Music

Bach on a cold day

Leave a comment

Actually it’s not all that cold. About 20° F today. I’ve seen it a whole lot worse than this.

What’s got the whole state (nay, the whole region) bloodhound-faced today is the knowledge that tomorrow will be colder, and the day after that colder still, and on and on through the end of the week. I haven’t looked at the forecast past Sunday. I suspect the Monday one will say, “Supercooled through the afternoon; heat death of the universe after sunset.”

Yet we survive. We persevere. That’s what makes us better than you.



Here’s an article by Uwe Siemon-Netto, from Paul McCain’s blog Cyberbrethren, about the odd (though welcome) phenomenon of Asians converting to Christianity through the music of J. S. Bach.

I would have never expected this. I’ve always seen music as essentially non-propositional, unsuited to changing people’s minds, except by means of the lyrics.

But Bach’s music has no lyrics. It’s just very fine, intricate music on which the composer has written (at the end of every piece), “Soli Deo Gloria” (To God alone be the glory). And the testimony of an artistic job so brilliantly done seems to have an evangelistic appeal.

I suppose I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. It actually harmonizes well with some things I’ve been thinking for a while. I’m just always surprised to be right… or anything in the neighborhood of right.

Back in the misty years of the 1970s, when I was touring with the Christian musical group for which I was lyricist, a guy came to talk to us after a concert. He said he was a follower of Francis Schaeffer, and I thought, “Great. We’ll be friends.” But he wasn’t interested in being friends.

His reading of Schaeffer had convinced him that the gospel was about reason—reason and nothing else. In evangelism, no appeal should be made to anything but the “law of non-contradiction.” Because our songs appealed to feelings as well as reason, he informed us that we were heretics and tools of the devil. I suppose he’d hoped for syllogisms in song.

I hadn’t thought the whole thing out at that point (still haven’t, for that matter), but I think I argued that, although reason is important and much neglected, it’s not the only thing.

As the years have passed, I’ve grown more convinced I was correct. Schaeffer concentrated on reason in his books because that’s the element that’s being most neglected in theology and apologetics today. But if you read those books and pay attention to more than just creating bullet points, you’ll see that he talks about the importance of love and relationships and beauty, too. His book The Mark of a Christian was not about logic, but about love.

This is entirely consistent with essential Christian theology. We believe in the Incarnation. “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) It’s as heretical to neglect the soft, subjective side of our lives as to neglect the rigorous, rational side.

Which is why the Lord can even call souls to Himself through music.

Hey! Maybe He could use novels too!

Writing

Four Studios Drop Writer Contracts

Leave a comment

The LA Times reports that writers contracts have been canceled by 20th Century Fox Television, CBS Paramount Network Television, NBC Universal and Warner Bros. Television. Over 65 cancellations since Friday.

Authors, Blogs, Socials

DeMuth Blogs on Writing, Publishing

Leave a comment

Author Mary DeMuth is now blogging at www.wannabepublished.blogspot.com. She introduces her new blog on The Master’s Artist. She says she “remembers what it’s like to be wide-eyed and naïve about publishing. She’s passionate about helping new writers, but since her writing and speaking schedule is filling up, she’s decided to funnel her help into a user-friendly blog.”

Reviews

Trouble, by Jesse Kellerman

Leave a comment

I know you’ll all be relieved to read a review written by me which isn’t about a Dean Koontz novel. No, no. The looks on your faces are all the thanks I need.

Trouble is an extremely impressive thriller written by a young novelist. I found it gripping, frightening, and engaging. The writing was elegant and crisp, the characters real and sympathetic, and often very funny.

And yet, in the end, I found it unsatisfying.

The concept is promising. It’s the old “Fatal Attraction” scenario—the hero gets sexually involved with a woman who turns out to be a psychopath. The twist in Trouble is that the woman doesn’t want to hurt the hero. She wants him to hurt her.

The main character is Jonah Stem. He’s a medical student in his third year—that purgatorial year when you work long hours, get treated like a beast of burden, and subsist on a couple hours of sleep a night—in a Manhattan hospital. Twice a month he takes the train to visit his former girlfriend, who is sliding into schizophrenia, to help her father with her care.

Yet he’s not too beaten down to get involved when, on his way home from work one night, he sees a large homeless man standing with a knife over a young woman. He jumps in to protect her, and when it’s all over the attacker is dead, and Jonah is a tabloid hero.

It doesn’t hurt that the girl is extremely cute.

Eventually they bump into each other again, and there are sparks, and they do what modern young people are expected to do. (I should probably note here that there’s a fair amount of sex in this book, some of it pretty kinky.)

But gradually it becomes clear that this woman has something more wrong with her than simple loose morals. She wants to be hurt. She demands that Jonah hurt her. She is convinced that Jonah has committed himself to an “art project” with her, and she’s utterly shameless in manipulating and threatening him, and those around him, to get his cooperation.

And then it gets worse.

If a story like this could have been written (it couldn’t) back in the 1950s (for instance) there would have been an implicit moral lesson. “Don’t have sex with people you’ve just met,” or even, “Don’t have sex with someone you’re not married to.”

I see no sign of a lesson of any kind in Trouble, though. Not that all stories have to have explicitly stated morals. But in a classic story the hero is expected to at least learn something from his ordeal. In this book, the hero seems to be pretty much unchanged in the end by the horrible events he experiences. The only lesson the story seems to teach is that it’s dangerous to help people. But even that (bad) lesson doesn’t seem to be the point here. I guess the point is that stuff happens, and sometimes it gets really intense, you know?

Jesse Kellerman is the son of two bestselling mystery novelists, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman. I’m a big fan of his dad’s and not much of a fan of his mother’s. Jesse didn’t need their help to get published, though, I suspect. He’s a real talent, and a very accomplished storyteller. Expect big things from him.

I just hope he can find a way to write stories with something at stake in them.

Uncategorized

Freedom!

Leave a comment

The Anchoress is calling for glasnost in the United States of America, which seems to be a good idea, but I’m a little miffed because her post linked to this little political quiz which marked me as a right-leaning libertarian–not a solid conservative. Hmff! I don’t know about that.

Bookselling

Survey of Unique Bookstores

Leave a comment

The AP has a brief survey tour of unique bookstores in the United States, places like Powell’s, City Lights Books, The Stand, and Tattered Cover. (by way of the Wordsmith)

Music, Poetry

I Will Put Back to Sea

Leave a comment

I feel the winds of God today; today my sail I lift,

Though heavy, oft with drenching spray, and torn with many a rift;

If hope but light the water’s crest, and Christ my bark will use,

I’ll seek the seas at His behest, and brave another cruise.

It is the wind of God that dries my vain regretful tears,

Until with braver thoughts shall rise the purer, brighter years;

If cast on shores of selfish ease or pleasure I should be;

Lord, let me feel Thy freshening breeze, and I’ll put back to sea.

If ever I forget Thy love and how that love was shown,

Lift high the blood red flag above; it bears Thy Name alone.

Great Pilot of my onward way, Thou wilt not let me drift;

I feel the winds of God today, today my sail I lift.

These words are by Jess­ie Ad­ams in 1906.

Reading

“No bigger than a calf’s skin”

Leave a comment

The internet was down most of the day at work today, so a number of things I wanted to do either didn’t get done or didn’t get finished. Sometimes I wonder about this whole computer thing. Imagine an office in 1927, and somebody comes to the boss and says, “I’ve got great new office machine for you. It’ll allow you to do your bookkeeping in a fraction of the time. It’ll streamline your correspondence and printing in ways you won’t believe. It’ll provide information from around the world before the local newspaper knows it.”

And the boss, being no fool, says, “What’s the catch?” (No doubt he’d take a drag on a cigarette before speaking, because everybody smoked in the office back then.)

“Well, the machines will break down every down and then. Fairly regularly, really. And when that happens, your business will basically grind to a standstill. And even when it’s working, your employees will waste a lot of time playing with it”

Would he be willing to invest in something like that? Maybe he would. But I bet he’d think long and hard first.

Dirty Harry over at Libertas speculates amusingly on how “The Yearling” would be handled if it were filmed today.

Dr. John Eidsmoe, author of Christianity and the Constitution, is at our school teaching a seminar just now, and he dropped in to my office today. We got onto the subject of Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskringla (the sagas of the kings of Norway), one of our mutual favorite books. I mentioned to him one of my favorite stories from the book, one which is included in the Everyman edition, translated by Samuel Laing, but not in the other two translations I own (this is due to a difference in the source texts used).

It comes from the saga of the sons of Magnus Barefoot: Sigurd the Crusader and Eystein the Good. Eystein, being good, died young, but Sigurd lived to an overrripe old age, and appears to have suffered from dementia. Toward the end he announced that he was going to divorce his faithful and much-beloved queen, and marry a younger woman.

The bishop of Bergen at the time was named Magne. Bishop Magne went to confront the king at his hall, and brought along a younger priest, also named Sigurd, who would eventually become bishop himself, and who reported what happened.

Bishop Magne sent word for the king to come out of the hall and speak with him. The king came out, with a sword in his hand.

The bishop refused the king’s invitation to come in and dine. Instead he condemned the king’s decision and told him he forbade “this wickedness.”

While he thus spoke he stood straight up, as if stretching out his neck to the blow, and as if ready if the king chose to let the sword fall; and the priest Sigurd… has declared that the sky appeared to him no bigger than a calf’s skin, so frightful did the appearance of the king present itself to him. The king returned to the hall, however, without saying a word….

Then the bishop went to his own house, and Father Sigurd noticed that he seemed extremely merry. He asked the bishop if he wasn’t frightened, and if he didn’t think it would be a good idea to get out of town.

Then said the bishop, “It appears to me more likely that he will not act so; and besides, what death could be better, or more desirable, than to leave life for the honour of God? or to die for the holy cause of Christianity and our own office, by preventing that which is not right? I am so cheerful because I have done what I ought to do.”

If you’re wondering how it all turned out, the king got his wedding in the end, by going south to Stavanger and bribing the bishop there with a lot of gifts.

But I love that story about Bishop Magne, and particularly Father Sigurd’s description of the sky appearing “no bigger than a calf’s skin.”

I’ve never read a better description of the psychological effect of fear. That man was a storyteller.