The hard-shell Baptist doctrine upon which I was raised plays very little part in my worldview these days. But that church music draws me still, and those singing conventions in my memory were its purest expression. Hundreds of voices coming together in rough harmony, most all of them untrained except perhaps for a weeklong “singing school” at some church. No “program” to dictate the day’s events. The “president” of the local singing convention would just call on a singer from the crowd to stand before the choir and lead the song of his or her choice. After a moment of hymnal browsing, you’d hear something like, “Please turn to page 36 …” A piano player would roll through the first few bars of the song, and off they’d go, making a joyful noise. You never knew what you would hear next.
These Southern singing conventions thrived because the untrained singers, who had to sing from written music, could learn how through a technique called “solfège,” to use the music-school word for it. Plainer folks called it shape notes. You know the system. You’ve heard it a thousand times.
“The thing that I love about Sacred Harp is that when you walk into that church door, you have people from all different kinds of walks of life. You have people from different denominations, you’ve got people that are young, people that are old, people who have grown up loving the Lord their entire life, and you have people that do not know the Lord, who have rejected the Lord. Strong contrast, from any way you look at it.”
“Please Keep Silence”
Gui Minhai, a naturalized Sweden, originally Chinese, has worked with four other men in “publishing books about political intrigue among China’s Communist Party leaders; now they are in the custody of mainland Chinese authorities, apparently charged with selling illicit books.”
In January on state-controlled TV, Gui “confessed” to being convicted and paroled for vehicular homicide. Now he is emprisoned for having broken that parole. His daughter, Angela, doesn’t believe it. She’d never heard of any wreck, killing, or conviction until the newscast. What won’t be confessed is the government’s rounding up everyone in Gui’s publishing company to stop them from writing criticism of the government.
Angela Gui said she received a Skype text message from her father’s account a day or so after his TV confession on Jan. 18, when she was widely quoted in foreign media as saying she had never heard of the vehicular homicide case he cited. The message told her to “please keep silence.” Judging from the grammatical errors, Gui said she didn’t believe her father was the author.
Brutal Satire in Eve Tushnet’s ‘Amends’
“That skirt is so short I can see your soul.”
That’s one of the biting lines in Eve Tushnet’s novel Amends. Kate Havard reviews it. The story is about a reality show focused on alcoholics going through rehab for a month.
At first, it appears that [the right-wing journalist] and his fellow cast members [and Internet social justice warrior and a would-be saint, among others] have nothing in common except for their sustained commitment to drinking and “waiting for the alcohol to eat up the present and excrete it as the past.” But it turns out that what this group has in common is a great talent for lying, mostly to themselves. Each cast member has built an elaborate origin story that allows them to keep on living in a way they know, but can’t admit, is unsustainable. . . .
The addicts in Tushnet’s novel who are really in trouble, though, are the ones who have given up trying to justify themselves, and choose to tell the story in which they are not, and cannot ever be, good.
[via Prufrock]
New Film Award: The Duranty
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) has announced a new film award “to highlight Hollywood’s feats of cluelessness, naïveté, and deceit when telling the history of socialism, communism, and the Cold War.” The Duranty Award is named for reporter Walter Duranty, who took what Stalin said as gospel and used his reports as PR for the Soviets.
“With each passing year, Hollywood’s historical amnesia about communism and the Cold War grows more disturbing,” said Marion Smith, VOC’s executive director. “The film Trumbo portrayed Hollywood’s most influential communist as an American martyr for free speech, ignoring the fact that communist regimes were—and from China to Cuba, still are—serial abusers of human rights and freedom of conscience.”
The award is an attractive chunk of fool’s gold to be given this year to Trumbo, a film about a communist screenwriter, and that film’s lead actor.
How Climate Cultivated Revival
Philip Jenkins describes the climate of the Great Awakening and how bitter cold and other calamities provoked people to cry out to God.
Clearly, the apocalyptic forces were running wild – famine, plague, insurrection, and war. What a proclamation of human powerlessness in the face of unknown powers, and the futility of all human efforts! How could anyone doubt that Judgment was near, or that revival was the only solution?
Trying to Capture God’s Mockery
All satire exists in the gap between what ought to be and what is, and therefore remains a powerful skewer against the shortcomings of an all-too-human church. “The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel to touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them,” Mark Twain wrote in a 1905 New York Times essay.
Laura Turner reviews a book on religious satire, attempting to tie together the truth and the self-righteous.
Facing Fears and Ourselves
http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/joeljmiller/time-to-panic/?utm_content=buffer0edce&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Speaking of scary, Stephen King said the new movie The Witch scared the hell out of him. From what I’ve read, I think it would do the same for me, but then I don’t take to horror movies well. Josh Larsen says Christians may find some good themes in that story. “For Christian horror-movie fans, it functions as a provocative consideration of the ways religious extremists may be particularly susceptible to the devil’s whims.”
Sharing From an Abundance of Ideas
Eco was funny and smart and he made all of us feel funnier and smarter just by reading him. That’s a trait, a sharing of the wealth, we authors should aspire to. An abundance of ideas, after all, means there’s enough of them for everyone.
Glen David Gold writes about interviewing Umberto Eco, a James Bond expert among other things.
Are Literary Mash-ups a New Horizon for Publishing?
Is the literary mash-up a passing fad or a fertile new genre? The art of mashing up involves putting together two completely incongruous genres, only to discover that something in the high-cultural original matches the low material with which it is mixed. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
the Bennet girls prepare themselves for encounters with the undead just as enthusiastically as they prepare themselves for husband-hunting in the original.
The Guardian’s John Mullan suggests several ideas, like this mashup of Paradise Lost and X-Men.
John Milton was surely a super-hero bard avant la lettre. All those angels tumbling from heaven’s crystal battlements, flying across the universe to visit Earth. Think of the war in heaven, where the fallen angels pit “their engines and their balls / Of missive ruin” against the less well-armed Cherubim. It could surely have profited from the involvement of Wolverine and Gambit, while Satan’s concordat with Magneto would challenge the Archangel Michael, even with his sword that “felled / Squadrons at once, with huge two-handed sway”.
The End of Democracy?
Democracy can lose its soul when it “exaggerates” its principles, when it forgets the legitimate place of hierarchy, authority, and truth within their own spheres. As Dominique Schnapper argues in a brilliant new study inspired by Montesquieu’s insight (The Democratic Spirit of Law), in an “extreme democracy” equality risks becoming indiscriminate egalitarianism, the defense of novelty risks giving rise to the “temptation of the unlimited,” and healthy skepticism risks decaying into “absolute relativism.” As another contemporary French thinker, Pierre Manent, has put it, “To love democracy well it is necessary to love it moderately.”
This is what we should mean if we say we want to get back to a better America, rejecting hubris and restoring healthy boundaries in our civilization. People in the old days were not sinless, but they did understand the morality that builds and maintains a nation a little better than perhaps we do today. How do we get back there? It is partly by politics, but politics only as an outgrowth of godly community, by healthy church life, and by following the Good Shepherd wherever he goes.