IVP - Strangely Dim

Too Pretty to Drink

Rick over at Mmmm, That's Good Coffee has posted a cool YouTube video. If you only like coffee right now, you'll love it by the time Rick is finished with you.

Come back when you're finished and tell me what's the deal with YouTube. Where are all these videos coming from? Beyond the individual merits, what's the appeal of these homespun art films? Most of the ones I've seen remind me of the film American Beauty, in which a kid captures ephemera on film and takes consolation in it. Some of them, unfortunately, remind me of the TV show America's Funniest Home Videos, in which people do stupid stuff and other people film it.

Of Surnames and Pseudonyms

I recently met someone with a famous name. I don't mean a bank teller named Thomas Jefferson or anything like that; I mean someone who is blood- and name-related to somebody famous. And now having talked with her, I have a new respect for pseudonyms.

There's all sorts of weight attached to your name. My mother's name was Grady; her mother's name was Brady. One look at her driver's license and you would have pegged her as Irish Catholic, and then you would have imagined her regularly overindulging in potatoes and whiskey while reciting the Rosary. Then my mom married a Zimmerman, took my dad's name, and encountered an entirely different set of presuppositions.

Now, imagine if my dad were famous, let's say for inventing Vitamin C. My mom would go from enduring irrational expectations of her to bearing the mystique of a famous spouse: "Oh, Mrs. Zimmerman, you must be so healthy. What's your favorite fruit? Do you miss potatoes?"

My mom would be spared all that scrutiny and false expectation if only my famous dad had taken a pseudonym. "Miss Potatoes" would be a good one.

I'm told that surnames originated out of people's vocation. "Zimmerman" means "innkeeper"; presumably someone deep in my family's history kept an inn, and the name stuck. Over time, of course, those connections became so distant as to be meaningless. Now our names are simply one way we organize our society--how we alphabetize our phone books.

But proximity to celebrity complicates our self-understanding. Fame transforms a name into a commodity; people are judged by their famous relatives, and their name becomes a brand that they must protect. Roger Clinton has lived a relatively normal life, but in the shadow of his brother, President Bill Clinton, that normal life starts to look pathetic. Even worse, Roger's foibles reflect badly on Bill's reputation, so the pressure on Roger amps up.

You can ride the right name into a supremely comfortable life. Names open doors that otherwise would remain closed; names grant us access to the most power and the best parties. But what if you're not interested in the life afforded you by your name? What if you're a Kennedy who wants to vote Republican? What if you're a Bush who wants to vote Democratic? What if you're a Gates who wants to use a Mac? What if you have something completely fresh and distinct to say or do, but all your advisors and even complete strangers are steering you onto a path carved out for you before you were even born?

So my new friend with a famous name (let's call her "Misty Meanor" just for kicks) faces a number of challenges, among them living up to the fame of her name while simultaneously carving out her own destiny. "Who am I, and what am I about?" she might ask. "What has my lineage contributed to the legacy I'm trying to produce? At what point does Meanor end and Misty begin? How do I handle my second-hand fame responsibly and ethically?"

I heard a song by John Lennon that proved especially poignant to me, because he sings about my surname--Zimmerman--in reference to a pseudonym, Dylan. When you peel back all the layers, Bob Dylan is really Bob Zimmerman, but all those layers are so important that to think of him simply as Bob Zimmerman is to not really know him. Lennon's song, "God," is an attempt to get past the layers to the core of who we are, and to rebuild from there. He sings from the far side of his career as a Beatle, and you can hear the tiredness in his voice as he deconstructs his lineage in search of a meaningful legacy. It's a sad song, really;I'll digest it to reflect what made me hit the brakes:

"I don't believe in Zimmerman . . . I just believe in me."

Ultimately, "me" is not all I believe in. I believe in God, for example--the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. Et cetera, et cetera. To believe in a God who is a Father, to assert my sonship as a foundation of my belief, is an audacious claim: in doing so I am positioning myself out in front of all of creation. But it's not just a power grab; it also prompts a great deal of responsibility: my legacy will reflect back on the Father I have so audaciously claimed. I call God Father; how then shall I live?

Embrace the Tension

So we had this Likewise Gathering over the weekend. Nineteen guests of InterVarsity Press came in to discuss the faith + publishing needs of people in their twenties and early thirties. Among the things I learned: "young adults," in the ears of most people, means "adolescents." I wonder what "old adults" means, but I fear that it would mean me.

But the word that kept coming up was tension. The tension of enjoying your youth but being taken seriously as an adult, the tension of living in a consumer culture while knowing that children are being victimized around the world by consumer practices, the tension of making ethical decisions in real time, the tension of navigating adulthood when the primary adults in your life checked out years previous, the tension of living up to the life handed you as a child of promise, the tension of bearing someone else's legacy as your lineage. My nails are getting shorter by the minute.

Add to that the tension of a faith rooted and established in paradox: Jesus the fully human and fully divine, one God in three Persons, the now and the not yet, and on and on and on. The rallying cry of the weekend seemed to be the concept statement of Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz: faith, like life, doesn't resolve.

As a publisher we face our own tensions. Do we publish books for the mind or the heart? Do we publish to social-justice activists or pop culture gluttons? Are we a ministry or a business? And on and on and on.

In a culture characterized by tension, the misery index is going to be pretty high, but it's only aggravated by the fact that we've been, in the words of Sam Phillips, "raised on promises." I certainly expected to be president of the United States by now, but instead I can't decide which pile of work I need to do first, which denomination I should invest my energy in, and on and on and on.

So perhaps the job of a publisher is to find and produce books that train people to tolerate tension--and beyond that, perhaps, to even embrace the tension. If God, after all, is paradoxical, then even our happy ending will have a fair bit of tension built into it.

The logo for Likewise displays some tension; a man leads a donkey, with a taut rope between them. An earlier draft, believe it or not, was even more tense: the donkey's legs were locked tight. Our designer hinted at motion by bending the donkey's leg. Clever, huh?

I can't imagine that selling tension is an easy task; good thing I'm in editorial.

A Likewise Limerick

This week IVP Books is gathering seventeen people to discuss the direction of our Likewise line, which I've posted on previously both here and at Loud Time. In case you don't like to link to stuff, Likewise is a line of books geared toward young adult discipleship. The logo is a farmer leading a donkey; the tagline is "Go and Do." You can see the logo here. I wrote a limerick to celebrate the line (so to speak):

There once was a donkey named Ferdinand
Who started a hurdy-gurdy band.
The band liked to swing,
But soon broke a string
When they strummed with their hooves--not fingery hands.

As you can see, I've named the donkey Ferdinand, and I certainly have my reasons, but you're welcome to offer up your own name for both the donkey and the farmer, whom I've named Tony. Anyway, I'm looking forward to a fun time with some interesting people over the next few days. I'll blog about it when it's all over.

Walk Much?

I just walked into a wall. It wasn’t like I had my head in a comic book or was testing to see if I had sonar or anything; I just walked into a wall. My head was somewhere else.

This weekend my eighteen-month old nephew ran into a wall. He was so excited running down the hallway that he turned too early. It was cute because he’s so little, and he's cute when he runs, and he got over it quickly. But I’m not little, I wasn't running, and I’m clearly not over it. Not cute.

I’ve noticed lately that when I get stressed, I start to check out. I don’t listen as well when people talk to me, I don’t notice how people are feeling when I see them or talk to them. And lately it seems like I can’t stop running, like I’m facing wave upon wave of hyperactivity—family visits here, road trips there, writing projects there, special events here. I’m coping by checking out, which is clearly not coping at all, if it means that I’m stepping on toes and walking into walls.

This really should be a time of reflection for me: my birthday is coming up, my annual performance evaluation at work is coming up, and I have a blog--the center of the navel-gazing universe. I should have self-awareness coming out my nose. But I can’t seem to collect my thoughts: it’s like my brains have been rattled from banging my head on too many walls.

It strikes me that a person is much less likely to slam into a wall while walking than while running. At the very least, it’s easier to stop, but walkers are also more likely to be aware of their surroundings--unless, of course, their minds are racing and their heads are somewhere else.

I came across this passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which I think offers a pretty astute analysis of the crisis of pace: We think we have to know everything, even though we cannot, and so we strive continually and thereby gradually and unrelentingly run ourselves down.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge?

So I’m going to try to run less and walk more. As soon as I can pry my head out of this wall.