Tag Archives: Inklings

Old Book Love, a Pub Renewed, and More

Here’s a Thoroughly Professional Video showing a couple of my antique books. They aren’t commercially valuable, but they’re pretty and have the humanistic value of a great books. On the left is the Complete Works of Shakespeare, a Walter J. Black edition, which I think means it’s cheap. I say it’s leather bound, but I’m sure it’s imitation leather. On the right is the Works of Edmund Spenser, an 1895 MacMillan edition.

It’s too bad I don’t have something really nice to show you, but I may record more physical books to better reveal their tangible value, especially if I can up my A/V quality.

Inklings: “The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) has purchased the historic Eagle and Child pub on St Giles’ from St John’s College, with plans to refurbish and reopen the space to the public.”

Poetry: From Philip Larkin
“For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.”

Horror: Mike Duran has written on horror stories and how they fit with a Christian worldview.

Also, some of the story of the man who portrayed Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist.

(Photo: “The Eagle and Child,” Hofendorf/ Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

“Give people a story!”

Defeating Jihad

Met with some students at the Bible school again today for lunch. What we’ve done is start a weekly “Inklings” group, to talk about writing, mythopoetics, theology, etc. It’s an appropriate time to schedule it, as the social branch of the Inklings used to meet at noon on Tuesdays at the Eagle and Child (Bird and Baby) pub in Oxford. We’re exactly like them, except without the beer and the smoking. And with more females present.

Today the subject was “stories.” When they asked me for my input, I quoted something I heard from Dr. Sebastian Gorka, who guest hosted for Larry Elder on his radio talk show yesterday.

Gorka said (as I recall it) that when he’d finished his book, Defeating Jihad, he showed the manuscript to his wife. Her response was, “Is this all there is?”

I’m sure that Gorka – like all the rest of us writers – had been hoping for a response more along the lines of “This is the most wonderful thing I ever read! I laughed, I cried, I wanted it to go on forever!”

But she explained. “You’ve got to give people a story. Nobody will care unless you tell them a story.”

So, he says, he added a long preface, telling the story of his father. His father was in the anti-communist underground in Hungary, during the Cold War. He was betrayed (by the noted Judas, Kim Philby), and sent to a political prison. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he was released, and he decided to flee to the West. A friend asked him to take his 17-year-old daughter along with him, so she could live in the free world. They managed to escape (crawling through a mine field at one point), and eventually settled in England. He and the girl married, and Dr. Gorka is their son.

“Whenever anyone talks to me about my book,” Gorka said, “they never talk about the body of the thing. They want to talk about that preface – the story.”

The Nightmare of Tolkien’s Success

Who is the more enduringly important of the two? Tolkien wrote the greatest work, as evidenced by Germaine Greer’s backhanded compliment: “It has been my nightmare,” she snarled, “that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century. The bad dream has materialized.” Lewis’s claims are broader. A half-century after his death, does any other writer turn up on so many shelves of good bookstores and libraries?

Michael Nelson reviews another one of those books about the Inklings. (via A&L Daily)

The Fellowship of the Inklings

The Eagle and Child

“In general, the all-male group shared a longing for that half-imaginary time before man’s alienation from God, nature and self, the time before the chaos and materialism of the post-industrial era had displaced the elegantly organized cosmos of the Middle Ages. In their ­various ways, each hoped to spearhead a rehabilitation, a re-enchantment of our fallen world.” Michael Dirda reflects on The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. He says the book focuses largely on the men’s religious lives and thoughts.

The Fellowship looks to be a great, detailed introduction to Barfield and Williams, two men close to Lewis and Tolkien but unfamiliar to most of their fans.