Ryan's Cultural Consumption

March 24, 2010
By Ryan

Bill Buford’s Heat put me on a nonfiction track a while back, and I’m still doing some laps on it. I’m a ways into the World War I account The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, which also fits onto my recent Pulitzer slant (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Olive Kitteridge being the most recent).

Other novels on the current nightstand (reading or soon to read) include The World Without Us, Anathem, The City and the City, and The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet.

I recently finished Shambling Towards Hiroshima, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and The Forest of Hands and Teeth.

Check out more of what I’m reading (or am about to read) at GoodReads.

My wife and I watch Infomania every week, and have discovered the secret of Hulu for keeping up with the current season of The Office. Two recent guilty pleasures are Dorm Life and Legend of the Seeker.

Iron Man was probably my favorite movie of 2008. Star Trek seems to be the front-runner for 2009.

I’m still subscribed to Wired and First Things, both of which I enjoy.

I’ve also become a social media junkie. Sort of. I’ve managed to completely avoid Facebook, but I Twitter as jesteram, which is also the name I write under at ficly.com.

QUOTES

Humility in the wrong place

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed....

...the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

–G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Make No Little Plans

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us."
–Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago, quoted in Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Planner of Cities, II:147. (via Christ is Deeper Still)

Borges on Short Stories


“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
–Jorge Luis Borges, from the preface to Ficciones

Strickler on Top Ten Lists

See full post for Yancey Strickler’s 2005 taxonomy of top ten music lists, as cited here.

Berry on Writing Poetry


“Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
–Wendell Berry, from How to be a Poet

Twain (?) on History


“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain

Lewis on God's Glory


“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Merwin on Writing


“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
—W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand