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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

So 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

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.

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.

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.

It’s easy to install on Ubuntu–just add the ppa and install it. On RPM-based distros, though, it’s not as easy, particularly Mandriva where the rpm available won’t officially install. Here’s how to do it:

1. Download the rpm. I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t understand rpms, so this may or may not be relatively up to date
2. If the rpm won’t install, extract the files to a directory
3. The directory structure will clue you in where to put all the files, in which system folders they go
4. If necessary, install the fonts you need
5. Create a symlink to get the executable in your path:

   ln -s /usr/share/conkyforecast/conkyForecast.py  /usr/bin/conkyForecast

6. Get your .conkyForecast-rc working as per the thread on the Ubuntu forums
7. Run Conky and enjoy the hotness!