Religion, Uncategorized

More on art: Trying to think above my weight class

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Photo credit: Evie Fjord. Unsplash license.

Still haven’t finished the book I’m reading, so you get further puerile musings on art tonight.

I have read Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty twice, and I’m still not sure I understand it. I kind of suspect that’s the point of the book – that art is essentially an effort to convey an experience that can’t be pinned down in words. You “catch” it or you don’t. Kind of like Zen, I suppose, though I hate to use that comparison.

But my point (I think) is that art is mysterious and evasive. There are formulas, but they never really touch the heart of the thing. It’s what C.S. Lewis called “Joy” in Surprised by Joy, and he linked it with Romanticism – which, not coincidentally, is what The Truth and Beauty is also about.

I watched one of Klavan’s interviews on YouTube the other day, and (if my memory is correct) he said he talked about the value of Pi and Fibonacci’s theorem in TTAB. He said that Pi expresses itself in Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, which, he maintained, suggests that the Trinity itself is expressed in creation. Every living thing around us, from the smallest single-cell animal to the human and the elephant, develops according to that ratio. The leaves of the trees tend to grow in tripartite forms. Fractals create three-part shapes, leading to astonishingly naturalistic digital images.

The value of Pi – the number three plus a little more. Three, but not a static three. There’s some mystery added, a little extra to surprise us and keep us off balance.

Theologians have scoffed at the legend of St. Patrick teaching the Irish about the Trinity by showing them a three-leaf clover. “Bad analogy,” they say.

But what if the clover expresses the Trinity in a more profound way? Not as an analogy, but as an artifact? The metaphorical fingerprints of the Potter in the clay vessel He has created?

I think this Fibonacci stuff may be one reason why I was never a good artist, back when I was young and dreamed of making a living with pencil and brush. An art teacher in high school once told me I was good at symmetry, and that pleased me. But symmetry isn’t what you want in art, I think, most of the time. You want dynamism –a sense of movement, if only the movement of the viewer’s eye.

I missed that Fibonacci knack – dividing things into threes, creating a compelling imbalance. My work just sat there. (Among its other failings.) I always think of a panel from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip that impressed me – Hobbes leaps at Calvin, and the line of his body and tail is so elegant that you can feel the motion. I could never draw a line like that, though I wanted to very much.

Anyway, I guess it all goes back to a basic disconnect between our impoverished age and the past (the break came during the World Wars, I think). The old artists believed they were expressing God (or even pagan gods), and sought to recreate beauty. Nowadays, artists only think they’re expressing themselves – and they believe themselves to be cosmic accidents (bad for the environment too).

Christians are capable of producing really great art. Subcreation. Genuine, God-reflecting beauty. We’ve done it in the past. And our competition is occupying itself taping bananas to walls. It should be an easy contest.

But we need a) to take art seriously, and b) to encourage our talent.

Uncategorized

On art: I think above my weight class

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Photo credit: Sui Sim. Unsplash license.

Tonight I must be in an antic mood, for I intend to talk about Art.

This is, of course, absurd. I am a middlebrow, generally unknown fantasy writer. Google my latest novel (The Baldur Game, in case you forgot, which is not unlikely) you’ll find that the only person talking about the book online is me. I have zero standing to make pronouncements about Art.

But I’ve had a couple thoughts. I’ll maunder on about the first one tonight. The next one will be provided the next time I find myself with a night without a book to review.

One truth that grows increasingly unavoidable as one grows old (though I think I’ve never repressed it much myself) is that we are going to die. The sands of time are sinking, the sun is setting in the west. Choose your metaphor.

I’m inclined to think of it as like floating down a river. You can’t slow your velocity and you can’t go ashore and rest – you are forever being carried by the current.

The river has pleasant stretches and unpleasant stretches. Some stretches are horrible. Some are delightful.

But good or bad, they speed past. The bad ones come to an end, but so do the good ones.

And sometimes you see one so wonderful, so sublime that you want to preserve it. You want to share it. You feel that the world will be better – it will be an act of love for humanity – if you can just preserve that moment for others to enjoy as well.

That’s what art is. An effort to preserve – to freeze – one of those fleeting moments and make it available to others.

Art, therefore, is an attempt at stopping time.

Or it was, until the Postmoderns decided that Art should be an exercise in self-expression, the less interesting the self, the better.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Operation Echo,’ by Ed Church

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Author Ed Church recently commented on our “About Us” page, and I was reminded of his Brook Deelman books, which I’d much enjoyed but lost track of. I checked and, behold, there is a new volume in the series. I read Operation Echo with great enjoyment.

Brook Deelman, South African-born former London police detective, has now set up a modest private investigation agency with his buddy Jonboy. They have a variety of clients, but they never expected to be approached by Inspector Terry Barnes (retired). Brook has had a strained relationship with the man in the past. But Barnes, having time on his hands now, has decided to try to find the answer to a question that’s been troubling him for many years. There’s a man who belongs to his club, Sir Archibald Gough, a millionaire who made his fortune as a music promoter. Barnes has always felt there’s something… vaguely wrong about Gough. He’s not sure what bothers him about the man, but he’s certain there’s something. He wants Brook and his partner to check the man out.

They do, and are not prepared for where the investigation will take them – back to the Cold War and the year 1963, the year of the Kim Philby scandal and multiple black eyes for British Intelligence. A story of a very secret operation which has left very few traces behind. Punctuated with a knock-down fight or two.

I thought the plot itself was slow getting started, as the original problem, based on a mere ungrounded suspicion, seemed a little implausible. However, the characters – especially Book Deelman, our hero – were so fascinating that I simply enjoyed the ride. And the plot, once it found its legs, ran extremely well.

I highly recommend Operation Echo and all the Brook Deelman books. Cautions for language, but nothing else really.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dain Curse,’ by Dashiell Hammett

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“Lily and I were true sisters, inseparable, hating one another poisonously.”

Recently, in the course of my explorations of old mysteries on YouTube, I watched once again the 1978 CBS TV miniseries adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Dain Curse, starring James Coburn. The dramatization kept to the plot in broad terms, but made a lot of cuts, most of which, it must be admitted, improved the story. For some reason they moved the setting from California to New York state (contrary to the usual custom of that California-based industry). The plot was streamlined in various ways. The casting of Coburn, a famously lean man, as the “Continental Op” (a fat character who is never named in any of his stories), a case of literal streamlining, was justified through turning him into a fictional version of the author himself (who had indeed been a Pinkerton detective), calling him “Hamilton Nash.”

I had watched the original broadcast on TV, and having watched it again now I was curious to re-read the book. It’s not Hammet’s best work, in my opinion.

The story begins with the Continental Op visiting the San Francisco home of Dr. Edgar Leggett, who is involved in chemical experiments involving diamonds. Some of the diamonds he keeps in his laboratory have apparently been stolen in a break-in. The Op finds Leggett’s story fishy, and before long breaks it down into a messy scheme involving false identities and blackmail. At the end of this episode of the story, the Leggetts’ daughter, Gabrielle (who is a morphine addict) has been orphaned, and is left with the conviction that she is a victim of “the Dain Curse” (Dain is her mother’s name) and doomed to cause the death of any person who gets close to her.

But there are two further sections in the book. In the second, the Op is hired to locate Gabrielle and finds her in the temple of a fashionable San Francisco cult, where he barely manages to save her from murder, after which her fiancé whisks her off to a quick wedding and honeymoon in a southern California seaside town. In the third, there is yet another murder, and Gabrielle once again comes under suspicion. After clearing her, the Op takes it on himself to wean her off her drug addiction.

The origins of The Dain Curse as a serial story in Black Mask Magazine are very evident, and don’t always help with readability in a consolidated narrative. Each episode (it was originally a four-parter) involves its own dramatic arc, and each ends with a “solution,” though the actual culprit is kept secret until the very end of the book. Hammett was never in Raymond Chandler’s class as a prose stylist, and the writing here is rarely memorable. The plot of The Dain Curse involves a lot of repetition, and doesn’t reach the levels Hammett achieved in The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, or even in Red Harvest (which is believed, by the way, to have inspired the Samurai film Yojimbo, and by extension A Fistful of Dollars and a score of other copycats).

But it’s worth reading. I must say though that (in my opinion) the cuts the writers made in the TV version were well taken and effective.

Music

Palm Sunday Singing: When I Survey the Wonderous Cross

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Today’s hymn isn’t the typical Palm Sunday theme, because I’ve been thinking about the cross lately and meant to post another hymn on the cross last Sunday. Isaac Watts on this favorite in 1707 as a communion hymn, and it’s become a beloved Easter hymn. The tune sung above was adapted from a Gregorian chant by prolific hymn tune writer Lowell Mason (1792-1872), “the father of American church music.”

“But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14 ESV)

1 When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

2 Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God:
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to his blood.

3 See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down:
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

4 Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Uncategorized

My mind wanders: Richard Mentor Johnson

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Today, free association. Because I used to work for the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations. (Actually, no – I just free-associated that thought.)

What actually happened was that I was reading the latest issue of the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty magazine today, and saw an article about the founding father John Dickinson. My brain burped, and somehow the name came out “Dick Johnson” in my mind.

That sent me sliding down the memory hole, to my antique boyhood. One of the only books we had in our home was the anthology of light verse, What Cheer, published by Modern Library, edited by David McCord. I spent a lot of time with that book, understanding about half of what I read but fascinated by the rhyme, rhythm, and word play. One of the poems that caught my fancy was an American political ditty about the politician and soldier Richard Mentor Johnson (1780-1850). I can’t find the poem in my own copy at the moment, but I remember the chorus going, “Rumpsey-dumpsy, rumpsey-dumpsy; I, Dick Johnson, killed Tecumseh.”

The poem struck me at the time because I had a schoolteacher named Dick Johnson. I wondered, vaguely, who this Dick Johnson might be (I did not wonder about Tecumseh. Contrary to what the educational demagogues are telling us today, we did learn about Native Americans in school back then). Once the internet became available, I eventually looked the man up. He had a fascinating story, one that demonstrates some of the overlooked nuances in American history.

Going straight to the headline, Richard Johnson was Vice President of the United States under Martin Van Buren. He holds the distinction of being the only V.P. ever elected by the Senate under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution.

Johnson was a Kentuckian. He attended Transylvania University and became a lawyer, being noted for doing pro bono work for the poor. Among the properties he inherited from his father was a female slave of mixed race, what they called an “octoroon,” named Julia Chinn. He fell in love with her. It was illegal for them to marry, but Johnson treated her as a common law wife and acknowledged their children. This arrangement would impair his political career, but he remained faithful to her until her death in 1833. Both their daughters married white men, though they were not permitted to inherit his property.

He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and then became the first native Kentuckian elected to Congress. He was one of the “war hawks” in the run-up to the War of 1812. Notably, he supported the claims of Alexander Hamilton’s widow to army wages which her late husband had refused during the Revolution, despite the fact that Hamilton had been a member of the opposition party.

Back in Kentucky, Johnson raised a troop of 300 volunteers for the war and they elected him their major; later he became a colonel. Most of these volunteers’ actions were against the Native Americans allied with the British. At the Battle of the Thames in October 1813, he led a charge against the Shawnee leader Tecumseh in which Tecumseh was killed. Johnson himself never claimed to have fired the shot that struck that charismatic man down, but several others said he did. Historians are undecided.

The capitol was in ruins, burned by the English, when Johnson returned to congress in 1814, and they met in temporary quarters. As a legislator, Johnson pushed for pensions for military widows and orphans, and for public improvements in the west.

In 1819 he was elected to the Senate (state legislatures did it back in those days, you may recall). In 1820 he voted in favor of a law to bar slavery north of the 36˚30’ north latitude line (with the exception of Missouri). In 1822 he proposed a bill outlawing imprisonment for debtors in the US. It did not pass, but he reintroduced it every year. (Full disclosure – he had debt troubles of his own.)

He became a supporter of Andrew Jackson, and was one of the original founders of the Democratic Party in 1828. In 1825 he succeeded in getting funding for a school for children of the Choctaw nation which was established on his own property and which he oversaw (there were accusations of conflict of interest).

On an amusing note, Johnson sponsored a bill in 1823 for funding an expedition to discover whether the earth was hollow. This proposal failed. In 1828 he lost a race for reelection to the senate. He returned to the House in 1829. In 1832, his law to abolish debtor’s prisons finally went through. He was considered as Andrew Jackson’s running mate in 1832, but Martin Van Buren got the nod. Friends, including Davy Crockett, urged Johnson to run for president in 1836, but he ended up as Van Buren’s running mate. Much of Johnson’s political opposition rose from distaste, especially in the south, for his racially mixed domestic situation. Thus, though Van Buren did win the presidency, Johnson got considerably fewer electoral votes, and the race was thrown into the Senate, as mentioned above.

His tenure as vice president was not notable, except for continuing accusations of conflict of interest, and his adoption of a personal fashion brand – he made it a practice to wear a red tie and vest at all times. In 1840, although Van Buren was reelected, Johnson was not. By that time, it is reported, his mind was beginning to fail.

Back home in Kentucky, he served in the state legislature and was one of Daniel Boone’s pallbearers. He died of a stroke, aged 70.

The early 19th Century is a somewhat neglected period in our common memory, it seems to me, except for a few incidents like the Alamo and the California Gold Rush. But I always found it a fascinating time, full of idiosyncrasies, as the new country tried out its muscles, tested its limits, and tried to figure out exactly what kind of a country it wanted to be.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Drive to Kill,’ by Sam Jones

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There are many ways for a book to be bad, and many different ways for readers to respond to badness in books. (I’m speaking here of bad craftsmanship, not qualities of morality.) In my case, really bad prose will usually kill a book for me – if words are fumbled, I’ll dump it. Weakness of plot I can tolerate a little more, if there are other pleasures in the story. So it was (for me) with Drive to Kill, by Sam Jones. It was weak, but good enough to finish.

Dean Blackwood, the hero of the series that this book kicks off, is a sort of special FBI agent. He’s been their go-to guy for extreme investigations in which overkill and brutalization of prisoners are permitted (not sure how that works legally). But in his last case, his family got caught in the crossfire; they survived, but his wife left him and he was reassigned to a desk job in the northwest.

But now he’s come back to Los Angeles to visit his family, hoping for a reconciliation. He goes to the beach for some surfing with an old friend, and a gunfight breaks out in the parking lot. His friend catches a bullet and is killed, and Dean makes up his mind to investigate this thing, whether the cops, the feds, or his wife approve or not. The trail will lead him to the Armenian mob, crooked cops, and somewhere else where he really does not want to go.

The major weakness in this book was the plotting, which was unusually poor. I’m accustomed to today’s thriller writers employing “movie logic,” expecting us to swallow improbabilities camouflaged with fast chases and violence. But author Jones expects us in this story to believe a ridiculous sequence of coincidences – the gunfight that kills Dean’s friend at the start of the story just happens to be related to an old case Dean worked. And then he goes to talk to a witness, and just happens onto another related murder. There’s a further coincidence too, I think, but I forget the details.

Writing tip: You get one major coincidence per book. One coincidence, especially if it kicks off the action, can be permitted. Pile them on, and you lose credibility.

The prose was fair – I’ve seen worse, though the author sometimes needs his verbiage pruned, and occasionally he mistakes homophones. On the other hand, he included what I considered one good, original figure of speech, and in a couple scenes he employed a nice technique for building suspense that impressed me – I may borrow it in the future.

There’s a Christian evangelist in the story who looks pretty bad, but the character turned out more complex than I suspected, so that’s OK.

But all in all, I give Drive to Kill a thumbs down for shabby plotting.

Publishing

The present is Prologue

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Getty Images, licensed under Unsplash + license.

It may be spring at last now. We’ve hovered around the freezing point, up and down, for several weeks. Just warm enough to make me check what coat to put on every time I’ve gone outside. Last Saturday I attended a wedding. Rain had been forecast, but it turned out bright – though the temperatures were cool. I was able to wear my new suit. Survived a few conversations with human beings, which required some restorative napping afterward.

On Monday I finally did it (I think). I sat down in my makeshift recording studio and recorded the Prologue to Troll Valley. I don’t know how long it’s been since certain friends provided me with a decent mike and earphones, plus peripherals, and I began trying to master the dark art of recording audiobooks. I have taken it slowly, and for longer or shorter periods I’ve had to set it aside for other projects. I’m not sure what accounts most for my slow progress – my fear of technology or my innate ineptitude with anything that involves working with my hands. Perhaps a mixture of the two.

So I’ve taken the cautious route. I have not pushed myself far on any particular day. Practiced until I felt uncomfortable, then packed it up for tomorrow. Tiny increments. Dr. Jordan Peterson tells us that if you’re afraid to tackle something, you break it down into small portions. If you can’t clean your room yet, clean out a drawer. Dust a shelf. Just do something every day.

He says that if you do this, your confidence will grow as you accumulate little successes. Each success results in a small shot of dopamine, and you come to look forward to those little shots, and so you can accomplish more and more – enjoying it more and more all the while.

That doesn’t really seem to work for me. My dopamine delivery system appears to have been suppressed, or overwhelmed by one or more of my myriad phobias.

So I’ve been proceeding purely on stubbornness, buttressed by a guilty fear of disappointing the people who’ve helped me out.

And on Monday I recorded that Prologue. And in spite of all my misgivings, I could not but admit that it was adequate. Adequate is enough at this point. Artificial Intelligence does adequate work, and it’s taking over the book narration business. Adequate will do.

And I actually felt that little spurt of dopamine. It must have been a massive infusion at the source, to muscle its way through all my inhibitions. But I felt a genuine sensation of gratification, of having passed a milestone, of scoring a goal.

My progress will continue to be slow. Chapter 1 is long, and I’m taking it in little pieces.

But I’m actually producing a recording.

That’s something. Something.

I’m pretty sure Dr. Peterson would agree.

Authors, Religion

C. S. Lewis on Charles Williams

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Here is a portion of a radio talk C. S. Lewis gave on Charles Williams, whose Descent Into Hell I reviewed last night.

I’ve heard the complete talk, which is very short in its own right. I don’t know why they cut it down, except that Lewis starts with an anecdote about the poets Leigh Hunt and Thomas Babington Macauley as an example of bad literary criticism. I suppose nowadays nobody knows who either of them is. (To be honest, I don’t know much about them myself.)

Below, an introduction to Williams by the scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, for whom I recently did some translation work. I did not in fact know she was into such good stuff. Turns out that, counting David Llewellyn Dodds, who comments here from time to time, I know two important Inklings scholars.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Descent Into Hell,’ by Charles Williams

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He could enjoy; at least he could refuse not to enjoy. He could refuse and reject damnation.

With a perfectly clear, if instantaneous, knowledge of what he did, he rejected joy instead.

Charles Williams’ novels have been a major influence on my own works (partly, certainly, by way of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, but to a great degree on their own account). Of all those books, it’s the 1937 urban fantasy Descent Into Hell that has most kept me company through the years, because I recognize my own vulnerabilities in it.

The book is misleadingly simple to explain, yet complex in the execution. The action centers on the production of a new play by the poet Peter Stanhope, in his home town and residence of Battle Hill, a suburb north of London. Among the actors is Pauline Anstruther, a young woman crippled by constant fear. Occasionally through her life, and increasingly frequently in recent weeks, she has been seeing her doppelganger, a double of herself, approaching her up the street. Her fear of the apparition is increased by her fear that she is losing her mind. She’s ashamed to share the problem with anyone, until finally Stanhope himself draws it out of her. He is surprisingly unsurprised, and explains to Pauline the doctrine of exchange, by which Christians may literally bear one another’s burdens. He promises to carry her fear for her, and the results are immediate. But Pauline learns that this relief is only the first step in her own assignment, that of carrying the burden of yet another person – an ancestor of hers who was martyred under Bloody Mary. (In Williams’ view, as in quantum physics, an effect may precede its cause.)

Meanwhile, we also have the chilling tale of Lawrence Wentworth, a noted but superficial military historian, also a resident of Battle Hill. Wentworth is experiencing what we now call a midlife crisis. He has grown obsessed with Adela Hunt, a pretty and superficial young woman who’s engaged to a young man but likes to flirt with him. Through the machinations of a local witch, Lawrence is presented with a simulacrum of Adela, a soulless automaton which embodies his lustful imaginations of what he thinks Adela ought to be. Under the spell of the false Adela, Lawrence gradually disengages from everything that mattered to him – even some of his petty sins might have offered a roundabout road to salvation, if he desired it, but all he really loves, at bottom, is himself as he seems himself reflected in the false Adela. And so he is damned.

There’s yet another plot thread, touching both Pauline’s and Lawrence’s stories, involving a pitiful ghost who never lived much of a life and died a suicide. He wanders in a sort of limbo in another dimension of Battle Hill, and a way to salvation is offered to him as well.

What I had forgotten about Descent Into Hell was how dense and difficult the prose is. The characters’ actions are fairly straightforward. But the author is constantly informing us what is going on on the heavenly or spiritual level. And that commentary is what makes the book a difficult read. Author Williams goes very deep into his theology and his personal speculations on theology here. I’m more familiar with Williams’ thinking than most people, but I often had trouble following.

And yet it was worth it – for me. I do love Descent Into Hell.

There were interesting points I noticed for the first time on this reading: for instance, Lawrence neglects his scholarship as part of his process of damnation, but Stanhope, in another place, sets aside his poetry, in a different way, and that’s part of his process of sanctification. Nice touch, symmetrical and instructive.

Recommended, if you’re up for a challenge. This e-book edition contains some OCR errors.