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Daniel Silliman
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| 2.8.02 |
Blogging Itinerary
I’m off to a family camping trip for the next few days.
Posting is suspended while I’m in a tent reading and writing, or floating down Salt Creek to the Strait of Juan de Fuca in an inner tube.
Look for a return with doubly interesting posts Sunday afternoon.
I’m ending my summer break in Washington Thursday. I’ll be in D.C. for a journalism conference for a few days--where I hope to blog a bit--then in New York city for 10 days at an economic conference.
So look for interesting blogging from the ends of the Nation before a triumphant return to the fiefdom of Hillsdale.
Meanwhile: Get some sunshine, rest the computer and read a newspaper.
by Daniel Silliman @
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Artist explores contrasts on museum wall in 'act of drawing'
By Daniel Silliman
PENINSULA DAILY NEWS
PORT ANGELES -- The artist’s notebook was sprawled open at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center Thursday, white pages open on the top of a piled stack of art books.
Spokane artists Melissa Lang’s neat printed writing and loose lines of drawing cross the blue grid of the book.
A loosely drawn bird, inked in black circles, perches on the thin line of a forked twig on the right side of the page. His head, cocked curiously, looks toward a list of the artists appointments to draw for children.
A phone number scrawled out upside down formed the ground beneath the bird.
Lang, an emerging Spokane artist working in residency on a mural beginning Thursday and lasting two weeks, stood against a large white wall in the Fine Arts Center.
Her hair was bound up in a red handkerchief, her denim jeans rolled up to her knees, the charcoal she was working with smudged across her jaw.
With a stick of charcoal in her hand, Lang gestured at the upper right corner of the wall, the emerging piece of art.
“I love the contrast between the delicacy of the lines and the dark foreboding,” she said.
She moves an outstretched hand in an arch. The charcoal scratched across the wall, leaving black and gray lines in a descending vine with tailing leaves.
Read the rest of my story of a charcol smudged postmodernist artist...
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Enjoying Calvinists
Gideon Straus blogs about his love for the variety of Calvinism, even the stuff starkly different from his own Dooyeweerdian neoCalvinism.
Looking at his piece and the list of online sites he mentions I'd have to say that I, a Reconstructionist and an Anglican, also enjoy the Calvinists.
But I'm not one. Which is weird, I suppose, since I run (surf?) in all those circles read all those types of people and believe things said to be based on Calvinism. I even know who Kuyper and Dooyweerd are.
I just don't think the five point stuff works, is all. I understand it too.
But my logic can't make the stuff do anything positive. I can make it tie knots of meaninglessness. I can make produce determinism or fatalism. I can make it entirely irrelevant. I can make it dance on the head of a pin.
I just can't make Calvinism do a single positive thing for Christianity and find it stripping the absolutely necessary choice from the world we live.
But I love the Calvinists anyway.
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Our Babel Fish
This site, which can translate blocks of texts and whole websites from one language into another, is pretty cool. It is still pretty limited, but certainly a good idea and a workable one.
I think the whole experience is rather heightened, though, by the association with the Babel Fish associated with Doug Adam's five book trilogy, The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Universe.
I rather expected them to be more slimey, seeing Adam's description.
--From a place that is "Mostly Harmless,"
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The End of Simon
A company owner by Bill Simon, GOP gubanatorial hopeful, was charged with fraud and required to pay $78 million in damages by a Los Angeles jury Wednesday.
Bill Simon isn't folding his tent in this Gary Hart like turn of events, but he should be. Nobody can have the support of a morally conservative base and run a proven fraudulent business.
I’m disappointed in the man, someone I would have supported and probably worked for until now.
I don’t wish he the verdict had gone another way, or that they hadn’t been tried, or that voters would overlook his fraud. I do think it was very unfair of him to cut out other contenders to fall like this. I feel betrayed and I just liked the fellow; imagine those that worked for him and backed him.
I wish the man had never won the primaries. I wish he'd never gone into politics, I wish he had left bloody well enough alone.
I hope the Calif. conservatives can hang on to their end of the political spectrum and run somebody next time without become stooges for a fraud.
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Defending Creeds
In his second and concluding article in defense of creeds, Greg Uttinger on Chalcedon writes about the development of the Apostles Creed.
I was a little disappointed by this, though I love the creed and its use in worship. It's just that the title--the Apostolic conection--makes it slightly more palatable to primitivists who reject (or think they reject) any use the Church tradition in hermeneutics. As Uttinger points out the dates of the creed well past the death of the Apostles, the connection is often made for the uniformed Evangelical Primitivist.
I think the harder argument would have been another creed, and would have made for a better argument. However, if he felt the Apostles was the best, then the point should have been made that the Apostles' connection was given to creed because it was the traditon of the Church and any belief aligning with the traditon had the Apostolic seal of orthodoxy.
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Coming to That Point
When I know that no one else could write the story. Knowing that I am the one who can do a story justice, do a story the way it deserves.
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In the Newsroom
White-haired women are waiting for obituaries to come through the fax today. More should be coming, normally more people die.
A photographer shots pictures unrelated to any story, pictures to stand by themselves in the morning's paper, and calls them wild art.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 1.8.02 |
Celebrating the Music of the People: The Life of Alan Lomax
Describing an honest folk song on an early, pre-electric album, Bob Dylan said: “This song wasn’t written up there in Tin Pan Alley, that’s where most the folks songs come from now-a-days. This song was written down here in the United States.”
Blues guitarist and singer Bill Bronzy, being asked to sing a folk song, said he only knew folk songs. After all, he “never had heard no horses sing.”
Alan Lomax knew what they meant.
Lomax was the great musicologists, archaeologists and folklorists. He was the man who saved the natural music springing from America’s earth and being sung by people who just needed to sing. He searched America, and then throughout the world, finding people who were singing on the mountains and in the dust, to the clinking of chains and the beat of hoes and the rhythm of life.
If Lomax hadn’t discovered the music, the last few refrains would have echoed off the mountains and fallen silent.
A man who couldn’t sing himself, Lomax was a song hunter. He scoured the land and found its music. He was discovered the great American music and saved it from silence. He was a song hunter. Lomax discovered American icons Muddy Watters, Lead Belly and Woody Gutherie. He was dedicated to knowledge and understanding, good music and the culture of rural peoples and most of all, the hearty need to sing.
When he asked, men sang of love and crime and dust and poverty and envy and happiness and longing and life. They sang to hammer beats while building roads, cutting throats while locked in chains, dirty feet and dusty hills. They sang of poverty and they sang for free.
They sang for the love of singing. They sang and he recorded.
Alan Lomax died Monday, July 19 at the age of 87 in his Florida home.
Immediately before his death, a few of the recorded songs were produced on the soundtrack for the Joel and Ethan Coen movie, “O Brother Where Art Thou.” The soundtrack became a bestseller, brining the work of the obscure musicologists again.
If any man was deserving of an ode upon his death, it is Alan Lomax.
And because of Alan, the songs are playing for everyone.
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Talking Theology
Discussing technicalities and complexities, I posted on Atlas about Revelation as an optional answer to the philosophical Is/Ought problem and David Heddle posts on his blog about the state of man after death and before resurrection, while I respond to his post (check the comment link below his post), complicating the issue.
Meanwhile, I’m looking for my pipe and armchair.
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Avoiding Qwerty: Writers and the deadlines they ignore
A blogging fellow named Jimmy has an interesting post on the novel writer's deadlines and the sad state of the modern publishing industry.
All types of writers are bad at deadlines. It seems that deadlines are best met by those who are inspired and terrified by their editor. Of course, creative and selling novelists are just about the least likely to be those two things. They will also probably--unlike reporters who know the concrete reality of their stories--claim muses and whims and moods as reason to write or not to write.
Which is very bad, overall, for writing.
"I love the sound of deadlines," the hilarious science fiction writer Doug Adams once said. "I love the woosh they make when they go rushing by."
Novelists and other deadline-avoiding creatures should learn from the living reporter, who takes one of two routes:
1. Embrace the hack and pound the keyboard: the words must proliferate at your fingertips if you are to be happy.
2. Embrace the presure. You can't write without the energy, you must wait for the rising swell of the deadline wave and ride it down to publication.
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Serious Christianity
In words endorsing traditon and orthodoxy, words sounding like G.K. Chesterton's case for the historic faith, T.S. Eliot said:
"You will never attract the young by making Christianity easy; but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult."
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| 31.7.02 |
Eschewing Contraception and Embracing Procreation
 Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception finally came today—after weeks with a lame company working for Amazon.
So now I’m digging in to what looks to be a really good little book by Sam and Bethany Torode. It is easy reading and I'm finishing it off easily.
They are attempting to argue that sex has three purposes: a procreation, union and worship. Contraceptives try to divorce the procreative and, often, the sacramental reasons from the act.
A few jewels before I blog my overall response to the book:
Pope Paul VI said: “To experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of contraception is to acknowledge that one is not master of the source of life, but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator.
The Torodes said: “The contraceptive mentality treats fertility as a sickness and children as inconveniences.
“Pregnancy is not a disease.”
“As the Bible makes clear, the mystery of marriage is not about becoming one mind or one soul, but one flesh, encompassing the totality of man.”
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Random Question
Do Catholic blogs focus more on their faith then Protestant ones? Why?
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Metaredux
Seraphim further explain the metalife of the prefix.
Which is interesting, though it seems Arsitotle didn't have much of a knack for titles. I gather, reading all of this, that meta is a bloody interesting prefix.
He also points out, responding to my random question, that the Eastern Orthodox read Moses during their fasts.
I guessed that Catholics and Orthodox would--with worship based in a litergy--like us Anglicans read the greater portion of the Old Testament on a cycling basis. The Book of Common Prayer has readings, I think, for the entire Old Testament if you follow a year's worth of morning and evening prayers.
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| 30.7.02 |
News and Technology
The internet seems to be edging out newspapers in the time readers spend with each medium, according to a report of a survey on Benediction.
A thoughts though, the is comparison between the entire internert and most people only read one or two newspapers, which is kind of misleading. A single advertisement in a newspaper is going to get more viewers than a single advertisement on the web. Think about every page being like A3729 in a newspaper. Yeah, your stuff is buried.
Besides, except for the printers, most of us in the noble old newspaper industry would have jobs in a digital world. So the hype isn't really that scary. In the new world of the computer, the same people will be covering the news.
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Covering Crime
A good piece on the wonderful and crazy and freaked out world of the night cop reporter.
Slugging my way through some lame general assignment work without any room to fly, I envy this guy. Soon though, very soon I will be there, working on the deadline drenaline.
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Students more moral after Christian cultural efforts
Christian cultural leadership has worked and is working in one area—abstinence.
Maggie Gallagher, in an opinion piece on Yahoo!, reports that virginity among high school students is up from 10 years ago and so is marriage. The only thing that’s really changed, she said, is the abstinence programs pushed by Christians.
It is slow, progressive work, but we will win.
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The Proliferation of the Blogging Renaissance Man
Joshua Claybourn has added my site to his list of permanent links, which I heartily thank him for.
I've been reading his site regularly, we've exchanged a few e-mails, he linked to my last theology post over on Atlas and maybe I'll even write for his Hoosier Review. He tells me it pays twice what I make writing here.
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Apex and meta: Seraphim takes on the fools
Mr. Danckaert has a few interesting posts up taking on the foolishness of the world around us.
He hits on those thinking they are at the apex history, smiling at their brilliance and the stupidity of all who thought before. Specifically, he's talking about medicine but he also uses (as always) the Greeks. Aristotle—current reactions to him and his own understanding of himself—serve to illustrate and highlight his point excellently.
He takes on those who think “meta-” means better. Using the title of a book by our dear prop Aristotle, he writes how “Metaphysics” doesn’t mean better than physical things, as some have misunderstood, but simply those things beyond the physical.
It seems a simple mistake though, when considered from the only-too-prevalent Gnostic view that the physical and material are somewhat to really evil. Metaphysics is seen as a way to escape physics, even though that's not the actual meaning of the prefix.
Thinking of metaphysics reminded me of my Philosophy professor, Dr. James Stephens, explaining the prefix: “The philosopher says, if you can do it, I can do it ‘meta-‘” .
Anyway, go read his posts.
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| 29.7.02 |
With typical unperdictability and suprise, Credenda Agenda has published another issue that slipped right by me.
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Christian Blogger Taxonomy
Martin Roth, et al, have organized the Christian bloggers list and given it its own site.
It looks like a workable system. I haven’t, however, figured out most of the new stuff, rankings, polls and such. But, I’m happy with it and with my place over there.
I'm still watching to see what kind of use the thing is put too.
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Protestants Arguing over Communion
I have run a longer piece over on the Atlas site on Calvin’s decidedly unknown view of the presence of Christ in the elements of Communion. Take a look.
The post springs from my summer reading of England's history of worship and theology. This is summer reading at its finest. Eucharistic controversy in Europe in the 1500s. Oh yeah.
Personally, I’m currently holding to the view of Consubstantiation. I've shifted here in the last year from an uncomfortable relationship with Memorialism. It may not last, but I am happiest, I think, with the ramifications this leaves me in the morning.
The meaning of "This is my body" is a difficult debate for Protestants to have. No scriptural text rules out any of the four views and the question is, instead, decided by hermeneutics, by reactions and by ramifications.
Thus the debate seems to be perpetually curious and always flying, like a one-winged chicken, unexpectedly.
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| 28.7.02 |
Laughless on the Right
Last night I watched But … Seriously, a collection of political comedy from 1950 to about 1993. It was enjoyable and mostly funny. But watching the thing I had to wonder: Where are the Conservative Comedians?
Is it something about comedians, about comedy? Perhaps we’ve just abdicated in that field?
Maybe we just don’t laugh?
UPDATE: Sorry, I seem to have lost an "h."
I'll say that Blogger ate it but you shouldn't believe me.
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When's the last time you heard Genisis 1 read in church on Sunday? How about any reading from the books of Moses?
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