Kevin Twit of Indelible Grace, at Cathedral Church of the Advent, Birmingham, Alabama, with Matt Schneider.
Still Arguing Over Saul Bellow
Lee Seigel describes the influence Saul Bellow had on him and a new biography of this important 20th century author who has been somewhat forgotten.
This spring, on the centennial of his birth and the tenth anniversary of his death, Bellow will burst from posthumous detention. A volume of his collected nonfiction is being published, as well as the fourth and last installment of the Library of America edition of his work. But the main event will be Zachary Leader’s biography The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, coming out in May, which portrays Bellow up to 1964. Orchestrated by Bellow’s literary executor, literary superagent Andrew Wylie (who replaced Wasserman), this massive life by Leader, also Wylie’s client, is transparently meant as a corrective to the authorized biography published by Atlas in 2000, which presented Bellow as a racist and a woman-hater, among other things, and accelerated Bellow’s fall from literary grace.
You can feel the lines being drawn and the gloves going up as you read Leader’s book. Leader very deliberately presents Bellow’s life in a way meant to rebut charges of Bellow’s racism and misogyny one by one. And where Atlas meanly dwells on Bellow’s minor failures — a short-lived literary magazine, several unsuccessful plays — Leader rightly celebrates his triumphs. Where Atlas resentfully interprets Bellow’s characters as reflections of their author’s narcissism, Leader gratifyingly shows how Bellow transformed his personal limitations into liberating art.
The Importance of Being Bernstein
“One of the keys to interpreting Bernstein’s career thus seems to involve the importance of music education—not just playing band in high school, or hearing a few minutes of Bach on the radio as you drive home from school, but actually studying the mechanics of music and appreciating its fruitful historical unveiling.”
Bernstein drew many people into his music and helped them appreciate higher arts in general.
Spurgeon on Reading
More from Spurgeon on 2 Timothy 4:13, in which Paul asks for someone to bring him his books.
Even an apostle must read. Some of our very ultra Calvinistic brethren think that a minister who reads books and studies his sermon must be a very deplorable specimen of a preacher. A man who comes up into the pulpit, professes to take his text on the spot, and talks any quantity of nonsense, is the idol of many. If he will speak without premeditation, or pretend to do so, and never produce what they call a dish of dead men’s brains—oh! that is the preacher.
How rebuked are they by the apostle! He is inspired, and yet he wants books! He has been preaching at least for thirty years, and yet he wants books! He had seen the Lord, and yet he wants books! He had had a wider experience than most men, and yet he wants books! He had been caught up into the third heaven, and had heard things which it was unlawful for a men to utter, yet he wants books! He had written the major part of the New Testament, and yet he wants books!
The apostle says to Timothy and so he says to every preacher, “Give thyself unto reading.” The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. Brethren, what is true of ministers is true of all our people. You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible. We are quite persuaded that the very best way for you to be spending your leisure, is to be either reading or praying. You may get much instruction from books which afterwards you may use as a true weapon in your Lord and Master’s service.
The Magnificent Creation of the Almighty
Are there not things which our short-sightedness would call trifles in the volume of creation around us? What is the peculiar value of the daisy upon the lawn, or the buttercup in the meadow? Compared with the rolling sea, or the eternal hills, how inconsiderable they seem! Why has the humming bird a plumage so wondrously bejewelled, and why is so much marvellous skill expended upon the wing of a butterfly? Why such curious machinery in the foot of a fly, or such a matchless optical arrangement in the eye of a spider? Because to most men these are trifles, are they to be left out of nature’s plans? No; because greatness of divine skill is as apparent in the minute as in the magnificent.
(from C.H. Spurgeon)
Personal update
Good afternoon, and thank you for your patience.
As you’ve noticed if you’re a regular reader, my blog posting has been light for more than a year now. You may also be aware that I’ve been keeping dog’s hours (is that a real saying? Sounds right, but most dogs I know generally sleep when they like and work very little) studying online for my Master’s in Library and Information Science.
This, of course, explains my frequent absences. I’m stuffing my head full of high-falutin’ book-larnin’ notions, and now figure I’m too good for simple folk like you.
No, no, no, of course not. The sooner I can get away from academics, the happier I’ll be. I’m a pin-headed Middle American yahoo, and the stress of trying to blend in with my classmates (even online) may kill me before I get through to graduation.
But I’m doing OK. Generally good grades, especially on my papers.
This week was spring break. I didn’t actually relax much because the Norwegian publisher I’ve been translating for, with exquisite timing, dropped some more work on me. I’ll get the translation back to them later today, so that worked out. The book, by the way, is supposed to be titled The Viking Legacy now, and seems to be coming late spring or in the summer. I’ll keep you posted.
In other news, my bad hip continues to improve under a regimen of stationary bike riding and mobility exercises.
So life could be worse. Thanks for your interest.
Fakes Quotes, Real Quotes
Martin Lloyd-Jones as an Evangelist
Jeff Robinson says many people who praise Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones seem to forget his strengths as an evangelist who prayed earnestly for revival. Pastor Tim Keller says he was wonderful influenced by Lloyd-Jones style of preaching to unbelievers, such as what Robinson describes:
In an age where it sometimes seems that John 3:16 is the earliest verse in the canon that ought to be marshalled for winning lost souls, Lloyd-Jones’s approach to evangelism might seem curious. But [Iain] Murray lists three primary reasons why the Doctor chose to use the Old Testament so often in seeking the conversion of sinners:
1. It reveals sin in its true nature. Murray writes, “Lloyd-Jones believed that the true difference between moralizing preaching on the Old Testament and true evangelistic preaching is that moralizing deals only with sin in terms of symptoms and secondary features. The essence of sin, the true seriousness of sin, can only begin to be understood when it is seen in terms of a wrong relationship and attitude to God himself.”
How True Crime Tales Affect Their Subjects
True Crime stories don’t live in isolation. They purport to tell the truth from recent history, and sometimes their authors become players in the story. Here are five True Crime accounts that have stirred up the cases they describe.
No single case has probably generated more quality standalone volumes in true crime than that of Jeffery MacDonald. MacDonald was an Army doctor whose pregnant wife and two daughters were murdered in their home in 1970. According to MacDonald, Manson-like hippies attacked him and his family. After a military court failed to make the charges stick, MacDonald returned to civilian life but was eventually indicted in 1974. Then, following a lengthy appeals process over the sixth amendment that went all the way to the Supreme Court, he was tried and convicted of the murders in 1979. Before the trial, MacDonald had granted nearly unrestricted access to writer Joe McGinniss in the hopes that McGinniss would write a sympathetic book that argued his innocence. The result was 1983’s Fatal Vision, which squarely pointed the finger at MacDonald and was adapted into a TV movie. In 1987, MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud and, after a mistrial, they settled out of court. The dispute between them was the subject of Janet Malcolm’s 1990 classic nonfiction media meditation, The Journalist and the Murderer. In 2012, [True Crime author] Errol Morris published his own investigation into the MacDonald case, A Wilderness of Error, and argued in favor of MacDonald’s innocence.
Ken Priebe on “Song of the Sea”
Jeffrey Overstreet talks about Tomm Moore’s animation. “This time, I invited animator and author Ken Priebe — a man whose imagination seems to exist in a state of perpetual invention. Ken literally wrote the book (books, plural, actually) on stop animation, and we have found that we have very similar passions for the works of Jim Henson, Pixar, and, yes, Tomm Moore.”
Moore’s movies, Song of the Sea and Secret of Kells, are visually arresting, magical animations that stand apart from everything else out there. Priebe says, “The one difference is that in [Song of the Sea], the song itself is almost another character in the film, and a recurring motif that is woven through the story (even the title). In Kells, the song is a highlight of one particular surprising moment in the story.”
Comparing it to another recent movie: “Big Hero 6 also dealt with loss of a family member as a theme, but not with the same level of resonance and beauty as this film does. I’m still trying to figure out why, but I think it may have something to do with the mystical elements, connection to nature, and mythological motifs vs. a story that is driven by lots of fast action and technology, which we are all too bombarded with these days.”