Today I have had an ability to investigate some of the damage. Tiny streams turned into rivers and flooded a lot of Delaware County this week, and it is forbidden to drive in the county until Monday except for emergency vehicles. Army helicopters are buzzing overhead.

Delhi itself escaped the worst of the disaster but Oneonta has been hit hard. Parts of Interstate I-88 have been washed out. Many county roads have been washed out.

Bridges have been undermined. The town of Walton, about ten minutes to the south, was apparently inundated. And it's been raining on and off throughout the day.

Fortunately the rain hasn't been steady. A cloudburst or two.

Trees are down, bridges are out, but there are no reports of looting, rape, murder, or anything like that. Let's hope that latter condition holds.

Yesterday there was flooding along the Delaware River that stretches from the Catskills down through Stroudsburg in the Poconos where I grew up all the way through Philadelphia and on into Chesapeake Bay, if that's where it empties. I think that's where it empties but would have to check on a map to be sure.

But unlike Katrina which caused major disasters thanks to the sybaritic nature of the people of New Orleans and their inability to think about tomorrow, the people of New York and Pennsylvania rallied and faced down the storm bravely, and no one was even scratched. A couple of trailer homes were swept away here in the Poconos where I'm staying with my brother but the Biblical waters have subsided leaving the God-fearing inhabitants unscathed, and everyone is back at work, fulfilling their destiny, responding to their call.

Lutheran Surrealism goes to pick up the fmaily today who have been vacationing in Finland. We have checked the bridges between the Poconos and NYC's JFK, and everything appears to be intact. Going home this evening, there may be some muddy water here and there, but the bridges have held, and the Protestant Reformation has withstood the enmity of the storm.

REading Marianne Moore

I spent a few days reading Marianne Moore correspondence and notebooks at the Rosenbach library. I am surprised by how often she makes fascinating aesthetic pronouncements.

She tells Allen Ginsberg that, "Any line that occurs in the course of the work as your pronouncement should be able to serve as a title." Letter of July 4, 1952.

She was specifically objecting to the line, "It was a load of shit."

I came to Philadelphia to do research on Marianne Moore at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. A friend of mine lives along the Main Line in a town called Gladwynne. I haven't seen much of him since high school when we were stars on the soccer team. It's been thirty years. He contacted me by email, and so I asked him if I could stay here. He said sure and to be honest I was expecting something modest. Maybe a yard. Maybe an apartment complex. I was stunned at his house. He has a tree fort in a tree that would comfortably house a dozen people. The house itself has three floors and is in a neighborhood of two million dollar houses. The driveway has a circle at the end of it. The oldest part of the house is 200 years old, and the newer parts are listed in historical journals as crucial to Philadelphia architecture, and there are dozens of kinds of trees I've never even seen in his yard. But get this, the house is haunted, he tells me, and then retires to bed. So I start to check my email in his ample kitchen. Suddenly a jar of cookies that were apparently sitting on a shelf fifteen feet behind me, are launched some fifteen feet out into the kitchen and land at my feet. I say the Lord's Prayer.

I cross myself. I investigate. My heart pounds, expecting a hand to clap over my mouth and to be dragged screaming into hell.

Then his second eldest son appears in the kitchen. He says, oh, well, that could have been the dog. Those are dog biscuits. Well, maybe, if the dog is telekinetic! The dog was sitting some twenty feet away from the area of action!

Another son appears, this one apparently older, but looks younger. This one says the whole neighborhood is haunted and there are people walking in and out of these old houses all day and all night.

OMG!

I will sleep with the lights on upstairs, and take at least three Tylenol PM, and probably arise in the morning a basket case that needs to be brought to the asylum!

It's like a Bob Hope movie, but I don't have Bing Crosby with me! Hellllllllllllpppppppppppp!

Still, I had a good catchup with my friend Jake. He explained to me about a dozen things that happened in high school. Apparently once we were picked up by a Vietnam Veteran after his car broke down and we had to hitchhike and the man had no arms or legs. He swears I was with him. I have no memory of this event. I think sometimes I live in an isolated world where everything is theory.

But Jake -- he lives right in the thick of things. Hellzapoppin, as they say.

If I end up crucified upside down, or am taken off to the asylum, these words will be my last moments of sanity. Let's see if Lutheran Surrealism can get me through the night! If not, then it was never much of a philosophy to begin with.

The Inescapable Choice

(NB: Every other post at Lutheran Surrealism has been written by Kirby Olson. This post is special. It was written by a retired pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America by the name of Richard Niebanck. He lives in Delhi, NY, where I live, and he often supplies [fills in] when our other pastor is on vacation. I have permission to publish his essay here, and reprint it so that those interested may see it for themselves. -- KO.)

To leave or not to leave, that is the question haunting a growing number of us who have labored as shepherds of that rapidly diminishing segment of Christ’s flock known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as well as an indeterminate number in the other Lutheran bodies. To leave or not to leave, and, if to leave, which way to go? I address these questions from the vantage point of an ELCA pastor.

To be quite honest, I had thought that I had settled the matter for myself, having decided some time ago that fidelity to my ordination vows and, more important, to my baptismal calling required me to remain where I was, serving Christ by serving the people he had entrusted to me.

Then came the departures of several pastors whom I held in high regard, some to Rome, others to Byzantium, and I found myself challenged to consider my own situation afresh. What might these departures, and the factors leading up to them, signify for me, even at my relatively advanced age. Abraham, after all, was many years older when he was called to set out.

It would, of course, be impossible fully to know the reasons why these colleagues, even those closest to me, have chosen to depart, and it would be quite wrong to guess at them. Their decisions are, after all, profoundly personal ones. Yet as holders of an office that is public in character, they are obligated to make a public accounting for their decisions. It is they who must so account, and it is we who must accept the accounting as having been made in good faith, whatever may be our subjective feelings about their decisions.

What I mean to do here, therefore, is to consider some of the factors that might bear upon a decision to leave and then, in a more personal way, to set forth my own reasons for remaining where I am.

Let me begin by reviewing some of the reasons being advanced for departing. The most obvious one is the contention that the reforming movement known as “Lutheran” has, for all intents and purposes, run its course and that the denominations calling themselves “Lutheran” are in fact not “Lutheran” at all.

On the positive side, it is argued that Rome has finally acknowledged the doctrine of justification by grace through faith in Christ without the works of the law, as witness the recently adopted Joint Declaration. Furthermore, it is asserted that the progress made in the various bilateral dialogues, and the corpus of writings produced by them, show that Lutherans need not fear compromising their evangelical faith by returning “home” to the Western church of which their forbearers were always a part, though long estranged. Believing that “the Lutheran ecumenical destiny [is] reconciliation with the bishop and church of Rome” (The Rule, Society of the Holy Trinity, 1996), the holders of this viewpoint see little or no justification for remaining “separated brethren.”

On the negative side, it is argued that those ecclesial bodies retaining the name, “Lutheran,” have long since ceased being Lutheran. When asked, “Why have you left your church?,” they are likely to retort, “So who moved?” The evidence is, as the lawyers would say, prima facie, whether one looks to right or left.

On the right, one sees a once-great denomination now deeply divided, torn by a power struggle just barely masked by obscurantist pseudo-theological bickering, looking less and less like a church and more like a conventicle. That church’s embrace of the combination of mass marketing and revivalist methods is little short of bizarre.

But the disarray on the right pales by comparison to that on the left. It isn’t so much that the ELCA has moved as that it has been politically hijacked by a well-organized and well-financed ideological mafia. These hijackers, intent on re-imaging God and reconstructing the world according to the anti-gospel of gender, sexuality, race, and class, have taken full advantage of the ELCA’s soft underbelly: a pietistic sentimentality, a “gospel reductionist antinomianism, and a wannabe eagerness to be “relevant.” Not surprisingly, this had led to a top-down imposed legalism and a totalitarian political correctness dictating everything from delegate quotas and seminary curricula to the use of personal pronouns.

In view of this sorry state of affairs, the full contours of which are all too familiar to us, is it any wonder that so many who love and serve the Lord and his church feel that they have no choice but to bail out? But what, one may ask, is it they seek? And what guarantee have they of finding it elsewhere?

If there is a single common denominator running through the variety of personal accountings for the decision to leave the Lutheran church it is, I submit, a profound longing to be part of a churchly community, a church possessing what is being called “ecclesial density,” a “specific gravity” sufficient to counteract the currents and countercurrents of secular culture.

When the Commission for a [so-called] New Lutheran Church opted to abolish the ministerium as a separate entity charged with guarding its normative doctrine and governing the conduct of ministers, it flung the gates wide to a populist polity; and, in establishing the quota system, made the church into a body of political interest groups. The adoption of a managerial and marketing ethos completed the virtual transformation of the church as Gemeinde into a fabricated corporation, its parishes being local outlets.

While many see in Roman Catholicism, with its Petrine Office and Magisterium, the “ecclesial density” so lacking in Lutheranism, others are looking to the Orthodox East. They regard Roman Catholicism as suffering from the same disease which Protestantism contracted in the 1960s: letting the world set the church’s agenda and seeking feverishly to be “relevant.” A “dumbed-down” liturgy, insipid music, embrace of “the triumphant therapeutic,” and, most recently, the official imposition of a lifeless translation of the Scriptures to be read at Mass – recently subjected to a withering critique by former-Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus – are frequently cited as evidence.

These Lutherans see in Orthodoxy a timelessness and stability not disturbed by the upheavals that have plagued the Western Church. They find there both a rootedness in God’s good earth and a liturgical spirituality that soars heavenward. Without apology, Orthodoxy is incarnated in ethnicity, undistracted by the Western urge toward engineered inclusivity and diversity. Its catholicity is more vertical than horizontal, one which draws its variegated mosaic of ethnic families upward toward an eschatological union in Christos Pantocrator.

These Lutherans point to the “opening to the East” being made by certain Finnish theologians who claim to have recovered theosis as an aspect of Luther’s thought, long neglected by the churches bearing the Reformer’s name.

So, these pastors are drawn to the earthy ethnicity and the heavenly ethos of Orthodoxy, undeterred by their critical brethren who warn against “aesthetic romanticism” and “triumphalist theology,” and regard their move as both an abandonment of the theologia crucis and a false equating of faith with sight. This ultimate rejection of the Western ethos, is, I submit, both attractive and utterly wrong. But I’ll save that argument for another day.

Why I’m Staying

Up until now I have postponed giving an accounting for my staying put in the ELCA. Now it’s past time for me to come clean.

I remain in the ELCA because, notwithstanding its loss of “ecclesial density,” the ELCA still contains congregations of faithful Christians where the Word is proclaimed in its purity and the sacraments are rightly administered by pastors who remain true to their vows of ordination. I, my wife of forty-seven years, a son and his family are active members of one such congregation served by one such pastor. I am linked with many other faithful pastors in the Society of the Holy Trinity, a functioning ministerium. I am aware of still more faithful pastors who “soldier on” for the sake of their flocks, refusing to flee from the menacing wolf. I see signs of a new generation intent on reclaiming their baptismal birthright. My own grandchildren are part of that generation. So also are the four gifted home highschoolers who are receiving instruction in Hebrew from our pastor and in Greek from me. In all of this I find that, amid the ruins of denominational Lutheranism, there are living, vibrant communities where the means of grace are being offered and received, and where faith is active in works of love.

The sorry condition of the ELCA in some ways reminds one of that hijacked airliner, United 93, and the heroic passengers who sought to take it back or, at least, to avert an even greater disaster. In the case of the ELCA, there is a doughty band of pastors and laity who are convinced that as “this church” was taken over by a minority of revisionists, it can be taken back by a majority of faithful confessors, observing that “there are more of us then there are of them.” Whether these hopeful souls prove to be right or not, I’m pledged to give them aid and comfort until our Lord summons me from beyond that “one more river to cross.”


Epilogue

Not long ago an overly-zealous Roman Catholic laid it on me and a couple of hundred other members of the Society of the Holy Trinity that we should abandon our leaking lifeboat and return to “Peter’s bark.” To this I, however belatedly, reply: I’m not in a lifeboat but the very ark of Christ’s church. I’ve been there since my baptism, and that’s where I’m staying. It’s one helluva stinkin place, but it’s full of redeemed sinners for whom Christ died. I intend to do what I can, God helping me, to care for the ones in my little corner until that great day when the ark arrives at its heavenly destination.

Richard J. Niebanck
June 14, 2006

I was over at our retired pastor's house the other day. Richard Niebanck is probably the most brilliant man I've met: his mind is sharp, but it is also solid. That is, he doesn't go in for hilarious novelties, and believes in orthodoxy.

He recently wrote a letter about Reasons for Staying in the Lutheran Church. He compared the church to Flight 93 that had been hijacked by terrorists with the apparent intent of flying it into the White House. Niebanck thinks the Lutheran church, too, has been hijacked by those with a secular agenda. But he thinks we can take it back, because there are more of us than there are of them.

Many are leaving. Richard Neuhaus (editor of First Things) left for Catholicism. Richard Niebanck thinks however that Catholics have "insipid music." How true. Even as a kid I would join one of my Catholic friends and they were singing sappy folk music in church to the sound of acoustic guitars. I wanted to puke. Others, like Jaroslav Pelikan, have left for the Eastern Orthodox Church. But the Eastern Orthodox have this creepy idea that we can become like Christ if we just try hard enough. Luther emphasized, without getting into quantification, that we can become slightly better people through Christ. But we can't evolve into God Almighty. Good Lord. They think we can. I like the Protestant idea of absolute depravity. Perhaps through prayer and reading the Bible we can become something like 2% like Christ.

As I started to read Richard's letter, I was afraid he was going to move out of Lutheranism altogether. But finally, he has decided to stay. Loyalty is one of Richard's attributes, and I think it's a good attribute. The problem in our church is that the laypeople have now almost the same voting rights as the ministerium (the body of pastors). I think laypeople should be kicked out and the church should be returned to full-blown pastors. The rest of us have no idea what we're talking about. The role denial of the 60s has flattened almost every pulpit and lectern and made everybody think that they know as much as the authorities if not more. It's not true. The institutions have to be returned to the authorities.

In search of authority, many are running off to join other churches that still have this sense of authority. Still others are running off to join cults whether it be postmodernist, or other secular cults to drink the pap of French suicides and cafe intellectuals. What do they have to offer? It's all so much Kool-Aid. Go ahead and drink it and perhaps through enough Mithridation you can tolerate it, and to tolerate our poisoned culture as well, and if you want to live among rats as a rat, you can fit right in. As for me, I prefer to tinct the blood of Our Lord. If it was good enough for my mom and dad (who I always thought were about as decent as any two people can get), it's good enough for me.

Silliman's blog -- http://www.ronsilliman.blogspot.com -- which is the blog that made us aware of even what a blog is, and how I too could have one, has a post today about macular degeneration and how some company isn't coughing up medicine to the citoyens. Medicine that Ron's mom needs to keep from going blind.

While I think a pharmaceutical company has the right to try to maximize profits, the government also should try to protect the eyes of citizens, and should step in and buy out a company's product so as to keep the eyes of our proletariat functioning.

Eyes is polis, as Charles Olson wrote, and we would agree. Aye aye, herr capitain!

Lockean liberalism would in effect mandate that the government protect the EYES as well as the AYE AYES, in terms of protecting the HEALTH of its citizens as well as its visual ORBS since we need the proletariat to help create an accurate VOTE.

The lumpenproletariat cannot read the Bible and get the idea of the Ten Commandments unless it can SEE. I assume that the Haute Bourgeoisie can AFFORD the higher price of the other medicine that is 100 times higher in price.

But it is not the bourgeoisie alone to which we novelists would like to hock our GOODS. We need the lumpens because it is they who have all the TIME while sitting in their prison cells or lounging in the cool basements of libraries, to READ.

Therefore, we think the government should step in and save the EYES of the POLIS!

Oh say, can you SEE?

JEFFREY DAHMER & JOHN LOCKE

Lutheran surrealism has long questioned the notion that "tolerance," should be our ultimate critical term. In Jefferson's perverse phrase, "the pursuit of happiness," we have a Sadean molecule inserted into Locke's values of life, health, liberty and property. "The pursuit of happiness," must have limits. Where Jeffrey Dahmer says, "hey, man, it's my taste!" the public has the right to say no.

Where are those rights best articulated? Not in Marx. Not in Foucault. Not in Sade. Nowhere more clearly than in Locke. The government should protect the "life, health and liberty" of its citizens. In other words, no tolerance for the anthropophagous no matter how much pleasure it brings them. "Oh man what a drag, what intolerance!" I can already hear the disciples of tolerance screaming, screaming, screaming.

Locke's principles ultimately descend from unchanging principles written on our hearts and inscribed in the ten commandments. Thou shalt not kill. "Oh, man, but you're such a killjoy you Lutherans!" But true joy is not found in the endless pursuit of perverse pleasures. It's found in adherence to God's word.

Kathy Bates in the film Misery (Stephen King vehicle) is the ultimate critic. She really wants Paul Sheldon (played by James Caan) to rewrite the end of his novel.

And she is determined to bring to bear as much pain as possible to get him to change it.

In a sense, Stephen King presents us with an author's view of almost any kind of criticism.

I often write criticism and I try to keep that film in mind as I write it. Criticism is a kind of correction, but it is also an homage. Critics and fans deserve more credit.

Every once in a while they are even happy with an author. That must be about as rare as perfect love. But perfect love is something completely different. Perfect love finds its truest moment in golden silence.

This just came across the desk. A medical study at Johns Hopkins indicates that microwaving inside of plastic causes the release of dioxins. I don't know what a dioxin is, but it causes cancer.

You are supposed to take the food out of the plastic tray and put it in a ceramic bowl, and then microwave it unless you feel like killing yourself in which case you should go on microwaving inside the plastic.

But then I tried to found counter-information on the web and came across an interview with a Johns Hopkins researcher who claims there are no dioxins in microwaved plastic dinner parts. But he does suggest it's better not to melt your plastic straw in your coffee or you end up drinking plastic chemicals.

He said that all of the above is an urban legend. People have been microwaving plastic for fifteen years, he said, and there's no research that proves the above. So, another false alarm brought to you by Lutheran Surrealism.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cookplastic.asp

PARTIAL ANSWER

A few days ago or was it weeks someone who signs in now and then named Slothrop brought up the class on postmodernism I taught at the University of Washington in 1994, and the way in which I was insisting at the top that everybody was an absolute minority of one. This was partially an anarchist critique of the Marxism that was even then prevalent not only in the academy but in the Seattle political milieu, and of which I was at the time a disgruntled part. In Marxism there are two important classes the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Through a variety of idiotic moves these two idiotic identities have morphed into the categories of race, gender and class in which identity is limited to those three groupings.

Anyone that we know cannot be reduced to such static categories but people that we don't know can. Anybody that we know quite well (and we have to get to know someone really well before we can say that we know them -- this takes years and years of living with someone before we know anything about them). To say that we can know someone based on their race, gender, or class is so laughable as to make me lose my sense of humor entirely.

And so my position at the time was that each person is a universe of their own.

And this is certainly true.

On the other hand, we are each made up of certain biological norms. Most have two eyes, two feet, one nose, and almost everybody likes the taste of chocolate, and almost everyone doesn't like to get walloped in the head with a brick. So there are certain similarities. Christians in fact would argue that everyone has a soul. I'm not sure about that, but everybody I have gotten to know very well over a period of years and years certainly has something like a soul.

Lacan posited the idea that identity was endless and that we ought in analysis to always be in the pursuit of it. To stop at a certain point and to say, I'm a gay Marxist who likes Oregon wines, or I'm a Lutheran, seems quite nuts. This is part of the reason this blog is called Lutheran Surrealism. The two categories together are so unstable that they cannot be held together.

"Qui suis-je?" Breton opens his novel Nadja.

Well, who knows? He says, we are those whom we haunt.

I doubt it.

I don't think anybody knows what we are. I don't. Anybody who tries to limit another person's identity by calling them one thing -- to say that someone is a (fill in the racial blank) or that someone is someone who typically does the above, is just not thinking.

The Alzheimers in our culture caused by the heavy wave of 68 Maoism and it's attendant push of binary identification has created a violent anti-culture that is unhealthy and is based on power-seeking.

Against this we have Gilles Deleuze and the notion of schizophrenia, and we have Flarf (where it is not the poet that is talking but some ironic procedure), and other modes that attempt to weasel out from under the interrogation offered by the banjo-playing lesbian leaders of the Cultural Studies revolution which is now morphing into a new layer of delirium at the same time it is increasingly being laughed into oblivion.

But I finally realized that it is Christianity not anarchism or postmodernism that is the truest antidote to those who want to create two identities, a good and a bad, and then go to war over it. When Christ identifies the good Samaritan (Samaritans were a hated sect) as the only one who would go out of the way to help he challenged the notion that we can ever think clearly about another group.

We can only think about individuals.

And when individuals are at their best (thinking in the religious framework, as Kierkegaard taught) then they rise to a level where they see with compassion and beauty and love.

Lutheran surrealism cannot pretend to have risen to those heights. But we recognize that there was one who did, and although we realize we are unworthy, if there is anything on earth we would like to identify with, it's the Christian message.

Walking on water, making bread fall from the sky, is completely surreal, and at the same time, it's ethically marvelous. It's the central event of humanity, and the central lyrical thrust of western civilization.

Marxism is a perversion, a turn into a Pharisaical bitterness. I detest its angry spirit, and think of it as the work of a devil, if not the Devil.

For the last few days I have been in Brooklyn staying with a friend who lives in the area called Carroll Gardens. While wandering around I popped into bookstores. Everybody was unbelievably friendly and helpful. I got invitations to read at bookstores, and so on. My friend Gary Mayer (his daughter is my daughter's best friend) was repainting one of the apartments in his brownstone that had turned over and he had invited me to stay. Wondrous. The apartment was 2300 a month for a very sizable two-bedroom. One could hear the sounds of cars going by, and the neighbor's music penetrated in, too, so I should have slept even worse than I usually do but due to my having walked about ten miles every day, and the lovely sound of the rain through the open window, I was fairly deeply asleep all night, and every sound startled me into becoming even more asleep. Tt was a beautiful place in an endless neighborhood of pizza shops, Indian restaurants, small bookstores, parks, and of course incredible churches with spires that pointed to Our Common Father.

Sunday I attended Marianne Moore's Presbyterian Lafayette Street church. This is a massive brownstone church whose spire was destabilized and later taken off when the G-train was dug underneath it in the 1930s. The church is struggling since Moore's day when there were 4000 congregants. Today there are only one-tenth that number. I met the pastor, and I met quite by accident while jotting down notes a very erudite Moore scholar named Edward Moran who showed me around the neighborhood and explained to me much of the inside of the church. The church is quite striking. It has murals of the local people on the high walls, and has a quite good, very liberal pastor. He was so liberal that I couldn't quite believe my ears at points. He said that the current administration was spiritually arrogant (he named Rumsfeld) and a portion of the congregation responded, "Amen!"

The pastor (Pastor Dyson) also said that liberal theologians talk about the Sermon on the Mount and love, while conservatives talk about the Ten Commandments and rigid rules. That's how you can tell the difference. He talked a lot about the Sermon on the Mount and love, and it was fun to read through the powerful text once more. Matthew 6. The order of things was odd, too, if not as completely different as the sermon.

For instance when communion was offered the deacons brought tiny glasses of wine back to us sitting in the pews. In my church we go up to the front and kneel before the cross. Also, their wine was grape juice, which Edward Moran hypothesized may have something to do with the temperance background of that particular Presbyterian church. We drink actual wine, but I only tinct (touch the wafer to the surface of the goblet of wine) because I am afraid of virological infection. I try to sit in the front too so that I am first or second up, and thus don't have to get the whole congregation's germs.

There are other differences. I am used to kneeling in prayer on kneelers that really hurt my knees even though the kneelers are padded with red leather. I don't mind the pain too much since after all Jesus went through a pretty rough time up there on the cross and by comparison the pain in my knees isn't intolerable. But these Presbyterians didn't have to do this kneeling business at all. Also they had a professional choir whose singing was angelic. We make do with our own voices. But when I tried to sing their hymns and heard my braying compared to the angelic tunefulness of that incredible choir I felt very depressed. The Tiffany windows of their church are quite striking. Our windows on the other hand might have been made by someone named Tiffany, but it wasn't the one in NYC. Still, I like the humble clarity of our own stained-glass windows. It was a delicious adventure to attend their church and to see how different it was from my own. Christ from the Presbyterian angle is a completely different kettle of fish, but we still share the notion that Christianity is about inner peace, and that the dove that attended to Christ at the river Jordan is ours through his love.

Back in Delhi I was surprised at the beautiful morning. I didn't really wish to come back as I was having fun in Brooklyn but had to do so in order to attend a class on on-line teaching. But the morning was brilliant. Sunny, with the trees now all completely green, and many dandelions in my lawn. I have to get the lawn mower out and make a little noise.

EGO-SURFING!

The latest nomenclature says that "ego-surfing" is what we do when we go strolling through the internet for mentions of our name. I do it quite often, and although it is not as good for my health as the long walks I used to take instead, it is much more addictive, and sometimes just as fascinating as mislabeling the plants, birds, trees, and flowers in my surrounding neighborhood.

This time there were three new reviews that popped up. Two of them are reviews of my novel. The third is a review of my poetry.

The first review of my novel can be found here. It was brief, and not very punishing! Just one page, in a journal of some kind that I couldn't quite get. How many people read such a journal? Let's hope millions! But why did they call it hackwriters? Doesn't that demean the credibility of the reviewer? Nevertheless, I was so gratified that he found the novel to be funny:

http://www.hackwriters.com/temping.htm

The second review of my novel is much longer and it appears in a big literary journal (well, it sounds big) called The California Review, of which I'd never heard but which looks kind of official. The reviewer is a distinguished professor at the University of Mississippi. At any rate, this is a southern review of sorts. I mean, he goes on for a while, as people in the south (I'm told) do. Get a watermelon from the fridge before you sit down with it.

http://calitreview.com/Reviews/temping_088.htm

The final review is by a young man named Jon Leon who apparently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. I looked him up and saw a picture of him. He's only 23 and is thin but not too thin. I'm not at all sure that this link will work as I tried to send it to someone and it didn't seem to work. In a certain way this is the best of the three reviews in terms of my being on seemingly the same page with the author. That is, he took notice of and yet didn't mind my Christian viewpoint. But this is my poetry chapbook not my novel, so maybe my poetry actually works better. Beats me. If you can't open it, use Google to find Galatearesurrection2, and then see if you can open it that way but it will take you all day. This seems to be a blog journal of sorts? Probably few will read this (what we here at LS would deeply wish for is a counter, along with a follow-up meter attached to the brain of the reader directly indicating how many of those who read the reviews went on to buy the book, and of those, how many enjoyed them, and of those, how long did the half-life of the book remain inside the head of the given reader?). Lutheran Surrealist marketing will have to get to work on these things and much more as we plot out our takeover of American (and ultimately world) culture.

http://galatearesurrection2.blogspot.com/2006/05/waiting-for-rapture-by-kirby-olson.html