Summerland

Here it is, the middle of the freakin' summer, and I've only read 7 books this whole year. The last thing I finished was Flannery O'Conner's Complete Stories, and that was 2 months ago. By this time last year I had read over 20 books. And so the pendulum swings...

I'm not in step with the whole Harry Potter craze. Don't get me wrong, I love those books, but I'm about 3 books behind now. and those are some thick mofos. I have about 10 other books I'd like to finish before I get to those. maybe this fall I'll try to catch up... In the meantime, I'm in the middle of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer - a book that was banned upon its release for indecency and obscenity, for decades we free Americans weren't allowed to read it. I'm not sure how that all works, but it obviously didn't. Does censorship ever do anything but the opposite of that which it sets out to do? I'm also reading Flannery O'Conner's Mystery and Manners - an excellent book of non-fiction, mostly dealing with the subject of the art of writing, novels, Catholicism, and the meeting of religion and literature. great stuff which I will be quoting here soon...

If you're any good at math, you've figured out by now that I've been back from Cornerstone for a few weeks now. It's been a fairly busy month for a slacker like me, so I haven't had the time nor the energy to sit down and write. And as Annie Dillard says, if you let the work go for even a day, you'd better come back at it with a chair and whip in hand... this here post is one of them "I forgot how to do this and so I'm gonna practice a few lines" posts. I'm still not sure if I ought to be writing for a reader or just for myself. I know you're reading this, dear reader, but I think I'm supposed to pretend you're not there if this is to be anything worth its purpose. Self-consciousnes is the enemy, the twin brother of everydayness...

I'm writing this at 6am, and I've noticed that summer birds sound different upon waking than spring birds do. This sacred hour of the dawn (or, as I like to call it, bedtime) changes with the seasons, and I've never noticed this before. Spring birds at dawn are probably one of my favorite sounds, indicating that the long dead winter is finally really over, and the resurrection from the dead is maybe still possible...

speaking of which, for some reason the passing of Tammy Faye both shocked and saddened me. Seeing her last interview made me gasp once again at the horror that is death. The life had literally been sucked right out of her, and she was nearly nothing more than a talking corpse at the end, and listening to her awakened the constant struggle within myself to come to grips with a God that allows us to know such horror. If I have doubts about the existence of a hell in the face of a loving god, I simply have to ask, why this hell now? 2,000 years later, after Christ came to save the world from sin and death, and we are still dying in the midst of evil all around us...

I'll try to post something more detailed about Cornerstone at some point soon, along with a few other stoney ideas I have rattling around in my head...