Tony Woodlief writes about writing and vocation.
One of the surest ways to determine if someone who wants to be a writer can, in fact, become a writer is to examine his output. I know more than a few people who want to be writers, but not so much that they actually write. . . . I write because I can’t help it. I write because sometimes, in the midst of it, I feel like I am doing what I was crafted to do.
My church hosted a great Michael Card concert last Saturday. His music is nothing like the song Lars described yesterday. He even sang my favorite song of his, one he said he wrote “at a professor” who argued for a more rational faith than Card was comfortable with. Card has always favored mystery and paradox, so when his professor argued for a list of concepts which one could assent to and thereby adopt Christian faith, Card bristled. So he wrote a song about Jesus and his clash with our understanding, called “God’s Own Fool,” which has the chorus
When we in our foolishness thought we were wise
He played the fool and He opened our eyes
When we in our weakness believed we were strong
He became helpless to show we were wrong
And so we follow God’s own fool
For only the foolish can tell-
Believe the unbelievable
And come be a fool as well
YouTube has a video of it. I sang this song during a Sunday service a few years ago because it tied so well to the sermon. I think the Holy Spirit used it, but now that I say that, I can’t point to anything for evidence of that–perhaps, that’s not a proper perspective.
I wanted to pass on something Card mentioned during the concert. He is working with several others on The By/For Project, an effort to encourage Christian musicians to write music for the whole church for use in worship services free of restrictions. The site says, “Worship is a gift freely given. By/For projects are licensed under Creative Commons, so churches can freely use the art in worship and other artists can adapt and extend it. Removing profit motives can enrich both art and worship.”
The site also wants to remove the natural boundaries between Christians. “By/For believes the local church can strengthen and support fellow worshippers down the street, across town, and over oceans” by using the Internet to distribute recorded music, scores, and lyrics. There’s also a visual art angle on this too, which should bend some perspectives a bit.
Your local Starbucks will close at 5:30 today for “barista re-education.” Do not panic.
UPDATE: Dunkin’ Donuts in Chicago is offering free small lattes today from 1:00 to 10:00 p.m. I believe they are 99 cents in other parts of the country. McDonald’s is also trying to win over coffee drinkers during the Starbucks black out.
Doug Wilson talks numbers in a post today about an ugly part of our modern culture.
Numbers about this kind of thing, taken out of context in this way, are weapons. Consider Kinsey’s infamous lie about 10 percent of the population being homosexual, and that figure, apparently immortal now, is routinely used to make the rest of us “face facts,” and come to terms with what is obviously a fact of nature. It is in fact lying propaganda. In the same way, the raw fact that American has a 10 billion dollar a year porn problem is used by friends and foes of porn alike, the former to tell us, “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated,” and the latter to tell us if we don’t get off our keisters now, we are all going to be living in a seedier section of one of the Cities of the Plain in about three weeks.
From my point of view, our problem with this vice has more to do with the free and publicity side than the pay-per-view side. Why shouldn’t the current issue of Sports Illustrated and some celebrity gossip mags/pages considered part of this $10 billion industry?
Will Duquette became a Roman Catholic a while back, and now he’s uncovering his inner Benedictine monk. Make that oblate, not monk.
Some while ago, Jane had picked up a book, rather on a whim, called Monk Habits for Ordinary People, by a Presbyterian minister named Dennis Okholm. Okholm has, rather surprisingly, for twenty years been an oblate of Blue Cloud Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in South Dakota, and his purpose in writing the book was to make Benedictine spirituality accessible to other Protestants. I’d glanced at it at the time, but no more than that; a couple of days ago Jane reminded me of it, and I more or less devoured it.
The weekend was beautiful, and so was today. High temperatures around, or above, freezing. We may not really deserve a mild stretch like this, but we feel as if we do.
In church on Sunday, among the praise songs our worship team had chosen for us was a number which contained (I’m not making this up) the following lines:
So much holy
So divine
Yours and so much mine….Our God reigns
Over the heavens
Over the earth
Our God reigns
Praise His name
All still standing
All that was
All that remains
Our God reigns
I can feel my brain cells atrophying just on account of transcribing those inane lyrics. In what way, I ask, is singing such content-free drivel (over and over, of course) any different from chanting “Om” in a Transcendental Meditation center?
Commenter Aitchmark told me about T. Jefferson Parker’s mystery novel, Silent Joe, and I ordered it out of curiosity. I found it a compelling book. Flawed, but as fascinating as any novel I’ve read in a long time.
Joe Trona, the narrator and hero of the book, is the adopted son of Will Trona, an Orange County (California) supervisor. He works as a jailer, on his way to a police career, but at night he helps Will with “delicate” business—serving as his driver and bodyguard for trips and meetings and exchanges that he doesn’t want publicly known. Joe has no problem with this. He has complete faith that Will is a good man, and any corners he cuts are cut in a good cause.
Joe is tall, strong, a trained martial artist and a crack shot. He’s handsome, except that an act of abuse by his birth father left him with a serious scar on his face. Joe has cultivated good manners in order to be unthreatening, and he generally wears a hat to shade his features, but he’s profoundly self-conscious.
One night he and Will make a mysterious run that involves delivering some money and picking up a little girl. Then they are ambushed. Although Joe manages to kill two of the attackers and get the girl out of the line of fire, he can’t protect Will, who is shot to death. The rest of the book chronicles Joe’s quest to learn who set up the murder, and why it was done.
As a pure mystery, I can’t give Silent Joe the highest marks. Although political affiliations are not explicitly stated, it becomes clear pretty early on who are the Democrats and who are the Republicans. And once you’ve identified the Republicans, you know who’s guilty. Only the details remain to be worked out.
By the way, here’s a tip (but only a minor spoiler) for any liberal mystery novelists who happen by—it’s been about forty years since unmasking a white, male Christian clergyman as a hypocrite and degenerate has had any surprise value. We figured out a long time ago that whenever you introduce a white, male Christian clergyman, he’s going to turn out to be a hypocrite and a degenerate. If you want to actually surprise anyone, try doing something we haven’t seen a thousand times. Show us an ethical clergyman, or a sympathetic Republican, or a Muslim terrorist. Mix it up a little.
Although the mystery was no great shakes, the writing and the characterizations in Silent Joe were absolutely top level. Parker writes prose with great precision and grace. Not a word is misplaced. And although I probably identify more with Joe Trona than most people do, I think everyone will find him a fascinating character, at once tough and vulnerable, dangerous and child-like, smart and innocent.
There’s a particular section where Joe meets a woman, finds her attractive, and works up his nerve to ask her out. I actually had to put down this un-put-downable book a couple times because I had a hard time handling the tension. Those of you who can’t, like me, strongly identify with Joe’s shame issues will still (I think) find it an effective and moving episode.
I generally just drop liberal novels if I find them politically strident or condescending. I never had much trouble with Silent Joe. The story and the characters kept me riveted, and I enjoyed it very much.
Some rough language. Some sex, but not explicit (rather well handled, I thought) and violence. Not a perfect book, but a very, very, good one.
I had a vision today. For a moment the veil of the future was swept aside, and I received an impression of things to come.
Bear in mind when I say that that my predictions are pretty much always wrong. If there’s such a thing as Second Sight, I was third in line.
But I had a vision of a possible scenario. Imagine (it isn’t hard to do) that Hillary Clinton doesn’t win the Democratic nomination this year.
I can see her turning on her party. I can see her becoming a Republican, writing nasty books about her years with Bill (whom she will have also dumped by then), and showing up regularly on Rush Limbaugh to comment on Democratic politics from the perspective of a former insider. Kind of the same thing Dick Morris is doing now.
Remember, you read it here first.
Not long ago I made a reference to my interest in Wild Bill Hickok. This led me to glance at my bookshelf, and I noticed that I had a book on Wild Bill there that I hadn’t read yet. More surprisingly, it was a book by Joseph G. Rosa, the foremost Hickok authority today (oddly enough, an Englishman), and a man with whom I once exchanged a couple letters.
So I read Wild Bill Hickok: Gunfighter. It was a good book, as I expected, and Rosa has done his usual yeoman work uncovering obscure sources previously unseen. The copy editing could have been better, but that’s pretty much a universal problem in publishing nowadays.
What particularly interested me was his comments on one of Hickok’s most famous photographs. You can see a small version here. It’s the picture at the top, where he’s standing in a buckskin shirt.
Somewhere, and I think it must have been in his magnum opus, They Called Him Wild Bill (the second edition came out in 1974), Rosa had identified that picture as probably coming from late in Hickok’s life, when he was traveling with the original stage production that Buffalo Bill Cody produced before he went whole hog with his “Wild West” show.
When I wrote a letter of appreciation to Rosa, I said that I thought the picture must be earlier, probably from Hickok’s time as an army scout. I noted, first of all, that Hickok looks quite thin in this picture. Anybody who’s studied the photographs (and Hickok liked getting photographed) knows that he put on weight as he got older.
Secondly, I noted that his mustache looks pretty modest, compared to the flowing affair he sported later on.
And I mentioned that his hair was parted in the middle. In his later pictures, his hair (when he’s bareheaded) is combed straight back.
Rosa replied (I have the letter somewhere, though I can’t put my hand on it right now) that the head-brace Hickok would have worn to hold him still for such a photograph would have stretched out his head and neck, making him look thinner; that the mustache length would probably have varied frequently; and the same would be true with the hair part.
In his comments on this photograph on page 35 of this new book, Rosa now identifies the picture as an early one, and says, “…a close examination of the photograph reveals that he wears his hair parted in the middle, an affectation he had discarded by 1870.”
I don’t claim that it was my argument alone that changed the biographer’s mind. He also notes that identification of the original photographer helps to date the picture. And doubtless I wasn’t the first person to study the picture closely and come to the same conclusion.
But I feel vindicated!
Another comment I made (and Rosa obviously hasn’t yet come around on this) is that I think the pair of Colt pistols Hickok is wearing here are not Navies (.36 caliber) but Armies (.44 caliber). I say that just because I’ve done a lot of shooting with a Navy replica, and they have rather small handles, about right for my hands, which are also pretty small. Hickok was a fairly tall man, and in proportion to his size, those pistol grips just look too large for Navies, to my eyes. The grips on an Army are a little bigger.
The flaw in this theory is that it’s known that Hickok owned at least one matched pair of nickel-plated, ivory-handled Navies. But there’s no record of a similar pair of Armies belonging to him.
But this is my night for bold theories. So make a note that you read this here first, too.
First of all, thanks to Dave Lull for sending me a link to this article by Stephen Hunter. If you’re not aware that I consider Hunter one of the truly great thriller writers of our time, you must be new here (in which case, welcome. Our membership fee is reasonable, and may be wired directly to my personal bank account). Apparently Hunter had a heart attack recently. Take care of yourself, Stephen! I still haven’t gotten over losing John D. MacDonald!
Today it got up to +16° (-9 Centigrade), and it was wonderful. Needless to say, if yesterday had been 25°, it would have been terrible. I’ve said before (why haven’t you quoted me yet?) that there are only two temperatures in the Northern Plains in the winter—colder than yesterday and warmer than yesterday. I don’t approve, but it’s true.
I hate the Subjective. It’s hard to get away from it, though. Modern society has placed the Subjective on the cultural altar where the Bible used to rest, so questioning it has become a sort of contemporary heresy (as Clarence Thomas learned during his Supreme Court confirmation process). Making everything Subjective is easy, because it requires nothing more than experience, and we’ve all got some of that. No thought is necessary. Plus, it’s popular. A hard combination to fight.
Einstein is supposed to have explained his Special Theory of Relativity by saying that time spent sitting on a sofa with a beautiful girl on your lap passes much faster than time spent sitting on a hot stove. Maybe it’s an apocryphal story. If he did say it, I can’t believe he was serious. The watch on my wrist, the instrument which measures whatever time is, doesn’t change its pace based on where I’m sitting. A scientist observing my watch would note that the hands moved at a consistent pace. And that’s how science works, blast it.
So I don’t buy it.
And if you disagree, well, that’s your reality. Don’t you dare impose it on me.
Here’s a very nice meditation on the TV show “Monk,” (which I haven’t been able to see since I cut my cable, but I remember fondly), by Dean Abbott on S. T. Karnick’s The American Culture blog. I’m not sure I agree with the assumption that a Christian subtext actually exists in the series. I’m sure such a subtext can be found by those who want to find it, but whether the writers intended it seems questionable to me. But Abbott doubtless knows more about the writers than I do. Either way, I think the piece has excellent things to say about life in general.
What to write about today? I haven’t finished reading a book recently (I’m working on a book of history, which goes a little slower than novels. I’ll tell you about it soon. Have to take a break from Koontz now and then).
There’s always the weather. God gave us weather so that human beings would always have something to make conversation about. Which means, I suppose, that He intended Minnesotans to be the most voluble people on earth.
Which isn’t the case, if you’ve ever visited here.
Today the high was about +1° F (that’s in the neighborhood of -20° C). It’s been vile for several days, but tomorrow the temperature’s expected to soar to about 15. And it should keep getting warmer into next week.
I’ve been trying to think back about childhood winter memories. I grew up on a farm, on a gravel road. When the big blizzards came, we’d be cut off from civilization for a short time. Never long. We were never driven to eat the dog. We had cows and pigs and chickens who could have served that purpose if necessary, but it never came close. We might have run out of ice cream or bread for a day (we produced our own milk and eggs. We pasteurized the milk on a burner on the stove. We sold our good eggs and ate the ones that had small cracks in them. It’s odd to think of it now, but we did not refrigerate those eggs. We kept them in a carton by the stove, at room temperature. I suppose I must be immune to salmonella after years of that. We went through those eggs pretty fast, though).
We’d turn on WCCO radio from the Twin Cities on the morning of a blizzard, to learn whether school was closed. They’d read the names of all the closed schools in their large listening area. The Faribault station would probably have a shorter list, but we didn’t really trust the Faribault station. WCCO’s school closing announcements had the weight of social authority.
If we got a real dandy storm, a white-out, the roads would drift over and there’d be no going anywhere until the snow plow came through, which could be a while. A day off from school didn’t mean a day of leisure, of course. Aside from the usual chores, we’d have to dig out our driveway once the snow stopped. The fact that we had a short driveway wasn’t an advantage in that regard, because if we’d had a long driveway Dad would probably have bought a snowplow for his tractor and done it that way. Since he had two (later three) sons, he saw no reason to spend money to do a job we could do for free. Once Moloch and I went away to college, he bought the plow.
I didn’t hate shoveling snow as much as I hated most farm jobs. It was clean, for one thing, and it was warm once you’d gotten into the rhythm of the thing. And it was a simple job with a clear goal. You knew how much progress you’d made, and you knew when you were done.
That didn’t stop me from griping. I knew, by way of television, that lots of people lived in a state called California, where it never snowed and (apparently) nobody had any chores, but spent their free time at the beach.
I seem to recall a blizzard where our TV went out. That was tough. In that case there was nothing to do but sit around with the family, listening to the house creaking. I suppose we must have talked, but I can’t imagine what about.
I probably read a book.