Scott Stilson

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Man, do I feel done with movie and TV watching. Just a phase, I’m sure. But still: No appeal whatsoever.

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Alas, I’ll be in Vegas
For the tenth or eleventh time ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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But Lord, I had noble pretexts! ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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Jane Doe?
I never knew her ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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What shall we do with the decaf tea?
What shall we do with the decaf coffee?
Nobody drinks it except me
And if I drink it, I can’t sleep ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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“Should” is a word with real, live uses
Granted, it’s seen its share of abuses ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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I wanna do everything
Without doing anything ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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Part of 1 Corinthians 16 is as a good a motto as one can find: “Do everything in love.” Since so much of my life comprises words, and since the biblical proverbialists, Jesus, and James all emphasize the power and importance of our words, I’m going to provisionally subset the motto to concentrate its effect: “Say everything in love.”

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Cheerful, curious, grateful, harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, humble. That’s what I want to be.

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“What does that third switch control?”
“I thought you knew!”
“I don’t know!” ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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You know what I need?
A MacArthur grant
I’ve got the genius
I just need the cash ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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Just listened to: A Sea Symphony, premiered by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1910 and recorded in 2014 by Hallé—their orchestra and their two choirs—plus two other choirs—because how else do you evoke the vastness of the ocean and remind everyone this is how the 20th-century renaissance of English classical music began—than with four choirs? Subtle this is not. A bombastically English response to when the Frenchy-Japonesque La mer is not enough.

Not that this piece lacks quiet moments: You may have come for the giant “Behold, the sea itself!” that opens the first movement, but you’ll stay for the evocations of solitude on the beach in the second movement.

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The word of the year this year is “get to”: Everything I do, I get to do. (Hat tip: Ethan.)

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This is what self-exhortation (in this case, to be a better listener) sometimes sounds like in my house.

Transcript

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May you enjoy it
Even though I know you don’t enjoy it ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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“The secret to faith is to have two loves: one for God and the other for whoever happens to be standing in front of you at any given time” (Eloy Cruz to Jimmy Carter, as quoted by Randall Balmer in The Christian Century).

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I’m pleased that this year’s listening added the following albums to my previous list of Christmas albums playable front to back both in the background or attentively:

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Just re-listened to Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective (2009). I hesitate to recommend this wacked-out indietronica because like all the other Animaniac albums I’ve listened to, it’s easily heard as mere maelstrom of sophisticated-yet-juvenile, repetitive, acid-plus-coke freneticism. But on this one there’s just enough charm for me in the (still sophisticated-yet-juvenile, still repetitive) melodies, harmonies, syncopations, vocal timbres, and lyrics (often about family, which helps the charm) to overcome the hesitation.

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Listen, Merriam-Webster: You descriptivists do good work. It’s important we have maps of the lay of our linguistic land as it lies. But don’t purport to explain to the world that prescriptivists are only interested in “‘correctness’ set forth in ‘rules’ that [we] imagine.” Just like poorly developed roads, a poorly designed language (as I concede every language is to some degree) sometimes leads to confusion, frustration, and hazards. To suggest prescriptivists are always wrong to do what they do is the equivalent of saying city planners are always wrong to do what they do.

Misdevelopment of the land has consequences. So it is with lexicons—especially when the words in question are of moral value. Consider “forgive.” If “forgive” is “actually used,” as you write, “by writers and speakers of the English language,” to include by definition reconciliation, forgetting, and anger abatement, which in some circles, although thankfully not quite in your dictionary, resentment being different...

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Inspired by part of this interview with Lisa Silvestri, the author of Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change, which I may read soonish with my friend Neill—after I finish:

here is a list of what bothers me:

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Currently, there are only five Christmas albums I can listen to all the way through with pleasure:

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Buildings have walls
Only by necessity ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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“All a man’s ways are pure in his eyes, but the LORD takes the spirit’s measure” (Proverbs 16:2). The first part isn’t true of everyone all the time. But it’s probably true of everyone some to most of the time. And certainly very often true of me. Lord, help us to discern.

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I cannot reliably control my circumstances. I cannot at all control other people. But I can control my (current) self. Herein lies happiness.

A truism, perhaps. But one worth repeating, especially to someone like myself who scores, mostly to his chagrin, as an 8 on the Enneagram.

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Just re-listened to A King and His Kindness (2021) by Caroline Cobb. My favorite nuthin’-but-Jesus album since Rich Mullins’ 1997 demo tapes. Definitely square and very devout, hence the kind of album my enjoyment of which will lose me cool points with just about everyone I can think of. But these are the kinds of songs that make you not give a damn about cool points.