Silliman on studies of speaking in tongues:

A lot of it is crazy talk. Not the speaking in tongues -- the studies.

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I lose sunglasses. They don't stick around long.

The other day before going outside for lunch duty I snagged a pair from Sean's room--perhaps confiscated from a student. They are cheapo plastic Ray-Ban Wayfarer knock-offs, black with red arms.

The kids love them.

standing outside the ring of salvation

What follows are the concluding sentences to the most sickening piece of fiction I have ever read:

We will be isolated in our agonies as the bundles are lit below us. We will be burned to cinders and our ashes scattered.

And God will come to know our secrets. At our immolation He'll appear to us and pour His gold out at our feet. And His grace that we kicked away will become like a tower on which we might stand. And His grace will raise us to such a height that we might glimpse the men we aspired to be. And His grace like the heat of the sun will burn away the men we have become.

I love that passage. I find it remarkable.

That being said, I don't mind sharing the last lines with you because I honestly do not feel that anyone should read that story. I recommend it to no one. When I finished the story a couple weeks back, it left me a puddle of horrified illness. It made some of the other awful things I've read seem sterile and weightless. Worst of all, the story, though fictionalized, remains substantially historical and true.

So was it worth it?--worth it to read that horrifying story for that beautiful ending? I don't know, but I believe that if those lines stick around after the details they follow fade, then the answer will be yes.

After a wonderful evening at the McGee's last night, I threw Unreal is Here into my truck's cd player to soundtrack the drive from Richmond to Charlottesville. Fog and intermittent rain paid little heed to my dilapidated wipers.

I am, to borrow a phrase from Jay last night, getting my ass handed to me at school. Even so, life is very good.

When my students borrow a pencil or pen, I make them leave me a shoe in exchange. It's pretty hard to forget your shoes, although just yesterday one of my students did just that.

On Tuesday I gave out tests to the poor little darlings. I didn't require a shoe that day. It seems a bit cruel to make a child take a test without one of their shoes.

I lost more pencils and pens that day than I did in the whole seven weeks preceding it.

"We are able to ponder our ashness with some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death." -Walter Brueggemann.

Natural disaster and human self-sabotage

There's a heartless avalanche or tidal wave or desert, and within that monster of creation Jim Shepard places his poor humans fighting like hell against that which brings healing.

There's fear of pain and exposure coupled with knowledge of something better as a result. The fear wins out again and again even when it's quite clear that without productive pain you've only death and sorrow.

Helplessness against furious nature without, helplessness against neurotic nature within.

First:

"Hey," the dog said. "There's a shitstorm of biblical proportions headed your way." "Please. I'm busy," the man said.

And later:

Bishop Prudentius of Troyes wrote in his annals that in the ninth century the whole of the country was devoured by the sea; all the settlements disappeared, and the water was higher than the dunes. In the Saint Felix Flood, North Beveland was completely swept away. In the All Saints' Flood, the entire coast was inundated between Flanders and Germany. In 1717 a dike collapse killed fourteen thousand on Christmas night.

Shortly after:

At each stage in the transfer of assets, financial advisors or bank officers have asked if my wife's name would be on the account as well. She still has no idea it exists. It means that I now have a secret net worth more than triple my family's. What am I up to? Your guess is as good as mine.

Finally:

We modeled risk management for our son when instead we could have embraced the freefall of that astonishing Here, this is yours to hold. We told each other I think I know when we should've said Lead me farther through your amazing, astonishing interior.

I doubt Shepard thinks in such terms, but it leaves me thinking on Eliot's wounded surgeon.

Jim Shepard, "The Netherlands Lives with Water," You Think That's Bad (New York: Knopf, 2011).

One of those things I'll remember after my grandchildren's names have collapsed into demential sludge

I keep revisiting a few moments from Friday's show.

The girl had her phone up directly between herself and John. I could see her looking at mini-digital-John on the screen. Smiling, off mike, John softly but firmly telling her, 'Put the camera down.'

John slowly quieting into dead silence over a hundred of the 150ish fans in the place.

A moment I didn't witness but Tom told me about: Peter, returning to the stage shortly thereafter, mouthing unrepeatable epithets at the morons in the back of the venue.

'Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?' 'No Children.' 'Old College Try.'

And when, as he played the opening chords, he leaned in to chat off mike with a handful of us and then asked us to sing along. Which we did, mightily.

Sufjan Stevens with Sean and Julie. The Walkmen with Sam. To which you may add: the Mountain Goats with Tom.

"I checked into a bargain-priced room on La Cienega..."

Those opening lines greet me like the warm embrace of dear friends. I've had the kind of day that demands this album.