Alan Jacobs writes about Mark Greif’s chapter on Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” saying, “Greif has misunderstood this story about as badly as it is possible to misunderstand a story. And he misunderstands it because he simply doesn’t know the biblical and theological context.”
Auster: “Writing is a Disease”
Paul Auster visited Yale at the end of March for the Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series. They asked him a few questions.
Q: Yale is teeming with aspiring writers. Is there any golden advice that you would like to give them?
A: Don’t do it. You are asking for a life of penury, solitude, and a kind of invisibility in the world. It’s almost like taking orders in a religious sect. Writing is a disease, it’s not anything more than that. If a young person says, “You are right, it would be a stupid thing to do,” then that person shouldn’t be a writer. If a young person says, “I don’t agree with you, I will do it anyway,” alright, good luck! But you’ll have to figure it out on your own, because everyone’s path is different.
For Want of Wonder
Ron Block explores unbelief in a George MacDonald novel, noting Chesterton’s observation, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
People Don’t Write Books
Author Jonathan Rogers was passed up by Senior Ms. America in last April’s Music City Half-Marathon. It proved transformative.
Here in my forties I have gained wisdom from running that I never gained from books. To wit: I have learned never to ask, “Can I run 13.1 miles?” (the answer is probably no) but only to ask “Can I run to the next telephone pole” (the answer is probably yes). To apply this principle to my line of work, people don’t write books: they write sentences.
The Beatles Wanted to Do Lord of the Rings
I didn’t hear this news when it hit years ago: “The Beatles had approached J.R.R. Tolkien about doing a film version of Lord of the Rings starring the Fab Four.”
Lennon wanted to play Gollum; McCartney, Frodo; Ringo, Sam; and Harrison, Gandalf. Tolkien said, “Over my dead body,” or something like that. Too bad Nimoy didn’t have to ask him for permission to sing about Bilbo in the 70s.
‘Hardrada’s Hoard,’ by Tony Nash and Richard Downing
An intriguing premise: On his way to conquer England by way of York in 1066, King Harald Hardrada of Norway secretly buried a great treasure in a ruined Saxon church. Some time later, the church was rebuilt without the treasure being discovered. Only now, in the post-Christian present when the church is falling down again, a priest accidentally finds the secret vault where the treasure lies. Once he informs the authorities, his church becomes the target, first of ordinary thieves, and then of right-wing, racist political extremists. So a Norwegian agent is assigned to infiltrate the conspiracy and sabotage it.
Hardrada’s Hoard could have been a pretty entertaining book. And I enjoyed it enough to finish it. But overall I found it unsatisfactory, for a couple reasons.
First of all, the numerous historical misrepresentations. The authors clearly did some research in preparing this book – their image of the Vikings is better, for instance, than that of the History Channel series – but they make a lot of pretty serious mistakes. They think Vikings used two-handed swords. They tell us with straight faces that King Harald’s queen and two daughters died in battle with him at Stamford Bridge (in fact the queen, a delicate Russian princess, stayed home in Norway with the girls). They tell us there was a spell of cold climate in Scandinavia during the Viking Age (the precise opposite of the truth). They seem to think Harald and his men were heathen (they were Christian). They think the 1950s Kirk Douglas movie popularized the idea of winged helmets for Vikings (the image goes back much further, and there are no winged helmets in that movie). They think Vikings sported Norman hair styles.
My second problem is that the sex scenes are far more explicit than called for.
And last but not least, the final resolution is both improbable and unsatisfactory.
Didn’t work for me.
Bonhoeffer 70th Anniversary
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed on this day in 1945.
A while back, Hunter Baker enthused over his exploration of the free-church idea in Germany. Baker observes, “A regenerate church is not a private church,” and so must engage the state while remaining independent from it.
Here’s a short piece on Bonhoeffer’s last twelve hours.
Michael Hollerich reviews a biography of Bonhoeffer, getting into many of the ideas presented in Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Protestantism in particular could not surrender the claim to be a Volkskirche, a true national church and the spiritual custodian of the German people. This was the preoccupation, even among Confessing Christians, that ultimately disenchanted Bonhoeffer and led to his visionary anticipation of an outcast church on the margins of society. We can appreciate the measure of that disenchantment if we remember that he had taken membership in the Confessing Church so seriously that he once said that whoever knowingly separated himself from the Church separated himself from salvation—for which he was roundly denounced for “Catholic” thinking.
As with most things, the man had something there.
Happiness is Bland
Gary Saul Morson describes “The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina,” starting with this idea about drama and happiness.
Often quoted but rarely understood, the first sentence of Anna Karenina—“All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—offers a paradoxical insight into what is truly important in human lives. What exactly does this sentence mean?
In War and Peace and in a variant of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy quotes a French proverb: “Happy people have no history.” Where there are dramatic events, where there is material for an interesting story, there is unhappiness. The old curse—“May you live in interesting times!”—suggests that the more narratable a life is, the worse it is.
With happy lives and happy families, there is no drama to relate. What are you going to say: They woke up, breakfasted, didn’t quarrel, went to work, dined pleasantly, and didn’t quarrel again?
Happy families resemble each other because there is no story to tell about them. But unhappy families all have stories, and each story is different.
I was writing about this idea yesterday. Patience and tolerance are demonstrated in undramatic ways. People don’t make flamboyant displays of tolerance unless they are passive-aggressively attempting to communicate something else. Real tolerance comes in what isn’t said, what isn’t confronted. The person who listens to you, stays with you through the dull times, and makes you feel loved is the patient one.
A while back, a video guy told me about working on a TV project which was essentially Jon & Kate Plus 8 with an African-American family. They recorded several situations with this family, but the project never came together because the parents were loving and self-controlled and their kids were well-mannered and disciplined. Whenever a child started to get out of line, a parent would take him aside and correct him. Problem solved = no drama. Who wants to watch a loving family handle their problems respectfully?
Are Anchormen Worth Watching?
Take a look at this culture shock from 1954. It’s Camel News Caravan, brought to you by the makers of Camel cigarettes–so mild and smooth.
This video came to my attention while reading Frank Rich’s article on whether the TV news anchorman is a relevant job anymore. Though anchormen are popular, he cites “60 Minutes” as a successful news program without a steady anchor.
Alex Carp chips in. “What is going to come back, in my view, is the importance of sector expertise, on-scene reporting, and enterprise journalism. I saw a poster in Times Square the other day for the new season of HBO’s Vice magazine show. You know what the tagline is? ‘We go there.’ It’s a sad day when a newsmagazine can use ‘we go there’ as a distinctive selling point.”
When non-persons are murdered
Gene Edward Veith writes on the horrific murders of Kenyan university students here. What impresses me most about the story, and the larger story of Christian persecution in the Islamic world, is how, despite all the coverage, nobody seems to have any plans to do anything about it. Expressions of outrage seem to be the limit.
I think I see a reason for this. Nobody really cares, because these Christians occupy no conceptual place in the mind of the world. Or at least in the mind of the world’s opinion makers.
In contemporary thought, there are two religious alternatives for third world people. They can belong to indigenous religions, such as animism, or they can be Muslims.
In the eyes of the world, Christianity is a religion for white westerners only. Anyone not white or western, in this view, should not be a Christian. If they are Christian, they are somehow “inauthentic.” Uncle Toms. Race traitors. In a sense they deserve anything that is done to them.
They are non-persons in the eyes of the world.
But “precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Psalm 116:15).