Serendipity from Sifting through Old Piles

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Yesterday, my parents came up from Tennessee, and we spent most of the day cleaning my apartment. A very productive day yesterday, after the dust settled. (In an unrelated story, I am happy to report that my apartment has a carpeted floor.) It was very cool to find some old relics of my past while sifting through boxes that haven’t been touched since I moved in with the Allergy Twins back in ’99.

Last night, after adding the WeatherPixie to my site, I was putting around, looking at some of my old content. Some this old junk has been around since ’97 or ’98. Scary. So, I clicked on a link to the re:generator to test it, with the aim of vigilance against linkrot.

Once more I asked myself the question I pondered over a year ago when I last visited their website: Why don’t I read this ’zine all the time? It is always brimming with soaring insights incarnated in sharp prose. Last night, two features captured my imagination.

Technology As If the Incarnation Actually Happened: David Gelernter and the universality of beauty

“…he believes that some things are beautiful and others are not. ‘You tend to talk about beauty as if it were a given, a universal,’ one irritated interviewer has said to him, to which Gelernter replied, ‘You can say the sense of beauty evolves and reflects social constructs, but people read and love Homer today.’ Or, as he has written elsewhere, Chartres, the Books of Samuel, and the Ryoan-ji garden in Kyoto are all universally acknowledged as beautiful. ‘Why do roses smell sweet and trash dumps not? Because human beings are built that way. In any case, had an omnipotent creator set out to equip man with a truth seeking physiology, He could hardly have done better than to provide us with this peculiar beauty sense of ours.’”

Romeo Must Die: Reed Arvin on censorship and propaganda in the Christian Booksellers Association

“Here is the CBA position on profanity, as I have had it put to me on many occasions: I am responsible for what the characters say in my books. It’s too convenient to claim that these ideas and words are espoused by characters and not by me, the author. I’m then quoted a Bible verse or two admonishing against vulgarity, and told to mend my ways. To which I reply: if that reasoning is valid, I will be having cocktails in hell with Tim LaHaye. Because if I must personally claim the words of my characters, how is it that other Christian authors don’t have to claim the actions of theirs?”

I really need to keep re:generator from falling off my radar this time. Perhaps I could get them to publish a piece for me. That would be cool.

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