Authors

On C. S. Lewis: Hooper vindicated?

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The serious cold has returned to God’s Country. The high today was a notch over 10°F. I’ve seen worse cold. Far worse. But this is definitely, inarguably frigid.

On Saturday it’ll be even colder. And the Viking Age Society is scheduled to help with a city cross-country skiing event that day, manning bonfires and passing out (warm) refreshments.

I’m trying to figure out a way to weasel out of it.



There’s news on the C. S. Lewis front. I wrote, over on the old blog site, about the late Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog’s accusations, repeated and embellished through several books, that Lewis’ secretary and literary executor, Walter Hooper, had forged documents, notably the unfinished novel The Dark Tower, and fraudulently published them as Lewis’ work.

I never put much stock in those charges, and it appears my instincts were right. The current issue of Christianity Today features an article called “Shedding Light On the Dark Tower” (not online, but here’s a discussion thread from the Into the Wardrobe site); by Harry Lee Poe. Poe describes a 2003 article in the Yale Review by scholar Alastair Fowler, a student of Lewis’. Fowler clearly recalls Lewis showing him some of his unfinished work, and he says he particularly remembers seeing The Dark Tower, with its disturbing scene about the man with the “stinger” in his head.

It would appear that Lindskoog was motivated to make her charges, in part, by the fact that the Dark Tower fragment just isn’t very good. She couldn’t accept that her hero might have produced something so inferior.

If that’s so, it’s evidence that she didn’t understand the creative process very well. Rare is the fiction writer who can produce saleable material on the first draft, and most who can aren’t the best in their genres. I often tell people, “The first thing is just to get your story down on paper. Don’t worry about the fact that it’s dreck. It’s supposed to be dreck. That’s what first drafts are for. Once the dreck is down in black and white, you can put your artistic mind to work, cutting, shaping, polishing and rearranging stuff.”

You can argue that a poor first draft by Lewis should never have been published at all (good luck with that!). But to complain that an early draft is substandard compared with his published work—that’s just starry-eyed.

Fiction

Crossing Ann

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As I set about my morning ablutions, I looked at the bathroom shelf and wondered, “Where did that fluffy blue wash cloth come from, the one that’s draping the deodorant and the extra bar of soap?”
On closer examination, I discovered it to be not a cloth, but a blanket of foam. My economy size can of shaving gel had spontaneously discharged, popping its cap and cascading blue froth all over the shelf.
I’ve been trying to decide all day whether this was a big deal. It was a large can, and I’d hoped to make it last a year or two. I use shaving cream very slowly, since I wear a beard and only scrape my neck and upper cheeks. So this can represented a lot of mileage lost.
On the other hand I bought it at Sam’s with two other cans of equal size, and I’ve got the other two left. I’ve occasionally wondered whether these might be the last of their kind I ever need to get. So I’ve still got a lot of the stuff remaining.
I’ll let you know what I decide in twenty years or so.
I got this link from Earthlink (link defunct). It’s a Google Map utility that lets you find out the answer to that eternal question, “If I dug a hole from here straight through the earth, where would I come out on the other side?” Sadly, it’s not China, as I was always told, in my case. I come up in the Indian Ocean, somewhere west of Australia.
There was a bit of a flap today about the TV program “Crossing Jordan” dissing Ann Coulter last night. I happened to watch that episode, since “Crossing Jordan” is one of the small number of shows I haven’t turned off forever yet, due to left-wing political content (though I’m pretty sure it won’t be long now). In the scene under discussion, two characters, a man and a woman, were stranded inside a store (I think it was a store) during a riot in Boston. The woman, a new character, has already established herself as hostile and prickly. The man said to her, “Are you suffering from A.C.S.? Ann Coulter Syndrome, where the person draws power from their enemies’ rage?”
I saw (and heard) a blogger and a talk show host complain today that this was an inappropriate personal attack.
Although I’m crazy about Ann Coulter, I couldn’t get very upset about it. It’s perfectly in line with Ann’s preferred tone of discourse, and I suspect she’s rather pleased about the plug.
In fact, I’m sure she’s drawing power from it right now.
By the way, Ann, if you’re reading this—give me a call. Can’t find your number on my Rolodex.
The episode of “Crossing Jordan,” by the way, was an exercise in Hollywood predictability. A black child was killed by police, and the medical examiners testified that it appeared that the boy had fired at the cops first. Rioting broke out all over the city, and it fell to Jordan, the feisty, beautiful M.E., to discover the Truth that we all knew was coming—that the child was innocent, and the police had falsified evidence. There was a great opportunity here to actually do something original and avoid a cliché, but I expected conventional wisdom and I wasn’t disappointed.

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Introducing Shakespeare

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Mental Multivitamin has an interesting post on Shakespeare: Yes, again! My older girls may be old enough for this now. A year ago, I took them to the Chattanooga Ballet’s Nutcracker with a group of school children. They were bored before the end of it.

What will bore them is a challenge for me to discern. They have fully enjoyed The Sound of Music and, I think, My Fair Lady, but have been bored with others which I can’t remember at the moment. They even watched Kiss Me, Kate and sang “Brush up your Shakespeare” several times afterward. I should teach that one, so they can impress their friend’s parents.

But I don’t know about Shakespearean plays. I suppose if I choose the right one, they will enjoy it. I wish I could take them to the cowboy version of Two Gentlemen of Verona that I saw in college. That was great fun.

Religion

Adventures in faith, by a non-adventurer

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It’s been weeks (or days at least) since I’ve promoted Andrew Klavan. In this LA Times piece today he analyzes Hollywood’s problem with portraying the War on Terror, and as usual he’s dead on. H/T to Dave Lull for the link.

High drama at my house last night—not the kind that would make a John Woo movie, or even an Edward Albee drama, but the internal kind.

I paid my bills, and there was an insurance bill in there I’d been worrying about. Sure enough, when all was done and I looked at my checkbook balance, a metaphorical hand, cold as a pump handle in February, took hold of my heart. The balance was about the size of the check for a large party at a nice restaurant (not that I ever eat at nice restaurants).

I’ll get paid in a few days, so it wasn’t the end of the world, barring emergencies. But it scared me badly. I’m not a gambler, and I find myself in a game of economic Russian Roulette these days.

Many Christians don’t worry about such things, or claim they don’t. “Jesus promised us our daily bread,” they say. “He’ll always provide for our physical needs.”

I don’t read the Bible that way. Lots of better Christians than me have lost homes, family members and their very lives without Jesus doing anything about it. I think the error comes from mistaking Jesus’ point. I don’t believe He meant to say that we were guaranteed some kind of miraculous minimum wage. I think He meant that we have to orient our spirits to understand that all we really need is Him, and if He chooses to deny us any “necessity,” it’s because it’s not really a necessity. Only He is a necessity.

Which isn’t to deny that God generally provides most of us our daily bread. I know the stories about George Mueller. It’s just that sometimes He doesn’t provide physical needs, and it’s always His choice, for His purposes. We can’t manipulate Him, and we’ve got no right to complain if the decision isn’t one we like.

In other words, God has the right to take my house, and I have to live with that. Rejoice in it, even.

Then, just before bedtime, I picked up the mail I’d gotten that day, and forgotten to open. There was a reimbursement check from my health insurance flex account. I’d pretty much forgotten it was coming. It didn’t entirely solve my problem, but it certainly increased my comfort level.

Frankly that spooked me as much as the low balance had.

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A Few Bookish Interviews

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Yesterday’s Prime Time America ran spots on some interesting subjects: on history with Meic Pearse, author of a book called Age of Reason, (31:00) on fiction with editor Andy McGuire and author Tracy Groot on fiction (46:30), and Leslie Montgomery on her book The Faith of Condoleeza Rice (1:10:30).

Here’s a link to the audio of Prime Time America. It’s the whole show. You can fast-foward to these segments using the times above.

Authors

Bob and Tom today

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What shall I say tonight, to follow yesterday’s hubris fest? Something self-deprecatory? That’s always a favorite, and I imagine I’ll get to it before I’m done, but instead, just to make a change, why don’t I deprecate somebody else? Somebody famous, somebody whose majestic literary legacy makes me look not only tiny, but invisible.

I’ll trash Robert Burns.

Mitch Berg at Shot in the Dark reminds us that today is Burns’ birthday. Scotsmen and their descendants around the world are toasting him today, no doubt, and good health to them.

But I don’t like Burns.

It’s not his poetry I object to, but his life. When I think of Burns I think of his womanizing, and that offends me. I unloaded on this subject through one of the characters in Blood and Judgment. That whole 19th Century Romantic movement was as famed for its flouting of traditional sexual mores as for its creative accomplishments.

You know what happened to a girl who got pregnant out of wedlock in those days? How many young women debauched by these scoundrels, do you think, ended up thrown out of their homes, walking the streets? I’m not defending that kind of draconian attitude toward “fallen women.” I’m affirming a more draconian attitude toward seducers.

Part of it’s plain jealousy, I have no doubt. I’ve always had a furious, repressed resentment against guys who have an easy way with women. I envy them deeply. I’ll not deny it.

And I know that C. S. Lewis would reprimand me for practicing “the personal heresy,” allowing judgments about a poet’s life to cloud my appreciation of his work, which is a thing whole unto itself.

Guilty on both counts.

But that doesn’t make me like Burns.

I close this section with the only Burns story I know, which isn’t helpful to my purpose in any way, but might soften the effects of my rant.

As the story goes, Burns was walking down the road one morning, when he met a pretty milkmaid.

“Good morning, lassy,” he said to her, tipping his hat.

“Good morning sir.” The girl smiled and continued on her way. Obviously she hadn’t recognized the poet.

“Do you know who I am, lassy?” he asked, turning.

“No sir.”

“I’m Robert Burns.”

“Oh,” said the girl. “I expect I’d better put doon my pails then.”

Commenter Michael suggested the other day, in response to my post about my medical test, that I might be “the Tom Bombadil of psychotropic drugs,” utterly unaffected by them.

That’s flattering, but laughable. If there’s a less Bombadillian character in the world than I, I don’t know who it is.

But it reminds me that in my recent re-reading of The Fellowship Of the Ring, I think I finally figured out a way to think about old Tom.

I’ve always had trouble figuring him out. I know that Tolkien didn’t write allegory, and so it’s always false to say of any of his characters, “This character symbolizes X.” His characters are rich and complex. They reflect qualities, and multiple qualities at that. They sometimes act in ways reminiscent of Christ or the Virgin Mary or others, but none of them is anybody but himself, consistently.

Still I find it helpful to see Tom Bombadil as a sort of Adam figure. Not the fallen Adam, but the unfallen, the First Patriarch who named the beasts and tended the Garden. Bombadil reminds me of the Green Lady in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra, though he’s been tested and lacks her vulnerability. Bombadil, it seems to me, represents humanity as it was created to be—at one with nature but not beastly; highly sexual but chaste.

(By the way, I’m glad they skipped him in the Peter Jackson movie. He’s absolutely unfilmable, and the scenes in his house could only have been done as a sort of musical comedy number. I just can’t see it working).

I could well be wrong in my conclusions. Feel free to tell me why.

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Letters from Anne Frank’s Father Discovered

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Letters from Otto Frank, written in 1941, will be released to the public this Valentine’s Day, according to AFP.

Otto Frank wrote the letters in 1941 in a despairing effort to get his family out of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, before finally hiding the family, including Anne, in secret rooms in an Amsterdam office building for two years until they were betrayed, Time magazine said Thursday

In a related story, a survey suggests several people in the U.K. don’t know much about the Holocaust and think it could happen again. This second article mentions intolerance and prejudice, but I suspect the people quoted see only the surface, not the philosophy that bears the fruit of prejudice. That’s our modern problem. Perhaps, it’s a problem human government has always had.

You will gain nothing by preaching love to your neighbors if you also preach independence and meaninglessness to yourself.

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Letters from Anne Frank's Father Discovered

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Letters from Otto Frank, written in 1941, will be released to the public this Valentine’s Day, according to AFP.

Otto Frank wrote the letters in 1941 in a despairing effort to get his family out of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, before finally hiding the family, including Anne, in secret rooms in an Amsterdam office building for two years until they were betrayed, Time magazine said Thursday

In a related story, a survey suggests several people in the U.K. don’t know much about the Holocaust and think it could happen again. This second article mentions intolerance and prejudice, but I suspect the people quoted see only the surface, not the philosophy that bears the fruit of prejudice. That’s our modern problem. Perhaps, it’s a problem human government has always had.

You will gain nothing by preaching love to your neighbors if you also preach independence and meaninglessness to yourself.

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Slaves to fashion

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I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet (for all you born after 1970, that’s a reference from the Bible).

But I think I have a gift for recognizing cultural trends a little faster than other people do. Or so I’m given to understand by fans of Wolf Time.

It seems easy to me. You just note three related points in contemporary thinking, lay a ruler against them and see where the extended line leads. Perhaps the trick is in recognizing which points, out of the thousands ranged around us, are related in a way that indicates a direction and a trend.

In any case, I’ve identified a trend (or think I have), followed it out, and I’m ready to make a prediction. I could be wrong. But I seriously expect to see this happen in my lifetime. If it hasn’t come true by the time I die, you can stand over my grave and say you told me so.

It seems to me that Taboo Depletion is becoming a serious problem for the cultural left. The problem is this—once you’ve defined “progress” and “art” as the continual demolition of traditional society, culture and social norms, what do you do when you’ve run out of taboos to flout? It was easy in the ‘60s. Make a movie with nudity. Write a novel about homosexuals. Instant, reflexive shock. People write angry letters. Mothers march with signs. The artist gains artistic cred, and the publicity’s good for business.

But it’s more difficult today. Actual sex acts between actors in a film? Done that. Novels about torture murder from the point of view of the murderer, sympathetically portrayed? Been there. What shocking thing can a performance artist do, that hasn’t been done by someone else already? Hard to think of anything. As Alexander is said to have wept because there were no more worlds to conquer (he didn’t, by the way. He wept because he wouldn’t live long enough to conquer them all), one imagines today’s young intellectual weeping because there are no more boundary lines to violate.

But I can think of one. And I see hints that it will soon take its place on the public stage.

I think we’ll soon see a movement to restore the institution of slavery.

First of all, the undeniable historical fact that Christians were largely responsible for the abolition of slavery is a constant irritation to leftists. They like to frame their narrative in terms that say, “Abolitionism was a liberal movement,” which is true, while covering over the fact that liberalism was, for the most part, a Christian evangelical impulse in those days.

It would give many of them much relief to be able to turn around and say, “You Christians abolished slavery, and it was an unforgivable act of cultural imperialism!”

“Cultural Imperialism” is a handy label. Any act of the Right, regardless of the idealism that might lie behind it, can be labeled “cultural imperialism.” Trying to spread democracy in places where it is not found yet? Cultural imperialism. Attempting to stop third world genocide? Cultural imperialism. Fighting international sex trafficking? Cultural imperialism. Defending freedom of speech or religion in Communist countries? Egregious C. I.!

So it’s only a short jump to a position that would say, “Well of course I’m personally opposed to slavery, but what right has America, a country where zoophiles still don’t enjoy full human rights, to try to impose its antislavery norms on countries with different, and equally valid, traditions?”

And once that’s accepted, why not legalize slavery in “multicultural” America?

Normal-looking deviants could be booked on Oprah, tearfully telling the stories of how they never found personal fulfillment until they entered into a satisfying slave/master relationship. Numerous Muslim clerics could be found to appear on the evening news to condemn American cultural arrogance. Movies would be made, which no one would attend, but they’d win Academy Awards and the moviemakers would be interviewed sympathetically in Time Magazine.

Sound ridiculous? Sure. Lots of things that sounded ridiculous when I was a kid are the law of the land today. And things move a lot faster now than they did back then.

Give it time. See if I’m wrong.

I hope I am.