Friday, September 16, 2011

Thought of the Day

Evangelicals and others can get excited over their "Yes, Lord" and "This is the air I breathe." It's a free country. But personally, having been through much of that sort of thing, I don't think it was until I was singing "Chief of Sinners Though I Be" and unexpectedly found tears rolling down my cheeks, or until I found myself walking back from Communion suddenly struck by the knowledge that, no matter how I felt, the eight or so sins that had been deeply bothering me were wiped clean away, that I experienced anything like true emotion in worship.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Poetry Blog

A few days ago, I thought, "I should write a poem every day this month."

A few seconds after that, I thought, "Nah."

However, as it happens, I have written a poem every day since then. So apparently it's been three days. At any rate, if I keep this up, I will have 23 poems by the end of the month. And I would want somewhere to go with them besides DA. However, while I occasionally post poetry on this blog, and while it seems to be EVERY OTHER POST these days, I feel as though those who originally signed up for this blog did not sign up for a poetry blog, and whether there's any truth to that or not it's MY BLOG and I'll POST WHATEVER I DARNED WELL PLEASE and, furthermore, I DO NOT DARNED WELL PLEASE to post poems EVERY SINGLE DAY for most of a month.

So in short, I have done something I probably should have done a long time ago, and created a separate poetry blog, on which I shall dump all of my poems. It is here:

www.themuseandfriends.blogspot.com

I will link it to facebook, so those of you who generally read me there will probably not notice much of a difference.

Friday, September 09, 2011

Drought

This has been a pathetic year for blogging. Looking at my numbers, my previous low for posts was 23, way back in the ancient days of 2007; this year I am at 16 (17 with this post), 3/4ths of the way through the year, and I'm fairly sure a deplorable amount of those have been poetry (which somehow I count less even though I probably write more of it these days than of anything really blog-gish).

That's all. Just wanted to say something about it, even while I continue the trend.

Monday, September 05, 2011

Ah, E-Readers

Here we have yet another perspective on the e-reader. This one comes from one of my favorite theoretical perspectives, that of Media Ecology. The thing I love about these guys is that they tend to be able to look at technology with a cool head, noting that any given technology is not necessarily good or evil (or if it is, it is not so for the simple-minded moralistic reasons that fundamentalists of various stripes would have us believe), but it will change things. Because of Media Ecology, now every time I hear someone praising some new form of technology and all the wonders it will bring, I can hear almost as audibly the shadow side of any given list of praises: the trade-offs, the obsolescence, which any widespread change in technology inevitably brings.

Now, every time an article like this appears, there are those--some of whom are indeed media ecologists--who in their technophility will in shrill tones denounce the complainer, and will wonder to the stars why people are so ignorant that they can't just GET ON THE BLOODY BANDWAGON and see, finally see, that we don't lose anything in the switch to digital, or anything we do lose can be made up for by a simple software upgrade, and even if we DO lose some things it's a necessary trade-off in the inevitable march of Progress, and those who wail and gnash their teeth will be seen by history as minor, unimportant breakwaters in the inevitable tide of Evolution. Thus, Mr. Grossman entirely misses the point that it is incredibly easy to do a word-search on a reading tablet, that we can (or will be able to) use all kinds of electronic bookmarks, and that anything we lose from the book can be replicated just as handily on a compact, eco-friendly screen.

For me, until the day when I can leave a tablet behind on a train (or, you know, some form of transportation that won't soon be as obsolete as books) and replace it for a fiftieth or less of what I make in a week; until the day when I trust electronic media enough to believe that things I have paid for won't evaporate at the whim of some corporate bureaucrat, and believe that somebody's idea of political correctness or making me a good citizen will not arbitrarily change certain words or phrases or entire books in my electronic library; until I see it proven that a power outage will not evaporate my entire electronic library; until I decide that it will be healthy for my ENTIRE life to consist of interfacing with screens (as opposed to just the majority of it)--for all this read: never--books will continue to be my friend and boon companion, and I will continue to sound my halcyon cries in their defense by use of this most electric form of media.

I shall diminish, and fade into the West...