What I'm reading...

September is always a very busy month for me and this year the busyness lingers into October. A trip to Clifton, a family wedding, Colorado vacation, a trip to Clifton, David's surgery, church library, church chairs, another trip to Clifton... Yikes! who has time to read. I do. The crazier things get the more I need words, words, words to keep me sane.

Vacation reading:
Poole, Ernest: His Second Wife. Kindle. Project Gutenberg. Originally published in 1918. Having enjoyed his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, His Family, I gave this author who is new to me another chance. Another good read by an author I plan to read again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Poole

Showalter, Elaine: A Jury of Her Peers. American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Kindle. This compelling book by the author of A Literature of their Own sabotaged my vacation fiction binge. I've spent the last month reading and chasing rabbits e.g. women authors I've read and those I haven't and I was surprised at the number in both categories. I've got more reading to do than I'll have time to do it. What struck me most was how time and again a woman writer was "silenced as much by her activity in a repressive political movement as by her domestic life." And, I wonder if feminism is not at least to some extent yet another repressive political movement. Women who celebrate heterosexual marriage and motherhood (certainly in the late Victorian era and I suspect in other past eras and the present) are still silenced by women as well as by men with the label "sentimentalist." Surely some of those writers have something of interest to say and a few at least say it well. But then I have a hobbyhorse: http://evelynwhitakerlibrary.org/

Fiction:
Kelley, Jacqueline: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009. Recommended by my friend, Cathey R. This coming-of-age book focuses on a young girl and her grandfather, interweaving rural Texas in the early 20th Century with Darwin. This a wonderful story beautifully told. Must reading for anyone (of any age, of any gender) who enjoys good fiction. I found it even more delightful as a break from and continuation of the study of Showalter.

Smith, Alexander McCall: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. New York: Pantheon Press, 2005. Cathey R. passed on this book from her collection as part of the thank you for the border collie puppy adventure. I had read and enjoyed The No. 1 Ladies' Dectective Agency and at least one other book in this author's series. This is the 2nd book in the Sunday Pholosophy Club series and the first that I've read of that series. It stood alone very well and was more to my tastes; probably due to the Edinburgh, Scotland setting. Good light ready with a thought provoking phrase now and then.

Bedside Book:
Peterson, Eugene H.: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. A conversation in spiritual theology. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005. Kindle. Yes, a Kindle book works at bedside if I remember to keep the battery charged. I plan to linger with the book for quite a while. It is dense and rich in food for thought. I have long loved the introduction to John's Gospel and his presentation of Christ--the Word, the Logos, the creative speaking of God. Peterson is building on and expanding my appreciation of this text and helping me see application in my own life.

Seasons:
Johnson, Elizabeth A.: She Who Is: the Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: The Crossroads Publishing Co., 1992, 2002, 2003. This month we are discussing the Chapter 1. Introduction: Speaking rightly of God and Chapter 6. Classical Theology.

Family wedding photoshop

Just as I did, my niece selected the Saturday of Labor Day weekend for her wedding date. We made the trip to Clifton to chauffeur my parents to Fort Worth for the wedding. I took lots of photos and have played around with Adobe PhotoShop. All sides of our family have lots of blue eyes so all the red-eye needed fixing. All the auto-fix tools are helpful. I've found that cropping often improves a photo. I've also played around some with lighting and managed to recover a couple of shots where there wasn't any flash. I retouched a number of photos to remove a blemish here and there. Sometimes something in the background (a light switch or a sign for the restroom or just an inconvenient person or clutter ) messes up a really lovely shot.

Here are a couple of examples:

Note the messy background in the bride's dressing room. A black skirt is visible in the mirror but I've "erased" it from the background; the hanger is still visible.

Crop it and voila! a bridal portrait.

Everyone loved the way that V. looked at P. in this shot as they bid their wedding guests Aloha! before leaving for their Hawaiian honey moon. Too bad about the crowd of people and the cluttered background.

Crop it! Still we have the frowning man coming between them and the background clutter. Use the tools to erase the man and to reproduce the flowers in the head band and lei to fill in the area. Then add sparkle effects to conceal my amateur workmanship.

And never overlook the potential in changing to black and white.

My, how weddings and brides have changed!

Compare one of my bridal photos with those of niece V.

I'm the old-fashioned bride with my matron of honor, ACE.

And, remember, with PhotoShop every photo may be something less than the truth.

What I'm reading...

Not much. I've made another trip to visit parents in Clifton. Road music: Best of the Righteous Brothers, Yanni In My Time, Schumann Symphonies Nos. 2 & 4, and Juilio Inglesias Tango. That list is almost a definition of eclectic. Miss Mandy Whitepaws, my sheltie, is in love with Juilio and found several of the Righteous Brothers' vocals intriguing. It was a good trip.

But it was not a break from the church library. I spent a lot of time looking at the Highsmith catalog making lists of furnishings and supplies. When I got home I prepared a budget for the coming year. I spent all day yesterday on-line making purchases from Highsmith and from Amazon, http://www.abebooks.com, and http://www.biblio.com. [If you're looking for a rare out-of-print book, give them a try. My first choice is biblio.com because I like the way they manage the orders from a plethora of independent booksellers.] I was really fortunate--or should I say blessed?--to find all but one of the thirty-three books that had to be replaced. Hurricane Ike destroyed four dozen or so others but I elected not to replace them. Given the state of the church library after the storm, the losses were really far fewer than I'd expected.
Other than catalogs I've been reading:

Fiction:
Poole, Ernest: His Family. New York: MacMillan, 1917. Project Gutenberg. Kindle, free download from http://manybooks.net/. The first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature. A beautifully crafted story of the interior life and family relationships of a man as he nears the end of his life. In New York at a time of transition (early 20th Century), his three daughters encounter their father, their family, each other, and themselves as three graces, if you will. What does it mean to be woman in the Modern world? How does a woman decide issues of career, marriage, motherhood? Poole examines issues of education, urbanization, war and conscience, and eternal life. A delightful read that is also thought provoking. FICTION 20th CENTURY PULITZER NEW YORK MODERNISM FEMINISIM

Chairside Nibbles:
mostly Kindle sampling for an upcoming reading binge

Bedside Book:
I was slow to make a new selection so I read Gerard Manley Hopkins and finally memorized

That Nature Is a Heraclitian Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection.

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

Peterson, Eugene H.: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. A conversation in spiritual theology. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005. Kindle. Can a Kindle book work as bedside reading? Just started but it promises to be informative and inspirational. I remain grateful to Peterson for his Psalms study, How do I answer the God who speaks to me?

SEASONS:
Linn, Dennis; Linn, Sheila Fabricant; Linn, Matthew: Good Goats: healing our image of God. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994. vi, 101 p. Next month will finish this book and after our last group discussion I liked this book much better.

Stranger than fiction

We enjoyed a rare movie night at home; we don't make good use of our Netflix subscription. Watched Stranger than Fiction selected purely because Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman are such a superb actors and they do not disappoint. We don't really like Will Ferrell but he was perfectly cast in this movie. Queen Latifah was a delight also. An excellent movie! David said, "It's funny but the three movies that I've found most thought-provoking were all comedies: Joe and the Volcano, Groundhog Day, and now Stranger than Fiction."

I've looked at more books (and done less reading) this past week than in any other week of my life since I've been unpacking and reshelving the church library as we finally get to move back after Hurricane Ike and all the repairs. About 6000 books in 45 or so hours. I was pleased that the damages were much less than I anticipated. I was delighted to come across some of the very lovely books that I had forgotten about and to realize that our church library is really a very strong collection.
I hope folks know that David and I didn't really skip the work day since we've had a number of workdays already the past couple of weeks and we got there at 7:30 a.m. this morning to finish the library and clear the table so that SEASONS could meet there this morning. It was a good session. It's wonderful to have a circle of sisters who truly nurture one another.

What I'm reading...

Still working on my annual review of medical literature re. scleroderma.

Doing some reading about the kidney and its various disorders.


Still catching up on my periodicals:

From Much ado about nothing, The Economist, Vol. 392, No. 8639, July 11th, 2009. A book review of Nothing: A very short introduction by Frank Close, Oxford U. Press, 2009. "Does anything remain when everything is taken away?... Big Bang... Where did all this stuff come from? Science says that it came from quantum fluctuations in the void.... Mr. Close surveys 3,000 years of thinking to arrive at the modern solution... The answer is nothing." I like both physics and metaphysics so I'll probably take a closer look at this book which is due out in the USA next month. Based on the review, the modern solution of nothingness closely approaches the Zen solution. In my reading and practice (which is no longer Zen) I've found those unexplained "quantum fluctuations in the void" to be a less poetic way to phrase the Judeo-Christian solution, "In the beginning, the Spirit of God moved across the face of the deep." The answer is not nothing" but rather The One out whose being {I AM} flows all that has being.


Fiction:

Fforde, Jasper: Thursday Next First among Sequels. New York: Penguin, 2007. Not the first sequel but the fifth book in this delightful series: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels. {There is also a companion series, The Nursery Crime series which I do not read: The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear.} Quote, p.52: "Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work--the writer might have died long ago."

Schweizer, Mark: The Diva Wore Diamonds: a liturgical mystery. Hopkinsville KY: St. James Music Press, 2009. 159 p. illustrator: Jim Hunt. Hip, hip, hooray! The slipcase didn't mean the end of the series. This is the seventh book featuring an Episcopal choir director who is also a small town chief of police and a wanna be writer who channels Raymond Chandler... The usual delightful read and a good laugh when I needed one. The series in order: The Alto Wore Tweed, The Baritone Wore Chiffon, The Tenor Wore Tapshoes, The Soprano wore Falsettos, The Bass Wore Scales, The Mezzo Wore Mink. Visit the link, not only for the liturgical mysteries but also because St. James Music Press is a serious press offering really superb church music and you can listen to practically everything in their catalog. http://www.sjmpbooks.com/ MYSTERY EPISCOPAL CHURCH POLITICS SMALL TOWN ROMANCE 21st Century

Bedside Book, just finished and have not yet selected another:

Andreach, Robert J.: Studies in Structure: Stages in the spiritual life in four modern authors: Gerarad Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane. London: Burns & Oates, 1964, Fordham University Press. This is an exceedingly odd book; it is less literary criticism and more an analysis of stages in spirituality in the works of these authors referring to Dante, St. Augustine, and St. John of the Cross as sources. I enjoyed this fresh viewpoint and I enjoyed revisiting those writers which I rarely read voluntarily e.g. Joyce and Crane. During my college years, when I was first reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I threw the book across the room {A real no-no for a librarian.} in disgust at what I thought was "really screwed up color imagery." Andreach explains that Joyce has consciously "inverted" the stages of spiritual life. At least now I understand why I have never liked Joyce nor Crane nor really most of the Modern writers. Quote from section on Hart Crane, p. 118: "The more he seeks among the particulars of a debased society, the more his spiritual consciousness in diminished."

Chairside Nibbles:

Patten, Robert L.: George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art. Volume1: 1792-1835. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Kindle BIOGRAPHY ARTIST ILLUSTRATOR 18th Century 19th Century 20th Century This award winning biography by one of my English literature professors from Rice University is proving a most enjoyable re-read. One of Patten's strong points as a professor was rooting the literature in the history, the sociology, and the culture of the time, He offers rich details in a very readable frame. With my new interest in book illustration it is even more interesting to me now than it was on my first reading some years ago. Since I'm spending much time in my chair of late, this reading may take quite a long while.

SEASONS:

Linn, Dennis; Linn, Sheila Fabricant; Linn, Matthew: Good Goats: healing our image of God. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994. vi, 101 p. I'm finding the Linns to be difficult authors. I agree with most of their conclusions but I find their arguments to be shallow and repetitive. Their attack in this month's reading was on St. Anselm's view of the atonement struck me as a bit insulting to both Anselm and God. I am, as always, enjoying the discussion with the circle of sisters. FEMININITY OF GOD JUDGEMENT DAY HELL DOCTRINE 20th Century

Anselm of Canterbury who in the Preface to the Proslogion wrote, "I have written the little work that follows... in the role of one who strives to raise his mind to the contemplation of God and one who seeks to understand what he believes.
I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that you have created your image in me, so that I may remember you, think of you, love you. But this image is so obliterated and worn away by wickedness, it is so obscured by the smoke of sins, that it cannot do what it was created to do, unless you renew and reform it. I am not attempting, O Lord, to penetrate your loftiness, for I cannot begin to match my understanding with it, but I desire in some measure to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this too I believe, that "unless I believe, I shall not understand." (Isa. 7:9) . " For more information visit these links: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/141.html

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/anselm-intro.html

Fly me to the moon...

Yesterday the world remembered "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

The date is also an important one in my personal history.

I was home following my sophomore year at Rice. My sister and I attended a summer session at Texas Tech: she, to jump start her college career since she was targeting graduation in three years rather than four; I, to take a history course for my teaching certification and to make up the math class I'd failed to pass. {Matrix algebra. At Rice it was the standard 1st semester 200-level course. At Tech it was a 400-level course taken by math majors and graduate students. A red-headed guy from my section at Rice also repeated the course at Tech. He and I got lots of negative attention for blowing the curve and we each took a 4.0 back for our transcripts. At least in summer school, the Tech course covered the part of the course I had understood; I had a good solid "B" after the first exam at Rice before it all fell apart. The Tech course never got past that point; everything I hadn't gotten the first time around was in Appendix Two which we never looked at in that summer course. The best thing I learned from my semester at Tech was that I really hadn't suddenly turned dumb. It helped me relax and start learning not for grade points but for the sheer joy of learning. But, I digress...}

Shift work at David's summer job in Houston gave him a four day weekend about once a month. So on the momentous day in history he drove clear across Texas to see me. It was his first visit to my family's farm. He was driving up the caprock between Ralls and Floydada and listening to the car radio just as the men first stepped on the moon. I had one eye on the T.V. and one eye on the road, looking for a cloud of dust that might indicate David's arrival. That night, he and I sat up late watching reruns of the moonwalk, holding hands, and talking. {There might have been a kiss or two... "fly me to the moon... in other words... hold my hand..." But, I digress...}

Which is how it came to be David, rather than my brother, asleep on the sofa bed in the living room when my mother walked in about 6:30 a.m., picked up the pair of jeans at the foot of the bed, and threw them on the sleeper,

"Get up, you lazy bones! It's past daylight; time you were in the field."

She jumped about six feet when a bass voice replied,

"Good morning, Mrs. Cummings."

On his second visit, the line from our one bathroom to the septic tank collapsed and David ended up digging about the front yard with my daddy and my brother.

And he married me anyway. Must have been true love.