Professor Jerram Barrs’ book, Echoes of Eden, has 11 beginning criteria for judging the arts. For example: “Is giftedness from God evident in the work of a particular composer or performer of music, poet or novelist, painter, sculptor, or filmmaker? We should ask this question about the presence of giftedness for all artists, whether Christian or not.”
Blood on demand
Reader TWS requested a picture of fighting from the Tivoli Fest in Elk Horn, Iowa. This is the best one I got. Unfortunately the selection is small, because my camera batteries ran down.
Creative Habits
Mason Curry talks about the habits of artists in a three week series on the work routines of famous creatives. Frank Lloyd Wright started getting up at 4:00 a.m. and working until 7:00. Curry writes:
Indeed, many artists are early risers because they have little other choice; working early in the morning is a tried and true method of fitting creative work into busy schedules. The 19th-century novelist Frances Trollope is a good example. She did not begin writing until the age of 53, and then only because she desperately needed money to support her six children and ailing husband. In order to squeeze the necessary writing time out of the day while still acting as the primary caregiver to her family, Trollope sat down at her desk each day at 4 a.m. and completed her writing in time to serve breakfast. Her son Anthony Trollope later adopted a similar schedule, getting up at 5:30 a.m. and writing for two hours before going to his job at the post office. (Later in this series, I’ll be looking closely at artists who also held down full-time day jobs.)
Curry has just released a book on this topic: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
How to Discourage Christian Artists
I suspect there are many followers of Christ who are called to the arts (they may not believe they are qualified to be labeled Christian artists) who feel out of place in the church or maybe at home or maybe everywhere. In this post, Philip Ryken lists many reasons artists feel uneasy in their churches. He says, “…Christians called to draw, paint, sculpt, sing, act, dance, and play music have extraordinary opportunities to honor God in their daily work and to bear witness to the grace, beauty, and truth of the gospel.”
We may be discouraged by other believers who commodify all art or praise cheap or bad art regularly. Some never offer to pay for the artistic work they want, but they also praise successful artists as if material success validates their artistic call. I’ve felt the tension of thinking of art only in terms of evangelism or pre-evangelism. But to requote N.T. Wright, artists “have a vocation to re-imagine and re-express the beauty of God, to lift our sights and change our vision of reality.” I want to climb that ladder, but I fear I will never leave the ground.
Tivoli report 2013
John Chadwell of Skjaldborg lectures on Viking combat.
I’m happy to report that, to the best of my knowledge, I made it to Elk Horn, Iowa for the Tivoli Fest and returned undamaged. That also goes for Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker. The town of Elk Horn is located in southwest Iowa, and hasn’t moved any closer since the last time I was there (I checked), but I made it.
The Tivoli Fest, like so many celebrations this past weekend, was marred by the Bergen-like weather we’ve been having on the Great Plains. But the rain held off most of Saturday, which is the main day. I sold and signed books in the Danish Windmill Museum gift shop for about an hour and a half, and then retired to the Viking encampment (pretty small this year, alas) where most of the other Vikings (the Skjaldborg group) put on a combat show (pictured above).
Friday and Saturday nights I stayed in a nearby town with Ian and Buffy Barrs and their family. The Barrs are L’Abri people, and we sat up until 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning having one of those long, discursive conversations one associates with one’s college years (considerably more recent for them than for me). It was an experience of discovering sudden good friends of the sort that happens all too rarely in life. I’m richer for it. Saturday night we cut it off merely at midnight.
Saturday brought more rain and fewer visitors, but I actually sold more books, putting in all my time at the museum gift shop.
On the way home I spent Sunday night at my brother’s house in northeast Iowa.
Thanks to everyone who invited me and extended themselves for me (particularly Lisa Steen Riggs of the Windmill Museum). And to anyone who prayed for Mrs. Hermanson to hold up.
$1.99 Kindle Hemingways
There’s still time to get several Hemingway classics and some selections for Kindle at $1.99.
True Story
I just pulled up something I wrote in 2002 and thought I’d share it with you. It’s true. I did not make this up.
My co-worker was home alone when she found a large spider on a pile of towels. She smacked it repeatedly with a fly swatter. screaming all the while, but afraid that it was only stunned, she scooped it up in the towels, dropped them on the driveway, and whacked it several more times, again screaming the whole time.
Later, she overheard her husband asking her son about the spider in the driveway, assuming he had run over it in his car a few minutes prior.
“Oh, that big, brown thing?” her son exclaimed. “It was huge! I couldn’t believe it! Good thing Mom didn’t see it.”
Cover Me While I Spy
I love these book covers for John le Carre’s novels. They sell the books well.
Dallas Willard: Conscious of Real Life
“For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:14).
Tom Nelson wrote on May 8 about the life and death of Dallas Willard. He quoted him, in reflection on this verse, “The difference is simply a matter of what we are conscious of. In fact, at ‘physical’ death we become conscious and enjoy a richness of experience we have never known before.”
Not that this world isn’t real, as some say, but it is like an illusionist, distracting us with the inconsequential so that we miss the most important things. At death, we see through it all.
Poet Christian Wiman's Next Step
The editor of Poetry magazine is moving on. Tom Bartlett writes:
He’s not abandoning poetry—he’s not sure he could ever do that… This June he’s leaving his plum poetry gig to become a senior lecturer of religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the Yale Divinity School, a job that was offered to him a couple of years after he lectured at the institute. “My life has been aiming at this,” he says. “It seems to me incredibly exciting but also a necessary thing for me to put my faith more on the line on a daily basis.”
I’ve been thinking about that myself lately.