Roberto parla Italiano

Chapter 1

Bob's interest in Italian, contrary to rumor, did not begin with an Italian supermodel. It started with ice cream. It was the summer of 2003 and we were somewhere in Italy. Bob was ordering gelato and became frustrated that he knew exactly two phrases in Italian: "Mi chiamo Roberto," and "Gelato mi piace." ("My name is Bob," and "I like ice cream.") So he used his creative mind and limited knowledge to fashion a new saying, "Mi chiamo gelato." This soon ballooned into "Mi chiamo cinque gelati," ("My name is five ice creams.") but for the next five years, his Italian knowledge stagnated, much to the annoyance of friends and family who wished that he'd learn to say something new. Bob really, really likes repetition.

Chapter 2

Sometime last August, Bob felt that it was time to take on a new challenge. He wondered at the fact that he lived in a city where most people were bilingual and some spoke many languages, yet he remained monolingual despite some high school and college Latin. It was time to acquire a new language. But which one? Having the Latin base meant that Romance languages would be his best bet. There were some distinct advantages to not learning Spanish, as he would probably only understand more of the swearing going on in our neighborhood, and French was just too hard to pronounce. But Italian--ah, there was a language of simple beauty and phonetic integrity! And they had that nice landscape, legendary art, and good food and wine. And he already knew three whole sentences of it. And, what do you know, we just happened to have an Italian Rosetta Stone CD lying around. (I'm afraid we have more than one Rosetta Stone set lying around. Our apartment is a virtual Rosetta Stone graveyard.)

So, he popped in the CD and got started. One thing to know about Bob is that he is very goal-oriented. Once he starts something, he lays out a schedule and works diligently, whatever anyone else is doing, and wherever we go. He started a study notebook, bought a dictionary and grammar book (or had me buy them) and set himself a goal of four lessons per week. He did the computer program on nights and weekends, and studied the curriculum text on the subway going to and from work. On Mondays, he asked a Venetian co-worker to help him with the weekend's idiomatic phrases and other confusions. On Wednesday nights, he had me quiz him at dinner. (I have a very elementary understanding of Italian.)

But perhaps most memorably for all involved, there was always an Italian phrase of the week. One early example was "Il cavallo sta mangiando una carota blu." ("The horse is eating a blue carrot." When in doubt, be silly!) And then there was the week he memorized the familiar notice on our local subway train: "Dovete trovarvi in uno dei cinque vagoni di testa per poter scendere alla stazione di South Ferry. Grazie." ("You must be in one of the first five cars if you want to get off at the South Ferry Station. Thank you." It's given in six languages.)

Slowly, the Italian began to stick. In December, I realized that he was going to finish the program soon, and I ordered him levels 1-3 in the new Rosetta Stone version for Christmas. (Unfortunately for continuity's sake, the program was completely reworked. As the sales rep put it, "We found out that people don't want to learn about boys standing on picnic tables or under them." But it was actually cheaper to get three levels than two.)

This week, Bob clicked on the last screen in Unit 8, Lesson 12, thus completing Level 1. Unfortunately, in his days of sometimes maddening perseverance, his daughter has run screaming from the room more than once, and his co-worker has quit helping him altogether. But recently when he popped his head in her office and asked, "Chi sta sentendo piu freddo di tutti?" ("Who is feeling the coldest of all?" which was a phrase of the week in early January) she forgot that he was speaking Italian and answered absent-mindedly, "Chi?"

Complain as we might about sheer repetition, success is when you forget that someone is learning a language, and you actually begin to speak it with them.

I don't know what Chapter 3 holds. Let's hope it includes a nice vacation in Tuscany, with five ice creams for all.

But for now, we're going to begin with a celebratory spaghetti dinner.

"I guess you had to be there" (Chapter 5)

I am now getting so far behind with blogging about Kenneth Myers's All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes that I’m a whole chapter behind Cindy’s schedule.  And my unusually busy winter, combined with my slower than average writing, will probably keep me behind schedule for some time.  I'm sure it would help if my posts weren't almost as long as Myers's chapters!  But here, a week late, is my attempt at blogging chapter 5:

Chapter 5 of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes discusses the question, Is there any qualitative difference between high art and pop culture, or is it just a matter of taste? This is a slippery question, partly because of aesthetic relativism, and partly because for the past few decades academics have evaluated all culture in terms of social background and politics.  

Regarding the political analysis, Myers says that surely art does have a social and political dimension, but he refuses to get sidetracked by the academic approach, calling it “the quasi-Marxist assumption that matters of taste and aesthetic judgment are determined by social class.” The political approach would seem to indicate that there is no such thing as a genuine aesthetic judgment, only determinism. It’s really just another aspect of relativism.

Seeing this expressed so simply enabled me to understand something about my own art education. One of my art professors in college told me that the problem with my art was that I had a “Protestant work ethic.” (He wasn’t the only one who made personal comments. They were common.) This is not to say that my drawings and paintings were aesthetically superior and merely unrecognized--not at all!--but looking back, I think the lack of authenticity in my work had a lot more to do with my pop culture habits than they did with my social background.  And when I learned aesthetics from my professors and from seeing first rate art, I didn’t merely move myself into a higher end niche market.  My whole world enlarged.  It was as though I could see new colors that I hadn’t known about before, and perhaps it was literally true.  

Myers says instead of politicizing art, we should evaluate it according to its effects and nature as much as its cause.  The rest of the chapter is about art’s effects and nature.  His ultimate argument is that the experience of high art and pop culture are so qualitatively different that they can’t simply be a matter of taste or social background.

This is a good place to refer to Mark Steyn’s 1997 essay “Twenty Years Ago Today.” (I have finally found in a version that doesn’t require a subscription to The New Criterion. As much as I would love to see The New Criterion flourish financially, I think this essay is so insightful that everyone should be able to read it.  Just remember where it came from.)  In the essay, Steyn is evaluating the progress of American culture since Alan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind twenty years ago, and making the argument that you can’t write off Bloom as an old style elitist (as many have done) for suggesting that college students remove the plugs from their ears so they can hear and think about something other than pop culture.  He’s trying to make the same point as Myers, that pop culture is qualitatively different experience than high culture, not merely a matter of taste:

“Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.”

... It is of historic proportions that a society’s best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats.” Confronted by these sentiments, many young readers just shrug: The old man doesn’t get it. Not his fault. He’s just old. In a way, their reaction or lack of it vindicates his final point: “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.” He’s mouthing away but they can’t hear. 

And most of us of Sir Mick Jagger’s age and younger don’t want to hear, either. To be sure, this or that gangsta rapper is a bit much, and Britney’s a sad old slapper, and Madonna’s a clapped-out provocateur, but what’s wrong with a bit of rock and roll? Nothing. Except that, when it’s ubiquitous, it’s stunting. Paul Simon and I once had a longish conversation about this and eventually he conceded that even the best rockers had nevertheless been unable to develop beyond a very basic harmonic language: There isn’t enough there to teach in a “music” course...What an achievement it would be if every high-school could acquire a classical catalogue as rich as that used in Looney Tunes when Elmer Fudd goes hunting Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny. Carl Stalling, who scored those cartoons, often fell back on formula: If someone was in a cave, the orchestra would play “Fingal’s Cave.” But you can’t even do that any more, because no-one gets the joke.

Please, go back and read that again, several times.  Read the article.  Read Alan Bloom’s book.  I care a lot more about that than I do about whether you read the rest of my post.  

But meanwhile here are a few guidelines Myers gives us for understanding the nature of pop culture, along with a few of my own thoughts about them:

Entertainment

It is a myth that only pop culture is entertaining. The truth is that all art is entertaining; but pop culture is only entertaining.  It can’t bear too much repeated exposure (thus its faddishness) or sustained aesthetic analysis (maybe this is part of the reason for focusing on political aspects?).  You can become acquainted with pop culture, but the relationship is always superficial.  (This makes me think of modern versions of friendship and community.)

Nostalgia

Pop culture is nostalgic.  It’s not an original experience; it’s about reliving one.  The person brought up on it doesn’t learn how to appeal to universal values, only to shared experience.  (This is not an absolute, of course, but a generalization according to the logic of pop culture.) 

The reliving experience point makes me think of “The Chris Farley Show,” a skit from the early 1990s on Saturday Night Live in which he played an interviewer who was so nervously inept that he could only say, “Do you remember that scene where...?  That was awesome!” His guests’ understanding of his questions depended entirely on their having acted in or seen the movie themselves, because Farley’s character could impart nothing of universal value.  This was even the case when he tried to describe something of lasting significance, like Jesus clearing the temple.  

Pop culture, like a Chris Farley movie review, is essentially a location joke.  As a case in point, most people’s appreciation of SNL depends heavily on the shared experience of watching the skits. This used to drive me crazy as a teen, because my family didn’t watch the show and so I never had any idea what half the conversations I heard were about.  Later, as a young adult, I did watch the show and so I got to be in on the joke--until the show went into a decline. And of course, I’m appealing to the location joke nature of pop culture myself by posting a video of it! 

This is not to say that it isn’t genuinely fun to follow a trend or be in on a private joke, but that it can’t easily transcend its original setting (though it can be extended a bit by adding layers of irony). Its primary lesson is “You shoulda been there!”  That’s fine between family and close friends.  But it’s not much of a way to conduct a broader social life, much less a cultural dialogue.

Sentimentality

 

Pop culture is also sentimental. One thinks of Precious Moments figurines, of course, but Myers also correctly connects Evangelical culture with sentimentality. He quotes Abraham Kaplan, saying that the object of sentiment may be morally “worthy,” but the feelings called forth spring too quickly and easily to acquire substance and depth. “To the sentimentalist, what matters is the feeling stored within him, not whether it is rooted in reality.” 

The point is somewhat subtle, but worth considering. If a worship service (or for that matter a movie) jerks my emotions around repeatedly, no matter how worthy the sentiment, my natural reaction is to first wonder that’s wrong with myself, then to feel manipulated and detached from the spectacle.  This is not to say that I don’t feel strongly stirred by art, or the gratitude for Christ’s sacrifice, or love for my neighbor, but that my emotions are limited to human scope, duration and proportion. They are effected by everything from how much sleep I’ve gotten to whether I’ve been arguing with someone. A deeper presentation of these underlying truths can outlast my emotions of the moment. C.S. Lewis noted somewhere that his problem with fear-based preaching was that strong human emotion seemed to have a natural duration of about two weeks.  This observation has helped me in times of crisis.  Even great life conversions,  relationships, crises and griefs have to be digested in smaller emotional increments.  So certainly we shouldn’t be surprised that our response to great art isn’t instantaneous.  

Celebrity

Another mark of pop culture is the cult of celebrity.  Ironically, though pop culture may stir strong temporary emotions, it is actually more impersonal than high art.  We might say that its range is less, or that it has a lower emotional resolution.  Therefore the focus  tends to shift from the art itself to the person to created or performs it.  As usual, I can think of a Lewis analogy. Lewis says that poor art focuses not on the work, which takes both the artist and viewer out of himself, but on the ego of the person who creates it.

But pop culture is not escapist! 

Myers ends this chapter by saying that the problem with pop culture is not that it’s too escapist, but that it’s not escapist enough!  As J.R.R. Tolkien put it, it all depends on whether you’re escaping or merely deserting. (Implying that pop culture is deserting.) He said, “Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?  Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?”

And finally...Individualism

Myers points out that it’s hard for Americans to accept that there is a difference in the quality of experience between high art or folk art, and pop culture, because we are pragmatic and tend to want quantifiable, scientifically provable results.  Besides which, we are individualistic to the extent that we don’t like the thought that high art requires patience, training and willingness to submit to a master.  

I have learned through repeated experience, both aesthetic and spiritual, that there is much to be gained from submission to excellence. My art instructors, who were mostly abstract expressionists, told me to question authority.  But even they would still tell me to go check out a book on Milton Avery or Robert Motherwell, or better yet, to go see their works in a museum. Even anti-traditionalists have their traditions. In my late twenties, I submitted myself to some atelier style training under well-known portrait artists.  I can guarantee you that although these artists give specific information about the craft, they don’t demand slavish obedience.  You’ll just get more out of your class if you adopt their style for long enough to see how it works.  Then you can adapt it to your own style. John Holt, the unschooling advocate, called this mastery that is worth obeying natural authority.  It’s very different from authoritarianism, which demands obedience because of an outsized ego.  

Myers also says we should be wary of an individualism that tells us we should discover who we are independent of family and community.  I see his point, certainly. In fact, a family could discover new cultural forms together, as my family has learned about classical music through my daughter’s violin studies. But this does bring up an interesting question--what if your inheritance is pop culture? This is the case with many, if not most, Americans now.  Or to put it in a slightly different way, what if you admire Wendell Berry idea of home, yet you’ve no strong community tradition to go home to?  This seems like a very, very important question.  

Winter sports

This winter New York City has had a lot of snow, but not much accumulation. And during the past couple of weeks, we've had a lot of weather that's too cold even for snow. What does one do during this weather? Why, winter sports, of course!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our family signed up for five weekday ski passes with our homeschooling group.  The ski resort is in the Poconos, two hours away in Pennsylvania. We get everything ready the night before, get up before daylight, meet a friend with whom we share a rental car, and are on the slopes before ten. We've done this twice now in January.

I have to admit that after my first attempt to ski two weeks ago, I was a bit nervous about going back. But since Bob loves to ski, I decided to do whatever it takes to conquer my fear. C.Z. and I had bought into very inexpensive group lessons, but that wasn't going to do the trick. So we signed up for individual lessons in the afternoon, too. I am proud to say that I can now ski very slowly down the bunny slope, doing snowplow turns. I can't say it's officially "fun" yet, but I'm not terrified anymore, and I can see where, if I keep putting all my effort into learning everything I can each trip, skiing might eventually be fun.

C.Z., of course, is way ahead of me, learning how to ski on a real slope. This is why, if you have a chance, you should learn to ski when you're still young!

The following photos are from a much less dangerous adventure. Little known to most people, the Central Park Conservancy occasionally opens up the Sailboat Pond at 72nd St. to ice skaters. They only do this if the weather has been well below freezing for several days. And they don't announce it; you just have to go by and check. (We live a couple of miles away.) But when Bob went by the pond during one of his runs last weekend, there were people skating!

Unfortunately, you can see what had happened, above, by the time we got down there on Monday morning with our skates. Too much snow. No more skating. But isn't that a lovely open space for skating? You don't even have to keep going in the same direction. You just have to avoid the hockey pucks! And divets, sticks, and clumps of snow frozen in. This is no holds barred ice, not well-groomed Zamboni'd ice. We love it!

So anyway, foiled from skating, we walked about the pond, trying to decide how to make the best of the situation. Above is the terrace next to the sailboat house. And you can see the entire house in the previous photo. (Sailboat Pond is for toy sailboats, by the way. Unless you're Stuart Little.) The dogs love this weather. Fifth Avenue is in the background.

C.Z. hasn't climbed on the "Alison Wonderstatue," as she used to call it, in several years.  Since then, she seems to have drunk out of the bottle that makes you grow.  Alice is still bigger, though!

After looking scoping out the surrounding hills, we settled (so to speak) on a nice sledding spot next to the pond. (Of course we brought our sled.) It even had a helpful railing to keep you from sliding into the pond if you got going too fast! After a few runs, Bob noticed that if you could keep to the far left of the path, you could "hop" onto the walkway and keep going all the way down to the water, making for a much more exciting ride.  Soon everybody was doing it!   

Eventually, however, the nice slick sledding walkway got too clogged with toddlers and dog walkers, so we left and started trekking home through the park. Above is one of our favorite paths from the days when we used to live on the East Side. We used to affectionately call it our "backyard." (So do a lot of people, no doubt!)  It goes right behind the Metropolitan Museum.  

Here are some cold pigeons by Turtle Pond. The building in the background is Belvedere Castle. It's a nature center.  

The next photo in the sequence would the the vertical one of the Great Lawn at the top of this post, and there should be some of the Reservoir in between, but I've got way to many photos already. Let's fast forward to the Pool at 104th St. I like this spot where a creek drains out of the Pool (another pond), splashes down some rocks, and winds under the West Drive. There's nice birding here in the spring.

But for now, there are mostly a bunch of ducks trying to keep open a spot of water in the Pool. And one Osprey was perching overhead. So you might call these sitting ducks. They looked very nervous, but the Osprey left them alone.

***

C.Z. and I finally did get to go ice skating, at Bryant Park, on Wednesday, with our homeschooling co-op.  After trying to ski, it was a breeze!  The season is over tomorrow at Bryant Park, because the rink closes for Fashion Week.  But the winter sports continue... 

Diversion as culture

Chapter 4 of Kenneth Myers's All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is about our cultural restlessness.  When I looked these chapters over, it was obvious that my problem was not going to be coming up with anything to write;  it was going to be whittling my thoughts down.  And since this month I seem to be running in the same gerbil wheel of activity I deplore below, what seems to have happened is that I've cherry-picked the quotes from the book.  They give you the heart of the matter.

Early in the chapter, there's a telling quote from Blaise Pascal:

“Men...are overwhelmed with business...and they are made to understand that they cannot be happy unless their health, their honor, their fortune and that of their good friends be in good condition, and that a single thing wanting will make them unhappy.  Thus they are give cares and business which make them bustle about from break of day--It is, you will exclaim, a strange way to make them happy!  What more could be done to make them miserable?...[If we wanted to make them more miserable, we could relieve them of these cares, because] then they would see themselves; they would reflect on what they are, whence they came, whither they go, and thus we cannot employ and divert them too much.  And this is why, after having given them to so much business, we advise them, if they have some time for relaxation, to employ it in amusement, I play, and to always fully occupied.  

How hollow and full of ribaldry is the heart of man!”

In one sense, busyness has been a problem at least since Pascal's time.  Certainly it describes most everyone I know, even myself at times. We keep our kids out of school because we think they’d be overscheduled, and then we immediately fill their calendars up with activities--all good ones, of course.  

But there’s something even more hyper about the culture of today than that of Pascal’s time.  Pop culture not only keeps us shlepping to lessons; it’s a whole culture of ever-evolving diversion.  It thrives on it, celebrates it, makes itself at home in it.  But diversion seems intrinsically related not only to television and music, but to our ailing families, our ailing communities, and even an existential sense of restlessness.  What's the connection? And where does this competitive, disconnected sense of pop culture come from?

The Left claims that it is imposed from above, because capitalism depends on it. Mothering Magazine deplores our society's brazen marketing to children. It’s certainly easy for a parent to get that feeling if you’ve ever witnessed the launching of a new children’s product, often via television or movies.  Ninja Turtles, Teletubbies, Pokemon, plastic bracelets from Nike, does it really matter what it is?  Each time the latest fad hits a new crop of children who have no sales resistance, no awareness of how marketing works.  Then, just when the last kid gets the item in a Happy Meal, it becomes passe. Today's fad is forgotten, or even becomes tomorrow's pop culture joke. It may even be recycled, along with a cool layer of irony.

Cool hunters comb the city streets, looking for new trends to exploit.  But the left really only gets part of the story.  Often teens or artists start their own fads.  Their whole lives are consumed with being competitively hip, and sometimes their style really is interesting.  By the time the fad filters down to the Gap level, the trend setters are on to something new.  But wherever you catch it, it's always evolving, and it takes a lot of energy to keep up.  No wonder teens can’t concentrate in school.

John Taylor Gatto connects our obsession with the fashionable present to the breakdown of communities and a purposeful helplessness inculcated by our age-segregated schools:  He says, “Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that."  He also said: "[School] cuts you off from your own past and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.” 

We might as well add the internet to that, except that at least we can choose to blog about our own past if we like.  Still, the challenge is to get any sort of involved conversation going.  Blog readers don't know your parents, or your family's past.  For that matter, all of Manhattan seems to live in a continuous present.  I'm lucky if I've briefly met another mom's parent. Mostly we talk about what we're doing this week.  

Myers seems to agree with Neil Postman (who figures into the book later on) and others that technological advances have changed the way we think. Artists and philosophers sense this change of consciousness and embrace it. Marshall Berman describes its essence:

“To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction...To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.”

Art has always reflected the culture around it, but after Andy Warhol, high culture became primarily about an ever-increasing pace of change and conceptualization, and its motto, “In the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.”  But change in high culture is the subject of chapter 5.  For now, let’s look take a quick look at how the Industrial Revolution changed our basic mindset.  

After finding what he considers to be the heart of the matter, Myers then discusses how the Industrial Revolution and its technological innovations changed our culture and our sense of time and ultimately produced pop culture. You might wonder what the aging Rustbelt has to do with technopop, but the common answer is obvious once you think of it:  Boredom.  Factory work is tedious and unsatisfying in itself. It is divorced from nature and liturgy. It ultimately destroys community life, and fosters a culture of diversion.  And John Taylor Gatto shows clearly how industrial models originated our present school system.

Jacques Barzun said:

“...industrial life requires something that would compensate the toilers for their loss of individuality, of self-will and self-regard, of free movement and dramatic effort.  Something, I say, had to be done to palliate their nervous fatigue, their self-contempt, and their boredom, which is only vital energy unused...and the compensation is the culture of cities, rooted in the newspaper and rising by degrees to spectator sports, organized betting, and panoptical sexuality.”

His words almost sound quaint now, but they’re still true.  Sure, the particulars have changed, and our educators sound alarms that we're "falling behind the times."  But the basic idea is the same:  We feel disconnected, but who's got time to figure it all out?  And does it really matter as long as we're having fun?  

I have developed my my own pet theory over the past several years that a "management" approach school and attraction to pop culture go hand in hand.  The most common outlook towards academics, not only in the dysfunctional public schools (in my neighborhood) that Gatto talks about, but even among classical Christian schools and homeschoolers, is what I call “managed workload.”  The primary lesson is not the subject itself, but the ability to manage one’s time and to master a certain quality of “output.”  One even sees it in Sunday school.  

I find that this approach is for the most part dependent on extrinsic rewards, of which the most common are related to pop culture.  ("Do your homework or no TV!") The management approach ultimately destroys concentration on substantive learning. Sure, there’s something to being able to manage your time well, but there’s even more to being able to say no and being able to answer the question, How do I want to live?  If I don't do what others do, am I willing to be alone sometimes, and poor sometimes? I prefer to foster interest in the subject itself.  This is why I am sympathetic to unschooling, even if I haven’t always got it worked out in practice.  No doubt some people think I'm not being realistic.

As I write this, C.Z. is working on a lesson in Jacobs’ Algebra. She wanted me to come check the first two problems (with several subparts each), because she suspected she was going off in the wrong direction, and her hunch turned out to be a good one.  I said, “You know, you’ll move along faster and do less work in the long run if you read the introduction to the chapters carefully.”  I said this because if she does her work well, I only require her to do the second set out of three in each lesson.  I was an A student.

“I prefer to do an extra set anyway,” she responded. “Otherwise I feel like a dog trying to hold a bunch of tennis balls at once.  I don’t learn anything.”  Now algebra is certainly not C.Z.’s favorite subject, but I admire her frank refusal to cater to efficiency at the expense of understanding.  She may even struggle with the workload at first when she gets to college, but at least she’ll know why she’s there.  And if she really wants to be there, she'll figure it out.

But what disturbs me most about the medium of school or work, with its artificial requirements for efficiency and its fostering of a culture of salient distraction, is that it overrides the student’s intuition and cuts off that part of the human mind that feels God’s presence most keenly.  As Myers says, 

“Modernity has not excluded God from the universe.  It has simply made it more difficult to maintain a consciousness of God’s presence in a culture that increasingly ignores him.” 

Case in point: My pastor preached two Sundays ago on the first sin.  It was a sort of Postmodern update on Lewis’ statement that most people are not reasoned out of our faith; they drift away. Dr. Keller said that the serpent didn’t tempt Eve by holding an Enlightment-style conversation on the probability of God’s existence.  He sneered.  “Did God really say that?”  Temptation is an atmosphere. And it's how rumors get started:  Eve exaggerated by saying that she wasn't even allowed to touch the tree.

And this is the way of pop culture.  It doesn’t reason us our of our faith, but it pokes fun at everything until we become afraid to take anything seriously.  What is truth, anyway? 

Adam Stenbergh recently reviewed David Denby’s book Snark.  Denby thinks that snark (bascially a sarcastic ad hominem attack) is ruining our public discourse. Stenberg answered that snark could be defended as a way of constructively criticizing a society that's already almost completely obscured by spin, but I beg to differ. There’s nothing constructive about snark.  It destroys, but doesn’t build. Or as Myers says, “A steady diet of such astute humor merely takes us to a third level of emptiness.”  (pg. 63)

Ernest vanden Haag took the place of boredom in pop culture in faith seriously: “In pop culture,” he said, “even the second coming would become just another barren thrill...No distraction can cure boredom, just as the company so unceasingly pursued cannot stave off loneliness,  The bored person is lonely for himself, not, as he thinks, for others.” 

Perhaps Hell is partly that level of cynical unawareness that makes us blind to grace and joy, like the Dwarves in the barn at the end of Lewis’s The Last Battle.  One thing I do know: When Christians are called to live in the present, that doesn’t mean a continuous present of the sort that can’t entertain itself.  It means a timeless present.  And it fellowship doesn’t mean constant companionship of peers, but the presence of the Love that casts out all fear.

Near the end of the chapter, Myers explains what’s at stake in a culture of diversion:

“Family and community are only one media of meaning, of the source.  High culture is another medium of meaning, one we’ll explore in more detail...The transcendent reality of God Himself, and the experience of fellowship with him in Christ, is the source of meaning.  The question remains whether popular culture cans serve as an able medium of meaning, or whether it is instead a distraction from confronting meaning, as well as meaninglessness.” (pg. 64)

 I hope to be able to blog about chapter 5 soon.  But I'm not sure when I'll get to it.  Ironically, my calendar is too full. 

It's partita time!

The concerto competition went just fine today, and C.Z.'s performance was quite respectable, which is what you hope for in a first competition. This is not false modesty, but just an acknowledgement of that the general level of playing is quite high. I enjoyed listening from the balcony, and was probably able to stick around for about half the contestants, including the eventual winner.  Wow!

I hope this doesn't sound ungrateful, but do you know what I'm looking forward to?  After three Mozart concertos in two years, C.Z.'s next solo piece will be a Bach partita.  (There's a link to the Grumiaux version on the right, along with her Dvorak chamber piece.)  We're all looking forward to something new, even C.Z.'s teacher.  Another nice thing about Bach partitas is that they're unaccompanied, so you can take them along anywhere without having to hire a pianist. 

Though it's hard work and I've occasionally wondered what our lives would be like if C.Z. didn't play violin for hours every day and attend a music program every Saturday, when I listen to the students play on a day like today, and realize what a wonderful opportunity she has to get first rate training and listen to top notch performers in the city, I'm extremely thankful.  Even if she doesn't become a professional musician, our lives have been changed by so much exposure to good music and the pursuit of excellence.  And that is its own reward.  

This and that

C.Z. sitting on our warm living room radiator, her favorite spot, watching it snow yesterday

It has been a busy week, which makes it hard to sit down and write an organized post, but here are a few odds and ends.

First of all, it's that cold time of year. There's always about a month-and-a-half where the weather can get so cold that it's unpleasant to be outside for long.  The high temperature might not get above freezing for two weeks at a time.  The high today should be 19. Of course, I do realize that discomfort in weather is a relative matter, and that Jody, for one, would probably find this weather a breeze. (Jody, I've added your town to my collection of dashboard weather widgets, just for inspiration!) And Bob likes this weather.  Just to toughen his girls up, he announced from the living room earlier this week, "There is no bad weather, only wrong clothing!"

A couple of seconds later, I heard a voice mutter from the study, "When it's this cold, I prefer my outer layer to be a building."

That said, she's really quite tough.

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And even if you're like me and don't always check up on the news, you probably know by now that a commercial plane landed in the Hudson yesterday. I remember thinking yesterday afternoon, "That's an odd low plane sound," but I'm so used to monitoring odd sounds since 2001 that when I didn't hear a crash, I forgot about it until Bob called me to let me know. Anyway, I'm extremely thankful that the pilot's skill saved all aboard, and I'm also thankful that he avoided Harlem and the Upper West Side, which it appears that he purposely did from the graphics on the NY Times website.

***

And speaking of crashes, I'm trying to learn to ski. We're going with a group of homeschoolers to the Poconos about every other week during January and February. I'm still in that stage where every time I try to turn to slow myself down, I fall, and then spend much longer than I ever spent skiing trying to get up without sliding rapidly down the hill. My goal for the year is to get out of this stage. 

***

C.Z. has started physical therapy for a shoulder injury she developed over the summer while playing violin.  The doctors didn't seem to be concerned at first, and we spent all fall making various adjustments to her playing, thinking they would do the trick, but the pain persisted. So now we're biting the bullet and making the trip to the therapist's twice a week. Things probably won't improve in time for her concerto competition this weekend, but she's managed to hold her own fairly well, considering.  We're hoping have her completely pain free by spring.  

***

Other than that, we're just trying to get into a good winter routine.   I'm enjoying my mornings reading Proverbs and writing in my journal, and we're trying to get schoolwork done as happily as we can despite a lot of interruptions.  Right now things are just a bit bumpy with our routine, but we'll settle in eventually.

Photos from another place

Without too much comment, these photos from our Christmas trip reflect other moods than the one we usually inhabit.  They reflect the moods that were normal for us until we moved to NYC eleven years ago.

The first was taken on my inlaws' property north of Atlanta on Christmas Day.  As you can see, there are no leaves and the grass is brown, but the cousins were perfectly comfortable running from house to house without jackets.  It was almost seventy degrees.  This sunshine, this freedom of movement because of both weather and privacy, this ability to scatter bluebirds and chipping sparrows at will and run accompanied by dogs, are all rare and lovely Christmas gifts for a city child.  

The next two photos were taken in downtown Athens, Georgia.  The first is of my sister and brother-in-law's store, Helix.  I'd like it even if I weren't related to the owners!  This year we C.Z. bought some jewelry and I bought a lovely carved wooden spoon that rests on the side of a pot, and my usual supply of greeting cards to mail throughout the year.  

The second is just a night scene downtown.  We were showing my cousin's children around on campus and reliving our youth at the same time.  Bob and I met in Athens when we were students, and we also lived there when C.Z. was born, because Bob was in law school.  My parents live there now.

Anyway, I've been so busy since we got home that I never really had time to do any sort of Christmas/New Year's post, so this is as close as it will get.  It was a nice break.