Religion

“You’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep”

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Chicken coop, Coupeville, Island County, WA. Photo by Anne E. Kidd. Library of Congress

Today I was reminded of a man I wrote about here some years back. He’s gone now, and one of his relatives came to the library today to donate several cartons of books from his personal collection.

I think it’s all right to give his full name now. It was Marvin Rodvik, and he lived in Franklin, Minnesota. I met him a couple times in my life. The last time he gave us another gift of books. He also told me a story, which I passed along in this blog. I’ll tell it again now, because it is, in my opinion, one of the best stories I ever heard for the Christmas season.

Marvin was a pastor’s kid. The story happened when he was a teenager, probably (by my calculations) around the time of World War II.

An entertainment event of some kind (he didn’t say what) was planned in their small town. Marvin announced at supper that he was going.

“You’re not going,” said his father. They belonged to a strict church, a congregation of the forerunner to my own church body.

“Yes I am,” said Marvin. “You can’t stop me.”

His father paused a moment. Then he said, “You’re right. I can’t stop you. But know this. If you go to that event, you’ll be locked out of this house when you come home tonight. You’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep.”

Continue reading “You’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep” →

Publishing

Remaking TNR in Their Own Image

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Chris Hughes, the owner of The New Republic, and new CEO Guy Vidra apparently don’t care nothing for the history and style of their magazine or the people who have worked for it most recently. Both men are relatively new to the organization. Last Friday, the two arrived at the Washington office, having previously announced its closure and moving to New York, and were greeted by the mice and a few orphans.

I’m joking only a little. Ten contributing editors resigned over the firing of leading editors Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier. Foer had been given repeated assurance that his job was secure until the day he read in Gawker.com that he had been replaced.

According to multiple sources, Hughes came to think of his writers and editors as “spoiled brats,” and especially disliked the flamboyant, feud-prone, white-maned Wieseltier, who was more than twice his age. Much of Hughes’s distaste was telegraphed in his body language; he strikes many TNR staffers as passive-aggressive and averse to confrontation.

The friction escalated with the arrival of Vidra, who is said to have complained to Foer that the magazine was boring and that he couldn’t bring himself to read past the first 500 words of an article. According to witnesses, Vidra did little to hide his disrespect for TNR’s tradition of long-form storytelling and rigorous, if occasionally dense, intellectual and political analysis—to say nothing of his lack of interest in the magazine’s distinguished history—at an all-hands meeting in early October.

Vidra said to someone in the room, “Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage.” To which that someone replied, “There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.” They saw the writing on the wall at that point but did not leave until last week.

Hughes has been described as “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” I didn’t get any sources for these quotations. In fact, you could say I made them up, but let’s keep it nice, thou cream-faced loon.

Authors, Poetry, Religion

N.D. Wilson on Adapting ‘The Hound of Heaven’ for Film

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Author N.D. Wilson has directed a short film of the Francis Thompson poem, “The Hound of Heaven.” Shadowlocked.com has part of an interview with Wilson on how everything came together.

So what’s it like adapting somebody else’s work as opposed to your own?

Well, honestly I’m far more comfortable adapting other people’s stuff than my own. And actually, in some ways, because I can be a stickler. I can be a stickler to try to stay true as I possibly can to their vision, when I’m adapting their stuff. But when I’m adapting my stuff, I don’t feel any loyalty at all to it. I feel complete and total authority to change whatever I want, whenever I want.

And so when I’m adapting C.S. Lewis or even trying to serve Francis Thompson, I felt like I could write an intro, like I could write an opening monologue for Propaganda, but I couldn’t bring myself to edit the poem. No matter how many people told me, “Well, surely you’re not going to do the whole poem”, it was like, “No, I’m gonna do the whole poem. I’m doing all of it.” Because I really wanted it to come through.

If I’m doing my own things, like I’m doing 100 Cupboards, I’m thinking, like, “Oh, wow, I can throw this part away, and do this other thing that I was going to have in the novel, and I needed to cut it for space, but now I can put it in. I can take things that ended up on the cutting room floor of my novel, and put them into the film.” And I feel completely at liberty to do that. And that’s dangerous.

Read more about the movie here.

“I fled him . . . in the mist of tears . . .

‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’”

Bookselling, Non-fiction

SALE: The System Has a Soul by Hunter Baker

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“What relevance does Christianity have in our societal system? What place does the church have in a system that so often seems to be ordered only by the ultra-complex machinery of state power and corporate strategy?”

Hunter Baker answers these questions and more in his collection of essays, The System Has a Soul: Essays on Christianity, Liberty, and Political Life. Get it today for almost half-price.

Uncategorized

Admiration for Islam (and Godwin’s Law)

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Godwin’s Law of Usenet discussions states that the longer a discussion of anything goes, the more likely someone will compare someone else to the Nazis. In other words, if you talk about My Little Pony in a discussion forum long enough, someone will call you a disciple of Hitler. So lets start this history post with our best foot forward.

Hilter admired Islam. “Both Hitler and Himmler had a soft spot for Islam. Hitler several times fantasized that, if the Saracens had not been stopped at the Battle of Tours, Islam would have spread through the European continent—and that would have been a good thing, since ‘Jewish Christianity’ wouldn’t have gone on to poison Europe.”

But Muslims did not return the admiration in full. “Few Muslims believed Nazi claims that Hitler was the protector of Islam, much less the Twelfth Imam, as one Reich pamphlet suggested. The Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda no doubt attracted many Muslims, as historian Jeffrey Herf has documented, but they balked at believing that Hitler would be their savior or liberator. . . . In the end, more Muslims wound up fighting for the Allies than for the Axis.” (via Prufrock)

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Send Global Study Bibles to India, Africa, and Asia

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Crossway Books is preparing “to distribute 250,000 free copies of the ESV Global Study Bible, to strategic leaders in strategic places, where the need is greatest.” They have large matching grants in place and ask for our help to get these Bibles printed and distributed. They are praying to receive the needed funds by December 31.

The ESV Global Study Bible has 12,000 study notes adapted from the popular ESV Study Bible, plus a global application of each book, fourteen articles written by global Christian leaders, introductions and timelines for each Bible book, nearly 900 highlighted Bible facts, and more.

Fiction, Reviews

Minder, by Duncan MacMaster

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A while back, I reviewed Joe Average, a satiric superhero story written by Duncan MacMaster, of the Furious D Show blog. I liked the book quite a bit.

I liked his recent novella, Minder, even better.

This is a dark and gritty story, suitable for a movie starring Liam Neeson. A crime boss in an unnamed city learns that a contract has been put out on a local woman cop. He doesn’t want a cop killing in his town. It’s bad for business. So he hires “Fitz,” a professional killer and IRA veteran, to protect her.

The story is well-written, the characters believable, the dialogue excellent. It’s simply a workmanlike hard-boiled story, entirely satisfying to the fan of the genre. The sort of thing Jack Higgins would have written before he ran out of steam. I wished it longer.

Recommended.

Uncategorized

It Isn’t Writing, It’s Coding the Computer to Write

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With NaNoWriMo coming to a close, let’s look at November again as National Novel Generation Month. It’s the month in which you write code that will spew forth a 50,000 word composition when you’re done and work out the bugs. “Reading an entire generated novel is more a feat of endurance than a testament to the quality of the story, which tends to be choppy, flat, or incoherent by the standards of human writing,” remarks the guy who came up with NaNoGenMo last year. You might read a few pages here and there, but really, this isn’t Raymond Chandler. It’s not even on the same city block.

Authors

Recommending ‘The New World’

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Observant film critic Jeffrey Overstreet recommends Terrence Malick’s The New World for our Thanksgiving viewing. He shares his insights into the extended cut version and a personal encounter with Malick’s father.

The New World is an extravagant achievement in historical recreation. It’s also the most refined example of Malick’s visual poetry, which he developed through Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. He has a meditative style all his own that will aggravate many viewers who prefer straightforward narrative and conventional Hollywood flourishes. He’s not an entertainer so much as he is a poet who uses pictures instead of words. Creation itself pours forth speech, as the psalmist says, and Malick invites those with eyes to see to look closer and listen carefully.