"with a little help from my friends"

• Blogging.  I started this blog because I felt like a stalker reading the blogs of some of the younger women at church.  I wanted to share my life with them as they shared theirs with me.  If I had known what I was doing when I first started,  I might have chosen WordPress rather than Blogger.  I knew I would be posting about my reading but I didn't know that my blog would prove interesting to a different audience than I originally thought.  WordPress is a more "academic" choice, I think, but I've found Blogger to be easy to use and I like its Google tie-in.   I don't post often enough; once a week would be about right for my blog. I think of things to post; I just don't sit down and do it; I'd rather read.  Even my husband of 40 years has discovered things he didn't know about me in my blog.  Because it's in some sense a shared journal, I say things that I never mention otherwise.  I follow several blogs of people I don't know. 

One of my favorite blogs is written by the man who fills Hugh Latimer's pulpit.  Malcolm Guite offers a mix of theology, literature, poetry, and music, especially classic rock.  I've become a great fan of his poetry and of his lovely voice reading it.  His November 4th blog is about The Inklings "exploring the thesis that far from being backward-looking, reactionary or escapist, the Inklings were fully and prophetically engaged with the main streams of modernity, that they foresaw the coming crisis of meaning in the materialist West, and in particular the attendant crises of violence and environmental degradation. I have tried to explain the way they forged a coherent alternative vision, which called for us to reintegrate Imagination and Reason as ways of knowing truth and relating to one another and the world." http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/blog/ 

• Facebook.  What a great way to stay in touch with friends and family and because of fb I didn't lose contacts that might have been lost after the huge computer disaster last January.  I  enjoy short visits with many of my cousins and now know who their kids and grandkids are and what they look like.  I enjoy updates on nieces and nephews.  Being back in touch with so many of my friends from South Plains and Floydada High School is so much fun--what wonderful, interesting people they are!  I treasure all "my kids" from Sunday School that have friended (what a word!) me--I usually wait for them to invite me because I really don't want to be too nosy.  As some age-related health limitations limit some of my abilities to minister, it's wonderful that I can be aware of their needs for prayer and encouragement.  Facebook kept me in touch with Peter Whitaker who has been a superb resource for biographical information about Evelyn Whitaker.  Publishing facebook links to my blog and to my website increased my traffic.  http://www.evelynwhitakerlibrary.org/id59.html

•  I was disappointed that one of the facebook revisions removed what I thought was my link catalog.  I have just started using Pinterest's pin board and I think it might work for some purposes.  I like the boards that I can collect; I like the visual links which make scanning my boards easy.  I'll have to play around with it a bit to see if it really does answer my needs.   Is there some other alternative?   I find that I collect links the way I collect books.  Of course that's what the Favorites bar is designed to do, I think, but for some reason things just get buried and forgotten there.  Often I save groups of related links  by opening a Word file then I copy & paste the links and add comment into the .docx.  For me that functions somewhat the old index card files that used to write college papers but I keep thinking there has to be something better.  Even if that "something" isn't Pinterest, I'm enjoying yet another time sink. http://pinterest.com/KCummingsPipes/

• I think I want my own personal version of  Arts & Letters Daily.  I first found this website by clicking a link on a friend's blog.  It's a good way to stay informed and to discover things I might miss.  http://www.aldaily.com/

• Library Thing is an on-line catalog for my library and provides the side bars for my blog.  It is also now the sole beneficiary of any associates income from clicks of the Amazon links in my blog.  I also enjoy the ratings and reviews of my fellow readers. I've written a few of these myself.  I'm always behind here because I just cannot teach the books to catalog themselves.   The first 50 books are free so you can give this tool a thorough test drive and I considered their life-time membership a great bargain.  http://www.librarything.com/profile/KCummingsPipes

• Pandora.  When KUHF bought KTRU I was most upset.  The Rice radio station had only offered  "alternative" programming while refusing to air anything that I might care about (like Rice athletics or programming from the Shepherd School of Music or faculty interviews) so I was not a listener, especially since the weak signal is not well received at my house.  KUHF, on the other hand, was my radio station for classical music and their plans to move the classical  programming to 91.7 FM  was not a happy one for me.  So once again my young friends led me by example to Pandora and suggested stations to me.  I really appreciate MGB's suggestion of Harold Budd radio and with the add variety button I've got a great shuffle.    I think getting some music back into my day has helped with my depression which has been a real trial this year.
• http://www.pandora.com/#!/stations/play/601253876655993859

• Several interesting books and a couple or three good movies have first been called to my attention by younger friends.  Among these are: 

Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans previously blogged here
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
The Help by Kathryn Stockett previously blogged here
The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as interpreter of Israel's scripture. Richard B. Hays
Many, many children's literature titles and some wonderful lit crit. and reading lists for the courses I didn't take.  For these gifts I am most grateful,  to my goddaughter, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, and to my fellow blogger Victoria Ford Smith running with carrots.

Some of my friends:  Luci, Debra, Whitney, Martha, Me, Chelsie, Bobbie, Belinda, Brandy, Beverly

• The most important thing I've learned from my younger friends is the sheer joy of friendship and ministry.  Wedding and baby showers had become for me social obligation and Christian duty.  I have relearned what I once knew:   life is joyful and celebrations bring us together and let us share joy.  The time spent in planning/preparing (which I once thought  wasted or "over dosing on Martha Stewart" as I have often thought and sometimes said) is part of the celebration and joy and that time has helped me connect and deepen relationships with some of my younger friends. 

A novel, a blog, and Bob Dylan

I can't seem to get back into the blogging groove.  I can't even keep Library Thing updated with my "what I'm reading" and "recently read" lists.  I have been reading as much as I can manage; I'm cramming for ChLA like I think it's a final exam.  When the program came out, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was better read in the source material than I had anticipated.  I'll save those books and my comments for the July blog after I've come home.

SEASONS (my women-reading-theology group) has decided to offer a special summer program based on the book and soon to be released movie, The Help by Kathryn Stockett which I read on Kindle.  I will probably blog much more about this book later also.  I'll limit today's comment to Stockett's decision to break the novel's timeline in order to include the lyric of Bob Dylan's The times they are achangin'. On page 352, Skeeter hears the song on the car radio. "It is better than anything I've ever heard... I feel a rush of inexplicable relief.  I feel I've just heard something from the future."  The novel is set in 1962 and Dylan's song was first played 26 October 1963.  I don't understand why Stockett didn't just push her timeline.  A later date would have allowed her to make use of the selective service draft which throughout most of the South took "coloreds and white trash" first. The conscription and death of young black men "in the white man's war" in Viet Nam served as a call to action for the civil rights movement.  I, however, did not write this book; the teller of the tale gets to make such decisions.  I basically liked The Help and thought it spoke truth.

My reading of Stockett's book came shortly before Bob Dylan's  70th birthday so I revisited the music of my youth.  As I recall I first heard Bob Dylan on the floor of my dorm room probably in the fall of 1968.  I had to learn to appreciate Dylan as a musician--it was a totally new sound--but I recognized at once that he was a great poet.  Malcolm Guite--British poet, singer-songwriter, and priest--writes a blog which I enjoy for its insight on the intersections of literature and Christianity.  In a 2008 article published in The Tablet, Malcolm Guite demonstrates how Dylan layers time and echoes biblical text. 
Turning again to the song that Stockett thought so essential to her story that she broke the timeline to quote the last two lines of the first stanza, I have added a few notes in red in The times they are a-changin' by Bob Dylan:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters       whelming waters                      
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you                  "redeeming the time"
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'  rejection of status quo
Or you'll sink like a stone        Jesus: "better a millstone"
For the times they are a-changin'.


Come writers and critics       Stockett's novel is about writing
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon     there is a long silence, time of waiting
For the wheel's still in spin  Bible is not the only religion's imagery
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'                    who is named in Skeeter's book
For the loser now                  Jesus:  last shall be first
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.


Come senators, congressmen    Stuart's father is a senator
Please heed the call                   Hilly's husband is running for office
Don't stand in the doorway       Hilly's husband loses election
Don't block up the hall              Stuart's father has more open views
For he that gets hurt                  but will not speak them publicly
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.


Come mothers and fathers       lots of mothers in novel
Throughout the land
And don't criticize                   Skeeter's mom & Elizabeth criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is                     Psalm 1, the way of the wicked
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one   road blocks to stop activists
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.


The line it is drawn         novel is all about boundaries
The curse it is cast          this image is about prophecy
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now       again Jesus: last shall be first
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.


[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/]

listen to Bob Dylan at the White House Celebration of Music of the Civil Rights Movement.