Leaving Orbit

Posted on by albrooke

Leaving Orbit

“Only when an era ends do you get to figure out what it means.”  Margaret Lazerus Dean, Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight 69 (2015).

An enjoyable read, covering the end of the shuttle era of American Spaceflight.  I wish this book had been out when I was teaching my Beyond Fiction class, because it would have formed a perfect inclusio with Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.  MLD has a comfortable competence as a writer and observer, so it is as though the reader is listening to the experiences of a good friend.

Television and books

Posted on by albrooke

This may not be original, but it occurred to me today that “television” is very different than the television I grew up with.  It used to be that if you wanted to “follow” a show, you had to make yourself available at the same time every week.  You had to be “in the mood” for Cheers or MASH or All in the Family (dating myself, of course) when it was on.  (Perhaps this kept me from being much of a connoisseur of television.)

Eventually, there was potential for videotaping, and time-shifting the shows you were interested in.

Now, though, you can pretty much “pick up” any series you want on Netflix or Amazon Instant Video or iTunes or one of the other video-streaming services.  Watch whenever you want and go quickly through an old series if you wish.

That was the way I always read books.  As a kid, I would read a string of old Hardy Boys or Tom Swifts or Nero Wolfes or Perry Masons or . . . .

And I have to say, this is a better way of consuming television.  It probably encourages better television, since it permits longer narrative arcs and more complex character development.

I’d still rather read a good novel.*

*And then read everything else the author wrote.

“Jesus never talked to two people in the same way.”

Posted on by albrooke

The Christian consensus has collapsed, and much of the rise of the so-called religious Nones is really the falling away of people who were only loosely attached to a church tradition. So there is a grand moment of clarification, and among the many things we need to clarify is our ability to communicate. Much of our witnessing, on the one hand, assumes that people are open and needy. It also assumes a whole series of formulae or recipes. I would argue that Jesus never talked to two people in the same way, and neither should we. So as part of the grand clarification of our generation, this is a time to reexamine our communication and see if it is as biblical as it should be.

from Tim Stafford, An Interview with Os Guinness, Christianity Today (July 23, 2015).

A use of fiction

Posted on by albrooke

Fiction is, among other things, an aid to reflection: a means by which we can more vividly and rigorously encounter the world and try to make sense of it, to confront “the problems of being” as freshly as we can. But we vary in our interpretative needs: the questions that absorb some of us never occur to others. Each of us has her own labyrinth . Every genre of fiction puts certain questions in brackets, or takes their answers as given, in order to explore others. Not even the greatest of writers can keep all the balls in the air at once: some have to sit still on the ground while the others whirl. People who come to a book by Murakami, or Neal Stephenson, or even Ursula K. LeGuin with the questions they would put to a Marilynne Robinson novel are bound to be disappointed and frustrated. But if we readers attend closely to the kinds of questions a book is asking, the questions it invites from us, then our experience will be more valuable. And the more questions we can put to the books we read — in the most generous and charitable spirit we can manage — the richer becomes our encounter not just with the books themselves but with the world they point to.

Alan Jacobs, Reverting to Type: a Reader’s Story, loc. 561-570 (Kindle ed., 2012).