On Good Music

I don't know if I should do this or not, but the more I age, the more I accept the "good is relative" definition when it pertains to the arts. What you think is good art I might think is bad art, and vice verse. I don't possess the authority to tell people that the music they like is "good," much less "bad." What makes for good music? Goodness if I know. I can only answer according to my own tastes and interests.

My musical taste spans many genres. Growing up, I went through my Oldies phase and my Country phase where I would only listen to radio stations that played that music. I also grew up always listening to some form of classical music, whether intentionally listening to the radio or unintentionally overhearing my mother or sister practice the piano. I began playing French horn in sixth grade, which further expanded my listening of classical music (orchestral, wind band, chamber music, etc.). Studying classical music, its history and form, encourages even more appreciation and love. When I think of good music, I automatically think of my favorite symphonies (Saint-Saens Organ Symphony) or piano pieces (Liszt's transcription of Widmung). The expert crafting employed by classical composers amazes me and creates in me a reverence for that genre.

But I also listen to pretty much anything: today's hits, country, folk (which I especially love), world, etc. But does simply listening to music and enjoying it make it good music? I must confess that not all the music that I like to listen to is music that I necessarily think is good.Take a Katy Perry or LMFAO song--is it good? I dance to it, I sing it, I love its beat, but is it good? I want to answer "no."

There it is: I like bad music sometimes.What makes it bad? I can only answer such questions with abstraction. Good music must expand my soul in some way. It must draw my mind to a higher plane than the one on which it usually rests. It must remind me of my humanity and human creativity while showing me the grace of God. The grace need not be explicit; the music needn't be "religious." It must show me, like a beautiful sunrise or a newborn baby, that God is working in, among, through, and around us.

Response to Selzer's "The Knife"

I love Selzer’s language in “The Knife.” Vivid and concrete, I could see each body part. I hold the knife in my hand. I am the surgeon. 

Selzer kept layering the metaphors for the knife, creating a complicated picture of his vocation. I think vocation is an appropriate word, considering he confesses “that the priestliness of [his] profession has ever been impressed on “him” by the vows, “taken with all solemnity” (709). He remembers visiting the hospital where his father worked and where he began to feel drawn to such a place.

The images of the knife contradict but somehow don’t compete. They create a full picture of what it is like to be a surgeon, to wield (or almost be wielded by) the knife—an instrument of great power. The knife can be dangerous but yet is necessary for the “priest’s” work. The knife leads Selzer on a dangerous journey or down a page of poetry or through a communion-like experience.

I was greatly amused by the ant part. At first, I thought the ant might be a metaphor for a distraction, but it turned out to be a literal ant. While humorous, the section ends with meaningful implied and explicit questions like, “Is our reverence for life in question?” (712). Although he refers to a literal ant, Selzer also makes the ant a symbol for disease. “He is disease—that for whose destruction we have gathered,” he writes (712). I thought the humorous and yet serious situation of finding an ant a potent image, communicative of Selzer’s whole experience of being a surgeon.

Emblems

River: Rivers can flow both lazily or hurriedly. They can move almost without detection from the human eye or move over immediately noticeable rapids with white foam and loud rushing. I am a person who usually “goes with the flow,” who goes through life accepting either smooth flowing or bumpy rushing as they come. Sometimes I don’t ride the river but am the river, moving slowly or energetically. I’m headed somewhere, to the end of my life, to my outlet into a greater ocean.

Standing on the edge of a cliff with a parachute: I’m going to graduate in May, and I have no definite plans yet for next year. There are many possibilities, just not any answers. I’ve come to the edge of a cliff, ready and willing to BASE jump with my parachute. I’m just waiting for the signal to go, the answer back from graduate school applications (after I actually fill those out...), before I step off the stone. I could land in a million different spots but am aiming for a general area. My landing might be bumpy or painful. I might not land near the target area at all. But I’m graduating. I have to jump.

Bread: Christ is the bread of life. As a Christian, I am called to be as Christ-like as I can. So I am striving for breadhood? Yes. The yeast I sprinkle on my spiritual life sometimes produces good, light bread and sometimes produces hard, dense bread that failed to rise. My good bread, my resolve to be spiritually steadfast, molds quickly in open air, and I must bake again. And again. I am also the bread, not the baker. I am dough, waiting for God to sprinkle good yeast so that I may work for his kingdom.

Rubber band: I’m tired. I’m stretched. After being stretch and pulled by trying to hold my schedule together, I’ll come to a time of rest. My rubber band self will relax and return to her original shape. Although stretching and pulling and holding things together put stress on the rubber band, the rubber is made to do this.

Seed: Like I wait for God to sprinkle yeast, I also wait for him to scatter seed. Seeds are opportunities for relationships, growth, new ideas, a job, a child. I must be prepared ground. The Holy Spirit waters. I add fertilizer, too. Sometimes the seeds lie dormant for a long time. Sometimes they spring up almost immediately. My life is the garden.

Saving Saint Nicholas

How did Saint Nicholas become the red-suited, jolly Santa?

Born around 270 A.D., Nicholas became Bishop of Myra at the young age of about thirty. Known for his generosity to those in need and his faith and devotion to God, Nicholas is the patron saint for numerous people and things, most notably children, ships/sailors, and the wrongfully condemned and imprisoned. Nicholas even went to the Council at Nicaea and later to see Constantine about lowering that taxes in Myra. He taught the Gospel simply so all could understand and pursued justice with vigor. His tomb became a pilgrimage sight for several hundred years.

Saint Nicholas and his feast day of December 6th were not immediately known or popular in the "New World" because the first colonists, mostly Puritans, rejected the idea of sainthood. But the Spanish, Germans, and mainly the Dutch brought over traditions surrounding Saint Nicholas, such as gift giving, which French nuns had begun as early as the 1100s.

Saint Nicholas's image really started to change after the American Revolution with the formation of the New York Historical Society in 1804 by John Pintard and the writing of Knickerbocker's History of New York by Washington Irving in 1809. Irving, a member of the Society, published this satirical fiction that referenced a jolly St. Nicholas many times. Irving transformed a Bishop figure in and "elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe" (St. Nicholas Center). The Society hosted its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner on December 6, 1810 and displayed the first American image of St. Nicholas, created by Alexander Anderson.

The New York elite also wanted to domesticate what had become a raucous, drunken public spectacle over the years. In 1823, Clement Clark Moore (although there is an argument that Henry Livingston first penned it) wrote and published "A Visit from St. Nicholas," or more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas." This poem boosted the image of St. Nicholas as a jolly elf figure and became a "defining American holiday classic" (St. Nicholas Center). Other various artists, like political cartoonist Thomas Nast, contributed to the image of St. Nicholas as the red-suited, rotund, jolly elf. Not only did St. Nicholas's image change, his name did as well. Santa Claus grew out of the "natural phonetic alteration from the German Sankt Niklaus" (St. Nicholas Center).

The Church also began to celebrate Christmas as they learned that Santa and a Christmas tree greatly improved attendance. The push for Christians to embrace Christmas also came from German immigrants, Washington Irving, Clement Clark Moore, Charles Dickens, and the Oxford Movement in the Anglican church. Carol singing also became popular.

Haddon Sundblom further cemented the image of Santa Claus when, in 1931, he began 35 years of designing Coca-Cola advertisements that featured Santa, whose aim was to convince consumers that Coke was a solution to "a thirst of all seasons." The use of the Santa Claus image in advertising firmly placed St. Nicholas and ultimately Christmas in the realm of consumerism.

Santa Claus exists today as a mixed symbol. While perhaps originally suggesting generosity and kindness, he also tends to represent the over consumption that characterizes American society.

From Bishop to jolly elf, Saint Nicholas has undergone quite a journey.

Sources:
http://www.stnicholascenter.org
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/1997/12/santa_claus.html

Teething

I notice when people’s teeth aren’t white and straight. I can’t deny it. Smiling in America is a sign of friendliness, approachableness, and social awareness, and it is almost expected in every human interaction. We grow concerned if our companion isn’t smiling. Is he mad? Is she sad? Something must be wrong. We want to see those pearly whites!

But I am not writing to discuss the mores of smiling in American society. I am currently more interested in the physical stuffs of the smile—the teeth.

I was about seven and my left front tooth was working its way loose. Like most children, I was afraid of the pain possibly involved with having a tooth pulled; therefore, I didn’t want to brush it, and I certainly wasn’t going to let anyone touch it, especially my mother, who told me it wouldn’t hurt that much to pull. Yanking a tooth out of my gums not hurt? I refused to believe her. The incarcerated tooth kept trying to escape the prison of my mouth until finally it hung by one, thin thread of tissue. Still my lips kept sentinel.

We were driving to my mother’s parents’ house in St. Paul, Minnesota and had decided to make it a two day trip. I remember sitting in the back seat of our mini-van, awkwardly eating McDonald’s French fries to avoid the use of my front teeth. We stopped at a Best Western Hotel for the night. Once inside and settled, my mother practiced her parental authority and told me the tooth had to come out. She was probably worried about my grandmother’s reaction to the tooth. Why would my grandmother react badly? Well, because when my mother seated my wiggling, squirming body on the sink counter and swiftly pulled the tooth (which didn’t hurt at all), we discovered that the once pearly white baby tooth had rotted clean through. A small pinprick of light forced its way through the hole in the middle of the tooth, which was disturbing shades of black and green.

I was horrified. My parents had let the tooth rot in my head! I asked my mom years later why she’d let this happen. She replied that it was a mixture of laziness and good parenting. “Experience is the teacher,” she told me. Let your daughter do something gross and then let her find out how gross it really was. She’ll never ever do it again. It worked. After that, loose baby teeth didn’t stay in my mouth for long. My parents tried a similar approach on my brother, and he just ended up with dirty teeth and an abhorrence for toothpaste. Independence is a gift difficultly given to children.

My brother, Edward, is an anomaly, having always struggled with consistent dental hygiene; yet, my sisters, Mary and Clara, and I have brushed religiously. Mary remembers a song that Dad used to sing when she was little, “Brush your teeth every night.  Brush your teeth, do it right.  Don't want to get any cavities.” I wonder why he didn’t sing this to me as my loose tooth sat rotting. Probably because he knew the tooth would come out soon anyways. Perhaps he did sing me the song, and I just don’t remember. Regardless, I got the message because I’ve never had a cavity (I don’t count the rotten tooth catastrophe). I am the only child to exist thus far cavity free.  Mary experienced the negative effects of gum disease, getting her first cavity at fifteen. Clara despaired when she got her first cavity around nine or ten because this meant that she didn’t get to have her Polaroid taken for the No Cavities Club at the dentist’s office. I still have all my Polaroid pictures distinguishing me as a No Cavities Club member in a photo album.

Then came those preteen and teenage years that bring braces. My mother informed me recently that not getting braces for her children was never an option. It was just something that would happen, no question. My mother says that braces are “good for mental health,” especially for self-conscious teenagers, even if they are gotten for mostly cosmetic reasons. Having straight, white teeth makes me feel that I can smile widely and proudly.

Not getting braces wasn’t an option for my mother either. Her parents wanted braces for her and her brother, my Uncle Rob. She had many friends with braces, and she tells me that it didn’t seem uncommon to have braces in the early 1970s.

 My family’s braces legacy goes back to my mother’s mother, who had braces almost sixty-five years ago in the late 1940s. Getting braces then was pretty uncommon, and my great-grandmother had to drive Granny sixty miles to Waco, TX for her orthodontist appointments. When I asked her about her braces, she told me that they were a great gift because even though it was uncommon and somewhat expensive, her teeth were so crooked from overcrowding that her parents made the financial sacrifice to get them for her. In fact, one of her front teeth stuck straight out and showed even when her mouth was closed. Overall, she had eight teeth pulled before the braces could even begin their straightening work. My maternal grandfather, blessed with straight teeth, never got braces.

My paternal grandparents never got braces either but not because their teeth were straight. Operating under an assumption my father calls a “frontier idea,” my paternal grandfather had all his teeth pulled in his forties and was fitted for dentures. He’s spent half his life without his original teeth. Pulling teeth midway through life was standard practice in the setting where my grandfather grew up, out in west Texas. With limited opportunities for education, most people didn’t take as good a care of their teeth as is common practice today. It was probably less painful in the long run to just get the teeth pulled. My paternal grandmother, however, took better care of her teeth, only needing partial dentures.

My father got braces to fix the large gap he had in between his two front teeth, which kept other teeth from growing in properly. Growing up in a similar but more urban setting as his father, my father didn’t know many other kids with braces. In lower-middle class sections of Fort Worth, money did not usually go toward getting braces. But my father and his parents didn’t want the gap to persist, so they decided to go forward with braces. His older sister, my Aunt Kathy, did not have them.

My parents passed on certain genes that gave all four of their children crooked teeth. We expected braces as a course of life. My sisters and I all went to the same orthodontist (my brother got to go to the wife of our pastor, who owned a practice an hour’s drive away). We didn’t especially like Dr. Mann, the tall, skinny, seemingly cold orthodontist who every couple of weeks tightened our braces and sent us home in pain. He hardly said anything while he tightened and attached more metal to our mouths.

Mary and Clara have their own painful stories. Mary began visiting Dr. Mann when she was nine, who installed an appliance to widen the top of her mouth. Three years later and four teeth fewer, she got her braces, which she had for two years. Clara also had an appliance. It sat attached in her mouth for nine months, fixing her cross-bite; then came almost three years of braces.  Edward’s braces were a gift from our pastor’s wife. His experience was at least a friendlier one without Dr. Mann.

I not only had braces on my upper and lower sets of teeth, I had a tongue cage appliance (akin to a medieval torture device). I needed it because my tongue was in the way, keeping my lateral incisors (those teeth in between the front teeth and the canines) from growing down properly. So I was supposed to rest my tongue in the four prongs that extended back into my mouth in a slight upward curve from just behind my upper incisors and canines. My tongue would then be out of the way so the incisors could finish growing. I’m not sure why Dr. Mann didn’t make the prongs blunt on the ends. Instead, they were sharp and pointy, which didn’t encourage the resting of my tongue on them. Playing French horn was a horrible nightmare for a while, until I figured out how to tongue beneath the cage.

The cage came out after I swallowed one of the prongs while eating a sandwich with my grandmother in Barnes and Noble. Dr. Mann removed the cage, but I still had a year of braces. He gave me other gifts to make up for the loss of the cage, two sets of head gear (to be worn while sleeping) and rubber bands (to be worn constantly).

But viola! All the Sanders children have straight teeth. For roughly $4,000 a pop (except for Edward’s, which were gift), Dr. Mann manipulated our teeth into straightness. Although expensive, my mother told me it wasn’t a big strain because the orthodontist used a long term payment plan.

I like my straight teeth. I like the way my smile looks. I like that they look clean.

When I talked to my mother about teeth recently, she admitted something to me. Every month at our church’s community meal, she said, I can’t help but make unconscious judgments about people’s class, hygiene, education, and even intelligence based on what their teeth look like. Like my mom, I also make little judgments about people based on their teeth. Much of what I think depends on context. For example, my mother’s judgments stem from the context of the community meal, which works to feed people who are hungry and poor. If I saw a person at school who had never had braces I wouldn’t think, “Poor, uneducated, no hygiene.” I probably wouldn’t think anything at all.

 But in reality, these little judgments are, for the most part, unconscious. Part of me wants to claim that I’m very judgmental and superficial and make rash judgments about people’s crooked teeth. But I think that would be an exaggeration. I either look at people and think nothing or, more commonly, look at people and think, “beautiful.” To me, everyone is beautiful, whether or not they have crooked teeth. The person behind the teeth is more interesting to me.

Is having braces more like having laser eye surgery or plastic surgery? Are the reasons for braces health related or cosmetic? Why am I still attracted to straight-toothed smiles when I think all people are beautiful? An article on the Better Homes and Gardens website tells me that only about fifteen percent of orthodontic patients need braces because the overcrowding of their teeth causes chewing problems or pain. The other eighty-five percent just like the look of straight teeth. I’m in the eighty-five percent. When my braces came off my junior year of high school, I thought I looked older, better, more sophisticated.

Straight teeth might also become an unvoiced recommendation for some jobs. A business executive or PR manager might depend on their flashy smiles to smooth out deals, contacts, or agreements. A study on who buys the most whitening strips might be interesting. Business women and men? Students? Celebrities?

Arguably, straight teeth also fall into a category of expected appearance norms, right up there with no unibrows, facial or leg hair for women, or large, visible moles. We take our bodies and tell them that what they came up with naturally isn’t good enough. I am not referring to sickness or disease, simply the ways in which all our bodies work that we then reject on a basis of standardized beauty. It doesn’t matter that women are mammals; that leg hair has to go.

I dislike some of these norms but follow them anyways. I can’t deny that I like the feel of smooth legs and the nice lines of straight teeth. I want two eyebrows, not one. I participate and resist, existing as a paradox within my own society. I’m sure I’ll pass on crooked genes to my kids, too, and when they’re old enough, they’ll go to the orthodontist, too.

Response to Thoreau's "Walking"

I really try to like Thoreau, and some of the time I succeed. I think if Thoreau and I took a walk in the wood, we would enjoy ourselves and talk about the uplifting effects of Nature and the dangers of a mechanical society.

But I take issue with a lot of what Thoreau says in “Walking.” My honors project focuses on American Indian literature and thus most of my dislike probably stems from discovering some of the effects of ideologies propagated by white men on native culture. I can see that “dominant culture” perspective in Thoreau when he talks about the West. Thoreau writes, “We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure” (488). The “we” here is obviously Americans of European descent. The West is a place to be taken and won, industrialized and profited from. Essentially, Thoreau articulates the belief of Manifest Destiny (although as a Transcendentalist, he probably didn’t think of it in quite those terms). At least in this essay, Native Americans really have no presence. I don’t know what Thoreau thought of Indians, but I approach the work of any early “wilderness writer” with wariness.

Wilderness writers, like Emerson and Thoreau, can be confusing. The wilderness is pure; society is not. We should be more a part of that wilderness. But if we all go into the wilderness, is it a wilderness anymore? Was it ever really a wilderness to begin with? Is wilderness even real? Ironically, although Thoreau want to be “a part and parcel of Nature” (480), his ideas about wilderness ultimately create separation between humankind and nature. Everyday human society and nature are polarized. “In short,” he writes, “all good things are wild and free” (497). Does that make human society inherently evil?

Response to Annie Dillard's "Seeing"

When I write, vision is my “go to” sense. My sensory details automatically veer towards descriptions of what objects and people look like. Even my details about touch, sound, taste, and smell ultimately link back to sight somehow. I can’t escape it. So I must accept it and explore the question, what does it mean to really see? 

Sight is a most beloved sense. Like Annie Dillard, I like looking at things, especially things in nature, by attempting to silence the “useless interior babble” (705) that clouds my vision. After reading Dillard’s essay, the word “transcendence” automatically came to my mind. True seeing is a transcendent experience. You leave the confines of your mind and body and begin to “sail on solar wind” (705). Dillard’s poetic style of writing contributes to this feeling of transcendence. I get lost in some of her descriptive passages. I’m there with her, pausing motionless, watching reflections of clouds form in the creek. We leave our bodies and float above the water as spirits. What we see enters our souls in unexplainable ways.

Dillard’s last point about true seeing being a gift and a surprise gripped me. To see, we must be open to it, yes, we must be ready and willing, but we also must be patient for grace to embrace us and lift the scales from our eyes. I was reminded slightly of the Passover image: sandals on our feet, staves in our hands, ready to leave when called to do so. Somehow true sight is found but not sought. I find it because God opens my eyes.

Response to Wendell Berry's "An Entrance to the Woods"

Last semester I did an independent study devoted entirely to reading Wendell Berry’s essays and poetry. Although I didn’t read this essay as part of that study, I did read it in a literature course called Literature and Landscape. I enjoyed having the opportunity to read it again. The more I read things, the more they lodge themselves in my memory.

My respect for Wendell Berry is great, even if he expresses his opinions strongly and sometimes harshly. For example, in this essay about being in the woods he condemns the progressive, machine and technology driven American society. He retreats into the woods as a kind of moral purification. He enters despondent and pessimistic and leaves renewed and hopeful. I think this is a simplification of Berry’s argument, however. In some of his other essays that I read, he claims that machines are good up to a point. If machines enhance human work, they are helpful; if they replace human work, they are detrimental. So when I read, “the distant roar of engines, though it may seem only to be passing through this wilderness, is really bearing down upon it” (676), I interpret his words through my knowledge of his other essays. He doesn’t hate machines. He drives a car to the edge of the woods and then walks in to his campsite. He does, however, approach technology and the fast-paced life with apprehension and caution. He implicates himself in the technological culture but also resists full assimilation. He wants to remember and celebrate the renewal possible through a retreat into the natural world.