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The Inner Torment of Being A Linux User

or How Linux Is Like Protestantism

March 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

Ivanka from the Ubuntu Design Team twit­tered a hys­ter­i­cal link about the dif­fer­ence between Mac and PCs recently. It was an old arti­cle, from 1994 or some such, so they com­pared Mac to DOS, which is funny to start with. Of course, you can sub­sti­tute “Win­dows” or even bet­ter, “Linux,” for DOS in this context.

About mid­way through the arti­cle, it really hit its stride, com­par­ing the Mac/DOS debate to the Catholicism/Protestantism debate. Here’s the killer paragraph:

DOS is Protes­tant, or even Calvin­is­tic. It allows free inter­pre­ta­tion of scrip­ture, demands dif­fi­cult per­sonal deci­sions, imposes a sub­tle hermeneu­tics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve sal­va­tion. To make the sys­tem work you need to inter­pret the pro­gram your­self: Far away from the baroque com­mu­nity of rev­el­ers, the user is closed within the lone­li­ness of his own inner torment.

Did I men­tion that last line about ‘lone­li­ness of his own inner tor­ment’ is sub­stan­tially fun­nier if you sub­sti­tute “Linux” for “DOS”?

Posted in christianity, linux | Tagged | Leave a comment

Music Composed by A Computer

or Where Does Art Get Its Meaning

February 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

Here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about a guy who wrote soft­ware that com­poses music. The whole arti­cle is really inter­est­ing, but this quote jumped out at me:

Cope thinks the old cliché of beauty in the eye of the beholder explains the sit­u­a­tion well: “The dots and lines on paper are merely trig­gers that set things off in our mind, do all the won­der­ful things that give us excite­ment and love of the music, and we falsely believe that some­where in that music is the thing we’re feel­ing,” he says. “I don’t know what the hell ’soul’ is. I don’t know that we have any of it. I’m look­ing to get off on life. And music gets me off a lot of the time. I really, really, really am moved by it. I don’t care who wrote it.”

He does, of course, see Emmy as a suc­cess. He just thinks of her as a tool. Every­thing Emmy cre­ated, she cre­ated because of soft­ware he devised. If Cope had infi­nite time, he could have writ­ten 5,000 Bach-style chorales. The pro­gram just did it much faster.

“All the com­puter is is just an exten­sion of me,” Cope says. “They’re noth­ing but won­der­fully orga­nized shov­els. I wouldn’t give credit to the shovel for dig­ging the hole. Would you?”

This is fas­ci­nat­ing on a cou­ple dif­fer­ent levels.

First of all, con­sider his first argu­ment, that the dots and lines that rep­re­sent music on the page are only trig­gers in the mind of the lis­tener (or in this case, as well as in a broader sense, the ‘reader’). Con­sid­er­ing that the music he’s refer­ring to was gen­er­ated by a com­puter, the music does have no meaning–the com­puter could not have felt sad and thus writ­ten a melan­choly melody. Which isn’t to say that the music isn’t beau­ti­ful and doens’t make peo­ple feel a par­tic­u­lar way, just as good art should (I’ve only heard sam­ples of the music (there’s a cou­ple short mp3 sam­ples in the arti­cle) and I’m no music critic, so I can’t say if it’s good art or not; let’s just say for the sake of the argu­ment that it IS good art, that if you didn’t know it was gen­er­ated by a com­puter, you’d think it was a great piece).

This argu­ment, that music cre­ated by an unfeel­ing com­puter sim­ply fol­low­ing the pat­terns its been taught can be just as great as any art, gets at the issue I’ve argued for a long time–that art has no mean­ing except when it’s expe­ri­enced. And while the author/composer may guide the reader towards a par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence, he attempt to do so means sub­stan­tially less than the reader’s expe­ri­ence itself, as the work remains mean­ing­less emo­tion­less dots and lines until it is experienced.

Sec­ond, look at the dichotomy between his two thoughts:

  1. Who cares who wrote the song–there’s no soul-to-soul con­nec­tion, only how it makes the lis­tener feel
  2. “All the com­puter is is just an exten­sion of me… I wouldn’t give credit to the shovel for dig­ging the hole. Would you?‘

There’s an inter­est­ing sub­con­sious rever­sal there, within 2 para­graphs: he moves from ‘the only impor­tant thing is the lis­ten­ers response’ to ‘I made this, I’m the one that made them feel that way.’

This poses an inter­est­ing, real-life ques­tion to my largely men­tal gym­nas­tic con­clu­sion above: Regard­less of how mean­ing­ful autho­r­ial intent is, how vital is autho­r­ial CREDIT? How related are the two? Are they one and the same? How and why is it impor­tant to honor the author of an artis­tic work if his intent had lit­tle mean­ing in the first place?

Finally, note how both thoughts are so sub­con­sciously self-centered, one as a lis­tener “I’m look­ing to get off on life…I don’t care who wrote it” and the other as an author, “The com­puter is is just an exten­sion of me.”

I’m not inter­ested in cast­ing asper­sions on this guy’s char­ac­ter or imply­ing that he’s a self­ish, ego-centric jerk. Instead, I’m inter­ested in the inter­play between the author and reader as indi­vid­u­als. How and why do we cre­ate art? For whom? If autho­r­ial intent is mean­ing­less, is art that never shared mean­ing­less as well? Which makes us a bet­ter reader: to read as an soli­tary indi­vid­ual just look­ing to get off on life or to read as mem­ber of a com­mu­nity try­ing to under­stand how to relate to the community.

I sus­pect the answer is a com­bi­na­tion of the two. But how to best draw that line and under­stand myself as a reader is a dif­fi­cult one that I’m not sure I’m fully equipped to answer.

Posted in art, literature, music | Tagged | 1 Comment

Calling Creative Risks ‘Good’

February 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

I read, today, an excerpt from a book called Nur­tur­ing Artists in your Local Church by a guy named Joshua Ban­ner.

This line stuck out to me:

We sim­ply need to be curi­ous and demon­strate that we believe what artists are doing is important—to call their cre­ative risks “good” just as the Cre­ator blessed his own hand­i­work in the first seven days—and to bless that work by giv­ing it our atten­tion and shar­ing in it. (empha­sis mine)

This idea that the church needs to call more of our artists’ cre­ative risk ‘good’ is really inter­est­ing (and I think, true).

Most Good Poems Start Out As Really Bad Poems

To be hon­est, I think this is why we don’t see much art right now in the typ­i­cal church–because to make really great art, you’ve got to be will­ing to take some cre­ative risks. That’s not to say that every piece of great art is par­tic­u­larly risky, but rather that if you don’t feel like you have the free­dom to take any risk, you will feel boxed in cre­atively. And whether or not those risks are suc­cess­ful isn’t par­tic­u­larly important–the impor­tant thing is that you’ve got to try a lot of dif­fer­ent things to find the RIGHT thing.

Or to put it another way: you’ve got to write some really bad songs before you can write some good ones.

Or maybe even another way: most good poems start out as really bad poems.

Nor­mal­iz­ing Cre­ative Risk

Unfor­tu­nately, we don’t see much of that approval of risk from the church, and in par­tic­u­lar, the pas­tors of churches. In some cases, this is because the pas­tors just aren’t artists. Most aren’t. They may be preach­ers (preach­ing may be valu­able, but it isn’t art any­more than med­i­cine is) or teach­ers, singers, admin­is­tra­tors or even, well, pas­tors, but very few are the kind of peo­ple who are tak­ing these cre­ative risks them­selves. And because of that, they don’t under­stand those risks, they don’t get what’s going on there. That’s not an excuse for them not to be reach­ing out to artists, but unfor­tu­nately that’s how it often works.

More­over, I think too many pas­tors are afraid of those risks, are afraid of tak­ing those risks because they can be mis­in­ter­preted. Above, I described these risks as a way to get the bad notes out so that when it really mat­ters you’re only left with the good ones, but that’s not entirely true–sometimes these risks involve things like writ­ing a book title The Weak­ness of God or a song with pro­fan­ity in it, writ­ing a poem ques­tion­ing God’s very exis­tence. Some­times the best art’s con­nec­tion to the Gospel is not imme­di­ately apparent.

For a pas­tor to put his bless­ing on some­thing like that, to call it “good” can be trou­bling, trou­bling for the pas­tor (I speak from expe­ri­ence here) and trou­bling for their con­gre­ga­tion (and thus for the pastor’s career). Such a “good” risk may not be just risky for artist–the pas­tor puts his rep­u­ta­tion on the line for the sake of the artist by endors­ing their work.

That’s a sac­ri­fice, I think, more of our pas­tors need to make, to endan­ger their own well-being for the sake of the peo­ple strug­gling to reveal the face of God. For that’s what I think all art strug­gles to do, to lift the veil of the imme­di­ately appar­ent and reveal the really true (True?) thing under­neath. Pas­tors have a call to draw all peo­ple into their communities–normalizing those cre­ative risks as part of our con­gre­ga­tions is an vital part of what the peo­ple who get paid to be pas­tors, and those of that don’t, have a respon­si­bil­ity to do.

Posted in art, christianity | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Synthesizing Schizophrenia or Who Is Billy the Kid?

A Review of I'm Not There

February 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

Last night, I finally watched I’m Not There, the rather sur­real take on Bob Dylan, with 6 dif­fer­ent actors por­tray­ing him.

It was sur­pris­ingly good. Sur­real and con­fus­ing, but good.

First of all, I didn’t real­ize that none of the char­ac­ters play Bob Dylan, per se–they all play ASPECTS of him, a Woody Guthrie-idolizing kid, a super­star unable to sus­tain his mar­riage, a folk singer pas­sion­ate about protest songs, the soli­tary old man carv­ing out a place in the wilder­ness of imag­i­na­tion, none of whom are named “Bob Dylan” (although some are more or less him, with Cate Blanchett’s spot-on por­trayal of Don’t Look Back–era Dylan com­ing the clos­est to real).

The real enjoy­able part of the movie was how hard it made you work to try to syn­the­size the dif­fer­ent aspects of his life, par­tic­u­lar the Cate Blanchett/Don’t Look Back Dylan vs. the marriage-centric sto­ry­line of the superstar/Heath Ledger Dylan.

The ten­sion between the time­li­ness, the impos­si­bil­ity of one time­line turn­ing into another gets at the movie’s the­sis, namely that Dylan is a sort of pur­pose­ful schiz­o­phrenic, liv­ing any num­ber of lives all at once, a shape-shifter that may or may not be healthy (the impli­ca­tion near the end of the film may be that such schiz­o­phreni­cism may not be unhealthy, but is cer­tainly incom­pat­i­ble with the cul­ture at large and that the only recourse for such a per­son is escape, to flee).

I’d argue that the film largely suc­ceeds at its the­sis, its biggest weak­ness being that to truly under­stand the film, you need to know a bit about Dylan’s backstory–you have to have done your home­work ahead of time. I’m not con­vinced that expect­ing that much out of the audi­ence is nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing, but more than once I thought, “oh, if I didn’t know such-and-such, I’d be totally lost right now.”

I did, though, get lost in the wild-West-Riddle-Missouri/Richard Gere parts of the film. The over­all idea of these parts is fairly appar­ent: that Dylan (now?) lives in a rich, imag­i­na­tive, some-what dark world where giraffes wan­der the streets of the old West and slightly insane chil­dren shoot their horses, and that world is con­stantly under attack (from whom?).

But it leaves more than a few questions:

  1. What’s with the dog, Henry?
  2. Why do we get Billy the Kid wak­ing up over and over?
  3. Who’s the dead girl in the cas­ket on stage while Jim James knocks “Going’ to Acopolco’ out of the park?
  4. Pat Gar­rett? I’m not sure this means what they think it means
  5. Why does Billy get taken to jail?
  6. Giraffes? Hal­loween?

If I could wrap my mind just a bit more around that part of the movie, I think I could feel a lot bet­ter about the whole thing.

Still, I enjoyed it–it was great.

Posted in art, music | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Ear Training

Something I'd Like to Try

January 22, 2010 | 4 Comments

Nathan posted a few days ago about a bunch of stuff he wants to do bet­ter includ­ing doing more ear traing­ing.

Hon­estly, that site is pretty awesome–they play inter­vals and you’re sup­posed to guess which one it is.

I played it for a while and sucked at it. But it’s some­thing I think I could really work on–it’s cer­tainly some­thing I regret not chal­leng­ing myself to do in college.

Like Nathan, though, I’m going to have to work hard to dis­ci­pline myself to do it. I need to fig­ure out a rou­tine it would fit into.

Per­haps over lunch?

Posted in Uncategorized, links, music | Tagged | 4 Comments

Living without Heat

January 21, 2010 | 2 Comments

The NY Times has a really fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle up right now about liv­ing with­out heat, by choice.

I don’t know if this is some­thing I could do (I do like being warm, a lot more than my wife does, for exam­ple). Actu­ally, I think I could more eas­ily go the other way: to live with­out air conditioning.

I find myself hat­ing the sum­mer because it gets really hard to go out­side when it’s SO hot and humid. Of course, the sum­mers that I worked at camp and rarely went any­where air con­di­tioned, I don’t remem­ber it ever being that hot.

It was, of course–I was just accus­tomed to it and didn’t sequester myself inside.

I think going the oppo­site way (towards cold) would be sub­stan­tially harder, but per­haps more reward­ing in terms of power bills and efficiency.

It’s the kind of life that’s attrac­tive as an idea. Maybe not so much in real life.

Posted in life | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

A Compact Theme for Spaz

January 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

I gave up on Gwib­ber a while ago–it was just too buggy for me to stand using on a day-to-day basis. In my search for an open source Twit­ter client, I found Spaz. While it’s based on Adobe Air, it’s not too bad.

I found the default theme a bit too big, though. And while I deeply appre­ci­ated the wickedly com­pact spaz-mini theme, I found it, sur­pris­ingly, too small for me. I fol­low a lot of peo­ple and want to see the names and pic­tures large so I can browse through the feed quickly.

sorta-small theme for SpazSo I made a few edits to the small theme and came up with sorta-small, a com­pact theme for Spaz, fea­tur­ing larger pic­tures and names as well as a embiggened text entry field, while main­tain­ing the over­all com­pact feel of the original.

As far as I know, the only way to install the theme is to extract the tar.gz to a folder and drop that in /opt/Spaz/share/themes (you’ll need to be root to do so). For you copy and paste junkies:


wget http://jaket.is-a-geek.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sorta-small.tar.gz
tar xfvz sorta-small.tar.gz
sudo cp sorta-small /opt/Spaz/share/themes/ -R

(There’s prob­a­bly a dif­fer­ent way to do this on Win­dows & Mac. I have no idea what that is, but if you’re in to that sort of thing, I’m sure you can fig­ure it out).

Then restart Spaz and select it in the Interface->theme preferences.

Down­load Sorta-Small Theme for Spaz

Posted in linux | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Regenerating My Creative Drive or Choosing Who Controls My Life

January 6, 2010 | 3 Comments

A few days ago, Tyco Garen posted about read­ing on his new kin­dle. He pointed out:

My main issue is that I’m really bad at set­ting aside time to read when I’m awake enough to actu­ally read.

I run into this prob­lem all the time. In fact, it’s the main rea­son I don’t read very much. I responded:


I’ve got lots of spare time. But rarely do I have lots of time when my brain is at more than 65% functional.

I Just Want to Veg

This cur­rently more a prob­lem than its ever been. Right now, things are really hec­tic at work, and hon­estly, my job is suck­ing the life right out of me (and by “life” I at least mean “cre­ative juices and brain power”; it may or may not be suck­ing more than that, but that’s a dif­fer­ent topic).

So when I get home, I want to take it easy, to relax, spend some time with my fam­ily and spend some time alone with­out expend­ing a lot of effort. If I stay up a lit­tle later than every­one else, I can even get a cou­ple hours of com­plete quiet, by myself.

Unfor­tu­nately, after about 11:00, my brain drops to about 65% func­tional. I can still do things, read my RSS feeds and watch TV, but I have a hard time mus­ter­ing the energy to com­pre­hend a dif­fi­cult book or doing any­thing creative.

So usu­ally, it’s Google Reader or hulu, rather than any­thing pro­duc­tive, cre­ative or challenging.

When the Shelves Are Bare

This is a good chunk of the rea­son I haven’t blogged much recently: I haven’t had time on my lunch break, and beyond that, I haven’t had the cre­ative energy to write any­thing at all.

But yes­ter­day, I came across this arti­cle talk­ing about deal­ing with being cre­ative empti­ness. The author writes:

So what do you do when the thing that sus­tains you begins to tire you? What do you do when the shelves are bare?

I think you go back and put stuff on the shelf. For the cre­ative soul I think the way we do that is a lit­tle counter-intuitive: we shoot more, write more, we go back to the well and fill it with the same bucket we use for draw­ing water in the first place. We get inten­tional about the process and stop wor­ry­ing about the prod­ucts. We stir the paint. We take more risks. We work more, not less.

This is a pretty big challenge–to expend more energy when you’re lack­ing it alto­gether, work­ing harder to push through not want­ing to work at all.

Putting Stuff Back on the Shelves

But I got to to think­ing: even if I hate my job (and in fact, because I do), why should I let it con­trol my life? Why should I let the part of my life that I enjoy least ruin the part of my life that I enjoy most?

So I’m mak­ing a deci­sion. I’m going to start putting stuff back on the shelves. I’m going to pick up the blog tem­plate I dropped a while ago, and dang it, I’m going to fin­ish it. I’m going to do fawm again (I think I’m going to lower the bar a bit, maybe 10 songs, but I’m still doing it). I’m going to start blog­ging again (with bet­ter back­ups this time).

I’m going to read­ing books and pray­ing more and read­ing Google Reader less. I’m going to help my wife more.

Hon­estly, those are going to be the hard­est pieces.

But I’m mak­ing a deci­sion: this is what I’m going to do. I’m tired of being con­trolled by the least impor­tant part of my life.

Posted in art, poetry | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Open Worship and Trust

January 5, 2010 | 4 Comments

I read this arti­cle last night about the Quaker prac­tice of open wor­ship, which as far as I can tell is mostly sit­ting around with­out hav­ing any­thing planned and let­ting the con­gre­ga­tion speak/lead/sing at will.

I like this idea a lot, mostly because I feel like the times I’ve had the best wor­ship expe­ri­ences (and by “best,” I mean “most wor­ship­ful”) have been times like this, when who­ever was in charge opened things up and let peo­ple offer praises, prayers, thoughts, tes­ti­monies, etc.

Apart from lik­ing it expe­ri­en­tially, though, I like the idea of open wor­ship because it’s pri­mar­ily very egalitarian–it doesn’t assume, like a nor­mal ser­vice does, that the guys in charge (the wor­ship leader and the sermon-giver) are the only ones through whom God is going to speak.

I think that’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion, espe­cially when we start think­ing about the dynam­ics of power in the church and about the priest­hood of believ­ers (not to men­tion the Beat­i­tudes) which turns the nor­mal ‘charis­matic leader in change of things’ dynamic on its head.

By prac­tic­ing open wor­ship, I think we com­mu­ni­cate to the our­selves (both on the plat­form and in the pews) that God is mov­ing in each of us, and that our min­istry to each other is as vital as what one per­son has to say.

And in fact, I won­der if that’s why my expe­ri­ences with open-style wor­ship have been mem­o­rably good–rather than giv­ing me some­thing to con­sume (a ser­mon, a song, a show), open wor­ship asks and val­ues my participation.

I can imag­ine, at this point, though, my friend Ken inter­ject­ing a warn­ing about dan­ger­ous the­ol­ogy being spewed when you give peo­ple the free­dom to do/say what they want. But lis­ten to what the orig­i­nal arti­cle says about that:

Finally, open wor­ship trusts the spir­i­tu­al­ity of peo­ple. When we talk about open wor­ship, a lot of peo­ple instantly think about the one “crazy” per­son who will say “scary” stuff. Even as rare as this occurs (I haven’t expe­ri­enced this yet in the 8 months I’ve been pas­tor­ing at our cur­rent church) we need to make our­selves vul­ner­a­ble to this because all peo­ple have a spir­i­tu­al­ity to be shared. This is an embrac­ing of the priest­hood of the believ­ers in a way that rec­og­nizes the risks involved, and yet believes in it enough to open one’s self up…[F]or the most part the com­mu­nity rec­og­nizes the out-of-place com­ment, the remark that seemed off base, or the per­son who does not yet have a rep­u­ta­tion in the com­mu­nity. We can trust the spir­i­tu­al­ity of peo­ple, and by open­ing our­selves up to that, I think we will see won­der­ful move­ments of God and spir­i­tual growth not pos­si­ble any other way.

My expe­ri­ence bears this out as well. I par­tic­u­larly remem­ber a friend of mine who was inter­ested in Chris­tiantiy com­ing with me to a cam­pus min­istry event one night and say­ing some things that were pretty appar­ently untrue (I don’t remem­ber what they were, just that they weren’t down with the Chris­t­ian main­stream). The major­ity of the peo­ple there rec­og­nized that he didn’t really have any rep­u­ta­tion in our com­mu­nity yet, and so didn’t take him too seriously–it wasn’t a big deal.

The prob­lem, I think, is that a fear of crazy the­ol­ogy in open wor­ship teaches us to not trust the Holy Spirit. Isn’t it the Spirit, after all, that moves those kinds of gath­er­ings along, that nudges peo­ple in the direc­tion of min­istry to each other? To relin­quish con­trol of those sorts of events works against that fear and teaches us to trust not only each other, but the Holy Spirit.

And that’s the kind of les­son I think we could stand to learn.

Posted in christianity | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

A Review of W.S. Merwin’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Book: The Shadow of Sirius

December 16, 2009 | 1 Comment

I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to start read­ing the Pulitzer Prize win­ners for lit­er­a­ture and poetry. Every time in the past, I’ve read a Pulitzer win­ner (Walk­ing to Martha’s Vine­yard and Gilead for exam­ple) I’ve always really enjoyed them.

So I got W.S. Merwin’s book of poetry, The Shadow of Sir­ius, out of the library.

The first sec­tion of it is really good. Mer­win knows how to write a good poem, to take a metaphor and lay it out, per­fectly. Through­out most of these poems, he plays his cards close to his chest through­out the poem, string­ing the metaphor along, then turn­ing the poem in the last cou­ple lines.

The poems in this first sec­tion are really pretty acces­si­ble. They’re short, mak­ing them easy to re-read, once you’ve hit the turn, and the metaphors and themes are famil­iar with­out being tired.

I’ve argued before that we need more peo­ple writ­ing acces­si­ble poetry, stuff that every­body under­stands, and the first half of this book does exactly that.

Unfor­tu­nately, the sec­ond half of the book tends to wal­low a bit more in poetry that’s either less acces­si­ble or maybe in themes that aren’t quite as inter­est­ing (there’s a lot of Poetry Sub­ject Num­ber Two, which might get more inter­est­ing to me the older I get, but cur­rently feels a lot like clas­si­cal music: it’s not so bad, but I’m just not interested).

In any case, the book doesn’t fin­ish nearly as strong as it starts, which is kind of a bum­mer from a Pulitzer Prize win­ner. Still, it’s a short book of poetry, so it’s prob­a­bly worth your time.

Posted in art, literature, poetry | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

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