The Local Yarn

∞ · Fri Jul 27, 2012

When St. Paul preached in Greece, he said “In Him we live and move, and have our being” (Acts 7), referring to the Christian God, but citing a pagan — one of “[the Greeks’] own poets,” Epimenides.

I find this beautiful and refreshing, in that any secular poet, artist or philosopher might depict God in a way that is both true and vivid to the mind’s eye. It doesn’t matter whether they call themselves Christian, or even whether they claim to be referring to “our” God¹.

Great bodies of water — lakes, seas, rivers — have become for me, lately, a vivid picture of the God I know. In one of my recent podcasts, Once Around the Lake, the lake is essentially an analogue of God. I have also begun to look closely wherever I find a reference to lakes and seas, to see whether, just perhaps, I have stumbled across another link in a divine trail — whether, somewhere in the picture, I can catch a new glimpse of “He whom my soul loves.”

So of course this song captured my attention. It seems to me that God, in the person of the river, is one of the characters in this song.

Good poetry, especially when set to music, fills the mind’s eye with layer upon layer of meaning. The picture of God as the river certainly happens to fit with Epimenides’ beautiful picture: “in Him we live and move and have our being.” Flynn himself even seems to suggest the connection when he asks “Lord, take me away…”

But what is happening in this river? The lines “The water can’t drown me, I’m done / with my dying” strongly call to mind the character of Riderhood in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. In the book, Riderhood is a firm believer in a common superstition that once a man “comes through drowning” he can never be killed by water.

In fact, though, Riderhood does die by drowning. If we read more closely, the line I just cannot stay / Or I’ll sink in my skin and my bones creates the possibility that the singer has in fact died and is floating down the river:

The phrase “I’m everywhere now” has a very real double-sense: one in that the singer, now dead, is “everywhere” as a spirit; and another in that perhaps his/her body is beginning to be subsumed back into the elements as it floats down the river. Ugh, you say! But death, in fact, forms a very crucial part of the pictures by which we understand the “new life” of a believer. The believer has in a very real sense died once already, and in the new life can no longer be drowned. This, in fact, is the exact picture of baptism.

What of God as the river? He is both the instrument of our drowning and the thing that sustains us and carries us “without even trying” — without effort, simply because it is his nature.

I’m not saying this is the only or right way to interpret this song. I’m just trying to share the sense of poetic discovery that it gave me, a sense which I more and more believe is one of God’s most often-neglected gifts.

∞ · Mon Jun 25, 2012

I keep coming across blog posts by people who obviously love to write, wringing their hands about how poor they think their writing is and apologizing to some mythical person-who-cares for not writing more.

I think the unconscious idea here is that if you obssess over your problem more and more and more, you will be free from it. You must see how ridiculous that is.

I’m going to break a few self-imposed rules here and tell you: if you know you need to improve as a writer, never write about writing. Just avoid it altogether. Either write, or take a break. Don’t write about the break, either.

If you’re having trouble writing, it’s because there’s nothing sitting in your head that you really need to get across to anyone, which is the whole point of writing or any other art. That’s not a problem with your talent or your practice. Just go outside and live a little.

“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”
— Freya Madeline Stark (1893-1993)

∞ · Wed Apr 11, 2012

“There’s only one way to make a beginning, and that is to begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the disappointments that were Martin Eden’s before he succeeded—which were mine before I succeeded…”

This is a quote that’s been going around from Jack London’s brutally honest reply to a young writer who sent him a manuscript.

By the standards of most bloggers and hobby writers, the fact that Max Fedder even finished a complete manuscript and mailed it off would qualify as a pretty strong “beginning” — but this is, to Jack London, a mere nothing!

Max Fedder finished a manuscript, but without investing years of hard work to make his craft good, and without devoting some intense study to what kind of writing people would pay money for. Mr. London appears to be telling him that he has in fact skipped the beginning.

“If a fellow harnesses himself to a star of $1000 week, he has to work proportion­ately harder than if he harnesses himself to a little glowworm of $20.00 a week. The only reason there are more successful blacksmiths in the world than successful writers, is that it is much easier, and requires far less hard work to become a successful blacksmith than does it to become a successful writer.

“It cannot be possible that you, at twenty, should have done the work at writing that would merit you success at writing… If you are going to write for success and money, you must deliver to the market marketable goods. Your short story is not marketable goods, and had you taken half a dozen evenings off and gone into a free reading room and read all the stories published in the current magazines, you would have learned in advance that your short story was not marketable goods.”

In this light, you realize that a 50,000-word NaNoWriMo manuscript is not really a beginning for someone who seriously wants to be a successful writer. It is more like practicing to begin.

It’s possible, of course, that Jack was not speaking objectively. You might suppose that, speaking from a place of hard-won material success, he wrote off the manuscript simply because of Max’s extreme youth. You can’t, however, come by this conclusion honestly without actually reading the manuscript that was sent to him — and then it’s your judgment against Jack London’s, for crying out loud. It’s Jack for my money; if anyone disagrees with him I will be honestly interested to know whether they have come by widely-acknowledged success in writing by some much easier means than he did.

One final word about money: Jack London appears in this letter to use it as a yardstick for merit, which some might object to. But Max was clearly aiming for success in the marketplace — that much is clear simply from the fact that he sent his story to to someone who had already gained success in that marketplace, hoping for a good word and a quick reputation. Jack is only telling this fellow what he needs to do to succeed in the marketplace he has chosen. If you write purely for its own sake, you do well; but once you attach to any gaining idea — wealth, or fame — you cannot avoid having your effort measured by its market value.

Examine what it is you actually desire to accomplish by your effort, and whether your effort in that direction is pure, or whether it pretends to be something it is not. If you write purely for the sake of expressing yourself, do so without repentance towards anyone’s judgement, and do not hope to gain by it. If, however, you write for the joy of producing saleable goods that have recognized quality, this is how to make a real and honest beginning at harnessing yourself to that star.

∞ · Mon Apr 9, 2012

Jessica and I have been together for nearly a year now. We never did get around to sending out Christmas cards, something we would ordinarily have enjoyed doing for our first holiday season together.

We opted to write a little book instead.

I knew early on in last year that I would like to produce my own version of an "annual report." Others who do this, such as Nick Felton, make their impression through the sheer density of numbers and data in their reports. There are several charts and infographics in my report as well, but I wanted to produce something focused more on the literary side of things: a book, with prose, poetry, and a personal voice.

The result is The Annual Yarn: 2011, the first edition of our first annual little book, a literary report of travels and milestones during the year we were married. It's a trade paperback the size of an A5 sheet (roughly 5.9″ by 8.3″) and runs 28 pages of black and white text, inky charts, floorplans, original poetry, one or two photographs, and some impressive whitespace.

This being our first time printing and publishing a book, it took quite a bit longer than we had planned, but we are very pleased with the result, and already accumulating prose, charts and paintings for this next year's edition. We plan to produce a new and experimental Yarn every year, until fifty rare and original volumes line the bookshelves (or bathroom reading racks) of our friends, family and loyal readers.

No more than 100 of this first volume will be printed, ever. The inside covers of each copy will be hand-numbered with its spot in the print run. At the time of this writing, about sixty copies of this print run are available for the cost-recovery price of $6 USD (includes US post and packing). We'll also put you on the advance list for next year's copy.

$6.00 USD Sold Out

Click above to order with Paypal/credit card
Bitcoin price (including post and packing) is 1.4 BTC.
For international and/or bitcoin orders, send me an email.
Orders will ship Tue, Apr 17, 2012

∞ · Tue Oct 4, 2011

Allison Arief’s article in the NYT, Shifting the Suburban Paradigm is a good one, but this particular statement needs addressing:

These continue to be built the same way they have for over a century, and usually not as well. Walls and windows are thin, materials cheap, design (and I use the term loosely) not well-considered.”

I would say that each part of this statement is false, including the bit about design. The idea that craftsmanship is dead and newer houses are more poorly-constructed than the farm-houses of yore is an oft-repeated one, and appeals to one’s sense of nostalgia, but it’s not true, for one simple reason: building codes. The houses of today are more structurally sound, more fireproof, safer and more well-designed than the houses that were built before the enforcement of building codes.

Take stairways as an example. When my sister was first married she and her husband bought a 100-year old farmhouse. The “stairway” leading up to the second story was almost a ladder, it was so steep. The stairs varied wildly in height, and you had to duck to get through the doorway at the bottom. If you go up a staircase in any new home, you won’t find one with a riser height of more than 7.75″. The heights of the risers won’t vary by more than 0.375″ and you won’t have to duck thanks to the 6′ 8″ minimum headroom.

Walls and windows are thin? With 2×6 exterior walls and seismic codes and massive LVL headers being installed over even small windows and doors? And don’t even try and tell me that the cheapest vinyl window at Menards is less energy-efficient than the single-pane site-built windows of old farmhouses.

You could look at nearly every aspect of home building — structural support, basement drainage, site grading, insulation and energy efficiency, location and number of electrical outlets, life safety — and see vast improvements over the homes of 75 years ago.

Of course, all of this code enforcement has had the effect of making houses more expensive as well. That’s the price of living in a developed nation. As much as builders and home-buyers might complain sometimes, the fact is that as bad as America’s recent natural disasters have been, an accidental fire can no longer reduce an entire city to ashes, and moderate earthquakes no longer result in death counts in the thousands.

America is, by and large, not a giant trailer park; and for this we may well thank those who maintain our building code’s boundaries on the “invisible hand” of the markets.

∞ · Wed Aug 17, 2011

“When you walk, walk; when you eat, eat; and when you sit, sit.” I am still learning how to do this. It seems whenever I do something, my mind is often elsewhere. I am still learning to be fully present in this moment.

Our souls want to be fully present, to only focus on the now. The irony is that we always look forward to a time when we can do this. We never just do it.

This is how I define beauty: beauty is what makes me forget everything else and just want to live in the now. When I look at this photo, I think, If only I were there, I would rest and enjoy it and not think about the past or the future. There is enough there to look at and enjoy.

The problem is, when I was there, I did not fully rest and enjoy it. Instead, I took this photo. I was thinking about the future and other peoples’ possible responses to it, or about other past and future things.

If you wait until your surroundings are beautiful before you will stop and enjoy them, you might never enjoy even the beautiful surroundings.

I was looking specifically for a summer photo. In order to find this one, I had to go back to the time before I started working on my house, more than three years ago. Now, I am getting closer and closer to finishing the house, and more and more I have let my mind be occupied with getting it done and moving in, and putting all the hard work behind me.

This is a very subtle trap.

∞ · Fri Aug 5, 2011 · 1 Notes

This quote from Dave Ramsey has been floating around:

"If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand."

(I can’t find where Dave Ramsey actually said that, so if someone could send me the source, I’d appreciate it.)

Regardless of who said it, there are a number of big problems with it.

1. No credibility. There are no sources given for any of the proportions stated — this ought always to be a big red flag that the quote is more of a juicy sound byte than an intellectually honest look at the situation. Also, the link to the source where Dave Ramsey originally said this is never given.

2. The proportions are wrong. Without any sources, it’s impossible to tell where the $58k/$75k/$327k proportions were derived from, but they are certainly a good deal off the Congressional Budget Office’s reported figures for revenue and outlays.

3. It’s wrong to classify all U.S. debt as credit card debt. “Credit card debt” is probably meant as a derisive reference to entitlement/welfare programs or other “non-essential” spending, but not all federal borrowing is of this kind. A significant portion of U.S. debt (roughly 25%) is for capital investment in things like defense and infrastructure - more like a home mortgage than credit card debt.

4. It draws attention to spending and ignores earnings. This metaphorical family has the freedom to request a raise as well as reducing spending in order to reduce its debt. Its annual income has more than tripled since it began to incur this debt. In addition, the family’s salary is technically higher than what is stated, but it volunteered return some of its salary to its employer (extending Bush tax cuts). In any case, it is normal for a family to incur significant debt early on in life (student loans, mortgage, e.g.), and then reduce the impact of the debt mainly by growing its earnings over time.

5. It says nothing about how the family got where it is today. Is the family financially better or worse off than it was two or ten years ago? Did it used to earn more money or is it just spending more now? Or both?

Here’s a more accurate and informative version of the analogy:

* Family’s “salary” in 2011 is actually $68,000 but they gave $10,000 back to their employers (Equivalent of CBO’s estimate in 2011 of extending Bush tax cuts).

Figures are adjusted for inflation and normalized based on the proportions to $2.228 trillion = $58,000. Sources: Wolfram Alpha — Debt (publicly held), Receipts, and Spending, and the CBO Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2011-2021 (PDF)

No it doesn’t sound as catchy on the radio, but that’s the way real life is sometimes: a little more complicated than you’d like to think.

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