Fiction

Pynchon: Let the Non-Reader Beware

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Are Pynchon and Dickens essentially the same writer? Alan Jacobs notes, “The Pynchonian and the Dickensian projects have a great deal in common [big rambling eventful tragicomic books featuring outlandish characters with comical names], and as time goes on I think it will become more and more clear that there is something truly old-fashioned about Pynchon’s career.”

Jacobs says Pynchon’s style appears to be to write long, complex books about people who don’t read long books at all. His characters are caught up in the Interwebs, the TeleVision, and commercial products of all types. He says Pynchon may be driving at a warning: let the non-reader beware.

Goofing

An interesting Lutheran

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I meditated the other day, in this space, on the question of whether Lutherans are boring. It’s a given, of course, that I’m boring personally, but what about the rest of my brethren? I tried to think of some notable Lutheran I could point to and say, “You call that boring? Ha!” But I couldn’t come up with any.

And then one of my Facebook friends posted this video.

Now I don’t know whether Egil Ronningsbakken, the performance artist here, is a Lutheran or not. Odds are he’s at least nominally Lutheran, since most Norwegians are, but more and more Norwegians are purely secular nowadays, without even going through the traditional pro formas of baptism and confirmation.

Still, he’s at least Lutheran by heritage. And whatever you may call whatever it is he’s doing, you can’t call it boring. Frankly, just watching the video is almost physically painful to me, afraid of heights as I am.

I might mention that Preikestolen, the cliff where he’s performing here, is the precise spot I had in mind in the big climactic scene in The Year of the Warrior where Erling and his men confront a warlock under the northern lights. I called it the High Seat in the book, not in order to protect the innocent, but just because I assumed that Preikestolen (The Pulpit) wouldn’t be a name the Vikings would have used. So I made one up.

Lutherans. Not boring. Just bug-eye crazy.

Music

The End of This Story Brought Me to Tears

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A friend asked me to read an illustration of God’s faithfulness yesterday morning. Perhaps, you’ve read or heard it. Here’s the start of one version.

A mother took her small child to a concert by Paderewski to expose him to the talent of the great pianist. She hoped as she did to encourage her son in his piano lessons, which he had just begun.

They arrived early at the concert and were seated near the front. Standing alone on the stage was a marvelous Steinway grand piano. As they waited for the concert to begin, the mother entered into a conversation with the people beside her.

Her boy had wandered up to the stage and began to play “Chopsticks” (or “Twinkle, Twinkle” in other versions). Members of the audience called out to get the boy off the stage and asked who was responsible for him, but then Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski hurried out to the piano. He leaned over the boy and whispered, “Keep playing, son. Don’t stop.” The master reached around him and improvised a piece worthy of the concert audience.

The story illustrates God’s faithful encouragement to his people. The version I read was in a Charles Swindoll book, which elaborated on God’s words to us. Keep going. Don’t give up. That’s the part where I teared up.

The story isn’t true, unfortunately. It’s a good illustration and has a bit of the variations you see in common among urban legends. Truth or Fiction says it may have been inspired by a poster for a Polish Relief event, showing Paderewski encouraging a young Polish boy at the piano.

But since we’re talking about urban legend types, you may have seen the one about the guitarist who gave a lengthy solo at the end of one of his band’s regular numbers. Someone began to boo him. The musician challenged this non-fan, saying, “If you think you can do better, come up here and prove it.” And the man walks up to the stage, showing himself to be Eric Clapton.

Continue reading The End of This Story Brought Me to Tears →
Religion

"Those that sleep in the Lord"

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Our friend Gene Edward Veith at Cranach blog links to a post where the blogger wonders why, if many young people are being attracted to liturgical churches, as has been widely reported, they aren’t streaming to Lutheran churches.

Our friend Anthony Sacramone, at Strange Herring, provides an answer: Lutherans are boring:

Growing up, all the Lutherans I knew were boring. They minded their ps and qs and paid their taxes on time (begrudgingly—I was LCMS, after all) and kept their heads down and their feet on the ground. They were good citizens and thought things through and were practical, rarely all that imaginative (although every once in a while a teacher would try and shake things up, only to be brought to heel if no great measurable results were forthcoming). There were exceptions, of course. (An elementary school teacher pretty much drank himself to death.) But they were notable for being exceptions.

I would rise to the spirited defense of my Lutheran brethren (and Anthony is a Lutheran, by the way), but I think I need a nap.

Religion

We Fought the War for Religious Liberty Too.

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Thomas Kidd of Baylor University talks about Christians wanting to sanitize the past and the restrictions on religious worship in the American colonies:

If religious liberty is one of our greatest national legacies, we can thank many early Baptists for being on the front lines of the fight for that liberty. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and later Rhode Island, Roger Williams was one of the first dissenting voices speaking out against a state establishment of religion, and against the state policing people’s religious beliefs. (For Williams, religion was too important for the government to meddle in it.) In the era of the Revolution, Baptists emerging from the Great Awakening wanted full freedom to create their own churches and to preach to whomever they wished. In most of the colonies, such freedom was not readily granted.

We forget that at the same time as the fight for independence from Britain, Americans were also fighting for freedom from oppressive religious laws. There were Baptist pastors being fined and even jailed for illegal preaching in Virginia in the early 1770s.

Goofing

Enough to curl your hair

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I’m not the Norway expert I thought I was. I hadn’t been aware that the Norwegian Olympic curling team is famous, not for winning matches, but for wearing silly pants.

I do not feel richer for the knowledge. It does make me feel better about my ancestors’ decision to emigrate, though.

Tip: “Scott” at Threedonia.

Authors

Personally Acquainted with Martin Luther King, Jr.

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The American Policy Roundtable has a podcast this week on Dr. Martin Luther King with a pastor who knew him personally, Dr. Sterling Glover. It’s remarkable what some of us do not know about certain important figures in our country or the truth of the biggest civil problem of 20th century America.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Guilt,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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Another Alex Delaware novel from Jonathan Kellerman, another enjoyable reading experience. The series is long established now, and few surprises are to be expected, except perhaps in terms of whodunnit. But the virtues of the books are consistent. Good main characters, interesting, layered secondary characters. And a studied avoidance of cheap shots at almost anybody, including conservative Christians.

In Guilt, Alex and his gay cop friend, Milo Sturgis, are called to a house where a tree has been uprooted in a storm. Under its roots was found a metal box, and in the box the carefully wrapped skeleton of a baby. A newspaper in the box identifies the burial as from 1951.

Then, in a nearby park, another, newer baby skeleton is found, as well as the body of a young woman, a girl from Oregon who worked as a nanny. Suspicion soon points to an A-list celebrity couple raising their brood of adopted children in seclusion on a heavily guarded estate. It’s easy to imagine what might have happened.

But it’s not as simple as that.

The great joy of a Kellerman novel, novels written by a psychologist about a psychologist, is how the characters reveal themselves, in a sort of psychic undressing. A shallow expectant mother is revealed to be so frightened about the future that she’s having trouble coping. A celebrity turns out to be entirely different than one would expect – or is it all just an act at the end? Nothing interests me like complex human personalities, and that’s where Kellerman excels.

There are some Christian fundamentalists in this one, and Kellerman treats them with his customary decency. An Oregon evangelical pastor who wouldn’t impose his “personal” views about homosexuality on his parishioners seems a bit of a stretch, but it’s a generous stretch by Kellerman’s lights, so I take it in the spirit intended.

Recommended, with the usual caveats.

Authors

Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing From Birmingham

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April 16, 1963–

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

…

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

The audio from King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail is available for downloading until Thursday for free.

Publishing

5 Reasons You May Never Be Published

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Steve Laube gives this list of reasons some writers may never see their work in print:

  1. You Won’t Do the Work
  2. You Are Hard of Hearing
  3. You Aren’t Ready
  4. Your Idea has Already Been Done
  5. Agents and Editors are Blind to Your Genius

“The bottom line” he says, “is that if you do the work, have a teachable spirit, are fully prepared, and with a unique idea…number five on the list shouldn’t be a problem.”