Category Archives: Blogs, Socials

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

The Heroes of Your Imagination

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People ask on social media to share gifs of the superhero they imagine themselves to be (when they aren’t fetching coffee for the office team or replying to emails from people who hadn’t read the original email). I don’t join the sharing, because I don’t daydream in previously defined types like this.

Sometimes I imagine catching a falling meteor and it setting my body ablaze, and maybe that’s the signal flare from an extraterrestrial being needing my help. Or I imagine I’m the one who can talk to either large, invisible beasts or poltergeist-like forces nearby, telling them no to tear up the door I’m walking through.

Lately, I’ve taken a different tack. I’ve imagined confronting the bad guys with their full names, telling them they’re on my list, and saying no one would die here except them. If they run, because maybe they shoot at me to no effect, I follow them, like the stalking killer of a horror movie. I’m not so much a superhero in this line of thought as a force of nature, literally an agent or ambassador for the office of Death. No power to use or abuse; only select authority dispassionately exercised.

That sounds like a boring character or a side character at best. But thinking on those lines got me thinking of the flipside, of someone who can heal anything. I’ve imagined putting a hand on the back of someone’s neck and getting an expanding, somewhat undefined sense of their nerves, tissues, and organs, recognizing broken parts or dead cells, and restoring them to life. Sometimes it hurts the healer, sometimes the patient. Sometimes emotional pain rushes out causing both to weep.

There may be a story with a character like that, but more likely it’s fruitless imagination.

Batman: Tim Burton’s Batman was released June 23, 1989. Michael Keaton donned the cowl in that film and again in the sequel, Batman Returns. He and Burton would have returned for a third film, but the studio didn’t like the results of the second well enough to allow it. Now that Keaton is Batman again in the recently released The Flash, Jesse Schedeen tells us what Burton had intended to do in a third film and what the DC Comics series Batman ’89 does to fill in the story.

BTW, it was Keaton who gave us the line, “I’m Batman,” when he was scripted to say, “I am the night,” according to All the Right Movies on Twitter.

Super Movies: What are the best superhero movies, in your opinion? ScreenRant has the original Superman with Christopher Reeve and Blade with Wesley Snipe at the top of their list.

Novels: Superhero novels aren’t big sellers, from what I can tell. I’ve heard writers say the boom in movie sales hasn’t translated into book sales. I heard another writer recommend against any new writer attempting to sell a superhero novel. FWIW, here’s a list of superhero novels that aren’t graphic novels.

Americans: Nabokov on “The Simplicity and Kindness of Americans” and insightful barbers.

Favorite Books: No doubt, you were asking yourself just the other day what would be Umberto Eco’s favorite books. His son, Stephano, provides few titles, including “one of the most beautiful in the world,” Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Context Is King and They’re Tearing It Away from Us

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Context is critical to interpreting words and actions. We speak and interact with each other in social contexts that include unspoken assumptions and patterns for doing things. Context tells us what’s stylish, professional, acceptable, or rude. You can’t tell jokes without context nor can you be a breath of fresh air.

Usually, we recognize the inside and outside of those contexts—an office climate, a social circle, a family. We know we won’t fit there without meeting certain conditions. If a reader tells you your writing stinks, you might respond with creative advice for him, but if an editor tells you the same thing, you may receive it willing, more or less.

We talk broadly about culture as a context we’re all in together, but in reality, we live in various, overlapping cultures at once. You and I may share a culture as English-speakers, as Americans, or as readers, and we will also contrast one another when we reveal other cultures we do not share. The blurred borders of those social contexts may or may not need definition or defense. We may just accept each other. Maybe that’s the creative act of forming a relational context.

The reason I bring up context is to say social media has almost erased the borders between our various contexts by tying us down to mostly verbal communication, removing physical and time limitations, and allowing us to stay anonymous. (Imagine if we had to introduce ourselves before joining a conversation thread.) Without context, we easily misunderstand other people and, if we are so inclined, assume the worst, and the popular climate of our country, if not all Western Civilization, encourages everyone to look for offense and confront the foolish among us.

What are we going to do about it?

Those Who Have Gone Before Us

Literary editor Robert Gottlieb, 92, died June 14. Most recently, he worked for Knopf Doubleday. Talya Zax writes the most remarkable thing about him is “how thoroughly he refuses to think about himself as a creature of distinct talents; he saw himself as talented in the context of working with others, not, necessarily, on his own. To him, there was not really such a thing as a good editor. There was only a good editor of the manuscript in front of him, or, more accurately, the person who wrote it.”

Among many other books, Gottlieb worked on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, selling it to publishing executives by saying, “The funny parts are wildly funny, the serious parts are excellent.”

Literary author Cormac McCarthy, 89, died June 13. In their statement honoring him, the leaders of the author’s society state, “He never compromised his devotion to the beauty of language and the necessary art of storytelling.”

Ten Texas Writers Remember Cormac McCarthy. Fernando A. Flores says, “Sometimes there’s a writer so singular, so pervasive, who captures a certain poetry from the region where you live so distinctly, that, if you’re also writer, you just have to pretend this other person doesn’t exist.”

Rejection: Speaking of listening to an editor, several authors didn’t listen to their editors when their famous works were rejected.

Of Moby Dick, Melville was told, “First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale? While this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device, we recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers. For instance, could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?”

And The Wind In The Willows author Kenneth Grahame got this feedback: “An irresponsible holiday story that will never sell.”

Photo by Florian Schneider on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry

Vanity Is Common, Blasphemy Ever Green

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Fear and Vanity
incline us to imagine
we have caused a face
to turn away which merely
happened to look somewhere else.
 
----  ----  ----
Everyone thinks:
"I am the most important 
Person at present."
The same remember to add:
"Important, I mean, to me."

from “Marginalia” by W.H. Auden, City Without Walls and Other Poems

Mencken: “[Paul] Fussell credits Mencken’s series of ‘elegantly subversive’ Prejudices volumes with making him a genuine reader and eventually a writer. He reveled in Mencken’s ‘refreshing battle against complacent inhumanity and the morons’ – like any know-it-all aspiring young literary man.”

Comedy: Monty Python is irreverent and sometimes blasphemous, but now one of its productions is being accused of a different kind of blasphemy. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality, as T. S. Eliot opined, and that seems especially true of the progressive political class and its commissars among the creative types.”

Fantasy: Patrik Leo raves over Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair among others. See the whole trilogy here.

Also, Elliot Brooks talks about a few new fantasy novels.

Non-fiction: Bookstore tales. Here’s a “charming tale of an Italian book publicist and poet who ‘launched a [successful] crowdfunding campaign on Facebook to open a bookshop in a tiny village in the mountains.'”

Also, ten non-fiction recommendations from Kirkus Reviews.

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Religion

‘Viking Vitalism’

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Jarl Haakon disposes of unwanted Christian priests, illustration by Eric Werenskiold for “Heimskringla.”

I am indebted for today’s blog topic to Greg Smith, who asked my opinion about an article by John Ehrett, posted yesterday at Mere Orthodoxy. The article is called “The End of Viking Vitalism,” and – in spite of my tendency to lord it over and ridicule anybody who expresses an opinion about the Vikings, especially in the religious area, I had to tell him that I agreed with it entirely. I might have even added (though I didn’t for some reason) that it in fact provoked some new thoughts in me.

In discussing the confrontation between Christian faith and heathenism, Ehrett cites both Neil Gaiman’s “Beowulf” film and Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles. He cites the following exchange from Cornwell:

“And I like the Danes,” I said.
“You do? So why do you kill them?”
“I like them,” I said, ignoring his question, “because they’re not frightened of life.”
“They’re not Christians, you mean.”
“They’re not Christians,” I agreed.[6]

For Uhtred (and Cornwell, clearly), Christianity is nothing but an ossified legalism: “the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws.”[7]

This is an issue I’ve attempted to address in my Erling novels. One of the more regrettable leftovers from the days of the Romantic Movement is the idea of heathens (or pagans, if you will) as happy nature children living innocent and uncomplicated lives, eating, drinking, and breeding without a care. Anyone who thinks that way should talk to a Christian convert from real paganism – a former animist in Africa, for instance. They’ll tell you that the world of the many gods is a world of darkness, fear, and blood. A world where cruel spirits take horrific revenge for the smallest transgressions of the taboos. It is with tremendous joy and relief that people receive the gospel in such an environment.

What Ehrett says that never occurred to me before is that the recent movie, “The Northman,” which I found a little disappointing, is much to be preferred on that score. It recognizes (even if unintentionally) the essential hopelessness of Amleth’s story. He is in no way free. The movie’s great strength is its realism, and that extends to the world of faith – to some extent.

Blogs, Socials, Music, Non-fiction, The Press

But How Are You Really? Well, Journalism Is Dead

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This week, I had one of those frequently repeated conversations about what we mean when we greet others with “Hello” and “How are you?” An earnest person might think it’s dishonest to ask someone how they are doing without expecting an answer and may feel a burden to share transparently when others ask them. You may have heard someone argue that Christians shouldn’t say they are fine when they aren’t fine; they shouldn’t paint on a smile when they’re going through a hard time.

But honesty doesn’t require complete transparency. That would expose us all to the fixers, who don’t know when to listen and when to advise. Greeting one another with a word or phrase is essentially verbal acknowledgement. We see and maybe recognize each other. We ask each other how’s the day or the doing or life at large as a way of well wishing. If we’re close to each other, we’ll want more than that, but even then, it may not be the time for it.

We can thank Thomas Edison for popularizing the word hello as a good way to answer the phone. Alexander Graham Bell (why do we give his full name so often? why not Alex Bell or Alexander G. Bell?) wanted us to us say ahoy, as if we were called out to someone in the distance. Prior to the phone, hello was a common word of surprise, which I suppose is the reason Bertie Wooster and co. say, “What ho!” regularly. The Online Etymology Dictionary says there are records from 1849 that show hello, the house as “the usual greeting upon approaching a habitation” in the American west.

Yes, yes, I suppose we should get on to other things, shouldn’t we?

Vocabulary: Here’s a good word for everyday use.

via Cian McCarthy/Twitter

Journalism: News outlets aren’t dead, but their owners may be trying to kill them. Ted Gioia has a compelling piece on news sites that wanted our clicks so bad they killed themselves, and now big news outlets appear to want to die the same way. “The company tried to maximize clicks with shallow gimmicks, when it should have been worrying about the articles themselves.”

Conservatism: A right-wing movement wants a big reset. John Ehrett says critics label it different things, but vitalism is a good name for it. “In place of Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘three-legged stool’—free-market economics, military interventionism, and religious conservatism—the new vitalists would burn the place down altogether, and host a festival around the pyre.”

Bruce Springsteen: “He paints his masterpiece of America as a brand and what it does to people. To me, Nebraska is an album-length description of how America has struggled to find its soul, has never had much of an identity beyond the brand that’s been sold over and over again to people living here. But lives are lived behind the brand, and Springsteen is unearthing them, exposing them to the light.” That storytelling was formed by a love of Flannery O’Connor.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized, Writing

What Is the Essence of Story?

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The essence of a story is conflict. We may think the essence as theme and remember some stories for a moment of discovery or clarity that moves us, but that moment must come through conflict to carry meaning.

In a 1959 text called Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write, “A story is a movement through complexity to unity, through complication to simplicity, through confusion to order.” Both adventures and mysteries follow this path. You begin with many questions and maybe competing statements of fact. The confusion may be as simple as being lost, and finding the way out takes a lot of problem solving. When order or simplicity is found, when the events finally make some sense, then you have a story.

There are many types of conflict, Brooks and Warren note, but an account of “purely physical conflict” can’t be called fiction. Motives and ideas are necessary. We need characters, not just actors. A writer needs to “investigate motives” and “imply sympathy or antipathy” for the characters involved. Dr. Jones wants to preserve the ark or save Marion and himself. Belloq wants to use the ark to conquer the world. (And there are layers of conflict despite what fan critics have said.)

In another Saturday post, I said games and sports could hit the points of story, and I think motives and character is what I was talking about. The conflict is there, and if you impute evil intent onto the other team, you’ve got something that smells like a story.

What else have we got?

Book Banning: The ALA asks us to believe “2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship” in mostly “school libraries, classroom libraries, or school curricula” in 2022. That’s a 38 percent increase over 2021. Though you may suspect the ALA of cooking the books to raise this number, a glance at the top 13 most challenged books shows “claimed to be sexually explicit” on every title. Why are any of these recommended in schools?

Faithfulness: A new book tells the stories of Lutherans under Stalin.

But the Communist Party sought also to erase Christian ethics. “Love your neighbor” violated the Marxist principle of “class struggle.” Thus, pastors could be charged with “preaching class peace.” Lutherans had an extensive network to help the poor and the disabled, but this was held to compete with the state and to keep the deprived “in thrall to their exploiters.” Consequently, the church was defined as an enemy of the state. One of the Lutheran bishops summed up the goal: “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear from the life of the people and its individual citizens.”

Ukraine: “[Victoria] Amelina is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated young literary figures and a common presence at literary festivals both in Ukraine and abroad.” Now, she researches war crimes, starting with what happened to children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko.

Reader Reviews: A writer gets angry that ARC readers aren’t leaving reviews.

Grassroots Hatred: Will anti-Semitism ever die?

Blogs, Socials, Music, Uncategorized

Denials, the Digital, and the Awesome

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I’m trying to decide if the apostle Peter is a good example of saying the quiet part aloud. When someone notes that an activist or someone has said the quiet part out loud, they mean this person has admitted to principles or goals his people usually leave unsaid or even deny. And Peter is famous for speaking his mind.

On Good Friday, we remember that Peter told Jesus he would die before he denied Christ. “Peter said to him, ‘Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you!’ And all the disciples said the same” (Mt. 26:35 ESV). But he did deny the Lord, and I assume the others did too by running away.

When Jesus filled the fishermen’s nets to overflowing, Peter said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Lk 5:8 ESV), saying immediately what the others may think later, that they were unworthy to stand so close to a holy man. Many years later, Paul had to rebuke Peter for holding Gentile believers to an unholy standard, implying they should maintain Jewish habits in order to be right with Christ (Gal. 2:11-14).

With these and other examples, Peter shows himself to be a great example of a Christian who can’t keep his act together, who lives in continual repentance for not living what he actually believes. In this way, perhaps it’s right to say he says quiet things aloud, and by doing so, he helps us recognize or reject what he says. We can say we do believe that and it’s wrong, or we do believe that and it clashes with other professed beliefs.

Or perhaps we deny that we will ever reject Christ, and then we hear ourselves rejecting him. Don’t let that be your final word. Christ’s work on the cross is enough to flood your entire life and raise you to a new life with him.

As for other things:

Internet: How is the Internet shaping us? How has it formed our habits and changed our values? Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age (via Keith Plummer)

Social Media: “The thought of those in our ministries being drawn away by a stranger through a screen is gut-wrenching.” But influencers don’t have the physical proximity we do. (via Keith Plummer)

Gospel: “The one thing the gospel never does is nothing.”

Sci-fi: Why do some space movies achieve awesome grandeur and others do not? ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and the elusiveness of awe

And as meditation on the grief of Holy Saturday, here’s a Chopin prelude.

Khatia Buniatishvili performs Chopin’s Prelude in E minor Op. 28, no. 4
Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Conforming to a Hot Topic World

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Many weeks ago, I was in a small group that considered how we might tell we were conforming to the world (Romans 12:2). I suggested one way would be to notice where and how we self-censor, which is a touchy subject for the 21st century social media user.

On one hand, social media encourages us to say outrageous things and to share our opinion on every topic we can articulate into at least a gif. And Christians may recognize this danger and their own ignorance and regularly avoid hosing down the Internet. That’s good.

On the other hand, social media has enabled small groups of people to pose as massive mobs to shout down, dox, and ruin the lives of anyone they target, so we may avoid commenting on select hot button topics to avoid getting caught by such a mob. That’s the self-censoring I’m talking about. It makes me uneasy to talk about it even now.

I’ve argued with myself over whether I should state one of my opinions, well-founded and potentially life-changing as they usually are. I wonder if I shouldn’t stick to posts on books and writing in order to stay in my lane, as it were. But sometimes I just retweet a link or someone else’s opinion because it’s important and I want to amplify the reach. If I hold back because the topic is too hot, is that conforming to the world?

Here’s a troubling video on the censoring publishers are doing to select authors poke the bear by not conforming to unspoken expectations.

Also, a woman with experience in college diversity efforts couldn’t overcome the mindset of her own office. “Orthodoxy superseded all else: collegiality, professionalism, the truth.”

A proper feature: Esquire magazine has published its own feature of author Brandon Sanderson, and with over 5,000 words, it’s what you’d expect from a feature article. It’s good and interesting, pulls in some relevant criticism, and remains positive overall.

More sensitive: New Agatha Christie novels have been submitted to sensitivity readers and thus altered for modern, ahem, sensibilities. The copyright holder, Agatha Christie Limited, has the author’s great grandson at the helm and, I suppose, responsible for this.

Publishing among friends: Publisher Richard Charkin has written about his years in the British book business. “In fact, agent-editor ‘negotiations’ makes it sound more adversarial than it actually was. Editors and agents were usually friends, and had often worked together previously. All too often this led to an unhelpful tendency among some editors to see “management” as the enemy, and they would readily side with their authors and agents against the company that employed them.”

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Life Builds Its Own Fences, and Fond Memories of Louis Armstrong

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A few months ago, I watched August Wilson’s Fences on Amazon. The play was first produced in 1985 and won a Pulitzer and a Tony in 1987. When the play returned in 2010, it won another Tony along with awards for the main actors. I watched the 2016 movie adaptation, directed by and starring Denzel Washington along with Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson. They were compelling and marvelous.

It’s a moving drama about a man, Troy, who was something of a star in baseball’s negro leagues and now works in Pittsburgh as a garbage man. His wife, Rose, asks him to put up a fence around their back lot, and he is a common-sense man who will do a job right, if he doesn’t talk it to death first. The story spans a couple decades, I think, and the fence is incomplete for the majority. It’s a metaphor for the boundaries Rose wants to protect their family and the boundaries Troy wants to exceed as a man who has done something with his life.

I don’t know what viewers of the trailer think of these lines, but coming as they do with the full weight of the story, they had me bawling.

Troy: It’s not easy for me to admit that I’ve been standing in the same place for eighteen years!

Rose: Well, I’ve been standing with you! I gave eighteen years of my life to stand in the same spot as you!

Troy had chosen his ego over his wife. He framed his choices as his ambition struggling against life and society. She framed them as betrayal. Many men take the same stand while making the different choices. That’s what mid-life crises are about. It’s a story that resonates.

Banned Books: It doesn’t resonate with everyone equally, though. In 2020, a mother had good reasons for complaining about her 14-year-old-son being required to read Fences in class as the only black student in eighth grade. She got a little too upset about it, but I think school officials proved to be the thin-skinned ones. They expelled him.

Thriller Writing: Here’s a cool discussion from 1958 between authors Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler to honor the latter’s 70th birthday. Near the beginning, Fleming notes that he writes thrillers and Chandler does not.

Fleming: I don’t call yours thrillers. Yours are novels.
Chandler: A lot of people call them thrillers.
Fleming: I know. I think it’s wrong.

Memories: What brought life back to tired guitarist Doc Watson? The memory of a tube radio and listening to Louis Armstrong.

New from Bill Watterson: In case you missed the news two weeks ago, the beloved cartoonist Bill Watterson is releasing a new book — The Mysteries, a vibrantly illustrated “fable for grown-ups.”

“From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.”

Photo: Paul’s Market, Franklin, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

The conservative resistance to Hitler

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My friend Gene Edward Veith has a review up at the Acton Institute. He reports on the book, White Knights in the Black Orchestra, by Tom Dunkel. Although the book is not primarily an examination of conservatives in wartime Germany, it does make it plain that the conservative conspiracy to kill Hitler was much bigger than Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his circle, and that German conservatives constituted a major, and serious, challenge to the Third Reich. He writes.

My impression had always been that Bonhoeffer was caught up in a quixotic and poorly planned attempt by a small group of German aristocrats and military officers at the very end of the war, and that his role was minimal, basically that of a courier. But Dunkel shows that the Black Orchestra conspiracy began in the earliest days of Hitler’s regime, that it penetrated to the highest levels of the German war machine, and that it carried out many anti-Nazi missions, some of which had an impact on the outcome of the war…..

Meanwhile, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was battling the so-called German Christians, who wished to Nazify the Protestant state church by turning Christianity into a cultural religion (as liberal theologians were already doing) and expunging its “Jewish elements” to the point of removing the Old Testament from the Bible altogether. (This, too, was made feasible by piggybacking on the work of generations of liberal Bible scholars who had succeeded in undermining biblical authority within the state church.)….

That National Socialism is thought of today as an extreme kind of conservatism is one of the biggest victories of Marxist propaganda. This book shows that Hitler and his followers were radical revolutionaries, who sought to liquidate—not conserve—the traditional Western values of faith, morality, and freedom.

Dunkel does not play up the conservative and Christian angle as such, beyond saying that the conspirators “tended to be politically conservative to the bone” and describing the key figures as devout Christians.

Read the whole thing here.