Religion

Trick or Thesis!

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I know what you’re wondering. You’re wondering, “Lars, what’s the appropriate way for a Christian to celebrate Halloween?”

I am happy to provide the authoritative answer to that question. You should become a Lutheran.

See, wasn’t that easy?

October 31 is Reformation Day, the anniversary of the date in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church (this was not an act of vandalism, by the way. The church door in those days was the regular place to post public notices, like your Facebook Wall).

Below is a short clip from the 1953 movie, Martin Luther. It depicts a dramatic moment in Luther’s story, when he stood before the Diet of Worms (“Diet” means “Council” and Worms is a city. Stifle that giggle) in 1521, and refused to recant his writings. The “Here I stand, I can do no other” line is now thought by scholars to be an addition made by a later writer with a gift for rhetoric, but the dramatic tension is accurate enough. Although he’d been given a safe conduct to the Diet, Luther was well aware of the fate of the proto-Reformer John Hus. Hus had attended the Council of Constance in 1415 under a similar promise of safety. Once he’d been condemned as a heretic, he was arrested and executed anyway, on the grounds that promises to heretics didn’t count. Luther was putting his head in the lion’s mouth, and he knew it.

There is no truth to the rumor that he wore a Batman mask and yelled, “Trick or Treat!”

Today is the last day of the Virtual Book Tour. The first blog listed is Ellis (though they don’t seem to have posted it yet) and the other is The Plot (again).

And that’s that.

Uncategorized

Ghosts? I Think There's One on Aisle K-L

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Ivebeenreadinglately has a curious post on Nate Hawthorne (his friends call him Nate) and a ghost he may or may not have seen in a library. I say may not have seen to mean that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the great American author made it up. The great librarian Dave Lull manifests in the comments a link to Britannica list of haunted libraries throughout the country. I note that there are no such libraries in Georgia. I also note my disbelief of any of it. (via Books, Inq.)

Goofing

Questions Not to Ask an Author

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  1. Do ever look at your gorgeous face in the mirror and ask yourself why you stay indoors writing?
  2. So when you were writing this, did you think about that A.S. Byatt story from a few years ago that’s almost exactly like yours?
  3. In what font is your new book set?
  4. So I heard your editor at Harper Collins is a real beast. Any truth to that?
  5. Did you complete your creative writing course before finishing this novel?
  6. Do you think you’re all that original?
  7. So, do you type?
  8. If you were to write a basic boy-meets-girl story only three boys meet the girl and she has a lot of cute friends and at one point thinks she may lose all of the boys to her friends but when a fourth guy comes in the first guy gets jealous, what would you call it?
Music

A cold and broken "hallelujah"

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Today on the Virtual Book tour there are three stops (at least in theory). I’m interviewed at Broowaha (though they jumped the gun, date-wise). There’s a nice interview at As the Pages Turn, and a very short item at The Plot, where I’m scheduled to show up in more substantial form tomorrow.

Occasionally I blog about music here, on the strength of no expertise whatever. Although I was in a musical group for several years in my tragically well-spent youth, and am reputed to have a pretty nice voice, I never comprehended music theory, and have a lousy ear and very little sense of rhythm.

Nevertheless, sometimes a song hits me, mutates into an earworm, and won’t leave me alone until I blog about it. And so I’m going to meditate on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” I’ve poked around YouTube looking for a cover I really liked, and frankly none I’ve heard has entirely satisfied me. All in all, I’m least disappointed in Rufus Wainright’s version:

Continue reading A cold and broken "hallelujah" →

Fiction, Reviews

Much Obliged, Jeeves

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Bertie Wooster loves his Aunt Dahlia, even though she has an ugly habit of leveraging him into some kind of theft. It would be for a good cause, of course, but if you’ve ever read Wooster’s adventures in the world outside his London flat, you’ll know it won’t go well. In this book, however, he is spared such pressure from his beloved Aunt–who employs the best French chef in a hundred miles (no small benefit). Instead, she wants him to knock on doors for one of his old university friends who is running for the House of Commons. That doesn’t prevent him from being accused of being a theft by the Lord of Sidcup, that Baron of Black Shorts, Roderick Spode.

I have been reading the stories of Wooster and Jeeves in relatively the order of their writing, but this is the first one which referred to events I didn’t remember, despite the familiar characters. And the familiar story too. This one didn’t surprise me a few times, and while it was wonderfully fun, it didn’t have a few zany scenes like others I’ve read.

One thing I love is Wodehouse’s style of having a character comment on something that isn’t described in the text. For instance, Jeeves was telling Bertie how something surprising unfolded, then in the same paragraph without pausing for description, he says, “I wouldn’t jerk the wheel so sharply, sir. It could alarm the other drivers.”

Perhaps, you’d have to be there to get the feel of it.

Much Obliged, Jeeves is not a good place to start reading Wodehouse’s terrific stories about Wooster and Jeeves, but it is a recommended part of the series. I enjoyed it.

Authors

Interview with Paris Review's Lorin Stein

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Sampsonia Way has a great interview with the new editor of The Paris Review, Lorin Stein. They talk about the many submissions The Paris Review people read and a little about the author interviews the journal is famous for. They actually had an author reject an interview request recently–someone you may have had on the radio.

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Of winds and hobbits

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No Virtual Book Tour stop today. That’s OK. I need a rest from this whirlwind virtual activity.

As many of you are aware (some of you, I’m sure, painfully), last night was a dark and stormy one. If I took any damage here at Blithering Heights, other than the state representative candidate’s campaign sign on my lawn that kept getting flattened, I’m not aware of it.

When I got to work, everything seemed fine there, too, although I soon noticed it was a little chilly. I thought nothing of that, though. The heating in our building is notoriously fickle, different sectors blowing too hot or too cold, for no apparent reason, on random days.

Later, at a staff meeting, I learned that one of the three power sectors on our campus had gone black, and the library was cold because our heat was in that sector. I was surprised at this, as it’s usually the sector that powers our library lights and computers that goes down. But this was remedied later in the afternoon, when we lost power too, for a while.

Phooey. I’ve got no kick coming. People are still waiting for their houses to get the juice back. Some people’s houses are gone.

I failed to mention (because I hadn’t put it together yet), when I did my review of the Masterpiece Theater/Mystery production of Sherlock, that the actor I praised in the role of Watson, Martin Freeman, has been cast as Bilbo Baggins in the upcoming The Hobbit movie.

Seems to me a great pick. He’s a veteran of the great, original British The Office series, so he can do comedy, and Sherlock demonstrates he can do the action stuff. And he certainly fits the established physical pattern of Peter Jackson hobbits.

Have you ever noticed what’s wrong with that pattern, in terms of the original material, by the way? Continue reading Of winds and hobbits →

Authors, Poetry

"Speak the speech, I pray thee, trippingly on the tongue…"

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I fell down in my obligation to link to yesterday’s stop on the Virtual Book Tour. But dry your tears—it’s right here, at Review From Here. (Can’t seem to find a permalink; if you’re reading this after time has passed, you may have to scroll down or search.)

Today’s stop is at The Story Behind the Book.

Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost links to a story, and posts a couple video clips, concerning the first American attempt to produce a Shakespeare play in the original accents of Shakespeare’s time. The point of the exercise seems to be, mainly, to demonstrate how much better the poetry rhymed back when it was written. Continue reading "Speak the speech, I pray thee, trippingly on the tongue…" →

Reviews

Television Review: Sherlock: A Study In Pink

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Although we naturally (and quite rightly) think of Sherlock Holmes as a character comfortably ensconced in Victorian London, with its hansom cabs rattling down cobblestone streets, yellow fog, and helmeted bobbies, the idea of updating the character isn’t actually a new one. The early Holmes films were always set in the year of their production, just as we today think nothing of seeing James Bond (whose stories were written in the 1950s and ’60s) using a laptop computer or carrying a cell phone. The first Holmes film actually set in period was The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Basil Rathbone, released by Twentieth Century Fox in 1939. Then, after one more Victorian film for Fox (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), the series moved to Universal and back to the cheaper approach of updating.

I was prepared to dislike the new BBC series Sherlock, broadcast on PBS, but to my surprise I quite liked it. The new Holmes operates as a police consultant in contemporary London. The police are suspicious of him (one accuses him of being a “psychopath,” to which he replies that he’s a high-functioning sociopath). He doesn’t wear a deerstalker or Inverness cape, but those costume elements have tended to be overused (and inappropriately used) in films and TV shows anyway. The modern world doesn’t allow him to smoke, so he relies on multiple nicotine patches when he needs to think out a problem. He does take drugs. The actor who plays him (one who rejoices in the name Benedict Cumberbatch) looks too young for the part, but has the attitude exactly right. Continue reading Television Review: Sherlock: A Study In Pink →

Book Reviews, Creative Culture