Tag Archives: America

Non-fiction, Poetry, Publishing

County Highway, a New Magazine Delivered as Newspaper

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When I read on Twitter (X) that novelist and editor Walter Kirn, along with David Samuels, had created “a magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper,” I looked up the website, and when I saw it would be for sale at one of my town’s cute local stores, I decided to check it out.

County Highway is meant to represent the heart of America, a place with natural rhythms, relationships, and grassroots sense. It’s written by “actual human beings,” which is more than some websites can say. “We hope to advance the same relationship to America that Bob Dylan had when he wrote his versions of folk songs” or when Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison wrote of their country.

I enjoy the feel of reading this paper, which cheekily touts itself as “America’s only newspaper” and plans to publish six issues a year for a $50 subscription. Kirn’s front page piece is on his visit to The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana, a place where memorabilia, props, and junk attempt to preserve a moral history. Duncan Moench has a report on artificial intelligence and the imminent threat of corporate technocracy.

I was pulled in by a review of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction), which says Kingsolver’s skill is clear and subject matter well chosen, but this “protest novel” in the form of Dicken’s David Copperfield is heavy on ranting, light on humanity. Other articles in this first issue include a lengthy piece that circles around Joshua Tree National Park, a front story on an American con man from last century, four pages on music, feature on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s falconry hobby, and a full page of legit classifieds: Wyoming cabins, bookstores, alpacas for breeding, and ‘shrooms.

I’ve enjoyed reading some of these, and there are a few more I’d like to get to. There’s a little poetry, a few wisecracks tucked in a small column, and attractive illustrations of a vintage sheen. The articles feel like those I’ve seen online and hoped to get back to, but often don’t. The Internet is ethereal; newspapers sit on the desk.

I may buy the next issue to try to balance what I read in the first, but I’m put off by the feel of the whole. Is it cynical? Maybe too secular? There’s a column about fugitives from someone who speaks positively about the Weather Underground. I believe he says he helped a couple of them back in the day. That’s like longing for time when your granddad would tell stories of fighting alongside Che Guevara. And then there’s this in a joke section: “Drag queen story hour — it’s what my pops used to call church on Sundays.” I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe I should untie my laces. (I wrote about the second issue also.)

Alt Culture: To balance the earthiness of America’s newspaper, let me point you to the new season of Doubletake from World News Group. This is a podcast of long features that can get complicated. Today’s episode is on what some people are doing in the Metaverse and a church trying to reach them.

Poetry: John Barr’s “Season of spores”:

“a bric-a-brac of fluke and ruff,
lavender cap, topiary puff.”

Photo by Wolfgang Frick on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry, Reading

Liberty Is a Growing Hunger, Like a Long Book

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What is liberty? Is it different from freedom?

Do Americans know more than the first verse of “America, the Beautiful,” specifically the second verse with the words:

“America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!”

In one simple line, we see the law, not as the source of our liberty, but as a tool for protecting it against those who would take it away. But what “it” is remains a question.

It’s that loosely defined something we can’t get enough of.

“More liberty begets desire of more;
The hunger still increases with the store.”

John Dryden

Fred Bauer has a piece on the different views of freedom we’ve had since the colonial days. We had Puritans’ “ordered liberty,” Quakers’ “reciprocal liberty,” Virginians’ “hegemonic liberty,” and Appalachians’ “natural liberty.” These are taken from David Hackett Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed.

“Ethical concerns,” Bauer writes, “factor into the notion of freedom as ‘elbow room.’ Patrick Henry argued that the centralized Constitution would threaten both ‘the rights of conscience’ and ‘all pretensions to human rights and privileges.’ That ethical strand offers a counterpoint to arguments that American freedom is simply about material prosperity. The genealogy of freedom is more complicated.”

Moving on to the links, we face a new frontier for ethical freedom in the choices we make with our technology. In other words, if we can do it, should we? How is using AI as described below not plagiarism?

To repeat the July 13, 2023, tweet above for preservation, Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) says, “One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking ‘you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?'”

She retweets Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) from earlier that day, who says, “Authors: we need to stand up with the actors. AI is ALREADY HERE in our work. I just spoke to a Very Famous Author who has to remain nameless for legal reasons. They are held up in a contract negotiation because a Major Publisher wants to train AI on their work.”

I’d think training a computer to mimic a popular author’s work would fall within the bounds of plagiarism. If not that, fan fiction.

Running: In Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, Lauren Fleshman describes what she saw of a sport that interested in recognizing or catering to female athletes as the women they are. Nike, the shoe company, can be especially cruel.

Poetry: “Who Furrows? Who Follows?” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. Here’s the first stanza.

Who furrows? Who follows?
             The owl in the hollow
            The hawk in the meadow
           The jay in the hedgeapple tree
Who follows the farmer who furrows his fields?
Who furrows?  Who follows?
           We three.

Fiction: It may be common for online chat to express a desire for short novels, but do readers want them? Nathan Bransford talks about the dangers of writing shorter works. “When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!”

Trapped: In other news, 100 people were trapped for hours yesterday in Agatha Christie’s old home by a large tree that had fallen across the only access road. They hung out mostly in the tea room. One witness reported the staff were “doing a great job, they are giving us free tea’s and things. It’s a bit bleak.”

Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

Music

Sunday Singing: God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand

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“God of Our Fathers” sung by the congregation of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church of New York City

Today’s hymn, “God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand,” was written by New York Episcopalian Daniel C. Roberts (1841-1907) to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. It was accepted by an Episcopal hymnal committee and given a fresh tune by organist George W. Warren for the commemoration of the United States Constitution.

1 God of our fathers, Whose almighty hand
Leads forth in beauty all the starry band
Of shining worlds in splendor thro’ the skies,
Our grateful songs before Thy throne arise.

2 Thy love divine hath led us in the past;
In this free land by Thee our lot is cast;
Be Thou our ruler, guardian, guide and stay,
Thy word our law, Thy paths our chosen way.

3 From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence,
Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defence;
Thy true religion in our hearts increase,
Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.

4 Refresh Thy people on their toilsome way,
Lead us from night to never-ending day;
Fill all our lives with love and grace divine,
And glory, laud and praise be ever Thine.

Non-fiction, Uncategorized

First Thanksgiving in Virginia, Elite Evangelicalism, and Everything Decays

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Phil Wade

I hope everyone here, there, and elsewhere has had a happy Thanksgiving. I realize this is an American holiday, but it’s just one more way you should allow America into your hearts and lives for your own and your country’s flourishing. I’m talking to you, United Kingdom. You never should have let all the good people leave your empire, you sick tyrant.

Okay, what else have we got?

First Thanksgiving: “After a rough two-and-a-half months on the Atlantic, [the Margaret, a 35-foot-long ship with 36 settlers and crew] entered the Chesapeake Bay on November 28, 1619. It took another week to navigate the stormy bay, but they arrived at their destination, Berkeley Hundred, later called Berkeley Plantation, on December 4. They disembarked and prayed.”

Ben Franklin: In a new biography, D. G. Hart presents Benjamin Franklin as an example of a “spiritual, but not religious” American Protestantism. “As much of a cliché as pulling himself-up-by-his-bootstraps is, his wit and striving say as much about Protestantism as it does about American character.”

Cultural Elites: Carl Trueman is thankful for David French‘s articles supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. “Elite evangelicalism is clearly making its peace with the sexual revolution and those of us who will not follow suit are destined for the margins.”

The Ends of History: Michael Bonner has written a defense of civilization. “All this is to say that the ‘whole new world’ we were promised in the 90s is much like the old one, only worse. The theory of irreversible progress seems increasingly implausible. It seems that anyone of any walk of life or partisan stripe could agree with Livy that ‘we can bear neither our vices nor their remedies’.”

Education: Can Christian Higher Education Stay the Course? “I could rattle off a litany of universities that remain under the auspices of Mainline Protestant denominations but where an effort to think Christianly beyond the bounds of theology is foreign to its educational mission and has been for a long time.”

Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Publishing

No One Said Liberty Would Be Easy

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The Critic: “Most of all Johnson wrote to drive away demons.”

Religious Liberty: A new book by Norte Dame political scientist Vincent Phillip Muñoz “provides one of the best treatments we have on the meaning of the religion clauses” focusing on the debates held in each state “about establishments and religious freedom. . . . These debates, and the views of a spectrum of Founders, allow Muñoz to craft a convincing argument. He contends that the founding generation’s concept of religious liberty was rooted, first and foremost, in natural law and inalienable natural rights.”

Science Fiction: Disney now has creative input into the BBC’s Doctor Who series, boasting it with financial support. I loved the classic series growing up. I watched every episode broadcast on PBS from Jon Pertwee’s run (#3), Tom Baker’s (#4 and still the best ever), Peter Davidson’s (#5), and Colin Baker’s (#6). I may have watched all the episodes with Sylvester McCoy, but the show lost its appeal for me during that time. Recently, I watched the new season 5 and part of 6 with Matt Smith, who is great as a title character, but over half of the stories were so much nonsense, I lost interest again.

Book Banning: At least 520 Penguin Random House staff and connections are arguing that Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book contract be cancelled. They don’t oppose free speech, they write. They aren’t calling for censorship. “Rather, this is a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits.”

Photo: Tivoli Theater, Stephenson, Michigan. 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Uncategorized

America, Imperfect as We Are

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Darrell B. Harrison notes Douglass’s words on the Fourth of July, saying the great abolitionist had more to say.

“Notwithstanding his well-founded criticisms of the prejudicial climate and construct of mid-nineteenth century America, Frederick Douglass never viewed America as being unique in that regard. . . . ‘I admit that during many years to come the colored man will have to endure prejudice against his race and color, but this constitutes no problem to vex and disturb the course of legislation. The world was never yet without prejudice.‘”

America was not unique in its mistreatment of immigrants and minorities, and we should not allow people today to make us believe it was. In fact, the holiness of the Almighty may be the very impossible standard to which we are comparing ourselves–many making this comparison without Christ in view.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Uncategorized

The World Never Stops Changing for Good and Ill

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I didn’t mention the death of art and theater critic Terry Teachout on January 13, because I didn’t feel I had anything to add. I interacted with him as a minor player in the early blogosphere, and I enjoyed seeing his enthusiasm over his one-man play, Satchmo at the Waldorf. Richard Brookhiser summarizes him in National Review this way:

He specialized in omniscience. There was a bit of boy-from-Sikeston-keeping-up-with-the-city-slickers in that. But the main source of his appetite to taste, learn, and enjoy was his love of all the arts, and of the wonderful sparks cast off by human minds generally.

(via Prufrock)

Ted Gioia tells a heart-warming story of being a recipient of Teachout’s “generous spirit.” “The last time I saw him was in Santa Fe, where the opera he wrote with composer Paul Moravec made its debut. His career seemed to know no limits—which was fitting, because that was true of Terry himself.”

Let me share a few other things with you. Let me know if you’ve heard these before.

America: Chinese-born Aaron Tao writes of American greatness and his appreciation for his parents immigrating to Ohio. “As I grew up, my parents gradually revealed more details of their former destitute life in Maoist China, which made me grateful that I never had any experience remotely comparable here in the United States.”

In New York, an immigrant from Hong Kong is now rallying people against Democratic policies. “The atmosphere at schools here is more and more like China’s cultural revolution that encourages students to cancel teachers and parents, all in the name of equality,” he said. This is only one example of Asian Americans vocally supporting better communities.

Strangers: The world is ever changing. J.A. Medders, recently the author of Humble Calvinism, shares this about his first book.

In the replies to this tweet, people mention Dangerous Calling by Paul David Tripp, whose endorsements are far more troubling. But faith is a living habit, not a single accomplishment, and some will enter heaven with clothing caked with the mud of the world.

Identity: Gina Dalfonzo talked to Alan Noble about his new book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World.

Dalfonzo: I’ve seen some vigorous pushback against your book’s title on social media, much of it from Christians—even though it’s taken from a Bible verse (which, as you note, was later incorporated into the Heidelberg Catechism). Where do you think some of these visceral reactions are coming from? Why have so many Christians bought into the idea that we actually are our own?

Noble: Some pushback to the idea of belonging to God comes out of a deep belief in self-ownership and self-sufficiency. But my impression is that most Christians who struggle with this concept have experienced abuse. Sometimes abusive people and institutions have used the idea of belonging to God to control and harm people.

Soft Porn: Francine River’s early book Redeeming Love has been made into a movie. People I know have praised it. My wife is not one of them, and because of her comments, I’ve thought about reviewing it here, expecting to rip it apart. But this book is not burdened with a lack of reviews, and do I really want to put myself through it when I’m not doing all kinds of useful things. World reviews the movie, saying fans of the book will probably enjoy it, but there’s a lot of vice, pushing the limit of its PG-13 rating.

Photo by Chris Bair on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Religion, The Press

What is Truth? What is Comfort? Blogroll Links

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A college professor told me he gets the most response from his students by exposing them to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism. It challenges contemporary assumptions and calls out our faith.

“What is your only comfort in life and death?

“That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

Here’s some other reading from this weekend.

Reaction: Kevin Holtsberry reviews the novella Trust by Italian author Domenico Starnone. “I enjoyed the story as a mediation on the way we create stories and perceptions of ourselves and our lives, about who we are and why we do what we do, etc.”

Paul Auster: Locked in a room, unsure of many people and things, the writer in this Auster novel wrestles with the difficulties of knowing and telling the truth. (via Books, Inq.)

Jew­ish Book Coun­cil has released its list of win­ners of the 2021 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards. The winner for fiction is Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ulti­mate­ly Even Neg­li­gi­ble Episode in the His­to­ry of a Very Famous Family. (via Literary Saloon)

Writing: What could happen if you committed to writing at least a little every day?

One Nation Under the Pope: Some politically and theologically conservative leaders today dislike the secular government we have in America and would like to unite the country under one holy, Roman high priest.

Glynn Young: A grassroots level summary of a major problem with journalists and how the Internet changed the news.

Photo: Main Street, Columbus Junction, Iowa. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Uncategorized

Losing Liberty

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When the taste for physical pleasures in such a nation grows more speedily than education or the habit of liberty, a time occurs when men are carried away and lose self-control at the sight of the new possessions they are ready to grasp.

Casey Chalk quotes Tocqueville above in an article on digital minimalism and how we can reclaim our attention and improve our country.

Americans engage in self-congratulatory, pseudo-civic activism on social media simply by clicking the “like” and “share” buttons or changing their profile picture—activities that amount to little. “Men travel faster now,” observes a character in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, “but I do not know if they go to better things.”

Fiction, Reviews

Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison

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I wanted to give you a thoughtful reaction to Ralph Ellison’s unfinished work, Juneteenth, at the appropriate time of the year, which is now, tomorrow being June 19, the day commemorating the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the States. But I couldn’t wade through it, only getting halfway. It’s a rambling novel that probably is best read in the company of well-read and thoughtful friends. Maybe, as you can tell from my recent posts, I’ve slouched away from that mindset.

“Ha, Bliss, so you remembered Eatmore, Old Poor John. Now that there was a great preacher. We did our circuit back there. Revivals and all. Don’t laugh at fools. Some are His. Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty. Which of Eatmore’s did you preach ’em, Bliss? Which text?”

Dreamily the Senator smiled. “They needed special food for special spirits, I preached them one of the most subtle and spirit-filled–one in which the Right Reverend Poor John Eatmore was most full of his ministerial eloquence: Give a Man Wood and He Will Learn to Make Fire . . . Eatmore’s most Promethean vision . . .” Hot here.

The story focuses on Senator Sunraider, quoted above, and the man speaking to him, a preacher and father figure named Hickman. In the beginning, Hickman and forty-three black men and women arrive in Washington hoping to meet with the senator for a few minutes, but he doesn’t give them that moment over the next two days. Then he is shot from the gallery while giving a speech.

I believe the rest of the novel is spent running memories through the Senator’s mind while Rev. Hickman is talking to him beside his hospital bed. Calling him Bliss, the name he’d given him as a child, Hickman remembers long sermons and revival meetings he did with the senator as a pre-teen. Bliss would be carried into meetings in a white coffin and wait for the right moment in Hickman’s preaching to rise up with his little, white Bible and preach with him in heart-tugging drama. It scared the boy and thrilled the crowd.

At another time of their lives, they went from town to town trying to sell the idea of a movie that showcased the town’s best qualities. Bliss was a young man then and naturally he discovered young women everywhere he went.

The reverberating tone in what I read points toward the senator, though himself a white man who has argued against black American equality in public life, understanding that his black heritage has formed him as a man and an American. No matter what he wants to believe, he has been shaped by black hands and black, American grassroot experiences.

In the introduction, John Callahan, who edited the draft that become this book, writes, “On many levels Juneteenth is a novel of liberation . . . Ellison, who took part in more than one ‘Juneteenth ramble’ as a boy in Oklahoma, speaks of false as well as true liberation and of the courage required to tell the difference. Even in the face of deepest betrayal, Hickman keeps his word to stand by Bliss, although the little boy is now contained within the frame of a man whose public words and deeds repudiate Hickman’s acts of kinship and fatherhood.”

It’s tough reading and maybe there are or should be better novels to capture this idea of liberty for all of us, but I’d sooner say I’m just not the right reader for this novel at this time.