Jay Arnold
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Industry | Education |
| Occupation | Teacher |
| Location | Columbia, TN, United States |
| Introduction | I am not this fat anymore. I grew up in east central Alabama and presently live in coastal Georgia. I have lived in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey as well. I married a Jersey girl who is both more attractive and more intelligent than I am. I have four funny, intelligent, really and truly handsome kids. I play banjo, guitar, and mandolin. I grew up playing hillbilly music on my granddaddy's front porch (in other words, I ain't no "revivalist"; my granddaddy was a drop-thumb player who started playing in 1929 after he traded a bushel of corn for a homemade banjo). I am tinkering around with the classical spiritual disciplines (see Dallas Willard) so that I can 1) stop sinning and 2) renovate American culture through teaching, writing, and picking made potently archetypal and mythopoeic (I hope) through my (desultory) study of ancient and medieval languages and literatures. Finally, I believe that pre-Flood civilization was insanely advanced and included space travel, mind levitation, mystical kung-fu warriors, Atlantis -- essentially, Star Wars, except it happened here instead of in a galaxy far, far away. |
| Interests | Folk music, theology, philosophy, history, mythology, education, the Western Canon, language(s), Literature, Sponge Bob, Southern history and culture and vernacular and literature, dragons, sea monsters, antediluvian technology, space travel without astronaut suits |
| Favorite movies | Badlands; The Outsiders; The Long Riders; Coal Miner's Daughter; Lonesome Dove; Kung Fu Hustle; Raging Bull; Raising Arizona; Deer Hunter; The Elephant Man; The Princess Bride; The Godfather Parts 1 and 2 |
| Favorite music | Hank Williams; George Jones; John Prine; Carter Family; Flatt & Scruggs; Stanley Brothers; Louvin Brothers; Delmore Brothers; Bach; anything played badly on an old scratchy fiddle or a clunky clawhammer banjo |
| Favorite books | Dostoevsky's five major novels plus Notes from the Underground; The Intellectual Life (Sertillanges); The Meaning of the City (Ellul); Watership Down (Adams); Perelandra & The Weight of Glory(Lewis); Beowulf; The Illiad; The Christian Criticism of Life(Hough); Evangelical Theology (Barth); the poetry of Pablo Neruda; The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Tolkien) |
If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?
I guess I'll just have to answer your question with another question - how many abor-diginals do you see invloved in cultural renewal?