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Shortest Winner of Bulwer-Lytton Contest

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This year’s winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for Bad Writing is the shortest entry to win in 30 years. Here are the 26 winning words Suzanne Fondrie submitted for this profound, profound honor:

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

Also of note, this year’s runner-up is a local man, Rodney Reed of Ooltewah, Tennessee. See what he wrote here. (via Books, Inq.)

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Of the introverts, by the introverts, for the introverts

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I have nothing, nothing, nothing, tonight. I’ve been fairly productive this week, but I’ve felt as if I’ve been slogging through Redi-Mix every day. Depressed about Norway, I guess, plus a personal anniversary coming up that I’d just as soon ignore.

Anyway, First Thoughts comes to my rescue with this link–a masterful article from The Atlantic on Introversion, by Jonathan Rauch. Introversion is only one among my sparkling constellation of personality quirks, but I always like to see someone trying to raise the consciousness of all those extroverts out there, running around slapping people on the back and never meeting strangers.

Are introverts misunderstood? Wildly. That, it appears, is our lot in life. “It is very difficult for an extrovert to understand an introvert,” write the education experts Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. (They are also the source of the quotation in the previous paragraph.) Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

Authors

Brad Thor Interview

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Here’s a fun audio interview with Brad Thor, author of Full Black, Foreign Influence, and other thrillers. He talks about his books a little and how writers must write (for one thing) and focus on what they love to read.

Fiction

Story Contest Results

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I am very pleased that my dragon story, Wilruf the Plunderer, scored at least 40 out of 45 possible points. Many of the stories in the contest achieved this level, which they said is unusual. I guess the bucket of lucky rabbit’s feet I sent the judges didn’t win me any favors since the story didn’t place, but congratulations to Loren Eaton for winning both second place and a tie for reader’s choice. You had my vote, sir. Here are the contest results.

Religion

Spectator link, plus another saint the fewer

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My article on Norway is up at The American Spectator today. Link here.

Sad news (as if we needed more). John Stott has passed away, old and full of years as the Bible says (he was 90).

J.I. Packer remembers that Stott “in his younger days … was a brilliant and hard-worked student evangelist.” He was the chosen speaker for a considerable number of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s week-long evangelistic campaigns at British universities, particularly Cambridge and Oxford. These later extended to North America and throughout the Commonwealth. From these evangelistic talks came one of his best-selling books, Basic Christianity (1958), which has been translated into 25 languages and sold well over a million copies.

Billy Graham first visited England in 1946, and Stott met him while sharing open-air preaching at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. In 1954 he welcomed Graham for his 12-week Harringay Crusade, and the two became warm friends. Later on this friendship would be important to the Lausanne movement, but it is worth noting that it began through an active, shared commitment to evangelism.

Religion, Reviews

Good stuff, bad stuff

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I squealed like a schoolgirl and jumped up and down today, when the great Andrew Klavan noticed my review of The Final Hour on his personal blog. Not as posted here, but as cross-posted at The American Culture. But who cares? It’s all about me.

On a subject I’ll be glad to see the end of, here’s a couple further things on Anders Barking Breivik, the worst Norwegian since Quisling.

From Timothy Dalrymple (by way of First Thoughts), a thoughtful article on the Christian response to the outrage.

And at the aforementioned The American Culture, a few excerpts from Breivik’s so-called manifesto, in which he explains how Christian he really is.

I’m working on a piece about Norway and Breivik for The American Spectator right now. I don’t know whether I have anything left to say that’s worth the publishing, but I felt I needed to make the effort. I’ll let you know if it appears.

Fiction, Reviews

Altamont Augie, by Richard Barager

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Will this book have the same visceral effect on other readers as it does on me? Perhaps not to the same extent.

Altamont Augie is, in the first place, a book about my own coming of age years—the late ʹ60s. The main characters are about four years older than me.

On top of that, the bulk of the action takes place on my home turf—Minneapolis and its environs. Mostly the University of Minnesota, where I did not attend, but visited often. I could easily have bumped elbows with these people. The main female character comes from the suburb of Robbinsdale, my present home.

The somewhat confusing title of the book is a double reference. “Altamont” means the Altamont Free Concert at Altamont Speedway in northern California in 1969, where four people died in the terminal delirium of the Woodstock Era. One of those dead remains unidentified to this day—a young man who climbed a fence and jumped into an aqueduct where he drowned.

“Altamont Augie” is the speculative name hung on that unfortunate man by the novel’s fictional narrator, a young Californian named Caleb Levy. It’s a reference to Saul Bellow’s novel, The Adventures of Augie March. Continue reading Altamont Augie, by Richard Barager →

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Gorgeous Landscapes from the American Frontier

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Thomas Cole, Alfred Bierstadt, and other painters who tried to recreate western American in the 1800s are exhibited in the Seattle Art Museum and reviewed by Laura Haertel for the California Literary Review. Ms. Haertel points to Cole for the exhibits theme:

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden. The wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.” -from Thomas Cole’s Essay on American Scenery, 1836

Non-fiction

The English Traveler

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Christopher Taylor reviews To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron in the London Review of Books, saying Thubron’s “books turn on the encounter between the energetic yet dreamy narrator, moving ‘in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency’, as he puts it in Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, and the sometimes deflating realities he finds. Once these have made him feel grizzled and disabused he’ll have a moment of human contact or a brush with the beautiful…” Thubron is the quintessential English travel writer, and he can’t help it. (via George Grant)

Non-fiction, Religion

The Omniscient Will Not Remember

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Last week, I listened to an audiobook of The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion. Author Tim Challies’ notes that many things we do online are recorded: our search requests, transactions, social network connections, and more. Each will be in its own database, but with the expansive overlapping of our social networks with other websites, that’s changing. Increasingly, what we do online is not only recorded, but tied to our social profiles so that even casual friends can know a good bit about us.

The Crucifixion Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553)This raises a natural question. Would any of us be embarrassed by the revelation of our online actions: our comments, searches, browsing, how much we do or when? I’ll say upfront that I would be, and I try to lead a fairly transparent online life.

Challies makes the obvious contrast between these databases and the Christian life. Our Heavenly Father has given followers of Christ Jesus the righteousness of Christ, and in doing so, he has removed our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:13)

“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25 ESV

The God who knows everything from the beginning to the end makes a conscious decision to reject the memory of our cancelled sins. What profound mercy. Psalm 103 says he remembers our frailty and has compassion on us like a father loves his children. He refuses to recount for us a long list of sins, because that list has been ruined. But he scored those sins in Christ’s own body and nailed them with him to the cross, like the horrible painting of Lucas Cranach the Elder shows.

What mercy.