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I picked up a potentially cool looking book at the library two weeks ago off their Recent Acquisitions shelf and have been enjoying it beyond, well, beyond most of what I've read recently. The Darkness That Comes Before [The Prince of Nothing, Book One], R. Scott Bakker's debut novel, reads like Gene Wolfe that makes sense: well written, with strong literary skill but that doesn't overpower the storytelling of complex tale.
All those who love high fantasy, go forth and buy! Especially since the next book in the series will be out in January.
Of course, with turn-around that quick, it will probably stink. Great book regardless.
Maybe this will get me to finally finish that Richard Powers book and Game of Thrones that JMMJ got me to buy last time I blew through SATX, I think after the last great flood.
Eric over at the Fireant Gazette mentioned what he would do if he won the Texas lottery and mentioned a post by Thinking that covered a recent article on what happens to people who win the lottery. Turns out that a lot of them go broke. Even worse.
"A fool and his money are soon parted."
This phenomenon isn't restricted to lottery winners. Actors, rock stars and other instant celebrities suffer it, too. A friend of mine handles banking for people who win big lawsuits for negligence, etc. and he says that the worst mistake someone hurt can do is take a lump settlement. Or for lottery winners, with whom he also works. There's something about being big enough for your money, maybe.
A friend of mine, who was barely getting by and very depressed about life in general, started talking idly one day about how he love to win the lottery just to be out of the hole he was in. I thought about it on the hour and half home — he lives in Chicago — and realized that winning the lottery would not help me. I would have more money, sure, but I would still be me. My biggest problems were not really external but internal: I didn't need more money. It would only aggravate my problems, not cure them. What I needed to do was get up off my butt and move. "Action is action", after all.
It's still true: a sudden windfall wouldn't make my life any better. I would still have to get off my ass and get moving. As a friend recently drove home. Another friend has pointed out that if I wanted to be rich, I probably would have already accomplished that. I must like fighting from positions of weakness.
I happened to be looking for a book by R.C. Sproul and if it were translated into other languages and I came across Amazon's page for his Tearing Down Strongholds: And Defending the Truth. A reviewer, Richard J. Britt, provided a pretty good discussion of the problem of apologetics books for people who really want to know "What is truth?" Mr. Britt says that he has given up on Christian belief but seems like he'd like to have an excuse to come back and not feel like he left his brain at the door. Something I can sympathize with. One of Britt's main concerns is with the canon of scripture, the collection of officially sanctioned documents we call The Bible:
I have no doubts that God the Creator exists. But beyond what He has revealed of Himself to us in the created order, by what reasoning should I even suppose that He has gone out of his way to reveal any more of himself? And why would He use the method of oral tradition that finally gets written down centuries later, and then is copied over and over and over, and then is translated, etc. Why a method so wrought with exposure to human error and manipulation? And given that for centuries there were literally hundreds of these books of revelation, how is it that the idea of the "canon" came into being, and by what confidence can I trust the "yays and nays" of some council in the 4th century to have correctly picked the ones that God Himself wrote?
Good questions that I'm surprised that Sproul doesn't address. But, then again, Dr. Sproul can be a bit stuck in his head at times. It can get grating, at least to me. Although I should confess to having read an awful lot of his stuff and enjoyed it. Mostly. I like the way he writes short analyses of historical moments in the church. His chapter on Finney got me thinking more than I would like to admit.
I've lost my power adapter for my MP3 player. Since I don't travel 140 miles every day any longer, I have had to resort to the CD changer again.
What's in the changer today:
This actually works remarkably well together. Yoakum and Miller are both retro country. Caedmon's Call does folk/gospel country rock. So basically about two and a half hours of country fusion.
And Village Records in Shawnee, Kansas has copies of Buddy's Man In The Moon, released by Coyote in 1995 only in Europe. Plus some Netherlandish copies of Julie's Invisible Girl with the additional tracks. Plus what seems like a fairly complete set of in-print Lauderdale. They don't seem to have a store front any more, just a web presence. Darn it. I do so love thumbing the stacks. As much fun as hitting the 50¢ bin at Galactic Greg's, but less evil on the knees.
Comic Book Artist, Jon B. Cooke's fabulous rag on artists in the comic book field (as opposed to comics, although they did a nice feature on Cho, who really straddles both with Liberty Meadows, since Image also puts out monthly or at least periodic collections in magazine form) did a feature this month on the Filipino artists who joined the ranks of Marvel and DC during the 1970s. I have to admit that I wasn't looking forward to this one: who remembers these guys any more? Much embarassment and enjoyment later, I remember why some of these guys were my faves.
Nestor Redondo comes easily to mind, with his wonderful work on a variety of titles, including Moench's Aztec Ace (Eclipse). His brother, Frank/Franciso/Fred Redondo brought new life to The Unknown Soldier feature in DC's Star Spangled War Stories, before that title was fully taken over by its lead character. Bob Kanigher may have provided the better scripts but he seems driven as a result of Redondo's great artwork, a frenetic but stratightforward style that suited the character's WWII spy thriller stories.
What I didn't expect was all the beautiful line work that was published in the Philipines and never got translated for the English speaking audiences. Most of them seem to be in Tagalog, so maybe folks just never got to see it. This rivals any of the fine work that came out of Europe during that time. These artists seem to all know each other — and many have no formal training whatsoever — and you can see some of the influences, especially out of Redondo Studios. But what amazing work!
From Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President, in regards to Grant's problems with bosses early in the war, when he was in the Western Department under Halleck. Halleck
Halleck piled on the humiliation with a follow-up telegram: "Your neglect of repeated orders to report the strength of your command has created great dissatisfaction and seriously interfered with military plans." — from pp. 180.
I'm trying to take Stan's suggestion that reading other things (he prefers the great dramas) can help me understand the organizational dynamics I'm investigating. I've picked up a couple of new reads, this book on Grant by Perret which I'm enjoying. It's a bit episodic but lacks the overly fawning or dismissive attitudes of most of his biographies. Perret obviously likes Grant but doesn't go out of his way to excuse him too often. I've also picked up Shakespeare's histories again, which I've not read since high school, I'll warrant. And I started reading The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which is quite another thing altogether.
Grant's conflicts with Halleck and Buell in the West at the start of the war looks more than a little like a stratum conflict issue. Even down to quotes like the one above. Yeah, a lot of other issues come into play, including bureaucratic power struggles and Grant's inexperience. Certainly it would have been to the Union's advantage to take a high-potential officer like Grant and give him the knowledge he obviously so desperately needed at the start of the war. He knew how to lead a small group of regulars from his experiences in the Mexican-American War but he lacked most of the knowledge he needed to lead a larger group, much less a group of unruly volunteers.
I wonder if Grant ever understood that he was bigger than most of the people he worked for, even at that time. Even dogged by a strong -T from a need for accomplishment (created over years of failure or being cut down by superiors incompetent to lead him and through a tragi-comic series of misfilings), Grant stood out as someone who needed big things to do. His constant complaint "But I was no clerk" is an admission that he needed something to occupy his thoughts. His drinking, while not heavy, was often to excess for a man who got drunk easily, seems to have been mostly out of boredom. And his marrying Julia probably didn't help. Having a wife the equal to his father's choice (Hannah was at least Jesse Grant's equal, which says a lot) would have suited him better and possibly filled out some of the places of stark deficiency he had.
From Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President, an interestingly balanced if slightly dull biography of the General who became President of the American States.
The unthinkable had become thinkable. The South, unable to manage either transition to a postslavery economy or irrevocable economic decline, was now talking only to itself as it sought to defend the indefensible, slavery, and deny the undeniable, union. It had become a paradigm of the closed society. And like closed societies everywhere, it was driven by extreme emotions into paranoid delusions and reckless action. There was such anger with the world beyond its narrow prespective that the South seemed at times almost to welcome its own destruction, like a suicide leaping with a shout into the raging sea. — from pp. 120
An interesting commentary that seems to continue to carry weight on present day political movements of many stripes, that the groups insulate, and through insulation become polarized, moving farther and farther to an extreme of whatever position they had originally only slightly held.
It's also a pretty readable book if overly episodic.
When I was in Raleigh for a class recently, a friend asked if I would step over for dinner and meet a pastor from the Dominican Republic who was interested in developing the leadership of his poor barrio community. I went and met Rod Davis, who is The Real Deal.
I don't meet a lot of the The Real Deal. Not now nor in the past. Nor am I what I would call The Real Deal, either. So when I do meet someone like that, I want to tell everyone who it is. It gets tricky with The Real Deal types: they don't see why anyone should be paying attention to them. Think about Jim Collins's Level 5 Leaders from Good to Great and you get the general idea. I'm going to talk about Rod because I think he's worth you getting to know. He's worth me getting to know for a variety of reasons. But maybe more on that later.
Perhaps I should start back twenty-five years or so.
I grew up in the normal conservative-y Baptist church, which means that they split every five years or so over some issue of doctrine that normally covered over some personal animosity or enmity, or even animosity to everyone in general. I limped through one that divided my family, with my parents following the denomination and my brother and I staying at the old church, because we had leadership responsibilities and friends we didn't care to leave. Plus, we had gotten to see everything from the inside and didn't have much to say for the behaviours all around. Sure, some people came out OK, but most dirtied themselves and others in ways that Karl Rove would have loved. We were "realists" at the time and considered "hardball" something that we had to do to gain success in business. Yet the behaviour of the churchfolk went beyond even our lax moralities. So we didn't see any gain from leaving one to be with the other. And our family lived divided most of the time as it was, so going to separate churches simply enforced the general feeling of emancipated minor that we already lived in on so many issues.
During that period, my brother and I began to look for someone who was, in our words, The Real Deal: a Christian whom we could not impugn, a man or woman whose life would withstand our pummels and still smell of grace. We looked for the Christian and found only one. We considered one in a community our size to be extraordinarily lucky.
During the rest of the years, I met other angry young people who wanted to see the real deal, a Christian whose theology got worked out in works, who when pushed fell to grace and not power. We only met a few. A woman I knew back in Chicago, she and her husband, they were The Real Deal. And when she died unexpectedly, a bunch of us gathered and wondered why God wouldn't have taken someone else.
Rod's story is indicative of The Real Deal. His ministry's website is down, so let me tell you a bit of what he let us know. But understand that this comes with my commentary and I'm more than a bit of a windbag. Rod's a softspoken man whom my friend's daughter calls "the humblest man I've ever met".
Rod has no formal education, not even a high school degree. At twenty, he was a drop-out junkie trying to score more on the corners of Oakland. And then, suddely, God saved him. There's a long story in there that seems to invovle an overdose of drugs and an overwhelming by God, but it happened: God in his infinite mercy saved the undeservig for his own purposes. Make no mistake: Rod's pretty clear on being undeserving in himself of God's salvation. God saved him all on his own.
The PeopleFit "Assessing Raw Talent" class ended with the third day on Monday. We reviewed each other's interviews. I felt pretty good about my ability to at least code close to what PeopleFit evaluated the interviews at. I had one pretty obvious Str5, one Str5H and a very confusing interview with someone who is either 3T or 4T (transitioning from 3-4 or 4-5). Mostly, the confusion was caused by bad interviewing techniques on my part, but some of it is the content, too. I have learned some valuable lessons about questioning and letting people talk. I think that for me, having anything less than two topics, one work and one non-work, makes it difficult to evaluate the interview. But I tend to go overboard with checks and balances.
Anyway, a very interesting course. And it's relatively fun to do.
Add to it all the other things that happened and it was yet another week of turning manasclerk's world upside down.
I hope that the comments haven't been down all week: there were some problems with my hosting company that I didn't get to until this morning. It's a long drive from Indiana's north end to Raleigh.
Well, I can honestly say that I can die tonight, happy that I have changed the world. Not that I have any plans for it. The goodness of God knows no bounds, it seems. I must be crazy. I've lost my work for the rest of the year and I feel like dancing.
Congratulations on the perfect job, Alan. The grace of God pours down on you; you just didn't know what all that sufferring was about. Now you just got to keep knowing what all this success is about.
Who would have thought that everyone is really connected?
So, I had the privilege of talking with the good Reverend Rob today. He's the guy who used to be a teacher, then a computer guy for schools, then gave education up to follow the call to pastoring. Some years of starving later — and facing some heinous bills from one of his younger boy's early illness — he followed another call to lead a church startup, a plant in a community that was underserved: the community I call the Church of PowerPoint.
Yeah, he uses PowerPoint. But he does use it tastefully. I'd argue for a bit more structured liturgy, but what can you do? Every place will have something I'd like less of, and something I'd like more of. In balance, these guys seem to have their heads on right. And talking with Rob showed why.
I've gotten too many people skewing my results and I hope that Rob will give me a solid, mid-forties 4 result for my interviews. With my luck, of course, he'll show up Str5+ like everyone else has. How can I learn to differentiate how people talk when everyone I interview is all the same? It's like having a conversation with the same person on different topics.
Well, Rob said he'd help me out and give me an interview tomorrow. We then chewed the fat about things. My life has been pretty grim lately: my contract, which I was counting on getting us through the end of the year and pay my back owe to the people from the IRS record label, got uncermoniously pulled two months early because I didn't add value. Hard news, even if it was week-on, week-off work, and less than 40 per even then. It'll be an Imagination Christmas again this year! Thank God for the one year I made money and bought jewelry.
Anyway, the grimness of the situation has been hanging over me. Rob, unprompted, started talking about what we would discuss. I said that we'd just get him started on an issue important to him and just go from there. "Or maybe we should talk about all the things that threaten to wipe us out!" he said. Well, sure: those problems sounded great.
"You know, there's always some big monster waiting around the corner for me," he said. "And it's a real monster: I really could be totally wiped out by it. But somehow, when I make the corner, the monster never turns out to be that big." This from a guy who's taken his young boy to the emergency room to get some wretchedly bad news, who is watching his favourite nephew die with nothing they can do, who has pondered many a week how to get the money to pay for the food for the kids, much less he and his wife. And not everything has turned out roses. I figure that he's in only slightly less precarious position than I right now, but he's been here before.
We talked about the Big Monsters that threaten to wipe us out, the ones we face personally and the ones our church even now faces. Starts live on the edge: finances are especially tight when you start attracting college and law school students, since they never have much to give. Add to it the unemployed and poor, the body of the congregation, and we'll probably always be a "renter" church. It makes for some interesting moments in robbing Peter to pay Paul, and since they were both churchworkers, it's a pretty fitting phrase.
The MP3 player has gone down: I left the charger in Raleigh at my brother's house. So back to using the three CD changer. Which has been interesting. Here's what has been in it.
Two days ago:
Yesterday:
My firiends in Cluj have kindly sent along the text of three talks that András Visky, professor of esthetics at Cluj University, Romania, (as well as playwright, poet, essayist, etc.). I remember sitting in one of them, on "Faith and Culture". I remember knowing that I got what he was trying to say, but I could not communicate that out afterwards. I really have no response to András. I always feel like I'm the kid who is finally at the grown-up table. He doesn't do that: he is a very gracious man and his inclusion of L and me is wonderful. No, it's more that I don't have anything to say. If I did say something, it would only prove my ignorance.
With András, the only thing I ever seem to be able to say is, "Can you say more about that?" or "I don't understand that. Can you say more on that?" Most of the time I think I understood his points but they were above me. I could read them and feel I understood them (or perhaps "got them" is a better way to say it) but I have a hard time putting his arguments back out.
He routinely talks in circles it seems. Not in the "avoiding the issue" but in the way of trying to communicate something important that I might not understand without constantly returning to it in a different way.
Jamie, over at BeChurch, decided some time ago to leave the institutional church and start a house church, 'walking out this "being a Christian" instead of "doing Christianity"', as he calls it. He's recently expressed how hard it is to live this way, not waiting on someone else to provide your connection to God. It's an experience that a lot of us can relate to.
His words got me thinking. Thinking about a lot of things. He's like that. A very thought provoking guy.
It's hard to admit that I am a grown up now, that no one is responsible or accountable for me but me. The pastor isn't accountable for my relationship with the Father. My parents aren't responsible for my faith. There's only me. How can I feed myself? How can I get spiritual nourishment?
And yet, that's not entirely right and I know it. I just hate to admit this even more than I hate to be a grown-up. Jamie talks about this:
Man. All this tomato ruination right after we've finally gone through all of our own plants. They don't last quite so long normally, but this year was odd is so many ways. It was 80 on Friday downstate. In October.
Anyway, with all this tomato blight, the prices have skyrocketed even here. We love tomatoes over at the manasclerk house, not only because we became addicted to picante sauce while going to university in Texas. I suppose that switching to a green salsa would be OK. It just seems so New Mexican. Kind of like a Louisiannan having to eat shrimps from the Atlantic.
I'll be out searching for a suitable tomatillo-based salsa to liven things up during the tomato shortage. I wonder if I can use tomatillos in my pasta dishes as well. Not canned, but fresh. Maybe with a few other peppers. A dash of sweet red and yellow peppers for balance. A little fresh herbs....
Could work. We ran out of cumin the other day and I figured that cinnamon would be a reasonable substitute in our turkey chili. It turned out more like some weird meal from my old roommate, whose father was from Greece, moved to El Paso, married a woman from Mexico and opened up an Italian restaraunt with a spanish name (only in America!). What am I going to do about chili? Hmmm.