Licorice

There isn't necessarily an inverse correlation between the number of cartoons I post in a day and how much I have to say...

but sometimes that's true. Like today.

Vaction Well Spent

So, I spent the week prior to Christmas listening to funky jazz and playing with my cartoons.

And reading Rilke:

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

to make every minute holy.

I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough

just to lie before you like a thing,

shrewd and secretive.

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,

as it goes towards action,

and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times

when something is coming near,

I want to be with those who know secret things,

or else alone.

(from the Book of Hours, trans Robert Bly)

Christmas is coming...

I suppose I'll feel better once it's here, but right now I'm still just waiting around. And it's raining. Have I mentioned before that I mostly view Christmas with a sort of dread?

In any case, the first cartoon was inspired by my favorite not-quite-plain Quaker poet; the second, by Plain-man and friends. I guess that means I'm missing the mid-west.

Who'da thunk it.

Sunday should be better, and who knows? Monday--Christmas--might not be so bad.

Bummed

I'm here in southwest Virginia for the week, and I won't get to see my two favorite people until Sunday, for reasons I don't really understand.

And the Indian grocery store closed; I guess I wasn't buying enough pappadums.

And I'm reading Reasons for Hope, which isn't really giving me what the title promises (the problems start in the subtitle, and go from there).

At least the weather is still nice.

Wed Nes Day

The cartoon refers to a story in the zen tradition, where the students ask, what is the nature of the moon?
The master points to the moon; the students think, oh, the moon is a finger!
The story sounds a little odd, but the underlying point is valid.
On a related note, John Punshon's discussion of the difference between Evangelical Friends and the Wesleyan Holiness movement reminds me of the difference between Rinzai and Soto zen...

I'll tell you the answer: Wait

So here I am in beautiful southwestern Virginia, wishing I'd packed a pair of shorts (or at least some different socks)--but I don't have the technology to post any cartoons. (And besides some non-thermal socks, I wish I had someone to check the lids of my drinks: coffee is a better beverage than it is outerwear.)

The title of this post comes from a Spanish riddle of sorts; it doesn't make as much sense in English (it's along the lines of "Pete and Re-Pete were sitting on a fence; Pete fell off, who was left?") but I liked the sentiment in English.
Of course, I'm a 5, so waiting is what I do best: "Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." (Measuring out my life in coffee-spoons is also a favorite pastime).

But I think it's a good idea most of the time anyway, waiting.

And that's what I'm doing here in beautiful southwestern Virginia. Maybe I'll figure out how to post cartoons tomorrow.

Cookies!

Another cartoon-a-thon, since I'm too busy to write anything thoughtful.

Click on the image to enlarge if you can't read the fortune: they don't make much sense otherwise.

(Well, they might not make much sense anyway...)

Quote of the day: "I am the statue, watching her around the elephant."

Mai Day

I hate to say it, but I may have had too much coffee already today.

Get back to work!

I like this CD review: "If funk were a disease, this album would be fatal." I realize that some of you suspect that funk may in fact be fatal.
I like it, but it certainly doesn't increase my productivity.

Universalist Christology?

Like many people around here these days, I have a lot of work to do. So why am I blogging? Like many people around here, I don't really want to do it.
Oh well.

Dreaming

You might hope I have something funny to say about coffee, or the MBTI--or the enneagram for that matter--or Rocky and Bullwinkle, anabaptists, the cold, Dr. Jekyll and whatshisname, derivative music (e.g., Def Leppard, the Scorpions, although certainly not Paul Simon), pandora.com--and maybe the Mother Funk Conspiracy--or even Bridget Jones' brain.

But not today.

Theory of something

Here come the holidays!

I don't think I can add anything today.
Not even a pithy, explanatory joke.

Yes, I have work to do...

But it's cold here, and I don't really want to do it.

Caffeinated Bullwinkle Universe, part 2

I wonder who might come out of the hat--perhaps Brother Blüz.

Then again, maybe not: Bullwinkle's magic tricks never quite worked out, and it's not clear that mine will end up any better.

Every day I get a little bit closer to that light at the end of the tunnel, but I have this fear that there's just another tunnel ahead.

But I've got Rhymin' Simon in my head this morning--still crazy after all these years. So I guess it could be worse.

Caffeinated Bullwinkle Universe

This isn't the worst Monday morning I've encountered, not even for this semester, but knowing that I have one more to go really makes this one drag. Being busy, trying to take care of all the lose ends, that I can handle: it's the waiting for it all to be over that's unpleasant. Can't we just skip this part and move on to the brighter tomorrow? (I know the answer to that one, but I still don't like waiting.)
The second cartoon is "Classic Miro"--I was looking for the cartoon where it's an anabaptist that's coming out of the hat, rather than light, but couldn't find it this morning. (Rocky, of course, objects. Darn flying squirrels and their practicality.)
I need another cup of coffee, and I'd much rather be talking about Boris and Natasha than the Five Pillars of Islam this afternoon. That shouldn't be too surprising, coming from a guy who has modeled his life on Mr. Know-it-all.

Blustery Day

I was walking across the main bridge in our little town, looking down and noting that the river looks like a real river today--which is a little scary in itself--and then noticed that the wind was blowing so hard that I had stopped moving forward.



Little known fact: the original title of one of Robert Louis Stevenson's more famous works was, The Strange Case of Dr. Dore and Mr. Miro. Aside from the obvious typo, the publisher made two suggestions: first, change the names because those are too odd (I'm not sure that "Jekyll" and "Hyde" are any better, but it's not my book).
Second, there needed to be a more dramatic way of showing the duality of human nature, the evil that lies within, than simply drawing cartoons. But the basics of the plot were there.

"Today's Best Rock"

I don't really like the Doors.
Why, you're probably asking yourself, should I care? Well, it's just to illustrate my disappointment, yet again, with radio.
As I was leaving work this afternoon, I turned on the radio; since I had missed most of "Talk of the Nation" and decided to try to find a decent music station (always dicey around here). I shouldn't get my hopes up, but why is that stations seem to invariably follow their boast, "today's best rock!" with a song that is just plain horrible? So I kept going and found the Doors ("Like a dog without a bone, An actor out alone") but that's the best this little town has to offer.
Now, before you jump to the conclusion that I'm some middle-aged white guy with a pony-tail and an earring who always complains that "music was better when I was a kid," let me just say that Def Leppard's Pyromania was one of the better albums when I was in high school (much better than the Phil Collins onslaught), which pretty much means that nothing was happening then, either (U2, REM and Elvis Costello were around, but not getting much radio play--I grew up in an even smaller town that the one in which I currently reside). Feel free to discuss how music sucked when you were in high school, too, in the comments.
(I realize that this isn't much of a post, considering that I haven't posted in over a week, but I hope that you at least can enjoy the cartoon.)

"Naive aprioristic autoanthropology"

I've been to Powells and got my fix: who knew a visit to Portland would would make me think of Matt?
Some select quotes from Daniel C. Dennett:
"The individual cells that compose you are alive, but we now understand life well enough to appreciate that each cell is a mindless mechanism, a largely autonomous microrobot, no more conscious than a yeast cell...
We are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, non-robotic ingredients at all."

But it's not just about robots: "Must we talk about zombies? Apparently we must."

And an unexpected treat from Selmer Bringsjord: "It all comes down to zombies."
Doesn't it, though?

Giving thanks

This hardly seems like the right cartoon to leave my loyal readers with for the next week, but I haven't had time for the "cookie" series this week, and I doubt I'll be able to post for the next week.
So, traveling mercies for all who are traveling, rest for all those who aren't.
(And please forgive my Hebrew!)

The Perfect Pizza

Whenever I think of the ontological argument (and I do that as little as I can, but Anselm keeps popping up these days), I think of an example I used primarily back when I taught at Radford.
No disrespect intended: we can compare Anselm's thoughts about God to the perfect pizza. The crust is just right, neither too thick nor too thin, not too chewy or crisp, not over- or under-cooked... ditto with the sauce, the cheese, and whatever other toppings you might desire. After all, it's the perfect pizza. Here's where we get back to Anselm: what would make that pizza you're currently thinking of even better? Well, it would be even better if it were here right now, i.e., if it existed. Since Anselm was talking about God and not a pizza, he could say that, since God is "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived," then God must exist. (Just as the truly perfect pizza must exist--but there's nothing inherent in the concept of a "pizza" which makes it necessarily perfect in the way that God is.)
The thing I particularly like about this example is that it addresses the problem of our finite imagination. We don't know what God's perfection consists in, but we can see that our differing ideas of what makes a perfect pizza can point towards some ideal. Whatever our notion of perfection is, God must be greater than that, but because God is that being than which nothing greater can be conceived, however else we imagine God, existence is a necessary perfection (i.e., a God that didn't exist wouldn't be perfect).
Now, if that argument doesn't make sense to you, please don't blame me: blame Anselm. That is, something has gone wrong here, but it's difficult to say exactly what. It wasn't until Kant came along in the eighteenth century that we see where the problem lies.

Work needs to get done...

And it doesn't seem to be getting done today.

Part of that is simply focus problems: I'm sitting in the piazza San Marco, having a cup of coffee in the late morning with Friedrich Nietzsche, trying to figure out... well, what I'm going to do next. The book contract is not simply for a book I have written, although I have done a lot of work on it. The problem is, I did that work seven years ago and haven't really looked at it since. Even the parts that I consider polished and well written need to be brought up to date; at the very least, I need to do a literature review to see if there's anything out there I need to incorporate.
And the chapters that I already know need work...

and I really want to do that work, which is precisely the problem I'm having this afternoon, because it's not the most urgent work to be done.
I need to be reading about St. Scholastica and Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, as well as Kathryn Tanner's Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, which I don't particularly like.
And despite my threat to "not-so-casually mention the book in any and all of your conversations," I doubt that Nietzsche would be welcome in the above discussions.

Radio Radio

I've recently discovered some new, listenable radio stations... which must be some sort of odd Midwestern thing, because both in the place I grew up (West Coast) and where I've lived as an adult (Mid-Atlantic and the Deep South), you pretty much know exactly what's on the dial all the time (unless they decide to switch formats as soon as you discover them, something that happened to me in Roanoke back in '98).
Anyhow, I've been thinking about the various--and pretty good--NPR stations that come in down at one end of the dial, and the smooth jazz--with Stevie Wonder thrown in this afternoon at least--I occasionally listen to at the other end of the dial... and the mixture of country and Christian stations in between. "Country & Western" is not my music, despite the fact that the little boys who lived across the street in Roanoke always thought I listened to country because they would troop over when the Dead broke into Mama Tried or Big River or Me & My Uncle on some bootleg I was listening to.
C&W is the music of my uncle, Fred, who shoes and trains horses for a living. His kids--my cousins--listen to it to, but both of them did rodeo as a varsity sport down in high school in Bakersfield, CA. And since it was part of the culture of a close part of my family ("close" in the emotional sense, not in physical proximity), I recognized that I couldn't just co-opt it. That, and it tends to be stupid and repetitive.
On the other hand, Christian music is mostly unlistenable, at least what they play on the radio around here, as well as what my grandparents listen to (although I have a killer version of "Abide with Me" on my latest CD!)
SO: depending on where you are in town, and the weather (and possibly other factors I haven't yet discovered, such as the color of my socks and how many times I've posted in the last week), I can pick up some decent rock and roll on the radio. But it's a gamble.

Recording contract?

Not today, but I did get my book contract!

Busy Wednesday

Today is yet another busy day, although at this point it looks as though I'll get everything done.


Well, probably.






In any case, since I might not get to post again until next week, I thought I'd leave you with a bunch of cartoons.




And I'd apologize to Drew... but I don't really feel like it.


And I guess I could mention that I've recently learned a Chinese phrase, hsuan pin to chu, which became the name of the cartoon which it describes. Who knew I'd learn anything while reading theology?

Wet Feet

I've just gotten back from a lecture on the medieval university which was quite interesting (and I'm sure Jerry would be proud of me--"the world needs more medievalists!"), but I was a bit disturbed that even back then parents were concerned about students wasting their time strumming the guitar...