Authors, Religion

Super apologist, supertaster

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Today is C. S. Lewis’ birthday (1898-1963). In honor of the occasion some of us have been posting quotations from his writings on Facebook. I’ll post this one here:

“The minimal religion in fact cannot, while it remains minimal, be acted on. As soon as you do anything you have assumed one of the dogmas.” (From “Religion Without Dogma” in God In the Dock)

I should have posted this yesterday so you’d have all day to celebrate, but do I have to do everything around here?

I made my special pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, besides the turkey, and while enjoying the leftovers I’ve been taking particular pleasure in breaking the edge crust off and throwing it away. I used to get in trouble for doing that when I was a kid. But what do you know? Now doctors say it’s a good idea, because it reduces fat. I was right all along. My parents could have avoided so much unpleasantness if they’d just realized earlier that Lars Is Always Right.

I’ve told you before that I’m a picky eater. So I’m delighted to discover that this may be a sign that I belong to a special, elite subspecies of humanity, the Supertaster. We Supertasters have more taste buds than you ordinary folks, and our extreme finickiness about things we won’t eat is actually due to the fact that we are tasting stuff you can’t detect.

Unfortunately, this article (tip: Joe Carter at First Thoughts) says that Supertasters tend to be skinny people.

From this I can only conclude that I belong to an even more select group—Fat Supertasters.

Blogs, Socials

Scary Ghost Stories and Tales of the Glories of Christmases Long Time Ago

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Loren has announced his 2010 Advent Ghost Story Flash Fiction Rally. I’m already polishing something, and I think I’d like to work on another one.

Religion

Thanksgiving Links

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Jared has seven great ways to crush the Thanksgiving spirit, such as freaking out over everything, like a late family guest, and practicing practical atheism.

Bill talks about communal living and productivity.

One of my earliest professional experiences involved leaving a job at a government-run municipal utility to take a job at a private-sector energy company. At the utility, it didn’t much matter what you did, you were going to get paid and keep your job. There was a lot of waste, shoddy work, and sloth at that company. Don’t get me wrong, I worked with good people. But the very structure of the place was set against big productivity gains, risks, improvements or innovation.

Loosely related to these is this post from Tullian Tchividjian on counterfeit gospels: “ways we try and ‘justify’ or ‘save’ ourselves apart from the gospel of grace. I found these unbelievably helpful.”

Authors

Free e-Book from Anthony Powell

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Patrick Kurp can’t get enough of a highly praised British novelist Anthony Powell, to which he testifies before the congregation here. What’s more Kingsley Amis says Powell is “the most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.” That’s got to count for something.

The University of Chicago Press will be offering the first novel of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time for free during December, so next Wednesday, if you’d like to dip your feet into an important British novelist’s epic work, download your copy here. (I neglected to say earlier that I got this link from the great Dave Lull.)

Religion

Rise up and walk. And say thank you.

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Thanksgiving tomorrow. I doubt I’ll post anything that day, as I’ll have family prowling the place like roaring lions, seeking what they may devour. Tomorrow morning comes my annual D-Day, when I face the challenge of roasting a turkey. I’ve done this four straight years now with unbroken success, but I still feel incompetent.

What am I thankful for? There’s a question to make me guilty. “A pack o’ blessings lie on my head,” to paraphrase Romeo and Juliet, and yet I spend most of my life (as you may have noticed) bemoaning the things (some of them quite important, you have to admit) that I’ve missed out on.

But I’ll tell you one thing I’m thankful for. It’s this.

Tip: Conservative Grapevine.

I love this stuff. A walking wheelchair—a way for paraplegics to enjoy a more normal life. A way to regenerate damaged spinal tissue would be better, of course, but I think we’ll have that too, before long. (And I’d bet you money it will be through a method that doesn’t involve embryonic stem cells.)

I think things like this are part of (note I said, “part of”) the answer to the question of theodicy—“If God is good, why is there so much suffering in the world?” If you’re wondering why God isn’t doing anything about suffering, I say He’s doing this. He’s working through people to overcome suffering and evil, which is a more glorious thing than starting out with perfection.

That leaves lots of questions, of course. Plenty of undeserved suffering goes unrelieved in this world. I don’t have the answer to the whole question. I’m just saying this seems to me a hint, a relevant fact.

And I would note (because I can’t help myself) that this happened in Israel, a country within the western tradition. Obfuscate all you like, but the great non-western civilizations never came up with the kind of science that does this sort of thing. The machines may be manufactured in Japan or China, but left to nothing but Shintoism or Taoism, those cultures would have gone on until the heat death of the universe without developing the scientific method and modern medicine. Because they don’t believe in a God who made a real world out of nothing, as Christians and Jews do. That doctrine made the examination of nature a praiseworthy thing, rather than blasphemy. It was Christians, who believe that physical matter was made noble in the Incarnation, who figured out thoracic surgery and penicillin.

And for that I’m thankful.

Bookselling, Non-fiction, Publishing

John Thompson of Merchants of Culture

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Cambridge University professor John Thompson talks about the problems with the publishing industry in this interview with The Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of the book

“The real trouble for the publishing industry, in my view,” Thompson says, “has more to do with the gradual unfolding of this economic transformation that led to this structure of publishing, where we now have five large corporate groups and a small number of retail chains dominating the industry.” He says the large corporations must maintain profitability, and 95% of their revenue is still from printed book sales. When profit margins stretch thin, they must eliminate people or other overhead costs to keep the large companies in the black. Everyone in the process must demonstrate growth for the corporation or risk being let go, and if they understand that to mean selling more books, despite the thousands they currently sell, then they try to crank out more books. Naturally, an environment like this produced the desire for the bestseller, those few great selling books which bring in the dough and relieve the pressure to sell other books, making one’s sales load more manageable.

Other factors putting publishing in its current bind include the rise of agents and the changes in book retailing. Will the whole thing collapse soon? Thompson doesn’t think so. Despite all of the industry changes likely to come, he states, “books are a deeply embedded part of Western culture, indeed of other cultures, too, and I don’t think that is likely to change quickly.”

Publishing

Thanks, But This Isn't for Us

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The post intended for this space was thoughtful, well-written though a little long-winded, and it would have made beautiful reading for thousands of BwB readers, however it simply was not the tenor of post we wish to distribute here. We wish the writer all the best success with other blogs for that post. Instead for this space, the self-congratulatory editors of BwB offer our readers a link to this article in the Independent of Ireland on famous statements made when rejecting manuscripts which later made bestselling books, e.g. J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel, which was rejected by nine publishers before one man’s eight-year-old daughter said it was so much better than anything else.

A commenter on Twitter pointed to this article, saying it was the reason agents send out bland, boilerplate rejection letters. They fear saying “guitar groups are on the way out” to a band like The Beatles.

On the subject of rejections, Molly-Ann Leikin has a short list of them here.

William Faulkner’s novel, Sanctuary, was tossed back in his face with the editor’s horrified remark, “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.” It was eventually published, of course, and nobody ended up behind bars.

Music

Concerning Lions

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Kudos to a great new band based in Chattanooga, Concerning Lions. This isn’t a great video, but the song is cool and, I believe, will be in an upcoming album. I wish I could point you to the lyric, but if you’re in a place where you can crank the volume, then you’ll be able to hear the words yourself, which is, like, better.

Concerning Lions – Young Curmudgeon – TBP from Concerning Lions on Vimeo.

Fiction, Reviews

The Viking Funeral, by Stephen J. Cannell

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I’d been looking for the late Stephen J. Cannell’s The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel for some time, just because of its title. I’ve enjoyed the other books in the Shane Scully series, and had kept my eye out for it, but the second-hand bookstore where I get most of my books never seemed to have it in.

Having finally found it, I have to confess to a little disappointment. It’s a diverting actioner, and moving in places, but it’s by far the darkest book of the series. I wasn’t prepared for the grimness of the thing.

In this book, our hero Shane Scully spots an old friend driving on the freeway, a friend who—he had every reason to believe—had committed suicide some time before. The friend’s response to catching his eye confirms the identification. His investigation of the matter leads Scully into very deep corruption in the police and sheriff’s departments, and to some terrible moments of betrayal, given and received. Scully spends a good portion of the book grieving his own killing of someone very important in his life.

It’s kind of depressing.

It gets better after a while, but the fun level in this one is pretty low, despite Cannell’s penchant for injecting cinematic violence, explosions, and automatic weapons fire at every opportunity. Worth reading, but not as light as one might hope. Cautions, as usual, for language, violence, and adult subject matter.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture