Closing time

After nearly nine years of blogging here at Just Thinking, sometimes regularly, sometimes intermittently, it's time to close this blog and turn toward something new.

I'm grateful to each and every reader who has read this blog, made comments, shared a link, sent me an email, and offered friendship. Thank you so very much.

Here's the link to my website. This is where I'll be based from now on. I'm not sure what the new thing is yet that I'm turning toward but you'll hear about it there. I hope it has something to do with the eventual publishing of the manuscript I've been working on. I hope it has something to do with online contributions to some wonderful sites I've been discovering in recent years. Perhaps, just perhaps, it will involve starting a different very minimalist blog as part of this main website.

I invite you to stay connected by signing up for my mailing list. I'll let you know, in very occasional notes, where my new writing can be found and updates on the book.

Email subscribers: If you already subscribe to this blog via email, you'll be getting an email soon (from nancy at nancy nordenson dot com) giving you the opportunity to confirm with a click that you want your subscription transferred to the mailing list. If you don't see it in a couple days, check your spam folder and then add the new email address to your address book.

Subscribers via Google Reader or another newsfeed: If you subscribe via a news reader, I can't email you directly (or even know who you are) but I hope you'll go to the link and do the quick mailing list sign up.

Again, thank you to each and every reader.

~~~

Justice, Beauty, Grace, and Other Big Words

Praying for Justice

This Lenten season I’ve been in a small group that’s been reading the stories of Jesus leading up to the cross. Last week the story was the parable about the persistent widow, meaning a woman who had no financial means or societal protection since she was no longer provided for by a man. The widow repeatedly goes before a judge, a godless judge, and asks for justice. Give me justice! No! Give me justice! No! Give me justice! No! Finally, the judge is worn down by her persistence and gives her what she asks. He gives her justice. Jesus ends the parable by saying if even a godless judge will eventually reward persistence and give justice, God will certainly answer persistent prayers for justice, and quickly. In the group we wrestled with how some prayers seem never to be answered, let alone quickly, despite the apparent promise in the parable. We wrestled with the factor of time, persistence, why the waiting, how to be patient when to us “quickly” means a day and to God it may mean a thousand years.

The sermon that followed on Sunday focused on the same parable, and here the minister emphasized that this parable isn’t about any kind of prayer but prayers for justice. And the person needing justice isn’t just anyone but a widow, a character type used throughout scripture, along with orphans and aliens, to represent the powerless, those for whom justice is most lacking. The minister gave statistics for groups suffering injustice today: 27 million in human trafficking; 2 million kids in sex trafficking, with 1 girl per day taken from the Mall of America for that purpose, according to the FBI (disclaimer: at one time it was thought to be this number but it’s more complicated than this now with the use of cell phones and websites that lure and trap girls). Pray for justice, keep praying for these groups, he said. Don’t stop.

I went home and thought more about this, about how often I forget to pray for issues of justice, about the promise of quick responses to prayers for justice, and about those statistics. How easy it is to look at big problems and big statistics and see no movement. How easy it is to lack imagination for the effect a single prayer may have on the margins. But maybe the statistic for kids in trafficking would be 2 million minus 1 tomorrow because of my prayer this morning, and minus 10 the next day for 10 more people who prayed. Maybe that 1 or those 10 are indeed rescued quickly and miraculously. Maybe the number would be 4 million were it not for those who never fail to keep praying for justice. Maybe a prayer goes up and a girl who would have been tagged just inside the west entrance of the Mall of America instead is quickly and divinely shielded from the man who was about to tag her. The thought that a single prayer may indeed be answered quickly in terms of justice to a single powerless person creates urgency. There’s no time to waste, no day to skip.

Reading Stack: Image Journal and the Lexicon of Art and Faith

The current issue (75) of Image journal features a series of short essays on the “lexicon of art and faith” by fourteen past contributors. Each was given the assignment to think deeply about the big words that are part of that journal’s common lexicon: beauty (Erin McGraw); mystery (Robert Cording); art (Theodore L. Prescott); story (Brett Lott); presence (Julia Spicher Kasdorf); community (Kathleen Norris); human (Linford Detweiler); discipline (Jeanne Murray Walker); form (A. G. Harmon); freedom (Joel Sheesley); image (Matthew J. Milliner); incarnation (Martha Serpas); suffering (Robert Clark); word (Richard Chess).

Here are some excerpts from “The Word-Soaked World: Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith.”

Erin McGraw on beauty: “Once we’ve been in the presence of beauty, and once the more crotchety among us have batted down the strange resistance to feeling our hearts moved, we are forever vulnerable, limping like Jacob after the angel’s blessing. We know what beauty is, and from now on we will be seeking it or shrinking from it. Why should we hope to attain such a state? Why should we call it good?” You can read Erin McGraw’s essay on beauty in its entirety here.

Robert Cording on mystery: “Our time is marked by our supreme belief in Enlightenment rationality. We are all too ready to say that a word like ‘mystery’ is a nostalgia; we limit the meaning of ‘mystery’ to a quantity of the unknown, thereby opening the possibility that the inevitable acquisition of further knowledge will reduce that which is unknown and, in the future, erase the unknown entirely. A mystery is simply something to be solved--if not now, then later. But the biblical usage of ‘mystery’ (from the Greek mysterion) refers not the quantity of the unknown but rather to the quality of the known; it refers to awe rather than ignorance.”

Kathleen Norris on community: “We do not belong to a church because it’s a self-selected group of like-minded people with whom we feel comfortable. We are there because God has called us to a be a community of faith. We are called there by love, and are asked to love the people who are there, even if we may not like them very much. Hard as it is to believe, it’s this unlikely, contentious, and motley crew that God has gathered to be accountable, both to God and to one another.”

Joel Sheesley on freedom: “If freedom is something that we apprehend metaphorically rather than by definition, it means that we are ever probing to fully grasp its tenor. We are searching for it in every conceivable direction. We yearn for it. Saint Paul sensed that the whole creation is yearning for its liberation, its freedom signaled by the resurrection of Jesus and the hope of resurrection within all his followers. This freedom is no escape, but rather a reinvestment in a world undergoing transformation.”

Robert Clark on suffering: “With such words, whose etymology and resonances are so vast, so rooted and entangled, be careful that what you mean and what you intend (two more overlapping words) do not come to loggerheads. Do not tell me suffering is a blessing, for I will despair; do not tell me it is a curse, for I will despair again. Do not tell me either--since both imply God’s deliberation--for I will not know what to make of such a God at all.”

This issue also includes an interview with Luci Shaw, a poet, writer, adventurer, and overall lovely wise woman who has long been one of my role models.

Image is a quarterly literary and arts journal that publishes work that is “informed by--or grapples with--religious faith.” You can read more about it--and subscribe--here.

 

Giving Up Chocolate for Lent

My good friend Rebecca Kasperak has been a contributing blogger this Lenten season at the blog ExperiLent. In one of her recent posts about giving up chocolate for Lent, she writes, “Semi-sweet chocolate’s velvety texture, its minor jolt of caffeine, and my responsive endorphins light up my pleasure sensors for a brief respite and escape.” I couldn’t agree more. She goes on to examining the connections between craving and longing and grace, and suggests “cravings are arrows to grace.”

“I often approach God with a full heart and mind and schedule. I envision grace, without realizing it, as a gift that tops off my life, like non-dairy whipped cream, something partially hydrogenated that puffs up to fill in the cracks. Nothing obtrusive, you understand, but something that smoothes out the bumps. I often stumble over the truth that grace is a free gift from the consuming love of my life. This Lent, even though I’m giving up chocolate, I’m also trying to shed some hackneyed views about grace, to allow a healthy emptiness to set in, to not rush to fill it with other sweet things.”

You can read her whole post here: “Cravings crack open space – chocolate, emptiness, and grace.”

 

Final Word

Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood was first published in 1948. Edited by Mary Strong, the book is a collection of anonymous letters.

“The time has come for you to march against this tide of darkness and carry your lighted lamps quietly, steadily. Heal yourselves, your bodies, your characters; get out of this slough of indefiniteness and bewilderment; come in where you belong and give this tragic world the infinite qualities of the Spirit when you let it have its way with you as channels for joy, beauty, and truth.” -from Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood

~~~

Working Where and When We Can

Nonconformist Art

The Museum of Russian Art in my city has a new exhibit, "Concerning the Spiritual in Russian Art." The 70-piece exhibit is owned by the Kolodzei Art Foundation, which has over 7000 works in its collection. The foundation was started by Tatiana Kolodzei when at the age of 17, in the 1960s, she started buying pieces of “nonconformist” art that couldn’t be shown in the museums and galleries. The art was considered nonconformist because of abstract form and spiritual (ie, religious or metaphysical) content. Tatiana and her daughter Natalia, who now runs the foundation, were at the museum for the opening reception, which my husband and I attended. Natalia spoke for a few minutes about the exhibit and its history, while Tatiana held the grandbaby. She was dressed in black and charcoal, with sunglasses, a black hat, and black scarf. It was fun to imagine her at 17 in her clandestine mission to find and save art that didn’t fit the anti-spiritual Soviet regime.

I went back last week to have another look at the exhibit; each piece offers so much to think about. For example, there are several crucifixion paintings by Tatiana Levitskaia that were so dense with symbolism and meaning that my friend and I thought we could maybe stand there for hours and not exhaust all there was to see in just those canvases. I read on a plaque by her work that she was involved in the “Bulldozer Show,” which I had not even heard of before. I learned there that an unofficial outdoor art show in the 70s had been completely destroyed, with all the art bulldozed into the ground, because it was of this nonconformist spiritual variety. There’s a wall-sized painting of the prodigal son parable, “Return of the Prodigal Son” by Olga Bulgakova, which is probably the most powerful depiction I’ve ever seen of this story.

The exhibit gets its name from the book by Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a book that had a big impact on me when I read it about five years ago. Kadinsky saw the duty of the artist as spiritual. Art for art's sake, even when the higher ideal of "beauty" is wrapped up in that vision of art, is insufficient to deliver spiritual meaning, to avoid having "hungry souls go away hungry." Spiritual feeling must be in the artist in order for it to be conveyed in the art. Kadinsky believed that abstract art has the greater potential to express inner spiritual feeling compared with representative art because abstraction allows for mystery, for epiphany, even within the context of the most everyday actions and objects. But the spiritual feeling can only arise when the artist's spiritual feeling has been legitimately quickened and when the artist, in turn, constructs the work to evoke spiritual vibrations in the soul.

Here are a couple passages from Kandinsky’s book:

"The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existance casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere; and from this inner standpoint one judges whether it is a good work of art or a bad one.”

and

"It is very important for the artist to gauge his position aright, to realize that he has a duty to his art and to himself, that he is not king of the castle but rather a servant of a nobler purpose. He must search deeply into his own soul, develop and tend it, so that his art has something to clothe, and does not remain a glove without a hand.

Related post: The Art of Work

 

Private Notes

I’ve long been a fan and proponent of carrying a notebook or index cards in one’s pocket or handbag. Last week the value of these hidden notes struck me again. I was quickly reading through a set of little notebooks that I’d carried in my purse over the last several years (photo above) and was amazed by how many random lines on their pages had become key sentences in essays or blog posts. Often those thoughts were written in the car or when waiting for a movie or something else to start or in church.

I’m always intrigued by what kinds of little notebooks people use and how they use them. Joan Didion wrote a classic essay on the subject, “On Keeping a Notebook,” which you can find in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

“We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”

Several years ago I posted something here about an essay of Mary Oliver’s in which she talks about her pocket notebook. From "Pen and Paper and a Breath of Air”:

"For at least thirty years, and at almost all times, I have carried a notebook with me, in my back pocket. It has always been the same kind of notebook--small, three inches by five inches, and hand-sewn....I don't use the pages front to back, but randomly, in a disorderly way. I write wherever I happen to open the notebook. I don't know why this is. When the notebook is fairly full, I start another....Both the shorthand and the written phrase are intended to return me to the moment and place of the entry. I mean this very exactly. The words do not take me to the reason I made the entry, but back to the felt experience, whatever it was. This is important. I can, then, think forward again to the idea--that is, the significance of the event--rather than back upon it. It is the instant I try to catch in the notebooks, not the comment, not the thought."

Of course, making notes of quick thoughts is easy to do on a smart phone, but there’s still something about the handwritten or printed word that an electronic file can’t duplicate. Charles Simic wrote a piece recently on The New York Review of Books Blog in defense of the little notebook, “Take Care of Your Little Notebook.”

“No question, one can use a smart phone as an aid to memory, and I do use one myself for that purpose. But I don’t find them a congenial repository for anything more complicated than reminding myself to pick up a pair of pants from the cleaners or make an appointment with the cat doctor. If one has the urge to write down a complete thought, a handsome notebook gives it more class. Even a scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil are more preferable for philosophizing than typing the same words down, since writing a word out, letter by letter, is a more self-conscious process and one more likely to inspire further revisions and elaborations of that thought.”

One of the sections in my book Just Think is about this very thing so I’m not really saying anything new here, but sometimes it’s good to underscore something tried, true, and so very simple.

Reading Stack: Torn

With the current controversy about Yahoo CEO’s decision to disallow all telecommuting, it’s been interesting to be in the middle of reading Torn: True Stores of Kids, Career & The Conflict of Modern Motherhood (CoffeeTown Press, 2011). Torn is an anthology edited by Samantha Parent Walravens with essays contributed by women in that active parenting age group. Some of them go into an office every day, some work a job (employed or self-employed) from home, some have put their work life on hold, but for each of them, the scenario they’ve chosen isn’t easy, particularly in this economy. If you see a woman carrying a baby or holding the hand of a little boy or girl, say a little prayer for her, whether she’s at the park or on her way to work. And as demonstrated last year by another public figure, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who told her story to The Atlantic (“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”), the difficulty of the decisions facing women who are mothers doesn’t get any easier when the sons and daughters are teenagers.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been in the position of figuring out how to make it all fit via all kinds of fixes: convince the boss to approve reduced hours, negotiate a job share, bring work home, work fewer days but longer days, work weekends, work at night, race to work the minute the bus pulls away, race home to arrive the minute the bus pulls up, bring work home (and pay sons money to let me work without interruption for a specific interval unless of course they were bleeding). The best fix was when I negotiated a telecommuting arrangement back in about 1993, the first ever for the large healthcare system I worked for, which I sustained for about 6 years, getting more done there than I ever could at the office, before resigning to become self-employed. If I were one of Yahoo’s employees right now I’d be devastated. I hope the slackers that Yahoo is probably trying to weed out quickly get on their way so that those employees who can do it well and take it seriously can get back to their home desks.

Final Word

This passage from Mary Catherine Bateson’s Peripheral Visions seems an appropriate final thought today.

“Rarely is it possible to study all the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere. When the necessary tasks of learning cannot be completed in a portion of the life cycle set aside for them, they have to join life’s other tasks and be done concurrently. We can carry on the process of learning in everything we do, like a mother balancing her child on one hip as she goes about her work with the other hand or uses it to open the doors of the unknown. Living and learning, we become ambidextrous.”

–Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions

~~~

Exploring On The Page and Otherwise, With a Bit of Mid-Winter Longing Thrown In

Three-Part Harmony

Ross Gale, a writer and creative consultant, just started his second online creativity series, "With Flames Upon Their Heads." He invited a group of writers to respond to the questions: What is the role of the creator? How does being a creator inform our work? Do you see yourself as co-creator? Re-creator? Gale describes the series as a "conversation, a meditation, and an inspiration."

My post went up last Monday, “Three-Part Harmony.” It’s a mini-essay and shows my thoughts about writing as creating, discovering creation, and participating in creation. I hope you’ll check out my post and all the others that are being posted daily for a couple weeks. Keep Ross’s blog bookmarked as you're sure to see lots of good things developing there in the future.

The first series, "Bereshit Bara," ran last summer with posts from 13 writers addressing the question of what triggers the first creative impulse. If you missed it, it's not too late to hear from Shannon Huffman Polson, David Clark, Adele Konyndk and others.

Reading Stack: The Prairie in Her Eyes

This book, with a cover the colors of autumn, caught my eye on a library table and I added it to my stack. Published by Milkweed Books (2001), The Prairie in Her Eyes by Ann Daum is part of its now gone “The World As Home” nonfiction series, which had been “dedicated to exploring our relationship to the natural world.”

Explore is what essays do best. Essays don’t teach. Although the reader of any essay, if it’s a good essay and if she’s a good reader, usually comes to the last sentence knowing more about the world and humankind than when she started. Essays don’t preach. Although the reader may certainly turn the last page only then to turn his life, or his thoughts or heart, in a new direction. Essays don’t give steps one through five for accomplishing anything, although they may sneak in tips, and certainly a reader may indeed accomplish something a result of reading an essay that he or she had never before considered.

I liked this collection of essays, and I like that Milkweed allows their nonfiction book chapters to be called essays if that is what they are. “Essay” is nearly a four-letter word these days in the publishing industry (yes, I know, essay is five letters). "They don’t sell; they’re too hard for the average reader; they aren’t immediately useful to the reader." Call the essay a chapter instead and hope the rose still smells as sweet. But I digress.

Daum’s essays are about growing up and living as an adult on a ranch in South Dakota. They are grounded in the world, in life, thingness, yet are about something bigger and universal, another mark of a good essay. Read them and you’ll be thinking about loss and grief, about courage, about returning to where you’re from but have never been as if coming home, about fear of death, nature’s beauty and cruelty, abundance and desperation. (Warning: there’s also gross chicken ranch stuff, which will make you only want to eat free-ranch chickens, if that.)

Daum’s tone is steady and calm, delivering no big epiphanies but lots of quiet ones, the best kind. One essay after another, Daum trusts the reader to take them as an offering, not to make them more or less than what they are--not a guide for living but a witness, a testimony.

Once the grass is up, all these mares will go to pasture, and then my evenings spread to include walking over prairie to inspect udders for any signs of milk or waxing. I love walking out to check the mares. In a wet year the prairie will be alive with frogs and locusts, nighthawks and meadowlarks. The grass stretches as far as I can see; farther. The mares move across the hills, even with their pregnant bellies, with the grace of wild things.

More On The “Essay”

If you’re interested in the essay as either a reader or a writer, you’ll want to know about Patrick Madden, a professor at Brigham Young University. He’s written a lovely book of essays called Quotidiana (University of Nebraska) and has a website by the same name, dedicated to the cultivation of the classic essay. I've heard him speak a couple times, the latest being at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College last year. He’s very entertaining and full of knowledge about the history of the essay and its place in our current literary culture.

To add my support to the cause of the essay I may be more intentional about posting mini-reviews about essays and essay collections here in this space.

Final Word

This quote came at me from multiple directions this week. Because it fits the essay theme of the entries above, and because I always long for the sea, particularly a warm sea since it is now mid-winter, and have other land-locked friends that do as well, I'll share it here. It's attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry, author of the classic The Little Prince, as well as a wonderful memoir-in-essays, Wind, Sand and Stars.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

~~~

I hope you can do some exploring this weekend, on paper or out in the world.

[Note: the photo is an extreme close-up of brush strokes from a painting of the sea by Vasili Nechitailo. Gorgeous, isn't it? I don't think there was a "no photography" sign up when I took it.]

Clothes and Books, Ethics and Passion, Poetry and Prayer, High Standards and Low

Dress Shopping

The last couple weeks I had reason to shop for a new dress. I had an idea what I wanted: a wardrobe staple, nothing fancy but a little classy, neutral color, something that would last more than a year or two. I had this list of criteria in my head, but since reading Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashiona couple months ago, I also had another list in my head. In Overdressed, author Elizabeth L. Cline surveys the clothing industry and what she finds make you think twice about picking up the latest fashion steal at the nearby mall or discount store.

Her premise is that our growing desire for more and more clothes and our unwillingness to pay a reasonable price for them or to keep them for more than a season is driving the industry to produce ever greater volumes of ever cheaper clothes with ever poorer wages to the sewers. And Cline is very clear, there are actual sewers (as in sew-ers), real people, in this chain of production who need their wages to live and raise families.

 Here are some images the book will leave you with:

• Holes in the floors of production plants so that sewers don’t have to leave their stations to go to the bathroom or the dorms where sewers live
• Garments made of such cheap materials they fall apart after one washing
• Charity resale stores, like Goodwill or Salvation Army, being deluged with clothes of such poor quality even they can’t sell them but yet are left to sort and dispose of them at significant cost
• Tons and tons of discarded tank tops and t-shirts and plastic shoes on their way to landfills
• Closets crammed with more clothes than any one person could possible wear
• Stores switching out complete inventories every 2 weeks to not only meet demand but to create demand

Her key suggestions include to shop for labels known to pay their sewers living wages and provide good work conditions, and to buy less, investing in pieces that will last for a long time. Cost of course is a stumbling block there. Manufacturers who pay living wages are more likely to make expensive clothes (comparatively speaking). She suggests buying better clothes but on sale or at consignment or thrift stores, and to forego the multitude of cheap pieces in lieu of one or two that will last. She suggests learning to sew or at least learning to alter your clothes (or hire someone) so that they fit well or so that you can update them to last longer. Check out Cline’s website for more suggestions and resources.

I found a dress, one that should last and that was marked way down at end-of-season clearance. At its original price I would have had to pass it by. For those of you who know me, you’ll probably see me in it for years to come.

The Lost Art of Making Things

There’s a great little sewing store not from where I live, Sewtropolis. When it first opened, I met the owner, Nikol, and asked her about why she went into business. To help reintroduce people to the lost art of sewing, she said. Her business is doing well, now in a bigger and better location from its original site. Sewtropolis has a fun blog, unique fabrics, sewing machines onsite for your use, and tons of classes that let you walk away with a finished garment.

One of my intentions for this year is to sew more. Sewing anything would be sewing more. So far, I’ve bought a pattern. But the year is still young. The last time I sewed anything was a couple summers ago. I had taken the week off work to make progress on my manuscript. After scratching and scribbling for a couple days and to no great effect, I realized what I really needed was to be quiet for a while, to stop the flow of words, and so I sewed a sundress. The last time before that was probably a maternity dress (and my sons are now in their twenties).

In high school and college I sewed many of my clothes, but a friend of mine took sewing to a much higher level. When we went shopping, instead of buying she would sketch the clothes she loved while in the dressing room, converting her sketches to patterns at home. If she’d followed her passion as the experts suggest, correctly or incorrectly, she could just as easily have taken the path to fashion designer as she did the path to physician. (That little story raises interesting questions about giftedness and vocation, doesn’t it?)

Lenten Poems

Lent started last Wednesday. I try to mark it with a practice, although I often fail to be consistent. A few years ago during Lent I listened to and prayed along with the Pray-As-You-Go Jesuit devotional, which I’ve written about before on this blog. Every day I wrote some notes or reflection in response to the devotional on an index card. It turned out to be a good thing. I liked flipping through the cards to review what I’d been thinking about, and even now I like that those cards are held tight with a binder clip.

This year I’m again listening to the Jesuits, but this time I’m trying to write a small poem in response to the daily reading. Writing a poem is a good way to break routine linear thinking and enter into a prayer or text in a new way, particularly if it’s a text, or reading, you’ve heard multiple times before. Let me be the first to say, these are not good poems, but they will help me think in new ways and be markers of something.

I’ve been reading Early Morning, Kim Stafford’s biography of his father, William Stafford, one of America’s greatest and most prolific contemporary poets. Stafford published more than 60 books via his practice of getting up every morning long before dawn, making himself a piece of toast and cup of instant coffee, and laying down on the couch with a sheet of paper, getting up only when his daily poem was written. When asked how he could write a poem every day, he answered that it was only by lowering his standards. I’m adopting that stance also in this daily practice--the goal not being to produce anything of literary value but to let the Word produce something in me.

Reading Stack: Punching In

A review in the Onion pointed me to Punching In: One Man's Undercover Adventures on the Front Lines of America's Best-Known Companies by Alex Frankel, although the review wasn’t complementary, giving it only a C+. I give it an A-.

Frankel is on a mission to explore the culture of workplaces and how new front-line employees are indoctrinated and made to manifest that culture, particularly in the short time allotted by the typical training period. Like Ehrenreich in her well-known Nickle and Dimed Frankel goes native, posing as a grad student and taking a false name. Unlike Ehrenreich, Frankel’s mission feels more gentle, to explore rather than expose, although to be fair, the stakes were higher for Ehrenreich, linking her daily survival to her ability to find and keep a job as she did. Frankel got hired at UPS, Starbucks, Gap, Enterprise, and Apple Store. He also tried but failed to get hired at The Container Store and Whole Foods. 

Halfway through the journey, I came across a statement that captured the spirit of the project quite well. In the formative years of UPS, its founder, James Casey, was known to repeat a basic phrase: 'Anybody can deliver packages.' It was both modest and profound, with clear implications: Anybody can deliver packages, so we had better be the best at it…It's the same sentiment, really, at any leading company. Anybody can pour a cup of coffee, rent out cars, sell pairs of jeans. Except, of course, they can't. The places, it seemed to me, that are the best at these things take 'anybodies' off the street and make them their own 'somebodies.' This completely intangible transformation of individuals is something increasingly critical to the success of companies. By organizing and running a small, yearlong experiment with myself as the subject, I would see and feel this transition in process. The journey would be this: I would walk in as an anybody and depart as a somebody. Or at least that was the idea.

I thought back to my early part-time jobs and wished I’d been more attentive to the forces behind the training and the philosophy of the places where I worked. Read this and you’ll look at the man or woman handing you a latte or folding jeans behind you at Gap with some empathy and even admiration. As with everything in life, there is so much more going on than we can see on the surface.

(If you’re curious, UPS comes out looking good.)

 ~~~

 Thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend! If you want, share with me what you’re doing for Lent, or if you've found a bargain on a garment that will last forever or made anything fun lately or are on your way to becoming a somebody at your job.

Experimenting, Books and Bookstores, Hospitality, and Valentines

New Format – An Experiment

In my list of New Year’s intentions, not to be confused with resolutions, I wrote “experiment more.” This new post format is an experiment. Over the years, for a multitude of reasons this blog has gone for long periods without new posts. One of the reasons as of late is that as the number of subscribers has grown, I’ve begun to (perhaps) overscrutinize the relative merit each small post has in a subscriber’s inbox. Does subscriber #XYZ really want to receive a single small paragraph or two in his or her inbox multiple times a week? Wondering about the answer to this question, the pressure to come up with freestanding small posts worth the space in a subscriber’s inbox has had a stifling effect on creative juices. My experiment is to write longer posts of a more casual nature, covering multiple topics, and aiming for increased regularity–once weekly (sure, I’ll try). If you’re a regular reader or a first-time or occasional visitor, I’d love to hear via email or comment whether or not you think this experiment is a good thing.

 

Brave New Booksellers

A couple months ago I posted about authors who have opened bookstores, including Ann Patchett and Louise Erdrich, among others. Well just this week, thanks to LitSeen, I learned about a new bookstore that has been opened in my city by an ordinary married couple. Brave souls, they are. Angela and Jamie Schwesnedl opened Moon Palace Books last October in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. According to this article, they are excited and optimistic about the prospects of a bookstore, despite all the handwringing about the future of the printed book.

It’s got to help that they’ve opened their doors in one of the country’s most literary cities. For years Minneapolis and Seattle occupied the #1 and #2 slots, flip-flopping from year to year, in the list of the most literary US cities. The last three years, however, Washington DC moved into the #1 position. At first I was troubled by our slip to #3 (2012 and 2013) but then comforted myself with the fact that it can only be a good thing if our nation’s capitol city increases in the degree to which its citizens read. A positive development with this year’s list is that St. Paul, Minneapolis’s sister city, for the first time rose into the top ten, underscoring what a literary powerhouse this area is. Back to Moon Palace Books, I’m sorry I didn’t hear about it until now but will soon check it out.

Reading Stack: Dillard, Kephart

The Maytrees, a novel, Annie Dillard’s latest book, has been on my reading list since it came out in 2007, but I finally read it only this month. I started it without knowing what to expect, other than something good--it is, afterall, written by Dillard. But I knew nothing about the plot other than what you can read on the book back and inside flap. Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree meet, court, and get married in Provincetown, Cape Cod. Something happens with their friend Dreary. Halfway through the book, however, nothing much had happened yet and I was tempted to move on. According to current publishing expectations, which assumes little about a reader's perserverance, perhaps I should have moved on after the first chapter failed to grip me, but I think tenaciousness and hopefulness are good qualities in a reader so I kept going. Plus, Dillard doesn’t usually disappoint. And she didn’t. The story went in a direction I didn’t expect and by the time it looped around again and headed to the final page it had become a study in forgiveness, humility, and love far beyond the limitations of eros, Valentine’s day love. Could hurt and damaged people really live the picture she paints, this side of heaven? I want to think yes.

Another book I’ve just finished is Still Love in Strange Places by Beth Kephart, a writer of all genres--poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Still Love is a memoir and one of her early books (she’s written many!). Although I’ve read Kephart’s blog for awhile, this is the first time I’ve read one of her memoirs. (A couple years ago I read her Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business.) While she calls the book a memoir, it’s more a story about her husband, about El Salvador, her husband’s home. And in the background, while writing about coffee ranches, harvest feasts, earthquakes, and corruption, she is making peace with her foreign status within her marriage. It is a large and generous book, beautifully written, which is exactly how I would describe her blog. 

“Nora [her mother-in-law] even knows who steals which oranges from whose trees, and she pretends she doesn’t know these things when the campesinos invite her to their shacks. Come here, an old woman beckons to us as we walk the slope at dawn. Sit here, she says, as we make our way through the opened gate and find the kitchen, which is really just a fire and a blackened pot, no roof overhead. One table. Two chairs. Nora sits down. The ancient woman with the white roped hair extends her family’s only orange. They need to feel that I’ve been a guest in their house, Nora says to me in English. They need to have something to give.

I have an orange for you, I saved it for you. This is my gift. Please. Allow me to give it. The woman splits the thing right apart with her hands. Nora lets the pulp dry, a testament, on her chin. Two little girls in tattered dresses point and giggle. The ancient, aproned woman waves her hands, exuberant. Chickens are everywhere, their beaks hard as dried corn, and an altar, made of colored foil, streaming in the sun. This is the house of hospitality.”

Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha

Along the theme of hospitality, last night a friend showed me a print of one of her favorite paintings, Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha. We had just read together out loud the story from Luke 10 in a group after the Ash Wednesday service. My reaction to the story of Mary and Martha has always been complicated. Martha is busy getting dinner ready for all the guests. Mary, her sister, is sitting with the men listening to Jesus teach. Martha speaks up and asks Jesus to get Mary to help her. Jesus declines saying Mary has found the better way. It’s easy to picture myself as Martha, too busy and in need of help; it’s easy to picture myself as Mary, wanting to be still, to focus, to be taught and nurtured. You too? This painting offers a way into the story without stumbling over its familiar words. I appreciate my friend showing it and want to sit with it awhile. I like the hospitality it shows to both Martha and Mary.

 

In Honor of Valentine's Day

Here's a link to the top 25 films on marriage from Image Journal's Art & Faith Forum. I've seen very few of these but have watched other films recommended by this forum and not been disappointed.

As I've been writing this at a coffee shop, a boy and girl, 14-ish, have been sitting at a table next to me, their conversation becoming louder and more animated, their laughter more passionate. At one point, the girl called home (presumably) and asked to be able to stay just a half hour more. "We're just talking," she said. I think they're falling in love.

~~~

Have a good weekend, everyone. Please, let me know what you think of this new format. I'm interested in your thoughts.

Thanks be to God, and surgeons, and ...

One year ago, on this first Thursday of February, I spent the day in a Lord-have-mercy prayer mode. Someone I dearly loved was having the first of two scary surgeries. This morning I revisited the long written list of bad outcomes I had begged the Lord's mercy to spare him.

Spared he was. Healed he is.

Thanks be to God, and surgeons, and operating room nurses, and lab techs, and surgical instrument designers, and custodians, and researchers, and bandage makers, and antibiotic manufacturers, and the list could go on and on.

~~~

(Photo credit: NASA, Hurricane Frances; colorized.)