Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Religion

Doug Wilson Has Been a Problem for a Long Time

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Pastor and author Douglas Wilson has spilled a lot of words over his lifetime. He has probably been blogging since the 90s, and even without that, he has preached and published bags and bags of words. You could probably pick up any of his solo-authored books and agree with most of it, as you would with many other Christian books.

But Wilson has taken a few hard stands over the years and expressed a few opinions in hard ways. He sees himself as a leader of culture warriors, an anchor point in the middle of a carnival of chaos, catching the wildness of our society and throwing wildness back at it.

According to his piece, I am a “provocateur,” but remember that we live in a time when trigger warnings about everything are most necessary, and this means that we are surrounded by people who are easily provoked. Maybe that’s the real issue. Provocateur, eh? I’ll show you provocateur. Ready? Bruno shouldn’t be allowed to shower with the junior high girls. Buster Keaton shouldn’t have been put in charge of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Men really shouldn’t have sex with unstable women. And there is plenty more where those came from.

Douglas Wilson, Theology Among the Deplorables | Blog & Mablog (dougwils.com), Oct. 13, 2021

I wouldn’t be writing about this if it weren’t for a piece that ran on September 28 on Vice.com. Vice isn’t my go-to for useful news or analysis, but there are too many details reported in this piece to dismiss it as creative writing. This isn’t a humanist simply finding ways to say how weird she finds those Moscow, Idaho-based Christians. This is a report of years of spiritual abuse by many members of Wilson’s congregation and affiliated networks.

In the blog post above, Wilson responds to some of it. He responded to at least one of the big stories in that article years ago; other issues are spelled out on a dedicated page. But these responses are beside the point.

If you read the Vice article–and I can’t recommend it because of the horrific details–you’ll see the problem is largely not Wilson’s particular actions but those of his congregants. Under his direction, they have left the Bride of Christ in the ditch in favor of a campaign against the lost and dying. They have become clanging symbols at best. At worst, they are going into the highways and byways not to invite whoever they find to the Master’s feast but to rob as highwaymen themselves.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion, Writing

Writing by Hand, Beastly Boy band, Blogroll, and Fear

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Paul Auster has written a biography on Stephen Crane and several other works without a word processor. He drafts by hand and types a paragraph with a typewriter (via Literary Saloon).

I have shelves of encyclopedias, foreign dictionaries, and all the reference books I use. And I must have five or six English dictionaries of various sizes and editions. I even have slang dictionaries. When I’m really stuck I look at a thesaurus, but it never helps me. I know all those words, but I always think, “Well, there’s one word I’m not remembering that would be better than the one I’m stuck on.”

City of Fear, by Alafair Burke, “a tight, pacy police procedural, in which three Indiana college girls hit New York for their spring break.” One of them doesn’t come back.

The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory, “deliberately and imaginatively breaks every one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rules of Detective Fiction.'” It’s a crazy premise, a genetically engineered boy band who find their producer dead in his hotel room, that apparently works.

Martin Luther: How Luther helped my depression. “I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton.”

Why should we fear the Lord when perfect love casts out fear?

Halloween meditation: Jesus defines hell as the place when everyone is “salted by fire.”

No matter what you call your church or church movement, I think you’ll go astray if you claim your side is the one breathing life into dead orthodoxy. The message of the Reformation is still needed.

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

Authors, Bookselling

Jack Lewis’s ‘Heimskringla’

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Photo from auctions.tennants.co.uk

Via the Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, Sept.-Oct., 2021:

News from finebooksmagazine.com website dated June 9, 2021:

Leyburn, North Yorkshire, England — A highly important collection of C.S. Lewis titles from the library of the author’s lifelong friend Cecil Harwood (1898-1975) is to be offered in Tennants Auctioneers’ Books, Maps & Manuscripts sale on 28 July 2021. […]

Leading the collection is C. S. Lewis’s personal annotated copy of Snorri Sturlason’s Heimskringla (Cambridge, 1932), a hugely evocative literary artefact shedding light on his mature engagement with the Norse sagas which had first stimulated his ‘imaginative Renaissance’ as a young schoolboy (estimate: £700-1,000 plus buyer’s premium).

I can’t find any information as to who got the book.
Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry

A Fictional Lewis, Miłosz in California, and Blogroll

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Gina Dalfonzo reviews Once Upon a Wardrobe, the second book from author Patti Callahan with a fictional story that draws in many actual details of C.S. Lewis’s life and habitat.

Czesław Miłosz, born in Šeteniai, Lithuania, 1911, spent 40 years in California before his death in 2004. Cynthia Haven has labored over a book on this great poet of last century and Czesław Miłosz: A California Life released this month.

“The Nobel poet spent more time in California than any other place during his long 93-year life,” Haven writes. “He wrote poems about the California landscape, engaged with our culture, and taught generations of students at UC-Berkeley. Some of those students became eminent translators of his work.”

David Zucker has written some pretty funny scripts, which cross the line too often for my taste. In Commentary, he writes about an opinion he often hears from fans: “You couldn’t do that scene today.” (Via Books inq)

Humor happens when you go against what’s expected and surprise people with something they’re not anticipating, like the New York Jets winning a game. But to find this surprise funny, people have to be willing to suppress the literal interpretations of jokes. In Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges’s character tries to quit smoking, drinking, amphetamines, and sniffing glue. If his “addictions” were to be taken literally, there would be no laughs. Many of today’s studio executives seem to believe that audiences can no longer look past the literal interpretations of jokes.

Dracula: How did Bram Stoker’s novel become a pop-fiction hit?

Malcolm Muggeridge: “If it should prove to be the case that Western man has now rejected these origins of his civilization, persuading himself that he can be master of his own destiny, that he can shape his own life and chart his own future, then assuredly he and his way of life and all he has stood and stands for must infallibly perish.”

To close, here are a few words plucked from Miłosz’s “City Without a Name,” written in California, 1968.

The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atrocious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire.

And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights,
there was not less bitterness but more.

If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is
transformed, at last, into harmony.

Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun’s secondhand-book shop, I am put to rest forever between two familiar names.

Photo: George Joe Restaurant, La Mesa, California, 1977, John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress.

Authors, The Press

Mindy Belz to Leave World News Group

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Veteran reporter Mindy Belz is leaving World News Group after thirty years. She brought news from Syria and the Middle East over the last decade, the kind of reporting that lead to her 2016 book, They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

“The fuel to carry on through these decades isn’t found in viewpoint journalism left or right,” she says. “It’s found in promises of hope beyond our circumstances.”

We need reporters like her to bring us the real story from difficult areas in the world, because we won’t get it from other major news sources. They continue to drop reporters into foreign circumstances, have them put together a story that looks whole on paper and that the editors prejudicially approve, and call it good. Journalistic integrity doesn’t sell.

All the best on the next season, Mindy.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, The Press

Not 1, but 2, Scandinavian stories

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My own photo of the reconstructed Viking houses at L’Anse Aux Meadows, some years back.

File this under “News That Surprised Absolutely Nobody:”

Counting tree rings reveals that wooden objects previously found at an archaeological site on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula were made from trees felled in the year 1021. That’s the oldest precise date for Europeans in the Americas and the only one from before Christopher Columbus’ voyages in 1492, geoscientists Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee and colleagues report October 20 in Nature.

You can read the rest here at Sciencenews.org.

1021 is actually fairly late in the game, if you give the sagas any credence. But most of us believe the Greenlanders were here for quite a few years. The sagas describe three expeditions in detail, and it seems probable that the Greenlanders would have exploited American resources (especially lumber) for quite a long time, even after they gave up on the idea of a colony.

I hold to the widely-held theory that the L’Anse Aux Meadows site in Newfoundland is not the entire Norse American enterprise, but merely a station – possibly a pretty insignificant one. The only real activity we can identify there from the archaeology is boat repair and its ancillary crafts.

Our good friend Dave Lull sent me this article from The American Conservative: A Norwegian American Journey, by Sam Sweeney.

Growing up in rural Montana, I was a bit removed from the Norwegian enclave in western North Dakota that my mom’s family is from. We ate lefse at Thanksgiving, but other than that, compared to my cousins I was not particularly in touch with my Norwegian heritage. I never felt a particular connection to Norway as a country, but do mention my heritage to Norwegians I meet, as there are a surprisingly high number of them in the Middle East, where I’ve spent much of the last decade. Reading Giants in the Earth, however, was an enlightening experience, and it brought to life the journey that my ancestors took from Norway to the Dakotas.

After reading O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious, the writer goes on to ponder Scandinavian cinema (I myself have seen The Last King and The King’s Choice, but none of the other films he describes). The article is interesting, though I was wondering by the end what its point was.

I personally am not a fan of much Scandinavian literature or film, as I expect I’ve made pretty clear. I read Giants In the Earth in college, and my major take-away was what a depressing book it was. I never read the sequel, Peder Victorious, but a friend described it to me, and the description didn’t appeal much (here’s a hint – the name “Victorious” [Norwegian Seier] is darkly ironic). The same friend described other books by Rolvaag, like The Boat of Longing, and that sounded even worse. I do not recommend reading Rolvaag if you struggle with suicidal ideation.

Scandinavians have a bent for looking at things coldly and in a brutal, unsentimental light. When the Scandinavians were Christian, I think, they found ways to mitigate that brutal honesty. Now that they’ve mostly “transcended” Christian faith, they seem to have settled on a glum fatalism, like those dogs in the famous Learned Helplessness experiments.

I think that probably explains most of their current social policies.

Authors, Religion

Keep Pilgrim’s Progress Humble

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Patrick Kurp notes that poet Charles Lamb wasn’t necessarily a fan of new, polished editions of Pilgrim’s Progress. At least, he said he wasn’t.

Bunyan’s book, for Lamb, is a model of Christian humility, not to be decked out in finery. Instead, Lamb would “. . . reprint the old cuts in as homely but good a style as possible. The Vanity Fair, and the pilgrims there—the silly soothness in his setting out countenance—the Christian idiocy (in a good sense) of his admiration of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains . . .”

Authors, Reading

On historical characters in movies

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It’ll be a day or two until my next book review. I’m reading Act One, the autobiography of Moss Hart, the renowned Broadway playwright and director. It came up as a bargain e-book on Amazon, and it’s about two things I like – writing and the theater. It is an interesting book, and I’ll have much to say about it when I’ve finished reading.

The book was made into a biographical movie in 1963. I didn’t see it, of course (we rarely saw movies in our family), but I caught part of it on TV at some point over the years. My perception of the film (which got mediocre reviews) is marked by an article I saw in Parade Magazine at the time of the release. At least I’m pretty sure the article was about this movie. There’s a scene that exactly corresponds to what it described.

According to the article, when they were casting the parts of famous people who only appear briefly, they hired some of those people’s actual children to play them. I’m pretty sure a son of Robert Benchley played him in the scene where there’s a gathering in George S. Kaufman’s apartment. (Might have been Nathaniel, but I can find no mention of it online). There were others as well — I forget who. IMDb says nothing about this casting gimmick, but I like to believe I remember correctly.

There’s a formula in the movie business, I read somewhere: “When you’re casting famous real-life characters, the smaller the part, the more they must resemble the person they’re playing.”

That sounds paradoxical, but it makes sense in practice. When you’re dealing with a lead, you’ve got the whole length of the production to convince the audience that (taking an example purely at random) Kyle MacLachlan is Franklin Roosevelt. But when you bring somebody on for a minute as, oh, Humphrey Bogart, you don’t want the viewer to be diverted from following the story to ask, “Is that supposed to be Bogey?”

The movie that jumps to my mind when I consider this rule is “The Plainsman,” a 1936 film by Cecil B. DeMille, which stars Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok. Except in height, Coop bears no resemblance whatever to Hickok. His nose is the wrong shape, his hair is way too short, and there’s no mustache at all (Hollywood, after World War I, adopted a long-standing tradition of erasing almost all mustaches from historical characters. Only the Hippie Era shook them off it). But Buffalo Bill Cody wears the proper long hair and imperial goatee. As does General Custer.

I’m not sure how they managed to preserve Buffalo Bill’s beard and hair style in 1944’s movie, “Buffalo Bill,” starring Joel McCrae. But they got away with it. I suppose Buffalo Bill’s appearance was so iconic they couldn’t escape it.

Note to future producers: If a movie is ever made of my life, you have my permission to cast somebody thinner and taller to play me. But you need to keep the pigtail in the older scenes.

Authors, Fiction

Missing the Joke or Playing Along?

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What’s the thing you saw to make you wonder about people’s grasp on reality? Sure, we seem to run a fair risk of seeing a Karen-type in social media each week, and that’s enough to wonder who those people think they are. But if you haven’t seen one of those people, here’s a story that may make you scratch your head.

In The Princess Bride, William Goldman opens talking about himself, how he was introduced to this “classic” from another era, and throughout the novel he inserts editorial notes of explanation or obfuscation. The fictional classic author Morgenstern, whom Goldman says he is merely editing, does the same. Somewhere in the middle, Morgenstern interrupts the narrative to say his wife had a complaint. Goldman interrupts the interruption to explain that M., not G., is interrupting at this point and that he agrees with M’s wife’s complaint.

I assume you know the story well enough for me to carry on. Yes? All right.

The complaint is over the lack of a reunion scene between Westley and Buttercup after she discovers who he is. Goldman says Morgenstern did not write such a scene, about which his otherwise appreciative wife complained. Goldman claims to have written the scene himself and that his editor would not allow him to insert it, because he’s not writing the book, only editing what Morgenstern wrote. Goldman tells us we can have this scene sent to us by request, giving an address for Urban del Rey at Ballentine Books, and saying his publisher would pay for return postage.

So please, if you have the least interest at all or even if you don’t, write in for my reunion scene. You don’t have to read it–I’m not asking that–but I would love to cost those publishing geniuses a few dollars, because, let’s face it, they’re not spending much on advertising my books.

—William Goldman, The Princess Bride, ch 5

How many letters would you say have arrived in New York with this request? When the book debuted, six or so letters a week found their way to the publisher. It was released in paperback the next year, 1974, and spurred upwards of 100 letters a week. In 1987, the L.A. Times reported that since the movie came out, 400-500 letters a week began coming in.

I don’t know how long that stream kept up that pace, but it seems a bit unhinged, doesn’t it? Combine this with reports of people asking for the original Morgenstern edition, which doesn’t exist because the whole abridgment thing is a joke, and you wonder about their grip on reality. Are they playing along or do they realize Goldman says many things he doesn’t not mean?

Authors

Resting in Peace: Walter Wangerin, Jr.

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A great, godly author died yesterday.

Walter Wangerin, Jr. dealt with lung cancer for the last several years and has finally succumbed to it. He wrote many award-winning books, including the popular The Book of the Dun Cow. He was the speaker for the Lutheran Vespers radio program for about ten years (1994-2005). More recently, he was Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University.

Image Journal shares Wangerin’s short story “Moravia” from Issue 82.

Pete Peterson says Wangerin cast a long shadow. “The proof of that shadow’s reach, perhaps, is that a few weeks ago when I sat down to write a short story for a forthcoming book called The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad, the tale that came out was, unexpectedly, about Walt.”

I’ve been referring to Wangerin in the past tense, but realistically, Christianly, he continues to live, even more full than he has on earth. We would say he was a good man because we approved of his life. He is a good man, even today, because of Christ. But today, I doubt he or anyone around him would refer to him or each other as good.

Who is good but God, after all?