Today’s hymn is a new one from the great Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. “My Heart Is Filled with Thankfulness” was completed in 2003. The video above is a 2020 evensong version. The lyric is still copyrighted, but it is displayed in the video.
“I will give to the LORD the thanks due to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the LORD, the Most High” (Ps 7:17 ESV).
Over the past several days, I’ve looked for peaceful, beautiful images or videos to share on Twitter in an effort to calm people down. No doubt dozens of readers had a momentary sigh because of it. Not a long enough sigh to like the tweets. Of course not. That would be too much like making eye contact on the street.
But I have tried to share peace on Twitter, the primary social media I use, because what Thomas Kidd says about news consumption is true. “News Anxiety Is a Waste of Time.”
He recommends dialing back your daily news calories to almost nothing, giving this detail on contextual reporting. “Newspapers are generally better at telling readers what’s going on – normally with some hours or days of time to digest events – than the insta-reactions of cable tv and social media.” Add to that good magazines and podcasts, like the good people at World News Group.
A 24-hour news cycle should not be the soundtrack of our day. Let’s set it aside and take up good and praise-worthy things instead.
I thought of Mahalia Jackson tonight, for some reason. I don’t think she’s much remembered anymore, but in the Ancient Days she was the most acclaimed and respected gospel singer in the world. Here she sings “Just As I Am.”
The hymn is an English one, written by Charlotte Elliott (1789-1871) who spent much of her life as a semi-invalid. The story is that she said to the Swiss evangelist Henri A. Cesar Melan one day that she did not know how to come to Christ. He replied, “Come just as you are!”
I have no idea where I’m going with tonight’s post. I just have some thoughts provoked by my paperback book project. As I’ve told you before, all my self-published Erling Skjalgsson books (except for The Baldur Game, still waiting in the wings) are now available as paperbacks, thanks to backbreaking effort on my own part.
Currently I’m working on West Oversea. Its previous publisher, Nordskog Publishing, has transferred all rights to me, and I’m currently going through the manuscript, formatting it as an e-book form. Nordskog was kind enough to provide me with the graphic files for all their neat art, and I’m embedding that stuff now. My version won’t look exactly like Nordskog’s, but it will have similarities.
Which gets me thinking about some of the stuff I sort of learned in library school… some of which I sort of remember. I’ll probably get the terms wrong.
First of all, we studied what a work is. I reviewed True Grit last night. True Grit, as conceived and written by Charles Portis, is a work. Print it in hardback, print it in paperback, make it an e-book – it’s still the same work. If you adapt it as a movie, that’s a different work, because substantial changes have been made. A comic book version is also a different work (if I remember correctly).
But the hardback, the paperback, and the ebook, though the same work, are all different editions. And when it went out of print, and then got printed again, that became a new edition.
The individual copy you hold in your hand, on the other hand, pretty much identical to all the other copies of the edition, but distinct in its individual quiddity and whatever notes you might have scribbled in the margins, that’s called an instantiation.
My new e-book of West Oversea, similar to but different in detail from Nordskog’s, will be a new edition.
This is all complicated by the question of editorial changes. As I’ve been working through the manuscript, I’ve made small corrections. Mostly in punctuation. Very rarely, I’ll change a minor word. I don’t want to go crazy – I feel I must let the chips lay where they fell, even if I could do a better polishing job now than I did back in 2009. Mostly for the sake of the people who already bought it and think they’ve read the work.
I think that makes my new edition a different iteration of the work.
But it’s the same work.
Unless I remember it wrong.
The bandit chieftain made no reply. He brushed snow and dirt from my face and said, “Your life depends on their actions. I have never busted a cap on a woman or anybody much under sixteen years but I will do what I have to do.”
I said, “There is some mix-up here. I am Mattie Ross of near Dardanelle, Arkansas. My family has property and I don’t know why I am being treated like this.”
I was appalled to read, in Donna Tartt’s excellent Afterword to this edition of Charles Portis’ True Grit, that the book was out of print for a while. That was, apparently, due to the fact that its association with a John Wayne movie drove it beyond the pale for the kind of intellectuals who got a drubbing in last night’s election. Fortunately, that injustice was remedied in 2010.
True Grit, which I first read back in the 1970s, is – I almost need not say – a really wonderful book. It’s the kind of work that can be read on several levels – as a sheer, headlong adventure tale, or as a commentary on Victorian American culture, the Western genre, female empowerment, or even Christianity. There’s something for almost everybody here.
The story – for those few who haven’t at least seen one of the movies – involves Mattie Ross, a feisty, precociously hard-nosed 14-year-old Arkansas girl who hires US Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt for Tom Chaney, the man who murdered her father, in the Indian Territories in the 1870s. She insists on going along with him, to make sure she’s getting her money’s worth.
Surprisingly, I find the contrast between the two True Grit movies (John Wayne in 1969 and Jeff Bridges in 2010) illuminating in discussing the book as a literary work. It’s common to assert that the more recent movie is truer to the book. I would say that’s only right in a sense.
As stated above, the book can be taken on many levels. On the surface, it’s almost a perfect John Wayne vehicle, and I was unable to decouple his voice from Rooster’s character as I read. They softened the ending for the 1969 version, but that’s generally how a John Wayne movie works. By and large, it was quite a faithful adaptation.
The 2010 version has many excellent qualities. It has a more authentic look than its predecessor. The use of gospel music is especially evocative, and Mattie’s age is correct.
However, the Coen brothers made some alterations of their own. The sequence where Mattie and Rooster are separated from LaBoeuf, and they cut a hanged man down from a tall tree, does not appear in the book anywhere, and I’m not sure what purpose it serves.
But that version delves deeper into the subtext, into the layers of social commentary and religion. It’s a more profound movie.
They’re each True Grit in their own way, it seems to me.
Whichever approach you prefer, you’ll find it in the book. If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s not long. It’s just perfect.
Highly recommended.
(I might mention, as a footnote, that I believe that True Grit marked a watershed in the writing of Western movie dialogue. The somewhat stilted diction Portis uses in the book, meant to emulate the writing of a middle-aged woman in the early 20th Century, was lifted verbatim for the movie characters. It worked so well in evoking the period that writers have been copying it ever since.)
The Fellowship & Fairydust blog has posted the second part of its interview with our friend Dale Nelson. This portion concentrates on his work on Inklings scholarship:
So, much that keeps me interested in the Inklings is not just academic curiosity or opportunism but a concern for the moral imagination incarnated in our lives and homes; and these books are delightful to read. At the moment I’m reading The Lord of the Rings for the 14th time.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Columbus won out, as state capital, by only one vote over Lancaster, and ever since then has had the hallucination that it is being followed, a curious municipal state of mind which affects, in some way or other, all those who live there.
I had read bits of it already. I remember finding “The Night the Bed Fell On Father” hilarious when I was a boy. So I looked forward to reading A Thurber Carnival.
To be honest, I found it less funny, and more troubling, than I expected.
James Thurber is a classic American humorist, one of the founding fathers of The New Yorker. Some of his pieces, especially the story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” have become classics. Even legends.
As I worked my way through this collection of essays, stories, and cartoons, I was surprised how dark I found it. Not overtly – there was no obvious self-pity on display here. But I thought I felt the presence of a bitter spirit behind it all.
James Thurber, born in Columbus, Ohio, suffered the loss of an eye in a game of William Tell as a small boy. For the rest of his life, he lived with the fear – then the certainty – that the other eye was going to fail. He lost his sight entirely in the end, a terrible fate for a man of letters. For this reader, that unspoken fear seemed to form a background to everything. Here is not the lightness of Robert Benchley. Here is a humorist cracking wise on the scaffold.
Or so it seemed to me.
Or maybe it’s just that I’m not bright enough to appreciate the sophisticated gags.
Anyway, it’s a classic. You should probably read it. You might enjoy it more than I did.
I should perhaps warn that there’s some casual racism, characteristic of the time but not vicious, in descriptions of black people.
For an All Saints hymn today, let’s meditate on “Shall We Gather at the River” by Philadelphia-born minister Robert Lowry (1826-189). The Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers praises his musical work.
“His melodies are sung in every civilized land, and many of his hymns have been translated into foreign tongues. While preaching the Gospel, in which he found great joy, was his life-work, music and hymnology were favorite studies, but were always a side issue, a recreation.”
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:1–2 ESV)
1 Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod;
With its crystal tide forever
Flowing by the throne of God?
Refrain:
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
2 On the margin of the river,
Washing up its silver spray,
We will walk and worship ever,
All the happy golden day. [Refrain]
3 Ere we reach the shining river,
Lay we ev’ry burden down;
Grace our spirits will deliver,
And provide a robe and crown. [Refrain]
4 Soon we’ll reach the shining river,
Soon our pilgrimage will cease;
Soon our happy hearts will quiver
With the melody of peace. [Refrain]
Douglas Murray discusses the success of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and its failure of as both a concept and a conclusion from the trail of Adolf Eichmann.
“Together with Eichmann’s contemporary attempts at memoir-writing—which were known about by the time of the trial—an Eichmann entirely different from Arendt’s emerges. Wonder of wonders, it is the Eichmann that the world knew existed until Hannah Arendt came along.”
He wasn’t “a mere bureaucrat” but a man who was proud to be a part of the murder of six million Jews. Nazis in Argentina wanted to believe the Holocaust was a hateful lie. “To Eichmann, these efforts to minimize the Holocaust were offensive—something like spitting on his life’s work. Eichmann knew that the six-million figure was accurate, and he seems to have only realized gradually that his audience was hoping for something quite different from him.”
Murray then describes the use of evil banality by contemporary journalists as a way to wave away the acts of terrorists.
“Pure evil. Terrible evil. Unfathomable evil—all of these things for sure. But ‘banal’? No—nothing could be further from the truth. And yet today, the idea of pure evil seems unavailable to many cultured minds. Perhaps it is too theological. Or perhaps we think such terms come from a metaphysics that we have abandoned as insufficiently subtle for our more enlightened times.”
(Photo of Eichmann trail by Israeli GPO photographer/ Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Dale Nelson, retired professor of English at Mayville State University, North Dakota, is a good friend of mine and one of the more frequent commenters on this blog. He is also a presence in the world of Inklings and fantastic fiction scholarship.
Linked here is a recent interview he gave to the Fellowship & Fairydust web site. The interview actually comes in two parts. This is the first, and deals mainly with horror literature.
A second segment, more about the Inklings, is coming soon. I’ll post that too.
