Authors, Writing

A Gap Between Taste and Creative Work?

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Terry Teachout reflects on some writing advice from Ira Glass that has passed around the Internet for years. Here’s a part of it, if you’ve seen it before. “But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.”

The bottom line is to write through the discouraging junk until you gain the skill to write with the excellence your taste has always wanted.

Teachout says he didn’t have problem as such, because he didn’t start writing creatively until he had spent many years writing professionally.

All this leads me to believe that Ira Glass’ observations about the relationship between taste and creative inhibition are the answer to the question of why so few drama critics try to write plays. If you’re a competent critic, then you’re painfully conscious of the yawning gap between “good” and “pretty good.” That knowledge can’t help but be inhibiting—especially when you earn your living by sitting in public judgment on the creative work of other writers. . . .

For the moral of my story is that while it’s important to be realistic, both about your own abilities and, more generally, the larger prospects for success in the world of art, it can be just as important not to let yourself be overwhelmed by that realism.

Uncategorized

Spend 2:30 in the French Alps

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Filmmaker Franck gives us two and half minutes of beauty in this video of two boys in the French Alps. When you’re ready to take a break from your work, stand up, breath deeply a couple times, and watch this.

breathe from FKY on Vimeo.

More photos of the French Alps can be seen here.

Music

“Amazing Grace”

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For your delectation and inspiration, here’s Sissel Kyrkjebø, the pride of Bergen, doing a fine arrangement of “Amazing Grace” at the wedding of one of her band members. This is essentially the same arrangement, by Andrae Crouch, she did on her “Innerst i Sjelen” album. This recording lacks the quality of the studio version, but the live performance in a Norwegian church has charms of its own. Have a good weekend.

Religion

Lip Service Theology

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“If we say we believe God is sovereign, but spend our days wringing our hands and fretting, we’re just doing lip-service to theology.

If we say we believe God is love, but spend our days berating ourselves and others, we’re just doing lip-service to theology.”

Lore Ferguson has a brief devotional on this theme at a new website for gospel-oriented readers and leaders, ForTheChurch, at ftc.co.

Publishing

SCIgen Programmers Strike Back at Spammy Journals

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Three MIT students decided to punk a computer science conference that published less-than-thoroughly vetted articles by speaking from completely bogus research. They developed a program that allowed them to produce random, “nonsensical computer-science papers, complete with realistic-looking graphs, figures, and citations.”

By drawing attention to “predatory publishers,” the students accomplished their goal, but their program went on to do far more. Their website still gets many visitors and the team receives emails from researchers who have used SCIgen to successfully submit papers to different conferences.

“Our initial intention was simply to get back at these people who were spamming us and to maybe make people more cognizant of these practices,” says [Jeremy] Stribling. “We accomplished our goal way better than we expected to.”

This is one of the ways more content is not better. Perhaps the publishers in question here are so far out of their league to begin with, they wouldn’t recognize legitimate research if they took the time to read it. On the other hand, maybe this is a sign that some scientific fields have advanced to the point of being indistinguishable from magic, and how do you analyze magic?

More here.

Uncategorized

Forgetting What Makes Us Human

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Should two chimpanzees have rights as “persons” under U.S. law? Rod Dreher doesn’t think so, but he does recommend that should the chimps be freed from their human oppressors, they should apply to teach at an American university.

Fiction, Religion

Making Bad Christian Art

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The trailer for the new movie, Little Boy, worries me. I can’t tell if it’s setting up a story that cautions an audience willing to believe that faith can be measured in specific acts and feelings or panders to such an audience. This review doesn’t exactly answer that question, but it does imply that the faith of the boy relates to the dropping of the bomb by the same name. Maybe if they had released the film on August 6 for the 75th anniversary of the leveling of Hiroshima, we would have all gotten the connection.

Heh.

I gather the movie is heavy-handed enough to need more explanation–still some people need things spelled out, you know.

Tony Woodlief, author of the concept “Dreadfully Wholesome,” linked to an old article of his, in which he describes common sins of the Christian writer: neat resolutions, one-dimentional characters, sentamentality, and cleanness. On this last point, he says, “In short, if Christian novels and movies and blogs and speeches must be stripped of profanity and sensuality and critical questions, all for the sake of sparing us scandal, then we have to wonder what has happened that such a wide swath of Christendom has failed to graduate from milk to meat.”

The point, of course, is not to mix a little filth into our current shallow stories. Little Boy is PG-13, I believe, because it shows some of the horrors of war and uses some contextual bigotry. It may even have smoking! That’s a letter grade drop all on its own. The point, though, is to think honestly and depict reality appropriately.

A strong example of this is the recent movie, Something, Anything. I saw it on Netflix Instant a few weeks ago at a friend’s recommendation. Justin Chang summaries it nicely as having a “dichotomy between materialism and spirituality, between the pleasures of a comfortably middle-class existence and the rewards of an introspective, examined one.” This is not a heavy-handed movie at all. In fact, there’s a touching scene in the middle that clearly shows the disconnect between two main characters. Viewers might overlook that scene because one says anything, but that appears to be the tension point between them. The husband picks up his wife’s journal, exposing him to her struggling cry to God, but he just puts it back down and walks out of the room. He doesn’t know how to talk about that.

If you watch Something, Anything, let’s talk about it here. It’s beautiful, quiet film without common sins listed above.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Undercurrents’ and ‘The Body of David Hayes,’ by Ridley Pearson

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As you’ve probably discerned from my reviews, I continue to read for pleasure even as I toil for my master’s degree. I don’t think I’d keep my sanity if I couldn’t take fiction breaks from the textbooks.

So, recently, casting about for something new to read, I decided to check out one of my consistently favorite authors, Ridley Pearson. I’ve always enjoyed his Lou Boldt police procedurals, but I discovered I’d never read the very first in the series, Undercurrents. And then I got the most recent novel in the series, The Body of David Hayes, which is closely related though separated in time.

At the beginning of Undercurrents, we find Detective Sergeant Lou Boldt of the Seattle Police Department, never a lighthearted guy in the best of times, in a particularly bad spot. He recently closed a serial killer case, and the accused murderer was himself murdered by a family member of a victim. But now he’s called back from a conference in Los Angeles, summoned by the news that there’s been another murder. They got the wrong guy.

Not only that, his marriage is falling apart. He has personally observed his wife meeting another man at a hotel. He’s moved out, and is considering divorcing her.

The story is as much about Lou’s struggle to keep his sanity as about his conflict with the serial killer, a smart and devious one who has singled Lou out as his police contact and personal foil. As Lou tries to function on too little sleep, too little food, and too much coffee, he tries to deal with his attraction to a beautiful police psychologist, and is brought face to face with his own culpability in the collapse of his marriage. When he truly achieves self-knowledge on that issue, it’s in terms that will please almost every Christian reader.

The Body of David Hayes picks up on a thread from that first book. David Hayes, a banker, was a colleague of Boldt’s wife and the man with whom she had the affair. He was later convicted of cyber-embezzlement and sentenced to prison. But now he’s been released early, only to be kidnapped and beaten. There’s more to his crime than anyone knew, and some very dangerous people are looking hard for the money David Hayes stole and hid in the bank’s own records. Lou is forced to bring his wife into the investigation, and old wounds get opened.

Frankly, The Body of David Hayes was above my head in terms of plot. The schemes of criminals and police (not all of whom may be honest) are so convoluted that I just lost track at certain points. But, as you may have noticed, plot isn’t my main concern in my reading. What I love is the characters Pearson creates — believable, sympathetic (in most cases), and grounded in a moral universe.

Both books recommended. Adult themes and language are relatively mild.

Fiction

The Evil Twin

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Mark Bertrand writes about a new favorite author and the novel, Scandal, in which a Catholic novelist and public intellectual discovers he has an identical, evil double of himself. This other man is encouraging the community to believe the moral novelist is a flaming hypocrite. “The hunt for his doppelgänger,” Bertrand explains, “draws him into an underworld — actually, that’s not quite right: the quest has more to do with realizing that this world is the underworld.”

This appears to be the kind of thing The Shadow claimed to know: the evil that lurks in every man’s heart.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture