Learning better handwriting from a calligrapher. I’d like to have better cursive writing, but all of my bad habits have been congealed by playing the journalist.
In Defense of Prose
John Updike said, “Nabokov writes prose the way it should be written: enthusiastically.”
Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma runs with this idea in his essay on colorful writing:
Paul West noted in his essay, “In Praise of Purple Prose,” written around the heyday of minimalism in 1985, that the “minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy — the human bond with ordinariness.” This rationale, I dare say, misunderstands what art is and what art is meant to do. The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration. Thus, fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work — in its deliberate constructiveness, its measured adornment of thought, and in the arrangement of representative images, so that the fiction about a known world becomes an elevated vision of that world.
He argues that the most remembered and loved novels are those with beautiful, even audacious, prose.
I remember James Joyce using prose purposefully in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. His flowery language swelled with his theme, drawing attention to select passages in the story.
“It is not, however,,” Obioma explains, “that the ‘less is more’ nugget is wrong, it is that it makes a blanket pronouncement on any writing that tends to make its language artful as taboo.”
Must Art Be a Gigantic Effort?
Peter Crawley asks, “Does art have to be such hard work? A laborious investment of blood, sweat, tears and occasionally some writing?”
“While working for the post office,” he says, “Anthony Trollope would write before his shift began, from 5.30 to 8.30 each morning, requiring exactly 250 words every 15 minutes. If he finished one novel before 8.30 am, he immediately began another. ‘Let [the artists’] work be to them as is his common work to the common labourer,’ Trollope said. ‘No gigantic efforts will then be necessary.'”
His readers didn’t think so. They were outraged that Trollope may be closer to a hack than what they imagined him to be, a long-suffering saint of the arts.
We Are Westeros
Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson compare our world to the one in Game of Thrones and find many parallels. Secularists continue to redefine the world outside their little bubble, choosing to believe all religions are fruitless and merely the fading remnants of past generations.
The secular West in our own world has been stunned in the past several decades by the global resurgence of religion. . . . George R.R. Martin frames the problem of resurgent religion in theodicy, the age-old question of how a good God could let bad things happen.
In a July 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Martin said:
And as for the gods, I’ve never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain? I was taught pain is to let us know when our body is breaking down. Well, why couldn’t we have a light? Like a dashboard light? If Chevrolet could come up with that, why couldn’t God? Why is agony a good way to handle things?
A one-time Catholic, Martin struggles painfully with theodicy in his stories, which are pregnant with a bitter lapse of hope. Every violation pierces the reader. How could such a thing be allowed to happen? What kind of world is it where this happens?
Martin wants us to hear this proclamation: this one. This world. That’s where these things happen.
Bobette Buster with Eric Metaxas
Two writers talk about story on The Eric Metaxas Show. “The point of living is to become fully alive.” Storytelling is part of that life.
‘Gathering Prey,’ by John Sandford
They also had to deal with the question of whether Minnesotans were actually aliens. Terry brought it up: “You know what? Everybody I seen around here has big heads. You seen that?” They did, on their runs into town for food and beer. Minnesotans all had big heads. When they spotted a guy with a cowboy hat and a small head, they asked him if he was from Minnesota, and he told them no, he was from Montana.
Another John Sandford “Prey” book. Cause for rejoicing at my house. Sandford may not be the greatest creator of vivid characters in the world, or the greatest writer of dialogue, but when it comes to the art of ratcheting up the tension in a police thriller, while keeping the tone light with timely injections of cop humor, nobody comes close to him. He does what he does better than anybody.
Gathering Prey, the umpty-fifth Prey novel, starts in California, where hero Lucas Davenport’s adopted daughter, Letty, is attending Stanford University. She meets a couple of buskers, Skye and Henry, and befriends them. They mention to her a man they call “Pilot” who (Skye informs her) is “the devil.”
Some time later, back home in St. Paul, Letty gets a call from Skye. She’s on her way to Minnesota from the biker rally in Sturgis, SD. Henry has disappeared, and he had been talking to Pilot, who was also there. She’s convinced Pilot kidnapped Henry.
Letty tells Lucas, and Lucas looks into it, and one thing leads to another until he’s involved in a manhunt across South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Upper Michigan, pursuing a Manson-like killing cult that’s growing increasingly unstable.
I’m impressed with the way author Sandford manages to keep an old formula fresh. The book was as lively and engrossing as any he’s written. An incident at the end indicates he plans to change things up a little in the next entry, but that’s fine with me too.
The Prey books are fantasies to some extent, and not only in terms of the male wish-fulfillment embodied in the character of Lucas Davenport, millionaire cop. Davenport is clearly a Democrat, but he lives in a Minnesota where Democrats don’t consider every criminal a misunderstood child who just needs a hug, and where men can tell women dirty jokes without losing their jobs.
But I don’t object to a little fantasy either. Keep the books coming, John Sandford. Me and my big head are waiting for them.
Cautions for language, adult themes, and some pretty appalling (but not too graphic) cruelty.
Futility
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
The Freedom That Undermines Itself
“Universities are addicted to censorship, and the Department of Education is their partner and enabler.”
David French writes about Title IX and students who have sued to restrict the statements of their professor. There he explains the ramifications of modern liberalism, which is self-destructive in the sense that it undermines the principles at purports to celebrate. In another article, he explains what happened at Northwestern University when a feminist professor wrote in favor of student/teacher relationships.
“Two students filed Title IX complaints against her, claiming that she’d violated federal law with her essay and a subsequent tweet. In essence, they were claiming that her writings on matters of public concern constituted unlawful gender discrimination.” More than that, they complained when others shared their complaints and spoke in favor of academic freedom.
While there is a huge, stinking pile of liberalism in this squabble, one of the lessons is the real threat to students in American universities like Northwestern. If they want to believe that love is what you make it, then they’ll have to realize they have kicked down all of the fences. All of them. The students have no grounds for complaint against a professor who supports sexual license, but if they idea scares them, they need to get out and reconsider their own self-destructive ideas.
Not the Wrong Side of History
Tim Keller reviews two books that argue in favor of Christians accepting homosexuality, saying the books by Vines and Wilson are the ones he is most often asked about. Not wanting to dismiss the books as simply unbiblical and open himself to the accusation of flippantly ignoring the subject, he writes over 2,500 words on what the authors profess and how they are wrong. On the issue of secularism, which we’ve discussed many times on this blog, Keller observes:
More explicit in Wilson’s volume than Vines’ is the common argument that history is moving toward greater freedom and equality for individuals, and so refusing to accept same-sex relationships is a futile attempt to stop inevitable historical development. Wilson says that the “complex forces” of history showed Christians that they were wrong about slavery and something like that is happening now with homosexuality.
Charles Taylor, however, explains how this idea of inevitable historical progress developed out of the Enlightenment optimism about human nature and reason. It is another place where these writers seem to uncritically adopt background understandings that are foreign to the Bible. If we believe in the Bible’s authority, then shifts in public opinion should not matter. The Christian faith will always be offensive to every culture at some points.
And besides, if you read Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010) and follow the latest demographic research, you will know that the world is not inevitably becoming more secular. The percentage of the world’s population that are non-religious, and that put emphasis on individuals determining their own moral values, is shrinking. The more conservative religious faiths are growing very fast. No one studying these trends believes that history is moving in the direction of more secular societies.
(via Jared C. Wilson)
Remembering Carl
“Chicken Eggs 29563-360×480 (4899748717)” by Emilian Robert Vicol from Com. Balanesti, Romania – Chicken Eggs_29563-360×480. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
For no conceivable reason, I’ve decided to relate another childhood memory, something I haven’t done here in a while.
I grew up on a farm outside Kenyon, a small town in southeast Minnesota. We operated what they now call a “diversified agricultural operation,” which means we grew and raised whatever we could think of that would earn back worth the trouble.
One of the things we raised was chickens. I’m not sure how many we had; maybe about a hundred; probably less. The numbers fluctuated, I’m sure. In any case, one of the daily chores was to “pick the eggs,” to gather them from the box nests we had for them in the chicken coop. I have breathed a lot of powdered chicken manure in my time; it accumulated on the floor and we just walked on it. It dried fairly quickly. A doctor told me I have a spot on one lung that’s common in people who’ve worked with chickens; it might come from those days.
After the eggs were gathered in a pail, we took them into the house and down to the basement. There we would wash them in a special solution, swishing them in a bucket with many, many holes, inside a larger bucket of the washing solution, clockwise and counterclockwise until they looked clean.
Then the person doing the job would take them to another room in the basement, where we kept the Big Egg Carton. There was a stool there for sitting on and a bright light hanging from the ceiling. Each egg would be examined for cracks, and any lingering crud on the eggs would be sanded off with a sandpaper block. Then the eggs were placed in cardboard trays inside the big carton, several layers stacked one on top of the other.
(Eggs with cracks were kept for our own use. We kept them in a regular egg carton, the kind you see in stores, on a counter next to the stove. We didn’t bother to refrigerate them. We used them up pretty fast.)
When the carton was full, we’d load it in Dad’s Studebaker pickup and take it to town. There, in the southeast corner of town, near the railroad tracks, was Carl Larson’s poultry operation. Continue reading Remembering Carl