Her characters are haunted by the glory of God, "the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus," and thus lead bloody horrible lives and, like Jesus, die grotesque deaths. Their lives recall Jonah's, who ran from God at his own peril. O'Connor's vision of faith, according to Dark, is much more in keeping with the apocalyptic faith of scripture than is the sentimentalized spirituality heard on Christian radio. Salvation is terrifying precisely because it is apocalyptic--it radically changes our lives, prevents us from living comfortably, and opens our eyes to transcendent reality. O'Connor's stories portray a world where grace is terrible, mercy comes unbidden and the fear of God is real and warranted.

- This quote is from Melissa Jenks' review of David Dark's: Everyday Apocalypse: the Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, the Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons.

I was talking to my Stanford friend, Matt, on the phone yesterday and he told me that he had just reread Flannery O'Connor's short story, The Turkey. He also said that this has become his favorite O'Connor story.

As Matt described the story I realized that I didn't know it. So I got my collection of O'Connor short stories, headed to a coffee shop and read the story, which is absolutely fascinating.

I had totally overlooked The Turkey.

The Turkey is near the front of O'Connor's collection of short stories. It was one of the stories in her masters thesis at Iowa. While I've read most of her stories, I've paid less attention to the stories at the front of the book because some of them (like The Train, The Peeler, and Enoch and the Gorilla) are more maturely reworked in her novel Wise Blood and elsewhere in her later work.

The Turkey is about an eleven-year-old boy, Ruller, who chases down a wounded turkey and captures it. But, in the encounter with the turkey, he goes to deeper places and has a first encounter with the mystery of God and reconsiders the religious teaching and traditions of his family, and he toys with a sense of "calling." He also encounters the attraction of pride and sees consequences of following pride over taking a simpler path.

There are many themes in this short story that introduce the reader to themes that dominate O'Connor's later work.

I enjoyed reading The Turkey.

I also thought about other O'Connor themes and her prose. One collection of O'Connor prose is called Mystery and Manners. I talked to Matt about the concept of "mystery" as a theological idea. O'Connor says that "mystery" is an uncomfortable concept. I see that and have long thought about what she means by "mystery." Mystery is not a tidy concept in theology or literature.

I was also thinking about reading as I was driving home last night. I've had a recent encounter that left me thinking: "I bet that those people don't read." I'm not writing this to be mean, but I'm convinced that people who lack imagination do so, in part, because they don't read. So, they're left with a view of the world that is narrow and flat.

I saw your picture on the Internet last night when I was looking for photos of Sufjan Stevens!"

The story is that she found my Smugmug photo album of Sufjan Stevens' show at The El Rey in Los Angeles.

That's such an LA Moment.

(Good thing Owen's wife wasn't there!)

Kevin Gallagher, a commenter, informed me that one can buy alcohol on Sunday in Masshachusetts. I did some research and found this Boston Globe article on Blue Laws that confirms that Massachusetts changed its ways in 2004. I left Massachusetts in the summer of 1998. 

technorati tags: Blue+Laws, Boston, Massachusetts

It's not an easy as it might look!

The success of the site has spun off a book.

I don't have designs on anything grand like PostSecret. However, PostSecret tells me that people like to tell their stories - especially in the context of other people who are telling their stories.

That has sparked my interest in searching out and collecting personal, observed or overheard stories of joy and hope. I'm curious as to what people might share. And I think that the exercise of looking for joy is a good one.

Send me a story if you have one to tell.

Please feel free to share this post with someone else who might want to share a story.

Thanks!

I made a “to do” list this morning and, as a result, I got so much done today! For example, I’ve had a wrapped package in the front seat of my car for about a week. I hadn’t gotten around to sending it to my brother in Texas. There was no rush to get it out, but it bugged me that I forgot to take care of it every day. But I got it mailed off today – because it was on the list. (Is this sounding too much like My Name Is Earl?)

Actually, I had six different tasks that had been hanging around – and I got them all done today.

I wanted to make this point because junior year was my best year in college, and the only year that I got a perfect gpa. That was the year that I made a study schedule that divided up “study time” and “play time” – and I kept to my schedule religiously (literally, since I was a Jesuit at the time – but that’s another post). I swore by my schedule and told friends that having a schedule allowed me to totally enjoy my play time because I wasn’t worried about when I was going to get my school work done. I knew when I would because it was on the schedule.

Sure, today was just one day, but it was good to see that there really is something to putting things down on paper and getting them done.

There is a reason blogging has taken off as it has.

I had my first "homepage" at MIT. Robby built it for me and it was complete hand-coded html. I had a printout html manual that I used to change parts of the homepage. It was a lot of fun but it wasn't dynamic. A homepage stayed the same until you made some changes.

It the late 90's services popped up that hosted personal homepages. Lycos and Angel Fire were big players. They were slow and chunky and they carried ads. Then people started to buy domain names, which I jumped up right away, as soon as I understood it. I got "RolandAllen.com" although I only used it as an e-mail address once I acquired it.

Then, I got a TypePad blog. I got in early and was able to pick up "roland.blogs.com". Getting the TypePad blog changed my life!

With TypePad I could tinker with customizing my blog, and have a blogroll and I could see the traffic that came my way. Blogging came with a community and I loved it!

The difference with a blogging community is that it is built around common interests. BUT, what's really different about blogging is that in most cases many of the connections are with strangers.

My sense is that the ABOVE GROUND blogging communities (MovableType, WordPress, Blogger, etc.) really is about blogging. That is, connecting on ideas and opinions. For example, I came to know of Elise and her blog projects when I started to work with MovableType. She's so respected in the MovableType comunity. And now her "Simply Recipes" blog is a daily feed on Google's personalized homepage.

There is another blogging community that is for social connections. That's a world that it is under fire right now.

This post is about the former type of blogging.

I like the sense of connecting with others around the world who share similar interests. I've been part of ::grid blogs::, which are one event projects when everyone blogs on the same topic or theme on a particular day. I've read some bloggers every day for years and maintained an interest in their blogs.

Blogging tools allow bloggers to track the topics of interest that draw readers to the site. We know where readers come from, how they get to the site (mainly through Google searches on topics of interest to them), and what they look at on our sites.

For example, here's a cluster map of the nearly 2000 visits to this blog over the past three weeks. I am fascinated that this many people get onto this site.

Some of the topics that get people to this site are my comments on particular Flannery O'Connor short stories, often there's a search for an image that I've posted (-for example: the windmills in Palm Springs or the San Clemente Pier), Sufjan Stevens was a big search title this year that got people to this site, and other search topics.

Blogging is "self-publishing" and every writer wants to believe that there are people who want to read the product. While not conclusive, these are some of the reasons bloggers blog.

It's been a good weekend. I went to the soccer game yesterday afternoon and watched Drake dominate the midfield. That was great. Tj was there along with a couple of Drake's main cheerer on-ers. I realize that I'm a fairly loud fan. I can't help it. I tend to get in it when I go to sporting events. Otherwise, what's the point. You gotta want your team to win. Kevin's dad told me that he caught my enthusiasm on tape. We'll see where that shows up!

I was in Los Angeles this afternoon "Granny-sitting" while my aunt went to a luncheon with some of her friends. I like Granny-sitting. To update friends: My Grandmother came home from the hospital Thursday morning. She's doing pretty well, although this last stay in the hospital left her very weak and much more frail. We hope to get her moving around more and we'd love to see her start going outside to sit in the garden.

Part of my job while I'm in LA is to make sure that my uncle and aunt's computer is operating well, which means that I'm primarily cleaning up the spyware that comes with all the stuff that their teenage grandchildren - my cousins' kids - download onto the computer. I enjoy my tasks.

I'm kicking back tonight. I still get a kick out of the British comedies that come on Public Television on Saturday nights. I'm a sucker for those programs. The network sitcoms can't keep my attention, but I love the British stuff.

I'm listenning to a cd that I picked up over New Year's in Palm Springs: k.d. lang: hymns of the 49th parallel. It's a very pleasant evening.

I plan to write more about this, but I've been thinking a lot about why we blog. Chris 1's post a few days ago is pretty cool. It also captures the friendship and connection that a number of us "SMES bloggers" have among ourselves. As nerdy as it is, I enjoy the fellowship of ideas and creativity that comes with this hobby.

Expect more on this.

I'm posting on this summer's trip to Maine and New England to begin with because I love the region, especially Maine. Then I'll probably go on to Crete and other trips in Europe. I think that this will be an interesting site. Let me know what you think.

I have lots of travel photos and stories that I plan to organize and post on the site. The advantage of multiple blog projects is that readers can pick what they're interested in. I hope to list travel resources as the travel blog develops.

Some friends have asked me how I find time to do these projects. My response is that blogging and learning blog design is becoming my hobby. I really enjoy it. Some people collect stamps. I blog. Multiple projects allows me to blog to my heart's content. As I've posted on one other of the new projects (a really nerdy site that I'll share next week): I can wallow in nerdiness with abandon.

One link that I'll call to your attention is Johnny Jet. Johnny DiScala is a large personality. A graduate of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, he was an admissions officer at Marymount College in Palos Verdes for a long time and started a travel site on the side about five years ago. He's very friendly and became great friends with flight attendants as he crossed the country for his admissions work. JohnnyJet.com started out as travel stories that he picked up from his friends in the airline industry. It grew into a one stop travel resources site. It didn't take long for the site to get noticed by travel writers and early on Johnny got an endorsement from USAToday. Johnny left admissions and got into being JohnnyJet full time. The rest, as they say, is history.

Here is a summary of what happened:

Bill Hill, a former police officer, shot the animal just after 7 a.m. Tuesday with a 9 mm Beretta. His wife had seen the animal perched on a retaining wall less than 10 feet from her bedroom window and screamed. Hill fired two shots, one hitting the cat in its hip.

Sheriff's deputies and Fish and Game officials tracked the bleeding 2-year-old cat and shot and killed it just after 8:30 a.m.

1. I like living away from crowds and congested cities like Huntington Beach.
2. I also enjoy seeing open space outside of my front door.
3. However, I feel a bit guilty when I see all the animals in the area: deer, coyote, rabbits, owls, etc. It can feel like we've overbuilt into areas that should have remained open space.

I’ve had a couple on my mind for a while because I own a number of domain names and I’ve wanted to put them to use. But something happened last week that encouraged me to act on launching the new sites.

I posted a summary on the other projects so I’ll do the same here:

• I want to learn how to use the newest version of MovableType (3.2), which is substantially different from prior versions of the software and I want to do so without messing up this weblog, which I’ve worked on for about two years.
• My writing on this weblog is honest, but cautious. That is a result of drawing a fairly large and diverse readership. Most of the readers are annonymous. However, others are not and what I post attempts to carefully navigate the known audience.
• To continue that point, many of my readers on my main weblog are students at the school I work at. My writing is respectful of the fact that impressionable young people read the blog. I'm fine with that. However, some people who read this weblog have a lesser understanding and tolerance for nuance than I do.
• I own four domain names, at this writing, and I want to put them to use. This is an opportunity to do so.

Of course in order for this to work, I have to keep the other projects disassociated from this weblog, for the most part, because I don’t want those projects scrutinized by censoring voices. I will share access to those projects with friends and others who want access to them.

The projects include: a photoblog of friends, another site that is dedicated to “nerd-speak” – that is, all the geeky techie stuff that I find interesting, and a third site that is for personal thoughts, ideas and images that I want to share with my peers.

That doesn’t mean the death of “RolandAllen.com”. Quite the contrary. This is my principal weblog and identity on the web. It is also a repository of nearly 900 blog posts and hundreds of images.

I'm excited about these new projects becuase it's fun putting them together, and I'm learning lots of new things about working with domain names, CSS, and plugins. I've put in a LOT of hours into getting these projects beyond alpha stage.

The news media were out if full force this morning, like vultures waiting for first light to swoop in on the kill. Besides a half dozen or so news trucks, there were also news helicopters overhead.

On another note, Wheaton College and Westmont College duke it out on which of C. S. Lewis' wardrobes was inspiration for Narnia, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education:

When C.S. Lewis described a wardrobe that served as the Pevensie children's magical portal to Narnia, he had no shortage of models to choose from. His childhood home in Belfast would have had several, since closets were a rarity in that day.

At least two of Lewis's wardrobes still exist, and both are owned by colleges in the United States. One is at Wheaton College, in Illinois, and the other at Westmont College, in California. Over the years, the colleges have politely disagreed about which armoire inspired Lewis.

Last month The Chronicles of Narnia hit the big screen, and — thanks to the news media — the "war of the wardrobes" was on.

However, Slate's article on Patti Smith's new book of poetry caught my eye. According to Slate and to the couple of reviews on Amazon.com, Smith is a good writer.

Auguries of Innocence is a testament to her ongoing devotion to poetry—and not the poetry of her contemporaries. She adheres to poetic inversion and archaic language, and the poems are studded by her trademark French symbolist abstractions: "I saw the book upon the shelf,/ I saw you who was myself" (a la Rimbaud) and "I will sit here till dawn tripping/ the spine of the stars." The influence of poets like Baudelaire and Blake (whose "The Chimney Sweeper" she reprises here) is obvious, and her wide reading has resulted in a sense of how structure and sentiment intertwine in poetry.
...
Reading Blake, she told me, "reminded me of how elegantly he lived through personal strife and poverty, how he kept his personal vision"—a vision she strives to adhere to herself: namely, that music, poems, and paintings can make us better people.

Flannery O'Connor said that people who have the ability to read and choose not to do so lack imagination and a sense for mystery. It's awesome that Smith reads good literature and takes off from there as a poet. This makes me believe her when she says that "music, poems, and paintings can make us better people." She presents a rich idea and, clearly, art has encouraged creativity in her life. These are grand and hopeful and very cool thoughts.

One final point: I enjoy words. I love the sound of the title word "auguries" because, to me, it carries a mysterious tone that seems particularly archaic and literary.