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2021 the virtue gift and discipline of secrecy excerpts from middling i write an occasional newsletter quarterly when i don t forget to friends and family about my life music books work and getting older i d love to send it to you sign up for middling here color what follows is an excerpt from the winter 2020 issue before the whole world shut down considering how regularly i assail you with blog posts tweets instas and newsletters you might be surprised that a favorite recent read of mine is titled how to disappear color akiko busch sucked me in with her introductory chapter as she sat quietly in a forest observing how intentionally most of creation seeks to hide that insight springs into a series of essays on the virtue gift and discipline of secrecy of not making a scene of ourselves of allowing ourselves to be simply part of something larger i was drawn to the book by the title but i moved it to the top of the pile after someone suggested to me that i was too power hungry a critique that comes up occasionally enough that i can t ignore it even though i kind of resent it if how to disappear isn t still my favorite read nine months from now i ll be surprised and i ll surely let you know a much less transformative but similarly knowing book i read recently is the lager queen of minnesota color i heard it praised as an homage to the midwest and that sounded pretty good to me and it is quite good keenly insightful about how midwestern relationships work even when those relationships proceed without contact over the course of decades i want to give it to my mom because i think she ll like it and i want her to give it to her siblings because she thinks they ll like it at april 02 2021 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday march 31 2021 anachronistic today excerpts from middling i write an occasional newsletter quarterly when i don t forget to friends and family about my life music books work and getting older i d love to send it to you sign up for middling here color what follows is an excerpt from the winter 2020 issue before the whole world shut down i got some great music for christmas a new record by the avett brothers the debut album of the americana supergroup the highwomen a three disc concept album by sleeping at last and the thirtieth anniversary reissue of one of the most personally significant records of my life shawn colvin is what might be called a folk music superstar her music has been the soundtrack to several significant points of my life i first heard her cover of every little thing she does is magic by the police while kara and i were hot tubbing on our honeymoon and her collaboration with steve earle on the beatles song baby s in black was playing when a giant truck pulling a giant trailer plowed into the back of our one week old toyota rav4 my pastor and i figured out that we were probably at the same shawn colvin concert in the student activity center at northwestern university in the early 1990s but before all that shawn colvin was the artist behind one of the first cds i ever bought steady on would become the grammy winner for best contemporary folk album of 1991 how she won two years after the fact is beyond me while aging teen idol donny osmond was reinventing himself as the soldier of love depeche mode was milking the life out of your own personal jesus and milli vanilli was pretending to sing blame it on the rain shawn colvin was quietly strumming the opening chords to the title track and offering an ode to vulnerability china gets broken and it will never be the same it only got better from there with the second track my favorite at the time you re shining i can see you you re smiling that s enough i m holding on to you like a diamond in the rough i had tracks i preferred over others of course but i very nearly wore the grooves off that cd or however the technology works it occurs to me as i write this that this cd still in my possession is older than at least one of my coworkers in the past that would have sent me into a fetal position but i seem to be coming to peace with my advanced age anyway this year shawn colvin celebrated her thirtieth anniversary as a recording artist with a track by track return to this first album stripped away are the 1980s production values tastefully executed at the time but certainly anachronistic today the heart and soul of the record remains piercing and sober storytelling over lovely melodies and expert guitar work nobody does it like shawn colvin and these songs prove it just as effectively as her later more mature work i ll draw your attention to two songs from the record the first cry like an angel was the song i turned to after terrorists flew two planes into the world trade center in new york city on september 11 2001 and aimed a third plane at the pentagon the streets of my town she prophesied in 1989 are not what they were they are haloed in anger bitter and hurt may we all find salvation in professions that heal the second was one of the lesser lights to nineteen year old me but it s the song she used to promote this new record and it s doing it for me quite nicely these days it s hard to believe she had this much soul when she recorded it in her thirties i don t mean that as an insult to my thirty something readers that s an age range not a quantity only to point out just how much soul she crams in there at march 31 2021 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday march 29 2021 there was a chance 2020 would be great excerpts from middling i write an occasional newsletter quarterly when i don t forget to friends and family about my life music books work and getting older i d love to send it to you sign up for middling here color what follows is an excerpt from the winter 2020 issue before the whole world shut down the safest place is the more or less middling the mean average is not noticed w h auden the age of anxiety when i was a kid i thought about 2020 a lot that would be the year i would turn fifty and at the time fifty seemed to me about the oldest a person could get to speculate so far into the future seemed both pointless and irresistible what would the world be like what would i be like there were good reasons to wonder when i was a kid my society was enduring the aftermath of the abrupt end of a corrupt presidency we were facing global tensions on several fronts i read more than one library book about inter continental ballistic missiles before i was ten the middle east was a powder keg the economy was sputtering people hadn t learned not to pollute yet there was disco music it wasn t all bad of course sure we had barry manilow to deal with but we also had the ramones and schoolhouse rock color rest in peace jack sheldon sure the rain had acid in it but there was also this owl and this native american guy actively appealing to us to give a hoot and not pollute there was a chance i d make it to fifty there was a chance 2020 would be great i think about the past differently than the future or the present in my memories the hard stuff is less hard because i know i ve survived it the scary stuff is less scary because it s become more known than unknown even the lofty ambitions are right sized by the passage of time we aren t cured of the past we carry it with us but the passion and the pain of it levels off we become detached enough from it to consider it with grace in a matter of months i ll be hitting my fiftieth birthday having reached this year of my preoccupation i suppose it s time to be preoccupied with something else 2070 perhaps when i ll be a hundred years old which seems like just about the oldest a person can get meanwhile it occurs to me that there will be people thinking back to this unfolding decade with the same mix of melancholy nostalgia and i hope gracious detachment as i now think of the 1970s maybe one of those people will be me maybe it will be you maybe we should start practicing such gracious detachment even today fifty nifty schoolhouse rock at march 29 2021 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday september 21 2020 hashtag winning excerpts from middling i write an occasional newsletter quarterly when i don t forget to friends and family about my life music books work and getting older i d love to send it to you sign up for middling here what follows is an excerpt from the fall 2019 issue every september i attend a retreat for the academy of christian editors a feature of that retreat is a sharing circle where we each get roughly a minute to introduce our favorite book we read over the past year you can see this year s complete list here i always find this exercise a little stressful i want my choice to be distinct and memorable something i won t be judged for except to be judged as distinct and memorable myself i had a number of books that came to mind including the one i was still reading as i flew to nashville for the retreat the nickel boys by colson whitehead this novel inspired by true events is set in the mid 1960s at a reform school for boys all the students are tyrannized by the staff but the black kids are routinely terrorized and brutalized whitehead is a master at creating characters and carrying the reader into and through terrible things and he does so here again schools like this one existed in my lifetime maybe they still do i m haunted by that how many other atrocities are we allowing to exist and why are we allowing it but i hadn t finished the nickel boys yet so instead i put forward mandela and the general a beautifully drawn graphic novel recounting the true story of how newly elected south african president nelson mandela who was actively dismantling the century old system of apartheid that had privileged whites over people of color met with and earned the respect and loyalty of the leader of a nationalist resistance group bent on taking south africa back for the whites a story i d never heard before powerful compelling and nobody else had picked it winning thanks for reading if you d like to get middling in your in box give me a shout and i ll set you up at september 21 2020 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest older posts home subscribe to posts atom both inspiration and cautionary tale excerpts from middling what follows is an excerpt from the winter 2021 edition of middling my quarterly newsletter on music books work and getting older i moron making a scene david byrne on how christianity works in a previous post i recounted the eight priorities of making a scene according to talking heads frontman david byrne in his recent book h wild goose festival a recap i ve never been to greenbelt the famed nearly forty year old british festival of faith justice and creativity i ve heard countle subscribe to the middling newsletter search this blog about me david zimmerman view my complete 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