Cross-reference rainbow

In honor of the first Sunday in Advent, I post this graph of the interconnectedness of Scripture. It's beautiful. My thanks to The Point.

Through long ages of the past
Prophets have foretold His coming.
Through long ages of the past--
Now the time is come at last...

We didn't mean to go to Leesburg

No, seriously. We didn't. We meant to come straight-ish back from New Jersey, where we'd been having Thanksgiving with Jonathan's family. We were on the Beltway, looking for the Route 7/Tyson's corner exit. But instead we were deceived by signage into taking the "straight road to Dulles Airport" exit, from which there are no exits until the airport itself, except for toll roads which we were just not motivated to take. I had not been aware there was a straight road from the Beltway to Dulles; but so there is. We'd been making really good time on the trip and had hoped to be home by two.

The Straight Road to Dulles was rather insult to injury, as it happens. It was the second time that trip we got stuck on roads with no exit for miles. Grr. The first time, we were nearing Jonathan's parents' house. We could almost reach it. Yours truly, Navigatrix, thoughtlessly told the Driver we wanted Exit 3 and settled down with an Anne book, when in fact we wanted Exit 2. The Driver actually believed the Navigatrix, which is sort of scary. We pass Exit 2 -- "We didn't want the Swedesboro exit, did we?" "Yes. OH NO!" --and call up his mother for directions home, as neither of us had the foggiest notion where the next exit might land us. Sigh. Fortunately it spat us out close to his old church, but still.

So there we were, at an entirely unnecessary airport. We figured, while we were so close, we might as well call up my sister and have lunch. So we met her and Danae and had a glorious time. We also tried to call Kay, but couldn't get a hold of her. But all good times must end, even barbecue, so we steeled ourselves for the three-hour jaunt south across Virginia.

It was all right. 15 and 17 were actually decent regarding traffic, and we had fudge sundaes around 3:30. But then we got onto 95 south. Whimper. I prayed for a spot to merge into, and it's a good thing, because the traffic was bumper-to-bumper. It cleared out a bit after Fredericksburg, enough that we could go the speed limit, but the traffic coming north was much worse. We had a solid ribbon of taillights going 65, and they had a solid ribbon of headlights going about zero.

We got home around five, and discovered a certain lack of milk and eggs and bread in the house. We seriously debated having Chinese leftovers for breakfast, but dismally concluded we ought to get groceries. So off we go. Again. They were nice to us at Ukrops, and we came away with the eggs and b.

And I checked my phone, to discover we'd missed a call from Ben and Lisa. They were driving up through town today from the Deep South and wondered if we were interested in company. We'd missed them by about half an hour. Argh! And I had another message from Kay calling back. She hadn't gotten my call because she spent today flying home from Italy.

Isn't this an amazing life we live? We can, literally, get from almost anywhere to anywhere in a day, and know people who do.

But some days the road seems really, really long....

Our own Dr. Mitchell on the economy

Thanks to my excellent husband for forwarding me this article by our own Dr. Mitchell. I like the bit about dusting off the old-fashioned virtues of thrift and humility. And yes, you caught me blogging about the economic crisis. Enjoy it: it will be rare. :-)

A world where there are Octobers

"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it? Look at these maple branches. Don't they give you a thrill--several thrills?"

Anne of Green Gables, chapter XVI: "Diana Is Invited to Tea with Tragic Results"

Nearly the half of October gone

Hullo, all,

I beg your pardon for the delay in posting. It's been an active couple of weeks. I went up to PHC for Homecoming, had a birthday, interviewed to help with Sunday School at the new church, and started a new job. I'm doing a "long-term temp" assignment, which should mean about six months, and I'm reviewing claims for a law firm, medical details and all. I am now a fifth-floor cubicle minion.

Olwen doesn't care for Broad Street traffic on the way home, but we both rather like Cary Street going out in the morning. It's green and tree-lined and there are nifty shops and old houses. Unfortunately it's one way, so we can't take it coming back. In other news, I bought a new plant for my cubicle. It's a schefflera, much smaller than Bertie Woozle, and answers to the name Nellie. Bertie didn't get to go because he's grown too much, and in any case he's comfortably esconced in the upstairs bathroom.

Merry still scampers around her cage, but her eye isn't any better. Poor mousie.

Jonathan still likes law school. He spent today writing an assignment and will probably spend all day tomorrow studying for his midterm on Friday. And now, if you'll excuse me, we're just about off to small group. :-)

Why I married Jonathan

Me: "That napkin ring couldn't be worse with that napkin. In the clash of color, the green loses. Here, hand me that green napkin ring and put the amber one on. Thank you."

Jonathan replaces the green one with an amber one, which sure enough does match the red-and-blue batik napkins somewhat better. He then puts the green one on his knife and his implements start to talk to one another.

'Duel, villain! Shwobo!'
'Die with honor!'
'Hey, no fair! Ancestors avenge me! I die with honor.'
Jonathan: "An arms race soon developed." The spoon now joined the conversation.

I married him because he's the only man on earth to combine napkin rings and anime. So there. :-)

These jigging fools

I just finished re-reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and noticed something. There are two poets in the play, both introduced after Caesar's assassination, and both get ill-treated because of the civil war.

Both are short scenes. The first is III.3, when Cinna the Poet is mysteriously wandering around ("I have no will to wander forth of doors, /Yet something leads me forth"). Some of the plebeians roused by Antony's speech find him, confuse him with Cinna the Conspirator, and then, when they find out he's another Cinna, they kill him for his bad verses.

The second scene is just a short segment of IV.3. An unnamed poet noticed now-generals Brutus and Cassius arguing and insisted on seeing them to try and make peace. Their guards try to stop the poet, but he bursts in and urges them to be friends, in rhyme (which was unfortunate). They malign his rhyming and chuck him out.

Caesar is about demagoguery and violence, of course. But why should the victims specifically be poets? Is poetry perhaps a tool for a more civilized age, like a lightsaber? When the murderous plebs roved about, they'd have found an excuse to kill nearly anyone. But the one they did kill was ill-equipped to fight them on their own sharp pokey terms. He used his skills, answering them with a certain amount of wit and humor, but they didn't bother to refute him. You don't bring a wit to a knife-fight, and the yelling and sword-waving won.

The poet in the camp has determination, I'll give him that. The "Nothing but death shall stay me" to the guards is an indicator. Presumably he saw Cassius and Brutus arguing outside the tent, before Brutus' "Pas devant les infants" moment, when he pulled Cassius inside. But actually the generals had already more or less solved their differences and pledged everlasting friendship when the poet burst in.

Brutus threw a fit. Cassius asked him to "bear with him," just as he had asked Brutus to bear with himself a moment earlier. Brutus answered, "I'll know his humour when he knows his time: / What should the wars do with these jigging fools? / Companion, hence!" And Cassius, apparently convinced, joined him in kicking the poet out.

I think that line of Brutus' is a big part of it. The poet came too late, and in any case he thinks poets don't belong at war. But there seems to be more. It's not just the brute-like plebeians who disdain poetry, now: the very cultured ones who sneered at the plebeians aren't doing any better. If anyone, anyone had respected poets, you would expect it to be Brutus: the only conspirator who acted high-mindedly, out of love for Rome, and not from sordid ambition. But Brutus is the first to toss the poet out.

Or should the Romans have listened to the poets, now when their world is wobbling all over? Every time poets turn up, their verses get maligned. Cinna seemed to be out wandering because the gods sent him a dream and then compelled him to go out. Did the gods themselves conspire against them? Were the poets inadequate, or is Poetry inadequate, or was the rhetoric in the air addling them all?

What was Shakespeare doing with those two poets?

Proverbs for bloggers

Behold here a pile of international proverbs: some funnier than others in connection with blogging. :-)

"Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel."

Fun with grammar

Grammatical snippet of the day: there's a construction called "left dislocation," which was quite common in Old English. Example:

"My couch, it's covered with copies of Dante."

The gist seems to be you state the topic of your sentence as a grammatically separate element, and then you get into the sentence proper with a pronoun. It's somewhat redundant--if you wanted to be more efficient, you could probably leave the pronoun out altogether. People still use this construction, especially when talking. Left dislocation is not an appositive, a descriptive phrase set "apposite" to the noun, because appositives come afterward to add information or clarify the reference. Left dislocation, it starts with a clear reference and adds the pronoun later.

Left dislocation is said to be more common in "topic-prominent" languages, another phrase I'd never heard before. Topic-prominent languages apparently don't think in terms of subjects and objects, exactly, as in terms of "what this sentence is mostly about" and "what other nouns are necessary to help me talk about it."

Cool, no? Hat tip: the Wordhoard.

Spenser the poet

[I]ndeed, the study of Spenser's poetry is the best introduction available to the fascinating problem of what there is about poetry that can can bring more poetry into being, for no man has made so many other men into poets as Spenser has.

...Spenser did not allow himself to be inhibited either by the fear that a universal symbolism founded on sacramentalism might betray him into Catholic poetry or that his own fictive covering might obscure the truths of Scriptural revelation. No one else has so cheerfully and astonishingly combined pagan mythology, Christian symbolism, and personal mythmaking while remaining centrally in a main doctrinal tradition of Christianity.

Spenser had the humanist belief that classical thought and poetic form did not conflict with Christian truth; for him all myths merged, as all mirrored a unity of truth. ...Like Sydney, Spenser believed that a poet shared in the creativity of God, and therefore believed also in the poet's responsibility to bring his creation into a meaningful relationship with the moral order of God's creation.

--Harold Bloom, "Introduction to Edmund Spenser," The Best Poems of the English Language

Wow. Oh that someone might could write that about me! I think I need to go read more Spenser now.