God is an Awesome Artist

A couple weeks ago, my sister sent me this email:

Hi Pauline. At a women’s retreat in June, we had to try to find words (preferably alliterative pairs) describing the Lord for each letter in the theme of the retreat. But I think it could be fun to try the entire alphabet. So, for example, L could be Loving Lord. But there are more subtle ones, based on scripture; I found quite a few in the Psalms. For example, Foe Finder (based on Ps. 21:8). So I thought, Pauline might enjoy finding phrases, whenever you feel like thinking them up or hunting them down in the Bible.

Of course she was right – I promptly started trying to think of alliterative pairs for each letter of the alphabet. I remember doing something similar at a Wednesday night Bible study over twenty years ago, when we were learning about the attributes of God. But that time we only tried to come up with one word for each letter of the alphabet, not two. It’s easy enough to say that God is Zealous. But I have yet to come up with a noun starting with Z that applies to God. (I’m not going to even try X.)

Some letters were pretty easy. I came up with multiple ideas for F, G, P, and S. Others are more challenging, especially as I’m trying to find a Bible passage to go with each one, preferably using some form of both words. For A, the closest I could come was Almighty Alpha-and-Omega, from Revelation 1:8 (“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”)

But since I’m trying to find words starting with letters of the English alphabet, using a word that is actually a letter of the Greek alphabet, and is part of a phrase rather than a single word, didn’t satisfy me. If I want to say that God has been from the beginning and will be to the “end” (not that eternity has an end, or a beginning, for that matter), I’d rather use a perfectly good word like Eternal. (Which is what I’m trying to use for E, but I’m still working on that one…)

I can say God is an Architect (Hebrews 11:10), or Author (Acts 3:15), but neither of those passages offers an adjective to pair with it, not even one that doesn’t start with A but has a synonym I could use that starts with A. One idea I came up with was Absolute Authority. While I’m sure I can’t find a verse that uses those words (I’ve tried), the idea is certainly there in many passages.

But in the end I decided the one I like best is Awesome Artist. I have at least one other that speaks of God’s creative power, but there the focus is on bringing everything into existence. With Artist, I think of the incredible beauty we see throughout the universe. From the microscopic size (have you ever thought of bacteria as beautiful?) to the astronomic (NASA has a great Astronomy Picture of the Day archive), creation is filled with colors, patterns, and an endless variety of designs that leave us gaping in awe.

And the answer is … WordPress

It doesn’t matter what the question is – as you can see, the answer is always WordPress. Don’t you wish standardized tests were always this easy?

In a few weeks, my older son will be taking the SAT, along with thousands of other college-bound seniors. But that wasn’t my inspiration for the photo at the left. I read yesterday that WordPress is having a contest to use the WordPress logo creatively in a photo.

I thought about all kinds of places one sees circles every day. (My son used to have a book on that subject, but I’m sure we gave it away when he outgrew it.) Bowling balls, golf balls, and ping pong balls. Clocks, traffic lights, and wheels. Donuts, peas, and sliced carrots. CD’s, and the LED’s and buttons on my computer and monitor. Pushpins. Doorknobs. Life Savers.

But what kind of picture could I find, or take, that would give me a good place to plug in the WordPress logo? I thought about a traffic light, but the logo comes in blue and black versions, not green, red, or orange. I really liked the idea of one of those machines that has numbered balls for selecting the lottery number – I could superimpose the logo over the winning numbers. But I have no idea where to get such a picture, so I had to come up with a new idea.

And you see what I came up with. As I don’t have Photoshop, I had to use a combination of IrfanView, my favorite tool for resizing pictures and adjusting colors (including removing red-eye), and Microsoft Paint, where I did the actual pasting of the logo over the filled-in circles. Perfectionist that I am, it took several tries to get the two  under the pencil.

But it was fun – much more than filling in circles with a number 2 pencil.

Books: The Fairy Tales Detectives

Having never seen the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show as a child, my introduction to fractured fairy tales was James Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. I was on a business trip in St. Louis, and I had an extra night at the hotel before the conference started (in order to take advantage of Saturday-stayover low fares). I was doing a bit of Christmas shopping when I came across this slim volume in the bookstore. I was going to buy it for my husband, but it was so good I read the entire book before going to bed.

From then on I was hooked. I bought Garner’s Once Upon a More Enlightened Time and Politically Correct Holiday Stories when they came out the following year, along with Chris Fabry’s Spiritually Correct Bedtime Stories. Later I added David Fisher’s Legally Correct Fairy Tales to the collection – though I don’t think any of the latter books were quite as good as the first one.

When Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs came out in 1996, we bought a copy, and enjoyed it so much that we kept it on the coffee table to share with guests. I still think it’s one of the best in the genre. Of course, by then the idea of fractured fairy tales was getting so popular that they started springing up all over the place, many of them not nearly so funny.

My initial impression of the Sisters Grimm, based on the first book in the series, was that it belonged to the “not nearly so funny” class. As another disappointed reviewer on amazon.com points out, it begins with a compelling premise (which is why I happily picked it up from the children’s section in the library). Orphaned sisters Sabrina and Daphne Grimm find themselves in the home of a strange woman who claims to be their grandmother, in a small town in New York where all the fairy tale creatures from the old stories (which turn out to be true history) now live.

Unfortunately, Sabrina is not a particularly likable character, and the rest of the characters in the story aren’t much better (some are more appealing, but not developed well enough for me to care much what happens to them). There is a mystery to solve, related to a farmhouse flattened by a giant, but the eventual solution does not seem all that satisfying.

Of course, the books are written for children, not adults. But I often enjoy children’s books. (I’m looking forward to reading Alcatraz versus the Knights of Crystallia once our library get a copy.) Some parents do very much enjoy reading these books along with the children – there are hardly any critical reviews at amazon.com from either children or parents. The one critical review I mentioned above does point out that the first book seems to be a setup for future books in the series.

As my 10-year-old is in the target age range, I’ll have to see what he thinks of it (when he finishes the Harry Potter book he’s reading now).

A mountain, a man, and a monument

At the opposite end of the size scale from Willard Wigan (see my post “Art under the Microscope”), Gutzon Borglum sculpted works so large you have to stand pretty far away to see them properly. Eighty-two years ago today, he started carving the face of an American president into the southeast face of Mount Rushmore. When he died fourteen years later, the work was still not complete. His son Lincoln finished the massive monument, which today attracts almost three million visitors a year to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

I hadn’t known until today that increased tourism was in fact the initial motivation behind the project. Having lived in a town whose economy depended on tourism (Houghton Lake, Michigan), I don’t think highly of such a plan for stimulating the economy. There are plenty of jobs in a tourist economy, but few careers. Few young people aspire to work in motels or restaurants (or gas stations, gift shops, or convenience stores), so they move away in search of better work. And while an economic downturn hurts the whole country, it hits especially hard in an area that depends on people from elsewhere coming to spend their discretionary income.

The sculptor selected for the project had grander things in mind than tourism, however. He rejected the initial ideas of subjects for the sculpture: Western figures such as Chief Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill Cody, Lewis and Clark, and legendary Sioux warriors. Borglum wanted his work to inspire all Americans. Besides the four Presidents, he also planned a huge panel commemorating the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, plus the Louisiana Purchase and other territorial acquisitions. But this part of the project had to be abandoned due to lack of funds, along with carving the Presidents from head to waist rather than just heads.

I don’t know what I’d think of Mount Rushmore if I saw it in person. I love mountains, but in large part that’s because I like to be out in nature. I don’t dislike civilization, but I do like to get away from its noise, as well as from the lack of beauty in many populated areas. Mount Rushmore is certainly out in nature, but it is so obviously a work of man, I’m not sure I’d be more awed by man’s achievement there or wishing it had been left alone to be shaped by wind and rain.

Even without seeing Mount Rushmore, though, I will always associate it with the ideas of resourcefulnes and perseverance. When I was in elementary school, we occasionally were shown movies (on those old reel-to-reel movie projectors). My favorites were the Bell Telephone science series, and a movie adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, all of which we saw more than once. One movie we saw only once, but which I have always remembered, was called “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done.”

Art under the microscope

If you think a camel can’t fit through the eye of a needle, you haven’t seen Willard Wigan’s artwork. Of course, you won’t be able to see it without a microscope. (These days, I can barely see the eye of a needle, let alone anything in it. I understand now why just a few years ago, women I sewed with envied my ability to easily thread a needle.) With proper magnification, however, you will see that Wigan has placed not just one but nine miniature camels in the eye of a needle. (See slide 2 of this slideshow.)

My husband likes to paint small pewter figurines, and he purchased a visor equipped with both a magnifying lens and a light to aid him in his detailed work. To paint the eyes, he uses a paintbrush narrowed to a single strand, or the point of a pin. But even that would be impossibly large for the work Wigan does. He does use a hair to paint his creations, but it is hair taken from a dead housefly.

Wigan is a prime example of failure fueling success. A child who struggled with dyslexia and other learning disabilities and did very poorly in school, Wigan found solace in creating art on a tiny scale – so tiny his teachers could not see it and thus could not criticize it. Encouraged by his mother, he applied his unusual ability on a smaller and smaller scale. To this day he can barely read or write, but his one-of-a-kind artworks sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

I admire Wigan’s skill – both with his scalpel (unlike most artists working on a microscopic level, he does his work by hand) and in controlling his body. To avoid hand tremors, he has to work in a trance-like state and only make cuts in between heartbeats. He chose a difficult profession and applies himself to its demanding requirements, patiently working week after week to produce a single product.

Short and to the point

I never liked school assignments to write haiku poems. The results never sounded very poetic to me, and I got the impression that the purpose of the assignment was to make a way for kids who didn’t know how to write poems to write poems. It’s not that a poem has to rhyme, but just stringing words together according to a certain pattern does not make a poem.

I have discovered, however, that haiku contests produce some good stuff. I don’t know if they’re good poetry, but some of them definitely are humorous or thought-provoking. Several months ago, I read about a haiku contest in thinkgeek.com’s newsletter. I wrote my own haiku and submitted it, but it didn’t win. As I apparently didn’t save it, and I don’t remember it anymore, I can’t say how it compares with some of those that have won.

Since the haikus become the property of thinkgeek.com, I don’t know whether I can legitimately quote any here. But some of them are pretty good. If you don’t have a computer background, you may not understand a few of them. But take a look. Something there should make you smile.

I just read today about a haiku contest in conjunction with the upcoming G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. And this page has Harry Potter haiku. At first I thought it was someone’s clever creation based on characters from the book, but it turns out it actually  takes dialogue from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and writes it as haiku.

You can sample some beer haiku (even if, like me, you don’t like beer). You can even read movie reviews in haiku form. But I think I like these dog haikus the best.

Writing a haiku
Is discipline for the mind:
Short and to the point.

Classical Mass meets bluegrass

Bluegrass and Mass are not two words I would generally expect to find in the same sentence, unless it were a contrast between two very different types of music. When I got the email last week announcing the start of rehearsals tonight for this fall’s concert, I wasn’t sure whether I was even interested in participating. While I prefer classical music, either to sing or to listen to, I try to keep an open mind about other styles of music. But a Bluegrass Mass?

What little I knew about Bluegrass was that it was a sub-genre of country music. And the idea of a “country” style Mass did not appeal to me. (Though I imagine the right composition, well-performed, might change my mind.) But I figured it couldn’t hurt to go the first night just to hear the piece. (Besides, they always serve cookies after the first rehearsal.)

We listened to four movements from the Mass, “The World Beloved,” and attempted to sing parts of them. We’ll need quite a few more singers than those who turned out tonight (let’s hope several people had schedule conflicts or just forgot), and a lot of work to learn some challenging harmonies and rhythms. But the music itself, I decided is exciting. I don’t know how well we can do it justice (it was written for a professional choral group, while ours is just a volunteer community group). But it’s worth trying.

Apparently the fusion of bluegrass and the Mass was a challenge for the composer also. And the result was a surprise to the bluegrass group Monroe Crossing as they began rehearsing the work for the world premiere in January 2007. They had expected “a bunch of nice Gospel songs in the bluegrass tradition.” Instead they encountered “a true Mass in the traditional sense.” Their guitarist points out, “One thing people should know is that it’s not a bluegrass Mass sung by a chorus. It’s more like classical music played on bluegrass instruments.”

More that just the upbeat music itself (Barnett wanted to produce “cheery sacred music – all too rare in a medium rife with staid and even lugubrious settings”), I particularly appreciate the application of creativity and obvious talent in bringing the classical Mass and bluegrass style music together. If it had not been done so well, I would not applaud it simply for being new. But listening to the recording of VocalEssence Ensemble Singers together with Monroe Crossing, I became excited about the possibilities ahead this fall.

Games: Cranium Family Fun Game and Rack-O

Al asked for a Family Night, and the holiday tomorrow allowed for staying up late this evening playing games. So we gathered around the game table downstairs, and we picked out Cranium Family Fun Game as one mostly likely to work well for all ages and provide lots of fun and laughs.

Like most of Cranium’s games, this one has a number of different kinds of activities. Depending what color you land on, you pick out a card from one of four decks: Creative Cat, Word Worm, Data Head, or Star Performer. We quickly agreed that Data Head was the easiest category, generally depending more on knowledge than ability. Recognizing common objects from photos showing just a small detail is probably the hardest in that category, while the true/false questions and multiple choice were usually easy for all of us.

Word Worm is my favorite category, as I really like words. Spelling words backwards is not very challenging for any of us, but finding six words starting with six different letters (roll the letter dice to get your letters) in six specified categories can be quite a challenge. So much so, in fact, that we never managed before time was up.

Creative Cat and Star Performer require more ability and creativity, and generally are where the laughs come in. How do you pantomime playing musical chairs, or doing instant messaging? My husband had somewhat more luck acting out being a race car driver, and later being a waitress (the latter was quite memorable and will probably continue to generate laughter whenever we remember it).

I had to crab walk around the room with a plastic frog on my belly. There was some question as to whether the frog was still on my belly, as it slid down near my hip, but as I made it around the room, panting with the effort, my husband decided I had accomplished it. On other rounds, we raced around the house collecting items, such as something made only of cotton (a T-shirt), or something with batteries (a remote control). Kyra helped with this category, providing both something alive, and something for a dog to fetch.

Creative or useful?

In Saturday’s post I mentioned my son’s creativity. Among the various traits I want to encourage in my sons, creativity rates fairly high. One day recently my younger son was feeling very discouraged, though I forget what particular circumstances were the cause. He said he was useless, that he couldn’t do anything worthwhile. As his mother, I naturally wanted to affirm what he does well, so I pointed out how creative he is.

He wanted to know what is useful about creativity, and I admit it was not an easy question to answer. I pointed out that there are jobs that are all about creativity (all the arts, most kinds of entertainment), and that in just about any job creativity is helpful. I didn’t comment on the fact that most of his current outlets for creativity have very limited commercial value (this was before we created The Alien Game); at ten years old that’s not an issue, and as he matures he can find ways to channel his creativity in ways that are valued by other people.

I hope he’ll never value creativity only for its “usefulness,” though. Seeing creativity primarily as a means to an end tends to short-circuit the process. By its nature, creativity must be free to go in unexpected directions, which may not appear at all useful.

This blog entry on Creatity and Commercialism explains the tension between teaching children to be creative and preparing them for the workplace.

When educators nurture students to be more creative, the students often do not blend in well in the workplace; when the educators stop doing so, organisations are requesting for more employees who are able to explore issues from multiple processes (which requires a certain degree of creativity).

I was thinking about creativity in particular today because of the news about Disney buying Marvel. According to Marvel CEO Bob Iger, “This is not going to be about Disney sanitizing Marvel in any way.” But many comic book fans worry about the future of their favorite characters in the hands of a company that has often been accused of subordinating good story creation to selling lots of merchandise.

Games: The Alien Game

Have you ever played a game and thought the rules didn’t make much sense, or that the premise of the game was weak, and that you could probably come up with a better idea yourself? If so, I can tell you that coming up with a game that works well when you try to play it is not an easy thing.

Al is learning that also. Together we’ve been working on The Alien Game, borrowing ideas from Clue and Where in the U.S. Is Carmen Sandiego?, as well as, of course, his very fertile imagination. It started because he wanted a new game to play, and my stash of games (I pick up inexpensive games when I find them at yard sales, thrift stores, or dollar stores, and save them in my closet until an occasion comes when I think it’s time to bring one out) was depleted.

It’s not that we don’t have games in the house. We have at least four shelves of games downstairs, ranging from little kids games like Candyland to strategy games, party games, and a variety of card games. But Al has outgrown some of the simpler games, and is not ready yet for some of the more advanced ones. Having neither extra money nor a good idea what to get, I suggested making our own game.

I didn’t have anything particular in mind – perhaps some kind of card game where we designed our own cards. Or a simple board game where we tried to get from start to finish, encountering a few obstacles on the way. But Al tackled the project with enthusiasm and much grander aspirations. This game, he decided, would be a space adventure version of Clue, modified so that it would only require two players.