Chunkster Challenge 2008

Jan27

I’m joining the Chunkster Challenge 2008, mostly because I realized the other day that my attention span is becoming more and more limited. I read lots and lots of dinky little novels, some of them even challenging in their own ways, but fewer and fewer long involved novels. The rules are:

To qualify the book must be 450 pps regular type OR 750 pps large text.
You must read FOUR chunksters (one each quarter); you OBVIOUSLY may read more.
The Challenge will run Jan 7th, 2008 – Dec 20th, 2008 (the only chunky thing occupying my mind over Christmas is ME! AND I am using my foresight remembering my inbox on Dec 31st/ Jan 1 of THIS year when all the challenges ended). BUT any chunkster started after Jan 1 qualifies.

This format means that I can read one “chunkster” now, finish it during my blog break, and post about it when I get back toward the end of March. I have two books on deck that fit this challenge: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, which I started in December, but didn’t finish, and The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon, the same author who wrote The Speed of Dark, a favorite read in January of last year.

Reviews will be linked at the Feelin’ Chunky blog each month.

Time Series by Caroline B. Cooney

Jan27

It’s been my month to discover the young adult novels of Caroline B. Cooney.

First I read a historical fiction novel, Goddess of Yesterday set in ancient Greece. Good solid story.

Then, I read Fatality, a thriller about family secrets and suspected murder. I really liked it, too.

Next, I picked up all four of the books in a series about time travel; a girl, Annie Lockwood, from the 1990’s travels back a hundred years to the 1890’s and experiences romance, but also confusion and betrayal. The four books in the series are:

Both Sides of Time by Caroline B. Cooney.

Out of Time by Caroline B. Cooney.

Prisoner of Time by Caroline B. Cooney.

For All Time by Caroline B. Cooney.

Even though I thought some of the period details and the characterization of the 1890’s as a time period were a bit simplistic, reading the first book was addictive. I had to read the other three to find out what would happen to Annie and to her 1890’s beau, Hiram Stratton, Jr.

The second book in the series takes the reader into both a mental institution and a tuberculosis sanatarium of the late nineteenth century. Reading this story of a young man confined in an insane asylum by his evil, rich father complemented the factual information that I gained from reading this book, also earlier this month. I love it when my reading dovetails that way.

O.K., the series is YA romantic froth, but froth goes well with hot chocolate and cold January evenings. I went back to the library a few days after reading these books and picked up another very different series of four novels by the same author.

BY the way, speaking of time travel, Cindy asked the other day if I was looking forward to the season premiere of LOST. Yes, we’ve being re-watching all the episodes from the beginning to prepare ourselves for the fourth season. And, yes, I know it’s nerdy, but we enjoyed it. I’ll probably post this week, before Thursday, on what I’ve learned by re-immersing myself in LOST. However, the short version is: not much and I’m still confused.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 27th

Jan27

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.
“Which road do I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” was his response.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

Other Lewis Carroll posts to cause you to lose your way:

Of Snarks and Quarks

Lewis Carroll’s Birthday: 2006

Radio Jabberwocky

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never forget!”
“You will, though,” The Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”
This is so appropo of my life and memory. The 3M’s, middle age, menopause, and memory loss, are my constant companions.

“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.”

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Pray for Kenya

Jan25

This Friday, January 25th 2008, a Day of Prayer has been called for Kenya. We are asking every Kenyan, every friend of Kenyans, everywhere to take time to make a concerted prayer for Kenya. On January 25th, make a point of setting aside time to pray for Kenya , it does not have to be a long time but it must be a deliberate effort to pray for specific things about Kenya “

We have been in contact with a couple of pastors in Kenya, Pastor James and Pastor Daniel. Things are still crazy there. There are riots in the streets, and some people were actually killed by police just this week due to rioting in the area called Homa Bay. That is where Pastor Daniel lives. Houses are still being burned down as well.

Pastor James says that the price of food has sky-rocketed, and transporting goods is even more expensive. He has many staying at his small church. He is helping to feed them and keep them safe. He says that some schools have opened, but they will not let their children go there because of safety concerns getting back and forth. They do not go out of their homes after 12:00 noon because it is too dangerous. Pastor James says he has never seen anything like this.”

Both of these quotations are from an email I received from a member of our church who has been to Kenya in the past to preach and minister to the poor. Please pray.

Poetry Friday: Robbie Burns

Jan25

Robert Burns, b. January 25, 1759.

“Robert Burns is Scotland’s best-loved bard and Burns Suppers have been held in his honour for over 200 years. This site gives you the complete guide to Robert Burns the man, his poems, his travels, haggis, whisky and much more.” From this website dedicated to all things Burns, The Bard.

A Grace Before Dinner, Extempore
1791

O thou who kindly dost provide
For every creature’s want!
We bless Thee, God of Nature wide,
For all Thy goodness lent:
And if it please Thee, Heavenly Guide,
May never worse be sent;
But, whether granted, or denied,
Lord, bless us with content. Amen!

A Grace After Dinner, Extempore
1791

O thou, in whom we live and move-
Who made the sea and shore;
Thy goodness constantly we prove,
And grateful would adore;
And, if it please Thee, Power above!
Still grant us, with such store,
The friend we trust, the fair we love-
And we desire no more. Amen!

Selkirk Grace

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae the Lord be thankit.

Secret Believers by Brother Andrew and Al Janssen

Jan24

Secret Believers: What Happens When Muslims Believe in Christ by Brother Andrew, author of God’s Smuggler and co-author, Al Janssen.

I read God’s Smuggler when I was a teenager. For those who don’t know it’s the true story of a Dutch man, Brother Andrew who smuggled Bibles and other Christian literature behind the Iron Curtain to persecuted Christian believers prior to the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. The book made quite an impression on me at the time, and I continue to pray for those believers who are living in countries where freedom of religion is an empty and meaningless phrase.

As the Cold War ended and Christians in formerly Communist countries became more free to practice and spread the message of Christ, Brother Andrew and his organization, Open Doors, became concerned with supporting the persecuted church in other countries where there was no freedom of worship. This book, Secret Believers tells the story of Christian believers, particularly believers from a Muslim background, in predominately Muslim countries. These Muslims who convert to Christian faith in Isa as they call Jesus are persecuted by families, tribes, and by the government of their own country. They are often barred from educational opportunities, discriminated against economically, and not allowed to talk about their newfound faith or even to openly change their religious identity. In many countries, Christians, those who are born into Christian families, are allowed to convert to Islam, but Muslims, those who born into Muslim families, are never allowed to identify themselves as Christians. And the established Christian churches often won’t allow Muslim converts to come into the church because of the danger that brings to the churh in countries where evangelization and even attempting to convert a Muslim from Islam to Christianity is a crime punishable by prison or death.

The stories of Ahmed, Salima, Mustafa, and others, all MBB’s (Muslim background believers) is compelling and convicting. It made ashamed of the things I complain about and of the easy life I live, and it made me want to do something to help those who are suffering for their faith. The last part of the books has some suggestions along those lines. The most frequent request from Muslim believers in Christ is not for money or political action, but rather that we pray for them. And they don’t even ask that we pray that they be delivered from hardship and persecution but that we pray that they would be strong and unwavering in their faith in Christ.

Surely I can do that much.

For more information:

Secret Believers website.

The Voice of the Martyrs.

Persecution Blog

Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam

Jan23

Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital by Alex Beam.

Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.”

Poet Anne Sexton, an admirer and student of poet Robert Lowell, in a poem called Elegy in the Classroom that she wrote about Mr. Lowell’s mental illness

Gracefully Insane is a name-dropping history of McLean Mental Hospital in/near Boston, Massachusetts. A list of the alumni of McLean reads like a combination of Who’s Who in the arts and business and the Boston social register: navigator Nathaniel Bowditch, Edward and Robert Emerson, brothers of the more famous Ralph Waldo, International Harvester heir Stanley McCormick, art collector and patient for a time for Dr. Freud himself, Scofield Thayer, another of Freud’s unsuccessful analysands, Carl Liebman, poets Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton, musicians James Taylor, Kate Taylor, Livingston Taylor, Ray Charles, and Clay Jackson, author of the McLean memoir Girl, Interrupted Susanna Kaysen, and many other very rich, socially prominent people whose families could afford to have them live in a mental hospital/resort. For many of the patients, the records are still sealed because McLean promises, among other amenities, perpetual confidentiality. William James may have been a patient at McLean, but nobody knows for sure because the documents in the case, if there are any, are sealed and inaccessible.

In addtion to as much name-dropping as is possible under the circumstances, Gracefully Insane tells the story of how mental health care and treatment for the insane and the distrubed has changed over the past hundred years. At first (1817), McLean was a refuge for the members of Boston’s First Families who were unable to cope with, or unwilling to follow the rules of, Boston society. The eccentric and the insane were housed in luxury and with minimal treatment at Charlestown (later called McLean) Asylum. They were sometimes given cold baths or treated with purgatives or other medicines, but mostly they were admonished to behave themselves and left to their own devices as long as they stayed within the purvey of McLean’s rather small staff. Many inmates brought their own servants to minister to their physical needs.

One reason I found this book interesting is its association with one of the books by Caroline Cooney that I just read, Out of Time. In that book, set in the 1890’s, Hiram Stratton, Jr., heir to a great fortune, is imprisoned by his father who is the villain of the piece. Strat, as he is nicknamed, has had a serious disagreement with his evil father, and his father sends him to a mental institution. There Strat recieves no treatment for mental illness, but is subjected to the most horrifyingly dehumanizing treatment imaginable. Cooney implies that commitment to a mental asylum was a common way for the very rich to get rid of undesirable relatives. Although McLean was a much more humane place than the fictional hospital where Strat was imprisoned, Gracefully Insane corroborates the idea that eccentric and embarrassing relatives were sometimes sent to an asylum to be genteelly incarcerated and kept out of circulation.

Gracefully Insane is both a history of a particular hospital and a history of American psychiatric practices in general. I can’t see that we’ve really learned too much about the causes and cures of mental illness in the hundred or so years since McLean first opened its doors. Those wealthy families who can afford it still send their mentally unstable members to some sort of hospital/resort to maybe recover, and the poor and middle class still cope as best they can. Cures are as hard to come by nowadays as they were a hundred years ago.

Two interesting sidenotes:
The cover from the Amazon site (above) has a different picture and a different subtitle from the books I got at the library. In my library copy, the emphasis on the cover and in the subtitle is on the hospital itself. In the Amazon incarnation, the emphasis is on “life and death”, the people of McLean. Was this a change to sell more books?

I found this book last year sometime recommended by Marshall Zeringue at Campaign for the American Reader.

Life Links

Jan22

As we remember the millions who have died as a result of Roe v. Wade:

Kathryn on Refusing Death. I agree, that it would be appropriate if doctors and other health professionals were hesitant (afraid) to recommend abortion of possibly handicapped infants because they might offend their patients. Recommending that a mother kill her baby IS offensive.

Barbara Curtis at Mommy Life: “Thirty five years of 1.5 million abortions annually. That’s a lot of sin and shame for our country to bear. And a lot of women hurting individually. I’d like to challenge evangelicals to step it up on this issue.”

Scott Weldon on Life and Politics: “Christian people cannot in good conscience support any candidate for any office that doesn’t stand for life. I don’t care what party they represent or how good they look on television or how much money they promise they’ll put in your wallet; God’s people ought to be more concerned with those 50 million murdered children than any other policy, foreign or domestic.”

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 22nd

Jan22

Francis Bacon, b.1561. English philosopher, statesman, and essayist.

Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

The joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears. They cannot utter the one; nor they will not utter the other.

As for the passions and studies of the mind: avoid envy; anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated. Entertain hopes; mirth rather than joy; variety of delights, rather than surfeit of them; wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature. Laugh, wonder, and hope. Study in accordance with Philippians 4:8.

Judges ought to remember, that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law. Isn’t this just what conservatives have been saying in regard to judicial appointments for the past fifty years or so?

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, b.1788. Byronic: “of, like or characteristic of Byron or his writings, romantic, passionate, cynical, ironic, etc.” I thought Lord Byron, whose birthday is today, was supposed to be wildly good-looking. Here’s the best picture I could find; you see what you think.

Maybe you’re more impressed than I am–or maybe I’m just being Byronic (cynical). Anyway, I did always like this scrap of poetry by Byron–even though I’ve heard people quote it Byronically (cynically and ironically):

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that ‘s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o’er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o’er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,—
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

It would be fun to have that written about me. It’s probably the most innocent-sounding poem Byron ever wrote.

Blair Lent, b.1930. Author and illustrator of one of our favorites, Tikki Tikki Tembo. How would you like to be a first son and have the great long name of Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Ruchi Pip Peri Pembo? How would you like it if your great long name endangered your life?

Really, Huckabee?

Jan21

I went back and re-evaluated my support for Mike Huckabee as the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

When you write it out like that, it sounds serious, doesn’t it? Well, a lot of people don’t take Mr. Huckabee too seriously. Or else they do believe he is serious, and they don’t like what he’s serious about. I went to his website again and read his official statements on the issues. Here’s my (re)evaluation:

Border Security and Immigration Enforcement: First Mr. Huckabee says build a fence. This issue is one where Huckabee and I differ. Building a fence along the border is the most expensive boondoggle I can imagine, and if anyone can tell me how it would work to keep anyone out who was smart enough to go over, under or around the fence, please share your expertise. However, the rest of Huckabee’s immigration policy sounds reasonable enough. More border patrol agents. Easier and faster legal immigration. Closer attention to documents. More sanctions on employers who hire illegal immigrants. Those all sound like sensible things to do even if they won’t fix the problem completely.

Education and the Arts: Huckabee believes that art and music are an important part of education and that every child should receive a quality education. Those are innocuous positions that probably every candidate for any office could affirm. Huckabe also supports homeschooling, charter schools, and public school choice. Most importantly, Mr. Huckabee says that we need “a clear distinction between federal and state roles in education. While there is value in the ‘No Child Left Behind’ law’s effort to set high standards, states must be allowed to develop their own benchmarks.” I believe that education is first of all the responsibility of the parents, then of the local community, then the states. The federal government should have little or no role in education policy.

Health Care: No universal health care system. Huckabee advocates “market-based approaches” and “consumer-based health care.” His philosophy, again, sounds reasonable to me.

Taxes and the Economy: Fair Tax. I don’t see why this consumption tax is a bad thing nor why some people are making fun of the idea. I’m certainly no economist, but I like the idea of at least trying something different.

We’ll be taxed on what we decide to buy, not what we happen to earn. We won’t be taxed on what we choose to save or the interest those savings earn. The tax will apply only to new goods, so we can reduce our taxes further by buying a used car or computer. . . . Expert analyses have shown that the FairTax lowers the lifetime tax burden of all of us: single or married; working or retired; rich, poor or middle class.

So, yeah, why not?

Counter-Terrorism: Huckabee emphasizes the “war of ideas” while maintaining that we must continue to fight a physical war against terrorists and terrorist enclaves. He wants to expand the army, increase the defense budget, and “fight smart” against terrorists, using all our resources: “political, economic, diplomatic, and intelligence weapons as well as our military might.” I’m with him all the way, and I can’t see what withdrawal will get us other than another 9/11. Specifically, Huckabee thinks we should stay in Iraq until Iraq is a stable ally in the region. I do too.

Guns: On this issue, I’m a Republican heretic. I see no reason why individual citizens should own assault weapons and other guns that are essentially weapons of war. However, no Republicans are with me on this notion, so I have to give Huckabee and the rest a pass on the issue of gun control.

Judiciary: Huckabee says, “I firmly believe that the Constitution must be interpreted according to its original meaning, and flatly reject the notion of a ‘living Constitution.’ The meaning of the Constitution cannot be changed by judicial fiat.” I agree.

Sanctity of Life and Marriage: Mr. Huckabee says, “I support and have always supported passage of a constitutional amendment to protect the right to life. My convictions regarding the sanctity of life have always been clear and consistent, without equivocation or wavering. I believe that Roe v. Wade should be over-turned.”
Also, “I support and have always supported passage of a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman.”
That’s not wholesale tampering with the constitution, folks. That’s putting into law what should have been there all along. And the fact the Mike Huckabee is unequivocally committed to both life and marriage is the main reason I’m supporting him. Call me a one issue, or two issue, voter if you want, but I believe that the right to life is the defining issue of our generation. I believe that if we do not extend justice to the most helpless members of our society, sooner or later, we will cease to be a functioning society. And Huckabee is the only one of the Republican candidates for president who speaks passionately and credibly on this issue. The others (except for Guiliani who doesn’t bother) seem to me to be toing the party line because they must, but I’m not confident that they will even try to do anything about the horror that allows hundreds of thousands (854,122 in 2003 in the U.S.) of babies to be killed before they are even born every year.