Monthly Archives: October 2015

Religion

The Reformation: Here to stay

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This morning, in an e-mail discussion I participate in, someone lamented the Reformation. They wished and hoped we could all come together again soon.

That’s a nice dream, and I applaud the sentiment. But in my view it’ll never happen.

Here’s the thing — who’s going to be in charge of this new universal church?

The pope? Then how will you force all the Christians who think the pope is the Antichrist into your church?

Local congregations? How will you persuade the people who think an episcopacy is necessary?

You won’t be able to do this without some kind of coercive force. A new Inquisition.

And I don’t think even Catholics want that.

Besides which, the divisions are far deeper and more complex than just Rome vs. Wittenberg.

The divisions in Christianity go way beyond denominations. I have Catholic friends to whom I am far closer, in the fundamentals, than I am with many of my Lutheran friends.

Even if you somehow shoehorned all the denominations into your new World Church, the conservative vs. liberal divisions would persist.

And would probably, if history is any guide, lead to new institutional divisions.

Non-fiction

Green Book for Jim-Crow Era Travelers

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There was a time when black businessmen and their families could not travel freely throughout the states. There were sundown towns, where blacks needed to leave before sunset to avoid trouble. There were hotels and restaurants which would not serve them. So a New York City mailman produced a green book to help them travel comfortably.

With the introduction of this travel guide in 1936, it has been our idea to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trips more enjoyable. The Jewish press has long published information about places that are restricted and there are numerous publications that give the gentile whites all kinds of information. But during these long years of discrimination, before 1936 other guides have been published for the Negro, some are still published, but the majority have gone out of business for various reasons. In 1936 the Green Book was only a local publication for Metropolitan New York, the response for copies was so great it was turned into a national issue in 1937 to cover the United States.

Graham Auto Supply, Esso sign, Coca-Cola sign

ESSO stations were particularly hospitable and distributed the green books to all who asked. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in its 90th year, has digitized its Green Book collection.

Fiction

We Tell Ghost Stories In Order to Control Our Fears

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“One of the primary experiences ghost stories deal with is fear,” Chris Yokel explains. “Many literary critics recognize that the management of fear is one of the important explanations for the existence of the ghost story. Julia Briggs in her book Night Visitors says, ‘Both the recital and reading of stories of the terrific unknown suggests a need to exorcise in controlled circumstances, fear which in solitude or darkness might become unmanageable. By recounting nightmares, giving them speakable shapes and patterns, even if as compulsively as did Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, we hope to control them and come to terms with them.’”

Do we control our fears when we tell stories of indomitable evils, of horrors that cannot be held back, or of despair that literally eats at us? How much do our stories define for us this “terrific unknown”?

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Writing

Writers on the Internet

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Sean Minogue writes about writers using social media for better or for worse.

Unreachability and self-seriousness used to define many of our best-known authors, but the public appetite for writerly swagger in both old and new media is at an all-time low. Jonathan Franzen, for example, continues to spark minor firestorms with his pooh-poohing of Twitter: “I see people who ought to be spending time developing their craft […] making nothing and feeling absolutely coerced into this constant self-promotion,” he said on BBC Radio 4’s Today program. Franzen is behind the curve, but not because he doesn’t like Twitter. It’s his fundamental misunderstanding of social media that makes his opinions so quaint.

In the end, social media are just other platforms for authors to speak or ignore as they wish.

Dusty cobwebbed old underwood typewriter

Authors

One of Milton’s Homes Abandoned

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Distressed room in Berkyn
The great John Milton lived in Berkyn Manor (known later as the Bull Manor), a house in Horton near Slough, Berkshire, for about three years (1636-1638). He was out of Cambridge, apparently due to a conflict with his tutor, and was living with his parents. He didn’t write his greatest works there. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. He worked on it at his cottage, which is open to literary tourists.

Photographers have drawn attention to the Berkyn Manor by distributing their shots of the dilapidated interior, which has been sitting empty since it’s last owner died in 1987.

Fiction

Japan, Most Haunted

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When Lafcadio Hearn stepped onto the shores of Japan in 1890, he began writing ghost stories. On assignment from Harper’s Magazine, Hearn was charged to explore and explain this undiscovered country to eager Americans. That his answer was to write about Japan’s spirits should have surprised no one; Hearn had a predilection for the macabre and uncanny. But while a previous sojourn in New Orleans had supplied him with ore for his imagination, in his new home he struck the mother lode. Japan is the most haunted country on Earth.

…

Most people know that Japan is particularly good at ghost stories. As they should be; they have been working at it for some time. Theater, literature, art, or film—Japan’s storytelling is inherently haunted. Indeed, a history of Japanese literature is a history of ghost stories.

Authors, Writing

A Museum of Writers Seeks to Entomb Literary Artiness

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For years, American writers have toiled in obscurity, with precious few monuments, commemorative plaques, or wax likenesses devoted to their memory. Well, friend, no more: Chicago is soon to open the first-ever American Writers Museum, where, god willing, the fraught history of our art-form, like so many before it, will be boiled down into propaganda and shoveled merrily down the throats of our youth. And if you’re worried that a museum about words will look too much like a library—perish the thought—allow me to allay your fears: “The museum will focus on using new media and technology in exhibitions, not only to differentiate it from a library, but also to engage in contemporary forms of writing from social media to digital journalism.” That is, not much writing will be featured at the American Writers Museum.

Maybe readers will finally get a good answer to the question of how a writer came up with an idea. Dan Piepenbring has this and many more tidbits on his Paris Review blog today.

Reading

Relishing Not Reading

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Dan Piepenbring responds to a “really snotty” piece in The Guardian about avoiding reading anything by a recently deceased author. He says there’s at least one truth that emerges from this snobbery. “There are writers we instinctively, permanently dislike: not only will we never read them, we will quietly relish the not-reading, finding in it a pleasure that can occasionally rival reading itself.”

It’s the nature of the beast, he says. Not that we have to be nasty in our opinions of authors we haven’t read, but we will reject–and even enjoy rejecting–books and authors for scant reasons of our own. And sometimes we miss good writing, which Piepenbring illustrates with his about-face on Michel Houellebecq. Once he enjoyed hating Houellebecq, but now he enjoys his work greatly.

“It took impassioned pleas by not one but several friends to get me to read him—an almost literal conversion effort. People have become Catholic for less.”

Reading, Writing

What Makes Good Writing?

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Barnabas Piper offers the one key component to good writing: playing baseball. (Double-check me on that.)

On that topic, Stephen King says in his widely praised book On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. . . . If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

He also says, “Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”

Uncategorized

Catching up with Orwell

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Today, I happened to think of the Party slogan from George Orwell’s 1984:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

And it occurred to me that we’ve reached the age of the second line.

How can freedom be slavery? How can a political culture devoted to the concept of human freedom turn around and call freedom slavery?

We’re seeing it happen now, I think.

The problem of freedom, from the progressive point of view, is that it makes inequality inevitable. Leave any group of people free to do whatever they want, and inequality will be the result. Some people have more talent or intelligence than others. Some have better work habits. Some did a better job picking their parents. It follows inevitably that the competition will have winners, losers, and lots of people in between.

The Left is convincing itself, more and more, that such inequality is unacceptable. Inequality is unjust. Inequality, it seems to them, is exactly equivalent to slavery.

Thus, freedom is slavery.

And we can’t have that. Freedom will have to go.