Vigil of 1 Advent: God's patience and God's impatience

Do you have an Advent wreath? Do you light Advent candles? Did you light the first candle tonight? Will you wait for tomorrow?

This is your virtual lighting of the first candle. Take a moment (or two) to gaze at the flame here, the wooden match lighting the purple candle. Simply gaze. There is no need for words. Some may come to you later. Or not.

Advent and Christmas are in some ways the ultimate celebration of space, the celebration of God entering human space in the most intimate way possible: by becoming human. The celebration of word become flesh, the discovery that God-the-other is also God-with-us (Emmanuel in Hebrew) -- that is the good news of Advent.

We celebrate in Advent God's invitation for us to view our space --our society, our environment, our neighbor, our own flesh-- as sacred, pregnant with justice and hope, filled with hidden treasure.

But Advent is also a celebration of time and a celebration in time.

The way in which we live time in Advent is profoundly counter-cultural. At a time when many of us are caught in the frenzy of work and in dashing about to buy presents, we Christians are invited to step into a season of muted colors, whose mood is slow, gentle, and deep --though also, as we will see in some of the season's biblical readings, disturbing at times. In Advent, light increases gradually, week by week, instead of appearing in one great post-Thanksgiving burst of electricity. (For those of you not in the U.S., there is no Thanksgiving holiday in late November, but the great burst of electricity is there.)

There is a reason for this slowing down. If we are to hear the good news that our space and God's space have become one, we have to slow down enough to hear. Sometimes this good news is spoken to us by God very softly, in ordinary ways and places, in the daily events of our lives. Sometimes this good news is simply that there is immense treasure already present in our lives and hearts: all that we need to claim the treasure is to slow down, stop, and notice it. 

If the good news is going to take root in us --once we have begun to listen or to notice-- we need to enter God's time, God's timetable. Advent is not a flashy season. It takes time for good news to sink in, for love to grow, for wisdom to ripen, for lives to be transformed, for truth to dawn in us -- much more time than our frenzy will often allow.

So in Advent, season of waiting for Christ, we take in the good news slowly, steadily, lighting candles one at at time, adding a new insight, a layer of understanding, a little layer of light every week, as around us in the Northern Hemisphere* the days grow darker.  (*If people from the Southern Hemisphere read this post, it will be interesting to hear about Advent and Advent lights from people for whom it is the middle of summer right now.)

Advent challenges our impatience and invites us to enter God's patience.

Yet Advent is also a time to enter God's impatience, a time when prophets (more on them in the coming weeks) challenge our apathy and paralysis and urge us forward, a time in which the stories and songs in the scriptures speak of a God who longs to transform our hearts, our society, and creation itself -- soon, now, urgently.

One of the challenges of this season is to figure out the connections between our time and God's time, to readjust and balance our sense of time, to discover  or rediscover --to discern-- when it is appropriate to enter into God's patience and when it is time to enter into God's impatience.

In this first night, before anything else, take time. Rest in the patience of God. All else will unfold, in God's time.

______________

This is the first post of a retreat I led last year during Advent. It appeared on the retreat's closed  blog (i.e. a blog accessible only to retreatants, not a public blog like this one) at the beginning of the retreat. I will be offering the retreat again this year, with a few changes. Information will be available here by the end of the day tomorrow, December 1.

Farmers' market bounty, July 3

Tomatoes from Peterson Farm.

The photos are selective, as I tend to buy from the smaller farms that do sustainable agriculture.  (At this market, those farms are mostly not certified organic but they use no pesticides and watch their farming methods in a variety of other ways.  It costs $ to get certified.  One of the best such farms is Peterson Farm, and it has a blog! There are some great photos of the farm there.)  

There were larger displays like the one in the photo immediately below and there was also a lot of good people-photography opportunity, but I didn't have the portrait camera with me, only the BlackBerry in my pocket and my several shopping bags, which rapidly grew heavy with vegetables, fruits, and goat cheeses.

Not sure of the name of this farm.

I went to the market out on Stony Ridge Road in Colfax, off Route 40, not the downtown one near the old stadium.  I prefer this one in the summer most of the time.  Initially I only went to the downtown market when I first lived here. This market one is more basic-NC-folks and much less hippie-lefty and not so connected with the Slow Food Movement, though the Goat Lady Dairy people are at both markets.  Happily for me.  When I became a finalist for my current job at Guilford College, I googled "goat cheese Greensboro" to see what I could find, and sure enough, Goat Lady Dairy popped up; that's when I knew I could manage living here.  Seriously.

Interesting-looking squash from Peterson Farm.
 

Peterson Farm again. Yum.

Okra from Peterson Farm too.  I just bought one box.

This was a small family farm stand. 

Berries are among the higher-in pesticides fruit but I couldn't resist, and since this isn't an industrial-sized farm, the berries may be less toxic than the ones in the supermarket. I decided to take my chances, and I'll rinse the berries well.  I went for the "3 for $6" deal and got one pint of each of the berries: two kinds of blueberries --they really do taste different-- and big juicy blackberries.

Can't remember name of farm here.  
It's not one I remember from other times I've been at this market. 
Those onions look fabulous! 
They are going to go into one dish with squash 
and another made with okra and tomatoes. 
And I'll still have some left over.  

Four or five of these onions go a long way in the flavor department.

The first corn of the year is out in full glory.  More later in the weekend (when I add more text here) on the white vs. yellow corn disputes in my family.  This is a white corn variety called "Avalon," very sweet, and it turns pale yellow when cooked. I had these two ears for lunch. Here they are post-steaming and pre-seasoning.

And here they are mid-lunch. Olive oil, salt, and freshly ground pepper. Nice alternative to butter if you are watching your butterfat intake or if you are a vegan.

I thought to myself, "Well, we are in North Carolina" when I saw these, but that was my bad and my nasty stereotyping.  I am an ignoramus. The true origins of whoopie pies are Pennsylvania Amish and New England.  I looked this up after I got home.  But anyway, there they were. I didn't buy any.

These are all BlackBerry photos. I'll take at least the Nikon digital camera with me next time.  It will fit into a big pocket and I can pull it out easily. 

Presidential speech to school children and adolescents AND a transcript of Q&A with students in Arlington, Virginia

Here's a transcript of the discussion between President Obama and 9th grade high school students in Arlington, Virginia.

Here's the infamous speech to the students -- really a conservative's dream. Work hard, believe in yourself, understand planning and delayed gratification. It reminded me of my grandfather the summer camp director, my uncles the school principals, and my mother. (None of them political conservatives, but that just goes to show that the categories we use are sometimes useless.)

Lost and found

I have been cooking an essay called "Lost Things" which has suddenly started flowing out of my fingers. It may or may not be my next piece for the Episcopal Café, whose editor has been extraordinarily patient with my absence from my contributor duties during this difficult year. I have been musing about the things I have lost or have had stolen from me over the course of my life and about why their absence bothers me. The essay comes straight out of those musings.

In the course of hatching a rough draft, I have remembered once again one of my favorite books from childhood, one which I reread many times as a young adult and which my parents had to give away or leave behind during a major move. I cannot hope to track down that very copy of the book but in these days of the World Wide Web it is possible to find a book that has long been out of print. Every so often I search for it on the internet.

Lo and behold, after two and a half pages of writing I began poking around for the first time in months, and I found not only copies of the book available for sale but confirmation that the book was in fact the one I loved in the form of a picture of the book cover! The first few copies I saw online had either no picture of a cover or a very different picture from the edition I remember. So here is a picture of my beloved book. At some point I will order a copy for myself, or perhaps I will wait till my next trip to France or ask a friend to get it for me. I really want to read the book again but I am just happy it still exists somewhere.


By the way, the book is full of wonderful fables and legends and tales: how certain streets in Paris got their name, what a fortune-teller said to one of the Medici queens (two Medici women married French kings), who built what when, and how the city got its start. That part is not fable but historical fact. It is through this book that I learned about the Parisii, the tribe that gave Paris its name. Paris was a city of boat people, clustered on a few islands that were later consolidated into the two islands we know at the heart of the city. The Romans, of course, took over the islands when they conquered Gaul, did a lot of building, and named the city Lutetia (Lutèce in French), though some sources say that the city's name was already Lutetia by the time the Romans conquered it in 52 BCE. Bits of Roman amphitheatre and baths survive, but the Parisii came first and it is their name that endures.

The book is also chock-full of stories of the saints, and I still remember them: Denis, martyred (on what became known as Mons Martyrium, later abridged to Montmartre) and carrying his head in his hands all the way to what is now the town of St. Denis, where a basilica commemorates him; Geneviève the shepherd girl, praying away the Huns; and others, but those two especially.

Interesting how stories pour out of us when we are ready, or sometimes long after we were ready. I should have known by the grumpy mood of the last few days that I was cooking several pieces of writing. Reports and other mundane word processing stood at the doorway and blocked them. I must get back to those duty-bound words, but now I know what was ready to come forth, and there will be no stopping it.

It's music time: Let It Be

I just posted this on Facebook for a friend who is deep in a writing job and thought I'd share it here for the assembled multitudes. I'm enjoying watching and listening to this video. (Sorry MP, I still love the Beatles.) And for you religious types, this has Mother Mary in it, too. What's not to love?

Enjoy.

With thoughts and prayers for the people of Mexico as they face the swine flu epidemic and the aftermath of an earthquake.

Bo update, with a beagle bonus

Indulge me: I've had a long week and it's only Wednesday.

The Telegraph (U.K.) has a nice Bo story with the history and sociology of presidential dogs. You know you want to read it.

HuffPo's Dr. Patricia Fitzgerald write about all the benefits of living with a dog. You may know most of this, but you probably haven't seen the cute dog photo accompanying this article.

Meanwhile, a few days ago, Max the fabulous beagle, who lives with double-blogger PeaceBang, wrote his friends a letter.

This here is Ermengarde, PeaceBang's cat, and that is Max the Beagle.

And now you have a Bo source: yes, a blog of Bo with all the latest news and all manner of ridiculousness. Not sure who writes it; the blogger's e-mail only says "Moira." Has the first Bo cartoon (this next one is funnier), the side-splitting Jon Stewart piece on Bo and a fab photo of Michelle Obama walking the dog. (Good: she looked tired in the other photos and I started worrying about her. Seriously.)

Okay, now we've really gone over the top.

+Maya is going to be jealous. I promise I will take photos of her in the next few days. I finally bought a roll of film the other day. I was completely out of film for a couple of months.

Peter Zumthor wins Pritzker prize (interesting even if you're not an architecture buff)

Interesting and worthy winner of this year's Pritzker Prize: Peter Zumthor. (Link is to the NY Times story.)

Pritzker Prize website here.

Photo booklet (from same site) here.

Meanwhile, in Verona...

A big wine event called Vinitaly. Dennis of psychology, politics, dogs, and wine fame probably knows about it.

John Hope Franklin, R.I.P.

The great historian John Hope Franklin died yesterday at the age of 94.

The Washington Post has several pieces about him including an obituary and tribute with a slide show here.

Duke University, one of the schools at which Professor Franklin taught, has a biography here.

From the WaPo obituary by Wil Haygood:

Franklin was among the first black scholars to earn prominent posts at America's top -- and predominantly white -- universities. His research and his personal success helped pave the way both for other blacks and for the field of black studies, which began to blossom on American campuses in the '60s.

In time, a second generation of eminent black scholars -- Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr., Georgetown's Michael Eric Dyson and Princeton's Cornel West -- would follow Franklin to the heights of America's most illustrious schools.

"He gave us a common language," Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, said yesterday. "As the author of a seminal textbook, 'From Slavery to Freedom,' Franklin gave us young black scholars a common language to speak to each other. He had invented a genre out of whole cloth."

Gates, a former recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," for years was curious as to who had recommended him. He attended a dinner once with Franklin, and Franklin confided that he had been the one to recommend Gates. "And I cried at the table we were sitting at. A lot of us called John Hope 'the Prince.' He had such a regal bearing. We're all the children of John Hope."

More on inclusive language and public prayer

Re: the post below and its many comments (read it and them first), it turns out I had posted a little piece of the Jaci Maraschin essay a little over a year ago.

You can read that post here.

For another Brazilian perspective, from Silvia Regina de Lima Silva, posted around the same time, see here. (Tracie, this may speak to you, though Silvia doesn't use "Goddess." But she is a radical woman after your own heart, and full of passion and fire.) It is important to listen to this voice from a Black woman of the Southern Hemisphere.

For the struggle to come to words we barely know are within us, especially if we are women, see here. (Nelle Morton's classic essay on "Hearing to Speech.")

One among many examples of the beautiful Anglican, inclusive prayers by Janet Morley of England.

I've got a chapter on language in When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life, as I mentioned in the Comments section of the post below. Thought I had posted part of it once to this blog, but perhaps not. It's not showing up in two searches I just did in the archives. I'll look again later. Some of you have the book, anyway. (The rest of you should buy it ;-) - just sayin'. And thank you.)

Lots more on language, prayer, and gender in the church in the archives of Acts of Hope.

For instance, Julian of Norwich (14th century) on the Trinity. Today some of us would find the language less than satisfying but in the context of the 14th century, it's marvelous. So, as many pointed out when our Presiding Bishop began to use mothering language for Jesus and some got their knickers in a knot about it, this is not exactly a newfangled idea. Even earlier in Christian history, there were maternal images for Godde. There are also such images in the Hebrew Bible, though the patriarchal images dominate.

I thank you all for your courtesy and honesty in this conversation. Let it continue, and do share resources with us.

Italian humor (animated) courtesy of Brother of Acts of Hope

This one has been around the internet for a while, but I am pretty sure I have not previously posted it. If I have, my apologies. Brother of Acts of Hope, who lives in Italy most of the time (when he is not in Turkey or one or two other places), just sent this again, and it is as funny the second time around as it was the first. No language knowledge necessary. Enjoy.

"Stimulus: More than bread alone"

A good op-ed on the need for a stimulus package for the arts in the new administration, by an old friend of the Acts of Hope family whose work has occasionally appeared here. Thank you, Jerry.

Stimulus: More than bread alone

by Jerry M. Landay
The Providence Journal

There's a rumor that President Obama plans to create a new cabinet position — secretary for the arts. Should he do that, I for one will shout to the skies: Bravo! Bravissimo!

You may reply: “Surely he’s got more important priorities.” Think again.

Read on here.

(P.J., you will like the Isak Dinesen quote.)

Nedi Rivera rocks: a brief note, and full text soon, I hope.

No, she's not a rock star,* she is the Episcopal bishop mentioned below, and she addressed the Diocese of North Carolina Convention this morning on mission, outreach, multicultural ministry, justice, Jesus, and related topics. As she did yesterday when she preached, she spoke without a note (that I could see, anyway) and with complete coherence. She said some things I have never heard anyone say out loud (about kitchens, bathrooms, and liturgy, among others) and she said them with joy and clarity. I am hoping there will be a text and/or a video and if so I will post them here. If not I will try to reconstruct from my notes, but I really hope I can bring +Nedi's words to you as fully as possible. I wish all Episcopalians, and for that matter all Christians in the U.S. (especially, but not exclusively, those from majority white Euro-American cultures and the more privileged classes) could hear her.


*Okay, so maybe she is a rock star in the other sense, but personality is not my point here, though +Nedi's personality and style are part of what help people listen to her and hear her. Now let's see if we do anything about what we heard.

Other than that, I skipped most of the sessions and had meetings with folks I needed to see, mostly about our committee work for racial justice and reconciliation, but also some involving more personal and ministerial catching up. I also stopped by various exhibits and learned about various people, places, groups, and ministries. Always enlightening and sometimes fun.

I will post in the next week or so a very nice pledge for straight allies that PFLAG is offering.

That is all Her Grace the Feline Bishop is letting me write. I am under orders to have a nap.

Click to enlarge and see detail.

Hugh Mulligan, RIP

The Acts of Hope family had some fond moments of remembrance for colleague Hugh Mulligan this weekend during our little reunion. At least one of us (Brother of Acts of Hope) had worked with him and all of us knew him or had met him. Most of us are or have at one time been in the news business, hence our acquaintance with this fine reporter. Father of Acts of Hope was outraged that the New York Times did not pick up on Mr. Mulligan's death and that the Boston Globe published an obituary a week after the death actually occurred.

Hugh was quite a character, a New Yorker with the Irish gift for language, great curiosity and wit, and the proper amount of panache. With a name like Hugh Aloysius Mulligan, you also know he had a Catholic connection. See here for the official Associated Press obit. Rest in peace, Hugh.

Second City bound

Remember last November? The American Academy of Religion (AAR), just before its split from the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) (rumor has it the two Annual Meetings are going to get back together, but I digress), was at the two societies' joint conference, just before Thanksgiving, in San Diego. I was a little wacked out from jet lag and culture shock, having just returned from another conference in Belgium with a side trip to Paris, or maybe Belgium was the side trip and Paris was the main course; they were both wonderful.

At the San Diego meeting my colleague Eric and I were interviewing candidates, sixteen of them as I recall, for the soon to be vacant position in our department (and eventually, in the spring, hired Parveen, our new colleague who arrived two and a half months ago) and the conference was half consumed with that work. It was tiring. I also was a respondent to a paper and attended a few other sessions besides the one at which I was a respondent. It's like going to school for three days, except that last year I couldn't do as much learning as usual due to our being "in a search," as they say in academe. I did manage to have a meal or two with friends.

This fall the two professional societies are meeting separately and at different times in November, and I am only going to one of those conferences, the AAR one, which is in Chicago this year. It begins this weekend. I head for Chicago later today, after my late afternoon class, because I have a pre-conference meeting tomorrow and also because I want to make sure I get to the Art Institute, which is very close to the hotel. Girl with no social life and a big culture deficit finally gets a break.

It's especially nice to see some of my friends and colleagues from the West Coast. I'll be seeing some from California and Oregon this year, and also some folks from the U.K. and a colleague from Mexico I haven't seen in years.

My publisher is throwing me a little party Sunday night in honor of the book's release; Chicago folks or people with Chicago peeps (ahoy Dennis) write me at widsauthor at earthlink dot net, and I can have Amanda The Publicist contact them with the info.

Monday morning I am presenting a paper (my first one at the AAR, I have only given responses to other people's papers thus far, the competition can be stiff to get a paper accepted) in the morning. Have I finished writing it yet? Of course not. The title of the paper is pretty sexy, but if I write it here MadPriest will mock me (he had a field day with this last year) so perhaps I'll just write it in the Comments section below.

In the afternoon I am presiding at a session where other people are giving papers. It's not as glamorous as it sounds: I get to be the timekeeper and hold up little signs saying "TWO MINUTES" and I facilitate the discussion after everyone has presented.

Then I fly back to Greensboro, and Godde and the airlines willing, get in not too late, get a good night's sleep, and get up Election Day and volunteer for the Obama campaign until it's time to teach my afternoon class. Yes we can.

5 days.

Brought to you by your daily ¡Sí, se puede!

Activated till the polls close on November 4.


Photo: Camel and Rider, Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.), China, 1st half of 8th century. Permanent Collection, Art Institute, Chicago.

Sarah Palin, politics, the Episcopal Church, and the culture wars

I am having some thoughts about the connections among the above and at some point will write them down. I am more and more struck by what is best called a culture (or subculture) gap and some would call the culture wars and by the way it plays out both in the Episcopal Church and U.S. politics, in some of the same ways. Hearing Sarah Palin (bits - I was at work all evening yesterday till very late but listened to radio later and this a.m.) also reminded me, as does the larger religious and political scene, of a very helpful book that came out two decades ago, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhoodby Kristin Luker. It is as much about the cultures behind and around the abortion divide as about the divide and the subject itself. (The reviews on Amazon.com don't really note that.)

More when I can on this topic. Stay vigilant.

Mahmoud Darwish, R.I.P

A humane and heartstrong poet has died, of consequences of heart surgery. His physical heart had been ill for some years. Mahmoud Darwish was the leading Palestinian poet.

The BCC story is here from the Agence France-Presse (AFP). One learns more about Darwish there.

I'll try to find a poem later and post it.

Photo: AFP, 2005.

Later:

"I Come From There and Remember"

*****by Mahmoud Darwish

I am from There:
I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is born, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the ken of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there. I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the
sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts
in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home

(Translated by Tania Nasir for publication in Marwan’s 1998 exhibit catalogue: “An Die Kinder Palästinas”, published in Berlin by the Goethe Institut.) H/T: Annie's Letters

A video of a song by Marcel Khalife, "Ummi" ("My Mother" in Arabic) whose words are a poem by Darwish. H/T: Annie's Letters

Here's the info about a book of selected poems by Darwish published by the University of California Press, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.

And here is a review of a Hebrew edition of a book of poems (Mural in English) by Darwish in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The review is titled "Palestine as Poetry." Its author is Sami Shalom Chetrit, who teaches literature and politics in the film department at Sapir College in the Negev (Israel) and at UCLA.

Beijing business

...Most disgraceful of all is the fact that six of the 12 worldwide Olympic partners are American companies. This has to heart-sicken any patriot. These companies will reap the full exposure of the Summer Games, swathing themselves in the flag, and rationalizing that their business is helping uplift the Chinese people. Don't buy it -- or them. You should know exactly who they are: General Electric (which owns NBC), Coca-Cola, Visa, McDonald's, Kodak, and Johnson & Johnson.
******* Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post

Read more at janinsanfran's place, Happening Here, and see a picture of Beijing's air.

What the Web Hath Wrought

Even as I ponder a blog slowdown (you'll notice I am still writing at least once a day, so I haven't exactly slowed, and +Maya Pavlova did ring from England to say yes, there will be more pictures, but not quite yet) and my need for thought, prayer, and a break from Perpetual States of Distraction, I received in the (e-) mail a perfectly timely piece.

Beloved Elder Sibling of Acts of Hope, once again, has tapped into his sister's psyche and sent in just the right thing. And he doesn't even read my blog. Or does he?

I'm posting below the beginning of the article he sent, and you can read the rest via the link to the magazine. Please read everything I posted here. Don't do what we all seem to be doing, which is skimming and jumping around.

I have been wondering for months and months, really a few years (pre-blogging), what is the internet doing to concentration? to contemplation? to reading? I even wrote about it in the New Preface by the Author which will be out, with the Old Book, in the fall.

It's not as simple as "the internet has wrecked our brains." It's much more complex and not all negative. But it does make one think, and I am thinking.

No, I'm not going to stop blogging. I am just pondering how to blog, and live, more mindfully.

Apparently I'm not the only one. My friend Chris is about to change his blogging habits.

Have a read and see what you think.

Oh, and the salsa was very good. The food co-op was out of cilantro today and said "come back tomorrow" but driving four miles just for cilantro is a bad idea, so cilantro-less we shall remain. But there was very fine basil and I bought some and there is pesto in my near future.

Speaking of distractions.

Okay, now read:

What the Internet is doing to our brains
by Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Link to full text here.

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets-reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances-literary types, most of them-many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."

Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking-perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.


There's more. Read on. Link to full text here.

July 14 blog flashback #2: secular France, with affection, wit, and charm

Blog flashback: last year on this date....

Thoughts on France, with pictures. Note the artistic dog poop disposal and the dishy firefighters.