Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Fiction, Religion

Is There Beauty in Sodom?

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“What appears shameful to the mind, is sheer beauty to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, for the great majority of people it is in Sodom and nowhere else.” — Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Dmitri Karamazov, in the “Confessions of an Ardent Heart in Verse,” rants with great feeling about the two ideals of beauty that haunt the heart of man: the Ideal of Sodom, and the Ideal of Madonna. Dostoevsky expanded on this idea in one of his journals, calling the Ideal of Sodom the “Second Beauty” — the beauty which sin has in the eyes of those who are tempted to commit it.

Dostoevsky was criticized, of course, by those who felt that his works sank too far into the darkness without offering any “real” solutions to the problem of human sinfulness. D. H. Lawrence wrote that, “He is like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and in order to belong to the light, professing love, all love,” while Freud lamented that “Dostoevsky threw away the chance of becoming a teacher and liberator of humanity; instead he appointed himself as jailer.” Such criticisms are typical of a certain critical tenor that sees literature, and art more generally, as a force for reworking the social order and rewriting the heart of man. It is a critical pose that leads to a kind of puritanism, and it is found just as commonly amongst atheistic reformers as amongst Christians.

Melinda Selmys writes about this second beauty and where the incarnation comes in.

Authors

The Nightmare of Tolkien’s Success

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Who is the more enduringly important of the two? Tolkien wrote the greatest work, as evidenced by Germaine Greer’s backhanded compliment: “It has been my nightmare,” she snarled, “that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century. The bad dream has materialized.” Lewis’s claims are broader. A half-century after his death, does any other writer turn up on so many shelves of good bookstores and libraries?

Michael Nelson reviews another one of those books about the Inklings. (via A&L Daily)

Authors

Edward Gorey’s Cover Art

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“Commercial book cover design is a minor portion of Gorey’s award-winning legacy, but not a lesser art. His linear expression and droll comedy are integral ingredients. There are also covers that are stunning for their hidden allusions. The barren landscape, for example, on the cover of The American Puritans evokes an otherworldly quietude, but speaks to concealed psychological demons as well.”

Steven Heller writes about a part of the much-loved illustrator’s work that has been overlooked. “Gorey’s covers and jackets were not done anonymously or as mere throwaways, as many others were. Nor was this a strategic compromise until he found and embraced his true calling.”

I want to look into that Puritan book.

Authors, Writing

#TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter

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Twitter is channelling writer angst, gripes, and chuckles over things people say to established writers.

“Oh, you’re a writer? When I retire, I want to write a book too.”

“So are you still writing or are you working now?”

“I really like your work! Will you write for us? Oh, we don’t pay.”

How do you spell conflabigation? You’re a writer, aren’t you?

I love your work. It’s just like, oh, that other guy, you know?

And then there’s this one from Guy Gavriel Kay.

Authors, Publishing

World’s Largest Published Novel

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Yahaya Baruwa, is an ambitious entrepreneur, who wrote a novel in college and now intends to have it printed as the largest published novel in the world. The novel, Struggles of a Dreamer, is about a farmer and a beggar who must reject traditional restraints in order to pursue their dreams. In keeping with that theme, Baruwa will get the whole book printed on pages 8.5 feet tall and 5.5 feet wide. He’s already raised more than enough money through kickstarter, where you can still learn more about the book, project, and author.

The current Guinness World Record holder for largest published novel is The Little Prince, published in Brazil at seven feet, seven inches tall, and 5.05 feet wide.

Authors, Fiction, Religion, The Press

Would They Defend Salman Rushdie’s ‘Verses’ today?

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If Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses were first released today (assuming even that is possible), would the literary world defend Rushdie as they did in 1989? He doesn’t think they would.

“Instead of realizing that we need to oppose these attacks on freedom of expression, we thought that we need to placate them with compromise and renunciation,” he said.

When the PEN American Center moved to honor Charlie Hebdo with a freedom of expression award, over 200 writers signed a letter of protest. Rushdie reached out to one of them, who replied to say he would defend Satanic Verses and that Hebdo was a different situation. They were accused of racism, but Rushdie was accused of blasphemy.

“It’s exactly the same thing,” Rushdie said. “I’ve since had the feeling that, if the attacks against The Satanic Verses had taken place today, these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.”

In a 1991 talk, Rushdie said, “Throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recently destroyed Actually Existing Socialism of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit. There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.”

Authors, Religion

When Preaching the Gospel Was Considered Trouble-making

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John MacArthur was talking about forty years of ministry back in 2009 and he shared some details about his ministry after seminary. From the transcript:

Well in the purposes of God [Dr. John M. Perkins] returned to Mississippi to a little town called Mendenhall, and Mendenhall, Mississippi, south of Jackson, and he started a ministry there. He started a school there. He started a church. Started a little co-op for people to buy things and really helped that little community of Mendenhall. This was right at the time when the Civil Rights Movement really exploded, and John asked me if I would come to Mississippi and if I would preach, if I would go out to the black high schools which were totally segregated and always on the other side of town, and if I would preach and do some gospel ministry in these high schools around Mississippi. So I said, “Absolutely, I’d love to do that.”

Got a few friends, in those days I used to sing a little. And we would do a little bit of singing together. And then I would preach and I had an absolutely wonderful time. I can’t remember how many years, I think I went down there for a period of about five years, going down and spending a pro-longed period of time. I lived with John and Vera Mae in their house, very interesting to live at that time in the home of black people in the south and to be treated the way they were treated, to be refused meals at a restaurant that I would go to because they knew who I was associating with.

It was so tense there. There was a friend of John’s who was a custodian in the First Baptist Church in Mendenhall which is a white church. This custodian loved Christ and he built a friendship with the pastor at the church, even though he couldn’t attend the church. The pastor started a Bible study with him on a regular basis and the church leaders told him he had to stop that. He said, “I can’t.” And the circumstances became so overbearing on him, he had problems in the community, in the town and getting gas and things like that. He had a nervous breakdown. They took him to Jackson. Put him in a hospital room and he dove out of the window, the third floor, and killed himself. That’s how intense that was.

Later on, he said he was arrested for fomenting trouble by preaching the gospel in high schools. That wasn’t nearly as bad as what Dr. Perkins’ suffered.

If you’re unfamiliar with Dr. Perkins, he spoke at the 2015 ERLC Leadership Summit in April on “The Gospel and Racial Reconciliation” on the Civil Rights Movement after 50 Years. He’s a good man. I’ve heard him many times on a radio program with Michael Card, musician and Bible teacher, and I recently listened to a seminar series from Covenant Theological Seminary which led with a couple sermons by Dr. Perkins.

The trouble-making is still here, but the church must not continue to hold to a politicized view of the gospel that ridicules the black experience in America and justifies past sins. The gospel is reconciliation across all barriers. “Segregation and discrimination are almost witchcraft,” Dr. Perkins says in the video below. It’s forbidden in the Bible we hold dear.

“We’re at a pivot place in the history of the church,” Dr. Perkins says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. . . . This is a conversation we need. We’re going to leave here and go to our homes and talk about the past, but forgiveness takes care of that.”

Authors

Williams: “Arguably the Finest Afro-American Novelist of His Generation”

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The NY Times has a obituary on John A. Williams (1925-2015), whom they called a strong but perpetually underrated novelist. He died July 3 at age 89.

His 1967 bestselling novel The Man Who Cried I Am is about a black novelist in Europe, struggling with the world, his own marriage, and an American friend of his. One Goodreads reviewer says, “This should be much more of an African-American classic than it is. I’d never even heard of it. The writing is excellent, simple but always appropriate, never pat. Although it is a novel about a novelist, and his relationship with another novelist, it never feels overly literary or self-referential.” In the NY Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith said it is “a compelling novel, gracefully written, angry but acute, committed but controlled, obviously timely, but deserving of attention for far more than that.”

His second novel, Night Song, appears to have opened him up for insult. William Grimes says Williams impressed the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which “unanimously recommended him for a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In an unprecedented decision, the Rome academy rejected the selection, offering no explanation. Mr. Williams said he believed himself to be the victim of a false rumor that he was about to marry a white woman. He was offered a $2,000 grant instead, which he rejected.”

Williams graduated in 1950 from Syracuse University, where his professors encouraged him to pursuing writing.

“Mr. Williams, whom the critic James L. de Jongh called ‘arguably the finest Afro-American novelist of his generation,’ excelled in describing the inner lives of characters struggling to make sense of their experiences, their personal relationships and their place in a hostile society,” Grimes writes. “His manifest gifts, however, earned him at best a twilight kind of fame — a reputation for being chronically underrated.”

Authors, Writing

Awake at Night with an Active Mind

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Writer and world traveler Karen Emslie writes about waking up in the middle of the night and how it may be a good time for creative play.

March 15, 2011It is true that when I wake at 4am I have a whirring mind. . . . If I write in these small hours, black thoughts become clear and colourful. They form themselves into words and sentences, hook one to the next – like elephants walking trunk to tail. My brain works differently at this time of night; I can only write, I cannot edit. I can only add, I cannot take away. I need my day-brain for finesse. I will work for several hours and then go back to bed. . . .

Indeed, when [Nicholson] Baker was writing what would become A Box of Matches (2003), a novel about a writer who gets up around 4am, lights a fire and writes while his family sleeps, Baker himself practised this ritual, then went back to bed for a second sleep.

‘I found that starting and nurturing this tiny early flame helped me to concentrate,’ Baker told The Paris Review. ‘There’s something simple and pleasantly meditative about building a fire at four in the morning. I started writing disconnected passages, and the writing came easily.’

Authors, Fiction

Dune at 50

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Herbert was a quintessential product of the libertarian culture of the Pacific coast, self-reliant and distrustful of centralised authority, yet with a mile-wide streak of utopian futurism and a concomitant willingness to experiment. He was also chronically broke. During the period he wrote Dune, his wife Beverly Ann was the main bread-winner, her own writing career sidelined by a job producing advertising copy for department stores.

… The prevailing publishing wisdom of the time had it that SF readers liked their stories short. Dune (400 pages in its first hardcover edition, almost 900 in the paperback on my desk) was rejected by more than 20 houses before being accepted by Chilton, a Philadelphia operation known for trade and hobby magazines such as Motor Age, Jewelers’ Circular and the no-doubt-diverting Dry Goods Economist.

“By rights,” Hari Kunzru writes, “Dune ought to have become a big movie. An attempt by the visionary Chilean film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky to bring it to the screen became one of the great “what if” stories of SF cinema…. But Jodorowsky’s prog-tastic project was strangled in the crib by risk-averse Hollywood producers.”

But the story actually did make it to the big screen–as the movie Star Wars. “Herbert knew he’d been ripped off, and thought he saw the ideas of other SF writers in Lucas’s money-spinning franchise. He and a number of colleagues formed a joke organisation called the We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society.”