This one is for Michael, who raised a question about the need for definitions in our post on reading the classics. World reporter Timothy Lamer asks, “Is the newspaper industry about to die or experience a revival? The answer may depend on whom you ask and how you define the word newspaper.” Heh, heh.
The point of the article is to quote some folks about how newspapers will survive and can they make money online. I think a subscription for the Chattnaooga Times-Free Press (formerly two papers, one of which was the Chattanooga News-Free Press, a far superior name don’t you think?) for a year is $120. If the cost was $50/year and it was only online, would I subscribe for the sake of local news? I don’t know. Maybe I would. I think I’d have to see the offer when it comes, much like the 2008 presidential election questions being asked now. I don’t know if I would vote for Giuliani or McCain. I don’t want to vote for either of them. So, I’ll wait and see what the options are.
When you have no thoughts of your own, quote Lewis
I know I’m quoting too much from my current reading, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, but I burned my brain out last night, and I was impressed with this passage today, from a July 20, 1940 letter to his brother Warren:
Humphrey came up to see me last night… and we listened to Hitler’s speech together. I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people: but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little. I should be useless as a schoolmaster or a policeman. Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly. The same weakness is why I am a slow examiner: if a candidate with a bold, mature handwriting attributed Paradise Lost to Wordsworth, I shd. feel a tendency to go and look it up for fear he might be right after all.
I know just how he felt.
This, by the way, is from the same letter, where he mentions, later on, in reference to going to church on Sunday morning…
Before the service was over – one cd. wish these things came more seasonably – I was struck by an idea for a book wh. I think might be both useful and entertaining. It wd. be called As one Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient’….
People Don't Read Classics; They Only Talk About Them
Ella askes an important question: “If you want to be a good writer, do you need to read the classics?” She believes her writing has improved after having read great literature for the past few years, but she wonders if it is necessary. Should the average writer read the classics in order to mature or are there other options, this one being simply the road less traveled? I think the would-be good writer should read the classics and study some of them too. But now that I’m thinking about it, “good writing” is a fairly relative term, isn’t it? We have to define what we mean by “good writing” before we can decide how to accomplish it.
For more writing advice, Mark Bertrand suggests spending time singing, painting, photographing, or other creative, non-writing enjoyments as a way to enhance your creative writing. I guess blogging doesn’t count, does it.
Call me Cassandra
I heard from my prospective renter a few minutes back. He decided he’d fit better in an apartment of his own.
Maybe God’s telling me that’s where I belong too.
Gave a lecture to the Northfield, Minnesota Sons of Norway lodge last night. It was a special Twenty-fifth Anniversary meeting, held in a banquet room at St. Olaf College (which was fitting, since I was lecturing on the original St. Olaf, among other people).
It was one of my better lecturing experiences. Excellent meal, receptive audience, and I sold a lot of books.
And yet, my heart is bowed down.
I wrote the following years ago, in my novel Wolf Time. The speaker is a television news reporter:
“Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m sorry we have to bury America—it has its good points. But we’re talking survival now. This is the nuclear age, the killer virus age, the age of terrorism. As long as we can defend ourselves there’s no chance for survival…. I want to live, and I want my children to live, if I ever decide to have any. In a world like this we can’t afford honor. My honor, if you want to call it that, is to persuade people, any way I can, that nothing—nothing in the world—is worth dying for. And I think people are getting the message. You know why we’ve only fought little wars since Vietnam? Because Americans don’t have any stomach for long-term sacrifice anymore. I like to think we [the news media] had something to do with that. It’s an incredible power we have.”
I hate being right. I had the hope, when I wrote that scene in a novel set in the near future, that the Universe (not Providence. They’re two different things) would step in, as it usually does, to prove my prediction false. Unfortunately the Universe backed me up this time.
I’ve heard all the arguments that nothing big will happen in the wake of the power shift in Washington, because of gridlock, etc.
I don’t buy it. I keep hearing smart people on the radio saying the election was mostly about the war. And it doesn’t matter that a lot of people who voted to throw the bums out were angry that the war wasn’t being prosecuted aggressively enough.
The message sent by this election was, “America has given up. We’re pulling out. We’ll do what we can to save face as we leave, but you’ve beaten us.”
I think we’ve turned a critical corner, pulled the pin on the grenade. The message of Vietnam has been confirmed—fight the Americans long enough and you’ll wear them down. They’re soft. They won’t make sacrifices.
I have a vision of the future. I hope I’m wrong this time.
I see embattled people all around the world, Christians and non-Christians, fighting against the pressure of Islam. They’ll know that there’s no help to be expected from America, and far less from the United Nations. In other words, there won’t be any polite, Geneva Convention answer to their problem.
They will do what they need to do to survive.
It will be very, very ugly. There will be acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. There will be terrible battles and massacres and atrocities. On both sides.
I don’t think it will happen in America. At least not soon. But it will happen elsewhere, and it won’t be long now.
And it will be our fault. Because we had the chance to stop jihadism in Iraq, and we couldn’t finish the job.
But I see something else. It came to my mind as I sat in church on Sunday.
Our guest preacher was a missionary from Mexico. He spoke, among other things, of signs and wonders.
I need to explain here that we’re not a charismatic group. We mistrust faith healers, and positively oppose tongue-speaking.
But this pastor spoke of miraculous healings in answer to prayer, on the mission field. He spoke of a man raised from the dead. He spoke of exorcisms. He named names, names of several people who are known to us from mission trips, or as students at the Bible School.
He talked of all this matter-of-factly, as things just to be expected when God is working.
And that reminded me that the Kingdom of God is bigger than my fears. God is at work today, and what He’s planning to do is probably something that hasn’t occurred to me. His instruments will come from places where I’m not looking.
So be comforted.
But not too comforted.
Favorite Emily Dickinson Poems
Sherry is asking for your favorite Dickinson poems, and she keeps going on about pecans. It’s over the top, as you can see. Does that make her a nut-case? 🙂 (That’s as bad as the jokes my girls have been telling lately.)
Solzhenitsyn Praises by His Sons
There’s a new anthology of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work, and his two sons praised him at a related celebration event in Philadelphia last Friday. Asked whether they could understand their father’s deeply felt pain, Ignat, the musician in the family, responded:
It’s a fundamental question of human experience, what can be transmitted and what can’t. Fundamentally, we only really understand things we experience ourselves. Having said that, he has spoken very eloquently, nowhere more so than in his Nobel lecture, about the power of art to fill that gap, to build that bridge, to connect the disconnect, to help people to understand without the benefit of bitter experience what others have suffered, what others have experienced, whether taken as nations or as individuals.
(Thanks to Books, Inq. for the link.)
The Ardent Fan
From an article on Thomas Pynchon comes this description of a fan.
Tim Ware, who runs the Web site thomaspynchon.com from Oakland, Calif., recalls having a hard time getting through “Gravity’s Rainbow,” at least the first time around.
“I went back and looked again at the first page and everything just sort of snapped into view, and I thought, ‘This guy is a genius,’ like those who walked the Earth in the 19th century,” says Ware.
“And I got rather messianic about it, and I wanted my wife to read it. I started creating an index of all the characters, because there were so many and it was so hard to keep track of them.”
Maybe this is the wrong day for me to read something like this, but with so much going on in our shrinking world, giving yourself to the ardent fandom of Thomas Pynchon seems like a waste.
Don't Want the Must-Read List
Have you read Blue Like Jazz? What did you think about it? Jared gives it high marks for narcissism and thought message was “Look how cool me and my friends are.” He also cannot recommend A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity, whose authors apparently want to remake God to appeal to the modern world.
I know I’ve always thought the most culturally appealing things about Christianity were genuine godly character and authentic Christian living, which I suppose is another way to say loving our Lord wholeheartedly and loving each other properly. But that’s the most repelling thing about Christianity too. We can count on being slandered for our good deeds. I wonder if the emergent crowd understands that or if they are working to be appealing only.
Eugene Peterson: Recommended
Jared of Thinklings has heartily recommended Eugene Peterson’s books, namely Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading. He quotes Petersen, saying, “The blunt reality is that for all our sophistication, learning, and self-study we don’t know enough to run our lives. The sorry state of the lives of the many who have taken their own experience as the text for their lives is a damning refutation of the pretensions of the sovereignty of the self.”
Peterson was a guest on one the Mars Hill Audio Journals this year, and notes from that appearance as well as his entire unedited conversation with Ken Myers are available at marshillaudio.org. Myers notes that “Peterson believes, [the Bible] is too often read in that superficial way, perhaps because we are in a hurry to get down to the real business of life, which we assume can be conducted well with only a quick pit-stop with Jesus. That is not a good way to read anything important, especially the Word of God.”
Beowabbit
Dale sent me this Beowulf parody by Bruce Edward Blackistone.
I won’t say I love it, but I like it better than the “Beowulf and Grendel” movie.