“The left flattens people, reduces people to financial interests. Dave’s an artist. He knew people are deeper than that.”
Andrew Ferguson has a powerful article on the political conversion of the strong playwright David Mamet. Of note is the fact that one of the books that blew his mind was Chamber’s Witness
Mamet is stirring the pot on Broadway and in Hollywood with a new book of essays, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. I’ll bet it’s worthy reading.
Jeffrey Overtreet write about finding inspiration in The Muppet Movie and his strong identification with the crisis point in the plot.
You can try to stir the writer’s life and the self-marketer’s life together, but they’re oil and water. Publishers sent me a guide detailing what “successful” authors do: Build websites about themselves. Create their own fan clubs on Facebook. Pursue their own endorsements. Volunteer to blog on “influential” websites. Organize readings, book-signings, and giveaways.
Following instructions, I feel I’m standing on a street corner wearing a sandwich board with my picture on it and shouting, “I’m awesome! Go tell everyone I’m awesome!”
Alan Jacobs, ND Wilson, and Doug Wilson in conversation | Full Edition from Canon Wired on Vimeo.
Authors Alan Jacobs (The Narnian: the Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis), N.D. Wilson (100 Cupboards series), and Doug Wilson (Is Christianity Good for the World?) talk about C.S. Lewis.
Daniel Kalder notes that many writers describe murder in their stories, but few have actual experience with it, or if not murder, then killing on the battlefield. More writers do kill themselves, but that usually diminishes their future creative output. In the U.K. Guardian, Kalder writes:
Writers, by and large, are a boring lot – even more so now that so many are employed by the state (or states in the case of the US) to teach middle-class youth how to tell imaginary stories in prose. Yes, yes, the academy is a fascinating subject and you can’t have enough tales about college politics or balding, paunchy middle-aged lecturers lusting after young girls.
But if you want your work required for undergraduate modern novel classes, college politics is a great topic. Isn’t it? (via Books, Inq.)
N.D. Wilson is working on a screenplay for C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. He talks to Justin Taylor about it.
How do you take a set of episodes and turn them into a coherent story while being faithful and without ruffling too many feathers?
Oh, I’m not afraid to ruffle feathers. But any nervous fans out there should know that I’m as dog-loyal to Lewis and his vision as any writer could be. Where I’m adding and expanding and shaping, I am constantly trying to check myself against Lewis’ broader imagination as represented in his collected works—not simply this little volume.
I will admit that when I began the adaptation, I felt like I was jumping off a cliff into (hopefully deep) mysterious waters—you can never completely predict what will happen on impact. But now that I’ve impacted and finished the first draft of the script, I can say that (as a Lewis fan), I’m really, really happy with it. And from here, I hope it only gets better.
Today, I must warn you of a old tradition you will not encounter, not even if you were in the few British counties where it was practiced for many years. Today is Lifting Monday or Heaving Day.
In a letter by author Elizabeth Gaskell, she comments that Lifting Monday and Lifting Tuesday are in full swing where she is and that her husband has had to run hard to avoid the revelers. From what I can gather, men on Monday and women on Tuesday went into homes and lifted the lady or master of the house in a chair three times with loud cheers, and for this merry feat they were allowed to kiss her or him or be paid off a shilling. Some fun-going bands waylaid strangers in the streets. When the women tried this on Tuesday, it raised more of a ruckus because many would try to lift or heave men up without success. You can imagine how the mousey clerk from the Chershire Bank on Oakchest Rd would be a favorite target for roving bands of girls. If he wouldn’t let you kiss him, he’d have to give you a shilling. And on Monday, the barkeep at The Olde Red Lion could lift any woman he pleased even in a chair.
Mrs. Gaskell says there’s a story that on Easter Monday, 1290, seven maids of honor rushed into the room where King Edward I was sitting and lifted him in his chair until he paid them 14 pounds to put him down. That’s some history, but they stopped this tradition over 100 years ago, and of course, we wouldn’t do it today. We’re too busy superpoking friends on Facebook to do silly stuff like this.
“Author Stephen Atlrogge says that there’s a conspiracy affecting every person who has ever lived,” reported the publisher Crossway’s blog. Atlrogge has written The Greener Grass Conspiracy to explain the problem and recommend a solution. This photo, however, says he should have given his book another title.
Two stories tonight, whose common thread is authors who do non-admirable things.
First of all, First Thoughts directs us to a Salon.com article by a woman who tells “How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood.”
My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously. She agreed, dissolving Sunday church and Bible study with one swift signature. Mom didn’t mind; she was agnostic and knew we didn’t need religion to be good people. But a disdain for faith wasn’t the only reason he wrote God out of my childhood. There was simply no room in our household for both Jesus Christ and my father’s one true love: Ayn Rand.
I was hoping for a story about how the author found her way back to faith, but she says nothing more about that. Mostly it’s the story of how her father used Objectivist principles as an excuse to neglect his children.
Then, from Instapundit, a link to a Reason article by a fellow who set about re-tracing John Steinbeck’s route in his book, Travels With Charlie (which was very big back when I was in high school). His conclusion is that most of what Steinbeck reports is impossible, or is contradicted by the record.
It’s possible Steinbeck and Charley stopped to have lunch by the Maple River on October 12 as they raced across North Dakota. But unless the author was able to be at both ends of the state at the same time—or able to push his pickup truck/camper shell “Rocinante” to supersonic speeds—Steinbeck didn’t camp overnight anywhere near Alice 50 years ago. In the real world, the nonfiction world, Steinbeck spent that night 326 miles farther west, in the Badlands, staying in a motel in the town of Beach, taking a hot bath. We know this is true because Steinbeck wrote about the motel in a letter dated October 12 that he sent from Beach to his wife, Elaine, in New York.
Two writers, one from the far right, the other from the left. Both weighed and found wanting, by at least one reader, but for very different reasons. These are the besetting sins of liberals and conservatives.
I, of course, occupy the exact Middle. I look on both sides with condescension. The extent to which some people see me as partisan is precisely the extent to which the values of our society are warped. (Ahem.)
I expect most people feel that way, wherever they sit on the political/philosophical spectrum. Do the real extremists do the same? Did Stalin ever look at anyone and say, “Boy, he’s taking this Marxist dialectic a little too far”? Did Torquemada ever look at somebody else and say, “Hey, brother, you need to apply a little grace!”?
Author Robert Lane Greene has a good interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm on his book, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity. Many of his points are great, and it’s amusing that people have been complaining about the death of their language for centuries. Greene says slang will always be in a living language, and most of it will pass with times, but the idea that how we speak defines us to a large degree is critical. Perhaps that is another reason memorizing Scripture is vital to healthy living.
Irvin Leigh Matus, an extraordinary Shakespeare scholar who died recently, said this back in 1989. “Get a 9-to-5 job? No way. When you have a mind like mine, such a wonderful mind, well, to have it virtually imprisoned in the boring, trivial and mundane would be torture.”
Matus was homeless for a long time while pursuing his research. He wrote two critically acclaimed books on the Bard, but would not–perhaps could not–hold a regular job or I guess even an irregular job. I offer you his quote above both to point you to an interesting obit on him and as a writing prompt. What would a wonderful mind do in a regular job? How would a genius handle the everyday humility needed for living under God?