De of Thinklings and the programmer behind the blog software we use at BwB points out a post by author James Scott Bell. “The ‘celebrity author’ thing is highly overrated. Even those with #1 NY Times bestsellers are known only by a relative few. And a yearning for adulation can be destructive. The moment you start believing your press releases, you’re on a slippery slope.” Mr. Bell offers a handful of good examples for this.
Asking the Devil for the Lowdown
[first blogged on Halloween 2003] In honor of the upcoming season, let me write a bit about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great short story, “Young Goodman Brown.” Many of us were forced to read it in high school, but maybe you didn’t. Reject that foul Stephen King novel! Banish that evil Anne Rice tome! Tolle lege* this short tale of a young man’s dreadful walk with the devil.
I think the reason “Young Goodman Brown” sticks in my mind as a great tale, other than my fascination with early America and affection for Hawthorne, is its clear description of how to set yourself up for believing a lie. Brown does three things in the first couple pages to seal his doom. He leaves his home at sunset to meet the devil in the forest. Apparently, he is searching for the truth. He wants to hear what the devil has to say for himself. And like an idiot, he starts his trip just before dusk. Darkness conceals many things, so if he really wanted to the truth, he would look for it in daylight when things can be seen for what they are. But at dusk, he walks deep into the forest–putting himself in a place where shadows conceal. How much can you see when you’re in a dense forest at night? Still, Brown thinks he can meet the father of lies in a place like this and reason with him. That’s his biggest mistake, and possibly the one which makes his doom inevitable. He thinks he can talk to the devil and parse his words for bits of truth. Of course, Old Scratch reels him in easily.
When Brown first objects to walking deeper into the trees, Old Scratch encourages him to present his arguments while they walk because he can always turn back. Too far, Brown says while walking. He must not be seen walking with the devil. Naturally, replies the devil, that’s why my dealings with your father and grandfather were kept secret. What! Can it be true? exclaims young Brown. Of course not, you idiot! You’re talking with the devil! He doesn’t tell the truth except to make a lie more plausible, because a slight miscalculation is an easier lie to shallow than a total fabrication. Brown doesn’t get it, unfortunately, so into the darkness he goes.
What about us? Do these steps apply to our quest for truth, even if we don’t have the devil penciled in for 10 p.m. Friday? Yes, they do.
1. Darkness conceals truth. Light describes wisdom and knowledge. Read the first few chapters of Proverbs for descriptions of wisdom and her methods. In order to shed light on the deep questions you’re asking, give yourself time and quiet reflection. Noise and busyness can act as clouds over the sun. Try to avoid them, but don’t think getting alone with your thoughts will draw all truth to you. You can come up with only so many answers when you’re the one confused.
2. Trees obstruct the light and hide the real world. In the forest, Brown found that the night only got darker. The same can happen to us in a forest of opinions. We can find wisdom in many counselors, but not all opinions are worth hearing. C.S. Lewis encouraged readers to postpone reading another contemporary book until they had read an old one, meaning a book written before last century. If we consume many modern books, we can become conditioned by a limited perspective particular to our day. By reading old books, we are better equipped to see beyond a limited modern perspective.
3. The devil does not have a worthy point of view. It’s common to try to hear both sides of an issue in order to form an unbiased opinion; but I’d like to suggest that some perspectives, some sides of particular issues, are completely wrong. Not everyone’s perspective is worth hearing. Some are logically inconsistent. Some are merely argumentative, taking up a position solely to conflict with another position. The better ones are internally sound, though they may be based on lies or ignorance. Some are completely right. It’s no shame to be partisan when your side is right.
I hope haven’t bored you back to your Doctorow novel. Have a good weekend, and try to avoid the cheap candy. Life is too short to eat waxy chocolate and those nasty orange rounds.
I see a season coming
First of all, I’d like to make it perfectly clear that I do understand the irony of the spectacle of a blogger of my temperament complaining about somebody else’s blog being depressing.
It took me a few hours, but I did get it eventually.
Today (right on time, the State Fair being over and the kids being back in school) was the first day of autumn. Not in calendar terms, but in terms of the nuance in the air. It didn’t get up to seventy today, and most of the time it was cloudy. Today was winter, phoning in its reservation. We’ll have more warm days, but they’ll only be temporary reprieves, Indian-giver Summer (I apologize for the ethnic slur, but the line was too good not to use).
Picking up again the subject of male-female differences, this fascinating story comes, like so many good things, by way of Blue Crab Boulevard. Has any woman in the history of the world ever tried a stunt like this (OK, Luci Ricardo might have, but she was a fictional character)?
And what do you bet that a dozen Hollywood sitcom writers aren’t working this into scripts at this very moment?
Say, wasn’t there a guy named Phil who used to hang out around here?
In which the blogger whimpers like a little girl
The subject of National Review’s Corner came up today in an e-mail exchange. I mentioned that I’ve stopped reading it pretty generally.
This was a sad departure for me. Ever since 9/11, the Corner was my favorite online hangout. Intelligent conversation from smart, well-informed people who knew a lot of stuff. What could be better? I even e-mailed the columnists and got replies once or twice. And one time Jonah Goldberg posted a Norwegian translation I did for him.
But the grape has raisined. Nowadays, you go to the Corner to get a good depression on, as an excuse for binge drinking. First I started being irritated with John Derbyshire’s knee-jerk pessimism and Anglican-tinged lukewarm religion, blended with fervent scientism.
Then Heather MacDonald started coming in to attack theism.
And Jonah Goldberg doesn’t seem to show up much anymore. And when he does he’s not as funny.
And they’ve all decided the war is lost.
Spare me.
If I want dysphoria I have a large stock of my own, thank you very much.
Also a little depressing: an interview Dennis Prager did today. It was with Marianne Legato, professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and author of Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget. Her theory is that men and women’s brains (in general) work very differently, and that in order to get along they need to take those differences into account.
Overall, I like this thesis very much. Any defense of innate sexual differences is Gershwin to my ears. No problem there.
The problem was in something she said about how men and women argue differently. Women, she said, play arguments over and over in their heads after it’s done, and tend to get angrier. Men, once they’ve blown off their steam, walk away and forget about it. They actually feel better, having enjoyed a nice spritz of adrenalin.
Here’s my problem: I’m just like a woman in this. I don’t feel better after arguments. I obsess over what the other person said, and what I’m sure they meant, and what I should have said.
Guys, help me out here! Is she right? Do you forget arguments as soon as they’re done? Do you in fact feel better afterwards?
Tell me I’m not an utter wuss.
Blast. Still a couple weeks until my next chance for live steel combat. And that’ll probably be the last one of the year.
I do feel better after that kind of fight.
Hit me with an axe, somebody.
Many are called, but summer chosen
Maximum comfort weather in Minnesota today. Warm but not tropical—a little above eighty, low humidity. Summer has mellowed, like a drunk at a party who’s passed through the stage where he’s telling everybody what he really thinks of them, looking for a fight, and is now sitting quietly in a flower bed, saying, “Man, I love you guys. You guys are so great.”
Summer has lost its edge. The days are kind.
But I’m not taken in. I’m not fooled. I hear, in the background, the voice of Mother Nature (who, as far as I can tell, has much the same character as my own mother) saying, “You like it cooler? I’ll give you cooler. Just wait a couple months.”
Strawberries taste like summer to me. I know a lot of people reserve that distinction for watermelon, but I never liked watermelon.
I never liked raspberries either. One of the chief distinctions between my brother Moloch and me has always been that he likes raspberries while I like strawberries. Recent research indicates that people are born with different numbers of sweet or sour receptors on their tongues. If you have a lot of sweet receptors you’re sensitive to sweet, and will prefer sour. You’ll be a veggie eater. If you have a lot of sour receptors, on the other hand, you’ll prefer sweet. You’ll truly appreciate the wonders of the strawberry, and be forever barred from appreciating the virtues of its raspy cousin.
I buy Driscoll’s, of course. Until they showed up, you had to grow your own to get anything in this country that could come close to the wonders of Norwegian strawberries.
From Front Page Magazine, this review by David Forsmark of the new book Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War.
Here is one of Philbrick’s most valuable points: Despite the priggish image perpetrated by the scoffers — including the first revisionist, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne — the Pilgrims were adaptable people willing to compromise in order to live in peace despite their strict code and religious outlook.
Now that looks like a worthwhile read.
Hail and farewell to Steve the Viking
I only watched Steve Irwin’s program once, and that was because I was visiting my dad and stepmother in Florida, watching what they watched. Their television consumption was limited, since she was uncomfortable with the immoral fare on television nowadays. But she didn’t object, apparently, to watching predators tear their prey limb from limb, and so they watched a lot of animal shows.
Even when I had cable I never watched animal shows. Animals, to be blunt, bore me. I don’t hate them, and the idea of owning a dog has its charms, but animal programs just make me uncomfortable. When the lion hunts down the zebra, I identify with the zebra. When only one male seal out of a hundred gets to have a harem and reproduce himself, I identify with the ninety-nine. When the wolves turn on a wounded pack member, guess which wolf gets my sympathy?
In other words, animals in general aren’t very nice. I prefer people. And I don’t even like people much.
The main thing I remember about Irwin was that stunt a few years back when he held his baby son in one hand while feeding a croc with the other. That just gave me the heeby-jeebies.
Still, I just read this report that says that his last action in life was to pull the stingray barb that killed him out of his heart.
That’s style. That puts him in the Viking league.
I quote from St. Olaf’s Saga in Heimskringla, the sagas of the kings of Norway (Samuel Laing’s translation). This excerpt concerns Thormod Kolbrunnarskald, an Icelandic poet who was fatally wounded by an arrow in the chest at the battle of Stiklestad, where St. Olaf died:
Then [the nurse-woman] took a large pair of tongs, and tried to pull out the iron; but it sat too fast, and would in no way come out, and as the wound was swelled, little of it stood out to lay hold of it. Now said Thormod, “Cut so deep in that thou canst get at the iron with the tongs, and give me the tongs and let me pull.” She did as he said…. Then Thormod took the tongs, and pulled the iron out; but on the iron there was a hook, at which there hung some morsels of flesh from the heart,—some white, some red. When he saw that, he said, “The king has fed us well. I am fat even at the heart-roots:” and so saying he leant back, and was dead.
One could die worse.
What gain has the laborer from his toil?
And how did I spend Labor Day? I spent it laboring.
Someone among the Powers That Be at the Bible School decided that today would be a good day for Student Orientation this year, thus dragging the young people from the bosoms of their family barbecues, causing mothers to weep and fathers to mutter darkly.
I was summoned to give my Oscar-nominated Library Orientation PowerPoint (you didn’t know the Academy Awards had a PowerPoint category, did you? Of course an Antiwar PowerPoint beat me out this year: “Sixteen Reasons Why Democracy Is Tyranny, Plus Eight Reasons Why Honor Killing Is the Culmination of Feminism.” Personally I thought it derivative).
Afterwards I went to the library and did my usual stuff. I suppose I could have closed the place up, since technically I work for the seminary, and the seminary was closed. But I’d been told my new student assistants might want to talk to me, so I hung around.
Give me a medal, somebody. I’ll put it where the Oscar should have gone.
Last night I dropped into the AvPD Chat Room for the first time. I joined a web group for people with Avoidant Personality Disorder recently, and they’ve been talking about this chat room. I haven’t had a regular chat room to participate in since I became a non-person at Baen Books, so I thought I’d try it.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that there were only three people there, counting me. What do you expect, trying to start a Loners’ Club? One was a guy from Singapore (where it was about 9:00 a.m.) and the other was a teenage girl whom I assume was somewhere in the U.S (as a prudential matter, I never ask teenage girls their locations online).
It’s very weird to communicate with other Avoidants. Trains of thought that seem perfectly reasonable when they run in my own mind sound utterly insane when other people express them. Now I know how normal people feel when they talk to me.
Maybe it’ll help me get some objectivity.
If it does, I’ll turn it into a PowerPoint.
Legal, moral and low-fat
It’s got to indicate a pretty disgusting level of self-complacency to go to one’s own writings for inspiration.
So naturally that’s what I’ll be doing tonight.
I wrote something here yesterday, and having writ, moved on. But as I thought about it, it seemed to me it was worth examining in its own right.
What I wrote was: Joylessness is an easy sin to ignore. It isn’t any fun, so how can it be bad?
Have you noticed how we (and I think I speak for most of us here) tend to equate pleasure with sin? And virtue with suffering and deprivation?
In a way I can understand how secular people would think this way. The concept is deep in our culture, probably a leftover from Victorianism (I could say Puritanism, but the Puritans really had a lot more fun than modern people give them credit for. So did the Victorians, for that matter).
But our culture is full of jokes about sin and virtue. “Everything fun is either illegal, immoral or fattening.” “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris” (Oscar Wilde). Alfred Doolittle’s fulminations against “middle class morality” in Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (that’s “My Fair Lady” for you musical comedy fans).
But Christians often think this way too, and we ought to know better. “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10, NIV). “You will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Psalm 16:11). “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).
In theory the Bible ought to count for more with Christians than quips from Wilde or Shaw.
But I know how it is. I suspect I know better than most, being famous for my depression and general sourness of disposition. Doing right seems to be so much work, and sin offers such welcome, immediate satisfaction.
(At this point in the essay I originally wrote a long disquisition on short-term vs. long-term gratification. I now realize that that wasn’t really what I wanted to write about. So I’ll try it over.)
Our cultural Puritanism (not to be confused with real Puritanism, for reasons explained above) tends to take it for granted that all pleasure is sin.
This is a snare of Satan.
One of the book passages that changed my life was the following from C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape (who, in case you don’t know, is a devil advising another devil in methods of temptation) writes in Chapter XXII:
[God is] a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it: at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore”. Ugh! …He’s vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to use. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.
Pleasures are very often sinful. But they’re not always sinful. It seems to me one bad effect of Christian revivals is that as the original fervor fades, people try to keep it going artificially through the imposition of more and more rules. “If we just get people to stop doing this or that, their hearts will turn again to the Lord.” So certain people are forever looking for new things to declare sinful and forbid to others. There’s one Christian leader in particular (and no, I won’t tell you who he is. Some of you will guess) who (it seems to me) has built his entire career on searching the Scriptures for new things he can declare sinful, new laws he can lay on the backs of his fellow believers.
I say it’s wrong. I say we need more innocent pleasure, and if Pharisees insist on condemning people who do things not forbidden by the Word, then somebody ought to punch them in the nose.
Try it yourself.
You might find it pleasurable.
Yeah, well, I worry about fear itself, too
I substantially finished getting the textbooks ready for the students today. I came back from my vacation week and was appalled to see the mountain of cartons from publishers awaiting me in the bookstore. I immediately took it as probable that I wouldn’t get them all priced and shelved in time for the first day of class on Tuesday. Or that if I did, it would only be through coming in on the weekend to work on my own time. But it went fine. There are a couple loose ends–books ordered too late (mostly because the instructors dawdled), one set that came in today that I haven’t got a price statement on yet, but essentially the job’s cleaned up.
Why do I torture myself this way? Why do I always expect the worst?
That’s a rhetorical question. I know why I do it. I prefer constant depression to occasional disappointment. If I expected the best, I wouldn’t get what I hoped for a fair proportion of the time, and that would hurt. But if I expect the worst I can never be disappointed, and sometimes I’m wonderfully surprised. It means I walk around with a low-grade depression 99% of the time, but I’ve gotten used to that.
There’s the small business of joylessness being essentially the Sin of Sloth, but that’s something I try not to think about. Joylessness is an easy sin to ignore. It isn’t any fun, so how can it be bad?
Speaking of fear (I was sort of speaking about fear. Worry’s a form of fear), Andrew Klavan has posted on the Horror genre over at Libertas. Klavan doesn’t blog enough, but it’s a big day for me when he does.
One of the things I worry about is disappearing from view altogether as a novelist. If that happens, it will be some comfort if I can know that Andrew Klavan was a big success.
A fictional lie
Hunter Baker has written a very generous review of The Year Of the Warrior, which he has double-posted at his Southern Appeal blog and at the American Spectator blog.
Woo hoo!
(That, for the uninitiated, was a Moment of Optimism. I have them once or twice a year. I’ll keep you posted if it happens again.)
I forget how old I was, or what grade I was in, in elementary school. I forget who the teacher was (though I could make a guess).
She assigned our class to write a short story about Conservation. (Conservation, children, is what we used to have before we had Environmentalism. It was abolished because of its association with Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican.)
I sat down and wrote an easy, boiler-plate, Department of Agriculture Information Office-style tale about a farm family that teaches its old-fashioned neighbor a lesson in Crop Rotation.
I opened it with a line something like this:
“Neighbor’s complaining about his fields eroding again,” said Dad as he came in for supper.
When I’d finished, the teacher looked it over.
“You have to change this dialogue,” she said. “It’s not proper English. You have to say ‘The neighbor’ or ‘Our neighbor.’”
“But this is how people talk!” I protested.
“This is an English class,” she replied. “We write properly in this class.”
I knew it was wrong. I knew that no farmer in this hemisphere ever walks into the kitchen and says, ‘The neighbor…’ or “Our neighbor…” He drops the article. That’s how farmers talk. I lived on a farm. I knew these things.
But I changed the dialogue, because I was a child under authority.
There are people who claim that fiction is a lie, and therefore Christians must not write it.
They are wrong. Fiction is not a lie. Fiction is a shared creative enterprise, in which a storyteller and a reader collaborate to build an imaginary world on terms mutually understood. There is no deception involved, and therefore no lie.
But what that teacher made me do that day was a lie.