The Return From Whence I Came

The past few weeks I have spent re-acclimating myself to life in the Northeast burbs of the Twin Cities.  Coming from both an academic institution focused on Christian theology and California, my reception from some close Christian friends has been met with some fear.  I have been called a “California Liberal” due to my refusal to affirm that homosexuality is not God’s plan (PS If California is so gay-friendly why did it affirm prop 8, and if the Midwest got it right, then what’s up with Iowa?  Corn-huskin’ ferries?).  

I am finding that that which I so desperately wanted to affirm prior to my escape to California (the Christianity I was offered here in my home town), uses a rhetoric that disallows the very religion it attempts to affirm (I experienced why “God is dead”, in the Nietzschean sense).   You see, I was given a religion that required my affirmation of certain propositions that when blatantly honest, I could not affirm.  I had to confess with my mouth the certain dogmatics prior to being an acceptable follower of Christ.  Words came first, action and ontological reality second.  

But what of those who rightly act first and are completely ignorant of the existence of any tenets to believe? (See Paul’s teaching in Romans 2:14-15)  This Christianity that I am revisiting here at home and having pushed on me as if it behooves me to make certain statements or worry about my salvation, I cannot accept.  I have found intellectual freedom in the God that is beyond my conception.  This is the God who transcends my mind and  the propositional statements I can make about Her/Him; the God that allows me to explore and journey without ever seeking a tidy systematic destination; this God is the God I can attempt to follow.  

I find it strikingly American to see the individualistic Christianity that now surronds me.   This is a religion swimming in a sea of books deemed “Christian Self-help” and whose practitioners go to Sunday church without ever talking to another individual; a religion so self-oriented that Sunday church is more like the religious gas station where one goes to get filled up for the week; a religion that holds tight to the affirming of certain statements yet its individuals nervously worry that perhaps they might have missed something due to the annoying black cloud that hangs over their heads whispering of angst and tension, reminding that something still seems wrong, out-of-whack, and uneasy about this existence.  

As I tried to live this religion in my past, I found that no set of affirmations–if I was able to muster up the self-delusion that I truly could undoubtedly affirm them–were enough to make me feel as if I was on the right track.  I left for Pasadena on a journey to see if there was more.  I ended up losing my religion completely, and de facto was able to regain a more robust faith by maintaining the simple affirmation that doubt is a necessary part of faith.  It was in my agnosticism that I was able to regain faith.  Though seemingly contradictory, I have not lost my agnosticism.  It is my agnosticism that allows me to reconcile my mind with Christianity.  I don’t know the God I seek.  I have tidbits of revelation that allow me to experience the Divine, but for the most part, this God is beautifully mysterious; a majestic divinity that for some strange reason, I, like everyone else in the world, seek after.  This God is not encompassed by factual statements.  We don’t have any facts to speak about.  This is why we call it “faith.”  Let’s not confuse the two (facts and faith).  How could we have faith without doubt?  If we did, we would simply have facts.  

Coming back and seeing friends, family, and church-goers attempt to find ways they can affirm statements in order to feel content about their status with God looks to me like a bunch of people throwing punches in the air, struggling with something that does not exist, or something that is ultimately unattainable.  My antidote?  Allow for a journey.  Stop trying to arrive at a peaceful destination.  There’s peace in rejecting the destination and embracing the journey.  There is peace in the tension, contentment in accepting the discontentment, (After all, doesn’t contentment usually lead to a static and stale faith?).  Stop trying to affirm something that you will always be wary of in the back of your mind.  Allow God to be bigger than your conception.  See Church as a community in which we struggle with the dubiousness of Christianity.  Reject Church as a place where individuals go to spiritually “fuel up”.  

 

Submitted by: Christopher Casselman

My Favorite Books Part 2: Homegrown

Many stories are universal. They could happen any time, any place. They speak to the common human condition, the themes are instantly recognized around the globe. Love stories are often like this. Boy meets girl, boy woos girl, obstacle prevents boy from being with girl, boy overcomes obstacle, boy and girl live happily ever after. The same can many times be said of heroic stories that follow the 12 step arc. Setting separates one from the other, but that setting isn’t the crux of the story. It’s more ornamentation. The hero would still be a hero anywhere else. Set Rambo in the wild west or Middle Earth or “a long time ago in a galaxy far far away,” and he’d still be one bad-ass motha sucka.

For other stories, the location is essential. This is true of the exotic locations of my last five favorite novels. Saleem Sinai couldn’t have been one of India’s Children if he hadn’t been born in India. Little Oskar couldn’t have seen WWII if he hadn’t been there.

The next five novels feel distinctively American. The unique American history, geography and character are essential to their telling, and they are firmly rooted in place.

As a disclaimer: I would never suggest American novels have anything on their international counterparts. We can claim some good writers, but we’ve got a lot of work to do to catch up with the Russians, English and French. But I’m a Midwestern son and I do feel a certain connection to these stories.

20) Gilead – Marilynne Robinson: Gilead unfolds as a meditation on life in the form of a letter written from a dying father to his still young son. The letter is an attempt by John Ames, an aging minister in Gilead, Iowa, to impart to his son the stories and wisdom he’ll never have a chance to in life.

The story exists solely in John Ames’s mind. The action takes place in memories of John’s grandfather, a radical abolitionist who joined the guerilla movement of John Brown before the Civil War, his own father, a Christian Pacifist, his brother, a German educated atheist, his wife Lila, his good friend Boughton, a Presbyterian minister, and Boughton’s troubled son. The book is ruminative, reflective. It digs deep into theology and philosophy. It isn’t necessarily difficult, but it isn’t for the faint of heart either (in other words: if The DaVinci Code is your idea of a good read, I’d consider skipping this one).

If you’re willing to dive in, the payoff will be worth your trouble. What Gilead offers is a life lived: years of struggle, loneliness, regret, doubt, failure forgiveness, hope and ultimately beauty.

19) The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen: American dysfunction at it’s finest. The story of Alfred Lambert, the controlling family patriarch weakened by Parkinson’s and trying to hide his dementia, his wife Enid, the delusional, doting mother who would rather believe obvious lies than accept the shame of her family’s failures, and their three grown children: the oldest Gary, who suffers from depression but won’t believe it and grows increasingly paranoid that his wife and kids are conspiring against him, the middle child Chip, who destroyed his professorial career during a drug-filled affair with a student and finds work with a Lithuanian crime lord, and youngest Denise, a promising chef who can’t decide if she’s a lesbian.

You’ll laugh out loud, and you’ll be haunted because you’ll see echoes of your own family, and all families. Mundane suburban life, the effort spent on image and the cost when that image crumbles, the meaning of things left unsaid, the aftermath of those unspoken words: petty resentments stored up over the years. If nothing else, this book provides a valuable lesson: don’t let your family become the Lamberts.

18) Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates: This book is a tragedy for all of us who thought our lives would be better, bigger, who imagined ourselves doing great things, traveling the world, sipping champagne on the Rhine in the morning, playing artist by day, by night dining with our refined friends, discussing aesthetics and love (never politics or religion…how base) before retreating to our airy lofts with our bohemian lovers. But then life got in the way. We found ourselves in debt, married, with children. We found ourselves unable to escape the cages we’d created, forgetting where we’d left the keys. Our roots grew deeper, stronger, and left the prospect of any existence but days spent 9-5 in cubes, commuting to our suburban homes, spending our weekends washing cars and mowing suburban lawns, unimaginable. I know what some of you are thinking: “But Zizzle-Zot, you’re only 25. It’s a little early to give up hope.” Maybe, but I can already see myself and the people around me starting to petrify.

If you can relate, Frank and April Wheeler will break your heart. If you can’t…you can go to hell. Once you get there, read Revolutionary Road. You’ll get a sense of the slow death most of the world experiences daily, and realize this suffering is the living equivalent of eternal damnation.

17) The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron: Presented as a first-person narrative told by Nat Turner, the slave who in 1831 led a rebellion in Virginia that resulted in 55 deaths, The Confessions is a painful look at slavery in America. The book is based on a “confession” Nat Turner made after he was captured, in which he claimed to have been divinely inspired. The veracity of the original confession has been questioned, as it’s believed the lawyer who recorded it, Thomas Gray, let prejudice sway his objectivity, and Styron’s goal with this book was to portray the character of Nat Turner, not necessarily describe authoritatively the historical events of the uprising, but this is a powerful novel nonetheless.

When The Confessions came out in 1967 it was met with a fair amount of controversy. Several African American critics disliked the idea of a white author writing about a black historical figure and felt the novel reinforced certain stereotypes (I won’t get into it here). Other notable African American authors, such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, defended the work as a sympathetic look at the cruel circumstances that drove some desperate men to extreme measures.

From my perspective, the book offers a view of Nat Turner, an important but little known man in American history, as a passionate, intelligent, sensitive leader with a strong conviction that the state of the world was rotten and the impetus to do something. It doesn’t judge the actions of Turner or his followers. It presents a story: here is a man, this was his life. He was beaten, humiliated, degraded. He was treated as an animal. His mother was raped. The people he loved were bought and sold, sometimes killed. This is a man, this was his life, here’s what he did about it. It’ll have you asking yourself the question: “what would I do?”

16) Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow (Paragon of Storytelling): Ragtime, set mostly in New York in the early 1900’s (1902 to the United States’ entry into WWI) blends fictional characters with real historical figures, including Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford and Emma Goldman, to tell a story that is imaginative, challenging and fascinating in every way. Doctorow explores race relations, class disparity, work conditions, early feminism, extremism, and international relations during a tumultuous time in American history. Not only is he fearless in setting seemingly normal people in dire straights to see how they will respond, he dares to delve into the psyches and driving forces of some of the most influential people our country has ever seen. 

 Submitted by: Zizzle-Zot

My Favorite Books

Ask anyone who knows me well, and they’ll tell you that literature is extremely important to me. I’d go even further. After family and friends, the written word is the most important thing in my life. To be honest, even the preeminence of family and friends is, at times, debatable. Some people might find this sad. Hell, I think it’s pathetic. But it is what it is (I know the phrase doesn’t actually mean anything. I’m okay with that).

So, to share something that’s important to me with anyone who’s interested to know, I offer 25 books that I think kick ass. I’ve limited this list to novels, eliminating poetry collections and memoirs, just because they’d make the list unwieldy (but for poetry check out Good Poems, compiled by Garrison Keillor, and for memoirs read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard). I’ve also removed from consideration books on writing, because I couldn’t be certain they’d interest anyone but me (if they do, check out Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, The Writer’s Life by Annie Dillard, On Writing by Steven King (judge all you want, the guy is brilliant and knows his shit, and this book shows it) or Aspects of a Novel by E.M. Forster).

I’m not one of those literati blowhards that expect everyone to read and admire the same canon of literature. Let me throw my credentials out the window right now: Dickens wrote flat characters and Jane Austen was a bore.  I’m not going to stuff my list of books down your throats as books you need to read to gain the respect of English majors, or books that you’ll even like.

But these are books I love. Some changed my worldview in significant ways.  Some made me reconsider what a book could do, or inspired me to aspire to be a better writer, or just a better person. Some you might consider blasphemous when placed next to traditional lists of accepted “great literature.” I’m fine with that. For me they were extremely poignant in a time and place and that fact won’t change in deference to respectability.

Some of these books made me cry and others just made me laugh. In these last two characteristics you might find a pattern. Books that make you cry are important. Books that make you laugh, more so. Books that do both are holy. They deserve our reverence.

Without further ado (in no particular order…except for the last five, which will be my top five favorites (parentheses within parentheses: side note: I’ve grouped them into fives for your convenience. Thank me later (if you want to tangibly thank me, I like whiskey and bourbon (officially blowing your mind: Knob Creek, Eagle Rare, Basil Hayden, Jack Daniels, or Jameson (I’m not picky (actually I am (enough, enough already))))))) (trust me, it’s enough parentheses to close (I counted)) (I’m naughty, I know)…

 

International Flair: I’ve never traveled outside of the country (Canada doesn’t count). I’m ashamed. The travesty will be rectified in time. Until then, I rely on books to transport me to other places. These are all books that offer insights into cultures outside of America.

25) The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum is narrated by Oskar Matzerath, the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, as he writes his autobiography from a sanatorium several years after the end of WWII. Born in Poland in the years leading up to the war, Oskar decides at the age of three that adults are dimwits and liars and refuses to become one. He stops growing, and retains the stature of a child through the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Holocaust, the invasion of Normandy, and the postwar years.

24) The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck: I know what you’re thinking: “Buck…that doesn’t sound very international. In fact, it sounds like the name of a woman born in West Virginia.” You’re absolutely right. Pearl Buck was born in 1857 to a Southern Presbyterian missionary and moved with her family to Zhenjiang, China when she was three months old. She was educated by a Confucian scholar, learned Chinese and English, lived through the Boxer Uprising, and eventually became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

The Good Earth follows Wang Lung as he lifts his family out of poverty thanks to hard work and his strong-willed, wise wife, O-lan, sees his fortunes wane due to drought and famine, returns to his roots and rises once again only to become corrupted by wealth, sex and drugs. More than anything else, this book made me realize that simple pleasures are often the most profound.

23) Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children is proof of Rushdie’s genius. There are a few books on this list that weave multiple threads into spellbinding tales so effortlessly that I’m filled with envy by the storyteller’s prowess. Midnight’s Children is one of those. So is the next book on this list, One Hundred Years of Solitude. There will be a few others later on, but I don’t want to divulge them just yet (it would spoil the fun). Instead, I’ll make a deal with you: when I come to a book that I feel is a paragon of storytelling, I’ll identify it as such. See the example in One Hundred Years…

Midnight’s Children weaves together the past, present and future of India’s independence and partition in 1947. The story is told through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, a child bestowed with special gifts because of his unique birth at the stroke of midnight on India’s Independence Day.

22) One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez: (Paragon of Storytelling) Everyone thinks they have a crazy family. Most of us probably do. But you haven’t seen anything until you’ve met the Buendias. From patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia, who founds the town of Macondo (the setting of most of the story), but goes insane searching for the Philosopher’s Stone to matriarch Ursula Iguaran, convinced her family is cursed to be born with tails because she’s a cousin of Jose Arcadio’s. From revolutionary Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who loses 32 consecutive civil wars to Remedios the Beauty, who is too beautiful for the world and ascends into the sky one morning while folding laundry. From Aureliano Segundo, who goes insane searching for buried treasure to Aureliano Babilonia, who discovers the key to the family’s destiny to Aureliano (III), who is born with a pig’s tail to realize Ursula’s fears. Yeah, these people are nuts. And fascinating.

21) The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being asks the question: is life a circle or a line? Do events keep repeating themselves, so every action, every decision, comes back to us ad infinitum (eternal return)? Don’t these events add up and become unbearably heavy?

Or, conversely, do events occur by random chance? Do our actions one moment have no effect on events in the next? Is life just a series of circumstances that never happened before and will never happen again? If this is the case, aren’t our lives futile, pointless, unbearably light?

Set in Prague in 1968, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the invasion by the USSR, TULOF tells the story of successful, philandering surgeon Tomas, his photographer wife Tereza, his mistress Sabina, and Sabina’s lover Franz. It’s a must read (it just missed my top five).

That’s all for today. Stay tuned for the next five.

Thanks for reading.

Submitted by: Zizzle-Zot

Road Trip Day 1

Our cross-country adventure inaugurated yesterday morning.  Janelle, my main squeeze and I set out from 261 N. Madison Avenue, Pasadena CA 91101 at 1:15 PM heading north on CA5 freeway towards San Francisco.  It was a day to finalize my California life adventure that began two years prior.  I turned my key in at the housing office and made sure nothing was left over in my place.  I stopped for one last coffee at Fuller’s Coffee shop and made one last book purchase (Peter Rollins’ How (Not) To Speak of God).   I purposefully gave myself little time to get caught up in the nostalgia and sentiment in leaving a place that has been so fruitful and formative for me academically, personally, and relationally (Oh the good people I have learned and shared life with!).  I’ll post later telling the tale of my great California adventure, but I had better allow for this roadtrip to transpire so as to gain some perspective on it as a whole before I do so. 

 

We left Fuller’s campus, stopped off at the first place I lived (luckily catching Charles, my old landlord), and then hit the road.  Besides the fact that my truck bottoms out every time I hit a slight bump or depression due to its overloadedness, it’s been a smooth journey thus far.  Listening to a plethora of tunes and artists from a monster mix from my Pasadena community. Tomorrow I plan to jump into the latest Eels record, and ingest a couple David Bazaan tracks for good measure.  723 miles to Sun Valley, Idaho for some fly-fishing.  Cheers to all!  Hopefully I’ll have internet connection to tell you about tomorrow.  Be well! 

 

P.S.  Feeling rather Kerouacian now, “mad to live”  “desirous of everything”!  Hello American road.  My name is Chris.  We’ve met once before.  Good to see you again.

 

Submitted by Ckcasselman

Oh San Francisco!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/3145920351/

Oh San Francisco!

Sometimes I dream my afternoon away

Musing on your wonder

On your community

On your grooviness

 

I fall in love with you and my closest whenever we meet

Somehow you make a girl prettier

Your wired skies

And critical eyes

My new space, in your old space

The glinting bay waters against your illumined highrises

Your rolling streets into the diverse neighborhoods

 

Sometimes I dream of sitting at the table of thoughts with Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Ferlinghetti

I say the most poetic and groovy line, I blow Carlo’s mind,

Jack spits up his beer and falls back in his chair because my words are so mind expanding, he finds it comical; “Who is this guy? Where’d he come from? Minne-what? Oh that’s where Bob came from too,” Jack says…

 

All these thoughts strip my mind away from the present, I dream of you,

It pains me to be without you,

I am experiencing separation anxiety

 

 

Submitted by: Ckcasselman

Moments In Time

Per introduction of myself, considering this is my first post for this communal blog, I am an Master of Divinity Student at Fuller Theological Seminary who is graduating in about six weeks. I also have recently been married (3/21/09) to the beautiful Jennifer Lake. My life has been quite a rollercoaster in the past three or four years because I have experienced tragic death, the transformation of a friendship into love into marriage, and becoming a father of three wonderful, brilliant, and beautiful children. In anticipation of my wedding, the following thoughts began to percolate in my head. I had not planned on writing them down, but the day before my wedding I could resist no more, so I penned them. They are inchoate thoughts about the phenomenology of time or at least I think they are. I hope you enjoy.

 

Moments in time: the constitutive part of every part of day, which when looked at individually are mere blips in the large scheme of the time-continuum that provides us with the sense of the past, present, and future. Most of these moments mean little of anything to us most of the day. We go to the grocery and buy bread and peanut butter. Just another day. We drive our car to work. Just another day. Yet some of these moments take the shape and direction of our life and fundamentally change it so that it hardly resembles what it once did. The brakes of life are pushed to the floorboard and everything comes to a screeching halt before either slowly gaining speed once again or speeding off recklessly. Either way the direction always taken after such moments in time is different from the one previously traveled upon. Sometimes this change of direction from these instances, these moments, these blips is unwelcome. At other times this change of direction is anticipated, hoped for, awaited, prayed about, and joyfully received. In our existential journey from womb to tomb—this crazy thing called life—we experience these moments in birth and death, through a simple kiss, a word of encouragement, a letter of acceptance, a job opportunity, a wedding, graduation, etc.

 

Yet because these moments in time are the constitutive parts of past, present, and future we can hardly separate them apart and often time one reminds us of another. Two related moments may even be separated by the passing of much time, but when the second moment occurs the first is remembered, and through this remembering this once past occasion almost feels present rather than past. We experience this with Communion. The death of Jesus is remembered, yet not merely remembered, in our continuation of the practice of eating the bread and drinking the wine … or perhaps the Welch’s grape juice. Often times this occasion of the collision of two moments in time that have been long separated causes a mixture of emotions. We may be happy about the one while sad about the other. What happens in these moments is what we often call “happy tears.” These tears are healthy as we come to grips with the making of the present what has been past and the celebration of what is the present and will be the future.

 

Submitted by: Harris Bechtol

Zen, Ghosts, and Perception

Have you ever read a book that brought you to tears? Okay, well I have so quit calling me a nancy for it or I’ll bust your chops.

In all seriousness, a good book can truly change your life, or at least give you a different outlook on it. So for my latest blog I have decided to put together a series discussing “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Minneapolis’ own Robert Pirsig. For those of you that would enjoy an enthralling read without having to purchase the book, I will be posting links to the book in four segments. Here is the 1st of those.

I honestly don’t think I have ever read a book that made me consider my everyday perceptions of what ‘is’ so much as this piece of work. It is at times wildly insightful, maniacal, strangely logical, and occasionally disturbing. However, there is no doubt that it is moving. I ask that you take a read and express your thoughts as we move through the book.

I will make this first installment brief. The book is titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but in all reality it isn’t so much about motorcycles at all (although the book takes place on a cross-country motorcycle trip). In this first part of the book, we learn a little about our main character (whose name we don’t know) and his son Chris, as well as their traveling partners John and Sylvia. Three main themes seem to pop up throughout this first chunk of the book that give us clues/a better understanding of what is to be discussed as the book moves on: Ghosts, Classical vs. Romantic understanding, and Technology.

Ghosts: As these characters stop to camp for the evening, young Chris begins talking about ghosts and asks, “Do you believe in ghosts?” Our main character says ‘no’ because they are unscientific. He then brings it to a different level when trying to define what a ‘ghost’ is:

They contain no matter and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds. Of course the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too (being facetious)…Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.

This logic seems convincingly true and in a way in which I have never considered. So, the question that must be asked is, do you believe in ghosts? This seems to be enough info for this installment. We’ll take a gander at Classical vs. Romantic understanding and the disenchanting effects of technology in the next part.

Read this book!!!!

Submitted by: Al-Dogg

British Ales… Steeped in Tradition

A quick note from the editor:

Hello friends and readers of leaveitotheprose.  I’d like to welcome P Corcs to our writing team.  This is his first article for us, which I read on his family blog yesterday.  It seemed fitting for our milieu, so he graciously contributed it to leaveittotheprose.  I encourage you to read and comment on P corcs’ Ale-musings.  Make him feel welcome!   Ladies and Gentlemen… I present P corcs:  

 As this is my first front page contribution I would like to give a quick intro. I, Patrick (P Corcs) Corcoran am a born and raised Minnesotan. Just last fall I had the opportunity to move to London with my wife for her job. We will be here for two years and hope to travel Europe during this time. My blog contributions may involve travel and experiences, as with this blog, but may also be general life stuff. Thanks to everyone who have contributed so far. I enjoy reading all the different viewpoints and additions… it is exciting when there is a new blog as you never know what it will be about! Anyway, without further ado, here is my first post. I hope you enjoy it.

“Frost Brewed, low carbs, light, filtered, carbonated” These phrases are pounded into the heads of the American public as the big beer companies battle for market share. They are associated with everything good and refreshing when choosing a beer. The ads play over and over in hopes that when we are standing in front of endless choices at the corner liquor store, we will somehow associate their beer with what they tell us we desire in a beer.

For many British, these are all the things they hate in a beer.

To understand this view we must understand the role Ale has played in the history of Britain. Ale has been brewed in Britain probably since established civilizations inhabited the island, or in numeric terms at least since 2,500 BC. For most of this time period, say until about 100-200 years ago, most people brewed their own ale. It was often the primary beverage, especially in major urban areas like London where the water supply was often less than appealing. It is safe to say that Ale has been as much a part of every day life of the British for the last 4500 years as say cell phones and the Internet are for us today. I mean… what would we possibly do without our daily blog fix?

Building on the importance of Ale, let’s look at how and what has been brewed for 4500 years. Nobody can say exactly how or what was used, but it is pretty safe to assume from the archaeological record that not much changed during that entire time. Ale was brewed in casks, with water, some type of cereal, yeast, and spices. Hops wasn’t introduced in Britain until the middle ages as flavoring and as a preservative. The key part in this process has always been and remains the cask. Using all natural ingredients the ale develops full flavor and conditioning right up until it is served. In a sense, the yeast is alive and acts to condition and create the flavors and aromas until the cask is drained. This process of secondary fermentation sets all cask ales apart from the large processed beers.

To continue our education, lets look at the main differences in beer. We generally label everything as beer (before hops was introduced beer was called ale in Britain, since hops, beer became accepted as the general term). Beer has two main categories, ales and lagers. The common difference is the fermentation process. Lagers use bottom fermenting yeast, low temperatures, and then conditioning in tanks. Ales use top fermenting yeast which forms a thick froth, higher temperatures, and is a shorter process.

So why all the fuss about “real British ale” vs. that fake American lager crap when the processes seem similar? Well the difference is that British Ales, to add to and reiterate the earlier description, are alive and natural, they have a limited shelf life and must be kept at certain temperatures to achieve full flavor – cellar temperature (hence the American idea of “warm British beer”). Mass produced beer is filtered to remove all yeast and ingredients, then it is pasteurized to make it sterile… they kill the beer! The Brits see this as killing all the taste and aroma at the same time. They believe that beer is served cold in America to disguise the lack of taste and the carbonation is only a let down as they expect the froth to bring up the flavor and aroma but are left with fizzy nothingness.

As some of you may know I’m an ale guy and I’ve bought into everything these Brits are preaching! Back home in Minnesota my favorite beer is Summit Extra Pale Ale. But even a beer with great flavor and bitterness like that isn’t like ordering a cask ale at a pub that is poured using a pump handle to draw it straight from the cask in the cellar. It only took me a couple pints to get used to cellar temperature, now I don’t even notice it anymore. It is true what they say about the flavor and aroma of a true cask ale, there is no replacement or imitation!

So while it is true today that the best selling beer in the UK is Carling, a massed produced lager, there still is a very large and strong population that will ever only drink “real ale” and will in fact look down on you for drinking “fake beer.” They even form large organizations, one being CAMRA (almost 100,000 strong) – The Campaign for Real Ale – whose motto is, “Campaigning for Real Ale, Pubs and Drinkers’ rights since 1971.”

Whether you agree or not with the Brits perception of Beer you can’t fault them for their loyalty and dedication to their heritage and right to drink real ales from real pubs! Cheers!

PS. If you live in the Twin Cities area, go to Great Waters Brewing Co. (http://www.greatwatersbc.com/) in St Paul, they serve CAMRA approved cask conditioned ales, hand pulled at cellar temperature! If you don’t I challenge you to do a little research and find a bar near you that serves true cask conditioned ales to see what all the fuss is about! 

Submitted by: P Corcs

Musings…or When I Realized I Have Too Much Time on My Hands

This morning I woke up and thought to myself “what is it that our dear readers need more of in their lives?” You might imagine I would come upon some useful answer, something truly beneficial like more calcium, or a good dose of laughter, or a spoonful of sugar. But just as I was preparing to tackle the problem of how to disseminate essential vitamins and minerals over the internet, I said to myself “no, Zizzle-Zot (I talk to myself in the virtual third person), knowledge is power.”

So, in lieu of something you can actually use, I offer Zizzle-Zot’s Scientific Thoughts of the Day From a Blogger Who Knows Very Little About Science. (Disclaimer: none of the following should be interpreted as actual science).

Let’s Make Genius Babies: The human brain feeds pretty much exclusively off of glucose for energy. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, that feeding babies excessive amounts of glucose while their brains were still developing would result in adults with oversized, highly functional brains and create, in essence, hyper-genius babies without requiring any gene manipulation or freaky mutant making? Of course, the babies would be morbidly obese as a nasty side effect to all that glucose. But wouldn’t it be worth it?

Where has all the matter gone?: The 1^st Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can’t be created or destroyed. It can change forms, converting from work to heat to potential to kinetic, but we’re stuck with a constant energy level. My concern regards matter. If humans keep propagating the earth at unchecked levels (I’m looking at you, India), isn’t it conceivable that eventually we’ll run out of matter (energy) to create more people?

I realize this won’t be a popular theory, but maybe the destructive nature of humanity is a necessity. Maybe we need to raze the earth and kill off entire species so there is enough matter for more of us. It’s an instinctual, evolutionary survival trait.

I’m not a physicist by any means, so my science is probably way off. And I’m certainly not saying it’s likely, but still, something to think about the next time you have unprotected sex.

Call me Buddha Shakespeare Khan: I just finished a book by Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) that introduced me to the probability that each of us shares up to a billion atoms with every historical personage that came before us (only up to a point, so sorry, ckcasselman, there’s no John Lennon in you. I’ll explain why in a minute).

Atoms are ridiculously long lived (around 10³⁵  years according to some theories). When people die, the atoms don’t die with them. They are simply recycled to form other things. So, on it’s way to becoming wonderful you, each atom has most likely at some point been part of a star, a dinosaur (maybe even a T Rex), and a turd, among other things.

So the next time you’re looking to pick up a chick at the bar, tell her you’ve got a billion Casanova atoms in you. But don’t get too excited. One cubic centimeter of air contains 45 billion billion molecules (and a molecule is two or more atoms working together). So there’s a hell of a lot of atoms in us, and 1 billion doesn’t amount to much.

One Last Thing Before I Go: We all have bad days. You could be having one right now. Shit happens. But the next time you find yourself grumbling about annoyances like flat tires and taxes, take a minute to think about the seemingly insurmountable odds against you being here to complain in the first place.  Think of the trillions of atoms that for some inexplicable reason (apparently they don’t find it particularly gratifying) came together to become the one and only you. They’ll never assemble this way again, and it doesn’t happen anywhere else in the universe.

Now consider that the earth doesn’t seem to want us here all that much. In fact, with its ice ages and volcanic activity and bacteria and viruses, it can be downright hostile. But still the human race survived until now so you could bitch about the price of gas.

Now think about how many people had to meet and mate at precisely the right time to lead to you. You want a number? Go back only five generations, and no fewer than 33,554,432 people had to do the hippity-dippity to get you here. Now think about how difficult it can be to get even one to do it with you…sigh.

So whether you believe in a higher power and trust that somebody wanted you right here and right now for a damned good reason, or you don’t, and think you ought to take advantage of the incredible luck that’s given you the chance to be alive, I’d like us all to take this opportunity to be thankful.

It’s good to be here.

Thanks for reading.

 Submitted by: Zizzle-Zot

Who the Foucault?

I (Ckcasselman) have taken on a new area of study that I am hoping will be an ongoing investigation and perhaps, if I am lucky enough, will lead into my doctoral work.  I have begun reading the Michel Foucault Reader edited by Paul Rabinow.  As part of my study of postmodern thought this past quarter at Fuller, I surveyed a plethora of postmoderns and got to see the crux of their individual importance.  Michel Foucault stood out to me for his ability to critique, analyze, and postulate philosophical ideas that regard the overarching whole of society, seeing the societal fragments and how they construct the whole.  As part of my final project for this postmodern survey and as a way to persevere in my studies, I have decided to begin grappling and expounding on my Foucauldian studies in blog format. I would like to fuse my purposes of constructing a final project, my love and hopeful future career in education, and produce an interesting and hopefully provocative blog. Subsequently, I thought I’d start with a most basic biography of the late great Michel Foucault. 

Foucault was born in 1926 to a surgeon and his wife in Poitiers, France and received his education during the onset of WWII.  An intellectual giant, Foucault was admitted into the Parisian Exole Normale Superieure, an educational center for the world’s brightest where he gained his intellectual recognition.  During his education, Foucault’s life was wrought with depression for which he sought help from a psychiatrist.  As a psychiatric patient, Foucault gained a love for psychology, which subsequently led to dual degrees in both philosophy and psychology.   In 1960 Foucault returned to France for a teaching position at the University of Clermont-Ferrand where he met his partner of twenty years Daniel Defert.

          Michel taught both psychology and philosophy in his lifetime at universities such as the École Normale Université, Lille Nord de France, Warsaw University, the University of Hamburg, the University of Clermont-Ferrand, the University of Tunis, and at UC Berkeley just to name a few.  As an interdisciplinarian social scientist, it seems to me that a lot of Foucault’s writing stemmed from his personal insight and as one whose position in society has been pushed to the periphery.  As a homosexual suffering from depression, Foucault critiqued the institutions and reasoning that marginalized and oppressed his echelon as he wrote regarding psychiatric institutions in Madness and Civilization and social constructions of sexuality in The History of Sexuality. 

It seems only fitting to me that a man who didn’t fit into socially accepted norms created a methodology for finding the historical roots of social norms.  Foucault’s passion for the marginalized fueled his philosophy in both his writing and activism.  Foucault died prematurely in 1984 at the age of 58 from AIDS.  His works have proven to be crucial to continental philosophy and the social sciences and are celebrated posthumously.  

Stay tuned for more on Foucault!  Questions?

For a deeper biographical study, see these sources:

Wikipedia page:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

The European Graduate School page: http://www.egs.edu/resources/foucault.html

Stanford Philosophy page:  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

The Foucault Society page: http://www.foucaultsociety.org/resources/michel_foucault.asp

John Protevi, Professor of French Studies LSU gives a wonderful biography and further biographical resources here.  

Submitted by: Ckcasselman