Credo

I'm figuring this is as good a day as any stick this transferred post onto this blog. I think I originally wrote it in May, but it's gone through some editing since then, and this is its current form.

Anyhow.

Making Light had a quite excellent Credo entry a while ago. I've got a qualm or two about some of the points...but for the most part, it communicates, far more eloquently and poetically than I could, the way I've seen and experienced Christianity.

Partly because of Making Light, and mostly because I've had trouble communicating exactly what I mean when I say "I'm a Christian," I'm attempting this entry.

My initial answer to that question is generally, "Umm...go look at Nicea. Or some of the other early ecumenical creeds."

The Nicene Creed
I believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible;

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only begotten Son of God,
begotten of the Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Light,
very God of very God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father;
by whom all things were made;
who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man;
and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried;
and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into heaven,
and sits on the right hand of the Father;
and he shall come again, with glory,
to judge both the quick and the dead;
whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father [and the Son];
who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified;
who spoke by the Prophets.

And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church;
I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins;
and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
AMEN.

But I've found people generally don't accept this as a sufficient reply. So here's Nicea rephrased in one of the ways I've come to grapple with it and understand it. And hopefully in a way that's not too close to heretical:

This God exists -- he's good, he's perfect...you know the drill. That's really saying a lot, but stay with me.

He didn't have to, but for some reason he created all this -- the earth and galaxies and universes and gravity and dark matter. And apparently other things, like himself, that I can't really see with my eyes or hit with my hand. Like angels, I suppose...all that sort of thing.

And apparently he's got this son -- sort of -- who's him, but not quite him. What exactly this son is, and how he's related to this God has caused a lot of confusion in the past, so I'll just go with "begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father." It's an amazing image, actually, but no one word picture analogy has ever perfectly hit it exactly right.

Whoever this son was, he became incarnate. (Which is a cool word, so I'll keep using it). It's honestly hard to get a hold of how weird and unthinkable this is. This is God -- the infinite, perfect, unfathomable, uber-beyond our reckoning being -- becoming corporeal and one of us. But still being himself. The God-man. Logos become flesh.

Honestly -- if there was ever a focal point place in the streams of reality and history, this is it. Creator entering creation. Time and space bent in towards this point. Or shattered by it.

Aside from it being mind-blowingly awesome, though -- why'd he do it? You'd probably have to ask John and Paul and Anselm and Abelard and Aquinas and Lewis and all three branches of Christianity for the full discussion on all this. At the very least, maybe to show us his perfect and infinite himself-ness in a way we could understand. Or to live a life that gave us an example of how we should live. Or maybe to validate his creation and say "it is good."

The whole "for our salvation" deal seems to be the kicker, though. And it sort of implies a lot of things. Like that we need to be saved. That we, and maybe the world, too, are damn screwed up. That somewhere along the line, whatever this good and perfect and awesome God created (reflecting his goodness and perfection), stopped being those things. It got messed up and corrupted.

And he came to fix it. Apparently this involved incarnation, suffering, and death. And also rising up and being un-dead. (Maybe I need to change my shatter-focal-point, here. This God-person DYING is a rather big deal). Why did it involve all this? All the above people have made attempts at answering this, too (and very worthwhile ones). All the Credo says is that it happened, that it involved all these things, and that it worked.

Or at least that it started to work, because apparently it's not some sort of one time cure-all that puts everything back to the default setting. That would be amazingly awesome, but, dammmit, it didn't work that way. It's more like an initial, shattering blow -- one of those things that people look back on as the turning point in a war. The time the bad guys got blasted and scattered. Or maybe it's also something like the start of a viral infection. A good one, though.

Which is what this "church" thing ties into, apparently. It's the people who look at this and say "heck -- I want to be a part of this! I sure as hell need to be fixed, this world in all its pain and misery and ugliness sure as hell needs to be fixed...let me be a part of this. Let's renew this place!"

This "Holy Spirit" is a part of how it all works, too -- he's involved in the renewing and reshaping of these people, in a way that wasn't quite possible before the incarnation events happened. (Again, there's been lots of confusion as to exactly how he's related to the Son and the Father. It's more of the "him -- but not quite him" deal, and I'm not going to mess too deeply with it).

Anyhow. The church-people, even with the help and the renewing and the guidance, will often still screw up and still get it wrong. They'll lose sight of how we're supposed to be doing the rebuilding and glorifying and setting right -- labeling some things evil that aren't, and confusing a messed up thing with the messing up itself. Or forgetting that it's not by the sword that we can ultimately fix anything, because this place wasn't screwed up by the sword.

But still working toward the renewing and the rebuilding and the fixing -- at least headed in the right direction.

Then there's the "resurrection of the body" part, and the "life everlasting part", and the "kingdom with no end" part -- basically meaning that all this doesn't end with death, but keeps on going.

And you're looking at all this -- hell, I'm looking at all this -- and saying "that's crazy!" Because a lot of this is pretty whacked out, and though you can certainly get some it from looking at the world around you, it would be pretty damn hard to get the whole picture that way. People will notice part of it, and will try to articulate and explain it. But this is a screwy, messed up world, and our brains are damn well limited, and it's no wonder we confuse it and get it wrong.

The fact that this God did tell us a bit about the way things are definitely helps. Though there's still the limited, marred mind that gets in the way of understanding it all.

Whatever people make of whatever knowledge of all this they have -- I'll leave that to God to sort out. He will, eventually...the whole judgment part. Right now, I'm mostly just worried about how to live up to whatever it means to be "a part of this." It's already forced some pretty major re-thinking and re-prioritizing on me, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.

Tada.

I'll probably end up going back and editing this a couple times, soon. But I wanted to get the basic gist of the matter up as soon as I could.

Also note that this is pretty much a "what" entry, not a "why" one. "Why" is a heck of a lot more complicated; nailing down the "what" is enough difficulty for one day.

I Like Job

Some initial thoughts on Job. (Yay for yet another bullet-point entry!)

• Job asks some pretty hard questions.
  
  
• Job is sick of the easy answers (and he can rattle them all off, too).
  
  
• Job's friends would have made excellent debaters.
  
  
• Job gets more mixed up the more he tries to defend himself to his friends.
  
  
• Job was thinking a bit more clearly and a lot more humbly until his friends started trying to explain things to him.
  
  
• Job becomes an self-righteous idiot after debating with arrogant (if well-intentioned) idiots.
  
  
• I like Job.
  
  
• Job is my new favorite book of the Bible.
  
  
• Job is also one of the best books of the Bible to read during Advent. Sundahl got a few things right, and the deep and thoroughgoing messianic longing in Job is one of them.
  
  
• The middle portion is currently a lot more comprehensible to me than the bookends are.

Christmas Reading List

Reading list over Christmas break:

• Lorna Doone -- R. D. Blackmore
  
• The Everlasting Man -- Chesterton
  
• The Visit -- Dürrenmatt
  
• A Feast for Crows -- G. R. R. Martin
  
• Various resources on OT/NT connections, theonomy, and anything else that winds up being applicable.
  
• History of Spain stuff for Dr. Stewart

Would like to track down some Kierkegaard, too, but as I probably won't even get through half of the above list, it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Narnia @ Hillsdale

• Ticket -- $6.75
  
• Narnia -- pretty neat.
  
• Watching Laura and Matthew demonstrate the cha-cha (while waiting in line) -- hilarious.
  
• Sitting through a preview for this movie in a theatre 95% filled by Hillsdale college students -- really priceless.
  
• Double-stealing SAGA trays afterward -- wet, cold, fun.

Done!

Paper = DONE!!!

And Arthur Farwell would have been intrigued by the concept of a mosh pit. After he got over the fact that music history hadn't quite turned out like he predicted. Those community music pageants, man -- definite wave of the future. Not.

In other random news: Our chamber choir had a concert the other night, and Eric Whitacre is now my new favorite composer. If you ever get a chance, listen to his piece "Lux Aurumque." Glorious, beautiful, jaw-dropping stuff.

Arthur Farwell Paper

Three big things I have learned from my Arthur Farwell paper:

1. People at the turn of the century were INCREDIBLY optimistic -- always thinking we were right on the edge of a unifying, uniting, assimilating, “epochal” force. A huge change and shift, which would bring all Americans together in a gloriously unified national spirit, and at some point the world in a universal one.
   
2. People at the turn of the century were INCREDIBLY racist. Everything agreed with it -- religion, science, personal experience, experts, “common sense.” But for some lightning bolt of grace or stubborn insanity, I don’t see how ANYONE could have avoided buying into it.
   
3. Zow. How messed up are people 100 years down the road going to think we are/were?

Favorite Farwell quote: “If conservatism and radicalism existed in some divinely ordered proportion in each person, we would be close upon the millennium.”

And here's another link about him.

The 'Ideal Christian Life'

So. The Ideal Christian Life. (The Distracting Question of Doom, at the moment).

1. We can't get it perfectly, whatever it is, because we're flawed and sinful and imperfect human beings. But this doesn't mean that we can't strive to hit as close to the mark as possible.

2. There's diversity in the body of Christ. How does this relate to the 'ideal Christian life' question? Does it? How much room is there for our different gifts, roles, focuses, and personalities? Does God perfecting us into ideal Christians involve a "making us more ourselves than we've ever been"? With us all ending up being quite different from one another in the end? Or is that, if we were ideal Christians, we would all have pretty much the same and focus and approach to things, with a slight bit of variation? Where does the good variation end, and where does Christianess vs. un-Christianess begin?

3. Perhaps a way of rephrasing the last one: What are the adiaphora of our actions, or of how we relate to people...and what are the essentials?

4. Another kind of rephrasing (which gets down to the main reason I'm wondering about all of this): When can one say, "You're not thinking and acting like a Christian. Stop it."

5. Is the "Look at what would happen if everybody did!" approach a good way to go about thinking about this? (I was indoctrinated with Kantian ethics as a child! YES!!!).

6. Imitate Christ. "Imitate me as I imitate Christ." I sure wish there were a lot more stories to go off of, right now. (Also...I'm pretty sure Paul didn't mean it to the extent of "everyone should be a foreign missionary." So how far, or in what manner, is his "imitate me" exhortation meant?)

The San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival

Well -- the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival strikes again. And I have yet to get my thoughts on the matter wholly in order.

I haven't actually seen any of these movies. I'm working off of scattered summaries, trailers, and mission statements at the moment. But I definitely want to get my hands on one of the festival DVDs at some point. If this is the future of Christian filmmaking, I want a solid picture of the mess it's heading into, and hopefully some solid ideas of ways to provide a counterpoint.

Note the word "counterpoint." Unlike last year, I'm not going around yelling that the SAICFF is a disgrace to Christian art and culture, a dead end, and that should we scratch the festival and its guidelines and start over. There are problems, to be sure. But I was far too harsh in my initial assessment. I've reread the 2004 entries, and there are some promising summaries in the mix. After Hours, The Art of Play, From Joseph's Quill, and Nellie, among others.

I have no clue if the finished products do justice to the summaries or not. Images of horrific acting, bad lighting, poor scoring, poor dialog, and glaring moralizing immediately spring to mind, and I'm inclined to think that the answer is "or not." But I can see good films potentially being made out of some of these summaries, and this is a most encouraging thought. The festival and its guidelines do not have to be a dead end street. A good director can make something thoughtful and worthwhile under them.

Many of the movies this year also appear promising. No Greater Love, The Narrow Path, and A Journey Home, among others. Again, good acting, good filmmaking technique, good development, characterization, wit, and subtlety would be necessary (especially for other possibly good ones like Bubble Trouble,Growing Up, and Engel in America).

Assorted scattered reports say that the quality has risen this year, so maybe a couple of these hit gold this time.

Either way, they're clean, family friendly, moral, encouraging, Christian films -- just like the guidelines and festival makers want.

And as wonderful and encouraging as all these might be, they also come nowhere close to encompassing the potential breadth and depth and impact and height of Christian filmmaking.

If the SAICFF becomes the face of Christian movie-making, we are in quite a bit of trouble. Making family-friendly movies is a worthy goal; making clean movies is a worthy goal; making movies that have a nice and wonderful resolution (with clear answers!) at the end can be a worthy goal. But I can't agree that these are the only truly and deeply "Christian" movies that can be made. Or that they're the ideal standard a Christian movie should strive for.

First off, this world is a screwed up place, where bad things happen, where evil things happen, and where things aren't always nice and pretty and family-friendly. And often, if you're going to tell a story fully and deeply, you're going to have to deal with this sort of thing. If you're going to write a film that grapples seriously many of the evil, difficult, messy parts of reality, you're going to have evil-difficult-messy-uncomfortable parts in the film. Often things that you can't just brush over with a happy smilie Jesus-loves-you! face at the end.

Secondly, this world is a place where the answers to things aren't always clear and obvious and written the sky -- where people make horrific choices and mistakes, and where people think they are doing right, but are actually doing quite the opposite. And where the old man still exists in the redeemed, and where God's common grace shows up in the unredeemed. If you're going to make a film that tackles deeply important things fully and truly, this sort of mess and difficulty will probably show up in your film as well.

Going back again to the CS Lewis lectures...one of the incredible things about fiction is that it can be "at rest in a degree of ambiguity." It can "provide the exceptions to our generalizations, reminding us that our generalizations are generalizations."

SAICFF films appear to run into barriers and problems in both of these areas. There's a strict limitation on the portrayal of negative parts of reality. And, although it's a bit harder to pin down, SAICFF films also seem a bit reticent to allow a "degree of ambiguity," or to focus on "exceptions to the generalizations."

In one sense, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

People like me who tend to like a degree of ambiguity need people out there saying, "NO! SOMETIMES THINGS ARE CLEAR AND OBVIOUS! GET BACK IN LINE, YOU PROTO-HERETIC!" And while dark and troubling movies serve a good and necessary purpose, warm and encouraging and uplifting ones serve at least as vital a role.

SAICFF films will tend towards a certain emphasis and tone. Flickerings films tend toward another. Other Christian groups will tend towards other ones. Counterpoint. Hopefully. As long as we aren't killing one another over it, in which case it'd be more like John Cage than Bach...

(And really, it's not that simple, because these groups are often saying rather mutually exclusive things about culture, art, and Christianity's relation to the world. My brain hurts at the moment, though, and I've got a paper to write, and this is thing is already super-long, so part 2 will not get written anytime soon).

Nation Building Fun

NationStates is a pretty neat place. You get to set the initial political and social parameters of a country, then make decisions about various laws and issues that arise. The first Big Issue appears to be voluntary vs. compulsory voting.

My two countries are in their infancy, created out of thin air tonight with 5 minutes of button-clicking. And they've got lousy names...I really should have thought them out better, rather than typing in the first things that came to my head.

The Nomadic Peoples of Illing are a demi-communist Christian community. Or an attempt at one. The initial parameter settings didn't come out quite right. And by the time the voting mess is figured out, I don't know WHAT they'll sound like.

The Federation of Rhadika is sort-of libertarian country, and a slightly more serious attempt at nation-building.

I also wanted to make the Byzantine Empire. And Hillsdale College. Plus throw theonomy into the mix for another country. And other randomly fun stuff. :-)

Mayoral Elections

For any of you non-Hillsdale people who read this...

Hillsdale just elected 18-year-old Michael Sessions as mayor. We've a somewhat crazy city to match our somewhat crazy college, now. :-) Should be interesting to watch what happens, at least.

More links:
The latest news on the matter
And an article about the campaign
And an article about the victory

Floating Islands!

NYT has an article about floating islands. Because I'm in CS Lewis/Perelandra-mode, I thought it was especially cool.

Some key and interesting parts:

...there are dozens of floating islands, sometimes called floating bogs, in several states including California, Indiana, Maine, and Ohio. Many others once floated but have since been destroyed or become land-locked...


...The islands usually form in wetlands, where plants take root in peaty soil or sphagnum moss in a shallow lake or riverbed, said Dave Walker, a senior project manager with the St. Johns River Water Management District in Florida, where, he said, "you can get acres and acres of floating islands on a lake."

When the plants decompose, they release gases that can create buoyancy, he said. And if there is a surge in the water level, from a flood or hurricane for instance, the peaty mat can break away from the bottom and float. Mr. Walker said some islands could even be precipitated by "a large alligator burrowing" on a lake bottom.

The islands, which can be as big as an acre and six inches to six feet thick, are rich environments for wildlife, allowing small creatures to outfloat predators. Many of the islands sprout trees, which act as sails; the 20-foot birches, alders and pines on the Island Pond island can ferry it across the entire pond in as little as 20 minutes, residents say.

In some parts of the world, like Loktak Lake in India and Lake Kyoga in Uganda, people live or fish on floating islands, Mr. Van Duzer said.

In Springfield, few people seem to venture onto the Island Pond island; some residents say they worry about falling through its spongy surface. But it teems with birds and amphibians, and there is even rumored to be a turtle the size of a bear, nicknamed Big Ben, that ostensibly feasts on ducks, geese and anything else it can snap up.


...many Island Pond residents feel affection for their itinerant island. Dan Blais tried to plant tomatoes on it and named a pair of geese who return to it each year Hansel and Gretel.

"It's like walking on a waterbed," said Mr. Blais. "I love to see it moving around."

Thee, Thou, Ye, You!

I realized a few weeks ago that I use the familiar ("thee" and "thou") when talking with friends. (I also talk with my hands, and I also lapse into "fake German" and "fake French" when English words fail me. But that is beside the point).

My sisters and I refer to one another as "thee" and "thou" all the time. It's now apparently carried over to my interaction with other people. When I run into Jessie or Laura or someone else I know very well, my immediate reaction is to say, "Hi! And how art thou doing?" If I have time to think about it, I can check myself and say "How are you doing?" But it sounds very forced to my ear when I do so.

I have also recently realized that English has no second person familiar plural pronoun. Or at least none that is distinctly familiar.

In somewhat simpler English: There's no clear way to address two or more people at once as "thou." In my particular case, I ended up saying something like, "Hi! How art...how art thou two? Thou and thou? Thou all? doing??"

And if you are still utterly confused (which is quite utterly likely), here is a picture to straighten some things out:



(If you examine the chart closely, you will see that there's technically no way at all to definitively refer to multiple people in the second person. We get around this problem in everyday English by saying things like "you all" or "you guys" or "you people" or "y'all." But in standard English, there's no way to distinguish a plural "you" from a non-plural "you." Or a familiar plural "you" from a formal plural "you".)

ANYHOW! Laura brought up the word "ye" as a possible solution. And I have finally gotten around to researching the precise usage of the word, and its potential to solve this dilemma.

Basically -- it allows us to have an official second person plural. It does not, however, allow a distinction between familiar 2nd person and formal 2nd person:



Moreover, "ye" can only be used as a subject or predicate nominative. It can't be used as a direct object. We have to use "you" again:



Finally, "ye" has perhaps more connotations of the formal than familiar.

And here is a short history of why all of these things are the case, and of how we ended up with the mess of pronouns we have today:



And now I'm going to bed.

Icon Pie

At last night's dinner in Waterman (with apologies if I got the exact wording of this wrong):

Laura: [brings out the lemon meringue pie and sets it on the table]
Paul: [gets down on his knees before the pie]
Laura: "Paul -- get up. Stop worshiping the pie."
Paul: "I'm not worshiping it. I'm adoring it."
Laura: "So stop adoring it, then."
Paul: "But it's not an idol, you see...it's an icon!"
Laura: "Paul..."
Marie: "He's right! You've taken things that are good, and made them into something very good!"
Paul: "I'm looking through it! And this pie definitely shows me something of the glory of God."
Laura: [mumbles profound disagreement with the whole thing]
Everyone: [eats pie]

Which was probably only uproariously funny to us because we'd just had Aiden Hart (an famous English iconographer) come through and give a couple lectures. Still...'twas fun.

Walks and Such

I like crisp, gray, cloudy days. And night time. And rain. And taking long walks outside in any combination of the above.

So if you see me with sniffles and a cough and a cold at some point, this is probably why. :-)

Yay Seven Hours of Swing Over the Weekend

I now know enough Lindy to teach my sisters some basic stuff when I go back home for Thanksgiving. 'Twill be quite fun. (The lead steps BACKWARD at the beginning of BOTH sections! Transitions into Lindy from East-Coast happen on the 5-6-7-8! RIGHT FOOT (backwards!) after the triple step! "rock-step triple-step 5 6 triple-step!"). Though really...the super-good people don't seem to worry about any of that. They just get the 1-2 on the beat, and do nutso stuff for the rest of it.

I would love to be able to show said sisters some of the more complicated turns, but I still have to solidify my following on those before I can lead them.

Lindy is much more fun than east coast. Far more momentum; far better counterweight and tension. At least when you're comparing both of them on the basic level.

Leading is hard on the right hand. Lots of support and catching happens with it.

What I should really be doing is getting down the waltz steps, as I'll actually be tested on those for an actual class. But I get the lead and follow terribly confused when I do so...and Lindy is a lot more fun.

Snippets of the Good Side of Hillsdale

Because for all it's nutso problems, there's plenty of reasons why I'm sticking around up here.

Discussing the book Amusing the Million (about Coney Island) in HIS 307:

Dr. Kalthoff: "Well...Americans have NEVER been particularly good about philosophizing, about thinking deeply about things. We're a very practically oriented people. This, I would venture, is very closely tied to our frontier founding -- if a pioneer finds a river in the middle of his path, he's not going to sit there and write a poem about walking through the forest. He just wants to figure out how to get across the damn river!

But when the time comes that we can reflect, when we can read Plato and Virgil and what have you, we're not able to. If we can't find a practical, utilitarian purpose for something, we're liable to just dismiss it as useless And saying "you're improving your soul, living up to your potential as a human being made in the image of God" -- huh??? What's that mean? Where's the cash?"

Dan: "I worked third shift this summer at a factory, making boxes. And honestly...by the time I was done, I just wanted to get wasted. The last thing I wanted to was read Plato, or go to a symphony -- not that the symphony opens at midnight, but still..."

Guy-whose-name-I-don't-know: "With agricultural production there's also the sense of bringing order out of chaos. Something you don't get with industrial work, maybe."
Dan: "Hey -- you start with flat sheets of cardboard, and they become boxes! What are you talking about?"

Dan: [some comment about how the reformers had a bit of a vested interest in making the city life work; if they could alleviate the problem enough to keep the status quo, they could keep their own privileged position in society]
Dr. Kalthoff: "That's probably the most cynical interpretation you can give to it...but often cynicism is the right response to reality."


And Fairfield Society was pretty cool this week, too. Basically another discussion about iconoclastic views of God. And some rather funny stuff as well:

Dan S.: "When I tell people I'm studying 'death of God' literature and philosophy, the first response is overwhelmingly negative. But if people actually took a look at some of this, what it's actually about, they'd realize that a) they're either already in the process of doing it themselves, or b) that they ought to be doing it. If you've got the same picture of God you had in kindergarten, something's wrong, there."

Dr. Reist: "So -- what I'm wondering is...how come we never hear about this kind of stuff in the Hillsdale commencement addresses?"
Dan S. "It doesn't get us any donors?"

And there followed much uproarious and knowing laughter.

Stupid Politicized Public Image of My College...

Fun Hillsdale fact of the day (which-you'd-never-learn-from-reading-our-fundraising-propaganda): The Hillsdale Democrats number 50 members. They still need to get some better slogans...Chesterton on progressivism would generally go over better up here than Lennon's "Imagine." (I like Dr. Wyatt-Hayes's office door). But otherwise, go them, especially for trying to get a speaker to come in to talk about Hillsdale County poverty.

I am getting irked by politics and Hillsdale again. When I say "I go to Hillsdale" -- what does everyone think of? POLITICS. Why is it that we can't get any grand publicity and promotion of our history and English departments, our conservative ecumanism, or our honors program? Why is it always "yay conservative politics!" Thank God that ideologism has pretty much confined itself to the economics and poly-sci departments -- but it would be nice if they weren't the only facet of Hillsdale that got all the publicity and attention.

Worldbuilding and Single Sunrises

OK. This thing has been bugging me on and off for about two weeks now.

No matter how incredible the "what if there was a world that only had one sunrise [for hundreds of generations]" idea is...I can't think of a way to make it plausible. Or, even if you could, you certainly couldn't have people "lined up on the eastern horizon" to watch it.

I'm not a science or math kind of person, so maybe I'm dead wrong about all this. And if you can think of a way to make it work, I'd really love to know. I've just kept coming up with dead ends.

Por ejemplo...

• Assuming that the inhabitants of this world are natives to that world, they'll have lived hundreds/thousands of years in darkness. Their eyes and such will be adapted to/created for that kind of world. They won't be able to handle the piercing brightness of a sunrise.
  
• And what would happen to the plant life of the planet? You'd end up with something of a wasteland, I'd think, when the sun came around.
  
• Exactly how slowly would this planet have to rotate? Can planets rotate that slowly?
  
• What sort of whacked out weather and temperature conditions would this planet have? And what sort of atmosphere would be necessary to prevent super-extreme hot and super-extreme cold?

I'll give Dr. Root credit for a wondrously glorious and inspiring image. But I can't make the stupid thing work!

Would transplanted humans solve some of the problems? What if the sun came around at regular intervals (albeit super-longly-spaced ones)? Could everything be like the 13-year cicadas? It would have to be more like 1300 years, but it might be a possibility. What if this hypothetical world were flat? The scenario would actually make a bit more sense. Sort of.

The best solution I can think of is to roll with the absurdities of the matter, and push the thing REALLY far into the realm of fantasy. The earth is flat. The sun circles it. People survive. Plants survive. Why? Who cares? It's the way this place works. Our natural laws don't apply in these cases. Deal.

Lewis wrote Narnia as a flat world. So it's not impossible to pull of. And Lim has some even crazier worldbuilding going on here. And Martin has his non-sensical 30-100 year seasons. Maybe there's a bit of hope for it. :)

Lewis CCA Paper

I am currently writing my CCA paper. I forget what the assigned topic is, exactly…something about the morality and religion of Tolkein or Lewis. I’m just writing what I want to, and figuring it will manage to touch upon the necessary things. (It’s sort of hard to talk about Lewis without mentioning religion...)

Some of the lectures were OK, some were a bit boring, and apparently one was rather trite. But there were also two or three incredible ones. Like Dr. Jerry Root's, which I’m taking most of my required quotes from. It's got a really stupid title – “C.S. Lewis as an Apologist” (which isn’t what the thing was about at all). And it doesn’t have the speaker’s digression into coruscating sunrises, or stars, or the braided rings of Saturn, or what-if worlds where the sun has only risen once. But it does have the parts about iconoclastic reality, and problems with transposing the infinite into the finite, and master’s metaphors vs. pupil’s metaphors, and fiction helping to solve the general/particular tension.

And my new favorite Lewis quote: “For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live.” (The Pilgrim’s Regress)

And some more new favorites:

By Lewis:

• “When [a given] metaphor is our only method or reaching a given idea at all, there our thinking is limited by metaphor so long as we retain the metaphor; and when the metaphor becomes fossilized, our ‘thinking;’ is not thinking at all.” (Selected Literary Essays)
  
  
• “The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less as self, is in a prison. My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what other have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books.” (An Experiment in Criticism).

And one by Janet Soskice:
“Our concern is with conceptual possibility rather than proof, and with a demonstration that we may justly claim to speak about God without claiming to define him.” (Metaphor and Religious Language.)

And one by Robert Browning:
“Welcome each rebuff that turns earth’s smoothness rough.”

And a couple by Dr. Root:

• “Fiction, because it is not expected to give hard definitions, is less likely to tempt the reader into thinking its world is complete or full understood. Fiction is able to describe without eliminating all ambiguities. In fact, often it is a rest with a degree of ambiguity.”
  
  
• “Without respect for criticism, faith traditions (and we might add apologetic methods) will tend to ossify and become unresponsive to the way things are.”
  
  
• “All understanding is approximate, and one must constantly be seeking better and better approximations.”
  
  
• “Lewis writes, often enough in his books, that Reality is Iconoclastic. And iconoclast breaks idols. As Lewis uses the phrase, he writes of God, as the iconoclast who seeks to break all false notions we may have of Him. One may pick up a new image of God: after reading a book; after having a late night discussion with a friend; after hearing a lecture or a sermon. These images may be particularly helpful in a given moment for putting many pieces of a very complex puzzle in place. But, if we hold onto these images too tightly, helpful as they might have been, they compete against one’s gaining a growing image of God. The image once helpful now becomes and idol. God, in is mercy, kicks out the walls of any temples built for him, because He wants to give to each more of Himself.”
  
  If reality is iconoclastic, and more complex than any individual might naturally grasp, it stands to reason that understanding will be enhanced in the context of community where opposition is encouraged, and perspective widened by dialectic association with others….”
  
  
• “Lewis himself is quick to remind his readers in many, many places that all human system, paradigms, models, and so forth are destined to become ‘discarded images’.”
  
  
• "In the Great Divorce, George MacDonald appears as a character, and declares ‘Ye cannot know eternal reality by definition.’ The word definition literally means ‘of the finite.’ We define things by virtue of their limitation -- they can be distinguished from other things –- and their function. In other worlds, for a thing to be defined it must be small enough to wrap words around it. In light of this, how can anyone speak of the Infinite? Even Jesus, in the Gospels, preaching about the Kingdom of God, says, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like...’ – he resorts to simile, metaphor, figures of speech, parable and so forth."

Squee.

If all the professors at Wheaton were like this, I would have killed to have gone there. They aren't, which is one of the reason's I'm glad I ended up here at Hillsdale instead.

Brain is going into giddy overload at the moment. Partly because I finally got the transcript, partly because it’s dark and chilled and raining outside (and I want to go splash in puddles and lie down in the wet grass), partly because people up here are cool, and partly because I’m going to my first ever formal dance thing tomorrow.

Late Night Graveyard Conversations

Some useful things learned with Laura, Tiffany, Matthew, and Aaron tonight/last night:

• Cemetaries at night are beautiful.
  
  
• Order of the Stick is near-universally applicable.
  
  
• The existence of the word "zebroid" has been existentially proven. Sort of.
  
  
• If the ancient philosophers had known about Einstein, they would have envisioned God as hyperspace. Or space bent in on itself. Not a sphere.
  
  
• The honey glaze for ham can be used to penetrate some kinds of biological-weapons-defense materials.
  
  
• If you're stalking a deer, and you step on a twig, you should gobble like a turkey. It will confuse them, and they'll come back to check the thing out.
  
  
• We won't run out of energy, saith Matthew. But another apocalyptic event is very likely. Eventually.
  
  
• Apocalypses are like anti-christs. Even now there are many little ones among us.
  
  
• If your tradition is not to have a tradition, would you have to refuse to have a tradition in order to be traditional?
  
  
• You can see the International Space Station at night if the sky is clear enough.
  
  
• Matthew and Aaron could invent a killer "Biblical RPG":
  
  Player A: "Hey -- my conversion roll failed!"
  Player B: "You must be an Arminian, man. It's not you that does it -- it's the Holy Spirit!"

And finally...

• Envisioning a circling sphere of stars, turning around a fixed earth, gives one type of awe. Envisioning the vastness of space, with blinding motion and movement and scattered stars, gives a wholly other kind.
  
  And because Lewis can express things so much more poetically and articulately than I can:
  
  "Be comforted, small immortals. You are not the voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come. No feet have walked, not shall, on the ice of Glund; no eye looked up from beneath the Ring of Lurga, and Iron-plain in Neruval is chaste and empty. Yet it is not for nothing that the gods walk ceaselessly around the fields of Arbol. Blessed be He!"
  
  "[Even] the Dust itself which is scattered so rare in Heaven, whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made, is at the center. It waits not till created eyes have seen it or hands handled it, to be in itself a strength and splendor of Maleldil. Only the least part has served, or ever shall, a beast, a man, or a god. But always, and beyond all distances, before they came and after they are gone and where they never come, it is what it is and utters the heart of the Holy One with its own voice. It is farthest from Him of all things, for it has no life, nor sense, nor reason;it is nearest to Him of all things for without intervening soul, as sparks fly out of fire, He utters in each grain of it the unmixed image of His energy. Each grain, it if spoke, would say, I am at the center, for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. Blessed be He!"
  
  (from Perelandra)

Benzing Dorm Life

I officially recant. Benzing Dorm (or my hall of it, at least), is an awesome place. If I stay at Hillsdale another semester, I'd probably want to keep living here. It's one whacked out, weird, and rather goofed up place, but still awesome.

To save 1000 words (or at least 150), here is a lovely diagram of my dorm to start things off.



Claro?

Now, I can understand why people wouldn't want to live here, and why there were reactions last semester of "Eww! Benzing? That's the LAST dorm I'd ever choose to live in!" when I mentioned it. I hear you guys, and yeah, that was my basic impression of the place, too.

It is, I think, still my general impression of the second and third floors -- from what I can see of them, I still wouldn't want to live there. The second floor, because it's mostly athletes and I'm not an athlete. And the third floor because...well, I really don't know. Because it feels like McIntyre (my freshman year dorm)? Sorry for having no coherent reason; I just wouldn't want to live there. Although it is fun to visit. And it has the Narnia Club headquarters!

Now...the 1st floor. I can definitely understand people not wanting to live here, too. Reasons would generally focus on, but not necessarily be limited to...

• noise
  
  
• language used by some of the girls (crap, shit, fuck, ass, double entendres, etc. etc. etc.)
  
  
• The choice of 'Nigel' as a door decoration

And maybe a few other things that are slipping my mind.

I probably should have been traumatized by my first week there. But my brain ended up being pretty one-track: "Look! People! Yay! Talk!"

With the end result that I discovered a couple other things about this hall:

• Girls who know how to play Risk. ("Ha! The Fascist Confederates of Southern Asia will never surrender to the Greenpeace Alliance!")
  
  
• Classics majors.
  
  
• People writing epic poems.
  
  
• Noise.
  
  
• A good chunk of the anime club.
  
  
• Intermittent hand to hand combat with cardboard poster tubes, mineral water, and Sharpie pens. Usually sparked by some comment about the civil war.
  
  
• Staying up late.
  
  
• Air conditioning.
  
  
• Our hall's unofficial referendum on Benzing identity: "They're trying to make us a party dorm this year, and we DON'T want that. But it's not like we want to be Mauck, either."
  
  
• Cool RAs. Maybe it's just the "let's be friendly and positively reinforcive" training that they apparently switched to, but in either case, I actually know who my RAs are this year, and like hanging out in their rooms.
  
  
• Some really neat people I only knew in passing last year (Paula, Christine)
  
  
• Tons of neat people I'd never even have said "hi" to otherwise. (Megan, Suzanne, Kristi, Kirsten, Avril, Ellyn, Amy, Roseli...)

However cliched it sounds, and however much grief I'm going to get from my fellow Hillsdalians for saying this, I pretty much agree with one of Kate's RA profile answers. The best reason to live in Benzing is the diversity. Or perhaps more accurately, the diverse range of people who are happy and willing to talk with one another. At least on floor 1.

Life would be a lot poorer in 1st Floor Benzing without a Kristi or Megan or Christine or Kirsten or Roseli...or even an Avril. Maybe a bit more calm, or unified, or quiet, or easy...but nowhere near as fascinating. Or as exciting and challenging and fun. I hang out with fairly like-minded people all day, which is awesome-cool in its own right. Let me have my awesome-cool counterbalance as well.

Literature Papers and "Christian Life Application" Clauses

Some thoughts on literature essays...rather disorganized, and will probably stay that way for a while.

I went off on a bit of tangent typing out a reply to an email from back home; we're in the middle of looking for a new school for my sibling(s), and my Mom wanted a quick summary of what my high school Brit Lit class was like, so we could compare curricula.

Correspondence back and forth included this line:

As far as the writing goes, the students write a substantial number of papers, essays, some research work on various issues in the works, authors, and developments of British Literature itself. Most of the papers have some sort of "Christian life application" element to them, from the topics and themes we discussed in the literature.

Now. One thing I appreciated about Dr. Klucking, my 12th grade teacher, was that she didn't make us tack on a Christian Life Application to our papers, or sum everything up in some grand conclusion about how this book illustrated a profound scriptural truth. Lots of people did do that, but it wasn't mandatory. I could usually get away with talking about how certain beliefs the author had explained the actions/views taken by various characters in the work. Which is honestly still about all I'm comfortable doing -- if the author isn't making some grand point about the Christian life, I'd rather just say "look at the incredible, utterly believable character development! The interior monologues illustrate a progression from sanity to crippling skepticism -- and one that is as relentlessly inescapable as it is chilling." Or maybe, "doh -- this other book has an awesome use of the Faustian archetype. And that is one of the main reasons that this character and his dilemma resonates with us. This tension of "forbidden knowledge" has been a staple of Western literature since the beginning. Literally -- just look at Genesis. And Prometheus too, while you're at it. And Pandora. And of course Faust... :-)."

They're literature papers -- CS Lewis didn't go off giving gospel-summary life-application-messages in his introduction to Paradise Lost.

Last year, we had some speaker come in and give a talk about literature...though I didn't agree with his conclusion (along the lines of "we shouldn't analyze the 'lessons' of literature at all; we should rather experience it as we do music -- for its form and beauty"), I think he did have more than half a point. And I especially liked how he described literature as a window into the human soul, into human creativity -- sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes inspired, sometimes confused, sometimes misguided, but either way telling us something about people and the author and part of life. And a lot of the time, when I'm reading something, I just want to say, "Wow. That's incredible language, incredible imagery, incredible effect, incredible characterization, and an incredibly fundamental human tension and dilemma ... Look at it. It's a masterpiece. It's beautiful." Or as Donahough (or whatever his name was) put it -- "Dear God! To live in a world where such perceptions are possible!"

And I do not want to say -- (picking the first thing off the top of my head) -- "Hester Pryne was a bad person, according to Bible passages A, B, C, D, E, F, and G."

DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE!!!! What sort of literature paper is that? Context (for starters)! Why are you abstracting the thing from its context? Who was Hawthorne? What sort of audience and culture was he writing to? What was he trying to say with this story? What, precisely, was Puritanism? What would have been 1600-Massachusetts-Puritain-people's verdict on Hester? Then, what parts of this worldview if Hawthorne criticizing? What parts does he appear to be supporting? What does the symbolism, etc. of this story imply? Does Hawthorne show inconsistency in how he portrays these things? And forget Puritanism for a second -- what sorts of literary characters have prefigured the Hester-character?

I CAN write a paper on how Hester Pryne was a bad and unrepentant person according to Bible passages A, B, C, and D -- but I could pretty much only do it by discussing Hawthorne, Puritan culture, and Christian theology, Christian tradition, and what Hawthorne was saying about all of it -- how he was consistent/inconsistent, or giving a valid criticism/giving an invalid criticism, or hitting close to the mark/missing the point. And maybe throw philosophy and Victorian culture into the mix as well. If Hester's Pryne's a bad person, there'll be more to show for it than Bible passages A, B, C, and D -- we should be able to find a good bit of universal human experience on this side, and plenty of archetypes, and a rooted and consistent ethical system, and lots of other cool stuff like that.

Plus, the Scarlet letter isn't a (just) biography or moral proposition -- it's a work of literature, a piece of art, a glimpse into a creator's mind and thoughts and imagination. And any good literature essay will treat it like that, and not like a dead and cold moral essay, and not like a candidate for theological vivisection.

//...and she descends from her soapbox. ;-)//

Though I still want to write my "There is no fear in love, for perfect love casteth out fear" paper on 1984 someday.

Robert Jordan

Well -- I have finally read Robert Jordan. More specifically, I have read The Eye of the World, the first book of the Wheel of Time series.

According to the 20+ review snippets on the cover, Jordan is apparently the next Tolkien, and this series is The Great Fantasy Epic of Our Time. I'm figuring it's pretty safe to assume this is mostly hyperbole. Every fantasy author people like tends to be proclaimed the Next Tolkien. The overwhelming concurrence of the reviewers and readers on this point, however, is a bit unnerving. Especially given the utter banality of this book.

Quite honestly, I hated it. I thought it was predictable, boring, laughable, and way to long. I thought the prose was thick, heavy, dry, and sleep-inducing. It took me a week to sludge through his 800-odd pages, and there is no way I want to repeat that experience a dozen more times.

Does this mean it is a bad and terrible book? No. It does not. Not necessarily, at least. I have said some of those same things after reading Sense and Sensibility, The Brothers Karamazov, The Divine Comedy, and even The Lord of the Rings. Call me a heretic, apostate, blah blah blah -- I still never want to read those books again.

So I'm a bit wary of going after Jordan. I know that once there's a gut-reaction dislike of a book or movie, it's quite easy to find myriad reasons why it's so terrible. And I know that once I have a gut-level liking for a book or movie, I'm very good at gleefully ignoring its faults. Things that would arouse mocking laughter and criticism in one case get shrugged off in another. (I'm thinking here of the reactions I've seen to everything from A Tale of Two Cities to The Scarlet Letter to Oedipus Rex to Underworld to Star Trek to Firefly to Harry Potter to CS Lewis to Pullman to GRR Martin to GG Kay). Shucks...I could tear and nitpick the Star Wars original trilogy to pieces if I wanted to. But I don't want to. I tell people to get a life. "It's a rollicking fun story; just roll with plot holes and forget about the metaphysical ramifications."

On the other hand, I'm still scratching my head over Jordan. What on earth did I miss? Why are people so crazy about him? I can understand the attraction of Jane Austen, The Lord of the Rings, the Divine Comedy, and Russian writers, even though I can't stand to read any of them. I can agree that those books contain elements that are worthwhile, enjoyable, or thought-provoking. I can appreciate the artistry that went into that literature. I can agree that I am something of a blockhead for being incapable of appreciating it. But I CANNOT understand this attraction to Jordan. Not liking Jane Austen feels akin to saying, "I don't like to eat gourmet Chicken-spinach casserole." Not liking Jordan feels akin to saying, "I don't like Coke."

Or, looked at from another angle...I appreciated the fact that I could recommend The Eye of the World to my friends and sisters if I wanted to. There's no sex (graphic or otherwise) in it, and I don't think any horridly terrible language or violence, either. But I didn't like the fact that there was no reason to bother recommending it. Was there any outstanding prose and description, like in Kay? Was there any incredible plotlining and characterization, like in Martin? Was there any knockout satire and worldbuilding, like in Fforde? I've a limited amount of time on my hands, here...why should I sludge through 800 pages of pure mediocrity when there's better stuff out there?

Sure...there were occasionally things I enjoyed. I rather liked the way Jordan played with the concept of cyclical history. Perrin turning into a wolfman was awesome. I liked watching Mat and Rand having to live as apprentice gleemen. But other than that, I didn't find much of interest. There's a Dark One bound by the Creator in the Mountains of Dhoom (honestly -- they're CALLED that) with his Trollocs and wraith-things, intent upon taking over the world. There's a farmboy who's actually heir to a some ancient bloodlines, a cool sword, and a Prophecy. He and a party of companions (ax-wielding blacksmith boy, archer boy, bard, warrior, magic-wielding lady, two more magically inclined girls) flee the village pursued by the Dark One's minions. They get separated, run into lots of trouble, finally get back together (the bard is replaced by an animal-thing), finish reaching the spot where a semi-final showdown will occur, and defeat the Dark One when the farmboy calls on heretofore unused magical ability. There's some politicking and political discontent going on in the world, and some vigilante groups, some gypsies, and the magic-wielding Aes Sedai who have their own purposes in mind.

It's not bad, per se. Conceivably, it might have been a cool book. Some of it has definite potential...the "group gets scattered" part, or the "naive farmboys hit outside world" theme, or the "politicking/divisions/ulterior purposes" idea. Shucks -- even Dark Lords, Chosen Ones, and Quests (though rather overdone by now, and a bit of a turnoff for me) have been executed well. But compared to other writers, Jordan manages these poorly.

Por ejemplo...Tolkien also separated his guys. Each group then went and did crucial things that united nations of good guys and/or set up the bad guys. When the storm broke, evil got defeated. Everyone was reunited in a denumount. The End. Where did Jordan miss the "scattered groups do important things on an international level to unify the factions against the looming threat before at last being reunited" idea? Do I have to read the next nine TWELVE books to get to that part of the story? I wonder...do they get separated again, and reuinited again, in each book? Or does Jordan finally leave them alone, like he should have in the first place?

Somewhat related to this...did Jordan also miss the "scattered groups get caught up in the international/national troubles and have to fend for themselves" idea? Politicking and vigilantes and groups of people at cross-purposes with one another are cool. Wars with multiple contesting factions, focused on their own very troubles, while shadows of deeply evil things loom on the horizon(s)... THAT is awesomely cool. But Jordan is no Martin, any more than he is a Tolkien. When do run-ins with these factions/cultures/politicking ever cause deep and lasting changes to the character's life-purposes, character, and goals? Aside from Perrin, who becomes a wolfman tied into the rebirth of legendary magic, everyone seems to glide through any contact with the outside world unscathed. Why not just teleport them to the Eye, give them a few lectures on magic, and have done with it? With all the other magic pulled out of thin air when it's convenient (applications of elemental magic, the passageways, the green man, Rand), WHY NOT throw in teleportation?

Final verdict? I guess it's OK fantasy. But with Martin-Kay-Pullman-Lewis-Tolkien (and maybe Robin Hobb or Stephen Brust, too) out there, what makes you think I'd even bother with Jordan? Perhaps his books do get better. But after the first one, I'm not inclined to give him another chance.

Half-Blood Prince, part 2

Okay...Snape. Again: I've done a lousy job at predicting her red herrings, even when I got in trouble for reading the books when I was 3/5 of the way through Prisoner of Azkaban, and had 18 months to guess the ending. My grand prediction was that Sirius was trying to kill Lupin. Ha!

Here goes nothing; spoilery stuff galore below.

Basic Option 1: Snape is good. (Sort of).
This was my initial reaction. Rowling is pulling her favorite red herring again, and working really hard to make us fall for it this time. But it's still a red herring.

I can't exactly say that Snape is good. He's not. He's a bitter, cruel, vicious, messed up man, with a history of terrible acts...who somehow managed to come up on the right side of things. Probably only because of Dumbledore's friendship.

When has Dumbledore ever been this drastically wrong about a person's character? He may screw up in some things (like going after a locket that isn't there, like not telling Harry the prophecy, like underestimating Draco's ability to get Death Eaters into Hogwarts), but when it comes down to seeing a person's heart, he's always judged rightly. I'm with Lupin. If Dumbledore trusts him, I do too.

The Unbreakable Vow caused a lot of problems. Snape agreed to it, probably because he was on the spot, had to make a split-second decision, and goofed up. Bellatrix was calling his bluff. Narcissa was pleading with him to save her son. And perhaps Snape wasn't expecting the third clause of the Vow. Though it's possible that he had already talked to Dumbledore about Voldemort's plan, and they'd agreed that Snape should kill him (Dumbledore) if Voldemort demanded it.

Anyhow -- once the Vow was in place, it's only a matter of time. Once it was evident that Draco would not be able to kill Dumbledore, someone had to die. If Snape refused, then Snape would die. If Snape fulfilled the vow, then Dumbledore would die. Moreover -- and I may be wrong on this -- I'm pretty sure that if Draco failed and another Death Eater killed Dumbledore, then Snape would die. It's a no-win situation. Once the Vow was in place, the best anyone could do was postpone the time of confrontation with Draco. (The necklace and gin, I believe, did not have enough "Draco is going to fail"-ness to them to force the situation. The confrontation in the tower, on the other hand, did).

I don't know if Snape told Dumbledore the whole story of the Vow. My first thought was that he did, and that Dumbledore made a pragmatic command decision about who had to die. The argument between Snape and Dumbledore arose because Snape didn't like Dumbledore's call on this matter. Then up in the tower, Dumbledore pleaded with Snape not to mess up the plan. However, it's not clear at all from the book that Snape informed Dumbledore about the depth of the mess he was in. I rather like the idea of things getting out of hand in the tower -- of Dumbledore underestimating Draco, not expecting Death Eaters, not knowing the extent of Snape's dilemma. I can't see him making the promises to Draco that he did, unless he expected to survive a bit longer.

Now...there's "revulsion and hatred" on Snape's face as he kills Dumbledore. Interesting choice of words:

Hating himself, repulsed by what he was doing, Harry forced the goblet back toward Dumbledore's mouth and tipped it, so that Dumbledore drank the remainder of the potion inside (571).

Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face" (595).

All in all...people made some big mistakes. Bad things happened. Sacrifices had to be made. But all this is setting the stage for Voldemort's defeat. First, we have the classic mentor-death, showing Harry that he has to learn to battle and survive on his own. Secondly, the good guys now have a person deep within Voldemort's trust and councils. We're looking at the first part of a longer story. HP6 is putting the pieces in place, setting us up for something like a "Snape is good" twist in HP7, just like the first half of HP1 set us up for the "Snape is good" twist in its second half.

A final consideration: Rowling's world would lose a whole lot of subtlety, and a whole lot of gray, if every guy that Harry thought was evil was actually evil. Or if every guy who looked evil was pure evil. I stayed with the series because, in book 1, Snape turned out to be the "good guy."

Basic Option 2: Snape is evil.
I need to go back and read the series from this perspective. Because, by golly, it just might be right. At first I thought, "No way! Rowling's world doesn't work like that! Dumbledore wouldn't be that incompetent! He's freaking demi-omniscient! He always manages to fix things, and he always knows what to do!"

But if Dumbledore is more fallible than we assumed, it's gloriously, tragically inevitable. The whole series has been leading up to a moment like this -- a moment when Dumbledore for once bets wrong. When Harry realizes that not even Dumbledore had everything under control, or had all the answers, or was without a major failing. Snape's evilness works. It's an inescapable necessity. It's a foreshadowed tragedy. It makes an awesome-cool story.

Dumbledore, who usually gets this sort of thing right, eventually makes a misjudgment of a person's character. There have been foreshadowings of his fallibility (see above; see Order of the Phoenix; etc). Other teachers mention that he can be too trusting -- that it has always been his weakness. Dumbledore acknowledges his potential to make catastrophic mistakes.

"But as I have already proven to you, I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being -- forgive me -- rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger" (197).

And he does make a huge one, which costs him his life, and that of several other people, too (the murders at the beginning of the book, at the very least).

HP6 isn't meant to be a set-up for book 7, any more than 5 was a set-up for 6. This volume has reached an end and a resolution. The mystery has been solved; the answer had been revealed. This page of the drama -- a tragic one -- has been completed. It's time to move on, making the best of the new situation.

This is the way the books have always ended...a twist that has a ring of finality. The final chapters are always a revelation of the true nature of things. In Philosopher's Stone we realize that Quirrel is evil, and that Snape is innocent (at least of that particular crime). In Chamber of Secrets, we realize that Riddle is evil, and that Hagrid is innocent. In Prisoner of Azkaban, we realize that it's actually Pettigrew who is evil, and that Sirius is innocent. In Goblet of Fire, we realize that Crouch the evil and guilty man. In Order of the Phoenix, there's no 'villain' to find, per se. But there is the matter of Sirius's death. Despite some ambiguity, it was evidently real and final, just like Dumbledore & Co. said. There's no loose ends; he's not coming back. (His non-return is what convinced me of the finality of Rowling's conclusions. Even if there seems be wiggle room, there actually isn't). So happens in Half-Blood Prince? It is revealed that 1) Snape is actually evil, and 2)Dumbledore is dead. Given the finality of each of the previous book's revelations, we should assume that these things are what they appear to be.

I don't like it. I don't want Harry to be right about Snape. But if HP6 follows the pattern of books 1 - 5, Evil!Snape is the way Rowling wants her world to be. I can be OK with that (if not overly thrilled); a Dumbledore-tragedy plot arc is still quite cool. Moreover, while I may mourn the state of the series as a whole, Evil!Snape sure makes book 6 a lot more gripping and chilling than Good!Snape.

Final consideration for this side: Voldemort is "the most accomplished Legilimens the world has ever seen." Snape might be very powerful in Occlumency...but I have a lot of trouble believing he's that powerful.

In Conclusion...
Basically (QuickSummary!): If this is a book complete in itself, following the pattern of books 1-5, then Snape is evil. If this book is "part 1 of 2," then Snape is probably good.

I'm aware there's probably an Option 3: "Snape is on his own side." I'll have to think about it, but I don't find this too plausible. Everyone is pretty much ends up either helping Voldemort ("evil") or not helping him ("good"). Snape is now either a Death Eater or Fake Death Eater. I'm sure plenty of DE's are allied with Voldemort for their own ulterior purposes or their own survival...and that doesn't make them merely "on their own side."

My bet is currently on Good!Snape...after I wrote this, I found that Rowling said she considers this book a "part 1 of 2." However, Evil!Snape makes book 6 a lot more interesting, and should be a pretty fun framework to use when re-reading the series. Also, I’ll probably read book 7 using the Evil!Snape template. Gleefully going along with a red herring can be fun. 1) If he’s good, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. 2) If he’s evil, then he’s evil. 3) If he’s evil and I’m betting on good, it’ll be a bit of a letdown and disappointment. Sort of like realizing that Sirius’s death was a settled issue.

Half-Blood Prince, part 1

I usually wait until books show up on the library shelves....but I gave in this time and actually put Half-Blood Prince on hold at the library. Here follow some initial reactions...basically, everything except a prediction on Snape.

Spoilers for certain.

1. It's generally not a good idea to start a book with a punctuation error. My 12 year old sister, whose writing I'm correcting this summer, knows better than to let this pass:

It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office...

2. Holy Moses -- the potion of Deus ex Machina! And I thought Veritaserum was bad! ::collapses on the floor in uncontrollable gut-wrenching laughter::

I'm considering letting it pass, because Harry Potter seems like a semi-absurd world. (If Fforde had included Felix Felicis in his books, I'd have thought it was a stroke of genius). I usually don't care about absurdities and plot holes in the HP world. Still, this honestly seems like a bit of extraordinarily lazy plotting. Along the lines of "Oops! Some really improbable cooincidences have to occur! And I don't have time to think up a plausible chain of events!" The Deus ex Machina potion also brings up the retroactive effect problem again. Potions as super-powerful as this ought to have had a huge impact on the wizarding world. Their effect should have shown up before book 6, like Polyjuice potion did. There should be some awesome-solid reasons why they aren't used all the time (at least by Voldemort).

The same probably goes for Unbreakable Vows, but those at least didn't send me into fits of giggles.

3. Do I care who is "snogging" whom? NO!

Maybe it's just because I've never been on a single date, and never had a "boyfriend". Maybe it's because I've had a grand total of ONE crush in my entire life. (Well -- okay. TWO. Once you've learned to identify them, they can't ambush you anymore. You can shove them in a cage and laugh at them until they die).

I liked Bill and Fleur. I thought the whole thing was sweet, funny, fitting, and believable. But everyone else? Why oh why did we have to spend 30% of the book worried about these kids' childish 'romantic' squabbles? Was there honestly ANY doubt that Ginny and Harry would end up together? Or Ron with Herminone? You could see it coming from HP2. I was thrown off by Viktor and Cho in HP4; those relationships actually raised some doubt in my mind about the direction Rowling was going to take her characters. The pairs matched believably, and stayed together for a whole book. But this time around? Lavender Brown, Dean, and every other love interest were so obviously unfitting and short-lived it wasn't even funny. Forgive me if my eyes skipped whole pages.

I'm rather confunded by Tonks/Lupin as well. I guess it works, but I would have never seen if coming. Lots of other people seem to share this sentiment, so I'm going to assume my confusion isn't just due to not having read the books for two years.

4. Tentative theory...I'm wondering if the Harry Potter books could be considered an example of a (perhaps unsuccessful) Cerebus Syndrome. The stretchings of plot that work in a lightheard boarding school/whodunit/parodical world might not prove workable once things start getting more serious and dramatic. The same might also be said for the moral framework of the world.

Then again, I've probably just read way to much meta, which uber-analyzes everything and tends to make it more serious than it is.

5. Tom Riddle is an awesome villain. He's smart, he's evil, he's manipulative, he's persuasive. I like skilled and intelligent villains.

6. Harry and Co. aren't very nice to the lower-schoolers. I forgave them for any inconsideration in HP5 -- but they're 16 now, and you'd think they'd grown up a bit. Especially since Ron and Hermione are both prefects now.

7. The commentators at the Quiddich games are horrible. It's another thing I never noticed when the books had a lighter tone. If they're going to be this biased, they need to rotate commentators. Luna was probably the only close-to-objective one.

8. Snape is smart. He's talented. He's a freaking prodigy and genius. Has no one else noticed this? He practically rewrites the potions system. He's got some uber-occlumentic abilities. He invents spells and hexes. He's managed to double-face his way -- to either Dumbledore or Voldemort -- for years. Double bonus points if it's Voldemort ("the most accomplished Legilimens the world has ever seen"). And who does Dumbledore go to when really nasty stuff needs to be healed and fixed? The last time we saw people of this caliber were Voldemort and Dumbledore. I honestly can't think of another current wizard who comes close.

If you were this good, and people didn't recognize and respect it, wouldn't you be a bit bitter, too?


When I finally get around to it, Part 2 should be on Evil!Snape vs. Good!Snape. Rowling threw me for a loop on this one -- I don't know what to bet on at the moment, and the more I look at it, the more confused I get. I'm also notoriously bad at predicting the endings to her books, so you'll be better off going with whatever conclusion I don't reach.

George R. R. Martin and "A Feast for Crows"

//Quick-fix Edit as of 1/03/06: Martin has officially lost his plot in a morass of sex and violence. Revised verdict: NOT recommended to anyone. There's better books out there. Read those. Yes, I'll back this up with a three-point persuasive essay if you want to call me out on it.//END EDIT

Ok. I've done some minor editing to this to make the content more understandable to the uninitiated. :-)

A Brief Intro
Here is George R. R. Martin's web site. He's currently writing a fantasy series entitled A Song of Ice and Fire.

Here is a spoiler-free Wikipedia page that introduces this series. I can't vouch for the spoiler-freeness of any pages connected to this one, but this particular page is nice and bland, and gives a good feel for his worldbuilding.

The Song of Ice and Fire books have phenomonal plotlining and characterization. Martin has subplots upon subplots that interweave and connect. He manages to make you side with whichever character currently has the PoV. (Except for Theon Greyjoy. I despise Theon, and hope he dies a terrible, horrible, grusome death. It would be poetic justice to the nth degree). It is very likely that Theon will meet said death, because Martin is not nice to his chracters. Bad guys die, good guys die, minor characters die, main characters die. Multi-faceted civil wars are tearing apart the kingdom(s) of Westeros, and worse things lurk around the corner.

I wish I could recommend these books to everyone I know; again, the plotting and characterization are incredible. But his stuff would also be rated R (or M, or whatever the rating is) for violence, language, and sex. Maybe higher. There's portions of these books that I skip.

Some thoughts on A Feast for Crows
Now that all the stuff up there is out of the way...

There's a Cersei chapter up! I'm probably the last to hear about this, but I'm going to shout about it anyway. First because it's Cersei. Martin's finally made her a PoV character...and darn it, I think he's almost pulled another Jaimie. Secondly, this is a much more recommendable chapter than the Theon one that was up the last time time I checked. Now, even though the chapter pretty much spoils the series so far, I won't have to worry so much about people I know hearing me mention "Martin" and running across one of his (IMO) worst chunks of writing.

Here's the link -- though if you haven't been reading A Song of Ice and Fire, be aware that it obviously contains really big spoilers for the first three books in the series.

I'm probably the last to hear about this announcement, too.

::sigh:: Seven books, now, is it? Weren't there only supposed to be four when he started this series? I've every confidence in Martin as a writer, but here's hoping that he doesn't go Robert Jordon on us. And I do find myself among the readers disappointed that they won't get their favorite characters in A Feast for Crows. With maybe one or two exceptions, every character I really like is now in the North or East.

The splitting up of the book like this also seems to throw the balance of the series out of whack. There's always been a tension to the books. On one hand, you have the murderous, backstabbing struggle for the Iron Throne that's plunged just about every house into war with one another. This is very bad, and very terrible, and lots of horribly cool things happen in the middle of all of it. But on the other hand, there's the northern and eastern chapters. They remind you that Westeros is in a race against the clock -- a race which most inhabitants don't even realize they're in. The end of an Age is approaching. Bigger, scarier threats are looming and building. Winter is Coming. An Empire arises. Magic awakens. Whoever gets the Iron Throne isn't going to last too long. You're thus kept from getting too wrapped up in the civil war; you're reminded you of the big picture, which is more ominous and more hopeful all at the same time.

But if anyone can pull this division off, it would be Martin.

A Work of Musical Genius

There's been some uniquely funny stuff up on the Honors Program's Introduction/Meet the Freshmen board this year. Like this:

Katherine (in her introduction): ...I also love playing the flute...

Allen: Hurray for flute! If you ever want some piano accompaniment for anything you may be playing, feel free to ask.

Augie: I'll be bringing a horn...

Hannah S.: I play a mean kazoo. Might compliment nicely.

Rebekah: Haha. May I join you on that kazoo action, Hannah? I guess I'm unusual here, but I don't play any musical instruments except the cd player. :-)

Allen: I'm sure there's some crazy composer at Hillsdale who could write something for our little ensemble. Two kazoos, a flute, a horn, and a piano. It would sound atrocious, but it'd be worth a good laugh or two.

Finn: I'll write it! It will be based on the lesser known proverbs of Nietzsche, with each movement having one of his proverbs as a title. It will be an ambitious work, an ironic epic that portrays the pitiful state of the pathologically soft democratic man.

The flutes, in their impotence, will reflect both the democratic man and women in general. The ones who must be trodden underfoot by the ascendancy of the rude, blaring horn--the ubermensch! The kazoos would be the unfortunate masses crushed by necessity under the mighty heel of progress, and the piano will represent the universe--tinkly, beautiful nonsense that serves only to further the climb of the superman beyond mere mortality, morality, and religious considerations.

It will be hailed as a work of genius.

Elsa: Better add a second flute, Finn. No way am I missing out on this one.

Marianne: I'm sorry, but there can be no work of genius, Finn, without a bassoon.

Thursday Next

In my three weeks or so away from the computer, I've done quite a bit of reading...here follows the first of a few SHORT reviews. (No more 10-part theses I can't finish!)

Out of the Thursday Next series (by Japser Fforde), I read Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots. These are actually books 2 and 3 of the series, not books 1 and 2; I misremembered the titles when I was ordering them over interlibrary loan. But Lost in a Good Book has a solid introduction to the Thursday Next world, so I think I managed all right.

These are absurd, hilarious, enormously enjoyable books. And rather hard to explain. They are set in 1985 in an alternate universe. The Crimean War has been going on for 120 years. The gleefully ruthless Goliath Corporation has a monopoly on pretty much everything, including cloned dodos. The SpecOps organization keeps close tabs on tax fraud, time travel, pasta, and vampires. People are fanatical about classic literature. Thursday next works for SpecOps department 27, which prosecutes "literary fraud."

Thursday can also "book jump," and she thus winds up working for Jurisfiction. Essentially the SpecOps of the literary world, it polices the goings-on in published (and unpublished) books. Duties include eradicating grammasites, regulating the Character Exchange Program, preventing plot-tampering, and making sure the Pro-Catherine faction doesn't kill Heathcliff.

I liked book 2 better than book 3 -- it had a more varied and interesting plot, taking place in both the real world and the book-world. (WoLP is wholly centered in the book world, and some of the humor falls a bit flat after a while). But both were still highly fun to read. Some favorite parts included Thursday’s freelance work with SpecOps-17 (vampire/undead division) to pick up extra cash; Miss Havisham's addiction to horribly written romance novels; Miss Havisham; Thursday's father (who is a rouge time traveler, technically never existed, and keeps having to prevent Armageddon); Thursday’s uncle, Mycroft (an inventor; hides out in the Sherlock Holmes canon after he retires); the ending of Lord Jim; the decision to preserve the endangered "u" by eliminating its use in various words in a certain geographical location (labour/labor...); and the many uses of the footnoterphone.

Some possibly objectionable stuff...the main denomination is the 'Church of the Global Standard Deity'(something of a parody of everybody worshipping whatever sort of god they want to); Thursday’s older brother is in a homosexual relationship; some references to premarital sex Thursday had when she was a teenager. Might be some language, too. I'd rate it PG-13.

A Rant on Boycotts

This has been a week of running into boycotts. First this article about the Southern Baptists and Disney, then this post here about Tom Cruise.

The resulting train of thought:
a) I never got to go to Disney World as a kid. Nutso boycott.
b) War of the Worlds looks like a rather stupid movie.
c) Minority Report was awesome -- remind me to buy it when I have money.

Boycotts are evidently a sometimes-efficacious way of raising support and awareness for a cause, so I can't categorically label them as stupid. Plus, after giving them a bit more thought, I can't really say that any boycott is stupid. The Almighty Dollar reigns in America -- it's one thing that just about everybody pays attention to, and cutting off a good chunk of its flow can go a long way toward affecting change. Connotations, symbols, and Bach Preludes got mixed up with my thoughts on that matter, too, but that might just be due to the fact that I scribbled notes on this while practicing piano. Bear with me.

I. Boycotts are stupid. I apparently have no sense of moral and civic duty.

I go to movies to see cool movies. Cool movies involve varying levels of the following:
a) cool acting
b) cool music
c) cool cinematography
d) cool ideas
e) cool plot

NOWHERE on here do you see "cool ideas and causes that the actors and/or film studio thinks and supports in real life."

Conversely, I avoid movies that are lousy. Lousy movies have varying levels of the following:
a) lousy acting
b) lousy music
c) lousy cinematography
d) lousily-put-together ideas
e) lousy plot

And just as I don't choose to watch movies because of any cool causes and ideas that the actors/filmmakers think and support in real life, I don't avoid movies because of the lousy causes and ideas that the actors/filmmakers support in real life. (And because I am sick of typing out all of those words, and because I like neologisms, someone's "Causes And Ideas Thought And Supported In Real Life" will hereafter be referred to as their caitasirli.)

When I go to see a movie, I am saying with my $7.00 "This is a cool movie -- make more movies like it." Or maybe "You do an awesome job acting! Keep it up!" Or maybe "Dude -- the cinematography in this was awesome!" Or, "Whoa! Awesome way of making me think about this subject!" I am not, in any way, trying to say, "Dude -- I support that personal crusade and ideology that you keep talking about on TV -- here's my way of donating some money to your righteous cause, man."

The same goes for music, and the same goes for books. When I purchase a product, I am making a statement about its inherent coolness or lousiness, not the coolness or lousiness of its makers' caitasirli.

If I wanted to support the guy's righteous cause, I'd make a donation.

Purchasing things on the basis of inherent coolness or lousiness, not the coolness or lousiness of its makers' caitasirli, has proved a quite freeing principle. I've successfully avoid lots of lousy books and music and films, and been able to watch/read/listen to a lot of cool ones.

I'm not paying good money to see Left Behind, because I'm pretty sure it's a lousy movie. The Veggie Tales movie was lousy. Most Christian music, apparently, has pretty lousy musicianship. In no way do I feel compelled to go buy that stuff just because the people making it have caitasirli I pretty much agree with. Or even because the caitasirli have infected the product.

::Searches for converse example...:: Oy. Ok. I like Babylon 5. It's cool. Does it bug me that the director is an atheist, and that some of those ideas infect the product, and that he probably donates stuff to causes I don't like? No way! I'm still buying it when I have money. I also think Phillip Pullman's books have awesome worldbuilding and "feel" and playing with ideas.

With actors in movies, you've got even more degrees of separation. Actor X donates money to missionary organizations and talks at Republican conventions. Umm...OK. Good for him? But if he's a lousy actor in lousy movies, I'm not going to watch them. Actor Y donates money to abortion clinics and talks at Democrat conventions. Boo! But if he's a cool actor in cool movies, I'm still going to see them.

I have no clue if the Dixie Chicks make lousy music or cool music. But my decision to listen to them wouldn't have anything to do with their political posturing. And Bach Preludes are awesome, regardless of whether he was a Republican/Democrat/Nazi/liberal/conservative/Christian/atheist.

Why does "me going to see War of the Worlds" = "me supporting scientology"? Or me going to Disney World = me supporting gay marriage?

This can honestly get pretty ridiculous. Look! I can play the game, too!

• Me buying a Steinway piano = me supporting the KKK! Woot! (Three of employees in the factories donate 1% of their income to them! ::gasp!::)
  
  
• Me buying a loaf of tasty Harvest Delight bread = me supporting misogyny! (um...Amish-grown wheat comprises 25% of the flour?)
  
  
• Me buying an SUV = me supporting Al-queada! Oh...wait... (though the makers were obviously a little fed up with absurd connections, too).

::headwall::.

II. Boycotts are not stupid. The almighty dollar reigns. Informal social controls rule. This section is rather incoherent.

Money talks, apparently. If you want someone's caitasirli to change, cutting their income until they change their caitasirli to something more of your liking tends to be a good way to do that. If you want certain caitasirli to get less money, cutting off the income of people who support said caitasirli does wonders.

Making Cruise a liability to film companies by having lots of people boycott every film he's in will make film companies either say "shut up and stop being a liability" or "you're fired." Refusing to buy things from companies with discriminatory policies will make them rethink their policies.

Sometimes just plain disapproval works. But throwing monetary discomfort into the mix makes even people who don't care about disapproval listen.

If it's not OFFICIALLY illegal to say certain things and have certain policies, we can still make it unthinkable and impossible.

Here follows the "I-am-lazy-and-am-going-to-let-some-famous-dead-guy-be-dramatic-for-me" quote:

The authority of a king is physical and controls the actions of men without subduing their will. But the majority possesses a power that is physical and moral at the same time, which acts upon the will as much as upon the actions and represses not only all contest, but all controversy. [...]

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-fe, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he has revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.

Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn. Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: "You shall think as I do or you shall die"; but he says: "You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death."

(Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Bk. 1 Chapter 15)

Ok...so my sister says that the democracy-master sounds like an evil mastermind giving a really lousy monologue.

"AND SO -- BWAHAHA! I SENTENCE YOU...TO LIVING DEATH!!!"
(hero scratches head) "So -- um...you're not killing me?"
"ARRHG! DIDN'T YOU HEAR WHAT I'VE SPENT THE PAST 23 MINUTES TRYING TO TELL YOU??!!"

But the appearance of informal social controls in the absence of formal ones (apologies if my terminology isn't exactly correct) is a pretty standard phenomenon. Or at least an unavoidable one, as far as I can tell.)

III. Symbols are important. And we're a culture of connotations.

It's rather unavoidable, however, to separate items from people from caitasirli. Especially when so many producers of goods don't want us to.

We have bake sales to raise money for causes. We have companies who say, "we donate 5 cents of every dollar spent on these shirts to cancer treatment!" We have advertisements saying, "You'll be cool like these people if you buy this (lousy) product." Or "You'll be a good citizen if you buy this (lousy) product." We show our coolness by wearing "cool" brands. We demonstrate our patriotism by buying and flying US flags. We show our support for AIDS research or US troops or any other conceivable cause by buying bumper stickers. Or by buying one of those "5 cents of every dollar" products.

We're TOLD to buy their products because of caitasirli. We buy stuff all the time not based on inherent value, but based upon the connotations and significance and caitasirli and connections it has. Woot for brand name logos splashed all over things. Woot for 10% of my purchase being donated to save baby woodchucks in Mongolia! Does it make it an inherently better shirt or cup? NO!!!

Which came first -- the chicken or the egg? Did this culture of connotations gives rise to boycotting, or did some genius realize that you could reverse the boycott effect to make money?

::headwall::