Learning better handwriting from a calligrapher. I’d like to have better cursive writing, but all of my bad habits have been congealed by playing the journalist.
All posts by Phil
In Defense of Prose
John Updike said, “Nabokov writes prose the way it should be written: enthusiastically.”
Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma runs with this idea in his essay on colorful writing:
Paul West noted in his essay, “In Praise of Purple Prose,” written around the heyday of minimalism in 1985, that the “minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy — the human bond with ordinariness.” This rationale, I dare say, misunderstands what art is and what art is meant to do. The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration. Thus, fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work — in its deliberate constructiveness, its measured adornment of thought, and in the arrangement of representative images, so that the fiction about a known world becomes an elevated vision of that world.
He argues that the most remembered and loved novels are those with beautiful, even audacious, prose.
I remember James Joyce using prose purposefully in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. His flowery language swelled with his theme, drawing attention to select passages in the story.
“It is not, however,,” Obioma explains, “that the ‘less is more’ nugget is wrong, it is that it makes a blanket pronouncement on any writing that tends to make its language artful as taboo.”
Must Art Be a Gigantic Effort?
Peter Crawley asks, “Does art have to be such hard work? A laborious investment of blood, sweat, tears and occasionally some writing?”
“While working for the post office,” he says, “Anthony Trollope would write before his shift began, from 5.30 to 8.30 each morning, requiring exactly 250 words every 15 minutes. If he finished one novel before 8.30 am, he immediately began another. ‘Let [the artists’] work be to them as is his common work to the common labourer,’ Trollope said. ‘No gigantic efforts will then be necessary.'”
His readers didn’t think so. They were outraged that Trollope may be closer to a hack than what they imagined him to be, a long-suffering saint of the arts.
We Are Westeros
Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson compare our world to the one in Game of Thrones and find many parallels. Secularists continue to redefine the world outside their little bubble, choosing to believe all religions are fruitless and merely the fading remnants of past generations.
The secular West in our own world has been stunned in the past several decades by the global resurgence of religion. . . . George R.R. Martin frames the problem of resurgent religion in theodicy, the age-old question of how a good God could let bad things happen.
In a July 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Martin said:
And as for the gods, I’ve never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain? I was taught pain is to let us know when our body is breaking down. Well, why couldn’t we have a light? Like a dashboard light? If Chevrolet could come up with that, why couldn’t God? Why is agony a good way to handle things?
A one-time Catholic, Martin struggles painfully with theodicy in his stories, which are pregnant with a bitter lapse of hope. Every violation pierces the reader. How could such a thing be allowed to happen? What kind of world is it where this happens?
Martin wants us to hear this proclamation: this one. This world. That’s where these things happen.
Bobette Buster with Eric Metaxas
Two writers talk about story on The Eric Metaxas Show. “The point of living is to become fully alive.” Storytelling is part of that life.
Futility
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
The Freedom That Undermines Itself
“Universities are addicted to censorship, and the Department of Education is their partner and enabler.”
David French writes about Title IX and students who have sued to restrict the statements of their professor. There he explains the ramifications of modern liberalism, which is self-destructive in the sense that it undermines the principles at purports to celebrate. In another article, he explains what happened at Northwestern University when a feminist professor wrote in favor of student/teacher relationships.
“Two students filed Title IX complaints against her, claiming that she’d violated federal law with her essay and a subsequent tweet. In essence, they were claiming that her writings on matters of public concern constituted unlawful gender discrimination.” More than that, they complained when others shared their complaints and spoke in favor of academic freedom.
While there is a huge, stinking pile of liberalism in this squabble, one of the lessons is the real threat to students in American universities like Northwestern. If they want to believe that love is what you make it, then they’ll have to realize they have kicked down all of the fences. All of them. The students have no grounds for complaint against a professor who supports sexual license, but if they idea scares them, they need to get out and reconsider their own self-destructive ideas.
Not the Wrong Side of History
Tim Keller reviews two books that argue in favor of Christians accepting homosexuality, saying the books by Vines and Wilson are the ones he is most often asked about. Not wanting to dismiss the books as simply unbiblical and open himself to the accusation of flippantly ignoring the subject, he writes over 2,500 words on what the authors profess and how they are wrong. On the issue of secularism, which we’ve discussed many times on this blog, Keller observes:
More explicit in Wilson’s volume than Vines’ is the common argument that history is moving toward greater freedom and equality for individuals, and so refusing to accept same-sex relationships is a futile attempt to stop inevitable historical development. Wilson says that the “complex forces” of history showed Christians that they were wrong about slavery and something like that is happening now with homosexuality.
Charles Taylor, however, explains how this idea of inevitable historical progress developed out of the Enlightenment optimism about human nature and reason. It is another place where these writers seem to uncritically adopt background understandings that are foreign to the Bible. If we believe in the Bible’s authority, then shifts in public opinion should not matter. The Christian faith will always be offensive to every culture at some points.
And besides, if you read Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010) and follow the latest demographic research, you will know that the world is not inevitably becoming more secular. The percentage of the world’s population that are non-religious, and that put emphasis on individuals determining their own moral values, is shrinking. The more conservative religious faiths are growing very fast. No one studying these trends believes that history is moving in the direction of more secular societies.
(via Jared C. Wilson)
Making Yourself a Soft Target
Charles Murray received the third Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society last April. His book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission is came out in May. When accepting the award, he told this story:
My wife knows a man in a town near us that I will call Bob. Bob operates one of the many kinds of businesses that use Latino workers. What makes Bob different from almost every other such employer in his line of work is that all of his workers are documented. He spends about $20,000 to $30,000 a year for the excruciatingly complicated visa process. He pays good wages, pays for his workers’ airfares, and is in other ways a model employer and member of his community.
My wife started to tell me stories about how Bob has come under relentless harassment by the government. Why pick on him, when his part of the country is full of employers who have 100 percent undocumented Latino workers? Because, by doing the right thing and documenting his workers, he opened himself up to easy inspection by government enforcers of regulations. He made himself a soft target.
The story that tipped me over the edge involved a stupid regulation that Bob could not comply with. He didn’t have enough American-born employees—and there’s no way he could get Americans to work for him. Bob became so frustrated that he told the bureaucrat that he would fight it in court—at which point the bureaucrat said to him, “You do that, and we’ll put you out of business.” And Bob knew that is exactly what would happen.
Grocers: Stop Selling Immoral Magazines
Do we view ourselves as political beings? Would we say our minds are bound by cultural cords? I don’t think most of us would describe ourselves in these ways. We think of ourselves as independently minded and capable of standing on our own, but if we allow our attention to be directed by the popular press, we are training ourselves in groupthink and tweaking our moral compasses.
Not long ago, the media was celebrating the suicide of a terminally ill woman. They repeated uncritically the ridiculous arguments for suicide being a matter of dignity and honor. How long will it be before they celebrate someone making public arguments about the right to suicide without illness? “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” he’ll say, “so I wanted to die on my own terms.” Doesn’t the press already support this the line of thought?
This week, they have celebrated another vein of self-destruction, and I’m troubled by the many people have said it’s none of their business. It is your business. It’s just as harmful as celebrating suicide. We are not islands. When others buy and sell vanity in the marketplace, we can’t just ignore it or many more will be hurt by it.
Take the idea that some people don’t believe they should live without disability. Does the press celebrate this yet? Is any form of identity up for grabs?
I think we need to reject the popular press at large. Many individuals already have, but I want to encourage select business leaders to take this up.
Grocers who are willing to sell the regular line of magazines everyone else sells should reconsider what I assume are practical reasons for selling what they would not want their families to read. It doesn’t matter if all the publications are bundled together by the vendor. Insist on being allowed to sell only what you want to sell. Make noise about wanting a choice in the titles you offer, and don’t surrender to the bad logic that says someone is going to sell it, so it might as well be you. A vendor can’t force you to make immoral choices. By refusing to offer pop culture and other immoral magazines, you help others avoid buying them. You encourage them to think independently, as they already believe they do.
It feels like a throwback idea from the ’80s, but is it not still a fair idea?