They say, “You can’t tell me how to live. ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.'”
But change the subject, and they say, “What you are doing is bad for you and dangerous to everyone else. Stop it.”
Thanksgiving disaster!!!
The worst possible thing happened at Thanksgiving, from a blogger’s point of view.
Everything went fine.
Moloch and his wife drove up on Wednesday night, so as to roust me out of bed early, to remind me that Turkeys Take Time. With their supervision I set about the mighty enterprise, le grande ouvre, den store gjerning.
And it was a total success. I followed Martha Stewart’s turkey instructions (brother Baal had sent me a link to her site), and the result was as perfect a turkey as I’ve ever enjoyed. I don’t think I’ll go to the extent of following her giblet gravy recipe again in the future (it was a lot of work and I didn’t like it any better than the kind we usually make), but even I, who live to make jokes about myself, can’t find any reason to quibble.
It was, in fact, pretty much the kind of holiday experience I’d hoped to facilitate when I bought a house that could be a central holiday gathering place for the Walker clan. Blithering Heights is a little cramped with more than five people in it at once, but we got along well in the close quarters. Not so much as a political or theological discussion arose to trouble the waters.
We laughed loudly when The Oldest Niece spoke to her boyfriend on the phone thus:
TON: “I’m here in Minneapolis with my family.”
BF: (Unheard)
TON: “Yeah, well, you don’t know my family.”
(Fill in the blank yourself.)
We also had some laughs when The Oldest Nephew brought out his newly purchased Wii gaming box and hooked it up to my TV. He showed us the games he had. Moloch’s wife showed remarkable enthusiasm playing the boxing game against Moloch. I averted my eyes, wounded by this gratuitous display of virtual domestic violence. But Mrs. Moloch seemed to enjoy herself a whole lot.
The best part of the Wii system, in my opinion, was the opportunity to create avatars of ourselves. We worked as a committee to caricature each one of us in turn, and we got some remarkable likenesses. My avatar, everyone agreed, was the most successful, largely because my hair and beard are fairly distinctive. Smooth-faced kids are the toughest.
I’m sorry that this report isn’t as entertaining as a “drop-kick the turkey” Thanksgiving horror story would be.
But not very sorry.
Serious Fantasy Questions
Help me out with a couple questions on matters of serious fantasy. In this age of brand name appliances, Playstations, video games, hand-crafted swords, and premium roasted coffee, is it more likely that Santa Claus has become the world’s largest importer, bringing in products from Sony, Intel, Tyco, Random House, BMW, and GE for distribution around the world, or that Santa Claus has contracted with foreign manufacturers to produce “toys” for him? The latter possibility would mean Santa is the mind behind Steve Jobs of Apple Computers and Bob Eckert of Mattel. Or could it be that Santa Claus dissolved his manufacturing interests long ago and become a distribution center for the world’s toymakers, which means no toys are actually made by Santa today, not even the quaint old-fashioned ones?
Simple Gifts by Joseph Brackett, Jr., 1848
‘Tis the gift to be simple,
‘Tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
to bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed
To turn, turn, will be our delight,
‘Til by turning, turning, we come round right.
The feast of St. Jack
I’m not glad President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Far from it. But I am glad that, if he had to be assassinated, Providence scheduled the event for November 22, 1963, because that’s the day C. S. Lewis died. (Aldous Huxley too, but who cares about him?) I hadn’t read Lewis yet at the time (I was thirteen years old), but it comforts me somewhat to know I mourned deeply that day.
I remember it well. I was in an art class in school when the radio broadcast came over the intercom system with the news from Dallas. It was my brother Baal’s birthday, which was rather tough for him. Moloch and I gave him a great gift—a plastic car designed to fly to pieces spectacularly when you crashed it into a wall. But the news dampened even his eight-year-old spirits.
I credit Lewis with being God’s instrument to preserve my faith through all the challenges it met in college and since. He was the first writer to tell me that faith involved reason as well as feeling. It seemed too good to be true at first. I thought surely I’d learn somewhere that this was heresy. But it wasn’t. So I planted my banner on the orthodox side of the battle-lines for life.
Here’s a quote from Lewis’ letter to his friend Owen Barfield, April 4, 1949:
Talking of beasts and birds, have you ever noticed this contrast: that when you read a scientific account of any animal’s life you get an impression of laborious, incessant, almost rational economic activity (as if all animals were Germans) but when you study any animal you know – what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.
Have a great Thanksgiving, friends.
Who would make your top 10?
The 101 most influential fictional characters–I think Santa Claus and King Arthur would be in my top 10 list of most influential on me. Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, Hercule Poirot–I’m not sure who else to name. What about you?
The Paris Review
The Paris Review, which I’m told is the literary journal everyone respects but no one reads, has special holiday offers. They proudly note the words of William Kennedy, “Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.”
They have also reprinted the first of three volumes of The Paris Review Interviews, which they say contains the “most essential interviews” from their collection. If you are unfamiliar with these interviews, you can get a taste for them here.
Happy Thanksgiving
from the Academy of American Poets, At the Common Table: Poems for Thanksgiving.
Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun,
The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run,
And the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold,
With broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold,
Like that which o’er Nineveh’s prophet once grew,
While he waited to know that his warning was true,
from “The Pumpkin” by John Greenleaf Whittier
Author Asks for Stories about Vonnegut
Author Charles J. Shields, whose book on Harper Lee was well-received last summer, wants to hear from you on your experiences with Kurt Vonnegut. “Now I’m beginning work on the first authorized biography–the first biography at all, actually–of Kurt Vonnegut. I’d like to hear from any of your readers about their experiences with Vonnegut, either personally or with his novels.”
Vonnegut is the author of A Man without a Country, Timequake, Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and a few other books.
I asked Mr. Shields how he gained the opportunity to write Kurt Vonnegut’s first authorized biography. He replied:
Many years ago when I was a little boy wearing thick glasses, baggy pants, and Hush Puppy shoes, I realized I wasn’t the brightest star in the heavens, but I could compensate for that by being persistent. That’s really the story behind MOCKINGBIRD, which Harper Lee didn’t want me to write and tried to dissuade her friends from helping me with. But four years of research and hundreds of interviews produced a portrait of her. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s done in watercolors, not oils, but it will be valuable to biographers of hers who will come later.
Mr. Vonnegut turned me down at first, but when I pointed out the number of ways our lives connect—-we’re both Midwesterners; both humanists; he’s a veteran, so was my father; both men worked in public relations for large corporations—-I convinced him that I’m the guy for the job. He still remained skeptical for awhile, I think, but I kept up a regular stream of chat via phone and mail and I seem to have won him to my side. He’s a generous man, anyway. This biography will be the obverse of the one about Lee, in a sense. Vonnegut is an extrovert with many friends and a large body of work. His papers going back to the 1950s are on file at Indiana University. I was Philip Marlowe on the case of “Harper Lee, Recluse.” This time I get to be Boswell!
Aruging Against the False or the Evil
Is it worse to be accused of believing something false or to be accused of believing something evil? Christianity isn’t true? That’s so last-century. G.E. Veith writes, “It is one thing to oppose religion, but now we have arrived at the marks of dangerous religious bigotry: spreading sensationalistic lies, instigating fear in the public, and promoting paranoid conspiracy theories.”
This reminds me of a radio report I heard several weeks ago on a Christian outreach to a homosexual community. One young man said he felt uncomfortable with the group of Christians, because he sensed negativity from them. He had read the Bible, he said, and there’s no negativity in it.