Fire and Knowledge

Not only do rock lyrics denigrate reason, but the way rock is usually experienced discourages any kind of careful reflection. Much of the time, rock (like most popular music) is used to cover over silence. Whether in a car, on a bus, or when walking, rock music serves for its listeners as a kind of personal sound track, enlivening tedious activities with excitement, much the way that film and television scores enliven boring passages with exciting music. Time that could be spent thinking is thus spent listening and daydreaming.

—Kenneth A. Myers All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1989), p. 149

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things to it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

—C.S. Lewis (Cited in All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture by Kenneth A. Myers (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1989), p. 92)

I got "tagged" for a "meme" by Amanda at Foreword. I don’t normally do anything like this, but I’ll make my first life exception because it is about books. And I like books. Too much.

Number of Books I Own

I would guess somewhere between [update: 600-800], but I don’t have them counted at this point. A little over five large bookshelves worth. But I’m still young and have time to accumulate many many more.

Last Book I Bought

Last week I picked up The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein.

Last Book I Read

I finished my second reading of The Lord of the Rings (this time in the beautiful 50th anniversary edition) and my first reading of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes about the same time (two days ago).

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me

• The Bible. This triggered the "first revolution" in my life, and I became a Christian in 1998.
• Desiring God and The Pleasures of God by John Piper. These books triggered the "second revolution" in my life, and I embraced the doctrines of grace in 2001. For those who don’t know, that means I’m a card-carrying Calvinist.
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. I read this book for the first time last November (2004), and it triggered the "third revolution" in my life, when the bias of mediums were finally revealed to me. I think of almost everything differently now, and am better for it (although that depends on who you ask).
• Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp. Even though I am not a parent (yet!), this book heavily influenced my thinking about how to parent, shepherd, and discipline.
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I had to include one fiction book. This book began my journey of reading and enjoying Dickens and other great novelists. I plan to re-read it sometime this year.

Who’s Next?

I hate spreading this virus to someone else, so I give my apologies in advance to Justin Taylor.

Good art, on the other hand, takes us to a world we wouldn’t have imagined ourselves. It does not leave us where it found us. “In a fully aesthetic experience, feeling is deepened, given new content and meaning. Till then, we did not know what it was we felt; one could say that the feeling was not truly ours.” Great music, literature, painting, or architecture imprints itself in our lives and becomes a reference point for our most subtle and profound experiences.

—Kenneth A. Myers All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1989), p. 82

Popular art depicts the world, not as it is, nor even as it might be, but as we would have it. In that world we are neither strangers nor afraid, for it is of our own making. Everything in it is selected and placed for our interest. It is a world exhausted in a single perspective—our own—and it is peopled by cardboard figures that disappear when viewed edgewise. Art opens to us a landscape over which we may roam freely, unfolds events that can be seen through the eyes of even the least of their participants.

—Kenneth A. Myers All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1989), p. 86

The last unfinished novel of 19th-century novelist Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Christo, was published for the first time as a book yesterday [June 3rd, 2005] after it was rediscovered by a French academic.

(Read the full article)

Do you need to give a graduation speech? Joe Carter posts Neil Postman’s graduation speech that he never gave. You can use it as your own graduation speech, if you like:

Having sat through two dozen or so graduation speeches, I have naturally wondered why they are so often so bad. One reason, of course, is that the speakers are chosen for their eminence in some field, and not because they are either competent speakers or gifted writers. Another reason is that the audience is eager to be done with all ceremony so that it can proceed to some serious reveling. Thus any speech longer than, say, fifteen minutes will seem tedious, if not entirely pointless. There are other reasons as well, including the difficulty of saying something inspirational without being banal. Here I try my hand at writing a graduation speech, and not merely to discover if I can conquer the form. This is precisely what I would like to say to young people if I had their attention for a few minutes.

If you think my graduation speech is good, I hereby grant you permission to use it, without further approval from or credit to me, should you be in an appropriate situation.

Oh, great. Just what the world needs. More DRM.

But why would Apple [switch to Intel CPUs]? Because Apple wants Intel’s new Pentium D chips.

Released just few days ago, the dual-core chips include a hardware copy protection scheme that prevents “unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard,” according to PC World.

Apple — or rather, Hollywood — wants the Pentium D to secure an online movie store (iFlicks if you will), that will allow consumers to buy or rent new movies on demand, over the internet.

According to News.com, the Intel transition will occur first in the summer with the Mac mini, which I’ll bet will become a mini-Tivo-cum-home-server.

Hooked to the internet, it will allow movies to be ordered and stored, and if this News.com piece is correct, loaded onto the video iPod that’s in the works. . . .

And that’s why the whole Mac platform has to shift to Intel. Consumers will want to move content from one device to another — or one computer to another — and Intel’s DRM scheme will keep it all nicely locked down.