Old World Swine

Big News!

 

Okay.

 

(Deep breath)

 

Some of you may be aware of this already, but many may not; in a few weeks, I'll be joining the faculty of the Chesterton Academy in Minneapolis as their teacher of art. Huzzahs all around!!

 

We have been (quietly) making preparations large and small for months and will be moving from the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas to semi-temporary digs in Andover, MN on August 1st. This will be just about at the middle point between the Chesterton Academy and my wife's new job (hurray!!), about a half-hour commute for both of us.

This is all tangentially related to my (still somewhat painful and awkward) withdrawal from the Catholic Blogosphere and what I know must seem my inexplicable abandonment of The League of Bearded Catholics project.

Oy. Please suffice to say that even as an active blogger, I was pretty guarded about my personal life, and some of my reasons for leaving TLBC and Old World Swine in mothballs (for now) are personal and would be difficult to articulate fully. It came down to weighing my various duties before God and having to make hard choices. I simply bit off more than I could chew all at once. Something had to go, at least for a time. I'm truly sorry to all those I may have confused and disappointed in that process.

After some years of fitful career struggles, God simply dropped the positon at the Chesterton Academy into my lap. Okay, maybe it wasn't as out-of-the-blue as all that, but it was rather sudden.

I had been working at making a transition from commercial art to fine art (painting), and after losing my last full-time job (a pretty decent gig), had made a semi-conscious decision not to commit myself deeply to graphic art so that I would be able to walk away more easily when I needed to. This meant taking on a high volume of simple local freelance jobs for pretty low pay, which kept me very busy and very stressed, seeing as how we were nearly always broke. I don't think I could have taken on another corporate position and kept my sanity (such as it is). One has to pretend to care deeply about too many trivial things, and I'm just approaching that age where I can't pretend to care.

You just never know what may happen at a Chesterton conference! At the 2011 Chesterton Conference in St. Louis, I brought some prints of my artwork to hawk between presentations. One thing, as they say, led to another, and next thing I knew, I was sitting at Dale Ahlquist's kitchen table, talking about art and Chesterton and life and stuff through a lovely haze of pipe smoke. Once you see Chesterton's walking stick in person, there's no turning back.

Oddly, events have turned out so that I will have to miss the 2012 Chesterton Conference in Reno in a couple of weeks. We'll be unpacking right then.

We covet your prayers. See you around Minneapolis!

T.T.F.N... Ta-Ta, For Now

 
 
It's Jimmy Akin's fault I ever began blogging, or looking at blogs. That was - holy cow - back in 2005! I posted at JimmyAkin.Org for a while, and in 2007 I started Old World Swine and began posting very regularly.

I've racked up 650 posts, almost 2500 comments and 143,000 page views. Thanks, for that. I've enjoyed all of it. I enjoy it more than is good for me, truth be told.

Those of you who have followed my blogging arc know that my posting activity has dropped sharply over the last year or so, and there are some good reasons for that, though I have mixed feelings.

Over time I've come to the conviction that - though I love blogging and though it has helped me keep my sanity at times - it is a luxurious time-sink that I can no longer very well afford. See, though I really enjoy writing, it does not always come easily for me, so even a modest post might take me an hour or two to polish up so it would be presentable in public.

In addition, I have for a few years been working to make a shift in my career from graphic art to illustration and fine art. This would be an admirable task even for a better talent, but for a "bear of very little brain", it's even more tricky, because one thing I've discovered about myself is that I am not good at balancing a lot of different kinds of activities. Studio art requires a major time commitment and a certain kind of concentration, and it takes me a while to find The Zone. Once I'm there, it is a pain in the arse to be shaken out of it. It's like deep-sea diving; it takes a while to prepare and to arrive, and it takes a while to decompress.

All that is to say that I'm no renaissance man. No polymath. It appears to me that I have to choose between being an amateur writer and being a professional artist, and put in those terms, there simply is no choice to make. I am an artist, not a writer (dammit, Spock). I already gave up being a rock star. My guitar sits gathering dust (figuratively speaking. It's actually in a case).

Hopefully, those who know me now mainly through my blogging will know me in the future mainly through my artwork, which will be cropping up here and there, especially in Catholic circles. I'm really itchin' to paint some saints, God willing.

So, anyhow, though I may post here now and then, this pretty well marks the end of Old World Swine. I'll keep it open here, and I've archived it just in case. Many thanks and blessings to all of you who have dropped by, left comments and had conversations. It has meant more to me than you know.

I'll be posting from time to time at Jimmy Akin's blog, now, so I hope to see you around!

Scientific Progress Goes "Boink"

Please remove your hats and observe a moment of internet silence...

Our old beast of a computer gave up the ghost in dramatic fashion last night, and so we will be broadcasting for a while from the luxuriously appointed facilities of our local public library, which finds it sensible to dole out internet time in two half-hour sessions per day.

I wouldn't be too surprised to find that this actually improves the quality. Economy is undervalued as an attribute of good writing.

Incidentally, this reminds me of an old blue jean jacket that I, my wife and some friends gave a true Viking funeral,l once upon a time. We sat and watched (and drank)  on the lake shore, as it floated away, burning. This was a little hard to explain to the policeman who came around... at 2:00 a.m..

I don't suppose a similar send-off would be ecologically appropriate for a computer. But then, it might actually be better than "recycling" it. There's no way we can make our curent level of wasteful living make sense, not even with fairy tales of recycling.

Oh, well. Maybe I can use it as a boat anchor. When I get a boat.

500 Posts!

500 posts!

I have a great deal to celebrate and to be thankful for every day, so one more rather superfluous and completely arbitrary milestone would hardly seem worthy of note, but hey... any excuse for a party.

The last post was number 500 here at Old World Swine, and this one makes 501, as in the kind of roomy (what they euphemistically call "relaxed fit") Levi's worn by guys of my generation, because we can kid ourselves for a while longer that we're really not that much bigger than we were in high school. The waist of the pants is one size, and the remainder is, like, three sizes bigger.

And speaking of waste, this blog is an equal opportunity waste of your time and mine, as you readers have contributed just over 2000 comments, or about four per post (okay... half of them were probably mine, but you can't say I'm not paying attention!).

I said in the combox of another blog recently that this is a little roadside fruit stand on the information superhighway, but it is mine and I enjoy it. I have come to treasure the relationships that have been fostered through this blog (and my occasional blurb at Jimmy Akin's). Foxhole people, the whole lot of you (that is, the kind of people I would want in a foxhole with me, if I had to be in one).

It is a bit like having an open door and being fortunate enough to have a couple of friends drop by now and then for some good conversation over a cup of hot tea, or cold beer, or on occasion something stronger (*knowing wink*).

Thanks to all for stopping by. What with some of my favorite bloggers bowing out, lately (Dawn Eden, Feddie at Southern Appeal, Amy Welborn) I have been recalling moments when I have felt like wrapping it up, when I wasn't really motivated to post anything, or when I remembered that practically everything I have ever written has been written about better and more thoroughly by someone else in the Catholic blogosphere. I don't think I could ever just quit, though, without popping up in some other form after a few weeks. It's a marvelous outlet, for a hermit crab like myself.

It's a blessing to me, and so I do celebrate my 500 posts and my 2000 comments, even if Mark Shea will likely get more visitors in his sleep tonight than I have had all year. That's not what motivates me (or him, I dare say) to blog.

"Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death." - Hilaire Belloc