For the Bard’s birthday, “ten plays, quickly resolved through texts.”
DUDE DONT DO IT!
All posts by Phil
Forgetting What Makes Us Human
Should two chimpanzees have rights as “persons” under U.S. law? Rod Dreher doesn’t think so, but he does recommend that should the chimps be freed from their human oppressors, they should apply to teach at an American university.
Making Bad Christian Art
The trailer for the new movie, Little Boy, worries me. I can’t tell if it’s setting up a story that cautions an audience willing to believe that faith can be measured in specific acts and feelings or panders to such an audience. This review doesn’t exactly answer that question, but it does imply that the faith of the boy relates to the dropping of the bomb by the same name. Maybe if they had released the film on August 6 for the 75th anniversary of the leveling of Hiroshima, we would have all gotten the connection.
Heh.
I gather the movie is heavy-handed enough to need more explanation–still some people need things spelled out, you know.
Tony Woodlief, author of the concept “Dreadfully Wholesome,” linked to an old article of his, in which he describes common sins of the Christian writer: neat resolutions, one-dimentional characters, sentamentality, and cleanness. On this last point, he says, “In short, if Christian novels and movies and blogs and speeches must be stripped of profanity and sensuality and critical questions, all for the sake of sparing us scandal, then we have to wonder what has happened that such a wide swath of Christendom has failed to graduate from milk to meat.”
The point, of course, is not to mix a little filth into our current shallow stories. Little Boy is PG-13, I believe, because it shows some of the horrors of war and uses some contextual bigotry. It may even have smoking! That’s a letter grade drop all on its own. The point, though, is to think honestly and depict reality appropriately.
A strong example of this is the recent movie, Something, Anything. I saw it on Netflix Instant a few weeks ago at a friend’s recommendation. Justin Chang summaries it nicely as having a “dichotomy between materialism and spirituality, between the pleasures of a comfortably middle-class existence and the rewards of an introspective, examined one.” This is not a heavy-handed movie at all. In fact, there’s a touching scene in the middle that clearly shows the disconnect between two main characters. Viewers might overlook that scene because one says anything, but that appears to be the tension point between them. The husband picks up his wife’s journal, exposing him to her struggling cry to God, but he just puts it back down and walks out of the room. He doesn’t know how to talk about that.
If you watch Something, Anything, let’s talk about it here. It’s beautiful, quiet film without common sins listed above.
The Evil Twin
Mark Bertrand writes about a new favorite author and the novel, Scandal, in which a Catholic novelist and public intellectual discovers he has an identical, evil double of himself. This other man is encouraging the community to believe the moral novelist is a flaming hypocrite. “The hunt for his doppelgänger,” Bertrand explains, “draws him into an underworld — actually, that’s not quite right: the quest has more to do with realizing that this world is the underworld.”
This appears to be the kind of thing The Shadow claimed to know: the evil that lurks in every man’s heart.
Lacking Context for O’Connor
Alan Jacobs writes about Mark Greif’s chapter on Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” saying, “Greif has misunderstood this story about as badly as it is possible to misunderstand a story. And he misunderstands it because he simply doesn’t know the biblical and theological context.”
Auster: “Writing is a Disease”
Paul Auster visited Yale at the end of March for the Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series. They asked him a few questions.
Q: Yale is teeming with aspiring writers. Is there any golden advice that you would like to give them?
A: Don’t do it. You are asking for a life of penury, solitude, and a kind of invisibility in the world. It’s almost like taking orders in a religious sect. Writing is a disease, it’s not anything more than that. If a young person says, “You are right, it would be a stupid thing to do,” then that person shouldn’t be a writer. If a young person says, “I don’t agree with you, I will do it anyway,” alright, good luck! But you’ll have to figure it out on your own, because everyone’s path is different.
For Want of Wonder
Ron Block explores unbelief in a George MacDonald novel, noting Chesterton’s observation, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
People Don’t Write Books
Author Jonathan Rogers was passed up by Senior Ms. America in last April’s Music City Half-Marathon. It proved transformative.
Here in my forties I have gained wisdom from running that I never gained from books. To wit: I have learned never to ask, “Can I run 13.1 miles?” (the answer is probably no) but only to ask “Can I run to the next telephone pole” (the answer is probably yes). To apply this principle to my line of work, people don’t write books: they write sentences.
The Beatles Wanted to Do Lord of the Rings
I didn’t hear this news when it hit years ago: “The Beatles had approached J.R.R. Tolkien about doing a film version of Lord of the Rings starring the Fab Four.”
Lennon wanted to play Gollum; McCartney, Frodo; Ringo, Sam; and Harrison, Gandalf. Tolkien said, “Over my dead body,” or something like that. Too bad Nimoy didn’t have to ask him for permission to sing about Bilbo in the 70s.
Bonhoeffer 70th Anniversary
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed on this day in 1945.
A while back, Hunter Baker enthused over his exploration of the free-church idea in Germany. Baker observes, “A regenerate church is not a private church,” and so must engage the state while remaining independent from it.
Here’s a short piece on Bonhoeffer’s last twelve hours.
Michael Hollerich reviews a biography of Bonhoeffer, getting into many of the ideas presented in Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Protestantism in particular could not surrender the claim to be a Volkskirche, a true national church and the spiritual custodian of the German people. This was the preoccupation, even among Confessing Christians, that ultimately disenchanted Bonhoeffer and led to his visionary anticipation of an outcast church on the margins of society. We can appreciate the measure of that disenchantment if we remember that he had taken membership in the Confessing Church so seriously that he once said that whoever knowingly separated himself from the Church separated himself from salvation—for which he was roundly denounced for “Catholic” thinking.
As with most things, the man had something there.