Warning: shameless plug to follow.

Our library will be hosting a 2-hour seminar and demonstration on advanced searching with Google and other search engines on November 7, at 10:00am. This is the first of many such seminars on topics ranging from database usage to research methods, but we thought we would start with something that would draw students in. If you are a student in the Boyce College or Southern Seminary community, please feel free to attend. Please respond via the Facebook event or send me an email so we can plan accordingly.

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Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Pierre Bayard, a well-known professor of French Literature at the University of Paris, has written a new book advocating the art of skimming in place of actually reading a book “the scientific way.” Move over, Mortimer, you’re old school now.

His book, Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus (How to Talk about Books that You Haven’t Read), sold out in France and is soon to be published here in the States as well. It is destined for the best-seller list. According to the New York Times Magazine, his tips include:

• How to talk about a book you have never read: Avoid precise details. Put aside rational thought. Let your sub-conscience express your personal relationship with the work.
• How to review a book: Put it in front of you, close your eyes and try to perceive what may interest you about it. Then write about yourself.

While this advice is rubbish, it may appear that not all he has to say is that bad. For instance, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine he says, “I think a great reader is able to read from the first line to the last line; if you want to do that with some books, it’s necessary to skim other books. If you want to fall in love with someone, it’s necessary to meet many people. You see what I mean?” (10/28/07, p13).

Of course, I haven’t actually read the book. Ironic, isn’t it?

Read more here (New York Times - USA) and here (Times Online - UK).

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I’ve seen a lot of fences in the last few days. Those pretty fences one only sees in Kentucky’s horse country: flat stones stacked waist-high, with perpendicular ones laid along the top. Something about that is attractive to me: permanence, boundaries, strength.

One of my favorite poems by Robert Frost is his “Mending Wall,” which begins with the famous line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He’s right. Walls deteriorate and require work to keep up. I think, though, that when it comes to human relationships, even the most intimate of relationships, walls are natural and require continuous work to tear down.

In Frost’s poem, two neighbors meet every Spring to walk the length of the fence that divides them and, keeping the fence between them, they repair the stones that have fallen from the wall over the course of the year. One neighbor is convinced that “good fences make good neighbors.” The other, however, is not convinced:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

We can debate the extent to which walls make good neighbors. There can be no debate, however, that they make for terrible marriages. My wife and I have just returned from our yearly retreat with the sole purpose of toppling walls, and I am reminded that I have the most patient and longsuffering wife on the planet. Here’s to open fields, sweetheart. May it always remain so.

I promised Barbara Napier, the host and incredible gourmet of the beautiful, relaxing, and ambrosial Snug Hollow Farm Bed and Breakfast, that I would offer some cyber-kudos for her hospitality. Thanks, Barbara!

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Poetry, Uncategorized | No Comments »