A Faculty Devotion

First I'm going to read a few scattered verses from today's readings:

"He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and comes not again."

"Then the Lord awoke as from sleep, like a strong man shouting because of wine."

"In the path of your judgments, O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you."

There's this songwriter named Dan Bejar who is one of my favorite people in music today. The lyrics I can initially pick out of his songs are invariably compelling, but when I write them down or look them up, I discover that they're basically gibberish--random turns of phrase, words strung together in aesthetically pleasing ways. The more I try to wrestle concrete meaning out of them, the more any kind of sense slip away. When he's asked about it, Bejar says that mining for intellectual meaning from of his lyrics is a mistake. He wants his lyrics to do something rather than mean something, to have an affect rather than to have sense.

As I read today's readings I was struck first of all by their beauty. Then I worked through what they meant. Unlike Bejar's lyrics, Scripture doesn't lose shape when you dissect it. It is dense with meaning. Today's readings are about who God's people are, and you can glean a lot of meaty, compelling meaning from them.

That's part of the marvel of Scripture. You can read it many different ways for many different ends, all valuable.

I grew up in the Navigators ministry. If any of you are familiar with the Navs, they have a strong emphasis on Scripture memory. This is a very good thing, but among the Navs there is sometimes a tendency to emphasize Scripture's didactic role to the exclusion of everything else, to drill into the Bible to extract application, application, and only application.

Given what little I've read of Desiring the Kingdom, I'm probably preaching to the choir, but the power of Scripture’s beauty been on my mind. Along with the Bible’s cognitive worth, I think we should also be cultivating a sense of Scripture's life-giving beauty. So, quickly, I'm going to reread those passages and then close with a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer that's been close to my heart these past few weeks.

"He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and comes not again."

"Then the Lord awoke as from sleep, like a strong man shouting because of wine."

"In the path of your judgments, O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you."

Let us pray.

Almighty God, heavenly Father, who hast blessed us with the joy and care of children; Give us light and strength so to train them, that they may love whatsoever things are true and pure and lovely and of good report, following the example of their Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Matthew 7:1-17

In the English Standard Version:

And Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah."

Tents. I've always read it as "tabernacle," like Sufjan--some sort of holy monument of sorts. The ESV translation makes it sound more like Peter's saying, "Hey fellas, you need a place to stay tonight?" Somehow, that's much funnier to me.

Reading that passage led to me to Sufjan, naturally, and that video took me to the following one, which made me think of Sean and Julie and the three of us staring wide-eyed at each other like giddy, awestruck fools five or six minutes into the show. And now I think of the span of time and events between the and now. It's wonderful.

Yesterday I drove home satisfied and filled with pleasant anticipation. My pace was leisurely, the windows down, the warm afternoon sun bright. A song played.

Today I am sitting in my car. Lacking paper, I'm writing on the final blank pages of You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard.

The windows down, warm afternoon sun bright. A song plays.

Heads up: my phone screen died, and I won't have another one for a week or so. I can't read or send text messages. I can receive phone calls, but I can't see who is calling.

So if I've been ignoring your calls, now's your chance.

tucson to cville: a roadtrip mix

In lieu–for now anyway–of my recently scrapped winter mix, I have thrown together an impromptu roadtrip mix, which you can download below.

I solicited suggestions for driving albums over at the tumblr a while ago. Everyone's suggestions were uniformly excellent. I have made it all the way to "D" and have been listening on the way to the Antlers, the Doors, the National, My Morning Jacket, Washed Out, Fleet Foxes, and Jack's summer and fall mixes for the alt-country fix. I am also very excited about this winter mix.

Download the roadtrip mix here.

tucson to cville
1. "Wonder Why" by Vetiver
2. "Under the Knife" by the Rural Alberta Advantage
3. "Santa Fe" by Beirut
4. "When Christmas Came to Me" by the Singing Mechanic
5. "Take Ya' Dancin'" by say hi
6. "Midnight City" by M83
7. "On Melancholy Hill" by Gorillaz
8. "Swimming" by Breathe Owl Breathe
9. "Your Hand in Mine" by Explosions in the Sky
10. "Chicago" by Dan Miloch*
11. "Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit
12. "DLZ" by TV on the Radio
13. "This Charming Man" by the Smiths
14. "Brittany's back" by the Love Language
15. "Dig a Little Deeper" by Peter Bjorn and John
16. "Gideon" by My Morning Jacket

*This song is unfinished. Barely started, really. But it has the bones of a magnificent track. Dan was kind enough to let me publish it here anyway.

I had a winter mix. It's been basically complete for about a month. I'm scrapping it and starting over.

This would have been the opening track. Enjoy the very '90s video.

Changes

You may notice that I've changed my name to "Porter Perkins" on the "About Me" section on the the left-hand side there. This is because I've taken a teaching position and would like to make it a little difficult for my students to find me. I don't have the time or energy to write about it just now, but feel free to give me a call or drop me an email if you're curious.

Storytelling, Place, Liberal Education

All of this was first noticed by the German critic Walter Benjamin, whose essay "The Storyteller" charts the decline of storytelling against an increased access to, and fiendish hankering for, information. In the essay, Benjamin sets the figure of the storyteller (rooted in experience, offering counsel) in opposition to the deluge of information (instant, ephemeral, verifiable). "Every morning brings us the news of the globe," Benjamin writes, "and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanations. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information."

After reading Benjamin, one awakens to find an "information age" abloom with near-parodic fulfillment of his prophecy. Information-aggregators (whether Wall Street investors or Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneurs) comprise our wealthiest class. Data point has become a trendy colloquialism, as if every story is a puffed-up soufflé that must be efficiently distilled to the nutrients of its information. In this sense, as the faith in information outpaces an interest in narrative, the title is but the latest rampart of style to be marauded by the forces of market efficiency. Calling Snakes on a Plane anything but is pretentious by a logic that views narrative as inefficient and self-indulgent: a fanciful scenic route to the speedier highway of information.

I'm reading this compelling article--written by Jacob Rubin, posted on Slate--on an airplane. Meanwhile, on screens which hang above us like dystopian bats, which project on either side of me the same silent images shrinking progressively like two mirrors facing one another, a movie plays. It's titled Life in a Day. My copy of Hemispheres describes it thusly: "Created from some 4,500 hours of footage submitted by YouTube users, this remarkable documentary chronicles July 24, 2010, as it was experienced by individuals living in nearly 200 countries. Exhilarating, moving and funny, Life in a Day is the story of our world--told by us."*

On an earlier flight, I read:

When proponents of liberal education describe it as the attempt to grasp the whole, they are partially right, but if we do not continue with the acknowledgment that the whole is grasped via particulars and that, as human creatures, we necessarily inhabit only a small and particular part of the whole, we are missing something crucial.

If a liberal education teaches a person to love abstraction, to relish the exchange of universal ideas of justice, charity, and beauty, yet to be inattentive to the neighbor down the street or the beauty of a well-tended garden, then something has gone wrong. Such an education is suited to abstract beings who naturally belong in no particular place and have none of the senses by which particular beauty or empathy can be experienced. Such an education is, in other words, not fit for human beings.

*I should note that despite my tone I find the concept potentially interesting.

Well hello there Caleb Joseph Lee Heisman.

He's four days old.

He was 10.3 lbs and 23 inches long. Or, as Jared said to me (in confidence of course), poor Rachel gave birth to a boulder of a child!

[Somehow this became a baby blog?]

[In random connections news, also on November 9th the child of one of my best friends from elementary/middle school was born. His name? Caleb. Good name. My mother once said that she would have liked to have named a theoretical third son Caleb.]

My Godchildren

Here is the forthcoming "Tiny" Coykendall, currently awaiting an introduction to the world outside Wendy.

And here is Phinehas Edwards McDermott, two months old.

I've got really good Godgenes.

I am so excited to meet these lil fellas, can't tell ya.

And it's an incredible honor to be asked by Eric and Wendy, and by Sean and Julie. I'll stop before I get emotional and such.