"Toleration should really be only a temporary attitude; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to offend." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Finally, a Great Mind who shares my opinion about tolerance! Time for a serious rant now, so fingers in your ears if you don't like roaring.

I really, really, really (and did I say really?) hate the word Tolerance as it is currently used. I am using the word hate here about Tolerance. (Yes, imagine a small woman in glasses doing Jack Nicholson and you'll get the picture.) The short version is, I think it's a cheap substitute for love, a cop-out to avoid striking the balance between justice and mercy, and a milk-and-water version of the milk of human kindness.

The long version really wouldn't fit in a weblog entry. I've looked Tolerance (and Toleration) up in the OED, and the root of the word, no matter how you slice it, is "to put up with," "to bear an unpleasant burden," "to build up an immunity to." Now, I don't know about you, but I feel offended when people present me with the attitude: "I disapprove of what you do and who you think you are, but I'm going to put up with you because I believe in tolerance." How smug for one thing. How divisive for another. Tolerance assumes that no reconciliation can ever be made between human beings who have different opinions, worldviews, lifestyles, or other choices of behavior, and that therefore we can only indulge a self-conscious sense of loving our fellow humans if we want to get along with these different people. It's just another way of holding them at arm's length, only we can applaud ourselves for doing it.

You know what? I'm friends with people who disapprove as much of my orthodox Christian beliefs as I disapprove of their lifestyles. And never for a moment have I had to merely "tolerate" these friends. (gasp) I actually like them! I honor their humanity, I appreciate their wit, I root for them in their ups and downs. No, no, don't thank me. It's just that special thing I do. Rubbish! It's the rare human that's not even a little bit valuable and lovable and worth expecting the best of, and if I do value and love and expect the best of people I meet, it's not like I deserve a Tolerance Medal or anything. Tolerance is putting a useless rubber stamp on stuff we're supposed to do anyway.

Two arguments against all this. One is, that if it weren't for tolerance, we would be overrun by the sheer mass pressure of normative and conservative culture, and suffocate under it. My opinion is that for one thing, I'm a bit skeptical about the "sheer mass pressure" of anything, and for another, there's nothing tolerance can do that love can't do better.

The other is, that tolerance as we understand it now comprehends all these things like love and justice and mercy and the milk of human kindness. So why are we using a negative word to comprehend all those positive things? Why say, "Oh, but it doesn't just mean 'putting up with' anymore, it means 'positively valuing people'" or something like that, not to put stupid words in the mouths of the intelligent people I've talked to about this. Just because a concept is several millennia old doesn't mean it isn't still better than these new ones we're coming up with.

Now, don't get me wrong. Love is not safe stuff. As Lewis has it, "Anger is the fluid love bleeds when you cut it," and that fluid burns. Tolerance by comparison is pretty safe. But I'm looking at this spooky picture of bin Laden on my AOL welcome page, and thinking that since the world's not safe anyway, I might as well love and be loved and take the risk that anger will happen.

So that, my friends, is the Reader's Digest version of my big rant on Tolerance, once and for all. If you can believe it. By the way, I have some beachfront property in Arizona I'd love to sell you, too.

I had another tornado dream last night. Two coworkers and I were walking together down a road toward our respective houses, and we could see the countryside, which was very pretty with the yellow and green fields and the light spilling through dark storm clouds (lest you think Oklahoma has a boring geography). We were observing nature, and we duly observed that there appeared to be three large tornadoes swirling together on the horizon, growing bigger, which means they are approaching you. As we watched, the three became seven big tornadoes (am I thinking I should call Joseph in on this one?) and were coming closer. So we all rushed to our homes and I cowered under a table, only to find when the storm had passed over, that there were only a number of pillars, not tornadoes, outside my window.

The thing about my tornado dreams is that they don't scare me. It's more excitement than anything, so tornadoes don't appear to mean Bad Things to me when I dream about them. Of course, the Freudian interpretation is that I'm really dreaming about sex, but I don't buy it. If I'm dreaming about sex I'd rather do it directly; but tornado dreams have more cool scenery anyway, so I suppose I shouldn't knock it if it works.

I just absolutely could not resist:


I'm pretty damn hard core! Fear me!


Surprising, considering I only put down once the answer "Find him, kick him in the groin, pour kerosene on him, and set him on fire." Though now that spacefem mentions it, it sounds like an appealing solution to a number of male-related problems. (However, all the people who really know me are all rolling their eyes and muttering, "Yeah, right.") I'm mild-mannered, I wear pink sometimes, I have little intellectual glasses, and I weigh less than 110. Fear me anyway.

So at TU there's, like, this thing that happens in late August where students start overrunning the campus, you know? And they park in all sorts of weird places with impunity, and they play chicken with the staff in the parking lots and roads (whether it's you in the car or on foot makes little difference, you are in Mortal Peril). Surely I wasn't this squirrelly when I was an undergraduate! And my friends were all genteel, traffic-law-abiding citizens too. I wonder if there's any connection between the crazy-driving students and the students who tell you, the writing instructor, that they ought to get an A in your writing class because they already know how to write, thank you very much. Luckily I don't have to deal with such students much nowadays, as they rarely filter up to Special Collections (You mean there's a fifth floor in McFarlin Library?) It's only when I go out of the building that I apprehensively remember the living will form which I didn't fill out. And am rather thankful I'm not teaching this semester -- as far as I know.

Well, that's torn it, as Lord Peter says. My brand-new netcomments system appears to have gone defunct. So Jessica, Rebecca, your insightful comments have gone down whatever Internet drain they go down when people go under. So I signed up with Haloscan. We'll see if this works.

(mutter mutter, bad words, bad words)

On the bright side, Haloscan appears to be a bit more snazzy and versatile.

Okay, so I'm a sucker for quizzes too.



Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

The first time I took it, I was Vizzini. Then I was Inigo Montoya. Apparently I need a Fezzik in my life. "Am I hearing things...or did the word THINK escape your lips?" Yes. I think so.

Am currently reading The Nine Tailors, which is a Lord Peter Wimsey story though you wouldn't know it from the blurbs. They do their best not to mention poor Peter in their praise of the book. I notice that the snapshot bio of Dorothy L. Sayers in the Penguin paperbacks of her translation of Dante spends a lot of time on her translations and her plays, and then says, "She is also the author of The Nine Tailors, a fascinating novel about campanology." Yeah, and To Kill A Mockingbird is about the practice of law in the South. Give me a break. Apparently Lord Peter has to gate-crash the Western Canon with a mild-mannered campanology party. Don't get me wrong, Sayers's academic stuff and her religious plays are very fine. But to imply strongly that detective novels aren't "serious" enough to be recognized as an author's achievement? Pernicious poppycock. I bite my thumb at the Canon.

A chastening quote:

"When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls, or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business." --Flannery O'Connor

Which makes me want to read her stuff. Is it good?...Is it depressing? Maybe I'll read it after I get moved.

Yes, I'm moving. I'm packing up and going to Missouri at the end of this month. So here's another rumination. This morning as I was driving to work, I was actually thinking (amazing!) -- about the word "habit." I've just looked it up in the OED (which I'll miss sorely when I leave here), and the note says: "The sense development, as seen in Latin and the modern languages taken together, is thus: orig. Holding, having, 'havour'; hence the way in which one holds or has oneself, i.e. the mode or condition in which one is, exists, or exhibits oneself..." But let that be for a moment. I was driving to work. I was thinking about moving, and about my habits. There are all kinds of habits, but we usually only talk about the bad ones. And I thought how much it misses the mark to tell people just to stop doing it. People can't just stop. So then I thought about our word "habit" and the French word "habiter" -- "J'habite a Londres" or, "I live in London." (Just imagine the accent marks, you French-major purists.)

People can't just stop a habit, because the habit is where they live. And moving stinks. I've moved a lot throughout my (relatively short) adult career, and nothing is more depressing, exhausting, wrenching, and did I mention exhausting? You have to get boxes and decide what to pack and what to throw away. You have to inconvenience yourself living without that one book you know is packed at the bottom of box 5 of 10. You have to take all your pictures off the walls. You have to throw away stuff you didn't know you still had. You have to uproot yourself spiritually from your settled haven. And then you have to sweat loading it onto trucks and trekking to your new abode. And then, you have to do that whole process backwards.

Moving sucks. If I want to stop a habit, I have to clean up my mental house. Then I have to sort everything in my head and pack. Then I have to go without things until I get to the new place. Pictures down from the walls, fridge cleaned out, silverware packed.... And how do I know that the new place is going to be safe, or good, or helpful? Moving away from one habitation and into another is difficult. It needs courage and patience and help from people who love you. And a big long nap when you get the chance.

"Breaking the habit" isn't positive enough. "Moving house to a new habit" is better. You can think of your new prospects. You can remind yourself it isn't done in one easy step -- and stop thinking of all those phantom people who do it in a snap. Leaving one place means arriving at another. You clean out your demons and replace them with something else instead.

Well, I feel somewhat comforted now.

Brilliant! Now I feel like I've accomplished something, and can go to bed peacefully.

Okay, now let's see if it works.

Okay, I've signed up with the Netcomments service; YACCS is full. Let's see if the code works!

Okay, the rumination. Man, I really wish I already knew how to add the message board to my page so I could hear from other people about this.

Christian Fiction. It's a prickly, snarly, and irritating subject for me. Some Christians don't like fiction. Many readers dislike fiction with Christian themes. And I don't know about you, but I tend to avoid the "Christian Fiction" section like the plague. I hate didacticism as much as the next person, and probably more than some -- and much of what is called "Christian Fiction" or "Christian novels" seem not only to embody a smarmy kind of didacticism but are badly written stories to boot. I hear things are changing, but when I hear the words "a Christian novel" I think of a story that is predictable, sanitized, irrelevant to most people's lives, and worst of all, saccharine. This is a very sad business, especially for a writer like me. I'm working on a trilogy of novels and plan to get them published. These novels treat gritty adult themes, contain swearing by certain characters, and don't give pat answers to difficult questions. But they also deal with the act of forgiveness, portray Christianity in a positive light, and involve the conversion of one of the characters as a major part of the plot. So what "genre" are my stories going to end up in? Even though I suspect times may be changing, I can't help thinking that my novels might well fall between two stools. If they're published as "Christian fiction," non-Christians who might like them (one of my betas is Jewish and likes the stories so far) won't find them; and Christians browsing in the local gospel bookstore might well feel betrayed when they pick up a book that rattles them a bit. If however they are published as "mainstream fiction," or "mystery and suspense," some Christians would never find them, and certain non-Christians picking up the book might feel betrayed to find something that looks like what C.S. Lewis called a "religious jaw" wrapped up in an alleged novel.

This is the issue: should things be so compartmentalized? I mean, it does make it easier to browse my local Borders. Yet I know I for one assign expectations ("premeditated resentments" as a friend's mother called them) to books shelved under a certain placard. This can be anything but helpful. I suspect that grass-roots word of mouth is what pushes things along, as it always has, but you have to wonder if you're missing something as you breeze past the various sections in Barnes and Noble.

It's something to think about.

I've been saving up a lot to say, so I'll tell you a few things about me and then...my first rumination!

I was a writer before I could read. When people asked me what I liked to do for fun, I always said lamely that I liked to read books. It never occurred to me to say that I liked to write. As Scout Finch says, "One does not love breathing." This is no proof of talent, but with or without talent, I write. Sometimes I even put it on paper.

I'm a synaesthete of the cognitive variety. My numbers, letters, and calendar names have always had their own colors whenever I think about them or see them in print. Some cognitive synaesthetes project the colors onto the black-and-white symbols they're actually looking at, but I don't do that; however, I do tend to sort names of people, places, and things by the color they start with. It's one of the many reasons I dislike my name: "L" is a sickly sort of yellow, and one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, unfortunately has a name composed of several garish yellows and reds. I didn't discover there was a name for this until about a year ago, and did the almost-proverbial Google search on the subject -- IMO the subject is interesting even if you aren't synaesthetic yourself, especially if you're into mind science. I can't help giving my characters names with colors I like, partly because I never can truly dislike any of my characters no matter how badly they behave -- unlike authors like John Grisham, who dislikes every single one of his characters...but I'm not doing a rant today. Really.

I write for the Drama Team at Liberty Church, my church here in Tulsa. My church is oriented toward contemporary worship, which really stinks if the worshipers aren't seeking God's face, but is very powerful if they are. The goal has been to make the arts a natural and vibrant part of worship at Liberty, and the Drama Team's mission in particular is to help make the day's message as relevant to the observers as possible. I'm very excited about this movement, and even though I'm moving away, I'm still planning to help create scripts for Liberty from afar. It's that initiative thing again -- I find when I get involved and get my hands dirty, I get blessed and I even am a blessing!

The rumination is coming....

So to christen my new blog, I give you a quote.

"It is better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." --Cyril Connolly.

From what I've seen of his collection at my job, Cyril Connolly appears to have done a bit of both. Checking my collection [hold music] I appear to have devoted myself quite happily to the former. So why am I making a blog? Because I figure that with a little good old fashioned initiative I can write for myself and maybe possibly have a little tiny smidgen of a public. Besides, I like to talk. Nuff said.

Okay, a template I think I like. I'm going to find out how to insert a comment-posting engine soon; I'm like MacGyver when it comes to HTML--chewing gum and baling wire, hardly ever the proper tools, but it seems to work okay. At least I haven't got blown up yet, and that's something.

This has to be the last word in egotism, but writers are inveterately egoistic. Here goes, my blog!