Small Wonders: The Pixies Are In the Attic
This short piece on Small Wonders by Azure Arther titled “The Pixies Are In the Attic” just made a real mess of me.
It’s short enough I don’t feel like I can meaningfully quote from it here without reproducing the whole thing, so I won’t. Just go click the link and read for a couple minutes. So many feelings about the challenges of raising children into wonderful, amazing adults brought about by so few words. Amazing.
Low key, work appropriate costume this year.
Tonight’s movie: Death on the Nile (1978). Peter Ustinov sounding a lot like Prince John from Disney’s Robin Hood. David Niven. Mia Farrow. Angela Lansbury hamming it up. Jane Birkin. Maggie Smith looking for all the world like Tilda Swinton. A classic Agatha Christie story. Good fun.
Life’s too short for uninteresting books
Nick Hornby, writing over at Lithub, says something that I am finding increasingly true: as you get older, life is too short to spend time on bad novels.
I try to find works of fiction, I promise, but it’s like pushing a wonky shopping trolley round a supermarket. I constantly veer off toward literary biographies, books about the Replacements, and so on, and only with a concerted effort can I push it toward the best our novelists have to offer. I suspect it’s to do with age and risk. A bad book about, say, the history of Indian railways will inevitably tell you something about railways, India, and history.
Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, however, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire.
It’s no secret that I read lots of books. For a long time my reading strategy has been one book at a time, in completionist fashion. Once I’ve put the effort in to give it a try, why not finish it so I can add it to my reading log? But more and more I pick up a book, almost always a novel, get a few chapters in, and decide I just can’t be arsed to finish it. So back it goes to the library. (Or, rarely, it gets resold to the used book store. Though I very rarely buy fiction any more when it can be borrowed instead.)
I’m at the point where my “to read” bookshelf has books that have been sitting there so long that I am no longer interested in the topics that were apparently interesting to me when I bought them. It feels like an entire next level of giving up to just throw those books in the resell pile, but, well, I’m getting older. Life’s too short to spend time in uninteresting books.
Today the blog turns 20
Twenty years ago today, October 29, 2004, my friend Geof set me up a Wordpress install on his server and sent me the keys to login. I wrote a hello world post and the rest is history. 20 years and 1477 posts later, I’m still at it. The URL has changed a few times. The original install was a shared site on rmfo.com/blogs. Then I grabbed thehubbs.net, thinking some of my family members would also want to blog. (None of them did more than once or twice.) But then in December 2007 I registered chrishubbs.com and I’ve been here ever since. (In early 2024 I migrated from Wordpress to micro.blog. I’m still very happy with that choice.)
My early posts set the tone for repeated themes over the years: a little bit of politics, a lot of music, theological rumination, and books. So many books. If I have a favorite post format, though, it’s probably bullet points. Sometimes you just need a post format to let you do a random brain dump, and then see how those random bits weave together.
There have been plenty of changes over that time, too. Shifts in political views. Going from one kid, to three kids, to two of those kids growing up and heading out. Going from a Baptist church to a church plant] to a Free Church to a little online church community, to finally the Episcopal church. Made lots of friends. (Often forgot to tag them.) Lost some, too. (RIP, Geof. I miss you.) Added family members, lost family members. It’s not all change, I guess. Through it all I still have the same wife, still live in the same house, and still have the same employer. All blessings.
I’ve never had an overarching philosophy for my blogging; I just write about things that interest me. I find the process of writing to be helpful for me to pull my thoughts together. If I can take the thoughts rattling around in my head and organize them into something that holds up when written down, maybe then I’ve really got something. I blog in spurts. I’ll write a post a day for four or five days in a row when the topics are flowing, then I’ll go dormant for a month. I’ve tried writing series (e.g. on NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope and positive politics), but usually struggle to complete them.
I’m happy to have maintained a presence online for two decades, under my own name, with content that I own. The internet has gone through so many changes in 20 years, but it turns out that a self-owned site with your own domain will let you stick around regardless of how the dominant platforms change. I’d recommend it. I hope to keep writing. If I’m still around 20 years from now it’ll be time to write another summary.
Had a really lovely time last night eating dinner at some new friends' house. Sat around and talked until way too late for this old guy. This morning: need more coffee. Also: can’t wait to do it again.
Marilynne Robinson on Community and Absence
Posting this quote from Marilynne Robinson here just so I have it at hand for later use:
To speak in the terms that are familiar to us all, there was a moment in which Jesus, as a man, a physical presence, left that supper at Emmaus. His leave-taking was a profound event for which the supper itself was precursor. Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life.
I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community. I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.
In full context, she’s talking about community with fictional characters and authors here, but this rings so true to me in a world full of online communities.
When I started my keto diet back in January, I still really wanted some kind of purchasable breakfast option for days when packing two meals didn’t work. Turns out you can order a Chick-fil-a grilled chicken filet with egg and cheese on top. I’ve eaten a lot of them this year. Still tasty.
2024 Reads: Moonbound by Robin Sloan 📚
Well, this was delightful. Hints of Monk & Robot as well as Narnia. So imaginative.
My daughter is soon to need her own car, and one option is to give her my RAV4 and find something else for me. Looking around, though, not sure there’s any current car I’m too excited about. Figure I’d best just keep driving what I’ve got!
Visitor underneath our bird feeders tonight.
Cleaning up cast iron cookware with SCIENCE! (Ok, it’s an electrolysis tank.)
Just got an email from the library that I have a book available to pick up. I don’t remember putting it on hold, but it looks like a good book, so I’ll trust my past self on this one. 😂
With all the mess going on with Wordpress these days, I’m happier than ever that I took the leap this year to move my 20 years of blog history to micro.blog.
Tony Bennett, men’s basketball coach at Virginia, reportedly retiring immediately, right before the beginning of the season. He’s only 55. Ton of respect for this guy, hope things are ok with him and his family.
I made it through an audition and will be joining the Orchestra Iowa Chorus this year. In the spring we’re doing Mozart’s Requiem. I bought the score and did a first listen/read through the other night… I’ve got some work to do! 😯I needed a challenge. This will be a good one.
Ah, the typical library visit: return two books, borrow six more.
Looking back or looking forward? Reading Ivan Illich up against Ilia Delio
A useful maxim for me over the years has been to find out who my favorite writers are reading, and start reading those authors. As I wrote previously, I’ve benefitted quite a lot recently from Chris E. W. Green’s podcast. One of the thinkers Green has been referencing frequently is Ivan Illich, an Austrian Catholic priest and thinker from the first part of the 20th century. So, off I went to learn about Ilich.
It appears that a digestible canonical form of Illich’s thought is in a wonderful CBC radio series titled ‘The Corruption of Christianity’ as presented by journalist David Cayley. I’m only through 3 of the 5 hour-long episodes so far, but it’s fascinating stuff. Illich contends that the movement to formally establish programs to do good, even (especially?) church-run programs, is a horrible corruption of the original Christian call, because the benevolence then ceases to be a voluntary act of love on the part of the individual believer.
Frequently through the first few episodes of the program, Illich argues that the early Christian view of certain acts was different than we understand today because those Christians had a different scientific view of the world. For example, he says the ancients thought of “the gaze” as an act where the human eye actually casts a ray out to the perceived object, by which the viewer and the viewed interact. With the advent of modern science, he says, we now think of the eye as a lens through which an image is received, and now we have a more passive interaction with the representation of the object rather than an active interaction with the object itself. And this represents a “corruption” of the ancient understanding.
This is really interesting for me to set in conversation with Ilia Delio’s writing. Delio approaches the question the other way around. Given what we now know, she says, about science and cosmology, how should we update our understanding of God and Christianity based on that modern science? Illich seemed to assume that the early church understanding was the perfect, uncorrupted one, and that we should work to get back to it. Delio takes a more progressive revelation view that encourages us to look forward rather than back. I have been helped a lot by Delio’s work over the past few years, so it’s interesting to run up against Illich and interrogate some of her premises. I haven’t reached conclusions yet but it’s some fascinating stuff to think on.
2024 Reads: Die Trying (Jack Reacher, #2) by Lee Child 📚
Back when Lee Child was writing really good stories. Fun stuff.
2024 Reads: All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld 📚
Rothfeld dislikes the practice of mindfulness. And really, really likes sex. I found her essays tiresome.