It's not easy, and it's not simple, and it will always cost more than you think. City life, I think, insulates us from the consequences of certain kinds of incompetence. Country life magnifies those consequences.

And yet, here we are. Here I am, up at 6 a.m. because we drew our house plans so the morning sun shone into our bedroom, listening to the trickling, liquid notes of the red-winged blackbirds, watching an Oriole flash past the window, hearing the woodpecker rat-a-tat-tatting on a tree.

The day's chores today include rolling what the HM assures me is a 500 pound log down to the bonfire pit, working further on fencing to protect the flower beds from the goats and finally, perhaps, putting in a ground level garden. My buckets of tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers up on the deck are doing so well I have half a dozen or so tiny peppers already, peppers the size of my thumb nail and cuter than a bug's ear. Breakfast will probably be pancakes made with freshly ground flour, goat's milk, and new laid eggs from other members of our homeschool group, maybe even freshly made blueberry syrup from the last of the blueberries in our freezer from picking last year.

The day's delights will also include those pancakes and syrup, as well as some deightful conversation with some of the most wonderful people in the world who are here visiting us this week. We will sip sassafrass tea (made from roots from our own trees), and talk about people, events, and ideas. We will pick flowers, walk in the woods, basking in the glow of a friendship going back to when two of my children weren't even born, and others were scarcely out of diapers.

From Total Loss Farm, A Year in the Life by Ray Mungo, online as a PDF file here.

Do You Know This Flower?

Square stem, so I think it's in the mint family. Bee Balm? Doesn't look quite right. Anybody else? Oh, the flowers start as a deeper purple, then fade to white. Picture of the blossoms is magnified 300 percent.

Blogger Glitch?

I've approved a couple comments lately that then just seemed to disappear into the ether, and I am not sure why. One was from Athena about a week ago, and one was from Timotheus just now. I edited the post Timotheus commented to, and then went to check out the link he shared and it wasn't there. Could it be that editing a post somehow affects the comments? That would be sad.

If you've commented and don't see your comment approved, please do understand it's very likely a blogger glitch. I almost never reject genuine comments (as opposed to Spam).

Update: Hmmm. Tim's missing comment is back. Color me bambaffled.

Pancake REcipes and More Pancake Recipes

Lots of recipes, a surprising variety, and all look delicious. It's the latest Carnival of Recipes, this one featuring pancake recipes!

Self-Sufficiency VS Personal Addictions

Ray Mungo and some friends are going on a canoe trip down the Merrimac back when it was so polluted human waste still floated on the surface. Actually, they went canoeing in the 70s. Manchester only stopped regular dumping of raw sewage into the river as late as 1992.

They began, roughly, because they wanted to follow parts of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849. Their trip is off schedule for a number of reasons- the river pollution, a missing wallet, a stomach illness that they believe comes from the nastiness on the river, and a friend who won't go down the river in the canoe with them, but promises to meet them at intervals because:

Tuesday was a Mets day, Peter said, and though he would follow us upstream and generally watch out, he must stay close to the car radio to keep tabs on Tom Seaver and so-and-so's stealing third. It meant nothing to me, but since Peter thought it was important, who was I to belittle it? Some people get their energy off Kesey and Kerouac and Thoreau, others off Seaver and Swoboda; stocks and bonds, movies and periodicals, movements and rallies, rivers and oceans, balls and strikes; you name it, somebody lives on it. Friends of mine have been addicted to such dangerous drugs as television, bourbon, and The New York Times, daily and Sunday.

I myself have been addicted to Pall Mall Cigarettes for years, and have more than once gone hungry to support my habit; I am also a Black Coffee freak, and have been known to drink 15 to 20 cups in a day. Everything in me which responds to reason prays for the imminent day when mass-produced and commercially distributed goods will simply stop coming, all the bright red Pall Mall trucks will break down in North Carolina and all the Colombian coffee boats rot in their harbors. Then we, poor weaklings, will have at least a chance to aspire to that personal independence which we all so desperately need. We will be addicted to making do for ourselves, each of us will be President of the United States and responsible for the social welfare of the whole world, we will rise to our godheads at the same time we stoop to gather scrap wood for the fire.

It wouldn't happen that way, of course. Human nature squirms against being denied its addictions and pleasures, and the mass produced instant gratifications of life will never stop coming once we've grown used to them. We'll only find new instant gratifications and new ways of delivering them. We cannot depend upon outside influences to protect us from ourselves. This must begin within and be sustained from within (as a Christian, I take it for granted that one has the Holy Spirit within). But still, we like our personal conveniences and comforts and we're not giving them up.

The HM used to manage a grocery store in Amish country, and he says they regularly showed up in his parking lot in their horse drawn carriages and stocked up on toilet paper and white sugar. The white sugar I could do without, but I'm pretty fond of mass produced toilet paper myself.

And there is a Dr. Pepper calling my name from the kitchen.


From Total Loss Farm, A Year in the Life, which, along with Famous Long Ago and Return to Sender, or When the Fish in the Water Was Thirsty, are online as a PDF file for the reading.

People, Events, Or Ideas

When the HG first went to college, far from being exposed to a new and wider range of interesting ideas and conversations, she learned that most of her classmates typically preferred to hold discussions centering around:
Who is cute
Clothes
Who is really cute
Sports
Who is cuter
Rock groups, especially who is the cutest member of the band
Country music (different set of friends), especially who is the cutest
Movies, primarily regarding who is the best looking actor in the movie
Shopping at the mall, especially cool if you see somebody cute
Television shows, especially who is really cute

Outside of college, amongst her homeschooled siblings and friends (who, as is typical of homeschooled students, span a wide range of ages), topics of conversation more typically include (in no particular order):

Who is running for office and the political record of the candidate

Clothes- they are girls, after all. Being as quirky as they are, my girls particularly like ethnic and period clothing.

Books and the ideas in them

Animals- and which one is really, really cute

Topics in science, history, and the Monty Python repertoire. Also Jeeves and Wooster.

Composers, especially who is the best current composer of music scores, themes, transitions, and things I don't follow.

Country music - an ongoing battle between the HG, who hates it, and the Pipsqueak who is driven by her ideas about what is hilarious to keep loading the HG's iPod with country music.

Movies, primarily regarding which is the best adaptation of a Jane Austen book, but also a lot of time is spent comparing and contrasting the acting merits and acting credentials of different actors. The cuteness factor is really not an issue around here, but UK accents of any sort get extra credit.

Shopping at the thrift shop, especially cool if you see some very cool vintage treasure or find a great book.

Television shows- we don't see a lot of these, but we have been big fans of Monk and do like mysteries. We also hear a lot of plot run downs from our friends, and we don't mind because this keeps us from being completely cultural ignoramuses.

The Bible, sermon topics, and favorite hymns and the ideas in them.

What's blooming

Whose turn it is to do the dishes.

Cooking

History, history, history

Literature

Math and how to overcome our deficiencies

Ideas, concepts, connections

Words and what they mean and where they come from

Babies- all of whom are really, really cute.



I will stress that the HG began college at a Junior College, and now that she's in her third year and is at the University, she is still finding the above to be true, but she is also finding more intellectually congenial company.
Community college was a bit of culture shock because so much of it was so shallow. So is a goodly portion of the University scene, but, again, there are depths to be found there. But it is not a given that education happens there, education worthy of the word, which is why we continue to be both amused and very frustrated by those who insist that to avoid college is to deny oneself an education. An education, and a good one, is entirely possible outside of college walls, and a college degree is by no means evidence that one is educated. It is a credential, and a useful one in many cases. It's largely an artificial construction, the need for that credential for remunerative employment, but we live in an artificial world.

On a sidenote, we have noticed that while we can talk about the sorts of things that interest the first group of people, when we start introducing topics that interest us, they are quite often completely lost and bewildered, not being familiar with the much beyond the world of pop culture. This is true of many people and we haven't noticed that a college education makes the sort of difference some seem to assume it does.

It's been said, I don't know by whom, that small people talk about other people (what they look like, what they wear, what they did, what they said), average people talk about events, and wiser people talk about ideas. That's a generalization, of course. People are involved in the making of both events and ideas, after all, but let's not quibble over details. Our conversation includes some of all three, and I suspect yours does, too. It's the rare person who actually maintains all his conversations in the lofty strata of ideas (and who would he talk to?), but it's a fool whose conversational topics all fall in the shallow waters of the first realm. Going to college doesn't magically change a person from the first sort of person into the third.

Sunday Hymn Post

Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish,
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;
Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot heal.
Joy of the desolate, light of the straying,
Hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure!
Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying,
“Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot cure.”
Here see the bread of life, see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above.
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing
Earth has no sorrow but heav’n can remove.
Midi files, score sheet, lyrics

Views on News

Amnesty may mean no back taxes.

Strangely enough, actual Americans who owe back taxes will continue to be hounded by the INS. Illegal immigrants, however, are on a "pathway to super-duper-special citizenship" which disobligates them the laws the rest of us live by.

Which makes sense, in a morally upside down world like this one, since those eligible for this amnesty thing got there by disregarding those laws in the first place. So why not reward illegal behavior by waiving other pesky legalities?

What Am I Doing Here?

No, this is not a deep question about metaphysics, spirituality, or philosophy. I mean what am I doing here? I was going to do something, something very specific, and I needed to be on the computer to do it, and I think I needed to be online to accomplish this important task and I've been sitting here for ten minutes trying to remember what it was. I keep thinking if I browse around long enough something will trigger my memory.

I'm sure it's not my fault. The increasingly senile and foul-tempered Sadie dog has barked nonstop today and my head is peeling from the inside out. The HM and I each agree that it's time for her to be put down, and the children don't. Well, just who is in charge around here, anyway? The moral cowards who agree that it's time for her to go gentle into that good night (or not gentle, we don't care, just GO), that's who. We're in charge. And the children would take their broken hearts in good grace and behave as becomingly as it is possible to behave when your heart is broken, but their hearts would be broken- at least some of them. And we neither of us want to be the one to break their hearts.

It's not my job, I tell my husband. I'm the weaker vessel, and besides, I have unresolved childhood baggage over parents putting animals down, so I can't be expected to do this deed. 'You're the man,' I say. 'You do it'. And the man tells me that he gets up in the dead of night to go get axe murderers who have stolen into the house (although the sneaky critters keep turning into dogs, or curtains blowing in the open window when the HM turns on the lights and looks), and he does numerous other manly man things for his family, but killing off the family pet is just not on his list of good daddy things to do. And so she barks and barks and barks and barks, all day, snarling and growling at the Donovan pup just for being young and cute, and at Zeus for being big and smart, and at the goats for being goats, and at the leaves blowing past the door for being leaves, and at noises and sights only she can hear or see, and I periodically bark back, "Oh, PLEASE shut-up," or I bang my head on the wall, whichever feels better at the time. Of course, banging my head on the wall makes the Sadie dog bark.

But I still can't remember what I was going to do here. Actually, what would probably be the most assured memory prompter would be to shut down the computer, and go take a shower, where lightning (in the form of my memory) would strike.

Unfortunately, even if I didn't bother to rinse, dry, or dress myself but simply made a mad dash past the open windows (startling the goats dreadfully, as they stand faces against the glass looking in) and turned on the computer- I would forget in route. And shock my family. And myself.

The mind plays terrible, cruel tricks on me these days. Last week a friend was asking me what I got for Mother's Day and I enumerated each thing from each child (an illuminated poem from the youngest two, two new books from the middle two, new shoes from the oldest...) and I couldn't remember what I got from the Equuschick. I was shocked and a little embarrassed. I wrung every drop of memory I could squeeze from my brains. "I know she gave me something," I said. "I am pretty sure she gave it to me just before she left for the wedding. I'll think of it in a minute. I can almost see it... I remember that she did, but I can't think what...." I've tried to remember all week long, too embarrassed to ask for help because I'm too embarrassed to let my family know I've forgotten a Mother's Day gift within hours of receiving it (my friend is older than I am, so she understands).

Tonight JennyAnyDots came in, bearing a canning jar of home-made lavender milk bath, the jar decorated with William Morris-esque stickers. She handed it to me saying, "This is very embarrassing, but Equuschick gave this to me to give to you on Mother's Day, and I just found it in my closet. I'm sorry I forgot."

I would feel better about this, I could even gloat (just a lot), if only I hadn't told my friend I was so certain that the Equuschick had already given me something, I just couldn't think what it was. I'm sure she's wondering why I have not thanked her for it in the phone calls we've had while she's been out of town (she comes home tomorrow!)

I still don't remember what I'm doing here.

Mayapple

A Mayapple plant growing in our woods. The picture was taken by Jenny Any Dots a week or two ago.

Birthday Card from the Jet Age

As a young man my uncle had a pen pal from England. This is a birthday card the British penpal sent to my uncle in 1958. It's even prettier than it appears here- the disc in the center is in two layers- what looks sort of gray on my screen is actually silvery foil.
I love the house on the left.

Inside it says:

The watchword of the day is Speed

It's symbol is the Jet

And so my wish will speed your way

For the finest Birthday yet!

Here's the picture inside the card, opposite the above message:

The town and bridge remind me of one of my favorite sets of blocks that I bought, um, for the children, especially those charming red rooves.

The card is made by 'A.M. Davis, Quality Cards of London, and is stamped 'British Manufacture.' No crass price is listed on the back of this card.

You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them, and use your own image programs to do what you like with them. Many people are using vintage images like these in online scrapbooks.

I'm not really into scrapbooking, but if you are, there are some other images to use here (great vintage ones in particular) Here are some links to tutorials in digital scrapping.

Carnivals

This week I forgot to mention a couple of the carnivals I like, but now I can't remember which ones have been poking at me from the back reaches of my inner 'to-do list.' So it seemed good to me to just go ahead and list them all in one place, even though some of them will have new editions up tomorrow or in a day or two.

The thing I like about carnivals (the ones that interest me) is that you can see what several bloggers are saying about the same topic. It's like a small, specialized magazine on the topic of interest. So, the Carnival of Homeschooling is a mini support group, newsletter, and free homeschooling magazine all in one. It's not as glossy as the print versions you pay for, but then, you're reading what real homeschoolers down in the trenches have to say, not what gurus who talk about homeschooling while their wives or paid tutors at home do the grunt work. Cynic, much? Why, yes.

My mother always said that the best recipes came from those cookbooks put together as fund raisers by local church-ladies. They put their best foot forward there, and they won't be sharing any duds or untried recipes. The Carnival of Recipes is similar= people share what works for them, the food they are really cooking. And this last week's carnival had an unusual theme- macaroni and cheese. It's amazing how much variety people can create out of a bit of pasta and some dairy products.

Make it From Scratch is similar, but it's not limited to recipes. So you get a weekly newsletter of recipes and craft ideas, from the practical to the frivolous.

Frugal Fridays aren't in carnival format, but they are lots of fun. I especially love this week's idea for making an apron out of an old denim jumper. Why, oh why, do I always find cool ideas like this within a month of getting rid of the old thing I could have repurposed? I had this great faded jumper I used for berry picking that I kept for years, even though it was washed out, faded into soft, comfortable, shapelessness, and fraying in spots. I finally got rid of it just this last month, and it would have made a great apron using this idea. Pout, pout, pout.

And today is Semicolon's weekly book reviews post- see what everybody else is reading and share a review of your own!

Blender Pancakes

Here is a way to get whole grain pancakes without a grain mill.

For about 14 generous pancakes, place in your blender:
1 1/2 cups of buttermilk (we use 1 tablespoon vinegar in the milk)
1 egg
2 tablespoons oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract, if you have it
1 cup whole grain- I like buckwheat. You can use wheat berries, rice (this makes pancakes that fall apart easily) or rye.
1/4 cup oats (not instant)

Blend above very well. Add:
sweetener- we liked it with a dash of stevia. A spoonful of honey is good, or just a couple tablespoons of sugar. Jam would be tasty. They really don't need sweetener, but it makes for a nice taste treat.
salt to taste
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder

Mix this in well. Ladle this onto a hot, oiled pan. Fry them until there are bubbles around the edges and the outside edge looks dry, not shiny and wet like the center. Flip and fry another minute or two.

Serve with butter, honey, syrup or jam. We like to make peanut butter sandwiches with leftover pancakes, or freeze them and make individual snacks in the toaster.

This recipe and others like it comes from More Than Breakfasts, a Sue Gregg cookbook. Her Breakfast cookbook is more than worth its price. It is unique, comprehensive, and it is one of the ten or so cookbooks I simply could not manage without. You can order directly from Sue Gregg at her website).

Booklisting Memories

I haven't written my booklists for March & April here yet. They're not very impressive, so I'll probably just stick them in with May's post.

While browsing an old journal, though, I found another booklist of sorts. In this entry I recorded some of my First Impressions (*janeite giggle*) about certain titles I'd read. Here are some of my favorite entries from that list:
Spoiler Warnings for Little Women by Alcott and Emma by Austen

The Count of Monte Cristo-This is the first book I remember resenting having to put down (for inconvenient things such as mealtimes).

Emma -First time I read this was as we were in the middle of an out of state move. I missed out on a whole lot of stuff that first read through. What do you mean Frank is engaged to Jane? I remember thinking.

Jane Eyre-I was 11 when I first read it. Completely enthralled me... think I was rather like Anne Shirley reading "Ben-Hur" when it came to this book. Read it and raved about it in my diary.(I read some of this sitting by the bathroom sink. I'd cut a toe and while the DHM cleaned it up and bandaged it, I eagerly followed Jane at Thornfield Hall)

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe-The DHM read this to the Equuschick & me when I was about seven. I loved it. I can remember being curled up in bed and wondering how it must have felt to walk along with Aslan and put my hands in his fur.

Little Women-Took me several tries to get through this, but once I did I was hooked. Did the usual stuff: sobbed when Beth died, wondered if Jo would ever get married.

The Lord of the Rings-Went from being a skeptic towards my sisters' enthusiasms to almost complete & total geekdom within a few months. (this is where positive peer pressure comes in. We almost never saw movies in the theatre and my sisters had their hearts set on seeing this one there. I knew that if I wanted to see it on the big screen, too, I had to finish the books. I decided it was worth the effort... and then found that the movie was only a side affair. The BOOKS were worth the effort. At the end of the "Two Towers" I did something I've only done rarely in my life: I begged for spoilers. The Equuschick gave me a dose of my own medicine and refused to give me any. I thus began reading "Return of the King" in tears.)

Persuasion -I couldn't believe Wentworth's letter the first time I read the book - must've gone back & read it half a dozen times before continuing with the story. I defy anyone to read that letter and call Austen dry or spinsterish.

Lloyd Alexander, RIP

His robe flapping around his spindly legs, Dallben made his way to a huge chest, unlocked it with an ancient key, and raised the lid. He bent and rummaged inside. "I confess to a certain number of regrets and misgivings," he said, "which could not possibly interest you, so I shall not burden you with them. On the other hand, here is something I am sure will interest you. And burden you, too, for the matter of that."
Dallben straightened and turned. In his hands he held a sword.
Taran's heart leaped. He grasped the weapon eagerly, his hands trembling so that he nearly dropped it. Scabbard and hilt bore no ornament; the craftsmanship lay in its proportion and balance. Though of great age, its metal shone clear and untarnished, and its very plainness had the beauty of true nobility. Taran bowed low before Dallben and stammered thanks.
Dallben shook his head. "Whether you should thank me or not," he said, "remains to be seen. Use it wisely," he added. "I only hope you will have cause to use it not at all."
"What are its powers?" Taran asked, his eyes sparkling. "Tell me now, so that . . ."
"It's powers?" Dallben answered with a sad smile. "My dear boy, this is a bit of metal hammered into a rather unattractive shape; it could better have been a pruning hook or a plow iron. Its powers? Like all weapons, only those held by him who wields it. What yours may be, I can in no wise say.

Lloyd Alexander was born on January 30 in 1924. He left this world on Thursday, May 17 of this year. He was 83 years old. We originally wrote this post in his honor on the occasion of his last birthday and we revise it here as a feeble eulogy. Then, we expressed the wish that he might have a double-decker chocolate cake with all the trimmings for the many hours of delight he has given his readers with these books. Now we express the hope that he has made his peace with his maker and that his memory be kept green for many generations of young readers hiding under the covers with flashlights and surreptitious crackers.

Yes, yes!" Gurgi cried gleefully, "crunchings and munchings for all! Thanks to generous, kindhearted Gurgi! He will not let brave warriors suffer bellies filled only with howlings and growlings!"

We are deeply grateful for his wonderful tales of heroism and hope.

He will not succeed in this," Taran said. "Somehow, we must find a way to escape. We dare not lose hope."
"I agree absolutely," Fflewddur answered. "Your general idea is excellent; it's only the details that are lacking...

Lloyd Alexander has written too many books to list, but our favorite would have to be the delightful Prydain Chronicles. The source of all the quotes in this post, these books are dashing tales of heroes and villains, and the villains are sinister, indeed, although some only seem foul.

"How would you like it," asked a cheerful voice behind Taran, "if you were turned into a toad? And stepped on?"
... "How many twigs in a bird's nest?" asked the enchantress suddenly. "Answer quickly. There, you see," she added. "Poor chicks, you don't even know that. How could you be expected to know what you really want out of life?"
"One thing I want," retorted Eilonwy, "is not to be a toad."

The Prydain stories are diverting, amusing, imaginative, exciting, uplifting, and eminently quotable.

"It's silly," Eilonwy added, "to worry because you can't do something you simply can't do. That's worse than trying to make yourself taller by standing on your head."

If you do not like stories of fantasy, myth, and fairy tale, you will not want to read these.

"I've never met a person," whispered Eilonwy, while Gurgi snuffled in fright, "who could talk about such dreadful things and smile at the same time. It's like ants walking up and down your back."

Alexander has written others without the magic, but we don't think the characters in them are nearly as delightful as those who people the Prydain Chronicles.

On the little farm, while Taran and Coll saw to the plowing, sowing, weeding, reaping, and all the other tasks of husbandry, Dallben undertook the meditating, an occupation so exhausting he could accomplish it only by lying down and closing his eyes.

The mythical land of Prydain bears an interesting resemblance to Wales, which is an added attraction for us. The tales themselves are similar in many ways to The Lord of the Rings, but these are more suitable for children ages 9-12 (roughly). Boys who may have hither to been reluctant readers may well be coaxed into reading through these books.

And Gurgi will help!" shouted Gurgi, springing to his feet. "Yes, yes, with seekings and peekings!"

They are full of heroes and ordinary assistant pig keepers, brave deeds and quiet wisdom.

"I am a Prince of Pen-Llarcau!" cried Ellidyr.
"Yes, yes, yes," Dallben interrupted with a wave of his brittle hand. "I am quite aware of all that and too busy to be concerned with it. Go, water your horse and your temper at the same time. You shall be called when you are wanted."

To read the story of:
Taran the assistant pig-keeper (Taran straightened and threw back his head. "I am Taran," he said, "Assistant Pig-Keeper of Caer Dallben." )
the pig Hen-Wen
the Princess Eilonwy ("I'm not speaking to you!" she cried to Taran. "The way you acted. That's like asking someone to a feast, then making them wash the dishes! But-farewell, anyway. That," she added, "doesn't count as speaking."),
Bard Fflewddur Ffllam and his tell-tale harp (A Fflam is always valiant! I've slashed my way through thousands"- he glanced uneasily at the harp-"well, ah, shall we say numerous enemies." )
and Gurgi ("Yes, yes!" Gurgi cried. "Crunchings and munchings for brave, hungry Gurgi!") you'll want to read the following titles in the order listed:

The Book of Three

The Black Cauldron (NOT the Disney atrocity, please)

The Castle of Llyr

Taran Wanderer

The High King

We have also enjoyed the picture book The Truthful Harp. We have enjoyed, in fact, every single minute spent reading the Prydain Chronicles, even when they are violent.

"Woe and sadness!" the creature wailed, loping anxiously to Taran. "Gurgi sees smackings and whackings by strengthful lord! Poor, kindly master! Gurgi is sorry for him.

You can read more about these books here.

"Goodbye, goodbye," muttered Gwystyl. "I hate to see you waste your time, not to mention your lives. But that's the way of it, I suppose. Here today, gone tomorrow, and what's anyone to do about it? Goodbye. I hope we meet again. But not soon. Goodbye."

But we hope you will read the books themselves if you haven't already. They are a treat.

"Go swiftly," Gwydion said, reaching out, his hand. "Your comrades wait for you; and Coll, I know, is eager to ready his vegetable garden for winter. Farewell, Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper-and friend."
Gwydion waved once and rode northward. Taran watched until he was out of sight. He turned Melynlas, then, and saw the faces of the companions smiling at him.
"Hurry along," Eilonwy called. "Hen Wen will be wanting her bath. And I'm afraid Gurgi and I left in such a hurry I didn't take time to straighten up the scullery. That's worse than starting a journey and forgetting to put on your shoes!"
Taran galloped toward them.

Good-bye, good-bye, sweet sir. We hate to see you go, but that's the way of it, I suppose. Farewell, and we hope to meet you again and again in the pages of your wonderful books. They have helped to make us merry in the face of much woe, and they will again. Thank-you.

Food and The Back To The Land Movement

We have found that an astonishingly wide variety of food items contain BHA or BHT or both, so I can only conclude that most of my countrymen subsist on the stuff. They are hooked. The sole advantage of preservatives to the consumer, it seems, is that he can now save money by buying day-old or month-old baked goods and be certain that they will taste like cold putty no matter their birthday. We did spend a goodly part of the harvest season giving away all the fruits and vegetables we couldn't use to city people (old friends and family) who freaked on what a tomato, or a peach, really is. The middle-aged and elderly ones remembered; the
young ones learned. One and all reflected on how sinister and subtle the Dead Food craze came on, how you didn't notice it taking over until it was too late. The old Victory Garden thing may be in for a revival, friends, but I suspect it will reach only a marginal part of the population, the others will be too busy at the shop or office, dump DDT or other chemical killers on their crop, or be afraid to eat an ear of corn that's white, a tomato with a hole in
it, a carrot with dirt on it. Tough luck for them what think it's Easier to go to the sooperdooper and get those nice clean apples wrapped in cellophane, uniform in size and shining like mirrors, the kind I have never seen growing on any tree. How about you?

From Total Loss Farm, A Year in the Life- online with other books by the same author here.

This has changed to some degree- in most big cities you can get organics, you can get rich, flavorful whole wheat breads for not even very much money, and you can get foods that don't taste like putty. Here in my part of the midwest, puttied starch is the preferred texture and flavor of the masses, who have hearts of gold, are the salt of the earth, and a favored delicacy is a baked potato topped with homemade noodles (white flour, natch) and gravy. Usually served with corn or potato chips on the side.

But I do remember when getting unbleached flour was a big deal, and now it's standard fair. I do remember when whole wheat bread was a 'new' thing and my friends thought my mom was weird because we ate it in lunch sandwhiches. I do remember when every church potluck salad featured jello and vegetarians not part of mainstream life. I think there's a lot to regret about the sixties, but I do appreciate being able to buy raw, organic honey at the market, as well as fifty pound bags of organic oats for .68 a pound through our co-op.

Illiteracy

Below are factoids about illiteracy that I copied from websites on the topic around 8 years ago. I am sure the numbers of have changed.

A 1992 survey estimated that 1/5 of the adult population has only rudimentary reading and writing skills. These adults can pick out key facts in a newspaper article, for example, but cannot draft a letter explaining an error on their credit card bill.

The literacy level of young adults ages 15-21 dropped more than 11 points from 1984 to 1992.

25% of 12th graders scored below "basic" in reading on the 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

SAT scores rose slightly from 1984 to 1995, gaining 2 points on the verbal test and 11 points in math. The average combined score in 1995 (before "recentering") was still 70 points lower than in 1963.
Three-fourths of 60 million adults who have reached the 4th grade unable to read since 1945 have never learned to read.

And Triticale, the Wheat/Rye Guy has this interesting and disturbing quote on 'current' reading methods:

... the method is to encourage them too grasp whole words, long or short, at once, by instantaneous observation, or, as often happens, by an effort of the imagination. When the word grasped is the word the letters spell, that is observation. When it is some other word, that is imagination. The development of either faculty is considered by contemporary educators to be useful.

Click on the link to see the source of the quote. I think you'll be surprised.

Sartorial Splendor

Click on the picture to enlarge. Admire. From a 1915 catalog.

No Picky Eater Zone

When I say we don't permit our children to be picky eaters, I should clarify that we also do not shovel spoonfuls of food down an unwilling throat, making a child gag. I try to have something on the table that each person will eat- even if it's just brown rice or home-made bread. Each person is allowed one food that they do not like and do not have to eat. For one child it's fish. For another it's tortillas. For another it's mushrooms. Nobody is allowed to choose beans. For everything else, every person in the family has to have at least one tiny taste of everything that is served. If they don't like it, they can fill up on other foods in the meal. But unless it's their one food item they never have to have, next time I serve it, they have to take one more tiny bite. I do not even require a full mouthful- just the merest taste. Over time, most children will get used to and even acquire a taste for almost anything this way (there's a spiritual metaphor there. It also helps if, when they are babies, you do not succumb to popular fallacies and assume that children don't like X so you should never try it. We start giving them the same strange and unusual foods the rest of eat, foods 'kids don't like' as soon as they are able to eat them. I think it's very telling that our pickiest eater, the one who has the hardest time with the most foods, had the least variety as an infant and toddler because she didn't join the family until she was nearly four years old. At that time, she'd never seen broccoli and I was told she would only eat tacos, hamburgers and french fries. So start your kids on a lot of variety and flavors when they are too tiny to know they won't like it, and you will be surprised how seldom you have to enforce the 'take a small taste of everything' rule.

Caveat- some children do have allergy, food intolerance, and sensitivity issues. I would not follow this program with an autistic child, for instance, and I would be very, very careful about doing this with a newly adopted child.

And I must emphasize the value of a tiny taste. Sometimes this 'taste' is so tiny that it's a bite not even as big as a baby pea, a homeopathic taste. I want the tiny taste to acclimate their tastebuds to the new food over time. Making a child gag will accomplish exactly the opposite.

Common Place Book Entry from Home Comfort

Everything old was once new. Everything new will either pass or one day grow old.

Repetition can be prayer, not drudgery.

If last night at the library was calm -

- tonight was insane. There can be no happy medium, it seems. After successive bouts of malfunctioning computers, patrons who don't even know how to use the functioning ones (and then get annoyed at you as if you were to blame for their incompetency), scheduling errors, and teenagers who know nothing about How To Behave In Public Or At All, all the staff had major headaches. We all agreed to go home and eat chocolate. Lots of it.

Still, there was a bright spot tonight. A teenaged boy voluntarily gave up some of his computer time to a woman who had been waiting for quite a while. He didn't do it ostentatiously or impatiently. He just gave her the computer in a matter of fact manner and went off to do something else while she did her internet business.

Little things matter SO much - and things that seem little us are often quite a big deal to other people. I should keep that in mind more often. I may shrug off doing something because it's "no big deal," but it might make a huge difference in someone else's life.

Literary Meme

Pulled from here.

1.grab the book closest to you
2.open it to page 161
3. find the fifth full sentence
4.post the text of the sentence to your blog
5.don't search around for the coolest book you have, use the one that is really next to you.

The closest book to me was "The Silver Chair."
"They followed his directions and passed out of the room by a door which they had not yet seen opened."

The Boy Speaks

We've mentioned here before that, compared to most of his sisters, the boy spoke fairly late and visibly struggled to spit out the words he longed to say.

I said compared to his sisters- not that we do compare of course, because everybody knows that's bad, but still, what else do you have to go by as a parent? Except all comparisons are odious, and some more than others, because you know, the children keep insisting on being individuals and not clones. But still, when other children were speaking in sentences as early as 8 months or as late as, oh, Heavens! 18 months, to see him struggle to spit out two words that were words and not sound effects even when he was four made it hard sometimes to be quite as relaxed about that as I told myself and everybody else I was being.

And so, from time I particularly enjoy how he now effortlessly strings his words together, I think, something like a poet.

He recently tied up an old plastic saucer to drag behind his bike. He needed it, he said, for hauling things from this place to that place and back again, the joy in the hauling, not in the destination. And, he admitted, "I really like it because it makes a sort of throbbing noise over the gravel."

And the other day he told me that'd he'd ridden his bike into a pile of brush and that 'the startled goats shot out of the brush like bullets.'

And the words fly out of his mouth like bright hummingbirds.

Hippies, Hospitality, and Home

It occurs to me that I am somewhat hypocritical in my amusement over the communal living arrangements of the hippies in my Total Loss Farm book. Because it's only different in degree, not kind, from what are we doing, what have we done, all our married lives.

Seldom have our open houses been so open ended as the sixties scene seemed to be- there is usually some sort of goal for moving on- the current friends are looking very hard for a new house, in fact, have a bid on property and are waiting for all the legal mumbletygook to slowly seep through the muddy pipes of bureaucracy. In other cases it's been for the weekend, or 'when your orders come through,' or 'when your husband has put away his gun and stopped looking for you and you can make a break for more permanent shelter,' or 'three months so you can get off your feet,' or 'for a few days after the baby's born,' or 'until the power lines get fixed out by your place,' or 'when you get a job-' this last proved far too open ended for one particular family, but I think it would work well for most of the other people we know.

Although most of the time it's gone well, there was one traumatic experience we still don't much like to talk about- our children witnessed other children being abused, belittled, and the birth child of the mother by a previous relationship being singled out and targeted by both her mother and her step-father. It was a horrible thing to have one of our children come to us in tears asking, "Why doesn't the father like the oldest girl? Why does he have to be so mean?" We had known things were bad- that's why we took them in. We hoped to be able to help the parents, or at least to give some support to the children and let them know their family life was substandard and not their fault. I don't know if we did any good at all, but we still pray for them. But we knew them before hand and had some idea what we were getting into, just not a complete idea. I did have the opportunity to sit down with that oldest child and tell her things that I hope she'll remember when she's an adult, even if she cannot believe them now ("you are not a horrible person... it doesn't matter that you told your mother you hated her when you were three years old, that's a childish thing to say and you were and are a child. She is an adult and mothers who are healthy get over this sort of thing and do not blame children for it forever. Your mother certainly has many problems and we must and will pray for her and understand that perhaps she cannot help herself, but her problems are not your fault and probably existed before you were born and would be no different if you had never been born, what is wrong here is not your fault, not your fault, not your fault...).

I guess one difference between what we do and what I'm reading about in my current crop of sixties period reading is that we usually know the people we take in. In a tiny handful of cases, we knew people who knew them, or we'd met our overnight guests at church that day, or somebody we did know brought over a friend we didn't know. Not that everybody who has stayed with us has been a Christian, not by a long shot, but that's the makings of some other blogpost I'm not sure is ready to be keyboarded yet. We have shared a meal with people we only met at the thrift shop that day, but I don't think we've had any of them stay overnight.

Another difference is that we do not consider property to be theft, nor do we believe that shelter is a right that other people can demand as an entitlement- unlike breathing, freedom, the pursuit of happiness. It is something we do because we believe God calls us to hospitality (rather than entertainment), and because he has given us the means and the space to offer that hospitality (even when that meant putting all the Progeny in one room, or the Cherub in ours for a time). We believe God calls us to share what He's given us. We don't believe that translates into a right to demand that any specific person give to any specific cause, private or public, nor does that give us the right to carp and criticize somebody else because he isn't giving to the charity of my choice.

All this blathering is prompted by the, to me, surprising responses of many people in our little town to the fact that our friends are staying with us while they look for a house. People think that's weird. I take it as a given, for granted, (why wouldn't they stay with friends or family when their house sells out from under them instead of staying in a motel and spending all their money before they ever find the new house?) and I really don't understand the surprise it generates.

Nearly everyday one of us hears something from somebody else about how terribly shocking this is to the local community.

On a funny side-note, the Mister of the family tells us that the first thing his co-workers wanted to know was, "Does that family have a television?" They were stunned to learn we did not. The Mister tells us that his co-workers thought HE was the weirdest person they knew because he doesn't have a television, and they can hardly process the news that there are two such nutcases in their town. They wanted to know what our friends do in the evening without television. Our friends read together, ride bikes, go for a walk, or just visit. We read together and apart, get on the computer, go for a walk, just visit, play games, or just work on projects of our own. I ruefully must confess that something I do share with the Hippies I've been reading about it is a mischievous delight in blowing people's minds this way.

But still, I don't understand the shock, the surprise, the stunned look and the slow shaking of the head that we get in response. My friend explains, "That's just not something that's done around here." Her Mister adds, "To tell the truth, I thought it was kind of weird when you first offered. I was wasn't sure how comfortable I'd be with this." I'm pretty sure the thought that goes through an awful lot of heads is, "You're not from around here, are you?"

Which all reminds me of that survey on the HG's community college campus a couple years back:

If you had a friend who through a series of misfortunes outside his control lost his job, his apartment, and his bank account and found himself with nowhere to live, would you help the friend out, and how?

As we said then:

To the HG and the rest of us at the Common Room this was a no-brainer. The HG told the girl that if those were truly the circumstances, she'd put the friend up at her house until something else could be worked out.

The HG tells us the girl doing the survey stopped in astonishment. "You'd do that?!" she asked in astonishment. "You really would? Wow. What a nice friend. You're the only person today who has said that."

That world is a world I don't understand. It's not my home.

And I'm not from around here. This is where we're coming from:

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Hebrews chapter 13

I am painfully aware that not many of those we've had in our home are truly strangers.

“Contribute to the needs of the saints [not haloed images with special titles- biblically defined a saint is simply a flawed fellow Christian]; extend hospitality to strangers.” Romans chapter 12

Then Jesus said to his host, "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." Luke Chapter 14

Entertainment is nice, there's a place for it, absolutely. But do not make the mistake of thinking entertaining ones friends, even with pretty table settings, fancy teapots, and lacey tablecloths fulfills the biblical call to hospitality.

"Then the King will say to those on His right, 'Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

'For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in;

naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.'

"Then the righteous will answer Him, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink?

'And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You?

'When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?'

The King will answer and say to them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.' Matthew chapter 25

As Keith Green pointed out in one of his albums, the only difference between the sheep and the goats in this passage is what they did and didn't do. And again with the inviting in strangers.

Be hospitable to one another without complaint. 1 Peter 3

This is not always easy, although at least in this verse we're off the hook with the stranger thing. Some of our guests have not been very considerate (do not take a book into the bathroom with you when you are visiting a one bathroom family. Do not flush paper towels, lots of them, in somebody else's septic tank. Do not drop green frosting onto beige carpet and try to hide it by stepping on it, especially if you are a grown and married man rather than a child for whom there might be some excuse...). But those inconveniences, both major and minor, are outweighed by doing what God calls us to do.

Sometimes this practicing of hospitality without grumbling or complaining is easier than others. I have no trouble adhering to this verse just now. I can be hospitable all day long without complaint to our current houseguests, but this reflects no credit on me, as they do nothing even the most disgruntled and cranky person could find to complain about.

Which brings us back to my previous point- I cannot relate to the surprise in our little town. We are not making any sort of sacrifice, nor are we suffering any sort of deprivation.

We are strangers in a strange land, and in that sense we do relate to the counter-cultural flower-children of yore.

New Ocean Discoveries

Carnivorous sponges, 585 new species of crustaceans and hundreds of new worms have been discovered in the dark waters around Antarctica...

More here, and very interesting it all is, too.

Scattered Thoughts from Life on Total Loss Farm

Living and spending are not the same thing.

More specifically:

"If you could only tell them that living and spending isn't the same thing! But it's no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend they could manage very happily on 25 shillings. If the men wore scarlet trousers as I said, they wouldn't think so much of money: if they could dance and hop and skip and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash. And amuse the women themselves, and be amused by the women. They ought to learn to be naked and handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on and embroider their own emblems. Then they wouldn't need money-train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness without needing to spend. But you can't do it. They've all one track minds nowadays.

This is in the frontispiece and it's actually from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, a book I have never read and doubt very much I will. It was published in 1928, indicating that the times, they really aren't a'changing all that much.

This reminded me of my post 'The Sheep That Shopping Shaped,' where I linked to this article:

Jan Whitaker’s history, Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class, helps shed light on the origin of the genus mall rat. A social historian whose previous book examined the 1920s tearoom craze, Whitaker here looks at the role of the department store in creating the modern consumer. She details how department stores, which dominated American retail in the early 20th century, helped give “material expression to vague ideas of what success, femininity, citizenship, and popularity might mean,” then put the identifying accessories (briefcase, lingerie, top hat, tennis racket) within reach of most customers. The secret to the stores’ success was that they were always selling more than the thing itself.

Most of the kids in HOme Comfort, Life on Total Loss Farm, were born in the forties. They are the grandchildren of the department store age, the asperin age, those whose parents bought the material expression that defined their ideas about success.

I think it was in materials from George Barna that I heard that their parents generation was also the generation most interested in getting things done by program and committee, which would explain why the young people on Total Loss Farm thought it so important to establish principles of 'systemless accomplishment,' or anarchy. As I mentioned in previous posts, this largely resulted in the doers doing most or all of the work and the dreamers thinking everything was cool about that.

There are still communes today, or 'intentional communities.' Some internet friends we like very much are members of one. In 1987 Boston Globe's Sunday Magazine published an article that was part update part retrospective (Where Have All The Flower Children Gone?) Most of them, from what I can tell, have overcome this problem by establishing some minimal system. Members usually pay a monthly fee, for example, instead of the systemless accomplishment of a joint checking account and those who have money contributing (or getting a job off the farm to contribute) and those who don't just not worrying about it. Total Loss Farm did the joint checking account for a couple years, but I believe they gave that up shortly after this book was published.

To supplement their farm income (which was minimal), they published a newsletter for a while, and erratically. Deadlines don't mean much in systemless accomplishment. It was first called The New Babylon and then became the Green Mountain Post. It was basically mimeographed sheets of paper with poems, stories, and pictures typical of the time, which means they include crude drawings, nudity, plenty of 'F bombs,' pornographic stories, and it's all rather sad.

Updated to add- the main point of even mentioning that last link (which on further thought I have removed) is because their own words speak more to their lost, sad, empty, longings than anything I could say. And for all the decrying of crass consumerism, one has to wonder why the reliance on a mind altering drug is supposed to be an improvement. But upon further reading, I realized it was too crude for this blog.

OK, so it's Wednesday...

... and I'm STILL re-organizing my room. Part of the blame lies with last night's 24 craziness.

Today, though, I have made progress. And I am liking how things are shaping up. Doubtless you all will get pictures when it is finished.

I am re-discovering how many books I need to read this summer

Tonight was mostly a calm one at work. One of our pages was sick and so I helped put away the media cart. Golly, I do not miss shelving.

Girl: Can you tell me when James Dean died?
Me: *looks it up* Why do you want to know? <-- Curious.
Girl: I'm writing a paper on him.
Me: Have you looked for any books on him here? We have some, and they would definitely be able to tell you when he died and a lot of information about his life.
Girl: No, I haven't looked at any books.
Me (internally): Dadgummit, were you going to write your paper by asking for random factoids?
Outwardly: Here are the call numbers for you to find some. They'll help.

Later it turned out that her project is due in just a couple days. Ho-hum. Why am I not surprised?

More of the fort

I posted about the kiddo's fort here. This is the sign for their fort. I think the skull was a nice touch, don't you?

Flotsam and Jetsam of My Mind

The children recently tried to move their digging and buliding operatiosn from the front yard to the back. When a blue tarp went up as a permanent feature, a blue tarp that could not only be seen, but the sight of which could not be avoided from my kitchen window, we all realized that my tolerance for creative messes was at an end. I made them take it down and move all their junk back up to the front (junk being a broken laundry basket, a couple ugly boards, the tarp, old pots, and other things you might expect to find at the dump).

They were not happy. In fact, they were sulky about it, and I indulged in a bit of self-aggrandizement, telling them that no mother in the world would be as tolerant as I have been over the earthworks in our front yard, and it was simply unreasonable for them to expect me to give over the front yard to holes, and caves, and underground tunnels and the backyard to blue tarps and garbage.

The Equuschick is in California where she is to be maid of honor at a dear friend's wedding. She arrived a week before the wedding (which is not the bridge burning wedding I wrote of earlier, but rather otherwise) to help out with many things, and a good thing, too, as at a critcial moment (is there a noncritical moment leading up a wedding?) one of the primary helpers came down with something debilitating and contagious. They had initially declared that this week would be a coffee-free week, and they would get plenty of sleep and yet still get everything done that needed doing. Late last night they emailed to say that they had decided it would be a free coffee week instead, and they were still up doing imaginative things with ivy and tulle.

And have we mentioned that the Equuschick is barely five feet tall, has the frame of a delicate piece of china, and is outweighed by her Zeus-dog, and the best man is 6'4" and outweighs the Equuschick, her Zeus-dog, and perhaps a small pony, and is built after the fashion of a line-backer? I am sure we have. We are immensely delighted in such absurd contrasts and the Equuschick wearies of our jokes about size.

I have seven children and it still amazes me how much time young children can waste dawdling because they'd rather be doing something else, even while they are lamenting the lovely day outside where they want to hurry up and go play.
If they would only get down to it they would be done already.

Last night and into this morning three of the oldest Progeny and I stayed up far too late indulging in remedial culture, 101.

In other words, we watched the first half of the first season of 24. I could understand what all the buzz was about, I really could. This show was riveting and the reason we had to stay up is because we had to know what happened. Naturally, we didn't find out, this being only the first half of the season, so we had to google. The HG objected, "Reading about it just isn't the same for me."

"You're certainly right about that," I agreed. "Reading about it won't tie my stomach up in knots, give me a tension headache, cause me to clench my fists so tightly I leave fingernail marks in my hand and yours, make me forget to breathe, or give me an exhausting adrenalin rush. Nor will I hyperventilate when I do remember to breathe."

We agreed to hate the composer because he or she is entirely too good. We agreed to hate Keifur Sutherland because his acting has improved so much since has in the Disney Three Muskateers (and his American twang is much better suited to Jack Bauer's character than to that of Athos). We also agree to never check out another 24 episode from the library again for the rest of our lives. We simply couldn't handle the tension.

Somehow, even before I read the Wikipedia recap, even while I was still forgetting to breathe, the lyrics to this old song kept going through my head:

...On and on and on it goes,
How it ends up nobody knows, cause

They keep me waiting, I don't mind waiting!
Don't call me crazy! No, I'm not lazy!
My day won't go right, I can't sleep all night,
My hands start shaking, my knees start quaking,
I just can't cope without my soap!
General Hospi-Tale!
General Hospi-Tale! Mmm, number one!
General Hospi-Tale! You're my worst affliction!
General Hospi-Tale! You're my favorite addiction!

I also got motion sick from all the plot twists and turns. Not to mention whiplash (Trust Nina, trust her not, trust Nina, trust her not, trust her not and hate her evil, hateful, vile character forever)...

After this experience, I am loathe to check out any episodes of Lost.

Home-grown VS Instant Community

So I've been reading all this fun 1960s countercultural back to the land movement stuff, and I've been googling this and that to find out if these particular 'simple living' commune advocates kept their principles (some did, some didn't), and posting fun bits and pieces from reading. And a day or two ago I wrote some good stuff one of them wrote about creating a sense of community, what's necessary for community building, and I agreed with the hippie (although he was one of them who left the commune first and went on to live a hedonistic lifestyle including world travel and lots of restaurants), and said: "And maybe it's not appropriate to take to the commune to create a community of like-minded neighbors before one has been able to apply the ethics and values mentioned above in the community of neighbors, co-workers, and acquaintances where one finds oneself."

We all want that comfort and warmth that comes from a fellowship of 'likeminded believers,' but we also want to come to it by shortcuts. The funny thing is that those of us who yearn earnestly for that community of likeminded believers are also some of us who dismiss pop culture, pop anything, especially our cultural drive for instant gratification, instant burgers, instant credit, instant coffee, instant oatmeal (which might save an entire 60 seconds at the cost of vitamins, minerals, texture, and taste), instant this and instant that. We decry this tyranny of the immediate, this slavery to the cult of the instant. And yet we are the same people who long for instant community.

Rick Saenz posted recently about experiencing the goodness of community in his small town. In the comments he said:

What is important, perhaps, is that the residents are rooted here, either by history or by choice. People did not gather here in order to experience community; they were already a community by dint of circumstances and geography and history and livelihood, and are just doing the things necessary to survive and thrive in this kind of community.

We've lived in several small towns (one had a population of 299) and I think this tends to be true of most of them, especially rural ones. Rural neighbors need to be able to rely on each other without taking each other for granted (good fences make good neighbors). We've helped look for our neighbors dogs, and we've helped hunt up their cattle when they got through the downed fencing on the creek onto our woods. They have helped us round up our horses a tiresome amount of times.

Small communities have a reputation, not altogether undeserved, for being small minded and often nosy. These things can certainly be true. Sometime we might tell you about the Great Water Debate over the girls at the animal shelter deciding to pay for a monthly bottle of water from a local supplier. The board objected because the water bottle used shelter electricity. Or I could tell you about the current ongoing feud over a couple bricks and plank or two one neighbor used to get his truck out of the mud- and the small rut he left behind when he did it. You'd think it was the Grand Canyon. When we were building this house (and Granny Tea the house next door), we'd often find tire marks in the drive where people stopped by to see what was going on. And we'd hear from folks in town, "See you've got the windows in, now."

But somewhere else on the 'net (I've lost the source, but I think it was comment from one of the hippies about moving into the commune in a small town and how they managed to make friends with the neighbors), I read this:

"To me, what I like about living in a small town is that everybody considers the whole town to be their home, rather than just the four walls they live in. So I see curiosity and concern about your neighbors as logical and correct."

It seems to me that this could also equally true in an apartment complex, a trailer park, or any neighborhood. But it has to start somewhere, and it might as well be us.

The Tyranny of Image

The wedding we went to was a pretty little ceremony, short, not too formal. The best man was holding his baby through most of the ceremony, which we thought delightfully quirky and charming. There were lots of small children and babies there, which we also thought sweet. We think children and small babies belong at weddings, but we know we're weird. A few days ago while browsing the web I copied down the phrase 'Tyranny of image,' from somewhere, but I got called away from the computer and forget where it came from. I don't know who said it, but I do know we, our culture, suffers greatly under this bondage.
I mentioned the best man (a great, hulking, linebacker sort of fellow) holding his baby through most of the ceremony- and I wonder how many of my readers raised an eyebrow or curled a lip, surprised that such informal proceedings should go on at a wedding, let alone with our smiling approval.
I suffer this tyranny of image as well, even though I pride myself on being out of the mainstream and not being a captive of pop culture. A few weeks ago we were out and about with Granny Tea, yard-saling, and my new clogs were giving me horrible blisters. We stopped at a store to pick up a pair of socks for me to wear with them. Because the blisters were by this time so bad I was hobbling, Granny Tea offered to run in and buy the socks for me. She asked if I cared what they looked like, and I said no.
She came out with a pair of socks with pom-poms at the heels, and I realized I cared very, very much. But why? The colors even matched my shoes and clothes? The socks were clean, new, and comfortable. My blisters no longer shrieked at me in fiery pain. But they were pom-poms.
I girded up my loins and shook myself free of the tyranny of the image and went on yard-saling anyway. I found a ten dollar chair in fantastic condition thanks, I suspect, to another example of that tyranny of image. It was a really cute red leather easy chair sort of thing, on a swiveling steel frame. It was divinely comfortable, and everything but the seat was in store-room floor condition. It even had the original paperwork (also still in good condition) in plastic bag taped to the underside. Wrapped all around the seat cushion and safety pinned together beneath it was an incredibly hideous and jarring fabric that wasn't pretty when it came off the bolt, so I assumed the seat must be badly torn. But when I sat on it it was so comfortable I bought it (ten dollars) anyway and figured we'd just wrap it in new fabric when we got it home.
This was at the close of two days of yard sales, and it was such a nice chair for such a nice price that I figured that probably tattered seat and the ugly fabric around it was the only reason it was still there waiting for me. Tyranny of image.
But when I got it home and we unpinned the hideous fabric, there was no tear. There was a stain, a large, bleach white spot dead in the middle of the cushion. That doesn't bother me, but if it did, I'd just wrap it in new fabric.

*Bullet Points

*The opportunty to observe, at very close quarters, true students of music play Rachmaninoff on a piano and Cello can be classed with what Calvinists call "Common Grace," and what The Equuschick simply explains by saying "No one really deserves to be this happy. Ever."

*The gift of oceans can also be classed in the above catergory. We don't deserve them.

*Cutting sponges into a proper size of wedge to fit in pew clips for wedding decorations is much more difficult than one might think. The Equuschick is now equipped to write the authoritative book on the subject, having practically discovered the system of cutting at every third ridge of the sponge.

*The Equuschick and Co. are now about to discover just how much can be done with Ivy swags and white gauze things while watching An Ideal Husband.

*The Equuschick amused the Co. this evening by scrawling Woohoo! and Yeehaw! and Smiley faces all over her Starbucks cup.

Bridge Burning

We are going to a wedding tonight, some of us, anyway. Some of us couldn't because we already had plans that involve others and cannot be changed.

I'm not going to go into details, but the occassion is not so happy as it could be. Relatives are angry. Circumstances are not of the sort calculated to bring unmitigated joy and happiness to any Christian parent. I hold small help for the future of this relationship without God, but God can do great things and who knows? The inlaws are not the inlaws I would choose- but the thing is, I didn't choose, and neither did the parents and what's being done has largely already been done beyond the point of no return and the time for raising objections and voicing direful predictions is past.

Long past.

Bridges are burning with a white hot heat just now, and things are being said and done that will send deep, deep hurts, hard to forgive.

And I bring this up on this space not because of this specific situation, but because I see similar situations all around the conservative Christian community. And maybe it's not fair for me to say it, me with my unrebellious, sweet, and yet unmarried daughters, but amongst those who of us who speak firmly about courtship and about not defrauding one another (you either know what I mean by that or you don't, and if you don't, I'm not explaining, this post is for those who know)- I am seeing an awful lot of defrauding going on- and it's the parents defrauding their children.

The time to raise objections, to point out possible character flaws, to object to a relationship that you believe may be toxic- even if you are right, dead on target, and absolutely correct in all your judgements is before there is a relationship to cloud judgment, before saying these things will cause a fatal wound in your child's relationship with you.

Do not let your most fondly cherished hopes and dreams for how your child's marriage will happen (and believe me, we are as conservative here as you could possibly imagine, and we would be heartbroken under these circumstances) come between you and your adult Progeny, whether they share those hopes and dreams or crush them under foot.

I have conservative views on mating, dating (we don't believe in it) and courtship, views shared by my husband and our Progeny- but those views are not more important to us than our children themselves.

All my views of purity in the world will not matter a fig if I conduct a slash and burn policy towards a wayward child and use my convictions as an axe against the root of our relationship in such a way as to drive my adult son or daughter away from me and into the arms of any waiting other, nor will it impress God or anybody else if I voice those convictions, no matter how pleasing to God the convictions themselves may be, in such fashion as to poison any future relationships with unsaved in-laws and grandchildren.

Connections in My Reading

The first nearly forty years of my life I never was reading more than one book at a time, except for the Bible. This was because I only read from cover to cover. I never put a book down to finish it later. I read in one deep, binging gulp. Even when reading the Bible I sometimes read in binges- all of the books of the Law at one long sitting, all the major Prophets might keep me up until three in the morning. I had not the self-discipline or habit of attention to permit me to read a few pages, put the book down and come back to it again, let alone keep two or more books going in this slow and steady fashion.

But books are not written in a vaccuum, and we lose much when we read them as though they are. Neither is the mind a vaccuum, although it is perhaps a different aspect of my lack of mental discipline that reading Bronowski reminded me of a passage in Home Comfort that reminded me of something else I'd read and been thinking about.

Here's my chain of thought:

Paraphrasing Bronowski in the chapter 'The Habit of Truth' from Science and Human Values: the concepts of science and those of ethics and values are not different worlds. Both what is and what ought to be are subject to testing.
Quoting more directly,

"Such concepts as justice, humanity and the full life have not remained fixed in the last four hundred years, whatever churchmen and philosophers may pretend. In their modern sense they did not exist when Aquinas wrote: they do not exist now in civilizations which disregard the physical fact. And here I do not mean only the scientific fact."

I think he means the conception of justice, humanity, and the full life do not yet exist in certain societies, and that Aquinas' ideas about them were different than ours, just as conceptions about gravity and the mapping of the solar system either did not exist in some cultures and time, or were not the same as those we now have. But the reality of those things existed nonetheless, apart from human inaccuracies about them. At any rate, reading that passage from Bronowski reminded me of this essay by Ray Mungo in Home Comfort, Life on Total Loss Farm:

The community needs common good and evil. These may be abstract and religious if you're Mike Metelica or Mel Lyman or Mao Tse-Tung' but they must be real to the people involved. They may be material and practical too- good in the leaves and trees and sun, bad in the inclement weather or threat of bankruptcy or the neighbors' absurd and wrong way of living. In the true sense we know that good and evil are but intellectual conceits, they don't exist, 'nothing is better, nothing is best.' Yet it is absolutely essential to the community to have a common enemy worthy of ear or contempt, we stand united against it; and a common joy incapable of tarnish, we stand together in loving it."

I agree with nearly everything he says about community, but we part company when he expresses a supposed disbelief in good and evil. Naturally, I do believe there are absolute qualities of good evil that are true and right and exist regardless of my understanding of those concepts. Moreover, I don't think he really, deep down, truly believes that there is no such thing as good and evil except as an intellectual conceit or he wouldn't be opposed to the war in Viet Nam, would he?

Other things necessary for community, says Ray Mungo:
trust, refusing to believe the worst of your fellow members of community, 'incidents or remarks which might be insulting or hurtful among ordinary citizens must be suffered and forgiven in the community,' some privacy and exposure- vulnerability- to one another. Shares joys and shared sorrows are also important.

Which naturally reminded me of what some other writers, with whom I have much more agreement, have written about community:

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

...be of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.

Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another...

encourage one another and build each other up...

love one another deeply, from the heart.

live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble...

Dear friends, let us love one another...

Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position....

Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other...

And maybe it's not appropriate to take to the commune to create acommunity of like-minded neighbors before one has been able to apply the ethics and values mentioned above in the community of neighbors, co-workers, and acquaintances where one finds oneself.

More Sixties Reading

I think these quotes are from the book Famous Long Ago, where Raymond Mungo recounts the history of LNS, the radical underground news service he and a friend started. It includes his version of events surrounding the split between two factions at the press, how that split happened and how very terribly the other side behaved. Those on the other side have described his account as a work of pure fiction, and I'm not very interested in who was right and who was wrong in that famous long ago that has little to do with me and is over details of a philosophy and politics I don't share- especially when the details are so fine an outsider can hardly distinguish them.

I just missed the 60s. I saw hippies all around- there were some on my block and in my church- but they were peripheral to my vision as I was occupied with playing cowboys and Indians, flying kites, riding my bike, and digging sand-lot forts at the time. I did wear bell bottoms and granny dresses and I learned what marijuana smelled like when a youth group spending the night at our church building didn't air it out enough in time for church services the next morning. I think I briefly babysat for a drug pusher. I was warned never to leave my food unattended at school, and to be careful who I took candy from- years later when I read Go Ask Alice I finally understood what that was all about. Being somewhat countercultural ourselves, I find the period fascinating.

I also enjoy reading any book, from any period of time, written in such a way that assumptions, standards, values and culture of that time and place are revealed in such a living way as one could never get from reading an encyclopedia entry. Ray wrote his Famous Long Ago in 1969. He and Marshall Bloom had only started the news service in 1967, the split was in 1968, and it was also in 1968 that Ray, Marty Jezer, a girl called Verandah and a few of their friends started the commune at Total Loss Farm in Packers Corner. So the window of history in Famous Long Ago is immediate, and much of the flavor and generally taken for granted assumptions of the era are revealed inadvertently rather than didactically. As this short and pithy review explains- it's a great historical relic. Here are some of the pieces I found particularly interesting for one reason or another:

Ray Mungo describing the people he and Marshall Bloom gathered around them, or rather, who drifted up around them, in their 1960s DC apartment building:

They were people who were homeless, could survive on perhaps five dollars a week in spending money, and could tolerate the others in the house. I guess we all agreed on some basic issues—the war is wrong, the draft is an
abomination and a slavery, abortions are sometimes necessary and should be legal, universities are an impossible bore, LSD is Good and Good For You, etc., etc.—and I realize that marijuana, that precious weed, was our universal common denominator.

These would be countercultural issues where we do not have much in common. It is interesting to note that while the propaganda arm of the sixties would have us believe it was all about peace, love, and acceptance, the acceptance was really largely just for those who shared a belief in those 'basic' issues- and whose judgment was warped by drugs.

Raymond also notes that "it is difficult to remain "independent" of aggressive young Trotskyites when you share a bathroom with them."

The whole point is that a free community does not have meetings, and your attendance is never required in a free community. You are welcome to do whatever comes to mind, so long as it does not actively harm others, in a free community. Nothing is expected of you, nothing is delivered. Everything springs of natural and uncoerced energy. Compassion and understanding will go a long way toward making your community free, delegation of labor will only mechanize it.

Sometimes, of course, you harm others by omission, by inaction, as much as you do by actions. If nothing is expected of you and nothing is delivered you don't really have a free community. You are in bondage to your own and everybody else's whims. And then we have a disconnect between the previous comment and this one- why is it difficult to be independent of aggressive young Trotskyites? Where's the compassion and understanding? In this freedom to do whatever comes to mind, why may they not hog the bathroom and proselytize?
If the most important bond you share in common is shared use of mind-altering, reality bending, hallucinogenic substances, then maybe, you know, that bond isn't really one that will support a life together in community without the crutch of mind-altering, reality bending, hallucinations. It's also odd that these things could be written by a man who writes elsewhere that there is no such thing as good evil, these are just intellectual conceits (more on that in another blog post).

After all that carping, I have to say I think I largely agree with the quote below. Before reading I will explain that the term 'ped-xing' comes from 'pedestrian crossing,' and is used to refer to taking care of the boring, mundane, routine drudgery of the 9-5 lifestyle- getting appointments made, paying the rent, getting the phone turned on, answering business mail, getting papers to the printers on time, meeting deadlines, that sort of thing.

"...ideals cannot be institutionalized. You cannot put your ideals into practice, so to speak, in any way more "ambitious" than through your own private life. Ideals, placed in the context of a functioning business enterprise (such as the government, SDS, or LNS) become distorted into ego trips or are lost altogether in the clamor of daily ped-xing which seems related to the ideal but is
actually only make-work."

The ped-xers of the world are those who get things done and we cannot do without them. I share Raymond's dislike of ped-xing, but not his disdain. I wish I were better at that sort of thing and I know that the reasons I am not have to do with personal character flaws and failings and are not a mark of my superior approach to life.

However, I totally agree that the best place to put your ideals into practice is through your own private life, at home, with your friends, in the local community where God has put you (not an idealized, artificial community created by you and some of your friends who think a sort of monastic withdrawal from the community of the lost is where it's at. Soapboxing over. For now).

Mrs. Whaley's Wisdom

"Duck hunting. It's a reason to get out of your bed and you do see the sunrise. The dew and the first light on the marsh. A flying duck sounds like nothing else. But I won't shoot. How awful. how useless. Of course, you don't talk that way around men or teach your daughters to talk that way around men, but bird-watchers have the right idea. Bird-watching is a wonderful turn of events..."

The Fort

FYB: Okay. About Thirty two people can fit in it. We have a pantry, and a kitchen, and we were going to have a toilet in there, but it's now been turned into a stockroom.
FYG: You have to crawl to get in there because of the roof, and you have to Watch Your Head.
C: I made LOTS of cupboards! (FYG inserts: About 25 cupboards. But, you know that area near the entrance? The one FYB and I have been working on? Some sand got into the cupboards.)
And the other two are scrubbing the five inches of sand and dirt off their small selves, so they were unable to give any commentary on the fort. Mine is: Way Cool.
You can click the picture to enlarge it!

The Thing About History is Everybody Dies

Island Story is just about my favorite history book ever. My son adored it from his first exposure (age about 4). His next older sister has complained that 'everybody dies,' but this would be true of any history book. You cannot tell a chronological story of kings who reigned without mentioning the fact that one king has to die (even if it's just of old age) before the next one becomes king.

Child also often see things differently than we expect, and sometimes our ideas about their sensitivity are imposed on them. I know I was just sure my firstborn was going to be crushed by Charlotte's Web, because Charlotte dies at the end, but she wasn't in the least bit sad. She figured the spider had lived out her life in full, for a spider, and she was just happy the pig didn't die.=) Another very sensitive daughter was far more distraught by Seton's Wild Animals I have Known than anything she ever read in Island Story.

I think, too, that it is better to be confronted with these grim realities through history books and literature long before they come
to deal with them in real life. The fact that it *is* a history book
and so this happend ages ago to people who would, in any case, by dead by now anyway, is itself a cushion that softens the blow-unless, perhaps we let the children know that we expect this to break their hearts.

Mrs. Whaley's Wisdom

My forebears were all interested in good food. Nan and my Aunt Em had been all over Europe and seen all the flower gardens. They could design a garden as well as anybody at that time. Aunt Em's garden was filled with statues and laid out with focal points. The most beautiful flowers. But the first thing Aunt Em would say when got off the train in Moncks Corner was, "Nan, did you get up a stand of spinach?" That generation... they had grown up in places where the store did not provide spinach, lettuce, or any of the other amenities for a table. The honey came from local bees. Everything that went on their tables, with the exception of rice, flour, salt, sugar, and cans of salmon -there were cases of canned salmon in every house- came from the vegetable garden.

New things learned.

It is possible to peel boiled eggs and read a book at the same time. This is exciting knowledge, but also tinged with some regret. Think of all the reading opportunities I've missed in my life...

----

Moving furniture in my room today (and tomorrow... and -good grief- hopefully not Wednesday). It's messy and I think I need an "under construction" sign.

Special People are coming soon. They know who they are. And I am so excited. :-D

Of Communes and Anarchy

There's a picture on the back of Home Comfort (the hippy commune book I'm reading, language and nudity alert), a picture of the members of the commune at the time of publication. They're smiling, young, enthusiastic, and I wanted to know what happened to them next, where they all ended up. Jeff Kisseloff had the same interest and ended up writing Generation on Fire (language alert), which turned out to be a different book than he initially envisioned, but he did track down some of the original commune members and interview them.

Marty Jezer was one of the founding members; his money made up a good portion of the initial down payment. He's also one of the most sympathetic of members, to my way of thinking. He's a lynchpin, a worker, ('drones' two of the other members who claim not to like routine, call people like him), a grown-up with a stuttering problem longing for a place to belong.
Kisseloff interviewed him for the book about the sixties and ended up not using that chapter because much of his information because it was duplicated by other people in the book, so Kisseloff put it up on his website. Here's some of the things Jezer said about life on the farm:

I think we had a huge stake in succeeding that other communes didn’t have. We had been written about and had written about it ourselves, and we had taken a stand that we were where it’s at, so even if it was horrible, even if it was cold as hell in the wintertime, we couldn’t give up. I couldn’t give up. We learned to give each other space, accept each other’s eccentricities and became extremely tolerant and compassionate with each others flaws and hangups and habits.

But our household was always kind of messy, and too often the same people cleaned up. We also had problems because some of us defined ourselves in terms of work and some of us didn’t. I was happy growing things and cutting things. I would have done that all day and all evening. I was happier doing that than talking and hanging out. But when things had to be done, people began to assume that “Marty will do it.” That got to be a dynamic on all the communes: there were the doers who would take on extra jobs, and everyone would think, “Oh, they’re happy doing it, I don’t have to do it.” and I got disgusted after a while and I left the farm and moved back to New York in 1972.

He only stayed away 18 months. In New York he wrote a book, got a job, lived with a girlfriend, tried a new commune, broke up with the girlfriend, got homesick and went back to Vermont.

In 1975, I got a job installing solar hot water systems around here. I did that while I worked on my next book. By then the farm had changed. Most of us had jobs in town. The land was no longer the center of our lives. I left for good in 1995. I had a girlfriend here, and while my daughter Katie was happy, I found it too constricting.

The farm hit its peak in the mid-70s, but then things started to change. People started to want to a little income or a little spending money. Some of us began to feel that we wanted some space. It was obvious that we weren’t going to be self-supporting in a comfortable way. People were getting older. They were tired of cars that were always breaking down. They were tired of homes that had holes in the roof or tents. They wanted some comforts.

We also realized that the New Age wasn’t going to happen....

There are 200 million people in the country, and even if you have 10 million with long hair and in the counterculture, it seems like a lot, but it isn’t. Still, I think it was a grand experiment. Our stance on the war was right. Our critique of the culture had and has a core of truth, that it is alienating, it is exploitative and based on greed.

I don’t think a counterculture the way we envisioned it can still happen. I think the big culture, the corporate culture, will absorb whatever comes up the pike....

In terms of our social agenda, I’m not certain if they co-opted us or we subverted them. The mainstream culture absorbed our ideas, toned them down and turned them into a part of the culture as a commodity of profit. On the other hand, some of those ideas — healthy lifestyles, back to the land, organic food and comfortable clothes — have triumphed.

In Home Comfort, one of the other members of the commune talks about how well anarchy works in the commune, that things just get done without anybody being in charge, people just do what needs doing and everything is bliss. But even at the time the book was written, Marty and one of the women are pointing out that the reason things just get done in this 'anarchic' system is because of those who take on the burden of getting things done and supporting the others.

Reality VS Philosphy

Once of the books on my TBR list, which takes the physical form of a structurally unsound pile of books around the desk and ledge near our bed, is Home Comfort, Life On Total Loss Farm. I do not know when I acquired this book, but for a very long time now it has been sitting, forlorn and unread, in the bookcase with my other homesteading/agrarian type books. I like to read cookbooks. I also like to read about people living harder than I want to in an attempt to grown all their own food and live in touch with nature and the earth around them. I like to read these sorts of how-to books for the vicarious virtue I get from knowing, academically, how to tell if a goat is a good milker, without ever again actually trying to milk the goat. Having done it before, in bitter Nebraska winters, I see no reason to desire to do it again now that I am ten years older and much less strong.

But I digress- I like to read these sorts of how-to books, as I say, and I thought that this was one. It was page 84 before I got to the first 'how-to' do anything, and then it was only some poor directions for making cottage cheese, an easy task that anybody could do, but not, I think, very successfully with these directions. What this books is, as more informed people than I already know, is a source document on life in the 60s on a back-t- the-land-commune, one of the first and most successful.

There is 'language,' there are naked people digging wells, and there is the amount of drug use one hoped was an exaggeration but it seems not. And it's well written, engaging, interesting, confusing, and fascinating. I read bits of it to my husband, who says succinctly, "Dude! Whoa. I mean, Dude!" But really, I think it's more confusing because this is a sequel and they seem to feel there is not any need to reintroduce the cast of characters and I can't keep them straight. The members of the commune wrote the book together, different folks taking different chapters, and I don't know who is speaking. It's like coming into a television show in the middle with nobody to tell you who the different people are or what they're tying to do.

So naturally I googled and found more by and about this crowd online, including another book called The Famous Long Ago, written by Ray Mungo, one of the founding members and perhaps the chief publicist and promoter (read: chief exaggerator and snake-oil salesman, but with endearing enthusiasm) of the project.

He and a friend founded LNS, a news service for alternative press organs in the 60's. They were totally into the whole tune in, turn on, drop out scene until they weren't, and the friend also joined the back to the land movement with his own nearby commune, but killed himself at 25. They had glorious, ridiculous, admirable, selfish, lofty, lazy, and mutually exclusive and contradictory ideals and principles, but, at least in the writing of the two books I've read and am reading so far, never, ever seemed to realize it even as they wrote them out in clear uncompromising black and white- unless it was this conflict with reality that caused Marshall Bloom to end it all at 25.

In Famous Long Ago, Mungo writes:

Our glorious scheme of joining together the campus editors, the Communists, the Trots, the hippies, the astrology freaks, the pacifists, the SDS kids, the black militants, the Mexican-American liberation fighters, and all their respective journals, was reduced to ashes. Our conception of LNS as a "democratic organization," owned by those it served, was clearly ridiculous; among those it served were, in fact, men whose very lives were devoted to the principle that no organization, no institution, was desirable. And I have come, through a painful route, to the same conclusion.

They buy a farm in Vermont and invite friends to come and stay. But before they actually get to the farm they have loose ends to tie up, drugs to take, and California to visit. It is the 60s, after all. So they go tripping off, in more ways than one, and wrap up the loose ends of the disappointing end of LNS, or rather, their involvement in it, and then they finally make it back to the farm that two of them have purchased.
This is, I remind you, the 60s. So they've been living sort of communally, but not deliberately so, for several years. People drop in and sleep in their apartments, sleeping bags on the floor, cots in the basement, three to a bed ("imagine the smell," says my fastidious eldest). They have run LNS partially on stolen materials, office supplies 'liberated' from the day job of one or two of them, lumber 'liberated' from nearby construction sites for desks and chairs, and occasionally somebody returns the favor and liberates a car stereo or a some other personal piece of property from these young people who do not believe in personal property.

And they arrive on their farm to find it 'overrun with strangers:'

On entering the house there was no place to sit down or sleep. People asked us who we were and how long we intended to stay. This is the most difficult to recount. What had happened in our absence? Ray and Marty left a couple to oversee the farm while they finished in New York. Peter and Linda made no distinctions between friends or strangers. They were under the impression that: property being theft, we had no right to pick and choose, to put down our own roots to the exclusion of others. How could we argue with that?"

Nonetheless, to protect their own vision of this property and what they were to do, they evict the strangers and felt guilty about it.

I'm honestly really enjoying this book and I much enjoyed Ray Mungo's other books, so more to come from them.

Two Young Cooks

Sitting around the table at lunch earlier last week I realized, because they told me, that combining our two youngest children with the three children of the family temporarily staying with us, the children's ages are stair steps- 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. The 9 and 11 year olds are the girls.

The girls participate in and direct the earthworks project going on in my front yard with just as much energy and imagination as the boys do, and they get just as filthy. So it was rather an interesting sight a few days ago when the girls came in, disheveled, hair wild and unkempt, faces coated with grime, fingernails black, the dust of hard honest toil covering them and surely grit between their teeth, to ask me if they could make supper for everybody all by themselves, pancakes and eggs.

Behind the grime their eyes were shining with a clean, good sparkle, and besides, I saw an opportunity to read further in my book, so I agreed. I did insist that they wash their hands, perhaps with the addition of a brillo pad. I slyly did not mention their faces, because I knew I was going to get out the camera and take their pictures and it just made such a delightful picture. Imagine, these two young maidens, hands spotlessly clean, aprons domestically donned, glowing smiles as they put their two heads together and grinned at me over the extra large bowl for pancake batter, and not a clean spot of skin on their dimpled, lovely faces.

I had inventoried the small freezer a day or two before (Pip inventoried the pantry, Mrs. B, our guest, inventories the larger freezers in the garage), so I knew that there were several small bags of various flours, whole wheat, buckwheat, cornmeal, even soy. So I pulled out a cookbook (More with Less) and multiplied the recipe for pancakes in it by five (to use up the five cups of flour we had). The girls measured in five cups of goat's milk, 12-13 tablespoons of oil, and got out 5 fresh laid hens' eggs, squealed in excitement over a double yolk, so one egg went back in the fridge. They carefully measured in the baking soda, salt, and baking powder and whisked it all together. I read my book from a stool on the opposite side of the island, occasionally directing them to do things like throw away the egg shells (repressing my twinge of guilt over the lack of an easily accessible compost pile), wipe up the spilled drops of milk on the counter and floor, rinse the empty milk jars before the milk dries on the edges). I also took pictures.

And the boys, what were the boys doing meanwhile? Digging holes, of course. The youngest two obviously missed their sisters, because they kept running in to share urgent pieces of news with them- you should see the hole, now, the goats have moved, the dogs have barked, I found a nest, would you like to see a magic trick, would you like to hear a riddle, would you like to see this toad I found?- that last was from my son, who informed me two days later that when he took the toad out of the kitchen he lost it somewhere in the house and doesn't know where it is.

We got out the big cast iron griddle that covers two burners and I showed them how to grease it and flip pancakes, instructing them as to care and caution about hot metal and burned flesh. There were no injuries committed in the making of those pancakes. The younger girl caught on to flipping sooner- quick and energetic in her moves, the brisk wrist motion necessary to flip a pancake perfectly suited her. The older girl, slower, more interested in watching the pancake on her spatula, observing it closely, slowly, too carefully turning so the pancake slid off before she was ready, folding itself in half as it hit the pan, did better at scrambling the eggs. Her day dreamy ways were more suited for the slow scrambling over lower heat that makes for tender, moist eggs.

The dinner was delicious, and they even helped with clean-up (the boys usually doing lunch dishes). They asked if they could do this once a week. I'm not sure I want a pancake supper once a week. ACtually, that's an untruth. I am sure I do not. But I will think of something else they can do once a week and try to tie a cooking lesson in with that.

They do not yet know of my perfidy over their sweetly unwashed faces and the photographic evidence.

Sunday Hymn Post

If I have wounded any soul today,
If I have caused one foot to go astray,
If I have walked in my own willful way,
Dear Lord, forgive!

If I have uttered idle words or vain,
If I have turned aside from want or pain,
Lest I myself shall suffer through the strain,
Dear Lord, forgive!

If I have been perverse or hard, or cold,
If I have longed for shelter in Thy fold,
When Thou hast given me some fort to hold,
Dear Lord, forgive!

Forgive the sins I have confessed to Thee;
Forgive the secret sins I do not see;
O guide me, love me and my keeper be,
Dear Lord, Amen.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day.

And thus it is a fantastic opportunity to say on this blog that those of us here at the Common Room are vastly blessed by having the DHM as our mother. She has dedicated so much creativity and love to all of us.

She has always let us know -in a million and one different ways- how very special we are to her.

I may never reach a million and one, but here is an attempt to let her know how special she is to me.

Special memories:
* reading aloud Narnia
* reading aloud Swiss Family Robinson while we dug a pioneer dug out
* singing loudly on long car trips
* begging the HM to stop by historical markers on those same long car trips
* her praise over my first "serious" history paper... it was a very short paper on the battle of Bull Run, and her praise -never given in an empty manner- thrilled me.
* cooking chicken artichoke crepes as a late birthday meal after I'd only mentioned them in passing. These are not quick and easy things to make, folks.
* baking Christmas cookies and sipping hot Christmas tea year after year.

The list could get quite long. :) Thanks for all of it, Mom! I love you!

Saturday Book Reviews

Take a peek over at Semicolon, because I'm sure none of us have long enough booklists.

The Equuschick Sees The Pattern, Here.

Why can't you?

"Reason for Surrender: Dog jumps on kids.

Has Dog Ever Had Obedience Training: No."

"Reason for Surrender: Dog (actually, a puppy, in this instance, Black Lab) will sometimes growl over food.

Has Dog Ever Had Obedience Training: No."

"Reason for Surrender: Dog has too may bad habits.

Has Dog Ever Had Obedience Training: No."


And it isn't like it is expected that the training involved be an Officially Sanctioned Professionally Instructed Dog Obedience Class. You don't have to pay somebody else for it. The Equuschick did with the Zeus child but she got an excellent discount and Zeus enjoyed it more for the chance to get out and about. But just because not everyone can get a discount, do not dissuade yourself from training a dog because it is too expensive. Home school your dog, too! Just school him. Somehow.

In many cases an owner will say "They didn't go to a class, but I did it myself" and those owners earn a little more respect from The Equuschick. It is the effort, and an acknowledgment on the owner's part that a dog does not learn good habits or bad by any sort of accident. That is what is lacking in so many people.

And it is one thing if you acquired the dog at a state in his life where he had all ready had ample time to learn the bad habits, but to have had a dog from his infancy and to give him up as a total loss due to his inexplicable lack of ability to train himself to behave is unfair.

They do, all of them as individuals, have each certain tendencies or bents in a certain direction, but unlike children, they have no conscience that will provide the slightest inclination for them to change their ways. They don't suddenly reach maturity and say "Dear me, I must read a book on self-improvement. My life is in shambles."

He is a DOG. As such, he is entirely without moral scruples and you must not be so shocked to find him so. Dogs do not know right or wrong, they know only what they want and don't want. Whatever moral scruples he is to have, you must instill.

The Zeus Dog does not sit for his food because he knows in his heart that it is the moral choice, he sits for his food because he is a dog, bless him, and he wants his food and knows that if he moves a split second before The Alpha has told him he may come, he'll have to wait that much longer before he gets what he wants.

This arrangement, which sounds so unromantically unLassielike, is one that neither The Equuschick nor The Zeus Dog are particularly unhappy with.

The Equuschick adores the dog with the ridiculous ears and derives great pleasure, of a purely human sort, from giving him what he wants and making him happy. The Zeus Dog adores his food, and has learned who gives it to him and under what conditions, and has developed a purely canine affection for the girl who gives him what he wants, and a purely canine respect for the chain of command she has set up, because that means she is a Leader and can be trusted in times of emergency. Like, when hard times come and there's no food, he knows that his Leader will find food!

Dogs want food (they're adolescent wolves, hello?), and it is easy to train them with it. In fact, you're training a dog every time he's around you and there is food in the room, whether you know it or not. But if you know what you're doing, he'll be picking up the good habits. Not the bad.

You, unlike your dog, have the capacity to take the initiative and attempt to improve the situation. When it comes to good behavior, do not be so surprised to find your adolescent wolf has not taken the initiative himself.

another post with divers and random thoughts

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?
- from Dorothy Sayers'The Lost Tools of Learning

I thought of this passage while at Wally World today browsing through the toy section. We're attending a birthday party and although most of our gifts tend to come from other sources, we didn't have any suitable ones stocked up this time around, so I hit the toy aisle. And was disgusted (as I always am) by the rampant and obvious propaganda for brand consciousness in small children. There was a Subway brand food set, so instead of little four year olds creating their own play food dishes, they can imitate a company's. I can just see those same children clamoring to eat at Subway the next time they pass one. It was the same with toy after toy -- glaring connections with some brand totally unconnected with toys.
Soon I'm sure we'll have children's blocks with advertisements on them. We may have already, for all I know.

While scanning the article to find that exact passage, I found another one that fit in quite well with an experience I had at work a few nights ago. You all are probably getting tired of these experiences.

"Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected), but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly, and properly documented, and one that is, to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?"

The emphasis is mine. A late middle school/early high school student came up to the desk and said he was having trouble finding information online about ancient civilizations along the Huang-He river valley in China. He had a rough time period he was looking for, and he needed to know about the culture, inventions, and fashions of the period. He said he had used Google, but hadn't found much. I pulled up a couple webpages that he hadn't seen and suggested he read them. He made it clear that he wanted to find a site that would say something like, "The inventions of this period are: blah, blah, blah. And the fashions were: blah, blah, blah." I told him he might have to read the whole page and decide which information fit the questions, that it might be sprinkled in various places through out the article. He was not impressed.
I asked if he'd read about rulers from this time period in his text book. Yes, he had, but he hadn't thought of using some of that information to help him find the answers to his questions.

So sad. We can only receive information, not manipulate it and fit it for different purposes. This is one huge reason narration at an early age is so fantastic and helps to keep us from being a nation of plagiarizers.

Crockpot Tuna Mac

Serves 6

Grease the crock-pot dish well. Combine:
14 ounces drained tuna
2 cups cooked pasta
1/2 cup diced onion
1/4 cup diced green peppers
1/4 cup diced mushrooms or one can drained
10 ounces cauliflower, frozen package, partially thawed.
1/2 cup chicken broth or other liquid
minced garlic, salt and pepper to taste

Stir this well and cook on low for 7-9 hours or on high for 3-4.

Just before serving stir in 1 cup grated cheese (or more)

Random Thoughts

These thoughts are so random that the iintitial thought that prompted my musings has completely escaped me.

YOu might have noticed that TLB is doing some housecleaning and rearranging or something and we dropped overnight from Mammals to insignificant microbes. That doesn't bother me, though, no. No, what really, really bothers me is that is said "I'm a insignificant microbe." It sets the teeth on edge that I cannot go in and change 'a' to 'an.'

It's not being picky. I can't not see it and make the automatic connection in my head. And now it's changed again to maruading marsupial, which was always the Equuschick's favorite, anyway. Sounds much cuter.

Speaking of teeth and edges, the FRB lost that baby tooth (mentioned in a previous post) and this means he did have to see the dentist for his scheduled appointment to have pulled that same baby tooth. As we learned with the Equuschick, poor dear, sometimes if the baby teeth don't fall out in time they can't fall out at all because the permanent teeth grow in funny and wedge them in tightly. Other times, they grow in even more funny- one of hers was growing towards the healthy roots of the permanent tooth adjacent, and so the Equuschick's five years of toture and braces were a blessing to her siblings.

And speaking further of teeth and edges, the goat does indeed love lilacs and has stripped all the leaves she can reach from my new transplants. I blame the goats for my missing lily of the valley, too. I told you she had that look in her eye, and just as I cannot not see that 'a' where it should be 'an,' I cannot not be cynical about such things.

Speaking of being a cynical person, at the yard sale recently a mother and daughter (daughter perhaps 12) were looking over at the boxes of books and the one or two boxes of movies (it was a five family yard sale), so I told them that the books were .25 a piece (which was a very good bargain indeed) And with a shocked and disgusted look on her face the girl tuurned to me and said, "We aren't buying no books."

I thought to myself "That's because you obviously can't read them, my girl," but I merely smiled pleasantly. A second later she asked if we had any Playstations, and of course, my suspicious were completely confirmed. Not that it took much discernment to figure that one out.

One of the hazards of living next door to grandparents is that one of them is bored and wanders over here to ask irrelevant questions at 8:30 a.m. LIke, can he walk on the path through our woods that he's been walking on for the last two years and that he, in fact, used to walk over to ask that question. One of the advantages is that small children can run next door to borrow sugar and receive treats.

Donovan is feeling well enough to play a bit now. With that inverted lampshade thing on his head he can play catch with himself quite well. He tosses his toy up in the air and catches it in the cup (not, however, on purpose). Looks like the old cup and ball toy.

We have had many people stay with us over the years for reasons other than a friendly visit.. The family staying with us now are among the top ten ever, probably the top five. They are very nice people. Plus, we have four bathrooms, which we have never had before.

I saw a baltimore oriole yesterday, which made me very happy.

A friend said to me that self-discipline is doing what you're supposed to be doing when you're supposed to be doing it, and upon further reflection I realize that this means I am even less self-disciplined than I thought. I had not known this was possible.

Some of the fencing my husband is putting up is made of old rolls of wood snow-fencing found at the old homestead farm. It has the virtue of being free. He grumbles that it is the ugliest fence he has ever put up (and he has put up several). But I think it is beautiful and rustic looking, and just right.

After roundly rebuking somebody for never, not ever, no never putting things away where they belong when somebody is done with them, and telling somebody in the sort of terse, tightlipped, and firm tone that comes from having said the same thing at least one billion and three times that moving something from one place where it does not belong to another place where it still does not belong is not cleaning, it is simply shifting the mess around and a waste of somebody's time and the time of the people who will have to find that item later when they go looking for it...
Well, you can guess what happened not very much later. I sent another somebody to bring me a brush, and the other somebody couldn't find it and none of us could figure out why it was not where it belonged, and she brought me a different brush and later I stepped outside onto the deck to look at my tomatoes and peppers growing in buckets and discovered the brush that I had left outside on the deck while brushing my hair in the sun earlier in the day, just left it outside on the rail where nobody would ever think to look for it in a million years.

My biggest problem with Charlotte Mason has always been that the habit training she talks about only works as well as the mother, and this mother doesn't work so very well.

But I did see a Baltimore Oriole yesterday.

Education by Questionnaire

This, of course, made me think of this.

From this the first:

This week an on-line questionnaire went out from the thought police — oops — I mean the Provost, to the faculty in the university where I teach, asking us what we do in the classroom....

... At the beginning, the survey asked these fairly reasonable questions, along with a few stupid ones ....then the questions began to get strange indeed. ...How often do students in your selected course section engage in the following:

Have class discussions or writing assignments that include diverse perspectives (different races, religions, genders, political beliefs, etc.)?

....“How often do students engage in . . . have class discussions” is a grammatical train wreck. You’ll see lots of this in what follows, but I thought I should point it out once....

The day I got this questionnaire, which asked me to pick one of the classes I was teaching this semester and respond on the basis of that class (I picked 20th-Century British Literature), I taught W. H. Auden’s early poetry. I think it is fair to say my class had no perspective on it whatsoever, regardless of race, gender, political background or preferred pizza topping. The subject of the class was actually Auden’s perspective, and my students are entitled to their own perspective on that, so long as they’ve understood Auden....

...Developing a personal code of values and ethics?

This one really lets the cat out of the bag. Apparently, we’re supposed to be promoting the latest brand of Education School religion by encouraging students to wed therapy to ethics in the service of whipping up their own ideas of right and wrong. I opt out. I’m a Roman Catholic; I believe that there is a transcendent reality outside of us that we confront and confronts us and that distinctions between right and wrong are objective. C. S. Lewis, at least, is on my side, as are all of the students who have ever complained to me about an “unfair” grade, to whom I never once have said, well, according to my personal values, that’s a “D.” But more to the point, I’m a better secularist than the people who put this questionnaire together; I don’t think the my students’ personal (the survey’s word, not mine) values and ethics are any of my damn business.

Developing a deepened sense of spirituality?

Are they serious? See answer above, but double the alarm....

The more things change, of course...

From this the second:

A colleague sent me a questionnaire. It was about my goals in teaching, and it asked me to assign values to a number of beautiful and inspiring goals. I was told that the goals were pretty widely shared by professors all around the country.
Many years earlier I had returned a similar questionnaire, because the man who sent it had promised, in writing, to "analize" my "input." That seemed appropriate, so I put it in. But he didn't do as he had promised, and I had lost all interest in questionnaires....
This one intrigued me, however, because it was lofty. It spoke of a basic appreciation of the liberal arts, a critical evaluation of society, emotional development, creative capacities, students' self-understanding, moral character, interpersonal relations and group participation, and general insight into the knowledge of a discipline. Unexceptionable goals, every one. Yet it seemed to me, on reflection, that they were none of my damned business.
...
So, instead of answering the questionnaire, I paid attention to its language; and I began by asking myself how "interpersonal relations" were different from "relations." Surely, I thought, our relations with domestic animals and edible plants were not at issue here; why specify them as "interpersonal"? And how else can we "participate" but in groups? I couldn't answer.

I asked further how a "basic" appreciation was to be distinguished from some other kind of appreciation. I recalled that some of my colleagues were in the business of teaching appreciation. It seemed all too possible that they would have specialized their labors, some of them teaching elementary appreciation and others intermediate appreciation, leaving to the most exalted members of the department the senior seminars in advanced appreciation, but even that didn't help with basic appreciation. It made about as much sense as blue appreciation....

More such here, as we've recommended before, and we do highly recommend a good dose of Richard Mitchell, especially before, during, and immediately after college. Such reading cleanses the brain.

And reading such things as you find here (including the links) strengthens my resolve, 'exhausted,' 'haggard,' and even lacking in 'mental sanity' as I may seem to those who are on the outside looking in. For a nice smile at the adversity of being called haggard, try reading Cindy's take.

Frugal Fridays

UP at Crystal's blog. Keep an eye on it through the weekend as new links are always being added. I am loving Stephanie's flower pot idea.

Those interested in frugalities may also find this website useful (it's a list of recipes for mixes and things people might by ready made from the store).

Of course, the Hillbilly Housewife is an excellent resource.