Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

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Charlotte’s Web: A Model of Good Writing

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Last month Tony Reinke encouraged me to read E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) to my daughter. Not only would my daughter love it, but I could learn a lot about how to write better.

That was good advice. My daughter Kara and I read it together in late April and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was her first “chapter” book without pictures on every page. I watched the 1973-film several times as a child, but I had never read the book (nor have I seen the 2006-film).

E. B. White knows how to write. Simple. Clear. Elegant. Magical.

That didn’t just happen. White worked tirelessly at it. He revised Charlotte’s Web many times until the wording was just right. (White contributes to the first of the “Six Useful Books on Writing” I list here.)

I love how the book ends. Someday I hope my friends can say this of me: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

A Good Excuse for Not Wearing Neckties

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Public-health officials trying to reduce hospital-acquired infections have adopted this one:

forbidding doctors to wear neckties because, as the U.K. Department of Health has noted, they

  • “are rarely laundered,”
  • “perform no beneficial function in patient care,” and
  • “have been shown to be colonized pathogens.”

—Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Super Freakonomics, p. 298 (bullet-points added).

Waiting for Superman

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My wife and I recently watched the award-winning documentary Waiting for Superman, and we were stunned when it opened with this clip:

One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist. . . . Even in the depths of the ghetto, you just thought, “He’s coming! I just don’t know when because he always shows up, and he saves all the good people.” . . . [My mother] thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because there was no one coming with enough power to save us.

That’s why this documentary about America’s broken public education system is entitled Waiting for Superman.

A documentary about broken humanity could be entitled the same thing—or maybe Waiting for a Deliverer or Waiting for a Savior.

Goldberg Variations

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It’s Bach around the clock at my house these days. God blessed us with the birth of our second child last weekend, and Gloria Grace is becoming well-acquainted with Bach’s masterful music, especially his “Goldberg Variations.”

Compare what I wrote in 2007:

Glenn Gould Plays Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”

Glenn Gould’s (Wikipedia) recordings of the Goldberg Variations by J. S. Bach are among my all-time favorites. Amazon has excerpts of both his 1955 and 1981 recordings.

My favorite is his 1981 recording, which I’ve probably listened to more than any other piece in my music collection (over 200 times according to iTunes, but that doesn’t count years of listening to it on cassette tape and then CD prior to importing it to iTunes).

You can also watch him play on Google video (though I admit that he is eccentric!).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6984208089899995423#

Brilliant. Masterful. Edifying. And as Bach would say, Soli Deo gloria.

News Stories in Photographs

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In 2009, I wrote this:

The Big Picture (RSS) is a blog I enjoy having in my blog reader because it offers a broad, vivid perspective of God’s world.

About:

The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com. Entries are posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com’s Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm’s MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery—with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.

The Big Picture blog transferred to new hands last month. Three picture editors at the Boston Globe now run it.

Alan Taylor’s last post for The Big Picture was on January 21, 2011. But this month he began a similar photo blog for The Atlantic called In Focus (RSS). More info here.