Idiotic Like Gabriel Gudding

(CLICK to enlarge. From left: "the three Jennys"--Jenny Huang, Jenny Chen, Jenny Lin; Shirley, Sabrina, Jerry, Yoyo, Michelle, William, May, Yvonne, Lillian; absent: Schani, Daphne)

In my almost fifteen years teaching English in Taipei, I've had maybe three classes stand out for creative enthusiasm. One I began my first year here, and the students and I ended up writing a short teen vampire novel together. I'm teaching another of these gifted classes now at the Zephyr English Institute, under the course title Creative Mythology.

The class is around a dozen preteens and teens, meeting once a week for two hours after school. We've been working mainly on reading Greek myth and writing in response to it. Sometimes however I break into something else. Two weeks ago I took the perilous decision to teach them Gabriel Gudding's brilliantly crackbrained poem "A Defense of Poetry." The poem begins like this:

1. The lake trout is not a furious animal, for which I apologize that you have the mental capacity of the Anchovy.

2. Yes the greatest of your sister's facial pimples did outweigh a Turkey.

3. I was eating Vulture Beast Cream, I was eatnig Lippy Dung Corn, and I said "Your ugly dog is very ugly," for he is.

4. And that is when I turned and a snowflake banged into my eye like a rusty barge and I killed your gloomy dog with a mitten.

5. For I have bombed your cat and stabbed it. For I am the ambassador of this wheelbarrow and you are the janitor of a dandelion. Indeed, you are a teacher of great chickens, for you are from the town of Fat Blastoroma, O tawdry realtor. For I have clapped your dillywong in a sizeable door.

Recently we've been working through an English version of the Odyssey. It was after Odysseus' men barbecued Hyperion's cattle that I decided to take a break with this American poem. Since the kids know English as a second language, before reading Gudding I had to teach them the new vocabulary they'd find (in these first stanzas, for instance, they probably wouldn't know capacity, anchovy, outweigh, barge, dandelion). Yes, I left dillywong undefined.

The kids' English is good enough that we had a riotous time of it. I admit we didn't read Gudding's footnotes and skipped some of the stanzas. At the end of the second class, I surprised them by collecting all their copies of the text, leaving them only the vocabulary sheets and a printout of the first few stanzas. "Why are you taking the poem away?" they wondered. It was because I didn't want them to copy Gooding too closely. I handed out an opening they were to use in writing their own "Defenses of Poetry":

A DEFENSE OF POETRY

by ___________
1. Since your name is _________ and since your ________ is/are like the _____ of/on the _____________, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the _____________

The students were to take it from there, trying to use the new vocabularly they'd learned. Follows some of their work. Many decided to address the class clown, Jerry. Two of them addressed countries (Myanmar, China). The first poem, by Shirley, is addressed to me:


SHIRLEY'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Eric and since your mental capacity is like the dung of a janitor, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the most foolish teacher in this school. We are the pompous students, you are the powdered trout. We are the rusty mitten.

3. You look like a buffalo trying to stab a wheelbarrow.

4. You yap like a feces from the stork, and never think about your disjointed nose. You puke like a pimple, and seldom think about your outsized anchovy.

5. You wear frosting on your head, and eat earwax like a barf bag. You wear sequins on your feet, and sleep on the roadblock.

6. You dream of lassoing Sherlock and Watson, but keep toting Prufrock from your buttock.

7. Upon occasion you argue with Jessica like an airliner in flame-out.

8. Finally your realtor tells you: you will be decapitated with a dandelion.


WILLIAM'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Buffalo, and since your features are like the roses on the feces, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the president of the wheelchair and the sweeper of a sunflower.

3. The salmon is not a pompous animal, for which I apologize that you have a tote bag full of dung.

4. Yes the greatest of your brother's earwax pieces did outweigh an elephant.

5. For I have punched your airliner and burned it.

6. For I am the administrator of that flintlock and you are the chairman of the bowels.

7. Indeed you are the office holder of the barg bag.


JENNY HUANG'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Myanmar and since your face is like the reflector of the moon, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the worker with the bell, and I'm the president with an artificial tooth. You have to lasso the stork since you're a tawdry salesman.

3. If you're a conductor of ducks, I'm the monarch of fishes. People will become crows small as ants.

4. Having no feet, they fly and fly, covering the sky. Having no feet, they cannot rest.

5. The whale planet is drowning in water. The geyser spouts trash, trout, anchovies, dung, wheelbarrows, barges and dandelions higher and higher everywhere.

6. Tens of thousands of crows fall from the sky like rain.

7. The crows really need barf bags in which to die, some earwax to avert going deaf, some frosting to cover their eyes.

8. What a nauseating and beautiful world!


MAY'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Jerry and since your garden is like the sequins on a barf bag, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the pompous pimple, and I will stab you with a rusty knife. Even if you outweigh an airliner, it is still a piece of cake to me.

3. For your earwax piles higher than a giraffe, and an army of janitors would be angry to have to clean it. They know hundreds of wheelbarrows would still not be enough.


YVONNE'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Jerry and since your mental capacity is like the anchovy on an old pizza, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are a stork with rusty bowels. I'd be surprised if the realtors would lend you a wheelbarrow to leave.

3. I write just one syllable for you, beginning with sh and ending in t, and the letter between is not o.

4. But that will have no effect on your pompous peristalsis, to stop which the janitor put a mitten in your fundament.

5. The yapping dog cooks you a pimple.

6. Because the barge has been stabbed by my ambassador, because the buffalo has lassoed your buttock, I give you a barf bag full of powered earwax.

7. At the roadblock you are stopped by a flintlock covered in sequins. They cover you with frosting and decapitate you.


SABRINA'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Sejaisc and since your buttocks are like the side view of a sick bag, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. You are going to get trouble if you keep babbling, and you'll get double trouble if you play with the barbel.

3. When you stop making trouble, you'll be able to get a bubble made with barbule. Hey, stop chewing bubblegum and playing Barbie!

4. For you are a pompous pimple, I will squeeze you every time: juicy bao zi.

5. The pork-flavored Pocky in your pocket makes you look so porky.

6. The door to the restroom holds mold. To beat the boss, flap him to Oz.

7. I overlook your Mediterranean and your toro belly, but look over your purse and pocket. Never-ending love deer, four kids and Dr. Sun Yat Sen.

8. A Whomping Willow lassos pupils to play Wii with it in the Forbidden Forest where crazy things grow.


JOSEPH'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Jerry and since your ears are like the caves on the mountain, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For your are the monkey. I'll kick your ice cream to sweeten my shoes. Then Eric will fall in love with me, for he has a sweet tooth.

3. After that, monkey, go away. Go to the farm and have your pumpkin pie. The pumpkin pie you prefer has bugs in it.

4. Jerry is the stupidest man in this world, singing and playing with his bug pumpkin pie. He takes the bugs into his cave with him, a big happy family.

5. Jerry makes the dandelions achy. Stabbing dung is his favorite pastime. He dreams of toting dung as a career. Anything to make him tawdry.

6. The buffalo is very pompous, proud of its peristalsis. On its skin a lot of sequins, but the sequins will rust. So the buffalo hires a janitor to clean its sequins.

7. Sometimes the buffalo is crazy. Sherlock takes a flintlock to shoot it.


MICHELLE'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is China and since you behave like a gangster soaked in blood, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you think you are the legal master of Taiwan. According to you, Taiwan is not a country but a piece of your territory. You will always be averse to those who say otherwise.

3. Nonetheless, though you can't bear that Taiwan is disjointed. Sorry to say, but for God's reasons Taiwan is not any part of your body--especially not your buttock!

4. Didn't you know that not just Taiwan but all the countries of the world are fed up with you? For your black products and “three deer” milk are nothing but poison. Food made from earwax, clothes from which the sequins fall a week after they're bought . . . Maybe we should just load up a fleet of barges with all the goods Made in China and ship them right back to you.

5. I know you've never needed any ambassador. Because you prefer weapons to long talks. But now you have one, right here in Taiwan! For a long time you were yapping like a dog to no effect, but now thing's are different.

6. Yes, Mr. Ma Ying-“Joke” is your ambassador. Huh? Didn't you know most people in Taiwan and the world think Ma is a joke? Perhaps your mental capacity is not up to understanding this. In this respect, in understanding, we are more fortunate.

7. But one thing you're right about--Ma is really the President of Taiwan. He's like a king actually. So he can do what he wants. But it won't be long before the Taiwanese punch Ma. It'll happen before you have Taiwan in your pocket. You are bigger, it's true, but we will protect our country. Because no one wants to be your bowels, or your little pimple, or any other part of your poisoned body.


DAPHNE'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Vivian and since your legs are like the legs on a stork, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the realtor whose pimples outweigh the houses she sells.

3. The police prepare barf bags when they set up a road block. For the drunks they stop. And so in your neighborhood they should have barf bags too. For when you walk buy.

4. If you keep making noise, I'll kick your buttock.

5. Buffalo dung outweighs itself.

6. It's difficult to lasso a stork.

7. Your hair is like a dried dandelion. When the wind blows, it flies everywhere.


SCHANI'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Eric and since your lips are like the anchovies on the pizza, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the janitor of this Barf Bag and I am the ambassador of a buffalo. You are from the town of petty Realtors.

3. Your dung collection, your pompous pimples and your dog's rusty feces together outweigh our school.

4. You haven't got a greater mental capacity than that of your earwax.

5. Eric is yapping with a wheelbarrow on a dandelion.

6. Your peristalsis doesn't work because of the barfight in your bowels between storks with rifles made of frosting and lake trout swinging disjointed mittens.

7. That airliner with sequins will be stabbed by a tawdry and pompous pigeon.

8. I am going to powder your buttock with a flintlock.

9. Your poem discomfits even that rusty yapping dog.

10. I am going to punch and decapitate your petty rabbit.

11. Yes, I know that you want to tote a barge made of dung.

12. Yesterday I saw a powdered realtor stabbing a yapping buffalo.


JENNY LIN'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Jerry and since you aim your flintlock like a buffalo at an instrument panel, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are barge realtor. I would advise you to see Prufrock and ask him how to lasso mitten realtors.

3. Since you have been bitten in a barfight, your mental capacity may be unsteady and sometimes you wonder if your skull is disjointed.

4. Your favorite cartoon Happy Tree Friends nearly made you stab the janitor and in court you pretend to be an innocent, mad person.

5. Once you saw a stork crossing the sky and threw up your clarinet to knock it down. Then your clarinet hit you as it fell and you yourself fell from the second floor. You may not remember that your clarinet somehow became rusty after that.

6. Another day you ended up in jail because of the Barf Bag Road Block Incident. You were dragged away with your limbs tied tightly and your mouth taped up because you kept asking questions.

7. You yell out, “Help me, someone! Help me!” A voice answers: “Shut up, Jerry! Why are you always so noisy?”

8. You realize you're in ZEI, the class looking at you.

Clay IV.16

If there is some part of God in the human soul, then the emanationist theory of creation presented in the Gnostic myth is in some respect an allegory of the truth. But where the Gnostic Christians would have the being of man stolen by the Demiurge Creator, I believe the being of man was given by the true Creator God.

Clay IV.17

Often in writing I refer to the world. But I am ambiguous about this term, and use it mainly out of habit acquired from others. That the world has already come to an end is obvious to me. And so my usage of the term the world is to some extent obsolete.

Our planet: that is a different story. The planet persists, spinning on and on after the end of the world. And inhabiting our planet, this wreck of the world, billions of men dig their trenches in preparation for a future that recedes to nothing. What can their future be? So much tells us that their reward will be death, chaos, suffocation. That they will suffocate under the stench born of their own labors.

Is there any way to avert to this end? The tradition tells us that there is in the redemption. When it writes of "a new heaven and a new earth," I understand this new earth to be what I mean by world. Thus it will be a "new world." How can we conceive of this? We make our suppositions, as St. John of Patmos made his. And we hope that the redemption will succeed.

Clay IV.18

I conceive of God as the ground of being, but I cannot conceive of God as omnipotent and omniscient as regards the universe we live in. At least not omnipotent and omniscient as these are normally understood. To do so is to project God as a tyrant and ourselves as something like automata.

There are many mysteries in the Christian faith, but this particular mystery, namely that of theodicy (i.e., how an omnipotent God created and rules a world wracked by evil), is one that shouldn't be upheld as such. I do not consider it a mystery, but rather a falsehood.

Clay IV.19

Regardless of their fallenness, it nonetheless remains that thought and language are the privileged signs of our being created in God's image: they are the marks of our closeness to God. Anywhere one encounters thought or its traces one may sense a sign of God's calling to man and of man's closeness to God.

Thus it is that I sense the miracle of the creation far more in an individual utterance, or in a written text, than I do in any of the scenes of outward nature. For me, the vault of the sky is a far lesser miracle than the discourse of two children overheard in the park.

* * *
It was in 1989 that I began to be drawn down this path.

There was a voice I heard at first, and it became a matter of not losing that voice.

The traces of the voice are there as writing. Writing is what is done so that the voice will not be lost.

I do not consider writing just another technology. Rather I think of writing as a special gift from God, or as a mark of God's greater gift.

Let the other technologies abuse and be abused as they will: only let writing remain as this gift.

I have given texts to others in hopes of finding some who will realize that writing is a sacramental activity.

Of course I know there is much writing that is not part of the sacrament. Witness the billion words of nothing being dashed out everywhere around us. That writing falls into nothing even as it is written; its writing is already the pull of nothing.

Never has so much writing been done as now, and perhaps never has so little Writing been done.

I hope to find those who realize writing as a sacrament.

* * *
Am I part of the body of the Church catholic? Different readers will answer this question differently. I myself will say: Yes, I am a Christian. And: Yes, I am part of the body of the Church. These assertions on my part should be clear from everything I've written.

I would like to say I am part of the Christian Duration. I would like to say I am a Durationist. What this means I will try to make clear in my writing from here on.

Obama is the Antichrist: An Open Letter to the, um, Scholars Behind the Video

If you haven't seen it yet, here's the video:

An open letter in response. . .

Dear Fellow Concerned Christian Scholars:

First off let me say that I was delighted to learn from your short video that our current president, Barack Obama, is actually the Antichrist. I'm guessing when you first discovered Obama's name in Luke 10:18 that you were drop-jawed in amazement, flabbergasted.

I try to imagine how it happened. There you were, in Abilene, or Lubbock, or Arlington, just minding your own business and practicing your ancient Hebrew by translating Gospel passages into that language--when suddenly, Wow, there's this staggering utterance from Jesus himself:

I have seen Satan fall like Barack Obama.

It's amazing really, and it must have left you in awe. I don't know what I'd do if I suddenly ran into a line like that. I'd probably light my hair on fire and run from the house screaming.

I know there are some will probably claim your discovery only came to you because you were looking for passages to demonize our president. Let these liberals say what they want. I would never attribute such low motives to you. And why not? Because I can tell by the honesty and warmth in the faint southern accent of the man narrating your video that you are good Christian people and are thus not likely to spend your time going out of your way to demonize others. Especially not a man who has dedicated his life to serving his country.

In fact I firmly believe you yourselves must have been deeply disheartened to discover that your country's elected leader, the man representing you to the world, is actually an incarnation of the Evil One. Probably at first, after making your discovery, you were tempted to keep quiet about it out of shame before the world. And out of a sense of patriotism. But you believe in truth, and truth will out. So finally you had to come forward. Yes, I really feel I understand you.

Though your scholarly methods in this video are excellent all round, I was a little surprised by your assertion that Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, is "the most ancient form of Hebrew." Of course Aramaic is not the most ancient form of Hebrew, but a different language. Probably as scholars you know this, but your presenter, nervous in front of the microphone, just slipped up temporarily. Whatever.

Also it's a little strange that you take Jesus' words, presumably spoken in Aramaic, and give them in Hebrew. I understand that in Aramaic the phrase "lightning from the heights" wouldn't come out sounding like "barack o bama" and that your whole video would be pointless if you used the Aramaic. But I think I get your deeper meaning here: Jesus, though he spoke Aramaic, normally thought in Hebrew, Hebrew being his Father's language. Jesus held his Father's language in greater esteem than his mother tongue. I'm guessing you guys are Protestants, aren't you?

Of course another little problem is that "barack o bama" in Hebrew wouldn't mean, as you say, "lighting from the heights" but rather "lightning and the heights." It's a minor problem I know, I'm sorry to bring it up, and who needs such nitpicking anyway? Your heart is in the right place, and that's what counts when doing linguistic analysis of ancient languages, no?

I'm in full support of your implied assertion that New Testament references to "lightning" are really references to Barack Obama. Actually when I first saw your video, I was really excited by it, I couldn't sit still, I was hopping around the living room gesticulating. Ask my wife if you don't believe me. It's not every day I see such a major breakthrough in scholarship presented in four minutes on YouTube. I was giddy about it, so I took your ideas and went looking around elsewhere in the New Testament. Though not a scholar of the caliber of you guys exactly, I do know my Bible pretty well. And I wanted to see what else God might have said about President Obama. The first passage I came upon was Revelation 4:5, which says the following:

From [God's] throne came flashes of Barack.

Now that's really interesting, I thought, what to make of it? Of course here I've translated the word lightning into our president's name, just as you do. So the text of Revelation seems to say that Obama was sent by God, or that "flashes" of Obama (maybe televised speeches, or appearances on Letterman?) come from God Himself. Almost like how God sends his Son, or the Spirit.

In truth I was kind of uncomfortable with this idea, because, hey, though I respect our president and all, I'm not about to start calling him the Second Coming of Christ. So I decided to go back to the Gospels to see if there was anything else that God said about Obama.

Let me tell you it's pretty amazing what I found. It's actually World-Altering maybe. It's going to change Everything.

In the same Gospel you used, the Gospel of Luke, in chapter 17--really I'm surprised you didn't notice it too--Jesus is talking to his disciples, warning them not to go after false prophets, not to be taken in by those who are not the Real Thing. Then Jesus, in describing his Second Coming, says he will be like our current president. He says it right there in the Bible!

For the Son of Man will be like Barack, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other.

Of course Jesus doesn't say here that he will be Barack, only that he will be like Barack. But what the heck? If it's permissible, as you do in your video, to say that "lightning and the heights" really means "lightning from the heights," why can't we just get rid of the word like in this later passage of Luke? Or why can't we change it to a similar word, namely as? I mean, if when Jesus is talking about lightning he's really talking about Obama, isn't he here saying that he will come back as Obama?

If that isn't enough to convince non-Bible believers, I mean the skeptics who don't read the Bible seriously like we do, then there's this verse, Matthew 24:27:

For as Barack coming from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

Now Chicago is kind of in the east, don’t you think? And Barack is truly visible all the way to the west--with TV he's visible anywhere really. So again we have the same implication here in the Gospel of Matthew.

I don't know about you, but when I think that our current president, Barack Obama, is really Christ come back to earth I get kind of teary eyed with emotion. I mean I get teary eyed that it's happening now, in my lifetime. That I myself had the choice of voting for Christ or voting Republican (i.e., against Christ) and I voted the right way. Because I voted Obama. Or, as you might say, I voted from the heights.

Come to think of it, this last election was maybe the great winnowing and sifting Jesus speaks of in the Gospels--that those who voted Obama will be gathered into the granary, but those who voted Republican will be burned up like chaff. And there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

As for me, I'm anxious to go back to the Old Testament and begin looking into all the prophecies and revelations about our current president. I really can't thank you enough for your scholarly acumen in setting me on the right track. I'm now starting to think that maybe, since Obama is actually the Second Coming, maybe McCain was the Antichrist. You think? Or maybe it was Cheney. To be honest I'm guessing Cheney is more likely. I'll have to look up how to say Dick in Hebrew. I also kind of suspect, in this fascinating new End Times scenario, that maybe Sarah Palin is the Whore of Babylon. You think?

I invite you or anyone else to comment below on these remarks about our current End Times predicament.

Sincerely,

Eric Mader

Eleven Good Reads: J.S. Porter's Spirit Book Word

The onslaught of digital culture has led many to fear both the end of book culture and the end of literacy as we know it. In the recent couple decades writers great and small have penned homages to the experience of reading, to the tactility and presence of the book in the reader's hands, and many of these homages have more than a little of the swan song about them. The tone of farewell is perhaps not unreasonable given the new technologies and the shoddy standard of literacy that prevails among millions now graduating from North American universities. But how impress upon those who live by "tweets" and YouTube just what is being lost?

J.S. Porter's small volume Spirit Book Word is just the kind of slap awake that's needed. Better than anyone I know of, Porter gets you inside the rollercoaster ride of danger and elation that is the essence of serious reading. If indeed books can change both individual lives and the very shape of the world--and who, looking at examples as diverse as the Koran, the Gospels, or the works of Karl Marx, would deny it?--Porter evokes the experience of being shaken in the first-person. What does it mean to take up a great work and be temporarily, or perhaps permanently, remade by the vision the writer offers within?

Spirit Book World is arranged as ten meditations on ten writers that have meant the world to Porter. Each meditation is an attempt to explain the import of a single word in the given writer's work and vision. And so, writing on D.H. Lawrence, Porter elucidates the word quick in Lawrence's work; writing on Clarice Lispector, he uses the word strange as a bridge across which one may approach Lispector's dangerously decentering narratives; with Raymond Carver, the word is love. Such a critical method may sound facile, and could easily be so with a less gifted reader, but Porter writes like a man in a terrible hurry--hurried by the need to make you experience what he has in his ten love affairs with his ten chosen writers.

"A man in a terrible hurry"--this doesn't sound quite right, since, as we know, those in a terrible hurry make a mess of things. But reading Porter at one point, in his opening chapter, made me think of the proverb Still waters run deep, and how, indeed, the proverb is usually true. Usually true. We know that still waters run deep, and that those who are staccato or loquacious--in other words fast--run shallow, are shallow. Porter's style is eccentric in this regard: it is both deep and fast, something that, at least as regards water, one doesn't encounter in nature. His sentences tend to be short, pugilistic even, but there is a concrete depth of reference, at times a great lyricism, at others pathos, at others a learned shorthand. Spirit Book Word reads quickly, in a conversational manner, and yet it reaches great depths.

One may put my statement to the test by looking at his chapter on Heidegger. The ten writers Porter takes up in order are Carver, Kristjana Gunnars, Flannery O'Connor, Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, Heidegger, Dennis Lee, George Grant, and Thomas Merton. The German philosopher stands out in this list; as I read through Porter's chapters in order, I could only keep wondering how his approach could possibly do justice. Not that Heidegger is somehow a greater figure than Carver or Dickinson, but there is such a breadth of background to Heidegger's work, the millennia-spanning web of Western metaphysics he struggled to think himself out of--how could Porter, with his conversational rhythm, hope to bring the reader near what Heidegger was up to? But he somehow manages to cut right to the chase: if fifteen pages is all you have to introduce Martin Heidegger, I challenge anyone to get at more of the gist in such a compelling way.

Porter tells of his own introduction to Heidegger's thought, in part through reading the philosopher, in part through George Steiner, and in part through being attentive to language in Heidegger's careful way:

Then, while at work on my poetic documentary of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, published in 1988 as The Thomas Merton Poems, I found myself lapsing into Heideggerian theory. Perhaps the best way to understand Heidegger was to do Heidegger, linguistically perform him and apply him to my own work.

In an unconscious echo of Heidegger and a poet he admired, Stefan George, I wrote, "There is no thing / without the entwining word . . . There is no returning / to the moment of / precopulation . . ." In defiance of current theories that to overcome human alienation one had to jettison language, I seemed intuitively to stand with Heidegger: that there is no Being in human form without language. While language, particularly when clad in calculative thought, can distance us from Being, language can also bring us closer, when poetically realized, to Being.

In Heidegger, language comes from poetry--in Emerson's phrase, language is "fossil poetry"--and thought comes out of language.

Porter is very serious about the books to which he would introduce us. He introduces us to them as he would introduce us to a good friend, somewhat reluctantly perhaps because he knows we may not like them. And besides, these particular friends are not to be messed around with:

I come to a book shyly, as I would to a temple. I open it as I would a snake-basket. I'm not sure of the exact nature of the reptile, but I know it might be dangerous, even lethal. I wait expectantly, patiently, for the bite. I pray that it may be life-altering.

How many people are there who can share in this approach to books?

It's hard to find someone to talk to. Hard and getting harder. Can I find a way of speaking to you that makes you care about [these writers]?

Porter ends with a chapter assessing how the growth of digital technologies may be destroying the experience he knows, may be alienating us from the Spirit he has sensed through literature encountered in the book. He is at times pessimistic, at others hopeful: "I go on then with the faith that the Spirit moves mysteriously; it can straddle a computer chip as it can ride a robin." Recognizing with George Grant that "the given overwhelms the made," that "we ourselves are more given than made," Porter wagers that no technology or particular regime will be able to completely erase our perception of this fact. It is a crucially important question.

Spirit Book Word will introduce most readers to at least a few writers new to them. Myself I think of people for whom to buy the book: friends who love reading, others who are perhaps on the way to loving reading. Porter has the odd persuasive power of a man speaking directly to you, willing to tell you straight out what matters most to him, in a sometimes strained and euphoric tone, at others more quiet and measured, but on most pages with the rare quality I tried to suggest above: both fast-moving and deep.

Get J.S. Porter's Spirit Book Word through Amazon.com