The happier the dog, the stinkier the breath

Finished reading: The Best of It by Kay Ryan 📚

I’ve been reading this without an ounce of haste for two years. Not once did I feel the need to hurry up and finish it.

Leah Libresco Sargeant: If parents are increasingly relying on professionals to guide them in shaping their chil-dren, it may be because the parents are not confident they have a normative vision of human life to pass on. The rise of parenting influencers who offer scripts for talking to your child is a response to parents who don’t want to raise their children as they themselves were raised, but don’t possess a positive vision of their own. […] In my own life as a parent, l already practice some of what Abigail Shrier recommends. I don’t run toward my children when they fall, and I wait for t... tinyroofnail.micro.blog

😆

@dwalbert Ha!

@jabel Can you take a higher res picture so that I may better zoom and scan your bookshelf 🧐

“Shield the joyous” — A short piece that is definitely more than the sum of its parts. And it reminds me (with goosebumps) of Tom Wayman’s wonderful poem “What Good Poems Are For.” There is also (though this is more rare) Bob Smith’s story about the man in the bar up north, a man in his 50s, taking a poem from a new book Bob showed him around from table to table, reading it aloud to each group of drinkers because, he kept saying, the poem was about work he did, what he knew about, written by somebody like himself. But where could he take it except from table to table, past the Fuck offs and th... tinyroofnail.micro.blog

@alexink Absolutely!

@annahavron Hearing that from you means a lot. Thanks, Anna 🙂

@jabel Excellent. I didn’t really follow the he-said-she-said history of labels that I know nothing about, but the zombie-ghost comparison is apt. We need more ghosts!

@toddgrotenhuis 🙂

“Lab diamonds are a testament to the principle that what nature can do, man is capable of doing better.” Don’t get me wrong, lab diamonds are cool and all, but the headline could also read: “After billions of years evolving in nature, species congratulates itself on beating nature in its widdle waboratory... tinyroofnail.micro.blog

@jayeless His latest thing is to crawl a beeline across the couch or floor to Jack and launch himself over Jack’s body. Jack never moves until Will is done 🙂

@jimmitchell @alexink On paper v ebooks, Julian Barnes is 👌

Happy reading!

@jabel I had your post bouncing around my head somewhere while I was finishing Christian Wiman’s Trinity Forum’s interview. Around 26 minutes in, he mentions the book of Job and need for more poetic understanding. But he says “The more we learn about reality, the more it seems that consciousness is much more widespread than we thought, and that the world is close to some kind of sentience.”

@jabel I do love it when a good sentence “snaps things together.” 🙂

I’m not sure this has anything to do with polytheism, per se, but I’m reminded of a book on Job that I’ve never read but the subtitle of which I’ve loved thinking about: A Contest of Moral Imaginations

Also finished reading: The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann 📚

Some thoughts (and a poem from Kay Ryan) here.

Finished reading: Silence by Shusaku Endo 📚 Not a book that is easy to write about, which is why I’m looking forward to the Transcontinental Virtual Book Club chat with our friends in southern Oregon. It was timely, though, with reading Walter Brueggemann and trying (and mostly failing) to get into the Hulu show Shōgun. I think I’ll go rewatch Martin Scorsese’s adaptation now. Here’s Scorsese in his foreword to the book: It seems to me that Silence, [Shūsaku Endō’s] greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and ... tinyroofnail.micro.blog

@JohnBrady Excellent. Do share what you find in it. I may follow your lead

@JohnBrady Enjoy!

Lately we’ve been watching Raising Hope for our highbrow entertainment needs. With this show, it’s the little things you might miss whilst digging for cookie dough in the ice cream bowl that are the funniest. Fortunately Meghan caught this one.

@drewbelf Not sure if I’m reading it right, but reminds me of this from Flannery O’Connor

@jonah Beautiful

@dwalbert There's a great line from the introduction to the 1998 reprint of Night Train at Wiscassett Station, about the writer Lew Dietz: "He understood the importance of the seasons. To this day Mainers generally don't have as much pavement separating them from the earth as residents elsewhere. Snowstorms are still largely respected in Maine—neither feared as cataclysmic, nor ignored as nuisances. Summer is perceived as the anomaly that it is, a hectic blip on the radar screen of the year, not to be mistaken as 'the way life should be.' Who residing anywhere on the coast or up in the woods has not felt the palpable sense of relief that washes over the state once the leaves have fallen? 'By the time of October's hunter moon,' Lew wrote, 'the trauma of summer has been healed, health and sanity restored.'"

I was saving that for October but what the hell.

​@JohnBrady, @jabel, @jonah

@toddgrotenhuis I should checked out the director’s cut if there is one. While I was mildly disappointed when it came out (I was not expecting an Alien origins thing), I’ve weirdly liked that movie and “bored watched” it a dozen times

@mbkriegh Fwiw, I understand the sentiment but think that it’s also an unavoidable part of an “internet community” that doesn’t cater to the easy (and addictive) likes and shares. Personally, I have much more anxiety (to a degree I’m not excited to admit) over online conversations and commenting, which I always fear will be “judged,” misunderstood, or read in the wrong tone (I use the 🤓 face to cover a multitude of sins … 🤓), than I do about just posting for posting/writing/sharing’s sake. I opened a micro.blog page because friends and family had asked for so long for some way to “follow” me online. I know zero people in real life who use micro.blog. It was (is) meant to be for them to check and read if and when they feel like it, which they sometimes do, but it’s never the same because it doesn’t show up in a newsfeed or a notification. But that means, again, personally speaking, that I have to remind myself that while what I write or share here at least can be for others, it’s mostly just for me because I like doing it. When I start feeling like I’m posting for the micro.blog community or for comments, I quickly feel that anxiety come back in and it makes me want to remove the internet from my life altogether. (Still not an impossibility, frankly.) I’ve also found benefits to different kinds of online life: this one, a static blog with no social connection, a Buttondown newsletter — each has its own (mental) benefit, for sure. In any case, I hope you find some peace about it and keep on sharing 🙂

@ReaderJohn Exellent. You mentioned one of his earlier book that I haven't read. I finished reading Brueggemann's first book the other day, and he mentions Cavanaugh's first book, Torture and the Eurcharist. Reminded me of this talk from 2016 on the Eucharist. Quite good.

Naomi Shihab Nye:

I have not succeeded this week in having a genuine day of Shabbat. But I did get a good reminder that Good News, in its simplest and everyday form, is also stripped of human elaboration. It’s good to let it be simple.

@mjkaul Love to hear what you think of it

@dwalbert Nice. She’s been my pocket buddy lately. I look forward to seeing how that turns out.

@tinyroofnail An addendum from Walter Brueggemann… a Brueggemendum 🤓

@jabel Lovely cover. Thanks for sharing. Reminded me of the early Covid video Curt Smith posted with his daughter

Quick stop at Broad Arrow Farm • Naturally, their motto “Do you know where your food comes from?” reminds me of this. 🙂

Meghan’s random book grab today. I figure the subtitle could just as well have been “A Brief Jaunt Through Human History.” Or even “A Brief Jaunt Through My Own History.” 🤓

From the epigraph: “To every kid with a little daydream and every grown-up with a big idea …”

“Mournful punditry” — Some thoughts from this week.

@ReaderJohn 😁 You as well!

📚Happy New Book in the Mail Day! Celebrate accordingly

@JimRain Lovely!

“This dual commitment to a single origin and a pluralized manifestation of moral living characterizes Bretherton’s approach.” Werntz’s worthy critique notwithstanding — what, after all, is wrong with “squinting very hard,” and don’t we end up doing that anyway? — I’m definitely ordering Bretherton’s book.... tinyroofnail.micro.blog

@ablerism Same! “The impulse of the Bible is always to complicate judgement — always.” Volf’s summarizing of her “humanism” as a “finding a humane way to deal with the inhumanity of human beings” too. I loved her book as well.

I love Jennifer Roberts’ phrase “the formative powers of delay”.

   …Patience

comes to the bones

before it takes root in the heart
as another good idea.

     — Mary Oliver

John Adams:

Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon Foi, believes itself Right. Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service, when it is violating all his Laws. Our Passions, Ambition, Avarice, Love, Resentment &c possess so much metaphysical Subtilty and so much overpowering Eloquence, that they insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and Convert both to their Party.

Photo by Kosti Ruohomaa in his and Lew Dietz’s 1977 essay-photo collection Night Train at Wiscasset Station. I was recently reminded of Richard Wilbur’s poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” which reminds me of this photograph — which reminds me of Wilbur’s poem. At some point I’d love to sa... tinyroofnail.micro.blog

For over a week, whenever I open Richard Wilbur I have been unable or unwilling to turn the page past his poem “The Event.” This is a pleasant and frequent dilemma. 🙂

Delighted with myself and with the birds,
I set them down and give them leave to be.
It is by words and the defeat of words,
Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,
That for a flying moment one may see
By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

Kay Ryan:

We Could All Use More Sabbath Fundamentalism:

The key is to lean into Heschel’s “realm of endless peace.” Shabbat is a taste of a world that could be, a 25-hour glimpse into a healthier, less stressful and more even-keeled existence.… It allows you to let go, to lose sight of the give-and-take of Sunday through Friday, and just breathe, and accept, and enjoy. By mandating a pause, Shabbat enables us to see once again the beauty of creation, to return to the simplicity which God gave us, stripped of human elaboration.

I love that phrase, stripped of human elaboration.