As you may have noticed if you’ve been here a while, I have strong opinions on the subject of “book banning” accusations, as made by liberal interest groups.
Michelle Malkin examines the question of who are the real book banners in this country in our time, in a column today.
*The reference is to “Excelsior,” a poem by Longfellow.
Christianity Today published a list a couple years ago of its top ten movies about Jesus. In this list, I learned that Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings was so moving, no one made another movie about the Lord until after the director died. Not on this list are the films made by The Visual Bible, which I thought were very good.
Have you seen any of these? Which is your favorite or perhaps least disliked? What do you think generally about movies depicting Christ? Are they bound to get it all wrong from the start, or do you think it’s possible to make a good one?
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) said, “Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function,” he once wrote. “It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” This quoted in The Independent, which ran a final tribute today.
William F. Buckley’s novels have always been a quiet, minor pleasure, at least for me. Buckley wasn’t a great novelist. He was a fine writer, and his books are well-researched and informative. But they lack strong characters, and everybody in them talks like William F. Buckley. Not a bad thing in itself, but it plays hob with T.W.S.O.D.*
I learned interesting things about the Nuremberg Tribunals in the reading, but I never worked up a whole lot of personal concern for the characters.
The main character in Nuremberg: The Reckoning is Sebastian Reinhard, a young German-born American. The book opens with a prequel, showing Sebastian’s father, an architect, as he works desperately to get his wife and son out of Germany. He succeeds, but fails to escape himself. Some time later he is reported dead.
Sebastian reaches draft age just as the war is winding down. Instead of seeing combat, he is assigned to serve as an interpreter in Nuremberg, assisting in the prosecution of a fictional war criminal named Gen. Amadeus. Through Sebastian’s eyes we are able to observe the struggles of life in postwar Germany, and the complicated legal and diplomatic maneuvers involved in conducting a series of trials for which there was no historic precedent. Most of the cast of characters are people who actually lived, and there is much to learn for those who (like me) hadn’t studied the trials (or even seen the movie).
Yet somehow, when it was done, it felt unfinished to me. Perhaps that was Buckley’s intention, in view of the moral ambivalencies of the whole project, the impossibility of making the criminals suffer proportionately to the sufferings they’d inflicted; the hypocrisy of allowing the Soviets to sit in gleeful judgment on monsters not appreciably worse than themselves.
But one way or another, there wasn’t a whole lot of satisfaction here.
*The Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
Hunter Baker, a friend and supporter of my writing career, (such as it is), whose writing you’ve doubtless seen at Southern Appeal, RedState, and other places I’ve lost track of because he does so many (and my brain is full of holes), has a blog of his own now, here.
It has my coveted endorsement.
This should be timely news to follow Lars’ last post. “Walkers, beware of where sidewalk ends.” (via WSJ)
In related news, the beautiful, kind-hearted people of America are burning wood in there fireplaces and stoves as an alternative to high-priced natural gas furnaces. Of course, some of the uglies among are complaining. We won’t name names here. They can speak for themselves.
I wonder if the Viking Age Club and Society of the Sons of Norway will be asked to participate in Walker, Minnesota’s annual Ethnic Fest again, next year.
I fear we’ve made ourselves unwelcome up there.
No, I’m not talking about the arson in the courthouse. Or the sacking of the coffee shop. Or the drunken assault on the Irish dancing troupe (admittedly a lapse of judgment on our part).
No, I’m talking about the weather. The legend of the Ethnic Fest, as passed down through the generations by the village elders, states that it has never rained on the event in its history.
Until last year, when the VAC&S came.
And this year, when we came again.
Rainy events are a drag. We can’t put out our stuff for sale (because it gets wet and loses its intrinsic market value) or our display equipment (because it rusts). Basically we just hung out in costume, most of us huddled under my sunshade (suddenly the most popular tent in the camp). With a waterproof tarp draped over it, it provided a relatively dry spot.
We did, however, do two live steel combat shows. So the town got something for its money.
It was actually raining lightly during our first show. Think of the final battle in The Thirteenth Warrior. It was pretty much like that. Except, of course, that I’m much better looking than Antonio Banderas.
By the time of the second show, the sky had cleared enough for the guys to unpack the chain mail assembly demonstration, always a venue of great fascination to teenage boys.
When all was done and we’d packed our wet canvas in our SUVs, our group repaired to the nearby Ojibway casino for supper. After a very nice buffet, the others turned to gambling. I myself went back to our gracious hosts’ home to bed, having explained politely to my friends that they were all going to Hell.
I’ve had better weekends, but at least I wasn’t in Galveston.
Lutheran and otherwise great fellow Gene Edward Veith agrees with The Vatican’s latest pronouncement: The name of the Lord Almighty, spelled YHWH, should not be spoken. I don’t know what to think about this. I love the names of the Lord. I think modern Christians would have a closer relationship with Him if they knew several of his glorious names, which mean The Lord who see, The Lord provides, The Lord is my peace, The Almighty, and The All-Sufficent. Didn’t the Lord tell Moses His name when he asked, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Exodus 3)
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.'” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.
Remembered but never spoken is awkward.
The writer David Foster Wallace died tragically by his own hand this weekend. I had not read any of his work.
But Shawn Macomber posts a charming excerpt of an interview where he said some extremely sensible things.
If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
I should probably look for one of his books.
. . . it will make it into the Congressional Record, said humorist Will Rogers. He was explaining the honor he had in having his material read into the Congressional Record. Normally, he said, you had to work your way up to being an actual senator before your stuff is funny enough to make it into the Congressional Record. Perhaps, Rogers was someone who could talk politics with common folk in his day. Mickey Mclean wonders if many of us still can.
I’m not sure I can do it well in person. I don’t have much opportunity to do it, but when I do, I find it’s much easier to lean on general cynicism (all politicians are blind and corrupt; they all waste our money) than to talk over something specific. I can wrangle a tough issue with one friend of mine, but we mostly agree, so it isn’t a real challenge. When I’m with people I disagree with, I usually just listen.
