I’ve finished the layout and design for my writing page of my website. As opposed to this blog the content there is longer, and more academic in nature. Much of it concerns culture, media, and politics. If that sounds interesting then head here.
Author: Andrew Spittle
DeLillo’s “Underworld”
I’m in the process of reading Don DeLillo’s book Underworld. The book, like everything he writes is fascinating and really breaks up the linear process of most fiction story-telling. Outside of all that though I find the simple way in which he makes obscure and foul things seem artful and well-written almost magical.
For instance, in this book he is discussing the way in which one of the characters, Marvin to be exact, experienced worsening bowel movements during his honeymoon through Eastern Europe. DeLillo writes:
The smell that surrounded him was infused with what, with geopolitics, and he waved a towel for five minutes and propped open the window, it kept closing, with a rolled-up copy of Pravda, he was still looking for baseball scores, and then he went and stood in their room and watched Eleanor sleep–she came from a gentle rural place and could easily perish from his reek.
Any author who is able to tie the geopolitics of the Cold War and Eastern Europe into a baseball fan’s worsening bowel movements while traveling through the country is a master in my mind. I don’t know why he does it this way or how it appears (to me at least) to be so well done, but it is and I love it.
Technorati
I just added this blog to Technorati, so this post introduces that (and gets that pesky little bit of code that they require onto the front page). Enjoy.
Religion and Fertility
The always interesting Andrew Sullivan has a great post up today in which he quotes Anthony Gottlieb on the correlation between religion and fertility. Part of the quote reads:
Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.
It seems to me that what Gottlieb defines here as “conventional wisdom” would simply be repudiated through the events of the last few decades. With the growth of the technology industry many aspects of business have become more and more industrialized and yet since the 1970s much of the nation has seen a religious revival.
The link to fertility is also interesting from a personal background. It does seem to me (despite the fact that I grew up in a very conservative and very religious area) that my friends who came from backgrounds of large families were more religious. Furthermore, even those that weren’t religious in a traditional sense were what many would call “spiritual.”
Here’s the link to Sullivan’s article and the link to the original Gottlieb piece.
Weather
The Northwest is crazy right now. I spent all of yesterday traveling from Walla Walla to Portland through the Columbia River Gorge (the drive too 8 hours). Now today I’m waiting in Portland hoping that the flight to Fresno, CA doesn’t get cancelled. As I sit here it just keeps snowing and snowing. I’m kind of wishing there had been an early morning flight; it seems the later in the day the worse it gets.
New Site Finished
So the new site is finished. You can see it here. Since I’m not on a real web host with MySQL and php capabilities I’ve moved this blog over there as well. The posts are all the same, but the design is definitely different, and in my eyes, better. Enjoy.
Welcome
Welcome to the newly redesigned and rehosted (if that’s a word) interation of this blog. What you see in front of you was the accumulation of a couple afternoons of designing my homepage and then modifying this Hemingway theme to match. For the most part the design is done, which is why you’re seeing it, but I’m still making some subtle changes (mostly to the footer and my homepage). From here the blog will continue and the old one at diversions.wordpress.com will be left as it is. Hope you continue to enjoy the content. Thanks as always.
Dreamhost
Dreamhost (link) is doing an end of the year promotion right now. You get unlimited hosting space and bandwith plus a free domain name for 6 months for the price of only $9.95. After that the prices go back to regular, but it’s certainly a deal for the first six months. I just picked up andrewspittle.net so when I finish with the design of my site it will be up there.
Interior of a church
Trey Ratcliff produces amazing hdr photography. As the first photographer to have an hdr image displayed in the Smithsonian his is some of the best. Here’s what he posted for today.
New Design in Progress
Just a heads up that I’m currently working on a complete redesign of my personal site so if there is any intermittent down-time over the next few days I do apologize. The redesign ought to be finished in a week or so (seeing as I’m now done with finals and can devote more time to it). Anyway, I’m pretty excited about it as it’ll be a huge improvement over what it is now.