I Don't Think So

I can think of at least one better reason.

What I'm Reading Now

"Postman (Conscientious Objections, 1988, etc.) once more cuts across the grain as an important critic of our national culture, this time arguing that America has become the world's first 'totalitarian technocracy'--otherwise known as a 'Technopoly.'' Postman starts out from the long view, showing that while every human culture becomes 'tool-using,' the use of those tools doesn't necessarily change that culture's beliefs, ideology, or world view.

In 'technocracy,' however (for us, this stage began to burgeon in the industrial 19th century), there's a change: tools (they're now called 'technology') begin to alter the culture instead of just being used by it: 'tools...attack the culture. They bid to become the culture.'' And technocracy becomes Technopoly when tools win the battle for dominance and become the sole determiners of a culture's purpose and meaning, and in fact of its very way of knowing and thinking--or of not thinking. The tools, in other words, come not only to use us but to define what we are--which is 'why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose of meaning, no cultural coherence.'

So desolate a view of generalized inversion and ideological collapse fails to subdue either Postman's humane and faithful energy or his unflagging quickness of mind as he travels from Copernicus, Descartes, and Francis Bacon on through discussions of modern bureaucracy, concepts of worker 'management,' the intellectual hollowness of social 'science' and its monster-children of poll- taking and IQ testing--these and others (schools, TV, the computer 'culture') all being 'technologies' that in fact are 'without a moral center,' yet ones that we insistently revere and haplessly measure ourselves by, because 'we have become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies.'

Amusing, learned, and prickling with intelligence, Postman easily outclasses the Allan Bloomians in the grave work of showing how it is that we've now stumbled our way into 1984--and offers, at end, some modest suggestions as to what to do about it. "

10 Most Pirated Books

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the ten most pirated ebooks of 2009 are:

1. Kamasutra

2. Adobe Photoshop Secrets

3. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex

4. The Lost Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

5. Solar House – A Guide for the Solar Designer

6. Before Pornography – Erotic Writing In Early Modern England

7. Twilight – Complete Series

8. How To Get Anyone To Say YES – The Science Of Influence

9. Nude Photography – The Art And The Craft

10. Fix It – How To Do All Those Little Repair Jobs Around The Home

What? No Jane Austen?

Calgon, take me away!

Only in Arkansas

. . . or maybe Mississippi.


We were out riding Saturday, enjoying the beautiful country around Searcy, turned down a gravel road and saw this:


Hard to get business that way.

Booking It--Recent Informative

What’s the most informative book you’ve read recently?

This is hard because a lot of the books I've read recently have been very informative, just in different ways. I guess if I had to choose one, it would be Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

"Michael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers 'putting food by,'as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl. Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork."

Prayer for Peace

It Is Good She Did Not Know

I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.
--II Samuel 12:23

It is good
she did not know
the end
from the beginning.

For then,
how could she ever
have left the side of his crib?
counting the ticking minutes
through the numbered nights.

It is good
for then
how could she ever
have smiled and waved
as he boarded the yellow bus,
or said yes
to a sleepover,
or told him
just go outside and play.

It is good
for then
how could she ever
have counted
out the candles
and said make a wish
when she knew her own
would not come true.

It is good
for then
how could she ever
have shown him how
to fold his hands,
how taught him to pray
when she herself
was not quite sure
how God answers.

It is good she did not know.

--SME

Some Gave All

Tyler Parten

1/12/85 -9/10/09

Please pray for this family.

Just Place Your Order

Latest student email, received after sending the student a warning about excessive absences:

"Sorry for missing so much class. I meant to inform you last week but I forgot. I was wondering if I could get 2 excused absences for being sick and 2 unexcused for missing the other 2 days. I will be in class today and will do my best not to miss another day."