Fire and Knowledge

Part of the The Reading Interviews series.

Could you tell us a little about yourself?

I am a campus minister, communicator and teacher in southeastern KY. I am married with two grown children. I write at Internet Monk and Boars Head Tavern.

What are your favorite books? What do you like about them and how have they influenced you?

• Works of Shakespeare: Unsurpassed. Invented what it means to be human.
• The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis: Incredibly creative way to present a subject most people are adverse to, and exceedingly insightful.
• Between Noon and Three by Robert Capon: Grace is the great theme of life, and this is the most powerful statement of grace I’ve ever read. You never escape it.
• Blood Meridian by Carmack Macarthy: Violence and evil are part of life. This looks at it in a personal and an epic way, with depth and with childlike innocence. A blood bath of a book, but actually beautiful. Some call this the greatest American novel.

Books influence you because you meet another mind who sees the same world that you do, but differently. You know you aren’t alone and that the truth of existence extends past yourself.

Who are your favorite writers?

• Shakespeare. He knows both sides of human beings.
• C.S. Lewis. Clarity.
• Eugene Peterson. The Beauty of the Bible.
• Thomas Merton. A life well lived.

What is the best non-fiction and fiction book you have read recently?

Non-fiction: Shakespeare: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd
Fiction: Henry IV Part I, William Shakespeare

Why do you think reading is important? What has led you to make it a priority in your life?

The encounter with other human minds is joyous and awesome.
The mind and soul are hungry for truth, beauty and story.

The first child whose genes come at least in part from some corporate lab, the first child who has been “enhanced” from that came before—that’s the first child who will glance back over his shoulder and see a gap between himself and human history.

But here’s the really awful part: he won’t be able to look forward, either. He won’t be able to imagine himself connected with those who will come after him. Because, of course, by then there will be better upgrades. They’ll be Windows 2050 to his Atari. He’ll be marooned forever on his own small island, as will all who follow him.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 64-5

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’re already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words—not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994), 198.

It’s hard for me to overstate the effectiveness of [the old mass media ad system]. Every time you buy a box of breakfast cereal, you’re seeing the power of TV at work. Due to a commercial you likely saw thirty years ago, you’re spending an extra dollar or two on a box of puffed wheat or sugared corn. Over your lifetime, that’s thousands of dollars in cost premium for TV ads just for breakfast cereal.

–Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, p. 15

I’ve written an update to my original post on the Ray Comfort debate debacle. I think that post might have the most comments of any on this site!

In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hand, did worse than the stoners by an average of 6 points.

There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted. More than a quarter of each 9-5 period (28%, or 134.4 minutes) is consumed by such interruptions, and 40% of people interrupted go on to a new task without finishing the one that was interrupted. This is how we end up with 20 windows open on our computers and nothing completed at 5pm.

Multi-tasking is dead. It never worked and it never will. Intelligent people love to sing its praises because it gives them permission to avoid the much more challenging alternative: focusing on one thing.

–Tim Ferriss “The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload and Triple Productivity in 24 Hours” (pdf), p. 5

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

–Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), p. 25

A sober friend once said to me, “When I was still drinking, I was a sedated monster. After I got sober, I was just a monster.” He told me about his monster. He sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are. The secrecy, the obfuscation, the fact that these monsters can only be hinted at, gives us the sense that they must be very bad indeed. But when people let their monsters out for a little onstage interview, it turns out that we’ve all done or thought the same things, that this is our lot, our condition. We don’t end up with a brand on our forehead. Instead, we compare notes.

–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994), 198