In April by Rainer Maria Rilke

Apr3

“Poets help us by discovering and uncovering the world-its history, culture, arifacts, and ecology, as well as our identities and relationships.” ~Wallace Stevens

Again the woods are odorous, the lark
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.

After long rainy afternoons an hour
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings
Them at the windows in a radiant shower,
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

FROM AN APRIL
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Austrian poet and writer, from a new translation of his poems by Edward Snow

Again the woods smell sweet.
The soaring larks lift up with them
the sky, which weighed so heavily on our shoulders;
through bare branches one still saw the day standing empty â€”
but after long rain-filled afternoons
come the golden sun-drenched
newer hours,
before which, on distant housefronts,
all the wounded
windows flee fearful with beating wings.

Then it goes still. Even the rain runs softer
over the stonesâ€™ quietly darkening glow.
All noises slip entirely away
into the brushwoodâ€™s glimmering buds.

Poems are notoriously difficult to translate. Poetry depends so much on the sound and meaning of a particular language, in this case German. I don’t speak or read German, so I can’t read Rilke’s poems in their original form. I like pieces of each of these translations: “The woods smell sweet” is better than “odorous”. However, I like the shafts of light flinging themselves at the windows and the raindrops beating the “panes like timorous wings.” “The rain runs softer”, but “the stones are crooned to sleep.” “And cradled in the branches, hidden deep in each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.”

Beautiful imagery, but I can’t help but think I might be better able to capture the essence of the poem if I could read German.

12/12/12: Themes of My Life

Dec12

These are the twelve themes or ideas or motifs that God has placed in my heart, and consequently the 12 Big Ideas that appear most often here on Semicolon.

1. Books. I have a houseful of books I read lots and lots of books, probably over 100 per year. I love books; I live inside books. I write about books here at Semicolon a lot. Some of my favorite booklists (may be helpful for last minute Christmas gifts?):
Reading Out Loud: 55 Favorite Read Aloud Books from the Semicolon Homeschool.
History and Heroes: 55 Recommended Books of Biography, Autobiography, Memoir,and History
Giving Books: Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.
Giving Books: FOr the nieces and other girls in your life.
Nine Series for Nine Year Old Boys.
Narnia Aslant: A Narnia-Inspired Reading List.
Books for Giving (to kids who want to grow up to be . . .)
Best Spine-Tinglers
Best Journeys
Best Laughs
Best Crimes

2. Family, particularly large families. I have eight children. Five are grown-ups, and three are still growing. Actually, we’re all still growing. I don’t write as much about my children as I do about my books, privacy and all that jazz. But having a large family and seeing God through the joys and difficulties of large family life is one of the major themes of my life.

3. Community. Through family, yes, but also through the church, the neighborhood in which I live, and even through the blog-world, the experience of community is very important to me. I’m interested in community as an ideal, and I’m also interested in little communities that form around hobbies, intellectual pursuits, ethnic identities, and other kinds of people-glue. I want to know how a subculture develops around a shared interest like bicycling or collecting butterflies or playing Scrabble (Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis) or any other random interest, how those communities work and how they coalesce, what the rules are and how they resolve conflict.

4. The Bible. God’s Word has been a part of my life since I was a preschooler, and my mother read to me from the book of Genesis. I still remember how exciting and suspenseful the story of Joseph was, and how I wanted to know what would happen next. I have read the Bible numerous times, studied it alone and in groups, and still I find treasure, hope, reassurance, and life in the words of history, prophecy, poetry, gospel, and letters in the Bible. The Bible is the central book in my life, by which standard all the many, many other stories that I read stand and fall.

5. Prayer. God is still working out this theme in my life. I’m 55 years old, and I still long to know what it means to really, really pray. If God knows and has preordained everything that happens, why pray? I think part of what it means is to communicate the desires and depths of my heart in language, that God-given means of communication and organization. If I can put my inchoate feelings and thoughts into words and tell them to a God who really, really cares, then I participate in the creation of meaning somehow. I participate in God’s work on earth through prayer.

6. Language. We create community through language. God communicates with us and we with Him, mediated by language. The Word became flesh. What does that mean? We are creatures who speak a language, and that means something. One of my life’s quests is find out what it means to be a language-using creation and how to use those words to communicate truth.

7. Story-telling. One theme leads to another: from books to the Bible, to prayer, to language, to storytelling. Maybe they are all one grand motif that defines how God is working in my life.

8. History. I love family history, especially my family history, but others, too, if they have stories to tell. History is the story of how God created, how He creates in the events of our lives, and what it all means.

9. Singing and Poetry. Music, in general is nice, but singing, alone or with other people, is what I most love, what makes me feel alive. That’s why I did the 100 Hymns series: I love songs with words and poetry put to music. This theme ties into my fascination with language and words, but the melody adds another dimension.

10. Homeschooling. Education in general is a theme in my family and in my life. I pray that I will be always learning, always educating myself and others about the wonderful world where God has placed us. I believe that as a family we were called to homeschool, not because homeschooling ensures God’s blessing or favor nor because homeschooling is always better than any other way of educating young people into adulthood, but rather because it fits with the other themes and concerns of my life: the community in family, the immersion in language and story-telling, the transmission of God’s truth to another generation.

11. Evangelism and missions. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, in GA’s and Acteens, two SBC missions organizations for girls. I am still immersed in the idea of how the gospel is spread to other people and cultures and active in supporting missions and missionaries.

12. Jesus. Last, not because he is the least of my life themes, but rather because He is the foundation. If I wrote a book, Jesus would be the underlying theme, perhaps unnamed as in the Book of Esther, but always present, always at work, always the Rock upon which everything else rests. In Him, we live and move and have our being.

You can see these themes embodied in this list of 52 things that fascinate me. Now it’s your turn. What are the themes of your life? Where has God led you to focus your energies and talents? What is it that wakes you up in the morning, draws you into study and/or action, makes you who you are?

Wednesday’s Word of the Week: Defenestrate

Apr18

My daughter and I think it’s funny that there’s a word for throwing someone or something out of a window: defenestrate. The word comes from Latin: de for down and fenestra for window, and it’s a transitive verb. So, you can defenestrate your garbage or your mother-in-law.

“There have been many defenestrations over the course of history, but the most famous, and the one that inspired the word defenestration, was the Defenestration of Prague on May 23, 1618. Two imperial regents and their secretary were thrown out of a window of the Prague Castle in a fight over religion. The men landed on a dung heap and survived. The Defenestration of Prague was a prelude to the Thirty Years’ War.”

The quotation is from Anu Garg’s site, Wordsmith.org or A.Word.a.Day. Can you think of any other famous defenestrations, either historical or fictional, because I’m blank? Brown Bear Daughter encountered the word in Eva Ibbotson’s YA novel, A Song for Summer. She says, by the way, that she liked the story but not the ending. (No, it doesn’t end in defenestration; that comes near the beginning of the novel.)

'Defenestration' photo (c) 2008, torroid - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

The above is a picture of a work of art in San Francisco called “Defenstration.” I also think the word would make another good blog title.

Prior Wednesday Words of the Week: galimaufry,flanerie, vatic, pavid, galactagogue, snollygoster, apophenia.

Links During Lent

Apr8

I was feeding my fascinations, even during my Lenten blogging break.

Book Lists:
Top 50 Books for Children by Lorna Bradbury at The Telegraph (British).

The 50 Best Books for Kids by Elizabeth Bird.

World Literature That High School Students Actually Want to Read at The Reading Zone.

John C. Wright: 50 Essential Authors of Science Fiction. I’ve read only a handful of these authors, and I don’t really feel a need to read all of them, since some sub-genres of sci-fi (cyberpunk, military sci-fi) are not to my taste. The ones I have read and can recommend on some level are Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1984 by Orwell, Brave New World by Huxley, Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky or Stranger in a Strange Land,, C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, Perelandra in particular, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, and Dune by Frank Herbert.

Historical fiction set in Russia from Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

Language:
An Indigenous Language With Unique Staying Power by Simon Romero. Mr. Romero writes about Guarani, the native language of Paraguay, which is enshrined in the Paraguayan constitution as one of two official languages along with Spanish.

Why bilinguals are smarter. I knew my Spanish was an advantage in more ways than just being able to understand what they’re saying when they think I don’t know.

Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs
Thanks go to The Headmistress and Zookeeper at The Common Room for the link to this site, Psalms in Metre, which allows one to match metrical psalm paraphrases with their tunes in a sort of mix-and-match sort of template. I love to sing psalms, and I’d like to teach my children to sing them, too.

Straight Talk:
Every single teenage girl who is considering “hooking-up” should read this post by a Catholic mom who has more courage to speak out than I have. And sometimes I’m rather blunt, but I’d have to pray for the presence of mind and courage to say what she said, even though it’s true.

Bookish and Wordie Humor:
For straight talk with a quirky and humorous bent, try this blog post about advertising roof tiles in Zambia. I can’t imagine how this advertising campaign would go over in the U.S., but it seems to be working in Zambia.

President Obama’s Young Adult Novel Economic Plan. This plan, on the other hand, could definitely work, folks.

Polyglots and Hyperpolyglots

Feb23

In the author’s note at the end of The Bone House by Stephen Lawhead (Semicolon review here), Mr. Lawhead writes about Thomas Young, a polymath of the 18th and early 19th centuries who is also a character in the book:

“Born in the tiny village of Milverton in SOmerset, England, he was an infant prodigy, having learned to read by the age of two. . . . He was able to converse and write letters in Latin to his no-doubt perplexed friends and family when he was six years old. . . By fourteen years of age he was fluent in not only ancient Greek and Latin—he amused himself by translating his textbooks into and out of classical languages—but had also acquired French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and, of course, Amharic.”

Thomas Young went on to become a doctor and to study physics, proving that light behaves as a wave as well as a particle and experimenting with wavelengths of light and electromagnetic energy. He was also an amateur archaeologist, particularly interested in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Serindipitously, I heard about the book Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners by Michael Erard on NPR and saw a tweet about this news article, an excerpt from the book, all on the same afternoon that I finished Mr. Lawhead’s book. The idea of being able to learn twelve or more languages and speak them all fluently is fascinating. In fact, I learned when I was studying Spanish in college that most people can’t learn to speak fluently like a native in any foreign language if they start learning the language after about the age of puberty. Something in the brain “sets itself”, and it is very difficult to learn to make sounds that were not a part of your language learning before age twelve or thirteen. This hypothesis is not accepted by all language learning scholars, but it does seem to explain why an intelligent person such as Henry Kissinger who learned English as a young man speaks the language with such an accent even though he uses sophisticated vocabulary and syntax.

There’s also a phenomenon called language interference, I think, which causes me, whenever I try to learn a third language, to speak with a Spanish accent. For instance, I’ve tried to pick up some German and some French, but whenever I read vocabulary in those languages aloud, it comes out sounding Spanish-accented. So I can’t really understand how these “hyperpolyglots”, mostly men, could learn so many languages.

But it is another fascination. And Babel No More is another book to add to my TBR list.

Wednesday’s Word of the Week Galimaufry

Oct26

So far, I’ve used a gallimaufry of words for my Wednesday’s Word of the Week feature: flanerie, vatic, pavid, galactagogue, snollygoster, apophenia. Can you use all seven words of the week in one (halfway intelligible) sentence?

This week’s word comes from ListVerse via Brandywine Books. The post where I found my word for the week is entitled 20 Great Archaic Words. ListVerse itself is a blog or website after my own heart, subtitled Ultimate Top Ten Lists. I did indeed find a galimaufry of lists, including Top 15 Greatest Silent Films, Top 10 Fictional Detectives, Ten Greatest American Short Story Writers, Top Ten Most Overlooked Mysteries in History, Top 10 Greatest Mathematicians, etc. You get the idea.

So, gallimaufry: A jumble or confused medley of things. Also used to describe a mix of chopped meats. The word might have come from the French, galimafree, having to do with a stew or hash.

If you plan to bake a mincemeat pie, you might use a gallimaufry. And, “Gallimaufry” is another great blog title. You’re welcome to use it if you’d like. I found one typepad blog with the title, a gallimaufrey. Be sure and let me know if you start a new one with that name.

It was simply a case of apophenia for the pavid snollygoster engaged in an afternoon of flanerie to assume that the gallimaufry of galactagogues, plastic toys, and French fries that came in his kid’s meal were actually a vatic confirmation for his candidacy. If you can translate that sentence into common English, you’re well on your way to World Word Domination.

Wednesday’s Word of the Week: Galactagogue

Sep14

A relative of mine posted this word on Facebook yesterday. That’s all, just the word. It’s not a word I’ve ever heard or used.

I tried to figure out what it meant, and I thought of several possible definitions. Then, I decided this word would be a good candidate for that dictionary game where everyone makes up a possible meaning, except for one person who gives the actual definition. So which of these is the true meaning of galactagogue?

A. a substance that promotes lactation in humans and other animals. Asparagus is supposed to be a galactagogue.

B. the dictatorial ruler of a galaxy or galactic empire. The galactagogue in The Empire Strikes Back is the Emperor Palpatine.

C. a large and elaborate celebration; a gala. They planned a galactagogue for the heir’s twenty-first birthday.

D. a non-living statue or wooden figure that comes to life. Pinocchio was a galactagogue.

So, which one is it, folks? The first one to answer correctly gets a virtual blue ribbon for Word Wizard of the Day.

Wednesday’s Word of the Week: Apophenia

Sep1

First, I read this post at Ace of Spades about how climate change may lead to an increase in mental illness because, as far as I can tell, schoolchildren tend to get depressed at a greater rate after experiencing a hurricane or cyclone. The post ends with the word “apophenia”. Isn’t that a lovely word? But I had no idea what it meant.

So, I went to my all-purpose, handy dandy, reference tool: Wikipedia. Yes, I use Wikipedia frequently to look up the stuff that I want to know, and so far I haven’t experienced any life-altering inaccuracies. Apophenia, quoth Wikipedia, is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. Ah, what a useful word in a world where conspiracy theories and seemingly random phenomena abound.

But is it apophenia or the hand of God when I see answers to prayer, and meaningful encouragement in Scripture that speaks to my immediate needs? And what about this statement at the end of the Wikipedia article: “The popular TV show, Lost, involves extensive use of apophenia in its storyline, including Biblical and numerological patterns, mis-identified faces, intentional use of pareidolia, and more.” Were the writers of Lost saying that the numbers and the patterns and the way people came together and crossed paths was randomness perceived to have meaning, apophenia? Or was there really within the Lost world supposed to be a meaning behind the island and all the things that happened on and off-island? Or were some things “apophenia”, like Hugo’s fear of of the numbers and his perception that he was cursed, and other patterns and coincidences meaningful, such as the idea that certain people were “brought” to the island to work out their salvation in fear and trembling?

I think the world is like Lost island: there are true incidences of apophenia, such as gamblers who think they have lucky numbers, people who see climate change-related calamities in every change in the weather, and even Christians who believe they hear the voice of God in events that are simply serendipitous happenings with no special message from God embedded in them. However, we should be very careful about crying “apophenia” when God may very well be at work orchestrating events and people to do His will. Was it apophenia when Esther found herself in exactly the right place and time to save her people from annihilation? Or was it apophenia that Jesus came to a world that was prepared to deal with him in a way that would fulfill prophecy and work out God’s plan of salvation prepared from the foundation of the world? There may be such a thing as too much ascribing of all fortuitous events to God at work, but there is also the danger of being blind to the wonderful ways in which the God of the Universe designs each detail of His world to work out His purposes.

WriteGuide: Individualized Writing Instruction for Homeschoolers

Sep20

About a month and a half ago, the director of Writeguide, an online writing course for homeschoolers, asked if I would be interested in reviewing their program here at Semicolon. I looked at the website, thought it sounded like something that would be of interest to many homeschool families, and asked if one of my urchins could do a trial run.

Karate Kid (age 13) was the guinea pig. He hasn’t done much formal writing, lots of reading but not much writing. We signed up for a one month course, and then promptly it got really busy around here and we managed to forget when the course started! (One month’s instruction at WriteGuide is $75.00, which would be a bargain for many homeschool families who often tell me how intimidated they are by the task of teaching kids to write.) Because it took us a few days to get on track in starting the program, and because I didn’t remind Karate Kid as often as I should have to communicate with his personal writing consultant, he was only able to complete one piece of writing over the course of the month. Nevertheless, I was quite pleased with both the process and the product.

Karate Kid’s assignment, an assignment that I gave him, was to write a process paper explaining how to do something that interested him. The WriteGuide writing tutor will work with your child on an assignment given by the parent, a writing task in the particular curriculum you are using, or a piece of writing that the writing teacher, the parent, and the child decide together that the child needs to complete. For example the homeschool parent could ask the WriteGuide teacher to work with the student on basics of the SAT essay or a research paper or simple paragraph writing, whatever fits the particular student.

Students enrolled in our Individualized Writing Course work with their own private writing teacher (called a writing consultant), Monday through Friday on papers and projects of their parents’ choosing. Your child’s writing consultant will provide 100% individualized, hand-tailored instruction to meet his or her precise needs as a writer. The course takes the form of a friendly, daily (Monday through Friday) exchange of letters, papers, instructions, lessons, and feedback between the student and his or her writing consultant. All aspects of the writing process, including generating ideas, prewriting, outlining, research, taking notes, drafting, controlling tone, sentence and paragraph structure, literary and stylistic devices, grammar, punctuation, mechanics, editing, proofreading, and the process of revision.

Students, parents and tutor communicate via protected, on-site email. As I said, Karate Kid’s writing teacher was great. She communicated with him daily, M-F, as long as he kept up with the assignments and revisions she suggested. (Sometimes he didn’t answer her for a couple of days, and therefore we may not have used the course to its full potential.) KK wrote a rough draft of his paper, and his WriteGuide tutor gave him specific suggestions to improve the writing, grammar, and structure of his paper. Here’s the end result: How To Make A Bird Bolas by Karate Kid. Remember that although KK is in eighth grade, he has done very little formal writing and had almost no writing instruction, although he has been taught basic grammar and sentence structure. And he has done a lot of reading.

Because I teach literature and history classes at our homeschool co-op, parents come up to me all the time in a panic about teaching writing. In fact, I see writing and science instruction as the two scariest subjects for homeschool parents who are entering the middle school/high school years. My new response will be to recommend WriteGuide as a resource for those who can afford it. Even if you can only do one month’s worth of instruction with WriteGuide, it would be a valuable month’s investment. I plan to sign up for another month’s writing consultation in the spring when KK writes his research paper.

WriteGuide also offers a three month long Introduction to Grammar class that I didn’t try out. However, if your child needs a basic foundation in English grammar, you should look at this course.

Sunday Salon: More Fascinating Stuff

Aug15

1. I told you I’m a C.S. Lewis fanatic. And I could always use some writing tips. Thanks to Jessica at Homemaking Through the Church Year for the link to 8 Writing Tips from C.S. Lewis. Lewis wrote this advice on writing in answer to a letter from an American schoolgirl, so it ought to be about on my level.

2. Homeschooling and finishing the race from Cindy at Ordo Amoris:

“It would be easier to not read the Little House series aloud for the 4th time. It would be easier to let those young boys sit at the computer or watch DVDs all day long. But homeschooling and child training are not hobbies for me. They are my calling. If I was purposeful and eager 25 years ago, I want to be ever so much more so today. It is going to take a lot more prayer and way more caffeine. I have lost a whole boatload of naivetÃ©.”

3. “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ~Howard Thurman. I love that quotation. What makes you come alive?

4. The Night Gift by Patricia McKillip, recommended by Peter at Collecting Children’s Books despite its outdated illustrations, deals with some of my fascinations: mental illness, secret rooms and hideaways, young adults acting like adults. I know I’ve read something by Ms. McKillip, but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, I’m adding The Night Gift to my TBR list.

5. Language and how it works and different cultures seeing things in different ways are also subjects that interest me. So, I found this article from the Wall Street Journal about the influence of language on thought patterns to be, well, fascinating.

“Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?”

I read once that the ancient Hebrews thought about words as living entities. If your words “fell to the ground,” they were not only untrue but also dead. How does this idea affect the language used in the Bible to describe Jesus as “the Living Word of God”? Amazing stuff.

6. Susan Wise Bauer on what to look for and what not to look for as you send your homeschooled or conservatively educated student to college:

“Iâ€™m often asked how home educated students stack up against others in my classes. My overwhelming impression is that theyâ€™re more fragile. Theyâ€™ve got little resilience; I canâ€™t push at their presuppositions even a little bit. Maybe theyâ€™re afraid those presuppositions will shatter.”

I would very much like for my young adults to be resilient, thinking, teachable students by the time they get to college. But I’m not always sure how to get there from here. I think two of my already graduated students fit that description, and the other two don’t. And I further believe that the two who think deeply and respond to challenges well got that way mostly as a result of their own attitudes and desire to learn. You can lead a horse to water . . .

7. Lists, lists, lists. Love lists.Miss Rumphius reviews a book, 100 Ways to Celebrate 100 Days, and gives some other links for ideas for celebrating the 100th day of school. She says that day generally falls around mid-February, so I’m looking forward to taking a day off about that time and having a 100 days party.

8. Another list: important dates to memorize.

9. I’m really interested in this (free) class:

I’m not much of an artist, but I would like to make a journal/photo album for my husband’s family for Christmas using old family photos and excerpts from my father-in-law’s old journals. Wish me luck.

10. More Lewis and Tolkien and England and Oxford: fish and chips, bobbies, The Kilns, tea, Tolkien’s gravesite, Addison’s Walk, Piccadilly CIrcus, Les Miz, even a little Shakespeare. Bill of The Thinklings got to go to London and Oxford to visit his son Andrew who is studying there with a group from Baylor. When will it be my turn?

11. Morbidly fascinating: Augustus St. Clair, Pro-life Hero. Can you guess what newspaper published an article with the following opening statement? (Medical malpractice was a euphemism for abortion.)

â€œThe enormous amount of medical malpractice that exists and flourishes, almost unchecked, in the city of New York, is a theme for most serious consideration. Thousands of human beings are thus murdered before they have seen the light of this world, and thousands upon thousands more of adults are irremediably robbed in constitution, health, and happiness.â€

12. Science and religion. Scientists creating religion. Science masquerading as truth. All of these are definitely fascinating. See this NY Times oped for more information on kooky scientists and their confusion concerning what man really is and what separates us from machines.

. . . a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity â€” whether itâ€™s the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science or stem-cell research.

If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?

Returning to Fascination #3, if we begin to speak of robots and algorithms as human entities, will they become human in our thinking, or will we become less than human and unable to realize the potential for which God made us?

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

Archives