CAUTION: Chip 'n Dale's Dance with a few of the guys

http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/sVb2RZyCqDEdJmXk

The Inaugural Address: A Look at Obama's Prose Style

I found this on Dr. Hartley's Facebook today. It's a great article and poses some really great questions/possibilities for our nation's education system (if these are the values he holds, perhaps he'll try to instill them within the school systems as well).

Barack Obama’s Prose Style

Stanley Fish
January 22, 2009, 9:00 pm

Barack Obama’s inaugural address is proving to be more powerful in the reading than it was in the hearing.

Commentators on radio and television have been doing a two-step. First they say that the speech lacked the eloquence of his speech on race or of his remarks on the night he won the presidency; and then they spend lots of time talking about the implications of a sentence (“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”), a clause (“programs will end”), a phrase (“dust ourselves off”) or even a single word (“Muslim,” “non-believers.”)

It is as if the speech, rather than being a sustained performance with a cumulative power, was a framework on which a succession of verbal ornaments were hung, and we were being invited not to move forward but to stop and ponder significances only hinted at.

And if you look at the text – spread out like a patient etherized upon a table – that’s exactly what it’s like. There are few transitions and those there are – “for,” “nor,” “as for,” “so,” “and so” – seem just stuck in, providing a pause, not a marker of logical progression. Obama doesn’t deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate.

Of course, as something heard rather than viewed, the speech provides no spaces for contemplation. We have barely taken in a small rhetorical flourish like “All this we can do. All this we will do” before it disappears in the rear-view mirror. But if we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.

Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic, and in this it resembles the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument. The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence.

Paratactic prose lends itself to leisurely and loving study, and that is what Obama’s speech is already receiving. Penguin Books is getting out a “keepsake” edition of the speech, which will be presented along with writings by Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (You can move back and forth among them, annotating similarities and differences.)

One day after the occasion, USA Today offered as an analysis of the speech a list of the words most frequently used, words like America, common, generation, nation, people, today, world. This is exactly the right kind of analysis to perform, for it identifies the location of the speech’s energy in the repetition of key words and the associations forged among them by virtue of that repetition.

In the years to come what USA Today has begun will be expanded and elaborated in a thousand classrooms. Canonization has already arrived.

Here's the actual NYTimes article, if you please:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/barack-obamas-prose-style/

Also, if you care to, here's the address to the actual speech:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html?_r=1&em



I haven't read the whole thing myself, but I can't aptly express how impressed I am with our President's ability to express himself and represent our nation. Maybe my mom's right and he is the anti-Christ... idk. Whether he is or he isn't, I think we're all better off for it.

Midlife Crisis at 22?

Ha! No way!

I definitely am finding myself in need of some signifant changes, though. The first and most important change I've already alluded to in my last blog - more God, Jesus, Holy Spirit in my life.

Other things I've been wanting lately, other than a rockin' bod, are: 1) my plugs back, 2) a tattoo, 3) the return of skater shoes in my life, 4) new clothes.

I realize that all of these 'wants' are materials and don't actually change anything, but something in my mind says that a change internally requires a change externally. Or maybe I'm hoping that in changing my external appearance (and combining some of my old values with some new and improved ones), I'll experience that internal change I'm looking for.

I don't know though, what are your thoughts? I doubt there's much that logically connects the to, but, from a psychological standpoint, I imagine there's got to be some correlation (probably not causation) between internal and external change/growth.

Let me know what you think! :)

-Mark

A would-be conversation with a would-be friend

Me- "Something's occurred to me."

Would-be friend- "What's that?"

Me- "That you are aren't being very fair."

Would-be friend- "Oh?"

Me- "When you see me, you choose to look for those things that make me less than Christ-like, less than a good person and at the same time, you choose to overlook the ways in which I have grown and have changed; the ways in which I have made a conscious, prayerful effort to become more like Christ and to better myself for both the sake of those around me and for the good of my own soul.

Would-be friend- "Hm."

Me- "And please don't hear what I'm not saying; I'm not saying that I'm right. What I am saying is that it is you who is in need of my grace, not me yours."

::silence::

Would-be friend- "I don't think that's true."

Me- "I know you don't, would-be friend. But why is it, do you suppose, that so many of your friends who call me friend can see the good in me and you can't?"

Would-be friend- "That's not true, either. I can see the good in you."

Me- "You even question my intentions for wanting to reconcile this relationship. Where do you see good in me?"

::more silence::

Me- "Goodnight, man."

So I just had a two hour conversation with my best friend..

.. on the inerrancy of the bible, him arguing for and me against, at it was flippin' phenomenal! In the end, it basically came down to me asking, 'If God in all His sovereign power can't communicate Truth through man's fumblings, how sovereign can He really be?' Well, of course if God is truly sovereign than He can use anything (and He does every day!), so then the question became, 'If God can use man's mistakes to communicate His Truth, then why does it matter whether to Bible can be right or wrong?' to which the conclusion was it doesn't!

Maybe I've done you a disservice in throwing you into the tail end of our 2hour long conversation, but maybe I can sum it up real quick.

It all started with the question of whether or not the Bible can be afforded the license to make mistakes or not and the implications that arise if it can. We, Kody and I, both agreed that if the Bible can make mistakes then it can potentially lead to a slippery slope in that what stops the reader from asking, 'Well, why is this true and why is this true, etc.' which can be a terribly scary thing and could theoretically mean that the Bible (and possibly Christianity) gets thrown to the wayside in order to make room for our postmodern indulgences. However, rather than going their, we opted to say that one must read the bible more responsibly if he is going to hold the opinion that the bible can make mistakes and in so doing will find that he believes the theology of what he is reading to be true not because the bible says so (it's clearly fallacious that the bible claims itself to be infallible), but rather because he has wrestled with it himself and found the Truth -- God's Truth -- in it. A beautiful realization.

(I apologize if this is coming off as incoherent ramblings from someone who is long overdue for sleep, but I'm going to continue in the hope that I might make myself more clear.)

Once to the decision that we could not say that the individual who wrestles with the errancy of the bible had a stronger faith but rather a different sort of faith, we moved on to what would become of our 'great religion' if we were to lose the bible. Naturally, one of the first things to come up was the example of sub-third world individuals finding God's Truth via missionaries despite the absence of a written language. Clearly, Christianity does not fully rely on the bible. In fact, as Kody and I agreed to disagree on, I would like to think that without a bible, we might become an even stronger people in our faith. I say this because rather than being spoon fed all of these apparent 'truths' on Sunday mornings (one might rather call these proof texts that do the church a greater disservice than anything else) we would have only our God give cognizance and ability to reason -- again, this is all said in the hope that man is doing this responsibly but allowing that he may be doing so irresponsibly as well. So then, we would be making our beliefs in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit our own rather than the biased, text proofed isogeses we encounter in our warm, comfy pews.

Again, more and more this is beginning to sound like incoherent ramblings to me. It all made sense when we were talking and for that I'm confident that if I am saying anything that sounds entirely too out in left field, I would be more than willing to revisit this conversation with you personally. :)

Moving on. To say the least, the conversation that Kody and I had went all over the place and saw a lot of good fruit for it, but it always came back to this idea of a capital 'T' Truth. Here at Greenville College we are familiar with the theology of the Logos (John 1:1) and all Truth being God's Truth. Something I posed was the finding of God in places outside of the Bible. Certainly there is no question that God is witnessed through Creation and nature, but what of entertainment (music, cinema, etc) and what of things like literature or relationships? This led to a brief discussion on the inspired writings of such notables as C.S. Lewis and St. Thomas Aquinas and the question of what makes them any less inspired than Paul or the writers of our canonized gospels? I argued that they aren't, but of course as one who does not hold the view that the bible is infallible, that wouldn't pose any major theological crisis for me. Kody, on the other hand, found himself incredibly scandalized at the notion that C.S. Lewis, as wonderful as his writings are, might be on the same divinely inspired level as Paul of Tarsus. Again I ask, if all Truth is God's Truth, why are we so afraid to say that Paul could be wrong and C.S. Lewis right to the extent that we would like to believe Paul is?

Wow. Let's just set up the coffee dates now. This is just getting ridiculous! :) In short, albeit a little late for that, we agreed to lovingly disagree and, yes, we are still best friends and very much as dear as ever two brothers were. However, in light of our conversation we've come to see that so much of how we read the Bible and interpret our faith has to do with what we as individuals bring to the table in the first place (ironically makes me think of Matt 15:27). This being so, we must be even more responsible and diligent in our pursuit and God and Truth. Also, with a plug from Prof. Dunnington on a paradigm shift that John Yoder offers in his "The Politics of Jesus", perhaps we should stop viewing the world and our day to day lives through the lens of cause and effect but of cross and resurrection. And with that final thought, I bid you goodnight and blessedly insightful dialogs (be they inter or intrapersonal).

-Mark

On Love and Faith

It's becoming apparent to me that it is impossible to love without faith. One must have faith that the other will not betray or manipulate them, that their intentions are of the best sort for we do not willingly give ourselves to those whom we know will take advantage of us. Love also requires grace which, again, requires faith; we do not give grace to those we think will abuse it. That being so, it's surprising how often we tell each other we love one another and yet 'protect' ourselves with walls so as not to be hurt. I can't help but believe that, by definition, this is not true love. And what is love if not the ultimate act of grace and selflessness? I'm not even talking about the romantic sort, just the platonic. Either we have grossly perverted the thing or we are just extremely ignorant (perhaps both). Either way, I hope you'll keep me accountable in working on it.

ps. Another interesting bit... Jesus loved despite being fully aware that he would be betrayed. he showed more grace and gave more of himself than I could ever imagine with the full knowledge that his passion was to come. What a crazy guy.

No fun

Have you ever lost $300? I just did. It's not fun.