sunday post

     This meme to me is like going to church. I could just stare at it on a Sunday morning and be thankful for the imaginary animals all around me.  And in heaven at the taverns it will be so fun. I am going to be a teetotaler for no reason in heaven and sell soda to minors.

     I thought about reading Les Miserables during quarantine and decided not to but did notice something interesting about the first part of the book, which was the straightforward portrayal of a good bishop.  All of the drama in the book hinges on the bishop’s good deed of forgiving a thief and adding silver candlesticks to what was already stolen.  This symbolic act of kindness inspires goodness that becomes epic and lifelong.  In fact, it takes a thousand pages to tell the story, which I really just don’t feel like reading.  The musical will do the trick for me, I think, and I hope everyone gets to listen that that music and read the lyrics in a way similar that I was taught in high school. To make it a whole English unit, a class could read the story Babette’s Feast and bring food, which is what another teacher demonstrated in grad school later on.

    Anyway I thought I would mention the rare generosity of the bishop, which isn’t as rare as it is to find a positive Christian authority within literature now.  I guess there are reasons for what gets told and appreciated in books, and some of my favorites, like I Know This Much is True, and The Poisonwood Bible, actually are pretty representative of the modern negative views of some Christian religion.  But I think everyone will eventually get past that phase, and it will be interesting to see what resurrections happen with Christian characters in books.  I personally think there is a literary frontier to mix evangelical foibles with hyper-detailed modern humorous tell-all-possibly-even-inappropriate stuff that I somehow haven’t been able to bring myself to write yet. My feeling that some of it is beyond me could be some good news of future team work and a lot of writers on the horizon thinking of the stuff that can only be theirs to tell.