“No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing…. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Category Archives: Authors
Who’s the Smug One?
Author Anne Lamott doesn’t like McCain-Palin. She even left church the other Sunday over it:
A man and a woman whose values we loathe and despise — lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world — are being worshiped, exalted by the media, in a position to take a swing at all that is loveliest about this earth and what’s left of our precious freedoms.
When I got home from church, I drank a bunch of water to metabolize the Dove bar and called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too. I asked, “Don’t you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent? Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?”
And he said, “Absolutely. They are everything He or She hates in a Christian.”
Later on, she devotes a paragraph to ridiculing the names of the Palin children. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto observes that she and her friend appear to be the very “stereotype people on the left typically hold of conservatives, and religious conservatives in particular: smug yet insecure, dogmatic and intolerant and filled with hate and rage. Even Lamott’s descriptions of Palin more aptly describe Lamott in the act of describing Palin!”
Ireland’s Eoin Colfer to Continue the Hitchhiker’s Guide
The publisher approached Eoin Colfer with the idea of carrying on with Douglas Adams’ series in a new book to be called, And Another Thing. To his credit, Colfer was initially shocked at the invitation.
More on David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) said, “Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function,” he once wrote. “It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” This quoted in The Independent, which ran a final tribute today.
RIP: David Foster Wallace
The writer David Foster Wallace died tragically by his own hand this weekend. I had not read any of his work.
But Shawn Macomber posts a charming excerpt of an interview where he said some extremely sensible things.
If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
I should probably look for one of his books.
Everything’s More Political Now
Nobel Prize Winner Orhan Pamuk on life after Nobel: “It made me more famous, it brought me so many new readers and it made it slightly difficult — it made everything I do more political than I’d expected.” Says something about the prize, doesn’t it?
Inspired by ‘Christian Charity’ (p3)
Here’s part three of our Q&A with Sarah Vowell on her book, The Wordy Shipmates. (Part one – part two)
13. Who was Anne Hutchinson? Why was she so important, and why did she get kicked out of Massachusetts?
Hutchinson was a wife, mother, midwife, and groupie of John Cotton who followed the minister to Massachusetts. She hosted religious meetings in her home questioning the preaching of many of New England’s ministers. Her followers started disrupting church services around the colony and so she was hauled before the magistrates to repent both her beliefs and her influence. She believed she had heard the voice of God, which was heresy. Not backing down, the magistrates expelled her from Massachusetts. She went on to found a settlement in Rhode Island. I think, like Williams, she sticks out as having been born too early. Like him, she practiced freedom of speech before this right existed.
14. How did she die? Why do millions of residents of the New York City metropolitan area encounter her name every day without realizing it?
After her husband died in Rhode Island, she settled with her children in New Netherland in what is now the Bronx. The local Indians were at war with the Dutch, and Hutchinson and her family were attacked in their home. A nearby river was named after her and a highway, the Hutchinson River Parkway, was later named after her as well.
15. How do you see yourself as being like Hutchinson?
Like her, I have a penchant for yakking. It’s just way more legal for me.
16. Why did the Puritans commit a gruesome massacre of the Pequot Indians and set the blueprint for all future Indian wars?
And now, for my next trick, I’d like to explain genocide! I guess the Massachusetts militia commits mass murder for the same old reason everyone does—hate, resentment, anxiety, frustration, xenophobia. It’s also simple military ground-war tactics. The English commander understood that his men were about to get slaughtered in the ground-war mayhem, so he thought setting the enemy on fire en masse was the most logical, streamlined way to save his own troops’ lives. When Hannah Arendt was writing about the Holocaust, she pointed out that once something has happened, it is far more likely to happen again. That’s what happened after Mystic. Slaughter one group of Indian women, children, and old people and it’s probably going to happen again—and it does.
17. How did the Puritan bloodlines flow right down to the 2004 presidential election?
The Republican candidate, President Bush, is a descendant of Anne Hutchinson. The Democratic candidate, Senator Kerry, is a descendant of John Winthrop.
18. Why were the Puritans so fearless? What was the source of their strength?
They weren’t fearless. They were fearful. Like, chockfull of fear. Their big fear being God. God is also their source of strength, of course. But mostly they are terrified of disappointing God and suffering His wrath. They are scared of the sea, Indians, heretics and the King of England. They are afraid of eternal damnation. And yet, despite all this terror, they still get on the boats to Massachusetts. They decide that if King Charles sends a new governor to take over, they will fight him. All that is old-fashioned English stiff-upper-lip stuff. But the Bay Colony’s fears are also the source of their worse impulses. This is true of pretty much every society at any time or place. Their fears cause them to enact unfair laws, to crack down on dissent, to burn alive Indian children. Of course, their faith is also their source of strength, why they kept going, why they didn’t give up. They had a city on a hill to build and they built it.
19. What is the positive side of the Puritan legacy? Why is it so overlooked, and why are we Americans so reluctant to embrace it? What promise does it hold for us today?
I think their most endearing legacy is their obsession with education, especially founding the first university in what would become the United States. The way they privilege learning and words, exhort their children to read and write, is worth admiring. I think we’ve lost that as a culture, to some degree. The most admired, most powerful figures in early New England were the smartest—men like Winthrop, Cotton, and Williams. We certainly inherited New England’s collective self-esteem, their idea of themselves as the most divinely blessed. But I think we’ve lost their sense of collective responsibility, their fear that they would fail each other and their God.
Stephenie Meyer Puts Next Book on Hold
A draft of Stephenie Meyer’s next book in the “Twilight” series, Midnight Sun, has been leaked online, prompting the author to stall the series. “I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on Midnight Sun, and so it is on hold indefinitely.”
Marilynne Robinson Talks About Home
Marilynne Robinson has another novel, Home, and talks about it with Newsweek.
The new book seems less like a sequel than a sort of Faulknerian return to Gilead. How conscious were you of the notion that the town itself is a central character to the story? Was that the intention?
To me it seems true that towns are always characters and that landscapes are as well. Gilead has resonance for me as a repository of a certain history, and as the kind of commonplace, self-forgetful little town you might find anywhere and not even bother to wonder about. These places are full of history and full of meaning. I am not particularly interested in creating my own Yoknapatawpha, but Gilead is where these characters live, and that was the reason I returned there.
The New York Sun’s Benjamin Lytal reviews Home here, opening his article with this: “Marilynne Robinson is an anomaly in the great tradition of American literature. One of our few novelists at peace with religion, she isn’t interested in the post-Puritanical game of unmasking hypocrisy, of entering into darkness.”
The Secret Isn’t Broken
The author of The Secret, the little book that told you to believe your way to happiness, is in trouble.
Dan Hollings, a former associate “whose ‘viral marketing’ helped propel Byrne to global fame via Oprah” claims he wouldn’t trade places with the author for any amount of money. “I just don’t think success has enriched her life,” he says. “It’s like lottery winners who win the lottery and discover their life is worse and they wish they had never won.”