Meanderings, 11 March 2023
We seemed on the cusp of Spring around here only to be met by a wet snow storm. So good ol’ winter is still here. The good news is that Thursday, on our morning walk we heard the loud croaking and then watched a Sand Hill Crane saunter its way near the shore of our little lake.
Photo by Federico Respini on Unsplash
St. John’s Episcopal Church in Plymouth, Michigan, has long owned and maintained an adjacent four-bedroom house, first as a rectory and later as a youth center. Now, the home will undergo a new transformation. The congregation plans to convert it back into living space to accommodate some of the many refugees who are being resettled in the Detroit area and southeastern Michigan.
The project is called St. John’s House for New Americans. A fundraising effort is nearly complete, with about $30,000 left until the church reaches its $120,000 goal. Church leaders expect this month to select a contractor to soon begin the renovations. Grants from the Diocese of Michigan will help cover the cost of demolition, electrical and plumbing updates, drywall, tile, flooring and painting.
“I just know it’s God doing this,” said Betsy Sole, the project’s coordinator who has been a member of St. John’s for more than 20 years. She told media that some of the cost of the renovations will be offset by donations of fixtures, appliances, volunteer labor and other project needs.
To welcome refugee families, the congregation is partnering with the nonprofit Samaritas, a social services agency that has supported families in Michigan for almost 90 years. It is one of several organizations that regularly resettles refugees in the state.
OK, it started with this carefully nuanced post by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, which is very helpful, but then someone sent me this one:
Blurbing has always had discontents. In 1936, George Orwell decried the use of blurbs in his essay “In Defense of the Novel.” He feared for the novel’s “lapse in prestige,” for which he partly blamed “hack reviews” and “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers,” which were dishonest and served the interests of the publishers. Half a century later, speaking to students in MIT’s writing program in 1991, Camille Paglia called “for an end to the corrupt practice of advance blurbs on books.” She maintained that “this advance blurb thing is absolutely appalling, because it means that they send your book around to your friends, they scratch your back, and you scratch theirs. This is part of the coziness of the profession that I think has just been pernicious… That has got to stop.”
In a recent essay on the controversial publication of American Dirt, critic Christian Lorentzen questioned the validity of the glowing blurbs that the book received from such literary luminaries as Stephen King, Sandra Cisneros, and John Grisham. “The blurb system is corrupt on its face,” Lorentzen writes. “Blurbs may be earnest and true, but they are always the product of favors being called in: from authors’ friends, from agents’ other clients, from publishers’ other authors. Everyone knows this.”
I don’t think blurbers believe they are doing a disservice to either the authors they blurb or the reading community when they blurt out their praise since within the blurb ecosystem it is generally understood (perhaps cynically) that “blurbspeak” is, as Wallace noted, “literally meaningless.” (And the jury is still out as to how much they actually help increase book sales.)
For better or worse, blurbs are here to stay. But blurbers who follow the Shteyngartian operating principle (“no hyperbole can be hyperbolic enough”) risk exposing themselves to accusations of lack of critical discernment, or integrity, or both. And, because most blurbs emblazoned on a book’s front and back cover (or on Amazon) tend to have, at best, a tenuous relation to the reality of the text, the final watchword for readers who turn to them when considering a purchase should be: caveat emptor.
More on blurbs — by Katelyn Beaty, who knows, and sign up for her Substack while you’re at it:
The book publishing business — including its Christian permutation — has for decades used endorsements to boost market appeal. As I wrote for CT:
Today, publishing leaders hope authors will receive a “blurb” from someone with name recognition or clout. The reasoning goes that if readers like an endorser, they’re more inclined to buy or read a book they’ve blurbed. An endorsement says, I can vouch for this person and their work. This takes on a spiritual layer in Christian publishing, where endorsers can lend theological cover for someone’s work.
Endorsements work to establish associations among book buyers. If you like this person, you’ll like that person. Or, if you trust that leader, then you’ll trust this leader. It’s about affinity, but it’s also about authority. From the article:
Endorsements are about establishing the market appeal of an author based on their connections to famous people. As such, endorsements are usually driven by celebrity, mutual back-scratching, and power consolidated through loose social, professional, and ministry networks. There’s a reason that endorsements come through the marketing team (not editorial): Endorsements are marketing tools, not editorial reviews.
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. (NewsNation) — A fourth-grade school teacher from St. Augustine uses the power of music to help her students learn.
Marlee Christianson has been teaching math and science for seven years but has recently gone viral on TikTok, reaching millions of views for her pop song parodies that help her students learn lesson plans quicker.
Christianson said she started making parodies when she attended a summer teacher camp where she was introduced to different teaching strategies.
“I started writing songs that weren’t popular a little bit before. But in 2019 was when I wrote the hallway song. I believe whenever ‘Truth Hurts’ was really popular, that’s when I wrote it,” Christianson said.
She created song lyrics about math and science to go with tunes by recognizable artists like Taylor Swift, Lizzo and Kid Cudi — who even commented on the parody of his song “Day ‘n’ Nite.”
Since she introduced this teaching style to the classroom, Christianson said she noticed their grades improved and she can actually hear the kids humming the songs while taking tests to help them remember the answers.
“It takes me a little while to write out the content that I want them to know and find a song that works,” Christianson said it takes her only about half an hour to create a new song parody.
She said she has written songs about concepts like decimals, the Earth’s rotation, atmosphere layers and even the sun’s rotation. Other teachers in her school have even asked her for the lyrics to her parodies so that they could use them in their classes.
Culture, at its most basic, refers to socially learned behaviors that are shared among a population. Until the mid-20th century, this ability was thought to be something uniquely human. But bountiful evidence now shows that culture exists in a wide variety of species, from bighorn sheep and vervet monkeys to meerkats and cranes.
Scientists are even discovering that insects can join in their own culture. In a new PLOS Biology study, researchers used a gold-standard test that’s been applied to species such as chimpanzees and great tits to reveal that bumblebees are capable of cultural transmission of information from one insect to another. Bees that were taught one of two solutions for opening a puzzle box spread that behavioral trait to untrained bees, creating a cultural signature for their colony. “This is an animal with a brain the size of a pinhead, and still they could achieve similar things [as] primates or birds, which is quite remarkable,” says lead author Alice Bridges, now a lecturer in biology and animal behavior at Anglia Ruskin University in England, who undertook the study as part of her doctoral research at Queen Mary University of London.