IVP - Strangely Dim - August 2009 Archives

Haiku and Also with You

Who doesn't like haiku--that endearing five-seven-five syllabic poetry form that can be as poignant as it can be prosaic? Rebecca featured a couple in her first ever Strangely Dim post, that's how awesome haiku are. I wonder if haiku can also be devotional, even creedal. I've heard lately of people writing their testimonies on pieces of cardboard, tweeting their theology in 140 characters or less, even presenting Christianity in no more than three words. So haiku ought to do, if you take my meaning.

I'll try a couple; I invite you to post your own as we enter into an open-ended season of sporadic faith-based haiku. Or something like that.

God created us.

When he did, he called us good.

Taste the irony.

Jesus saves sinners.

Why would he do such a thing?

Sinners are naughty.

The earth is the Lord's.

He put us in charge of it.

Sorry for that, Earth.

***

Your turn, everyone!

Write a haiku--or seven

It's fun--believe me!

The Meaning of a Tweet

Many thanks to Dave for his kind introduction. Many thanks to Dave, Lisa and Christa for giving me a little platform here at Strangely Dim. And many, many thanks to you, dear reader, for giving me a chance when you don't know me from Eve.

As the web editor at IVP, I spend a good deal of my time writing copy that packs a lot of meaning about books or authors in short spaces. But the shortest of these short-form communiqués has to be the tweet.

Recently one of our authors (don't even try to guess, I'm not going to give any hints who it was) said that he didn't believe anything that had any real meaning could be said on Twitter. What determines the meaning of a tweet? Is it the content? Is it the format? And is this kind of broadcasting of short thoughts really so revolutionary in the history of the world?

In his book, Flickering Pixels, Shane Hipps defines media as "anything that stretches, extends, or amplifies some human capacity." If we accept Hipps' definition as at least somewhat accurate, then it seems that media forms are not simply passive tools but active reservoirs; we pour into them the meaning from our lives for the sake of passing it on.

Viewed this way, I see tweets as little micro-compressed extensions of our lives. Just like lives, tweets are

• Fleeting. There are so many of them, a single tweet flows down your screen sometimes before you've even had time to read it. So too are lives, passing before our eyes more quickly than we can grasp and competing with so many others for prominence, each one pregnant with meaning and potential.
• Speaking. Each tweet speaks to the world, whether or not it expects to get a response. So too the details of our lives speak to the world about us--and yes, even what we ate for breakfast can communicate something. Why else would people carve words into a tree or spray paint a message on a highway overpass or tatoo symbols on their bodies? These kinds of shout-outs to the world may feel meaningless in one sense, but their meaning lies in the very human outpouring of a desire to speak into the world, to have a voice, to declare something, and ultimately to be heard and understood.
• Fickle. Tweets, like people, can be beautiful, funny, mean, lewd, misleading, spiritual, profound or mundane. They are conduits for all the things that lie in the human heart, which is perhaps one reason why I find these little missives so fascinating.
• Constrained. In a tweet there are only 140 characters available to work with. We can't cram every word ever written in. We have to make choices to communicate most clearly, deciding what we want to say at the expense of what we can't say. The same is true with life. Most people have around eighty years to work with. Like a tweet, we are constrained by the boundaries of what is and what is not, what we choose and what we don't choose.

Working within constraints is one of the things I love about writing. I can't use every word in the universe; there's really only one that is best for each idea I want to convey. And part of the fun is figuring out which words to use and which not to.

This idea certainly isn't new. How about the book of Proverbs? "When words are many, sin is not absent, / but he who holds his tongue is wise" (10:19). At seventy-eight characters, including spaces and punctuation, eminently tweetable. What about memorable speeches? We don't remember the whole speech. But the short quotes are bite-sized, so they stick. "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country" (seventy-nine characters). Long? No. Meaningful? Yes. Or how about song lyrics? "I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls, only to be with you. But I still haven't found what I'm looking for"--128 characters. Tweet it, baby.

This highly lauded poem by William Carlos Williams could be tweeted with 51 characters to spare:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Or this Japanese Haiku:

Simple. Beautiful. Tweet-worthy.

Of course, the short form isn't appropriate for everything. The Odyssey doesn't work very well in tiny chunks (though someone somewhere is certainly trying to tweet through it as I type). Verses from the Bible can be taken out of context and twisted beyond recognition fairly easily. Twitter, like any other media form, needs to be used with discernment, a quality many users will, unfortunately, lack.

It's that potential for misuse that may turn you off to Twitter. Or maybe it's because you think it's impersonal, or you think most of the people using it are idiots and you don't care what they have to say, or you don't like computers, or you think Twitter contributes to the general deterioration of Western society and our ability to comprehend and engage in longer forms of communication, or any number of other perfectly acceptable reasons. But please, let's cross "I don't like Twitter because it doesn't mean anything" off our lists, okay?

Goodbye Summer, Hello Rebecca

Summer is winding down, and for all our efforts at escape, it seems we're still here. One of the nice things about working for InterVarsity Press is that, because we're part of the movement known as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which operates on an academic calendar, fall doesn't seem like an end so much as a beginning. The fall brings with it a burst of renewed creativity, starting with the blank slate of acquisitions for each editor and culminating in the late-October annual all-company meeting, where we come thisclose to a group hug.

We're feeling that burst of energy here at Strangely Dim in part because we've got a new contributor: Rebecca Larson, our friend and IVP's web editor. Among other things, Rebecca writes the Likewise Notebook, a semiregular e-mail update on the comings, goings and writings of authors in our Likewise line. (You can sign up for it here.) She also tweets and friends and engages in various other online re-verb-erations on behalf of IVP. In her spare time she occasionally designs nifty book covers (like this and this). I had the honor of DJing Rebecca's wedding reception, which I managed to ruin by playing the wrong track as she stepped to the dance floor with her dad. Apparently he's not as big a fan of hip hop (or ska or grunge metal or whatever it was that I played) as I might have imagined.

Rebecca is insightful and creative, and a whiz at Mad Libs. I hope you'll enjoy getting to know her in all her strange dimness.

Pace and Peace

I wrote the following three years ago. The details have changed, but the story remains the same. Consider this "Escape from Urgency" in our Summer of Escapist Fantasy.

***

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. . . .

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.

Escape from Books?

A friend on Facebook(tm) wrote the following (he's in that time of life when you're predisposed to write in all-caps):

READING IS STUPID. I HATE IT. I HATE THAT [MY SCHOOL] IS FORCING US TO LIKE READING. YEA THE ART IN READING BLA BLA BLA IS GETTING OLD. I HATE IT AND WHEN HS IS OVER I WONT EVER PICK UP A BOOK AGAIN.

Some of the responses from well-intentioned old people in his life:

Maybe it's just the type of stuff you're required to read. Books bring a special dimension to our lives but we don't all appreciate "text books". I know I don't!

 

Grab a copy of "The Shack" and ponder it for a while. It has changed many a life . . . most positively!

 

Reading is a gateway to many other things. . . . Please don't give up on reading all together just because you don't like the books that are "requried" [sic] to read. Not everything in life is fun, but if you give it a chance, it may open up doors in your mind. I know that sounds weird, but I'm weird (you know that!)

My friend isn't alone in his frustration with books as a medium. Comedian Jim Gaffigan complains about people who give books as gifts: it's like giving homework. His response? "I got a present for you; go mow my lawn." Even poets and essayists recognize the privileged position books have been given. In his book So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, Gabriel Zaid seems to side with my young friend: "The cost of reading would be much reduced if authors and publishers respected readers' time more."

Escape the End