Tag: CS Lewis

SNIPPET // CS Lewis’ rule for literary criticism

I’m reading a bit of stuff CS Lewis wrote on writing, in this case an essay called On Science Fiction. He has this little gem of a rule buried in the essay.

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“Of articles I have read on the subject [science fiction writing] (and I expect I have missed many) I do not find that I can make any use. For one thing, most were not very well informed. For another, many were by people who clearly hated the kind they wrote about. It is very dangerous to write about a kind you hate. Hatred obscures all distinctions. I don’t like detective stories and therefore all detective stories look very much alike to me: if I wrote about them I should therefore infallibly write drivel. Criticism of kinds as distinct from criticism of works, cannot of course be avoided… But it is, I think, the most subjective and least reliable type of criticism. Above all, it should not masquerade as criticism of individual works. Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer’s dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett.

“Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist”

“Even if it is a vice to read science fiction, those who cannot understand the very temptation to that vice will not be likely to tell us anything of value about it. Just as I, for instance, who have no taste for cards, could not find anything very useful to say by way of warning against deep play. They will be like the frigid preaching chastity, misers warning us against prodigality, cowards denouncing rashness.”

“Do not criticise what you have no taste for without great caution. And, above all, do not ever criticise what you simply can’t stand. I will lay all the cards on the table. I have long since discovered my own private phobia: the thing I can’t bear in literature, the thing which makes me profoundly uncomfortable, is the representation of anything like a quasi love affair between two children. It embarrases and nauseates me. But of course I regard this not as a charter to write slashing reviews of books in which the hated theme occurs, but as a warning not to pass judgment on them at all. For my reaction is unreasonable: such child-loves quite certainly occur in real life and I can give no reason why they should not be represented in art… And I would venture to advise all who are attempting to become critics to adopt the same principle. A violent and actually resentful reaction to all books of a certain kind, or to situations of a certain kind, is a danger signal. For I am convinced that good adverse criticism is the most difficult thing we have to do. I would advise everyone to begin it under the most favourable conditions: this is, where you thoroughly know and heartily like the thing the author is trying to do, and have enjoyed many books where it was done well. Then you will have some chance of really showing that he has failed and perhaps even of showing why. But if our real reaction to a book is ‘Ugh! I just can’t bear this sort of thing,’ then I think we shall not be able to diagnose whatever real faults it has. We may labour to conceal our emotion, but we shall end in a welter of emotive, unanalysed, vogue-words — ‘arch,’ ‘facetious,’ bogus,’ adolescent,’ immature,’ and the rest. When we really know what is wrong we need none of these.”

September 29, 2015

Stuff & Things: 5 December

Stuff //

Guernica // What Will Happen to All That Beauty

I mentioned I’d been reading deconversion stories this week. I’m not sure if this is actually a deconversion story, but it’s powerful stuff.

““We have become and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things…” 1 Corinthians 4:13.

These are Paul’s words, from his letter to the church at Corinth. He crisscrossed the known world to establish and support the newly formed, and continually persecuted, communities of Christ. Despite his eminence—and I realize this is unfair—Paul has always struck me as humorless, as an incredible curmudgeon. It is surely the case that a great deal of my vexation with him has to do with a kind of nostalgia for the Old Testament. The God of the New Testament, though more consistently benevolent and loving, more evolved, one might say, makes me long for His predecessor. I miss the messy, wrathful God of the Israelites, roaring out of dust clouds or burning on mountaintops. Vagaries, the mysteries of death and suffering, and of wonder, are on the surface of that God. He was at once the Israelites’ avatar and the source of everything they were and could be. In the New Testament, His contradictions are obscured, or at least softened, by the sacrifice of the extraordinary figure of His son. Nonetheless, in both testaments, the Jews and early Christians are the protagonists of a grand narrative of the underdog, an epic poem of the oppressed. The God of the Bible, for all the ways He has been twisted into monstrosity by the various agendas of our human history, has always been the God of the trash, of the forgotten and forsaken. Certainly, He was the God of American blacks and of their struggle for liberation.”

Also in Deconversion stories // How I Lost The Religion of My Childhood // Frank Schaeffer: The Atheist Who Believes In God // Why I Miss Being A Born Again Christian

 

Kingdomview // John Frame’s 30 Tips for Theology Students

Someone asked me for my tips on getting the most out of Bible College the other day. If I’d already seen this list, I would have just sent them a link.

CBN // CS Lewis Final Interview

When I was digging about for links between David Foster Wallace and CS Lewis I unearthed this gem.

“Wirt: Would you say that the aim of Christian writing, including your own writing, is to bring about an encounter of the reader with Jesus Christ?

Lewis: “That is not my language, yet it is the purpose I have in view. For example, I have just finished a book on prayer, an imaginary correspondence with someone who raises questions about difficulties in prayer.”

Wirt: How can we foster the encounter of people with Jesus Christ?

Lewis: “You can’t lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into his Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.

“But we can block it in many ways. As Christians we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the faith. We give in too much. Now, I don’t mean that we should run the risk of making a nuisance of ourselves by witnessing at improper times, but there comes a time when we must show that we disagree. We must show our Christian colors, if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent or concede everything away.

“There is a character in one of my children’s stories named Aslan, who says, ‘I never tell anyone any story except his own.’ I cannot speak for the way God deals with others; I only know how he deals with me personally. Of course, we are to pray for spiritual awakening, and in various ways we can do something toward it. But we must remember that neither Paul nor Apollos gives the increase. As Charles Williams once said, ‘The altar must often be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.”

McSweeney’s // I Am An Artisnal Attorney

I could have posted 10 different McSweeney’s articles, such was the backlog in my Feedly… but these will suffice.

“Not long ago, while attending a small-batch honey wine tasting at a meadery with friends, I realized that we bought only organic produce at the local farmers market, ate only free range meat prepared by our traditional neighborhood butcher, and filled our apartments with only free trade, hand crafted furniture. We—and many others like us—insist on authenticity in everything in our lives. We don’t want to eat. We want the fullness that only comes from a meal created by the human experience. We don’t want to drink. We want the buzz that is produced by the draught of a person’s skill. It occurred to me that people who demand realness in their food and homes should also demand it in their legal representation. That was when I became an artisanal attorney.”

Other McSweeney’s // Snopes investigates the Anderson Family Holiday Letter — does what it says on the tin // Speaking for All Christians Exactly Like Me — A Christian novelist reflects on culture // Home On The Range — A long time gun lover is confronted with gun mania, and isn’t sure he likes what he sees.

 

Things //

io9 // Most Amazing Science Images of 2014

My Book, The Movie // Authors try their hands at selecting the cast for hypothetical movie versions of their books.

McSweeney’s // Liberal Arts Thesis Sub-Title Generator (list)

Vimeo // Hipster Designer Aaron Draplin makes a logo

http://vimeo.com/113751583

More Aaron Draplin on a Metafilter round up.

Vimeo // We Were Not Made for this World

A Robot walks on a sandy, desolate, planet.

YouTube // Terminator Genisys Trailer: Paradox Edition

Photo Invasion // A guy draws cartoon characters on stranger’s Instagram photos

Some are rude.

January 5, 2015

7 tips from David Foster Wallace (and others) on writing well

I think I’ve mentioned my DFW fanboyism once or twice before… I love the way he writes, and the way he thinks about writing, and the way he talks about thinking about writing. So. This book — Quack This Way —  a transcript of an hour long chat between David Foster Wallace and Bryan Garner, the author of the dictionary of usage that he reviewed, quite famously, is fantastic. In it DFW shares a bunch of his thinking about writing, distilled here for your edification.

I love this description of his own view of his deficiencies as a writer. I think, because I can relate to it…

“My main deficit, at least in terms of nonfiction prose, is I have difficulty of being as clear as I want to be. I have various tricks for working around that and making it kind of charming to watch somebody trying to be clear, but the fact of the matter is, I can’t be clear and compressed in the way that, say, parts of the preface of your dictionary that I liked very much are clear and compressed.”

And I have a strange phobia that there’s a crucial point and I haven’t transmitted it satisfactorily, so I have to say it again a different way and then later on again a different way. And I think I lean . . . There’s a Poe thing, right? “One out of one hundred things is discussed at great length because it really is obscure. Ninety-nine out of one hundred things are obscure because they’re discussed at more length than they need to be.”

I also really enjoyed reading this account of his famous essay Tense Present — the aforementioned review of Garner’s dictionary. It was commissioned by The New Republic, but DFW was so excited by his review that it blew out the assigned word limit and deadline. I can totally relate to that. Then. Harper’s magazine ran half of what DFW wrote, finally, DFW published the whole, unabridged, 62-page behemoth in his Consider the Lobster (a great collection of essays). Here’s his reflections on this little series of events. Those of you who know how I feel about word limits will know why I love DFW and his writing (and why this post is so long).

BAG: “Were you happier with the full-length version that appeared in Consider the Lobster than you were with the one that appeared as “Tense Present” in Harper’s?

DFW:  Well, sure. Harper’s cuts real well. This is part of the problem with what I do: I end up giving them five times as much as they can use sometimes. With the Harper’s piece, it was maybe twice as much. Which means I need magazines that cut real well, or editors who cut real well. Harper’s, they cut it okay, but they cut out most of the things that for them were dry or academic, which was actually the meat. They left in, like, pants analogies that were funny and zingy, but the actual essay is meant to advance a certain kind of argument through both fairly meticulous—not scholarly because it’s more pop than that—and fairly sedulous argumentation, and zingy, pop, informal things, and they cut out a lot of the sedulous stuff. The Harper’s article is probably more fun to read. The version that’s in the book, I think, is a heck of a lot better, pace the terrible capitalization and ital versus [rolling eyes] tone-quote question.”

Anyway. Here are some selected gems about writing from Quack This Way.

1. Writing is about communicating to somebody who can’t read your mind… with a goal to making reading as close to effortless as possible

“In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader—even though it’s mediated by a kind of text—there’s an electricity about it.”

 

“In my experience with students—talented students of writing—the most important thing for them to remember is that someone who is not them and cannot read their mind is going to have to read this.”

Part of this involves punctuating to control how fast or slow a reader digests what you’ve written. Not just for meaning (though they’re related).

Reading is a very strange thing. We get talked to about it and talk explicitly about it in first grade and second grade and third grade, and then it all devolves into interpretation. But if you think about what’s going on when you read, you’re processing information at an incredible rate.   One measure of how good the writing is is how little effort it requires for the reader to track what’s going on. For example, I am not an absolute believer in standard punctuation at all times, but one thing that’s often a big shock to my students is that punctuation isn’t merely a matter of pacing or how you would read something out loud. These marks are, in fact, cues to the reader for how very quickly to organize the various phrases and clauses of the sentence so the sentence as a whole makes sense.

I believe psycholinguists, as part of neuro-science, spend . . . I mean, they hook little sensors up to readers’ eyes and study this stuff. I don’t know much about that, but I do know that when you’re not punctuating effectively for your genre, or when you fail to supply sufficient transitions, you are upping the amount of effort the reader has to make in order . . . forget appreciate . . . simply to understand what it is that you are communicating.

The goal is a frictionless experience for the reader…

One of the things that really good writing does is that it’s able to get across massive amounts of information and various favourable impressions of the communicator with minimal effort on the part of the reader. That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it—the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention. Does that make sense?

Because writing is about a relationship —  a communion — a communication — between writer and reader. Except when it’s used for something more sinister.

Well, you get down to certain axioms about what the language is and what it ought to be used for. And you and I, I think, are essentially gooey-hearted humanists, and we want it to vivify and facilitate . . . we want it to help inter-human relationships of various sorts. But language is also a tool of persuasion. Propaganda, right? We have a president who apparently doesn’t need to use the language well because as he’s speaking, behind us are little banners—talk about Orwellian—“Fighting the War on Terrorism.” Right? Have you seen this? These press conferences? No longer do we need a president who’s an example of an articulate, thoughtful person because we’ve got behind him this sort of almost hypnotic set of messages that someone has discovered that, with some base, those actually work better at creating a favorable impression than having a well-spoken, apparently thoughtful president.

2. …and your reader doesn’t care what you have to say. So, write to communicate, not to simply express yourself

“In the real writing world, one of the axioms is that the reader doesn’t care about you. You know, the fact that this is you means absolutely nothing to them. The fact is, what can they get from this document that is going to require time, and perhaps money, for them to read? It’s a very different paradigm to come at writing from.

This means if you want to do the relationship stuff you have to be the one who cares about the other person, giving them a reason to read or listen —  DFW suggests this is the difference between ‘communicative’ and ‘expressive’ writing…

“… there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.

What I talk about is that one of the things that’s good about writing and practicing writing is it’s a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness. Right? “I am the center of my own world, my thoughts and feelings are more immediate, therefore . . . ” I mean we all know the drill, right? When students snap to the fact that there’s such a thing as a really bad writer, a pretty good writer, a great writer—when they start wanting to get better—they start realizing that really learning how to write effectively is, in fact, probably more of a matter of spirit than it is of intellect. I think probably even of verbal facility. And the spirit means I never forget there’s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I’m sending that person all kinds of messages, only some of which have to do with the actual content of what it is I’m trying to say.”

Thinking this way about writing — and trying to improve as a writer — could also make you a better person all round…

“It’s true, I think, that a lot of the muscles you use, skills you use, in trying to get better as a writer, are skills and muscles that pay off in ways that don’t immediately seem to have to do with writing simply because language and interpersonal communication is to a large extent . . . it’s our world, right?”

This also changes the way you open a piece of writing (and structure it from there through to the end).

A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel. Right? So it’s interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument, and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes. Right? Not only am I right, but in any piece of writing there’s a tertiary argument: why should you spend your time reading this? Right? “So here’s why the following issue might be important, useful, practical.” I would think that if one did it deftly, one could in a one-paragraph opening grab the reader, state the terms of the argument, and state the motivation for the argument. I imagine most good argumentative stuff that I’ve read, you could boil that down to the opener.

The middle should work . . . It lays out the argument in steps, not in a robotic way, but in a way that the reader can tell (a) what the distinct steps or premises of the argument are; and (b), this is the tricky one, how they’re connected to each other. So when I teach nonfiction classes, I spend a disproportionate amount of my time teaching the students how to write transitions, even as simple ones as however and moreover between sentences. Because part of their belief that the reader can somehow read their mind is their failure to see that the reader needs help understanding how two sentences are connected to each other—and also transitions between paragraphs.

I’m thinking of the argumentative things that I like the best, and because of this situation the one that pops into my mind is Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” If you look at how that’s put together, there’s a transition in almost every single paragraph. Right? Like, “Moreover, not only is this offense common, but it is harmful in this way.” You know where he is in the argument, but you never get the sense that he’s ticking off items on a checklist; it’s part of an organic whole. My guess would be, if I were an argumentative writer, that I would spend one draft on just the freaking argument, ticking it off like a checklist, and then the real writing part would be weaving it and making the transitions between the parts of the argument—and probably never abandoning the opening, never letting the reader forget what the stakes are here. Right? Never letting the reader think that I’ve lapsed into argument for argument’s sake, but that there’s always a larger, overriding purpose.

3. Read lots, but read with an eye on the mechanics, or anatomy, not just the style of what you like.

DFW trots out a bit of advice that I’ve seen elsewhere —  don’t just read stuff you like, sit down and write it out. It’s a bit like dissecting a specimen in a laboratory.

“Probably the second biggest one is learning to pay attention in different ways. Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph. Exercises as boneheaded as you take a book you really like, you read a page of it three, four times, put it down, and then try to imitate it word for word so that you can feel your own muscles trying to achieve some of the effects that the page of text you like did. If you’re like me, it will be in your failure to be able to duplicate it that you’ll actually learn what’s going on.”

 

It sounds really, really stupid, but in fact, you can read a page of text, right? And “Oh, that was pretty good . . . ,” but you don’t get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in that text until you start trying to reproduce them. And so that was just a random exercise that I could think of. I didn’t know other people . . . I know James Jones had a writing teacher who made them retype great books, but I think the book was right there and they were just retyping. They were supposed to learn through their hands, or something kind of flaky.

Hunter Thompson did it with The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, Cicero did it for speeches and poetry he admired, Nicholson Baker, one of my other favourite essayists/authors does it… apparently Robert Louis Stevenson also suggested it.

Here’s Cicero.

“For my part, in the daily exercises of youth, I used chiefly to set myself that task which I knew Gaius Carbo, my old enemy, was wont to practise : this was to set myself some poetry, the most impressive to be found, or to read as much of some speech as I could keep in my memory, and then to declaim upon the actual subject-matter of my reading, choosing as far as possible different words. But later I noticed this defect in my method, that those words which best befitted each subject, and were the most elegant and in fact the best, had been already seized upon by Ennius, if it was on his poetry that I was practising, or by Gracchus,” if I chanced to have set myself a speech of his. Thus I saw that to employ the same expressions profited me nothing, while to employ others was a positive hindrance, in that I was forming the habit of using the less appropriate. Afterwards I resolved, — and this practice I followed when somewhat older, — to translate freely Greek speeches of the most eminent orators. The result of reading these was that, in rendering into Latin what I had read in Greek, I not only found myself using the best words — and yet quite familiar ones — but also coining by analogy certain words such as would be new to our people, provided only they were appropriate.” —  Cicero

Both Desiderius Erasmus, in the 16th century, and more recently, Nicholson Baker, suggest when you find stuff you like you should copy them down into a book of memorable writing, a Commonplace book, which you can read more about in Tom Standage’s Writing On The Wall. I like the idea that this blog functions as something like a commonplace book, as well as a filing cabinet. And I’m thinking about typing quotes out rather than just copying and pasting. But I think there’s also, potentially a link between writing stuff out by hand, rather than typing, and getting a better sense of the way the words flow together. I’ll chuck some more stuff about Erasmus, and from Nicholson Baker, in the comments.

4. There are infinite possibilities to create something with words. You can always get better. So practice. 

“The fact of the matter is that good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.”

“Writing well in the sense of writing something interesting and urgent and alive, that actually has calories in it for the reader—the reader walks away having benefited from the 45 minutes she put into reading the thing—maybe isn’t hard for a certain few. I mean, maybe John Updike’s first drafts are these incredible . . . Apparently Bertrand Russell could just simply sit down and do this. I don’t know anyone who can do that. For me, the cliché that “Writing that appears effortless takes the most work” has been borne out through very unpleasant experience.

it becomes very tempting to go, “Oh, what’s good? Okay, look at that guy over there: that’s good.” Just be aware that that guy is looking at other people and going, “No, no, that’s good.” And like any kind of infinitely rich art, or any infinitely rich medium, like language, the possibilities for improvement are infinite and so are the possibilities for screwing up and ceasing to be good in the ways you want to be good.

So probably the smart thing to say is, if you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers—not all of whom are modern . . . I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this—becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul.

So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.”

5. Write slow so you think carefully

I don’t do this (or the next tip), I don’t draft much at all. I write too much and then I chip away until I’ve got something approaching something that I’m happy with. I hit publish, and I move on.

But getting an insight into how great writers write is always interesting.

BAG: So you don’t put much stock in that, the mechanical typing of it, as opposed to really mentally trying to recreate something?

DFW:  Here though, I mean I’m 43, and we get into the weird age thing because for my students, many of whom compose on a typewriter, that might actually be a useful exercise. The writing writing that I do is longhand.

BAG:   You write everything in longhand?

DFW:  Well, the first two or three drafts are always longhand, yeah. Only because I went through this school where they made me write a lot and it was right before computers became ubiquitous. And I just find that it makes me . . . I can type very much faster than I can write. And writing makes me slow down in a way that helps me pay attention. Like, is the clause that I just . . . does this make sense, what I just said? Which is very difficult, at least for me, to keep in mind when I’m actually writing the thing, unless something slows me down.

Apparently CS Lewis also wrote using pen and ink, not a type writer. Here’s a quote from Alister McGrath’s biography, and another from the preface to a published collection of his letters.

“Lewis actively chose not to type. This mechanical mode of writing, he believed, interfered with the creative process in that the incessant clacking of the typewriter keys dulled the writer’s appreciation of the rhythms and cadences of the English language.”

 

“Lewis learned to write with a nib pen, dipped into an inkwell every four or five words. When he was an undergraduate at Oxford he began using fountain pens, but he gave them up after several years and resumed writing with a nib pen, a practice he carried on for the rest of his life.

When Lewis dictated letters to me, he always had me read them aloud afterwards. He told me that in writing letters, as well as books, he always “whispered the words aloud.” Pausing to dip the pen in an inkwell provided exactly the rhythm needed.”

Both of these quotes feature in this post by Tony Reinke.

I think DFW and CS Lewis occupy similar positions in the literary stratosphere, both are particularly, in my mind, attuned to thinking about the human condition, Lewis as a Christian, and DFW as someone faced with the crushing and overwhelming nature of life without God. His stuff on humanity is always particularly rich. Which is part of why I love his writing. DFW listed The Screwtape Letters as his favourite book in this list. Here’s a stunningly poignant obituary from DFW’s friend Jonathan Franzen that discusses, in a way, the relationship between Screwtape and DFW’s suicide. And I think shows a little of how despite similarities, Lewis and Wallace took such divergent paths in life (this little piece that looked at what happened to Lewis’s self-reflection upon his conversion to Christianity —  it faded as he found his identity elsewhere —  in contrast to Wallace’s self-insight that may or may not have contributed to his death is pretty interesting reading alongside the Franzen piece). But I digress. Into some pretty dark territory. Lewis — via his discovery of value through the love of God poured out at the cross —  offers a better way out of darkness than Wallace found (at least, according to Franzen).

6. Figure out how your writing process gives your writing structure (and how it varies based on what you are writing).

BAG:   When you’re writing nonfiction, how do you go about research and then organizing your thoughts when you’re writing a long essay?

DFW:  I find it very difficult. The truth is that most of the nonfiction pieces I do are at least partly experiential. They involve going to a place, talking to people, taking notes. My fondest wish is that no one would have the kind of process I have with it. I end up taking a hundred times more notes than I need.   My first draft usually approximates somebody in the midst of an epileptic seizure. It’s usually about the second or the third draft where I begin having any idea of actually what this thing is about. So my own way of doing it, it’s not very economical in terms of time. It is just doing it over and over and over again and throwing stuff away and, you know, whining and crying to friends and stuff and then going back and trying it over again. I think there are very few professional writers—and certainly very few people who are doing things like having to supply good briefs or opinions in the law—who would want to or could afford to go through a process like that.   My process appears to be getting precipitate out of an enormous amount of solution. I wish it weren’t. I heartily advise people not to develop a process like that. I can get away with it because I don’t do many nonfiction pieces. I couldn’t make a living doing them because just one takes me six months

Everybody is different. I don’t discover the structure except by writing sentences because I can’t think structurally well enough. But I know plenty of good nonfiction writers. Some actually use Roman-numeral outlines, and they wouldn’t even know how to begin without it.   If you really ask writers, at least most of the ones I know—and people are always interested and want to know what you do—most of them are habits or tics or superstitions we picked up between the ages of 15 and 25, often in school. I think at a certain point, part of one’s linguistic nervous system gets hardened over that time or something, but it’s all different.

I would think for argumentative writing it would be very difficult, at a certain point, not to put it into some kind of outline form.

Well, but I do very few straight-out argumentative things. The stuff that I do is part narrative, part argumentative, part meditative, part experiential. The closest I’ve come to actual argumentative pieces are book reviews, and I mean straight-out, you-got-300-words book reviews. And at a certain draft, at a certain point in those drafts, I always make an outline. But that’s because I’ve got 300 words, which for me is very tight. How am I going to make it tight?

7. Don’t confuse complexity with intelligence. Pick good words that give clarity and humanity to your writing.

“…a lot of people with PhDs are stupid, and like many stupid people, they associate complexity with intelligence. And therefore they get brainwashed into making their stuff more complicated than it needs to be. I think the smarter thing to say is that in many tight, insular communities—where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency, and being able to speak the language of the discipline—pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one’s own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning.”

He spends a bit of time exploring why so many people who are qualified as ‘writers’ — writing in all sorts of professional capacities — are so bad at writing (even if they’re very good at reading). It’s touched on a little in the quote above, and expanded below.

Now, this is presuming that you’ve got a reader who is bright, literate, well-educated, and paying attention. Given the amount of verbosity—particularly in bureaucratic, institutional, legal, and scientific writing, including the stuff that gets published—indicates to me that there are certain audiences that aren’t especially bothered by this. Why that is I don’t know except that a lot of them tend to be audiences composed of professionals who went through a long apprenticeship that meant reading huge amounts of this kind of stuff, and they sort of got brainwashed or maybe inured to it in some way. From the point of view, like you, of somebody who just loves the language and thinks it’s hard enough to be clear anyway, in the default case the fewest words, each of which is the smallest and plainest possible, is usually the best policy.

I love some of the stuff he says about jargon – political, advertising, and legalese style communication where new, non-plain, dialects are used. Based on agendas other than communication-for-human-relationships.

One answer is the fact that people, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. For me, I’ve noodled about this a fair amount because a lot of this sort of language afflicts me. My guess is this: officialese, as spoken by officials, is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose.

My guess is one of the reasons why we as a people tolerate, or even expect, this officialese is that we associate it with a different form of communication than interpersonal—Dave and Bryan talking together. That the people who are speaking are in many senses speaking not as human beings but as the larynx and tongue of a larger set of people, responsibilities, laws, regulations, whatever. And that is probably why, even though it’s dreadfully ugly to the ear and why if you think hard about it, “Keep your personal belongings in visual contact at all times” is actually likely to be understood by a smaller percentage of people than, “Please keep an eye on your stuff at all times.” Nevertheless, there are imperatives behind using the language that way. And some of it is to be antihuman.

And, lastly, I love that he points out that clarity, achieved largely via plain language, also comes through elegance and craftsmanship, where the interest of the reader is paramount.

BAG:   Let me ask you this. If plain language is a good thing, why is it also a good thing to have an ample vocabulary?

DFW:  Well, for a couple of reasons.   One, plain language doesn’t mean all little, monosyllabic words. The general rule of thumb is you use the very smallest word that will do in a particular situation. Sometimes the situation you’re describing is specific and technical, and a small word won’t do.   Probably the other big thing is that there’s this thing called “elegant variation.” You have to be able . . . In order for your sentences not to make the reader’s eyes glaze over, you can’t simply use the same core set of words, particularly important nouns and verbs, over and over and over again. You have to have synonyms at your fingertips and alternative constructions at your fingertips. And usually, though not in the sense of memorizing vocab words like we were kids, but having a larger vocabulary is usually the best way to do that. The best. Having a good vocabulary ups the chances that we’re going to be able to know the right word, even if that’s the plainest word that will do and to achieve some kind of elegant variation, which I am kind of a fiend for.

 

 

 

 

December 29, 2014

God and the God Shot: How the quest for the perfect coffee points to the perfect creator

God and the God Shot

“…The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food…” // GENESIS 2:9

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. // ROMANS 1:20

God created Coffee. Coffee reveals something about God’s qualities. Coffee is good.

Coffee is proof that God loves us. 

It’s an interesting premise. A great T-Shirt slogan. But does it hold up to scrutiny?

I think it does. Here’s an attempt to prove the premise. This is long. Don’t think of it as a long blog post, but rather, a short e-book. But, for the blog post types – here’s the summary.

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Coffee is part of God’s good creation, God’s creation includes creativity and beauty – he made things of quality to be enjoyed, the purpose of this good world God created was to point people to him, and to reveal his goodness.

Coffee is also proof that we are fundamentally messy.

The way we drink coffee reveals that our hearts are diseased, and that this disease is because we don’t use the stuff God created for what he created it for. The way we consume coffee, and the narrative we surround it with, diagnoses our heart.

We consume coffee, and are consumed by it. We consume coffee, and as we consume it, we consume others and consume our world.

We worship coffee. We are tempted to find our identity in coffee – to use it as a point of pride – or to make it part of the way we control the world. We are addicts. Unable to function without a daily dose.

Whether you call it ‘instant’ (an abomination that literally causes desolation), or ‘specialty’ (where my preferences more naturally lie), you’re introducing a narrative to your consumption that reveals your idols.

On the ‘instant’ front: we trash God’s good creation and the people who work the land, to mass produce low quality crops that we then turn into a dehydrated, chemically-maimed, husk of its former self for our instant gratification. We want total deniability when it comes to process, but want it to fuel our addiction.

On the ‘specialty’ front:  We’re obsessed with control. We spend all our time finding finicky details to tweak for the sake of one iota’s difference, while crafting a narrative for the humble bean that explains just how sophisticated we are as we sip it – even if this means treating people and the planet more ethically, we wear our ethics as a badge of pride and self-glorification.

We engage in what CS Lewis calls the ‘gluttony of delicacy’ and can spend our time and money pursuing a perfect coffee, which doesn’t exist. Chasing a taste of heaven only regarding the creator of heaven and earth as something of an Arthurian punch-line. The chief end of our quest for perfection. Yet. The closest we get to the ‘God Shot’ – the Holy Grail of coffee craftsmanship – the more we realise it is unattainable.

We’ve taken God’s good gift of coffee and turned it into an idol, but even when we’re not worshipping it – the best most God-directed coffee experiences are still a reminder of what we crave. 

Our best experiences of coffee now involve fleeting moments, ephemeral visions of the future, a tantalising window between two worlds, where we pull a few wisps of heaven into a porcelain cup, and have them drift past our taste buds into oblivion. They can’t be savoured for long because they are vapour. There, and then gone. Such momentary bliss is a reminder that we are not yet home. That the world God created has been frustrated by humanity’s choice – corporately, and individually – rejecting him and choosing to use the things he made the wrong way.

This ‘God Shot’, and what we do with coffee, is a simultaneous testimony to our limits, our brokenness, and God’s goodness.

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WHAT IS THE GOD SHOT

“It is a homage to God in a way because when someone talks about a God Shot, it is something so special, so unique, so perfect, it’s almost as if God Himself has blessed it.”

// Mark Prince, coffeegeek.com, ‘Defining what is the God Shot,’ 2002

 

What is the God Shot? You could do worse than reading this 12 year old attempt at a definition from Mark Prince. It’s hard to describe exactly what separates the God Shot from the great shot. There is a certain quality that lingers. That you identify when you find it, and that tugs at the edge of your palate when you don’t. The God Shot has a certain Je ne sais quoi about it that one can’t really begin to describe without dipping into foreign tongues to borrow words. It’s a picture with colours beyond the average spectrum.

Perhaps it’s like asking someone to imagine a blue yellow that isn’t green – our heads can conceive of such a fantastical construction – but picturing it is beyond us.

This is the God Shot. It brings impossibilities together. It is paradox in a cup. Or, as Mark Prince puts it while trying to find words…

“…the God Shot is the ristretto shot maximized to the point of achieving something that David Schomer (of Espresso Vivace) and many other espresso purists before him have sought: coffee that tastes as good as fresh roasted coffee smells.

This is the fleeting thing. It really is.”

// Mark Prince, coffeegeek.com

Specialty coffee tasters describe coffee with all sorts of ‘tasting notes’ – something akin to the things you’ll read on the label of a bottle of wine. There’s a tasting wheel that invites people who spend a lifetime honing their senses of taste and smell to describe the flavours and aromas of coffee – and the sides of the wheel very rarely meet. The God Shot brings them together.


Image Source: coffeesnobs.com.au

Here’s how to spot a God Shot in the wild… it’s a multisensory thing…

“The God Shot is a double ristretto shot that looks special from the moment it starts slurping down from the portafilter spouts. The colour of the streams is always a dark rust-red colour, and often a sense of tiger striping, with alternating lines of lighter rust with darker rust, can be seen. In the cup, the shot is 100% crema from the get go right up until the end of the pour, and the black nectar starts to form as you complete the shot. It can take up to 30 seconds or longer for the crema to settle in the top third of the cup, leaving the bottom two thirds an opaque black. The top of the crema is quite often a dark ruby rust color with no traces of over extraction (blond or beige spots), but often something called tiger-mottling, or specks of darker spots where the intense, highly concentrated colloids and flavours of the espresso draw show themselves – these are the barely-solubles that made it to the cup.

The aromas as you lift the cup to your nose almost overpower with the intense, pure smell of what the roasted and ground coffee smelled like moments before. As you swirl the shot to release even more aromas, the true God Shot will almost overwhelm you. Then it comes time for the first sip. You’ll know at this moment, if you didn’t already, this was something unique – the mouthfeel is beyond almost anything you’ve sampled before – the aromas, tastes, colloids, flavours, you name it, they all coat the tongue and seem to constantly hit the perfect notes on all four major taste areas of your tongue. They compete with each other, but always seem to compliment the areas of sweet, sour, bitter and sharp on the tongue.

As you swallow the shot, the back of your mouth and throat get the final joy – the espresso coats this part of your mouth and doesn’t want to give up. Where a normal espresso shot may leave bitters and an unpleasant tang in the throat, the God Shot gives such an amazing sensation of mild bitters and sweets that it is almost as if your mouth doesn’t want to lose this sensation – it wants to keep it around for a while.”

// Mark Prince, coffeegeek.com, ‘Defining what is the God Shot’

MY QUEST FOR THE GOD SHOT

Of the perhaps six thousand coffees I’ve consumed in the last eight years (at a rate of two a day, which is conservative)- this is when my chemical romance with C8H10N4O2 truly blossomed (it’s not really about the drug though – the effect of caffeine gets in the way of the consumption of delicious coffee as far as I’m concerned) – there are around six coffees that I remember – and salivate over just a little bit – six that I experienced as ‘God Shots’ – purists would say that by adding milk I’ve adulterated the untamed beauty of the espresso, but milk, too, is a gift from God to be enjoyed. And the creative coupling of milk and coffee is a match surely made in heaven.

I poured two of these six myself – a Brazilian and a Tanzanian – within a few months of each other.

The other four were from cafes – I can’t name dates, but I can list places. And flavours. One came from Coffee Dominion in Townsville, one was from One Drop, one was from Shucked Espresso, and one was from Merriweather – these three cafes are in Brisbane. Two of these were on blends that were carefully orchestrated and calculated to stimulate and excite the senses. I’ve had exceptional coffees from cafes too numerous to mention. But these are the memories that stick. Feasts for the senses.

  • The Coffee Dominion coffee reminded me of butterscotch.
  • The One Drop coffee was on a day that I was flying up to North Queensland in my first year back in Brisbane, and I still remember the toffee-apple after taste as I drove home.
  • The one from Shucked was a Costa Rican that evoked a strong sense of lemon meringue pie.
  • The coffee from Merriweather was two Sundays ago – I don’t know quite how to describe the blast of sweet fruity flavours that cut through the milk in my flat white. You know a coffee is good when you text the roaster to thank them.

These moments stand out in what is almost literally an ocean of coffee. Well. About 175,200mL of coffee.

175 litres of exceptional coffee.

Coffee made in the best cafes in Australia. Coffee systematically and methodically produced at home, or at the hands of some of Australia’s best baristas. And despite limiting the search to the cream of the crop the God Shot has appeared for me 0.1% of the time (if my maths is right – it rarely is). Even if I add my next 20 or 30 favourite coffees we’re still at less than 1%.

I’ve got fancy equipment. I’ve tried roasting my own coffee. I’ve tried sourcing coffee from the best roasters wherever I go. I’ve read about coffee. I’ve practiced and honed the craft of espresso extraction. And my success ratio is significantly smaller than the percentage of God Shots to shots.

I drink more coffee at home than out, but God Shots from elsewhere outnumber the coffees I’ve produced three to one.

HOW DO YOU PRODUCE A GOD SHOT?

Mark Prince’s symposium of baristas (surely the official collective noun for a group of baristas?) agree that while the God Shot requires the perfect preparation – the perfect preparation is no guarantee of a God Shot.

The God Shot will not be tamed by human ritual or superstition.

The God Shot is not subject to the whims of the one searching for it, but one must search in the right places.

“Do everything right, and hope for the best.

That’s it. Do your prep the right way – make sure you’re using the best quality specialty coffee beans you can get, fresh roasted and well blended. Make sure your grinder is working in tip top shape and it is a top notch grinder. “Be at one” with your grinder, as in know how your grinder will react to the beans you put in it, know about the tiny things such as humidity, ambient air temperatures, age of the beans and the like, and adjust the grind accordingly.

Make sure your espresso machine is set up right, and running right. Know the proper temperatures and boiler pressures your machine needs to pull off a great shot. Keep your equipment clean.

Prepare your portafilter with all the skill and experience you can muster. Dose the exact proper amount. Level it off, get ready to tamp, and do your tamp. Tamp and spin and wipe. Flush the grouphead for a second or two, even on the commercial machine in a high volume shop. Lock and load, set up the cup and brew.

And hope (or more appropriately pray) for the best.

Do the things right, and you’ll get a great shot of espresso every time. But great doesn’t equal a God Shot. Why? Even the most seasoned, professional and passionate Baristas know they can pull great shots, but also know the God Shot only comes if the stars are aligned, the moons in phase, Jupiter is in Venus, yada yada… oh yeah, and for some who believe in it, God looked down, and decided, yes, this one is worthy, I bless it.”

// Mark Prince, coffeegeek.com

The religious pursuit of the God Shot highlights the problems with all human religiosity – we don’t control God via a series of buttons, variables, and levers, which can be carefully balanced to deliver us a desired outcome. The God Shot mocks our desire to be in control.

THE GOD SHOT AS (UNATTAINABLE) JOY

My experience of the God Shot is fleeting – and I’m not alone. But it’s also what keeps me going back for more, hoping that I’ll taste it again.

This reminds me of CS Lewis’s (and Rammstein’s) concept of sehnsucht.

CS Lewis writes about the fleeting experiences of joy we have now, in this world, and how their fleeting nature reminds us that we are not yet home. We are not where we were created to be – our world is not what it was created to be. Coffee is not yet what it was created to be. And the gap between our experiences now and what we anticipate – the gap that drives our longings – our cravings – and their final satisfaction… that’s this sehnsucht.

“That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan”, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves. It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given–nay, cannot even be imagined as given–in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.”

// CS Lewis, PILGRIM’S REGRESS

This is the same sense I think I feel when it comes to the fleeting experience of the God Shot, and the desire that sparks… CS Lewis also speaks of joy in similar terms…

“All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.”

// CS Lewis, LETTERS

He speaks of this momentary experience of joy – which, again, describes these six coffees.

“It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?…Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone the whole glimpse… withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else… an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction…”

// CS Lewis, SURPRISED BY JOY

 As an example of joy, provided by something God has created, the God Shot (and the quest for the God shot) reminds us that God is good, and that we are not home. That we are only seeing glimpses of heaven in our coffee cup. It’s a bit like the God Shot – both in its presence and in its absence – helps us see what the writer of Ecclesiastes says in chapter 3.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”

// ECCLESIASTES 3:11-13 

THE GOD SHOT AND THE HEART

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened…  They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator”

// ROMANS 1:21, 25

“Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.”

// 1 TIMOTHY 5:23

Coffee is actually good for your heart (and many other aspects of your health). But the way we consume coffee reveals that our hearts are profoundly diseased in a non-medical sense, and this disease permeates our every action, and our every use of the good things God has made.

Our hearts are diseased in such a way that when they control our hands and mouths we perpetuate this disease – inflicting it on others.

Our use of coffee – when it’s not properly directed to giving glory to the creator for what he has made, joyfully co-creating with his good gifts – falls into two opposite and equally pernicious uses of God’s world. We trash it, or we worship it. While both ends of the coffee spectrum – instant or specialty – can involve trashing or wrongly treasuring creation (rather than the creator), they tend to gravitate towards either pole.

Coffee helps diagnose our diseased hearts. We speak casually of coffee addiction, when what we really mean is dependence. We’ve become slaves to this created thing. The labels we apply to coffee – at either end of the quality spectrum – reveal our idolatry. Instant coffee. Specialty coffee. The narrative we use to surround our consumption of coffee is part of the narrative of our lives – and if it isn’t connected to God, this is a problem. 

THE SIN(S) OF INSTANT COFFEE

Instant coffee is symptomatic of the spread of our destructive disease into God’s world – the root cause may well be described as idolatry, but it’s the idolatry of self. Instant coffee. Instant gratification. An instant fix. Caffeine is this tool we’ve harnessed to further our ends, and instant coffee is the most efficient delivery mechanism that maintains some sort of veneer of pleasure (or connection to God’s wondrous coffee bean – I mean, you could take caffeine tablets or inject caffeine – but who’d want to do that?).

But is it instant? Really? We do not question. We don’t need to. Instant coffee is simply fuel, not fun. It’s all science, no art. Pure utility. It is instant. Quick. Cheap. Easy. To focus on the process is to miss the point – or, a lack of focus on the process is precisely the point.

‘Instant’ is a counterfeit claim. It’s not instant (it’s also arguably not coffee). But we want to be ignorant of everything leading up to our fix lest it reveal the deception inherent in the name, and the narrative.

The soluble instant coffee crystal is produced by a convoluted process that, in its lack of care for the world and its people, is both symptom and symbol of our corrupt hearts. It’s a symbol of our quick-paced, fix-driven world of convenient utility and productivity, and a symptom of the corruption we sow wherever our diseased hearts pump sin around our bodies and into our actions.

Our consumption of ‘instant coffee’ involves our consumption of the world around us – consuming both people and planet on the altar of our own convenience.

While much of the world’s coffee – including coffee at the specialty end – is produced in under-developed countries, and many coffee farmers are underpaid (passing that underpayment on to their workers – or slaves) – instant coffee uses the cheapest and nastiest coffee grown in the worst conditions.

The drive to supply the ever-increasing insatiable desire for coffee (largely in the developed west) is leading to deforestation in some of the planet’s most significant rainforests.

The coffee grown for instant coffee is much less likely to be ‘ethical’ on either the environmental, economic, or personal front than anything further along the spectrum towards specialty. This is because the people drinking it care less about quality, and less about process.

Instant coffee is not mankind creatively using God’s good gift to bring life. It’s destructive. This destruction spans the entire process – from planting to packaging, and arguably includes the way the coffee itself is treated – roasted without care, batch produced, dehydrated and crystallised using either extremely hot air or snap freezing. Subjectively speaking it’s hard to see how the generic approach to coffee production – where the only distinction in quality or process appears to be which process is used to crystallise the coffee – can point you to the good and creative creator better than specialty coffee – but if you love the taste of instant, and think you can drink it to the glory of God, then go for it. But remember…

“Most of the ethical problems in today’s coffee industry occur with poor quality Arabica coffee (ie Arabica which is grown at low altitudes, and poorly processed) and most of the world’s Robusta. This low cost coffee predominantly ends up in jars of instant coffee. Many of the large companies that use this coffee don’t purchase based on quality, their most important factor is price — as low as possible.”

// Five Senses, What is Ethical Coffee

Here’s a rule of thumb. If something you enjoy, that you didn’t produce by the sweat of your brow, is really cheap, then someone else has paid the price. It could be this kid.


Image Credit: The Atlantic.

THE SIN(S) OF SPECIALTY COFFEE

“…the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols… The human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptuous rashness, dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity; as it labours under dullness, nay, is sunk in the grossest ignorance, it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God. To these evils another is added. The god whom man has thus conceived inwardly he attempts to embody outwardly. The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth…”

// Calvin, INSTITUTES, I.XI.8

Lest you think I’m only prepared to point the finger at the side of the coffee spectrum I’m biased against – the specialty end of the coffee spectrum is every bit as pernicious. Where instant coffee denies the significance of process, specialty coffee celebrates it – praising the human ingenuity of farmer, roaster, and barista. The idolatry associated with this emphasis on process and control also sees the end user forging their identity on the basis of their consumption decisions.

You are your coffee order. I’ve got no doubt this is true, because it has, at times, been true for me. Here’s a description of the modern obsession with the designer life based on curated choices…

“We declare our individuality via our capacity to consume differently — to mix purchases from Target with those from quirky Etsy shops — and to tweet, use Facebook, or pin in a way that separates us from others . . . Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them.”

// Anne Petersen, ‘Basic is just another word for class anxiety,’ buzzfeed.com

If you want to order the ‘single origin honey processed Costa Rica De Licho as a double shot, three quarter latte, with the milk at 62 degrees’ and you know what each of those things contributes to the taste, and you care so much that you won’t accept any less – then you’re probably engaging in what CS Lewis calls the Gluttony of Delicacy.

“She would be astonished—one day, I hope, will be—to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness and self-concern?”

// CS Lewis, SCREWTAPE LETTERS

Sound familiar. Enslaved to sensuality? The woman described in the Screwtape Letters is one being led away from God by her particular tastes, her desire for her needs to be met in just the right way.

“You will say that these are very small sins, and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

// CS Lewis, SCREWTAPE LETTERS

Specialty Coffee is much more likely to be ethically produced. Partly because specialty coffee producers are generally nice people and want to do the right thing, and partly because partnerships on the ground with coffee growers will produce a guarantee of supply and allows the specialty industry to have some control over growing conditions – ensuring a better quality crop. Here’s the thing – such is the disease of our hearts – that even our most altruistic moments are part of a ‘triple bottom line’ approach to life – there’s a sense that we are ethical in our decision making because it is a way to buy some sort of indulgence to mitigate our consumption of the world around us.

We are often ethical because it makes us feel better. If we this wasn’t the case then the ethics of a particular coffee wouldn’t be a massive marketing tool. We’d care more about whether or not ethical systems like Fairtrade actually work (they don’t really, relationship based coffee purchasing seems to be the most ethical approach).

Or, we’re ethical because we see the good that our conscientious purchasing decisions do for someone else, and  feel a sense of pride that  our consumption is making a difference, which frees us to consume more, and invites us to continue to find our identity – or our point of difference – in just how special our decisions are. For us, and others.

The way our diseased hearts affect even our good deeds is the result of what Martin Luther called humanity curved in upon itself (or, in Latin, incurvatus in se) – even our good deeds are directed to our own glory, not to God’s. Even our good use of the coffee bean becomes a chance for us to celebrate our own ingenuity.

The pitfalls of ‘specialty’ coffee aren’t just limited to the bench seats of your local small-batch roaster. They’re just as prevalent in the coffee laboratory of the home coffee snob, who seeks to outsnob the other shots, to pour the most consistent god shots, to control every possible variable with increasingly complex (and expensive) equipment allowing minute adjustments to be made to the grind size, the temperature, the pressure, the water purity – every variable can be tweaked in the pursuit of that elusive and fleeting moment of joy. Joy that should be found in the appreciation of the one who made the coffee bean, and gave us taste buds. This joy is counterfeit joy. It is pleasure. And we seek to stimulate the senses as they grow and develop. The bar keeps raising. We’re never satisfied. We invest in bigger. Better. Brighter. We become discontent. Upgraditis is another word for idolatry.

Too often the quest for the God shot – for joy, be it in coffee, or any good thing God has made, becomes the ultimate quest.

THE SIN OF DELIBERATELY BAD COFFEE

You may have heard the line that really good coffee is expensive, so Christians should steer clear of it in order to spend that money on important work. Like telling people about Jesus.

I’ve certainly heard it.

I’ve used it about other stuff.

Like free range eggs and the environment (Thankfully. While the archives of my blog represent my thoughts in the past – our thinking grows as we do…).

But I don’t think you can separate using God’s world rightly and excellently from telling people about Jesus quite so easily.

The God of the Bible is good. He made a good world. A beautiful world. For people to enjoy – to find their joy in him, through the things he made. While there is certainly a place for asceticism – forgoing pleasures – in the face of a gluttonous world, there’s also a place for aesthetics in the good world God has made. For Christians to be modelling the best uses of God’s world in order to point people to the goodness of God. Otherwise, why will people listen to us when we tell them that God is good? God’s goodness isn’t just revealed at the cross of Jesus – though it certainly is revealed there. It’s revealed in the world he made, and his love for it. Jesus didn’t just die to gather a people (though he certainly did that) – his entering the world, his death, and his resurrection are part of the redemption of the world and God’s plans for a new creation – where the joy we experience fleetingly now will become complete.

Our presentation of the good news needs to be embodied, and it needs to mesh with people’s experience of the world. Too much of our evangelism is disconnected from reality – and there’s incredible scope for aesthetic and existential apologetics as well as the philosophical, or historical stuff we normally engage in, so long as we navigate away from idolatry.

Personally, I think this rules out instant coffee. But you might love the flavour, and find other people who do to… and you might be able to overcome the other issues – like the ethical issues – associated with instant. We’ll deal with this a bit more below – where I’ll again, make my case against Instant Coffee.

DIVINE ‘HEART SURGERY’ AND THE RIGHT USE OF COFFEE

“The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”

// GENESIS 6:5

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

// ECCLESIASTES 3:11

So the God Shot points us to the idea that we were created for something better, while our attempts to capture and reproduce it show that we are broken. Our hearts are simultaneously wired to point us to eternity, and diseased in such a way as to sow death at every turn and in our every action (the very opposite of eternity).

Here’s a cool quote from author William Faulkner when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949… this is, in part, why I think an aesthetic/existential approach to sharing the Gospel is worth pursuing.

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

// William Faulkner, NOBEL LITERATURE PRIZE SPEECH, 1949

His whole speech is worth reading – especially if you work as though the poetry he wants people to be writing is an analogy for the God Shot.

The tension in the human heart is not solved by itself – or, as Faulkner suggests – pointing to some higher version of itself. It needs recreation, intervention, a redefinition of what it means for it to beat for its maker again. It needs surgery.

This surgery happens when God makes an incision into time and space, decisively entering to declare both the true trajectory for history, and the true pattern for the human. So, when Paul describes Jesus become a man, within creation, to Timothy, he says:

“Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great:
He appeared in the flesh,
was vindicated by the Spirit,
was seen by angels,
was preached among the nations,
was believed on in the world,
was taken up in glory.”

// 1 TIMOTHY 3:16

This is God performing cosmic heart surgery. This is God pouring himself out on the world. The perfect pour. A multi-sensory experience that redefines every other experience of the senses. It’s only when our hearts are radically realigned with their creator that we can start to appreciate the good things he made the way they were intended to be enjoyed – as good gifts from a good God.

PUTTING COFFEE IN ITS PLACE

Here’s where Paul goes next when he’s talking to Timothy – this little description of Jesus’ entry into time and space – in the flesh – is how Paul is addressing a bunch of wrong thinking about what to do with delicious and nutritious gifts from God (and, indeed, what to do with everything God made).

“They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.”

// 1 TIMOTHY 4:3-5

It’s worth breaking this down – Paul tells Timothy that some hypocritical liars who have abandoned the faith will come telling people not to enjoy God’s good gifts that were there from creation. Marriage. Good food. But these things were made by God “to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth” – and in the context this “knowing the truth” must surely be linked to “the mystery from which true godliness springs” – knowing Jesus. This puts the physical world into perspective. It has value (like physical training), and it frames our labour and our strivings – there are echoes of Ecclesiastes 3 to be found here, because this is where meaning is to be found.

“For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance. That is why we labour and strive, because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe.”

// 1 TIMOTHY 4:8-10

The right response to God’s good gifts is not to reject them but to receive them. With thanksgiving. The right response to coffee is not to baptize it – like Pope Clement VIII but to accept it as already good, in line with God’s good intentions for his creation.

When coffee was first introduced to the western world – from Islamic Africa – it was suspiciously treated as the ‘Devil’s Cup’ – before condemning it, Pope Clement VIII asked to try some and apparently said:

“This devil’s drink is delicious. We should cheat the devil by baptising it…”

Coffee is good. It is made by God. It is made by God to be enjoyed so that we are thankful to God – not trashing it, or treasuring it (as God) – but treasuring God through it. In the next couple of chapters Paul says a few other things about how we’re to approach good stuff God has made.

“Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.”

// 1 TIMOTHY 5:23

“But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.”

// 1 TIMOTHY 6:6-8

And here is the clincher.

“Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.”

// 1 TIMOTHY 6:17-19

God provides us with good gifts for us to enjoy them. We are rich – especially when it comes to the coffee world – our consumption of coffee is a chance for us to enjoy God’s creation, do good deeds, and be generous to others, with our senses fixed on the true life to come.

USING COFFEE TO TELL GOD’S STORY, NOT OUR OWN

“I am not, however, so superstitious as to think that all visible representations of every kind are unlawful. But as sculpture and painting are gifts of God, what I insist for is, that both shall be used purely and lawfully,—that gifts which the Lord has bestowed upon us, for his glory and our good, shall not be preposterously abused, nay, shall not be perverted to our destruction.”

// John Calvin, INSTITUTES I.XI. 12

So. To wrap up. And here’s where I get a little more speculative – feel free to disagree with me…

Lets assume for a moment that when Romans talks about the function of what God makes it’s not our job to sit passively by why the heavens point people to God.

This seems pretty clear. A long held understanding of ‘natural theology’ -which is basically the understanding that we can know of God from nature – is that nature might point us to a God (enough to earn us judgment), but it won’t point us to God as he reveals himself in his word, and in Christ. So, people then think we should focus on sharing this special revelation from God – teaching God’s word and preaching about Jesus… This might be where the “don’t spend money on coffee when you can spend it on Jesus” idea comes from. This involves ignoring one stream of God’s revelation to us (about his character and qualities) in order to promote another. Why not do both?

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

// ROMANS 1

So. If what a few people call ‘God’s second book’ – what has been made – is meant to point us to God why don’t we think his people have a responsibility to interpret ‘what has been made’ and use it rightly to point people to the maker?

And. Is there any evidence to suggest this is how we should think of the world God has made?

I think so. The Calvin quote shows this sort of idea isn’t novel. But here’s a cool thing – when God creates his people and puts them in the garden, we’re told about the other stuff God makes.

“The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.)”

// GENESIS 2:11-12

This is such a bizarre thing to mention. God made lots of other stuff. But we get this mention of some (presumably) really good things he made. Gold pops up all over the place – including when Israel is escaping Egypt.

“The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and for clothing. The Lord had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians.”

// EXODUS 12:35-36

We’ve covered our tendency towards idolatry already. The tendency to turn God’s good gifts into God, treasuring them too much. Look what happens when Israel is waiting around at the foot of the mountain while Moses speaks with God.

“When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

// EXODUS 32:1-4

Gold. The good stuff God made, that was there at Adam’s disposal, presumably to help remind humanity that God made a good world (the constant refrain in Genesis 1). It has become an idol. It is not revealing God. His second book is not being properly understood – or taught by his people. Here’s another reference to Gold – being rightly used – from the Old Testament. This is Gold being used to tell God’s story – to bring ‘general’ and ‘special’ revelation, or God’s two books, together. Note that Moses is being given the design for this priestly garb at the same time that Aaron is turning the gold into an idol, and that it specifically mentions onyx (there in Genesis 2), and that it makes mention of the artistry of the human craftsman…

“Make the ephod of gold, and of blue, purple and scarlet yarn, and of finely twisted linen—the work of skilled hands. It is to have two shoulder pieces attached to two of its corners, so it can be fastened. Its skillfully woven waistband is to be like it—of one piece with the ephod and made with gold, and with blue, purple and scarlet yarn, and with finely twisted linen, and finally, that the design, and artistry, has a purpose.

“Take two onyx stones and engrave on them the names of the sons of Israel in the order of their birth—six names on one stone and the remaining six on the other. Engrave the names of the sons of Israel on the two stones the way a gem cutter engraves a seal. Then mount the stones in gold filigree settings and fasten them on the shoulder pieces of the ephod as memorial stones for the sons of Israel. Aaron is to bear the names on his shoulders as a memorial before the LORD”

// EXODUS 28:6-12

Coffee is gold (it’s a metaphor – like in those banking ads). 

The pursuit of the ‘God Shot’ so long as it is rightly framed by the pursuit of the God who made the coffee, is a way to both enjoy God’s creation with thankfulness, and point others to it.

As you pursue perfection (while knowing it is unattainable this side of God’s new creation), applying ingenuity, science, and art, to achieve the very best cup of coffee possible – so long as you are not turning coffee into an idol – you have a chance to tell God’s story, and ours.

If God brews coffee in heaven (it may well be tea) – I can’t imagine him serving up anything that tastes like International Roast. I don’t think you can truly reveal God’s character from a cup of instant coffee – not when you see the contempt with which it treats his creation, and not when you make the comparison to the significantly richer double ristretto that tastes as good as ground coffee smells.

This is where God’s good creation meets art, meets science, to the glory of a transcendent creative and good God.

God’s story is the gospel – his story of redemption of our broken hearts, and their realignment to him through Jesus. Our use of the world he made should mirror that realignment, and tell that story. This has to change our consumption habits for the benefit of our neighbours – global and local.

Good coffee is proof that God is good.

October 28, 2014

Handing in my Skeptic’s Card

handing in my skeptics card

I’m not the skeptic I thought I was. Forgive me for a slightly self-indulgent post musing on how I think, but this has come as quite a shock to me. It might make a change from wading through umpteen thousand words about what I think…

I’m not a skeptic.

This may not surprise you, given that my day job is to convince people of the existence of a supernatural being who sent his supernatural son (a son who shares his being) into the world he made to die and be raised from the dead. Many people think this particular sort of belief in the supernatural defies skepticism because it defies evidence and seems unbelievable (so shouldn’t be believed). I am skeptical about this sort of blanket dismissal of a particular worldview and its approach to evidence. I am skeptical about skepticism. But the fact that I’m not a skeptic surprises me.

For a long time I have described myself as a skeptic. I’ve understood my approach to truth claims as skeptical. I have understood skepticism as a core part of my epistemology (how I seek to know stuff). I’ve seen this as completely consistent with my Christianity, which I still believe is reasonable and evidence based.

I’m not really announcing a massive change in how I think I know things, just how I describe myself, particularly when it comes to discussions about Christianity. I’ll no longer play the “I’m a skeptic too” card.

There are many varieties of skepticism, many definitions, some more technical than others. What I’m talking about is skepticism as wikipedia defines it.

“Skepticism is generally any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere. Philosophical skepticism is an overall approach that requires all information to be well supported by evidence.”

The bold bits are particularly what I’ve been coming to term with, mostly it’s about the optimistic posture I’ve found myself taking to truth claims and what I consider to be evidence that supports these truth claims. Some of the tools of skepticism still form part of how I piece together my view of the world – tools like critical thinking, rational thought, logic… I still employ these in my approach to new information. But one thing I’m dissatisfied with when it comes to skepticism is that it is so negative. I’m much more inclined to take bits of information and see how they integrate into what I already understand about the world than see each bit of information as something to be rejected, or, if it passes, placed alongside other things I have evidence for as another factoid.

I have come to realise is that skepticism does not excite me. It doesn’t light my fires. It’s not the posture I want to adopt towards learning about the world. It’s not how I want to position myself when it comes to people who come forward with new information that challenges my thinking. I don’t want my default to be doubt, I want it to be seeing if the thing will fly. If it will fit with what I understand about the world, if it will add colour, depth, and life. I’ll still reject stuff that is wacky and nonsense, but the approach to that rejection won’t begin in the same place. Which is weird. Realising this has been a bit of a paradigm shift for me.

Most people – skeptics included seek to organise the facts they accept into some sort of systematic view of the world. I’m not wanting to paint skepticism as holding to a bunch of disconnected facts without seeing how they fit together, but truly skeptical people must always doubt that they’ve got the fit right. They must question both the merit of a particular fact, and, simultaneously, the merit of the frame they try to use to hold it.

I’ve decided that for me, a systematic view of the world actually helps me organise and accept facts. And I’ve decided I’m committed to many approaches to new data prior to applying the skeptical approach to the world. So I can’t call myself a skeptic. It turns out, the system by which I organise new information has been there all along – it’s been how I identify myself all along. It’s my faith. My belief that the world is best explained when the God who made it is present. This system guides my presuppositions, but not because the system tells me it should. I don’t think. I think I have good reasons to go with Christianity as the organising idea on philosophical, aesthetic, logical, and evidentiary grounds. I am skeptical about other organising ideas having the same explanatory power as Christianity.  But to be frank, even if I think I chose the system through a skeptical approach based on evidence, I can’t escape the truth that given my upbringing Christianity is something like the default for me – so I have to keep exploring the possibility that other options will do it better. The way to assess this is how well a particular view integrates all the available data, the facts about the workings of the world, that I have come across and been convinced are true.

This isn’t skepticism. It’s freeing to admit this.

New facts don’t force me to toss out the system, but they will shape how I understand the workings of this system. I like this description, again from wikipedia, of ‘Knowledge Integration‘… this strikes me as much more fun, stimulating, and worthwhile. It also describes my intuitive approach to thinking about stuff much better than boring old skepticism.

“Knowledge integration has also been studied as the process of incorporating new information into a body of existing knowledge with an interdisciplinary approach. This process involves determining how the new information and the existing knowledge interact, how existing knowledge should be modified to accommodate the new information, and how the new information should be modified in light of the existing knowledge.”

I want to know stuff. I want to see how all the different streams of information, all the different facts, all the different fields of scholarship – from philosophy, to science, to the arts, to theology, can be integrated in a coherent and exciting way. One of these fields of knowledge has to provide the organising framework for the others. I think that’s just how it works. For me, this is theology – Christian theology – it helps me make sense of the world. As CS Lewis says:

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” 

I’m liking this quote more and more.

I’ll stick with Christianity until I find a better look out point from which to view the world (and I’ll continue to allow my presuppositions to be challenged, though I admit to finding the intricacies and aesthetics of Christianity quite compelling). I’m probably too far gone. I just don’t know what other system accommodates and explains the Jesus event, and the emergence of Christianity post-crucifixion with the same power as Christianity. I think Christianity offers the best explanation of world history, the human condition, and our ability to do science and know anything as real. I think Christianity is the most coherent philosophical and ethical framework. I think the Bible’s story, centred on Jesus, is, aesthetically speaking, the best narrative to live by. But I’m open to other ideas.

August 25, 2014

CS Lewis on writing

Craig linked to this list of 8 writing tips from CS Lewis. There are eight of them…

  1. Turn off the radio.
  2. Read good books and avoid most magazines.
  3. Write with the ear, not the eye. Make every sentence sound good.
  4. Write only about things that interest you. If you have no interests, you won’t ever be a writer.
  5. Be clear. Remember that readers can’t know your mind. Don’t forget to tell them exactly what they need to know to understand you.
  6. Save odds and ends of writing attempts, because you may be able to use them later.
  7. You need a well-trained sense of word-rhythm, and the noise of a typewriter will interfere.
  8. Know the meaning of every word you use.

June 30, 2010