All posts by Phil

Religion, Writing

Dana Gioia on Catholic Writers

Leave a comment

Poet Dana Gioia from a recent interview with Image Journal

Image: Do you consciously think of yourself as part of a tradition of Catholic writers?

DG: I am a Catholic, and I am a writer. I don’t think you can separate the two identities. But I have never wanted to be “a Catholic writer” in some narrow sense. Was Evelyn Waugh a Catholic writer? Was Flannery O’Connor or Muriel Spark? Well, yes and no. They were first and foremost writers who strived for expressive intensity and imaginative power. Their Catholicism entered into their work along with their humor, violence, sexuality, and imaginative verve. The few devotional works Waugh wrote are his worst books. His merciless early comic novels, which are Catholic only in their depiction of a hopelessly fallen world, are probably his best. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is a deeply Catholic novel about free will, but it is also a violent, dystopian science fiction novel about social collapse and political hypocrisy, all of which is written in an invented futuristic slang. There is something complicated going on here that cannot be simplified into faith-based writing.

A Conversation with Dana Gioia

Non-fiction

‘Intelligences to Replace Us’

Leave a comment

We are rushing into the unconsidered embrace of a computerized future that, deep in the core of its design process, hates us. “Engineers at our leading tech firms and universities tend to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution,” Team Human notes. “When they are not developing interfaces to control us, they are building intelligences to replace us.”

Joseph Bottum in his review of Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff. It’s an uneven book, he says, with many good details and many mushy proposals presented as solutions.

Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Go Podcast, young man

Leave a comment

Everyone is podcasting these days. Your aunt is probably planning one if she can only get Clippy and Bob to show her how to record it. There are over 630,000 podcasts available today on just about everything. True crime is a popular topic. For months I’ve daydreamed about the details of a mock crime podcast that could use the song above as a theme, present itself in the tone and rhythm of true crime shows, but actually tell a story about nothing at all. If I could find one or more colorful Southerners who tell jokes and funny stories for hours, I would have material for a great recurring segment. I’d probably be the only one who thought it was funny though.

Podcasting has been taken up by both professionals and amateurs, like anything on the Internet. A couple of my favorites are “The World and Everything in It,” the news show from World News Group. It is the best news out there. I recommend playing the show from your desktop, if you don’t do podcasts in a mobile-like devicy kind of way. (You might ask Alexa to play “The World and Everything in It” and see what you get. I have no idea.) Also I’m new to a show that has been around since 2009, “The Sporkful,” a show about food for the rest of us. It’s a ton of fun. A recent episode on southern BBQ in Chicago made me want to get out and try things (which I won’t do, of course, because budgets mean something in my house.)

That may lead you to ask, has podcasting been around ten years already? Yes, it began in 2004. The first how-to book came out in 2005. Even before that, we had audioblogging in some capacity.

The way I listen to my handful of shows is through one ear while driving. I don’t want to plug both ears in case I need to hear something, so with road and wind noise in the background I need podcast audio to be clear with a steady volume. I know I’m usually behind the tech curve, so I wonder if my listening experience is typical, but I encourage the podcasters out there who are recording their conference calls in hopes of landing a better book contract to listen to those recordings with plenty of outside background noise. If you can’t hear what’s been said, neither will I.

Reading

Why We Read Fiction?

Leave a comment

We suffer from a worldly sickness engineered by the Enlightenment project, a misapprehension of reason as the highest faculty and as dislocated from our imagination. Such an assumption leads us to consider literature as unwarranted; Novels and poems play with our emotions, we think, and clutter our pure reason. But what if our emotions help us register our humanity, guiding us in moral decision-making? C. S. Lewis argues as much in The Abolition of Man. How we imagine God, the world, and our place in relation to both transforms how we act. Great literature trains the moral imagination.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, “In Praise of Useless Reading,” TGC, Jan. 25
Goofing

Scott Sterling, Comic gold

Video Leave a comment

Witness comic genius in these two skits about the epic Yale athlete Scott Sterling and his ability to block the ball. The first video featuring soccer penalty kicks came out in 2014 (though before this weekend I thought it was much older than that). It’s one of the funniest videos of the decades, only made better by the follow-up volleyball video released in 2016. The execution and pacing of these videos sells the comedy marvelously.

The unstoppable Scott Sterling, soccer goalie
The unstoppable Scott Sterling, volleyball team captain

Like the man said, when Armageddon comes I want to be in a bunker made of that man’s face.

Blogs, Socials

Voice, opportunity, and other Benefits of blogging

Leave a comment

Tim Challies, the grandfather of godbloggers (or should that be godfather), who has been blogging for years (And Pharaoh said to him, “How many are the days of the years of your life?”  And he said to Pharaoh, “Can’t count that high, dude.”), has a good post on the benefits of blogging. He encourages his readers to write steadily on topics of their interest, doing their best while understanding every post can’t break the Internet.

He contrasts what a blog could be against what articles submitted to one of the big ministry websites usually are.

If you only ever submit articles for consideration at the ministry blogs, you’ll become obsessed with the quality of each article. To borrow a baseball analogy, you’ll only ever swing for the fences. So much of life, and ministry, and writing is hitting singles, and learning to be okay with hitting singles, and learning to appreciate how God so often uses those singles to incrementally advance his causes. . . . There’s also this: we vastly overestimate our ability to predict which of our articles will resonate with people and make a difference in their day or in their life. 

These are just two of seven good points he makes on the value of blogging. These apply in some ways to podcasters and vloggers, who could do all of this in another medium.

Fiction, Non-fiction
Quote Leave a comment

THE TURN THAT REVEALS

In this universe God made, streams run to the sea; salmon swim upstream; monarch butterflies, at winter’s coming, fly 5,000 miles in search of warmth; objects tossed into the air return to earth—and doings among men are subject to “the turn.” The yearning for justice is as engrained as yearning for the last note on a scale to be played, and godly souls feel ill at ease till it’s complete.


Andrée  Seu Peterson, “The Turn”
Fiction

The Best Icelandic Saga

Leave a comment

What’s the best Icelandic saga? You asked yourself that just the other day, didn’t you? Yoav Tirosh says it’s the Brennu-Njáls saga largely because that title could be taken two ways.

It’s the story of a couple fun-loving vikings who want to take over their district. Everything goes swimmingly until someone dies, there’s a power struggle, and then some zealots off the one guy everybody loves. Blood-relatives or not, those zealots are going to have to pay. Lars talked about it more in an earlier post.

Tirosh praises some of the saga’s virtues and suggests the duality in the title clues us into the story’s greatness, because Brennu-Njáls can mean either Burnt Njáll and Njáll the Burner. It’s the story of the burner and the burned, both embodied in one character.

Fiction

Amazon TV is working on prequel series of LOTR

Leave a comment

What would you say is the prequel to the Lord of the Rings? Yeah, that’s not this. With an estimated cost of over $1B, the new Amazon series will look into all of those details we get in the appendices about Aragorn’s life as the ranger and heir to the Gondorian throne. When Gandalf took Bilbo and the dwarves to Rivendell, the young heir was there, though perhaps not around them. A few years later, he was told who he was, that the sword of kings of Arnor was his, and that he needed to watch his back. That’s when he began to roam Middle Earth and later served under two kings for many years.

Lots of good material for them to, you know, ruin. I know they want a new Game of Thrones, which would be bad, but I hope they don’t give us a medieval Gotham, which would be like saying, “You know all of the hope and purity of Middle Earth that you’ve loved all your life? This ain’t that.”

https://nerdist.com/lord-of-the-rings-prequel-tv-series-amazon-everything-we-know/

Fiction

Christian Movies are less art, more propaganda

Leave a comment

Jared Wilson says Christian movies have gotten better in the last few years but still aren’t good stories.

Christian movies are more akin to propaganda than art, because they begin with wanting to communicate some Christian theme — the power of prayer, the power of believing, the power of something — and then the story is crafted around that message. This is true even when the story is something based on a real-life incident.

They also take place in a world of Christian sentimentalism, in which cliches sound compelling even to harsh critics. He make five points in all, bringing it down to this fundamental question: “What if there isn’t a way to make the gospel sound cool?”

Now I’m going to do what Jared says I can’t do, which is point to an exception, but considering how he’s defined the subject, Paul Harrill’s first film, Something, Anything, may not qualify as a Christian movie. It is a Christian story–quiet, poignant, and untidy. We saw it in 2016 and thought it was wonderful. Read more and view the trailer through the link.