partsofspeaking

This morning I had a long discussion with a co-member of the church and Life Group I attend. She is a young professor at a university I know well and she had some questions about tenure and work-life balance. It was a good talk, mutually helpful, and it will continue. This article appeared in my "vision" along that line. It describes me to a tee. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/  I recently wrote about how corporations like pro-choice policies because it means they can employ women more and get more out of them. This all seems scary to me. I often say "I love my work," but that's a problem  I enjoy and get personal satisfaction from teaching and helping students and other work of an administrator, but I can't love my work; that is putting it in the wrong place.  

All anyone can talk about in the media is the Jussie Smollett case.  I'll let them do that. I wouldn't say anything that has already been said before. I liked Charles Barkley's take on it.  "American, don't commit a crime with a check." My son tweeted that he is the hero we need now. Last night at 10 I got an email from a faculty member. Two of her online students were escalating an argument about race and culture on the discussion board. Let's just say one of them should have kept her opinion about other races to herself. One benefit of working for a state organization is that it reminds me to be very careful on social media and that I don't have absolute freedom of speech (though I'm a free speech advocate, free expression is never absolute). I especially don't when it comes to student relations. My point is that those restrictions are good training for the rest of my life. As a novelist I think in particulars and stories and love exa...

Here I am talking about the final book of the Bible. The life group I co-lead wanted to study the book of Revelation for the next quarter. We usually use the LifeWay materials.  I looked into study books and decided the best bet was John MacArthur; you really can't go wrong doctrinally with him. I ordered the $10 study guides and also his commentaries. I have to say I was not crazy about the idea. Revelation starts great, ends great, but has some really, uh, challenging material in the middle (I could have said weird stuff but that's not appropriate). Whether it was intellectual laziness or insecurity about how we would teach it, I was not looking forward to it, but I'm the last person to impose my will on others. So. . . . I was wrong.  MacArthur's commentary has changed my mind and heart. Oh my word!  Chapter 1 is a continuation of John's gospel, which I am studying in depth (and need a good Johanine theology book). Example: "They will look upon Him w...

Can the "news" get any crazier? TV actor fakes hate crimes and wastes all kinds of taxpayer money. New Congresspersons can't keep their mouths shut. Toxic twitter where a few rants make something a trend and breaking news. People are actually questioning whether we should have national borders.  Meanwhile, millions starving in Venezuela despite world's desire to help in humanitarian crisis.

I recently heard a commentator on Fox say, "Here you will get the real perspective." Ironic, much? That's not really different from "My truth." Both are oxymoronic. 

I'll watch anything (at least for a while) that has Agatha Christie's name on it. Hence, I watched the first episode of The ABC Murders , with John Malkovich as Poirot. Oh, how about no. John Malkovich tries.  They at least put him in a fat suit.  It's really a question of how far a director/producer can take a reinterpretation of a literary character. I just think they take it too far.  It's very gritty, violent, just plain kind of nasty, etc., too.  There is also the problem of chronology. We are told it is 1933, but it has been multiple years since Poirot's heyday. But . ... the others were set in the 1930s. What? There will just never be another Poirot for me than David Suchet, who is a wonderful character actor and a fine human being and believer.  I think Agatha would agree. 

Last Friday night I watched Roma on NetFlix. It is up for an Academy Award, which means little to me but heh, I was tired and it was free. I thought Cuaron's work on Children of Men was superb, although I liked the book better, but he made a compelling version of it. Roma is wonderful. For those who say "Nothing happens until an hour and half in" I say, "grow up." You are wrong.  There is a lot happening, just as there is a lot happening in the day to day of life. The point is that he makes the mundane into a character study that then pays off. I sometimes thought the main character, a domestic, was too passive and therefore not a strong protagonist, but . . . she is strong in a way most women are strong and we take for granted.  Yes, there are issues of class and ethnicity there, but those are non-negotiable. She is not fighting against the 30,000 foot influencers in her life, but the immediate ones. I do not recommend movies to people because it is ...

I have wanted to watch THE WIFE and finally did last night, on Amazon Prime (I had to pay for it). Well, yes, the acting is good, but I thought the plot was just silly. 1.  The supposedly massively intelligent woman, smart enough to write books worthy of the Nobel Prize, believes the opinion of some woman writer in 1958 that women will never be taken seriously as writers. This is in the day of Harper Lee, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou.  Yeah, right. 2.  This woman's writing is good enough to win the Nobel Prize and she wants no one to know about it? She's either so afraid or so codependent with her husband that she's willing to not be recognized for that?  3.  How could her writing be that good, that influential, without her having access to the wider literary world?  It made me kind of mad, really. But it also made me mad because I thought of a similar plot years ago, where a famous writer's w...

I don't watch him every night, but sometimes Tucker Carlson says some interesting and provocative things. Tonight he explained why the left wants abortion so badly--and boy, do they. A woman who wants to raise children is not contributing to the workforce and the economy. Corporate American needs women who can give their all to their jobs, and moms just can't do that.  He shows the hideous Chelsea Clinton quote that women had added 3.5 trillion to the economy since Roe v. Wade was passed. He makes a good case. So, we white and/or middle class folks have fewer babies . . . .and we then have to depend on an underclass of uneducated immigrants (who have lots of babies) to support our infrastructure, which means they are kept down and "in their place" as laborers. Sure, we'll let them in, but we don't want them to rise.  This sounds racist, I'm sure, to someone.  It's not.  It's anti-corporate. Ideas have consequences. I have been slow to d...