What I read on my summer vacation

I am rediscovering the pleasures of the essay.

It's nothing like the grievous drudgery students often feel at an English teacher's request for three pages on the use of symbolism in "Jude the Obscure" (which request, I confess, never seemed to bring me down as it did my classmates). Nor is it about Ralphie's sly ambition, hoping that a school writing assignment will fortify his case when asking for a particular Christmas present.

I'm talking about the simple joy of listening deeply to another person speak fully about something/one that matters to them, or about an event or place they've astutely observed, or about a question pressed hard against their heart/mind/spirit. (Listening as you are now, Gentle Reader. Thank you for your generosity.)

Anyway, as you know, there's joy to be found in making that quiet connection, in reflecting on what binds us, on our common experience, our shared pain, our human aspiration. I've laughed and cried with Anne Lamott often, and chuckled at the mordant Bill Bryson; however, I've always thought of myself as a fiction reader. One of those limiting labels, I guess.

I've serendipitously been nudged toward three particular literary features in the last couple of weeks, and each of them has moved me deeply. They're not just non-fiction; they're about what's true.

First, NPR correspondent Scott Simon's Twitter feed this last week, which comprised the last days of his mother's life. Simultaneously aching, gorgeous and tender, they're like grief haikus. For all its strengths and influence, I never thought of Twitter as a vehicle for beauty, until now. Read them; you'll see what I mean.

Secondly, my fiction-junkie side has been aware of Chris Bohjalian for years; I've enjoyed many of his novels, including (last month) The Sandcastle Girls, which takes place during the Armenian genocide in Syria in the early part of the 20th century. It was a great read, and it led me to look for more Bohjalian books...so I found Idyll Banter. It's a compendium of his columns for the Burlington Free Press between 1992 and 2004--observations of life in small-town Vermont. Part history, part social commentary, all of it his lens on his life and the lives of those nearest him. One of these pieces, "Losing the Library," was particularly touching to me. His small-town library was drowned by the overflowing New Haven River during a storm. In eight short pages, he packs town history, literary history, meteorology, and reporting...all tinged with grief at the loss of a beloved town resource and the hope that underlies its rebuilding:

By their very nature, libraries are generationally democratic. They cater to everyone. School and work or classes and clubs may separate us, segregating us by interest and age. But libraries remain one of the few places in this world that still bring us together...on the morning after the waters had drenched much of the library and the town gathered to try to save what remained, I saw dazed adults crying softly as they worked...not for the roads or the bridges that had been lost...but they did cry for their books...

Stories like this are generously augmented with lighter pieces such as "Dead Cluster Flies Serve As Window Insulation for the Inept" and "Surly Cow Displays No Remorse," in which he and his wife, driving on a country road near their house, are pinned down by a herd of cows. They try to chase them back toward their corral, and

a number of times I even explained that I was a vegetarian, but obviously these cows were female, and they knew they were in no danger of becoming Quarter Pounders.

His columns are condensed generosity, humor and honesty, fortified with interesting reporting and observation. Well worth a look!

Finally, and most auspiciously for me as I plan for a new choir season, I found Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others." Author Stacy Horn is a 20-year veteran soprano in the Choral Society of Grace Church, NYC. For the most part, each chapter is grounded in a major choral work; within that frame, she explores her life, the history of choral singing, the foibles of a community choir and its directors, her soprano psyche...

Jesus Christ. How am I supposed to count this? It's in seven. Is that even rhythmically allowed? 

...and the magic of finding such beauty and shared humanity in the simple act of opening your mouth and making a sound.

I actually read most of a chapter aloud to my wife, who grinned at Horn's horror-turned-to-wonder as her conductor switched her from soprano 1 (melody) to soprano 2 (harmony): after some disorientation and paddling around in the music,

I was feeling harmony. Not just singing it, but physically feeling it. It was a rush. You don't experience this when you're singing the melody. I was completely in the power of the sound we were making together and I just stood there, afraid to move, thinking, Don't end, don't end, don't end. And it took nothing. A couple of notes. A D against a B flat. That's it. Two notes and I went from a state of complete misery and lonesomeness to such an astonishing sense of communion it was like I'd never sung with the choir before.

If you've ever sung in a choir, read this book. You'll grin in lots of places, learn some things and generally enjoy the ride.  If you haven't, read this book. You'll be auditioning for choir by the weekend...and I have some openings! :-)

Hedgehogs in motion

I'm feeling philosophical today. Perhaps it was brought on by five full days of sitting more-or-less in one place, listening to nature, conspicuously NOT producing anything. I'm feeling de-cluttered in a way I haven't been for about nine months. It's delicious and clean and, well, simple.

On the way back from our vacation, Beloved and I were listening to the audiobook version of our wonderful book club's next selection, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Two chapters in, it seems to me as if this is going to be one of those books I'll end up buying more than once because I keep thrusting it into the hands of all the readers in my life. You can find a synopsis at the link, so I won't bother with it here, but I have to say that Paloma–a mordant, intellectual, twelve-year old genius–will stay with me long after I finish the book. She has created a project for herself: to keep a journal of Profound Thoughts. I'll offer three of them here for your consideration:

• (Art is) the beauty that is there in the world; things that, being part of the movement of life, elevate us...grace, beauty, harmony, intensity.

Paloma understands Major Works of Art (and has a fondness for Vermeer), but doesn't see them as the only containers for artistic expression; for her, art is both ever-present (like Meister Eckhart's image of God as a "great underground river") and something that must be sought, held and practiced.

Movement is a major intellectual theme for Paloma. Her observations thus far encompass not only the way we're defined by the direction we're pointed, but the way that progress (or even the anticipation of progress) irrevocably alters us:

• Most people, when they move, well, they just move depending on whatever's around them. At this very moment, as I'm writing, Constitution the cat is going by with her tummy dragging close to the floor. This cat has absolutely nothing constructive to do in life, and still she is heading toward something–probably an armchair–and you can tell by the way she is moving that she is headed toward. Maman just went by on her way to the front door. She's going out shopping, and in fact, she already is out, her movement anticipating itself. I don't really know how to explain it, but when we move we are in a way destructured by our movement toward something. We are both here and at the same time not here, because we're already in the process of going elsewhere.

It's not simply our attitude that changes (which we can-do Americans hold as Tremendously Significant), but our fundamental nature. Simultaneous presence and absence...if you've ever tried to hold a conversation with someone who's absorbed in their TV program/text message/insert-your-pet-distraction-here, you know what this means. But to what effect on the person who's in two places at once? Paloma again:

• What makes the strength of a warrior isn't the energy he uses trying to intimidate the other guy by sending him a whole lot of signals; it's the strength he's able to concentrate within himself by staying centered.

Food for thought, no?

What kind of reader are you?

Newsweek has published their Top 100 Books: the Meta-List, derived via “number crunching” from various top-10 books lists. The purpose of this note is to gather a bit more information about your experience with the books on their list. I’ve started the process using the following key. If you’re interested in participating, please copy the list and replace my numbers with your own, and tag me. Please note that more than one number may be used per book. More information available on each book by clicking the link at the beginning of the post.

1 = read it

2 = saw the movie

3 = in my “to read” stack at home

4 = someday I’ll read it

5 = have made at least one attempt to read it, but didn’t finish

6 = no interest in reading it

(4/5) War and Peace—Tolstoy

(1) 1984—Orwell

(4) Ulysses—Joyce

(6) Lolita—Nabokov

(4) The Sound and the Fury—Faulkner

(3) Invisible Man—Ellison

(4) To the Lighthouse—Woolf

(3) The Iliad and The Odyssey—Homer

(2/4) Pride and Prejudice—Austen

(4) Divine Comedy—Alighieri

(5) Canterbury Tales—Chaucer

(5) Gulliver’s Travels—Swift

(6) Middlemarch—Eliot

(4) Things Fall Apart—Achebe

(1) The Catcher in the Rye—Salinger

(5/6) Gone with the Wind—Mitchell

(3/5) One Hundred Years of Solitude—Marquez

(5/6) The Great Gatsby—Fitzgerald

(3) Catch-22—Heller

(2/3) Beloved—Morrison

(1/2) The Grapes of Wrath—Steinbeck

(4) Midnight’s Children—Rushdie

(1) Brave New World—Huxley

(2/4/5) Mrs. Dalloway—Woolf

(1) Native Son—Wright

(4) Democracy in America—de Tocqueville

(4) On the Origin of Species—Darwin

(6) The Histories—Herodotus

(4) The Social Contract—Rousseau

(6) Das Kapital—Marx

(6) The Prince—Machiavelli

(4) Confessions—St. Augustine

(4) Leviathan—Hobbes

(6) The History of the Peloponnesian War—Thucydides

(2/5) The Lord of the Rings—Tolkien

(1/2) Winnie-the-Pooh—Milne

(1/2) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—Lewis

(2) A Passage to India—Forster

(4) On the Road—Kerouac

(1/2) To Kill a Mockingbird—Lee

(1/2) The Holy Bible (RSV)

(4) A Clockwork Orange—Burgess

(1) Light in August—Faulkner

(4) The Souls of Black Folk—Du Bois

(4) Wide Sargasso Sea—Rhys

(4) Madame Bovary—Flaubert

(6) Paradise Lost—Milton

(4) Anna Karenina—Tolstoy

(1/2) Hamlet—Shakespeare

(1) King Lear—Shakespeare

(1/2) Othello—Shakespeare

(4) Sonnets—Shakespeare

(1) Leaves of Grass—Whitman

(4) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—Twain

(4) Kim—Kipling

(2/5) Frankenstein—Shelley

(3/5) Song of Solomon—Morrison

(2/4/5) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Kesey

(4) For Whom the Bell Tolls—Hemingway

(4/5) Slaughterhouse-Five—Vonnegut

(6) Animal Farm—Orwell

(1/2) Lord of the Flies—Golding

(2) In Cold Blood—Capote

(4) The Golden Notebook—Lessing

(4) Remembrance of Things Past—Proust

(6) The Big Sleep—Chandler

(4) As I Lay Dying—Faulkner

(1) The Sun Also Rises—Hemingway

(2) I, Claudius—Graves

(2/3) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter—McCullers

(4) Sons and Lovers—Lawrence

(6) All the King’s Men—Warren

(4/5) Go Tell It on the Mountain—Baldwin

(1/2) Charlotte’s Web—White

(6) Heart of Darkness—Conrad

(1) Night—Wiesel

(3) Rabbit, Run—Updike

(2/6) The Age of Innocence—Wharton

(4) Portnoy’s Complaint—Roth

(4) An American Tragedy—Dreiser

(4) The Day of the Locust—West

(4) Tropic of Cancer—Miller

(6) The Maltese Falcon—Hammett

(1/2) His Dark Materials—Pullman

(1) Death Comes for the Archbishop—Cather

(1) The Interpretation of Dreams—Freud

(4) The Education of Henry Adams—Adams

(6) Quotations from Chairman Mao—Mao

(4) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature—James

(2/4) Brideshead Revisited—Waugh

(6) Silent Spring—Carson

(6) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—Keynes

(4) Lord Jim—Conrad

(6) Goodbye to All That—Graves

(4) The Affluent Society—Galbraith

(1) The Wind in the Willows—Grahame

(1/2) The Autobiography of Malcolm X—Haley/Malcolm X

(6) Eminent Victorians—Strachey

(1/2) The Color Purple—Walker

(4) The Second World War (6-volume set)—Churchill

Total read: 24

Additional questions:

What would you cut from the list?

HATED “The Great Gatsby.”

What would you add?

• Little Women—hello? :-)
  
• Where’s the Dickens?
• Though it was a terribly grim read, I’d also suggest Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” It was POWERFUL, and written with an economy of words exactly suited to its barren landscape.
• East of Eden—Steinbeck. Gorgeous.

When you look back at the list as a whole, do you draw any conclusions about yourself as a reader?

• My liberal arts education hasn’t demanded enough of me, from a literary perspective… though I’ve read a number of books that didn’t make the list, that were written by these same authors. (That's me...I chose "Chicago Hope" over "ER" when they came out; Betamax over VHS...)
  
• I have still read some great, mind-changing books; my book club has stretched me in several directions.
  
• I strongly prefer fiction to non-fiction; gimme a metaphor over a directive any day.
• At this point in my life, I read mostly for pleasure, with a “this is a work I should know” book every few months—a different kind of pleasure, I guess.
• I'm happiest if there's a sympathetic character or two, but that's not necessarily prohibitive; for example, I love Wally Lamb, and most of his characters are...unappealing to me.
• The fact that I've written this post at all suggests that I should think about a Lit course sometime, just for fun!
  

Better than coffee and bars...

...is this book, which I began reading today. If you Lutherans out there have ever found yourselves intimidated by theological jargon, consider this definition:

Angel
Divine beings, heavenly servants of God, know as purveyors of godly messages, such as recipes for light and delicious food--cake and impossibly fine pasta, or the somewhat rougher traditions of motorcycle fellowship.

There's a longer exegesis (a word which, sadly, they neglected to define) of the topic, a portion of which won my undying esteem:

In art angels are most often depicted with wings upon the back--sometimes two, sometimes six--but it should be noted that in the Bible, most often do not have wings and seem to appear much like people...if you're wondering whether the six-winged angel flies faster than the other varieties, the answer is no, as two wings are used for flying and the other four to cover eyes and ensure decency (Isaiah 6:2). (Now, whether a laden or unladen angel makes better time remains a separate matter.)

This caused a bit of a spew, as I was reading while eating chicken soup. Consider also:

Justice
A condition that most people desire for themselves, claim never to get, and have no interest in granting to their neighbors.

and

Free Will
The belief--which you have no choice but to believe--that human beings are free to make their own choices.

Gentle Reader. Buy this book. You KNOW you could use a laugh. Or thirty. I leave you with these thoughts:

The task of our generation

I was listening to a fascinating podcast of the most recent Bill Moyers Journal. His guest is Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun turned Islamic scholar and author of several bestsellers on religious themes (more info available here).

When she was researching her recent book The Bible: a Biography, a question formed in her mind: what if the Golden Rule were the lens used in interpreting scripture?

Well, this is one of the things that really intrigued me: how frequently the early rabbis, for example, in the Talmudic period, shortly after the death of Jesus, insisted that to any interpretation of scripture that read hatred or contempt for any single human being was illegitimate.

Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that when asked to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching, while he stood on one leg, said, "The Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. And everything else is only commentary. Now, go and study it."

St. Augustine said that scripture teaches nothing but charity. And if you come to a passage like the one you just read, that seems to preach hatred, you've got to give it an allegorical or metaphorical interpretation. And make it speak of charity.

Shades of Deuteronomy and the synoptic Gospels!

He answered,
‘You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart,
and with all your soul,
and with all your strength,
and with all your mind;
and your neighbor as yourself.’
--Luke 10:27

Last year she received the TED prize, which grants $100,000 and a wish. Karen's wish was for "help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion--crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule."

She's getting her wish. Check it out.

The task of our generation,
whether we are religious people
or secular people,
is to build a global community
where people of all persuasions
can live together
in peace and harmony.

--Karen Armstrong

People of the Book go sailing

One of my favorite movie lines ever is from the comedy "What About Bob?" Bob (Bill Murray) is multiphobic, almost panphobic, and has stalked Dr. Marvin, his therapist (Richard Dreyfuss) to his vacation home, hoping for some attention and help. Anna Marvin coaxes Bob onto her friend's sailboat, with this result:




For Bob, this brand-new experience is a defining moment--it becomes part of his self-descriptive narrative. And that's where the "funny" lives. Because he's only experienced one aspect of what it is to be a sailor...he's literally all tied up in knots.

Well, as for me: I'm a reader! I read! Reading is central to my makeup.

• Fiction and poetry teach me to imagine new worlds, and to see the one I'm in more clearly and completely.
• The Bible shapes me, along with academic-type study of various subjects. I get all excited about things like historical/critical interpretation, about peeling away the crunchy intellectual layers to find the chewy center.
• I understand music most immediately through listening, but also through navigation of a printed score. I don't seem to have much of a "jam" gene; rather, my bent as a singer or a conductor is to combine the forces of imagination/imagery, textual interpretation, historical understanding, and music theory. I try to understand the pieces and then do what they ask of me...to blow into the "sails" of the song. At its best, it's as alive as a jam session that really cooks; it's just a somewhat different path to the same destination.
  

I was at a choral workshop recently with Craig Arnold. He said that it's our job, as singers and conductors, to understand what's on the page and to bring it to life...in our voices, our faces, our bodies, whatever it takes to fully present the message of that particular piece of music.

The page as a bearer of meaning...a means to an end, not an end in itself. Hmmm...interesting.

If you've ever sung in (or heard) a choir that has rendered a piece of music completely, you know what that "bringing to life" feels like. It's as if everyone is moved by the same gust of wind at that exact moment, and we're all sailing. Conversely, if you've ever sung in (or heard) a choir that sort plods through their piece, you also know what I mean. Like Bob, we can get sort of tied up in knots--so focused on what our next note/consonant sound/vowel sound/dynamic marking is that we miss the deeper meaning. It's easy to keep our heads down and just look at the next thing in front of us. But it doesn't make very interesting music. If you're singing "alleluia" with a frown on your face, that creates cognitive dissonance for the listener, who then frowns with you. And the "alleluia," which was the point of the thing, gets lost.

We Western types are, in many senses, People of the Book. We read to discover, to understand, to learn. I don't think this is problematic, in and of itself; it's one of our points of origin, a characteristic of growing up in the Western world.

However, if we get stuck to the page, we miss out on the geist of the thing.

Music from oral traditions is passed on in a very different way. For example, in many parts of Africa, a child wishing to learn to drum starts out by listening to the drummers of his (yep, usually it's a guy thing) village, who repeat complex, polyrhythmic patterns beneath the improvisations of the master drummers. The child might be a listener for a l-o-n-g time before he's given a drum and a simple pattern to play. As the child's ear and technique improve, he's allowed into the more complex workings of the ensemble. This takes years, and there's no paper involved anywhere.

Folk songs of every culture are handed down by, well, singing them. Simple, memorable melodies with simple accompaniments (if any) are handed down, generation by generation by making music together. Again, no paper.

The beauty of the paper is that it's able to transmit a large amount of complex information pretty economically. It's researchable, it leaves time for pondering, and often, it charts more than one possible route to its destination. But paper is only a starting point; the music doesn't live until it lives in our bodies.

I know that my choirs sing better when they can get off the page. More and more, I'm making opportunities for that to happen--having a longer curve of rehearsals, so that we can memorize (or get close to memorization of) the mechanics, in order to enter into real conversation with our congregation/audience. There is generally some grumbling about this; most of us are middle-aged, and memorization takes a bit more effort than in those halcyon days of our youth. :-)

But it's not just about the freedom of movement and communication we gain by not having to hold music. There's something intangible at work here, too. It's about having the discipline to turn ourselves into artists...into sailors. If we don't somehow internalize the message of the page (music, poetry, Scripture), we won't have access to it when its moment comes.

We study so that we may practice well. We practice so that we may participate in the creative process of the Holy Spirit. In other words, we study and practice so that we may live.

Madeleine L'Engle talked about her piano practice as a way both of preparing herself and of inviting the Holy Spirit's presence...of readying herself for that moment in which the Holy Spirit would come:

Hugh and I heard Rudolf Serkin play Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata
in Symphony Hall, many years ago.
It was one of those great unpredictable moments.
When the last notes had been lost in the silence,
the crowd not only applauded, cheered, stamped, we stood on our chairs.
This doesn't happen often in Boston.

But if Serkin did not practice eight hours a day,
every day,
the moment of inspiration,
when it came,
would have been lost.
Nothing would have happened;
there would have been no instrument
through which the revelation could be revealed.

I'm not suggesting that church choirs should practice eight hours a day. But I AM suggesting that, as conductors, we must invite our singers into the adventure of the thing; that we never let the phrase "just a church choir" pass our lips; that we take seriously their commitment and artistry; and that we help them to prepare themselves musically (mechanically, intellectually, spiritually) for that moment of inspiration--the moment in which the Spirit comes.

I'm suggesting that we take 'em sailing.

Alchemy

I enjoy the radio show This American Life. It's like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get. Yesterday, I was listening to the program entitled "Music Lessons," (which I wholeheartedly commend to you; stream it here) with segments by David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and the wonderful Anne Lamott. Anne--I'm gonna call her Anne, because there's a frank and intimate quality to her writing that makes it seem like we went for coffee last Wednesday--was talking about the power of music to heal us, describing a holy moment at her church that bridged a gulf between two people:

I can't imagine anything else but music that could have brought about this alchemy. How is it that you can have a chord here...and then another chord there, and then your heart breaks open? I don't know the answer. Maybe it's that music is about as physical as it gets. Your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add the human heart to this mix, it somehow lets us meet on a bridge we couldn't get to any other way.

YES. What a miracle to get to participate in it--to create it, to lead groups of people who are doing something so natural, so stuffed with goodwill, and so mysterious. I'm grateful. :-)

Page 56

Thanks to my friend, the proprietor of the Swandive, for this fun idea!

Rules:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions on your blog (or facebook wall).
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Addendum: feel free to post the sentence in the comments, and you are tagged.

Here's mine:

Santy Claus is going to come and the turkey won't be tough and we'll all get along.

Funny that should be the case--the character who says this is in the middle of a mini-soliloquy that snarkily anticipates a pain-in-the-butt Christmas. Which is my general feeling about the holiday season. Love the theology and fresh/authentic interpretations of the music, love the goodwill that always presents itself in lots of ways, HATE the shopping and crazy schedule and slap-on-plastic-grins-even-though-we're-
collapsing-from-stress cultural side of it.

Oh, and the ever-present mechanical music. Did I mention the mechanical music? If God had wanted plastic trees that beep out "Here Comes Santa Claus," we'd find them in natural forests, not retail ones.

The other funny thing about the way this turned out: the book is "The View from Mount Joy" by Lorna Landvik. I always look forward to her next book. They're all funny and insightful and just good stories, that have sweetness but not treacle. They're also about people I recognize, sometimes literally: she's a daughter of the congregation I serve! She isn't a member any more, but her stories take place in neighborhoods that are very reflective of mine. That's just fun. :-)

Incidentally, if you haven't seen Home for the Holidays, I thought it was hilarious!

The big read: second edition meme

So, ever since this post about fiction that the NEA would like us to have read, I've been mulling its incompleteness. These lists are lists precisely because they're not all-encompassing, but I can't help but think that there were some truly glaring omissions (unfortunately, many of them by non-white authors):

• My Antonia (Willa Cather)
• East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
• Beloved (Toni Morrison)
  
• The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Native Son (Richard Wright)
• A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle)
  
• The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
• The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende)
• Siddhartha (Herman Hesse)
  
• Roots (Alex Haley)
• The Chosen (Chaim Potok)
  

As well as some I just really loved, that made me want to grab passersby by the lapels and ask if they'd read them:

• The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell--searing)
• The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Louise Erdrich)
• Jayber Crow (Wendell Berry)
• Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)
• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (Christopher Moore--will make you laugh 'til you have hiccups; also remarkably well-researched)
• Staggerford (Jon Hassler)
• A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley)
• I Know This Much Is True (Wally Lamb)
• Saturday (Ian MacEwan)
• A Lesson Before Dying (Ernest Gaines)
• One True Thing (Anna Quindlen)
• The Short History of a Prince (Jane Hamilton)
• A Map of the World (Jane Hamilton)
• The Lords of Discipline (Pat Conroy)
• Giants in the Earth (Per Rolvaag)
• Montana, 1948 (Larry Watson)
• Blue Shoe (Anne Lamott)
• Peace Like a River (Leif Enger)
• The Time of Our Singing (Richard Powers)
• Straight Man (Richard Russo)
  
• Plainsong (Kent Haruf)
• Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons (Lorna Landvik--I have a special attachment to this one; it's not just a fun summer read, but she's a daughter of the congregation I serve; the action takes place in a neighborhood I know...and, rumor has it, several of the prototype "housewives" are members of my church)
• Bastard Out of Carolina (Dorothy Allison)
• Rubyfruit Jungle (Rita Mae Brown)
• The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

So, that's 12 "I'm horrified that they weren't on the list" books, and 25 "given my druthers, I'd add these, too..." books.

What would yours be? Consider yourself tagged; I'd really like to know!

The Big Read

I got this over at Cecilia's place. This is from something called 'The Big Read', and it is designed to encourage community reading initiatives. The NEA came up with a list of their top 100 books and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these books. I will highlight the ones I've read. Cut and paste into your blog and let us know which you've read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

In case I was wondering what to do with my free time...

:-)

Friday five: a Bill Murray moment

Singing Owl's got a fun plan for today's Friday five, based upon word association. Every time I think about word association, it's Bill Murray's voice I hear, in What About Bob. "Some free associations from my infancy: a beach ball, a dog, a frog, a lock, a poodle, a noodle, a doodle..." Hilarious movie.


Anyway, here we go:

Think summer......are you there? Below you will find five words or phrases. Tell us the first thing you think of on reading each one. Your response might be simply another word, or it might be a sentence, a poem, a memory, a recipe, or a story. You get the idea:

1. rooftop

Francie and Neeley talking on the roof in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, after their father dies. Tender and poignant.

Oh, and my house needs some roof work.

2. gritty

Trailers for TV cop dramas of the '70s were always described as gritty: picture Harry-O's squint, Streets of San Francisco's back alleys and Karl Malden's thoughtful gaze, Pepper Anderson undercover as a hooker in Police Woman, etc.

Also, food eaten at the beach. Puts the "sand" in "sandwich."

3. hot town (yeah, I know, it's two words)

Can't get that song out of my head!

OK, after a giving myself a good shake, a memory has surfaced: catching fireflies in the back yard with my sister, wearing our PJs, sweaty hair sticking to our foreheads and necks.

4. night

Crickets! Post-fireflies, lying in bed in front of a big box fan stuck in the window, listening to the crickets in the back yard and making sure my sister's foot didn't wander to "my" side of the bed.

5. dance

Well, since I've spent practically this whole post in the '70s, gotta go with "Shake Your Booty" by KC and the Sunshine Band.




Thanks, Singing Owl, that was fun!

Preach the Gospel continually...

and, if necessary, use words.
— St. Francis of Assisi

I'm reading Here if You Need Me by Kate Braestrup. It's the story of a woman (mother of four, writer) whose husband was killed while on duty as a state trooper. He'd intended to go to seminary upon retiring from the force, in order to become a UU minister and law enforcement chaplain. She did so in his place, and found work she loves.

Holy cats, read this book. She's earthy and wise and funny; in the last half-hour with the book, I've wept and I've laughed out loud more than once.

Anyway, she tells a story of the day her husband died that perfectly illumines that quote at the beginning of the post, long a favorite of mine:

Perhaps forty minutes after I had heard the news of Drew's death, I was sitting in the living room with my friend Monica when the doorbell rang. The sergeant was on the telephone, so Monica sprang to answer it.

A young man stood on the front steps, clad in a spiffy dark suit, his hair neatly combed, exuding a scent of soap and virtue. Holding out a pamphlet, he beamed at Monica. "Have you heard the Good News?"

For a long second, Monica glared at him, not sure whether to punch him or laugh hysterically. She compromised by slamming the door.

A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. This time, I answered it. It was my neighbor, an elderly woman I had exchanged no more than a dozen words with in the ten years I'd lived in Thomaston. She had pot holders on her hands, which held a pan of brownies still hot from the oven, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. "I just heard," she said.

That pan of brownies was, it later turned out, the leading edge of a tsunami of food that came to my children and me, a wave that did not recede for many months after Drew's death. I didn't know that my family and I would be fed three meals a day for weeks and weeks. I did not anticipate that neighborhood men would come to drywall the playroom, build bookshelves, mow the lawn, get the oil changed in my car. I did not know that my house would be cleaned and the laundry done, that I would have embraces and listening ears, that I would not be abandoned to do the labor of mourning alone. All I knew was that my neighbor was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears: she was the Good News.

We mainliners aren't usually doorknockers. I'm not. There's something about it that just doesn't quite sit right with me. But I am very verbal (stop laughing, Friends of Mine), and I do love to discuss that old, old story when the right moment presents itself. It's just that...well, it seems to me that Big Truth rests much more comfortably in the passenger seat of a vehicle that looks a lot like Love. And that Grace shows up in hands and eyes of God's children in a much more compelling way than any abstract discussion can manifest.

Don't misunderstand me; I'm a Lutheran, and a good sermon is right up there on my list of favorite (and, for me, most necessary) things. But the Church Basement Ladies in my life (of all ages, arenas and genders) live out some serious wisdom: preach continually, and lead with your hands.

Friday five: where in the world is Choralgirl Sandiego?

The RevGals are all about location, location, location this week, in honor of the fact that many are meeting up in Minneapolis next week for the Festival of Homiletics--fun!

Today's challenge: name five places that fall into the following categories:

1) Favorite Destination -- someplace you've visited once or often and would gladly go again

The hammock at S&J's cabin in WI, to hear the lapping of the waves and watch the birds as I drink iced tea and read an absorbing book, or cuddle with Beloved. We were there on our honeymoon.

2) Unfavorite Destination -- someplace you wish you had never been (and why)

While on a National Lutheran Choir tour some years ago, we stayed at a truly dreadful, roach-infested motel in South Carolina...don't need to go there again (though I'm sure it's not representative of the whole state).

3) Fantasy Destination -- someplace to visit if cost and/or time did not matter

How many picks do I get?

• hey, after yesterday--maybe San Francisco, to get LEGALLY married!
  
• find my relatives in Norway & see the fjords
• hike and eat my way through Tuscany...actually, through most of Europe. :-)
  
• seeing the Cathedral at Chartres, as well as some of European choral festivals and opera houses would be nice
• two cruises: one to Alaska (before the glaciers melt) and one to the Greek isles (including Lesbos, despite the fact that several of its residents are trying to belatedly reclaim the word "lesbian" as their own; pretty sure that horse has already left the barn)
  

4) Fictional Destination -- someplace from a book or movie or other art or media form you would love to visit, although it exists only in imagination

• I would SO love to have access to a Holodeck, like they did in Star Trek TNG!!
• Hogwarts wouldn't be bad, either; I'd like to have a cuppa with Minerva and shake Harry, Ron & Hermione's hands.
  

5) Funny Destination -- the funniest place name you've ever visited or want to visit

Well, I have a couple of vacation photos of me, Beloved, M and B at street signs for "Dyke Avenue" and "Dyke Street" (in different towns). (see also: Lesbos)

Chortle.

Great cloud of witnesses

I'm sometimes moved to tears by hearing my congregation sing together. I've never been able to wrap words around exactly why, but it's one of the great experiences of my life in those moments where they abandon themselves to the music and sing unself-consciously.

One of the books I'm reading at present is Jayber Crow (by Wendell Berry), a loan from my wonderful pastor/colleague. It tells the story of a small-town southern orphan who, after trying out seminary, decides that he can't authentically preach doctrine (his faith is larger than the code) and so becomes his town's barber instead. There's a note from the author at the beginning of the book, sort of gently forbidding academic analysis. So I won't. That wouldn't get where I wanted to go with this text, anyway. I want to get you to buy it and read it, and discover for yourself the serene, elegant beauty of his prose. It's like honey ambling from a jar.

I also want to thank Mr. Berry for articulating so perfectly the beauty I find in that moment of everyone singing together. I'll let two excerpts from his text speak for themselves. By way of setup, Jayber has taken on the job of church janitor, in order to supplement his barbering income, and is attending church so that they may know that he cares about his work:

What I liked least about the service itself was the prayers; what I liked far better was the singing. Not all of the hymns could move me. I never liked "Onward, Christian Soldiers" or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Jesus' military career has never compelled my belief. I liked the sound of the people singing together, whatever they sang, but some of the hymns reached into me all the way to the bone: "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing," "Rock of Ages," "Amazing Grace," "O God, Our Help in Ages Past." I loved the different voices all singing one song, the various tones and qualities, the passing lifts of feeling, rising up and going out forever. Old Man Profet, who was a different man on Sunday, used to draw out the note at the ends of verses and refrains so he could listen to himself, and in fact it sounded pretty. And when the congregation would be singing "We shall see the King some-day (some-day)," Sam May, who often protracted Saturday night a little too far into Sunday morning, would sing, "I shall see the King some-day (Sam May)."

I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but they still liked it. What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and be forgiven, their need for one another's help and company and divine gifts, their hope (and experience) of love surpassing death, their gratitude. I loved to hear them sing "The Unclouded Day" and "Sweet By and By":

We shall sing on that beautiful shore
The melodious songs of the blest...

And in times of sorrow when they sang "Abide with Me," I could not raise my head.

Sometimes Jayber would go to work and, completely at home in the sunny silence of the place, take a nap before he began his work:

One day when I went up there to work, sleepiness overcame me and I lay down on the floor behind the back pew to take a nap. Waking or sleeping (I couldn't tell which), I saw all the people gathered there who had ever been there. I saw them as I had seen them from the back pew (as a child), where I sat with Uncle Othy (who would not come in any farther) while Aunt Cordie sang in the choir, and I saw them as I had seen them (from the back pew) on the Sunday before. I saw them in all the times past and to come, all somehow there in their own time and in all time and in no time: the cheerfully working and singing women, the men quiet or reluctant or shy, the weary, the troubled in spirit, the sick, the lame, the desperate, the dying, the little children tucked into the pews beside their elders, the young married couples full of visions, the old men with their dreams, the parents proud of their children, the grandparents with tears in their eyes, the pairs of young lovers attentive only to each other on the edge of the worlds, the grieving widows and widowers, the mothers and fathers of children newly dead, the proud, the humble, the attentive, the distracted–I saw them all. I saw the creases crisscrossed on the backs of the men's necks, their work-thickened hands, the Sunday dresses faded with washing. They were just there. They said nothing, and I said nothing. I seemed to love them all with a love that was mine merely because it included me.

When I came to myself again, my face was wet with tears.

Preparation

For one human being to love another: that is the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test of proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke. Yes. Wow.

I believe this to be true, and find that, like many truths, it positively seeps from our daily experiences. The ability to love another person is also dependent upon one's ability to participate authentically in her own life--to experience genuine pain; to acknowledge fear without being consumed by it; to perceive a real I/Thou boundary, across which genuine dialogue is possible.

I've known several people who are purely incapable of perceiving a "thou." Admittedly, we all have our days, but this impairment is particularly pronounced in some. They tend, in my experience, to create eddies of chaos around them, in order to obscure (and perhaps to appear to justify) their own inability to cope with the separate needs and viewpoints of any "other."

It is not easy for me to relate to this in an ongoing way, and there's someone like this in my life right now. Wears me out. Too much time & energy must be spent on border patrol, and not enough is left over for the good stuff. Am trying to extricate myself from the situation, but in the meantime, here I stand at sentry duty, trying to keep my powder dry and my compassion intact.

However, it also highlights just how wonderful it is to encounter people who are at home enough in their own skins to participate in I/Thou relationship. It is a gift to be authentically seen, engaged, nurtured and valued. And it seems to me that, the better we are at cleaning up our own emotional yards, the easier it is to invite others over...to drag out our picnic tables and have a block party, relationally speaking, and to truly commune with one another.

There is a deep sense of peace and safety present in an authentic relationship--with God, the eternal Thou, and with each other. Much groundwork, honesty and courage is required of each of us, but isn't that moment and arena of connection the real glory of being human?