Begin with images

I don't often repeat posts from one of my blogs to another, but in this case this extract is not only apt for Christians, but also for writers in general. Alan Jacobs, in his book, The Narnian, a biography of C S Lewis as well as an overview of his books, shows how much effective a story is if we start from images rather than 'themes' or theories. 

"Everything began with images," he wrote: "a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.  At first there wasn't even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord."  There was not, he says over and over again, an evangelistic plan in the making of Narnia, no apologetic scheme: "Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child-psychology and decided what age-group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out "allegories" to embody them. This is pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all."

Or perhaps he could have, but knows that it would have been a dreadful mistake, a giving over of his imaginative life to the "expository demon." What he has to do instead is trust the images that come into his mind - or, more accurately, trust that he is being formed as a Christian in such a way that the images that come to his mind are authentic ones, ones that lie at, or at least near, the centre of his soul. He can do this only if he rejects not only the market-driven questions of modern authors and publishers ("What do children want?") but even the more morally sound question of the Christian apologist ("What do children need?"): "It is better not to ask the questions at all.  Let the pictures tell you their own moral.  For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life."

This is a terrifying, or liberating, word: liberating in that one need not expose oneself to the sanctimonious drudgery of drawing up lists of Christian truths and hammering out allegories that will meet the desires or needs of children. But terrifying because as those images rise from your mind you discover what you are really made of: you discover whether you are one whose moral and aesthetic responses have been shaped by the Christian narrative or whether you remain a person "without a chest," lacking in true spiritual formation.  Trusting the images, you find out who you are.

Pages 243-4 The Narnian. 

Pillow Talk

One of the characters in the play our church is doing for its 150th anniversary celebrations is called Hopestill Pillow.  Yup.  And she was a real person and that was her real name.  Extraordinary.   Which set me to thinking about pillows as a topic, so I trolled through my clippings on Evernote to see what came up.  

First there's a tweet from the witty writer who goes by the name of Kim Kierkegaardashian.  He or she mixes the serious spirituality of Kierkegaard with the vacuousness Kardashain philosophy of life.  

Weary of people, weary of myself, so weary that I need an eternity to rest. That's why I always carry a pillow when I'm travelling.

 

And talking about neck pillows, another favourite tweeter, Alan Jacobs, wrote: I salute you, dude who walks around the airport with your inflatable neck pillow tied around your collar.   There's something daft about this sentence. 

 

On another tack entirely, Joan Acocella wrote an article on the grimness of the Grimms Brothers' fairy tales. There's a reference to pillows in this one: In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king who has twelve sons decides that, if his next child is a girl, he will have all his sons killed. That way, his daughter will inherit more money. So he has twelve coffins built, each with a little pillow. Little pillows! For boys whom he is willing to murder!

A super-preganancy pillow!

And in another article related to the after-effects of abortions, we read about Emily, who, after having had an abortion, began to have flashbacks in relation to live babies: Emily’s first flashback hit her violently when she had her first ultrasound while pregnant with a “wanted” child. As time went on, she would get frequent intrusive thoughts concerning her abortion when looking at the faces of her babies. After a time, she began to also experience habitual, obsessive, and scary thoughts about hurting her children. She imagined stabbing her children with a knife one by one, suffocating them with pillows, and strangling them.

 

In a piece by Lois Swagerty about churches sometimes forgetting what they exist for, we read:

One way the church may have its comfort zone stretched is when new elements of the community are welcomed inside.

“A young lady from the neighbourhood came in when she was high on drugs,” recalls Cindy Milbry, director of community outreach for Redeemer Lutheran Church in Toledo. “Pastor was doing the sermon and the girl  disrupted the whole process. Someone said, ‘Let’s call the police,’ but I told them, ‘This is what the church is for.’ Instead I took her downstairs and fixed her a plate of food. The next time she came in, she wasn’t as high, but she was still disruptive. One of the girls sat down with her and she fell asleep, so we got her a pillow and covered her up. People didn’t say as much.  Next time she came, she went up front for prayer and gave her testimony. She said the only peace she has is when she comes to the church. She’s learning that the church is a safe place to come and sit. And the congregation is learning that Jesus came for the unsaved, not the saved.”

And finally, a joke which touches on the friendly rivalry between Australians and New Zealanders:

An Australian rugby fan, a South African rugby fan and a New Zealand rugby fan are all in Saudi Arabia, sharing a smuggled crate of booze when Saudi police rush in and arrest them. The mere possession of alcohol is a severe offence in Saudi Arabia, so for consuming the booze they are all sentenced to death. However, after many months and with the help of good lawyers, they are able successfully to appeal their sentences down to life imprisonment. By a stroke of luck, it was a Saudi national holiday the day their trial finished, and the benevolent sheikh decided they could be released after receiving just 20 lashes.

As they were preparing for their punishment, the sheikh announced, "It's my first wife's birthday today, and she has asked me to allow each of you one wish before your whipping."

The South African was first. He thought for a while, then said, "Please tie a pillow to my back."

This was done, but the pillow lasted only 10 lashes before the whip went through. When the punishment was done, the South African had to be carried away bleeding and crying with pain.

The Australian was next up. After watching the South African's horror, he said smugly, "Please fix two pillows to my back." But even two pillows could take only 15 lashes before the whip went through and the Australian was soon led away whimpering loudly (as they do).

The New Zealander was the last one up, but before he could say anything, the sheikh turned to him and said, "You are from a most beautiful part of the world and your culture is one of the finest. For this, you may have two wishes!"

"Thank you, your most royal and merciful highness," the Kiwi replied. "In recognition of your kindness, my first wish is that you give me not 20 lashes but 100 lashes."

"Not only are you an honourable, handsome and powerful man, you are also very brave," the sheikh said with an admiring look on his face. "If 100 lashes is what you desire, then so be it. And your second wish"?

"Tie the Australian to my back."

 

Two books

While travelling to and from the States in the first couple of weeks of this year I read two books (wasn't time to read more; plus, on the way over I had a cold and didn't feel like doing anything).   One - I read this on Kindle - was Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.   The other was a book I picked up because it was going for under $5US in a bookshop at San Francisco airport.  (Of course by the time they'd added on the tax  - why don't they just include it like sane nations do? - the book was slightly over $5, which niggled my NZ equanimity a little!) This one was The Anthologist, by an author unknown to me: Nicholson Baker.  This turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable book that I finished while waiting at the airport and on the flight home (including a patch at what was, by then, about 3 am NZ time).


This is listed as a novel, and it does tell a kind of story from the viewpoint of its narrator, a self-deprecating character called Paul Chowder, a sometime poet.  Chowder's lady friend has recently left him because he just can't, or won't, get on with the introduction to his anthology of poems that rhyme.  The suspense in the book hooks on these two facets: will he get his 40-page introduction done by the deadline?  Will his lady-friend return?

But far more of the book hinges on Chowder's (or perhaps Baker's) views on poetry that rhymes, and how that's much closer to the human soul than free verse (even though he has such a writer's block that he can't write such poetry anymore).   He also offers in the process his views on innumerable poets, giving snippets from their biographies, critiques of some of their poems, the connections between different poets and how that affected what they wrote, and much more that's related to the topic.  It's a grab bag full of wit and some wisdom, some strong views and some snide ones, and numerous hilarious stories about all sorts of things, related and unrelated to the novel's 'story.'   It's thoroughly enjoyable and quite unlike any novel I've read.  The subject matter appealed to me, which helps (it's not long since I finished Stephen Fry's book on writing poetry, The Ode Less Travelled), but Baker is so engaging in this book, whether he's pretending to be Chowder or not, that I found it hard to put it down.

The author of the other book, Alan Jacobs, is someone I follow on Twitter (his Twitter name is @ayjay).  The quotes he collects that appear on one of his blogs - More Than 95 Theses - are worth following alone, but he's also written several interesting books, including one of C S Lewis (The Narnian) that is a better biography and discussion of Lewis' works than any I've read.

His new book is a paean to the joys of reading, a discussion of whether reading is going downhill or on the rise (it's the latter), a discussion on whether it's necessary to follow slavishly through books like The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You died, or whether it's better to read on a Whim (and he explains that a Whim with a capital W is somewhat different to a whim without the capital).   He shows that reading isn't limited to those books that are important, and that in spite of what such critics as Harold Bloom say, reading Harry Potter and the like (and even trashy novels) definitely has its place.  He also talks about the fact that we have different views of the same book at different stages in our lives: what seems wonderful when we're young can be dry years later (he found Absalom, Absalom! a revelation when young, but difficult to enthuse about a couple of decades later) - or vice versa: a book that's impossible for us to read in our youth may open itself to us when we've lived longer.

He writes about abandoning books without guilt - this is something we find hard when young; it seems 'wrong' to have got so far through a book without finishing it.  (I've begun to keep note of those books I've abandoned, with an explanation as to why I didn't persevere; perhaps this helps assuage the guilt!)  And, as he says, abandoning a book at one period of your life doesn't mean you can't come back to it at another stage.

He has a wonderful section on annotating books - whether we should do it with page-turners, and why we should keep a pencil handy when reading more serious works, particularly non-fiction.   His comments here reminded me of Billy Collins' poem, Marginalia.   (Billy Collins gets a few lines in Baker's book too: a few derogatory lines, because Collins is so successful and Chowder isn't!).  He discusses why we think we need to read faster.   (A blogger wrote that Mark Driscoll, the masculinist pastor of Mars Hill Church, claims to read a book a day.   Jacobs doesn't call that reading.)   And he looks at the value of reading poetry: a poem is usually short, its measure can be grasped quickly, but it requires several readings to get to grips with it.  This re-reading (and memorising too, if you can) is valuable for our overall reading.

Reading this book on Kindle meant I could highlight and make notes as I went along.  I think I've highlighted and noted more on this book than on any other recent one, such was my enthusiasm for what Jacobs has to say.  Of course, I believe deeply in reading anyway, so he doesn't have to convert me to anything, and much of what he says here is relatively familiar territory.   It's useful to have it under one cover, as it were.  Incidentally, he's a considerable fan of Kindle himself, and offers reasons as to why it's a valuable addition to our ways of reading.

Bit of a HitTail catchup

I've been keeping a diary of my time away in Boise, and will be posting some items on the Travel Diary blog in the next few days.   I'm obviously still on Boise time, since instead of sleeping through this morning from exhaustion after some thirty-six hours travelling (broken, but only in a sense, by stopping off at my daughter's place in Auckland for the day) I was wide awake at 4.30 am.

So I thought I might as well do something useful...like blogging!  Firstly I've just checked out the HitTail top four search words for this week: as usual a pretty mixed bunch.  

One item is the meaning or interpretation of Winnie the Pooh .  I certainly have no authorative view on this: the only time I've mentioned it, I think, was in this post, and that's relating to a pseudo interpretation of Winnie's meaning from Frederick Crews' Postmodern Pooh.  Pseudo and humorous, in fact.   Looking back over the number of searches relating to this topic on my HitTail account, it seems that there must be some study being done on this topic in some US University at the moment.   Perhaps some English professor has set the students a tongue-in-cheek task...?  It sounds like something Alan Jacobs might do  - I've just read his book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction - about which there'll be more in another post.

The Mousetrap script turns up as well.   There have been any number of references to Agatha Christie's play, The Mousetrap, in this blog, as this list will attest, but most of these come from Aug/Sept last year, when I was acting in the play.

The third item is Aotearoa Circus NZ, (the correct name is Circus Aotearoa) which I wrote about back in March last year.   Since then a commenter had been to see the Circus, and left me a rather negative note about it.   Certainly the circus was a little threadbare - which I noted at the time - but wasn't lacking in talent.  The person commenting seems to have had a bit of a rough time at this circus: certainly the troupe were rough and ready, in some respects, but I didn't see anyone in the audience the day I attended getting their hair pulled, as apparently happened to this person.

Last but not least we have Chrissy Johnson.  In spite of not having written on this blog for nearly a fortnight, due to being in Boise, Idaho most of that time, here's our old friend - who usually appears under the name of Chrissy Popadics, turning up again.  She's the wife of one of the (former?) football players in the Boise team, and I mentioned her again recently because of the new Boise connection my family now has - my new daughter-in-law comes from there.

Think again about Steve Jobs' quotes

Alan Jacobs alerted me to two blogs that commented on the famous Steve Jobs' graduation address, quotes from which have been doing the rounds since Jobs' death.  

Robin Hanson, on a blog called Overcoming Bias, wrote that Jobs' advice about not settling until you're doing what you really love isn't actually that practical in real world terms.  If that was the case, no one would get on and do the humdrum stuff, and unfortunately that still needs to be done, come what may. 

It's a bit like a lot of Seth Godin's blog posts: the idea that you can up and leave what you hate doing and go and find what you love doing.  The reality is that most of us have to do something that is 'normal' and do what we love in our spare time.

Will Wilkinson wittily commented further, both on Jobs' statements, and on Hanson's.  Sometimes those who have succeeded in life forget that many others just have to get on with it; they don't have the choices that hugely talented people - or hugely successful people - have.   It's just the way life is. 

I'm keen to do the things I love, but regrettably I've never been in a position to go for broke and do only the things I love.  So be it.  Contentment with your lot isn't too bad a thing, in many ways.

Incidentally, Jacobs also quotes another writer on Jobs, and the less savoury aspects of Apple's influence on the computer world.

Breaking rules

Alan Jacobs posted this quote on his 'more than 95 theses' blog...

“The guardians of the liberal arts have made exactly the same mistake. They themselves are securely grounded in the tradition of the liberal arts—they know the languages and literatures so well they can dispense with them—but they have small interest and less intention of giving their students anything approaching the same grounding. Like the early Jewish secularists in this country, they cannot see that it is their very grounding in the tradition that enables them to “blur [its] boundaries.” Their revolt against the liberal arts belongs to the liberal arts. But not their students’, who have been given nothing to revolt against. For their students, blurring the boundaries of the liberal arts has meant that nothing at all remains to be seen or learned. The liberal arts teachers valued something else, including their own self-image as enlightened revolutionaries, over the liberal arts and the continuity of liberal arts education.”

from A Commonplace Blog: Blurring the liberal arts

I probably don't need to add anything to this; it applies to all subjects in which those in the know fail to ground those not in the know in the basics: music is one obvious area, in which young composers are often exposed only to established composers who have known the rules and then broken them - but the newbies don't have much idea what the rules that were broken were, and consequently write unfocused nonsense.

Dolphins and healthy families

And via Alan Jacobs:

For 25 years, the researchers have made detailed observations of bottlenose dolphins in the eastern gulf of Australia’s Shark Bay. That one-of-a-kind dataset allowed them to chart the relatedness of dolphin moms and map their habits of social association, then correlate these patterns to whether their offspring survived childhood.

As would be expected, calves born to moms from reproductively successful families tended to do well. But for dolphin moms from less-fit families, that lack of a pedigree was offset if they tended to hang out with successful moms. The researchers’ analysis suggested that keeping good company was just as important — even, at times, more important — than coming from good stock.

”

— Baby Dolphin Survival Depends on Mom’s Friends | Wired Science | Wired.com

Second thoughts

Everyone should sometimes write with pen/pencil, to recall what it’s like to have 2nd thoughts before the 1st ones are complete.

Alan Jacobs, in a tweet on the 4th Oct, US time.

Serial tweets

Alan Jacobs wrote a set of serial tweets saying the following: 

Why I don't write posts on hot issues people think I ought to have opinions about. See the 2nd paragraph especially.

When I see people desperately trying to pick fights with someone as gracious as @reihansalam [on Twitter], that previous tweet is confirmed.

The interwebs seduce us into trying to solve all problems by argument, because argument is what the interwebs can do.

One of my chief goals in the coming year is to learn to have a meaningful online presence that doesn't involve debating issues...

...because the way we have defined "debating" and "issues" in our online lives is destructive of the social fabric.

The challenge is to learn to *be* in a certain way online, rather than always challenging or making a case. Blake: "Enough, or too much."

Online "debates" don't just hurt the social fabric, but also the selves who depend on the adrenaline jolt of disputation.

All addictions make people destructive and self-destructive. The junkie needs drugs; the online "debater" needs enemies.

Anne Rice and Blog Posts

Anne Rice, the author, has been in the news lately - at least in the States.   Her renunciation of Christianity (again) has apparently hit the headlines, because it always seems to suit the media to trumpet somebody who's put the boot into Christianity.   That's their preferred modus operandi.  

No doubt everyone and his brother (and her sister) has been blogging about it, so I may as well join the club.  However, I'm not going to say anything new about it, since I don't know anything new (or even anything more than I've read).   I'm just going to pass you on to two writers, one whose blogging I read a good deal and the other whom I've never heard of before (but comes recommended by Alan Jacobs, another writer I read a good deal) and let them speak for me. 


Firstly, the Alan Jacobs recommendation: AKMA, who's written a post called, On Giving Up. 

The second piece is by Richard Floyd, who always seems to write good sense.   His post is called My Top Ten Reasons Why Anne Rice Would Hate the United Church of Christ.  If you want a little more background to this post, read his previous one as well.

Michael Chabon

In a sense, Chabon writes, "all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom's notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me … . All novels are sequels; influence is bliss." Influence is bliss because reading is bliss, and one of the gifts this book [Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands] brings is its exploration of writers—as varied as Cormac McCarthy and Philip Pullman—for whom other books, previous books, are living beings with which (with whom) we converse and from whom we draw both instruction and delight. They have the breath of life in them, like Adam inspired by God, or the golems brought to life by the rabbis of old.

Books as living beings....I might not have quite put it like that, but it rings as a truth.

The quote is from Alan Jacobs' article on Michael Chabon (co-screenwriter of number 2 in the Spiderman series and author of numerous books).

Jacobs on mystery writers

I found the following four tweets from author Alan Jacobs on Twitter today. They were all sent around the same time, so obviously he's been doing a bit of reading up to this point.

I've been reading a bunch of classic mysteries this summer. Verdicts forthcoming.

Preliminary verdict one: Dorothy Sayers can be very, very good and embarrassingly bad, sometimes within the space of three pages.

Preliminary verdict 2: Josephine Tey might well have been the greatest mystery writer of them all had she lived longer.

Preliminary verdict 3: Rex Stout is amazing. Why have I never read these books before? There are so many they must be uneven, but . . . wow.

I've never read Rex Stout either, but have heard he's well worth reading. Josephine Tey's books are very good: murder mysteries, but done in style, and without any sense of stereotypical writing. (One murder takes place very late in the book.) Hitchcock made a movie out of one of the Tey books, but it was quite unrecognisable: the detective who was one of the main characters in the book barely appeared in the movie.

Dorothy Sayers' murder mysteries can be quite elliptical; sometimes the story gets confusing, and sometimes it's so complicated that the reader is left hanging in mid-air. But she's brilliant, all the same.

Listen to the Younger Brother

'Many years ago Umberto Eco wrote that the greatness of Casablanca stems from its shameless deployment of every narrative cliché known to humankind: "Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion."'

Alan Jacobs quotes this in a very good article on the subject of the Harry Potter books, called The Youngest Brother’s Tale. The Harry Potter stories have been classed as everything from evil to defaced by heteronormativity, from unliterary and unsophisticated to being penny dreadfuls, from being bourgeois in their concerns to being a bundle of clichés lumped together.

I have a great deal of time for Alan Jacobs. Quite apart from having written an excellent biography of C S Lewis, he’s a stylist par excellence and yet remains essentially readable; and he speaks good sense.

This article on the sequence of seven Harry Potter stories is full of good things. It doesn’t just aim to show the value of the books (which is far more than most critics would allow) it also shows how the morals and virtues that underpin them are the stuff of legends, myths, and great stories from the past.

Of the making of books there is no end...

"We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire." That is, "unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."

A quote from someone in the 21st century? Nope, the words of a 17th century scholar - and he was only echoing what Vincent of Beauvais in the 13th century said: "Since the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind, I decided to reduce in one volume in a compendium and in summary order some flowers selected according to my talents from all the authors I was able to read."

Even Solomon is known to have said something along these lines: Of the making of books there is no end. The problem ain't new!

The two quotes come from an excellent article by Alan Jacobs on the subject of information overload.

Lewis and Pullman

Terry Teachout noted in his August 11th entries in regard to choosing to keep up with new things, or not:
C. S. Lewis said it better than I can: "If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him."

I’ve been reading a book called, Beyond the Shadowlands, by Wayne Martindale, and in the preface to it, Walter Hooper notes something along the lines of the book inspiring him to go back and read the Lewis canon over again. While this would be something of a task (a pleasurable one, mind you) because Lewis was certainly prolific, to go back and read the Narnia stories, the three fantasy-cum-sci-fi books, and some of the other titles such as The Great Divorce and the Screwtape Letters, would be infinitely better than reading many of the less well-thought-out books that currently inhabit Christian bookshop shelves. The mere thought of the last chapter of The Last Battle always makes my heart leap – if ever there was a more wondrous picture of Joy, and of Heaven, I don’t know of it.

Beyond the Shadowlands takes as its main theme Lewis’ treatment of Heaven and Hell, and it’s intriguing to see just how much his best-known books focus on these two subjects. Alan Jacobs, in a recent book, Shaming the Devil, mentions Lewis in contrast to Philip Pullman, and the latter’s theological trilogy, His Dark Materials. Pullman, who seems to loathe Lewis – I gather this from at least two interviews with him that I’ve read, and Jacob's own comments – equally loathes the idea of Heaven as it’s generally been thought of. I felt, in reading Pullman’s second and third episodes in the trilogy, that the man hated Hope, hated Joy, and felt that children’s delight should be dashed as often as possible: his inexcusable killing off of the father in The Subtle Knife nearly made me refuse to read the third book. And when I did read the third book in the series, The Amber Spyglass, I was more than puzzled that Pullman could think that the spirits stuck in his version of hell - or was it purgatory? - could possibly feel happier floating off into dissolution than being given some kind of new life.