Roland Allen

Her characters are haunted by the glory of God, "the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus," and thus lead bloody horrible lives and, like Jesus, die grotesque deaths. Their lives recall Jonah's, who ran from God at his own peril. O'Connor's vision of faith, according to Dark, is much more in keeping with the apocalyptic faith of scripture than is the sentimentalized spirituality heard on Christian radio. Salvation is terrifying precisely because it is apocalyptic--it radically changes our lives, prevents us from living comfortably, and opens our eyes to transcendent reality. O'Connor's stories portray a world where grace is terrible, mercy comes unbidden and the fear of God is real and warranted.

- This quote is from Melissa Jenks' review of David Dark's: Everyday Apocalypse: the Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, the Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons.

I was talking to my Stanford friend, Matt, on the phone yesterday and he told me that he had just reread Flannery O'Connor's short story, The Turkey. He also said that this has become his favorite O'Connor story.

As Matt described the story I realized that I didn't know it. So I got my collection of O'Connor short stories, headed to a coffee shop and read the story, which is absolutely fascinating.

I had totally overlooked The Turkey.

The Turkey is near the front of O'Connor's collection of short stories. It was one of the stories in her masters thesis at Iowa. While I've read most of her stories, I've paid less attention to the stories at the front of the book because some of them (like The Train, The Peeler, and Enoch and the Gorilla) are more maturely reworked in her novel Wise Blood and elsewhere in her later work.

The Turkey is about an eleven-year-old boy, Ruller, who chases down a wounded turkey and captures it. But, in the encounter with the turkey, he goes to deeper places and has a first encounter with the mystery of God and reconsiders the religious teaching and traditions of his family, and he toys with a sense of "calling." He also encounters the attraction of pride and sees consequences of following pride over taking a simpler path.

There are many themes in this short story that introduce the reader to themes that dominate O'Connor's later work.

I enjoyed reading The Turkey.

I also thought about other O'Connor themes and her prose. One collection of O'Connor prose is called Mystery and Manners. I talked to Matt about the concept of "mystery" as a theological idea. O'Connor says that "mystery" is an uncomfortable concept. I see that and have long thought about what she means by "mystery." Mystery is not a tidy concept in theology or literature.

I was also thinking about reading as I was driving home last night. I've had a recent encounter that left me thinking: "I bet that those people don't read." I'm not writing this to be mean, but I'm convinced that people who lack imagination do so, in part, because they don't read. So, they're left with a view of the world that is narrow and flat.

Posted by Roland at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spent most of the weekend in LA and decided to stay in Manhattan Beach last night, which is my favorite place up here. But, there was an "incident" yesterday that has fouled the place:Sewage Spill closes Manhattan Beach.

The news media were out if full force this morning, like vultures waiting for first light to swoop in on the kill. Besides a half dozen or so news trucks, there were also news helicopters overhead.

On another note, Wheaton College and Westmont College duke it out on which of C. S. Lewis' wardrobes was inspiration for Narnia, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education:

When C.S. Lewis described a wardrobe that served as the Pevensie children's magical portal to Narnia, he had no shortage of models to choose from. His childhood home in Belfast would have had several, since closets were a rarity in that day.

At least two of Lewis's wardrobes still exist, and both are owned by colleges in the United States. One is at Wheaton College, in Illinois, and the other at Westmont College, in California. Over the years, the colleges have politely disagreed about which armoire inspired Lewis.

Last month The Chronicles of Narnia hit the big screen, and — thanks to the news media — the "war of the wardrobes" was on.

Continue reading "Short Takes" »

Posted by Roland at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve come to like the hard-driving staccato of Punk over the past couple of years but I didn't listen to it as a university student and l don't know early or "classic" Punk. So I know little to nothing about Patti Smith and The Sex Pistols apart from recognizing her name.

However, Slate's article on Patti Smith's new book of poetry caught my eye. According to Slate and to the couple of reviews on Amazon.com, Smith is a good writer.

Auguries of Innocence is a testament to her ongoing devotion to poetry—and not the poetry of her contemporaries. She adheres to poetic inversion and archaic language, and the poems are studded by her trademark French symbolist abstractions: "I saw the book upon the shelf,/ I saw you who was myself" (a la Rimbaud) and "I will sit here till dawn tripping/ the spine of the stars." The influence of poets like Baudelaire and Blake (whose "The Chimney Sweeper" she reprises here) is obvious, and her wide reading has resulted in a sense of how structure and sentiment intertwine in poetry.
...
Reading Blake, she told me, "reminded me of how elegantly he lived through personal strife and poverty, how he kept his personal vision"—a vision she strives to adhere to herself: namely, that music, poems, and paintings can make us better people.

Flannery O'Connor said that people who have the ability to read and choose not to do so lack imagination and a sense for mystery. It's awesome that Smith reads good literature and takes off from there as a poet. This makes me believe her when she says that "music, poems, and paintings can make us better people." She presents a rich idea and, clearly, art has encouraged creativity in her life. These are grand and hopeful and very cool thoughts.

One final point: I enjoy words. I love the sound of the title word "auguries" because, to me, it carries a mysterious tone that seems particularly archaic and literary.

Posted by Roland at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the fun things about Christmas is the thoughtfulness of friends and family.

There was a package waiting for me when I arrived home Christmas afternoon. It was from an MIT friend, HeeJun. HeeJun did his undergraudate studies at MIT during the time that I worked at the Institute, and he was in graduate school at Georgetown when I lived in Washington a couple of years back.

HeeJun had sent me a 1938 Limited Edition of The Song of Roland.

Posted by Roland at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had been thiniking about "words" yesterday because NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me passed on that podcasting was the New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year. (The OED added podcating in 2004, by the way.)

Yet, the "grabber" in the article cited in yesterday's post is that people were inspired to look up "insipid" because Simon used it on American Idol.

Posted by Roland at 06:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My first appointment as a college admissions officer was at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA.

This article was posted on Westmont's website:

Movers will be packing up a special Westmont wardrobe this week for a brief engagement at the Cerritos Library in hopes of inspiring youngsters to read. Westmont’s wardrobe was once owned by C.S. Lewis and closely matches the description of the one in his book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

“The Chronicles of Narnia, the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” hits the big screen, Friday, Dec. 9. Westmont’s wardrobe was featured in this month’s National Geographic.

Westmont acquired the famed wardrobe in 1974 with the help of former professor Arthur Lynip who was in England studying British literature. The wardrobe was taken apart and shipped to the United States, and it has been housed in Westmont’s Reynolds Hall.

“I think people are so fascinated by the Narnia stories because they open a door, as it were, to another world,” says Paul Delaney, professor of English. “The wardrobe is real. But it opens a door to a world not merely real but true.”

The wardrobe will be on display from Dec. 5 through Dec. 9 as part of the library’s Operation Read—C.S. Lewis Exhibit. Other Lewis artifacts will also be on display.

Movers will be packing the wardrobe, Wednesday, Nov. 30, for its moving date the following day.

Posted by Roland at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There were clues all along that this was about more than slapstick. Calvin was named for the 16th-century Protestant theologian who believed in predestination, Hobbes for the philosopher a century later who once observed that life is "nasty, brutish and short." Miss Wormwood, Calvin's teacher, was named after the apprentice devil in "The Screwtape Letters."

The artcile was prompted by the recent release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

I agree that Calvin and Hobbes is the greatest comic ever. Unforgettable quotes came from the strip.

This article does a good job at giving more insight into Watterson.

In one sense, it seems the comic strip was Waterson's one decade long version of "creative blogging." He was putting himself out there in the characters:

Watterson, in the book's introduction: "Hobbes got all my better qualities (with a few quirks from our cats), and Calvin my ranting, escapist side. Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary . . . it's pretty startling to reread these strips and see my personality exposed so plainly right there on paper. I meant to disguise that better."

Posted by Roland at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nothing happens in the books... I'm creating a person who's a lot like the person who's reading the books.
-Nick Hornby

I picked up A Long Way Down in the Newark Airport yesterday morning. I'm dog-earring a number of pages that I want to revisit as I make my way through the novel.

These are poignant characters who at times express angst that we all know that we could feel deep inside ourselves. Hornby gets to the core of why people hurt from loneliness and need a community to feel worth loving and that their dreams have value.

I think that I like this book because it touches the same nerve that Don DeLillo's White Noise gets to. (I think that White Noise is brilliant.)

A Long Way Down is about four strangers who meet on the roof of Toppers House, North London's favorite suicide venue. It's New Year's Eve and they each arrive to do themselves in and each of them has a story. They leave the roof as a group and their stories begin to unfold and complicate. I'm about 100 pages in but not deep enough to tell you more.

However, already I can tell that these four characters are not "Hallow Men" (to borrow from T.S. Eliot) ,

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion

I'm short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something.

I have to tell you that the language is prickly and spiced up; some readers may be sensitive to that.

I'll be back with more as I hear more of their stories.

Posted by Roland at 06:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm back in California.

I had a change of planes in Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport. I've always enjoyed the rocky outcrops and mountains around Phoenix and throughout Arizona.

Sky Harbor Airport plays prominently in the climatic ending to A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving), which is a book that I recommend.

Posted by Roland at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've talked about Matt Sargent, my good buddy during the Stanford days, and the Word of Whenever page on his website.

His current WoW is taken from a Flannery O'Connor story, The Lame Shall Enter First. This is significant because Matt just completed reading all of Flannery O'Connor's short stories.

That is very cool.

Matt's posted some pretty cool words, like his post of 5/30/05 1:43 pm - BICAUDAL: (adj. zoology.) Having two tails.

Matt recalled one of the words this past August when he was down visiting and we saw Venus and Jupiter in the sky above Laguna Beach: 8/29/05 9:35 pm - SYZYGY: (n.) The straight line configuration of 3 celestial bodies (as the sun and earth and moon) in a gravitational system.

We only saw Venus and Jupiter and not syzygy, nonetheless, it's a cool word.

Here is, by the way, something interesting about Matt: Even though he's from Seattle, he does not drink coffee.

Posted by Roland at 06:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Someone put the brilliant very short story Wants by Grace Paley online.

He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, half-way to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.

Posted by Roland at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have a subscription to a "Christian Audio Journal" called Mars Hill Audio. While I won't go into particulars, I can tell you that each cd is intellectually exciting.

The current issue includes a conversation on allegory and references two stories that are online:

Young Goodman Brown by Nathanial Harthorne and
How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Leo Tolstoy.

James Joyce said that the Tolstoy story is the best short story ever written.

I plan to read both stories over the next couple of days.

Posted by Roland at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is no shame to have a dirty face.
The shame comes when you keep it dirty.

- Truman Capote

My fascination with Southern gothic literature is well known. However, I've never read Capote; possibly because I've never heard of a redemptive direction in Capote, which is something that I am attracted to in the short stories of Flannery O'Connor.

That being said, the NYTimes article makes for a good read and raises interest in seeing the movies when they're released.

Posted by Roland at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Roland at 08:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the University of Texas is the latest university to pack up the books, move them out of the library and put in computer clusters, lounge chairs and coffee shops.

Continue reading "Digital Tsunami Hits Austin" »

Posted by Roland at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My friend Darrin in Wheaton, IL found this link and sent it on to me this afternoon. I missed this particular program from NPR's Speaking of Faith with the topic: Faith Fired by Literature.

This particular program is a conversation with Paul Elie who wrote The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, which tells the interwoven stories of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy.

Posted by Roland at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read the New Pantagruel: Hymns in the Whorehouse and recommend that you do so as well.

the New Pantagruel, published by Pantagruel Press, a 501(c)(3) non-profit company, is a quarterly electronic journal run by a cadre of intemperate but friendly Catholics and Protestants who have seen other electronic journals run by Christians, and thought that while they might not be able to do better, they could certainly do no worse. the New Pantagruel does not have a doctrinal statement such as is typical for publications of this sort because its creators haven't managed to agree on one.

Posted by Roland at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This isn't the first time that I've written about writer Harry Crews.

It is the first time that I've read him.

I bought Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader this afternoon. This book includes the autobiographical A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, The Gypsy's Curse, Car and a selection of essays.

Crews is very readable. He grew up in Georgia, the child of sharecroppers.

Readers of this weblog are aware of my devotion to Flannery O'Connor and her writing. Crews writes about similar characters. (There isn't much diversity in poor people in the rural Deep South when it comes to characters.) However, his characters aren't as funny as O'Connor's. Perhaps that's because he's not making his characters up.

Crews is writing about the real people who have shaped his life. (I'm reading Childhood, which is autobiographical. Perhaps his made up characters are funny when I get to his fiction.)

Here's the beginning of Childhood: The Biography of a Place:

My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew.

Posted by Roland at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wisdom

I stand most humbly
Before man's wisdom
Knowing we are not
Really wise:

If we were
We'd open up the kingdom
And make earth happy
As the dreamed of skies.

--Langston Hughes
from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Posted by Roland at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When O’Connor heard the old canard that Northerners discuss ideas while Southerners merely tell stories, she replied starchly that this narrative habit of discourse proves the innate superiority of the Southern mind.

There's talk of inviting Ralph Wood to Orange County for a Flannery O'Connor conference. I hope that it happens.

Here are some quotes from his book, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South:

I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

—Flannery O’Connor
The Habit of Being, p. 90
Quoted by Ralph Wood in Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, p.1

Something, it appears, has gone wrong with the Western world, and gone wrong in a sense far more radical than, say, the evils of industrial England which engaged Dickens. It did not take a diagnostician to locate the evils of the sweatshops of the nineteenth-century Midlands. But now it seems that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of meaning itself, the very ways people see and understand themselves. What is called into question…now is the very enterprise of human life itself. Instead of writing about this or that social evil from a posture of consensus from which we agree to deplore social evils, it is now the consensus itself and the posture which are called into question.

—Walker Percy
“The State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science?” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway, p 141.
Quoted by Ralph Wood in Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, p.9

O’Connor honored the Bible-centered faith of fundamentalists because, as we have seen, it gave them a storytelling cast of mind. Stories were not for her mere devices for entertainment; they were vehicles of moral and religious truth. Whereas Catholics have the teachings of the church to guide their behavior, Southern Protestants have the biblical narratives as the mirror wherewith to measure themselves and their world. These character-laden stories were greatly superior, in her view, to propositional abstractions. When O’Connor heard the old canard that Northerners discuss ideas while Southerners merely tell stories, she replied starchly that this narrative habit of discourse proves the innate superiority of the Southern mind.

—Ralph Wood , Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South p.37

Posted by Roland at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a repost of an entry from my former TypePad blog. I wrote it when I lived in Washington DC. I've been thinking about Flannery O'Connor today for a couple of reasons:
I was asked by an English teacher to lead a class discussion through O'Connor's signature story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and I may be involved in planning an O'Connor conference here in Orange County.

But, on to The Life You Save May Be Your Own:

Yesterday I read Flannery O’Connor’s Short Story The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

It's haunting, possibly because O'Connor freely borrows key images from a number of her other stories: For example, the image of the car as a vehicle of freedom and justification is used in Wise Blood (with its main character Hazel Motes noting that a man with a good car doesn't need salvation); and the notion of Catholicism as a dismissable unadvanced and "old" religion by a character who hasn't the patience to think deeply about spiritual things is used in The Displaced Person and other places. And, as is common, the story includes a widow with an invalid or idiot adult daughter who is unmarried. (It's interesting how often O'Connor uses this image since she was a physically afflicted, unmarried adult daughter living with a widowed mother. It's self-deprecating, perhaps, and brings recognition of her own need for grace to the forefront of her stories.)

I’ll try to explain my on-going response while reading the story. I began reading it on the subway going to work yesterday morning. I finished it last night on the return home. I’ve been thinking about it this morning and decided to pull out one of my FO’C commentaries (not intentionally a biblical reference, but it’s helpful to have someone else’s reflections and insights when reading Flannery O.)

But, back to the visceral response: As I began to read the story, I realized that I didn’t know it, which was nice because I’ve re-read so many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. As I got into it, I wanted the story to get along. I wanted it to make progress. I had the impatience common to her characters and I didn’t care for the two main characters, Tom Shiftlet (which appropriately rhymes with Shiftless and he is a scoundrel) and Lucynell Carter, the widow-mother who owned the place that Shiftlet happened upon, who has her own selfish purposes as well. I didn’t like Shiftlet and I didn’t care for his long-windedness, although that’s a usual characteristic of Flannery O’Connor characters – they cover their brokenness by talking a lot about their all-knowing perspective on the world.

Sidenote: I think that I wanted the characters to be more humorous. Like the Grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard To Find, I wanted characters that made me laugh. None of the five characters in this story entertained me. They were uncomfortably odd.

Shiftlet is physically broken. Although he has skills, he is a carpenter and he fixes Lucynell’s car later in the story, he is a one-armed man, who early on in the story stretches out both arms in a way that signals the redemptive nature of where the story is headed: "He swung out both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross." But the image is lost on Lucynell and her daughter:

“The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists.”

The story goes on with Shiftlet making references to deep things that disturb his thinking and that Lucynell thinks are plain foolish. For example, Shiftlet talks about a surgeon in Atlanta who had “taken a knife and cut the human heart” and “studied it like a day-old chicken.” Shiftlet is correct in concluding that the motives of the heart are beyond science. And he makes a reference to European monks who sleep in coffins, a reference O’Connor borrows from a James Joyce story, “The Dead,” but the reference is lost of Lucynell who responds that “they wasn’t as advanced as we are.”

Later Lucynell has Shiftlet marry her daughter in a civil ceremony. But, although it’s "legal," it’s not satisfying to Shiftlet even though it “satisfies the law” as Lucynell tells him. Shiftlet responds that “it’s the law that doesn’t satisfy” him – which expresses a deeper spiritual need that he is currently not aware of.

There’s so much more to the story that I won’t cover here. He ends up in a café called The Hot Spot – where he feels more uncomfortable, and later he picks up a boy (note: good deed to cover up guilt and sin), a hitchhiker, who quickly recognizes Shiftlet as a moral liar and calls Shiftlet’s bluff on his waxing and jumps out of Shiftlet's car in disgust. (Hint: The boy becomes the vehicle of grace in the story.)

I hope that you’ll read it. If so, let me know how you respond to The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

Posted by Roland at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design."

- Harry Crews

Posted by Roland at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read Nabokov's brilliantly crafted and disturbing novel, Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov masters language and cadence in this chronicle of degeneration and self-destruction.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Posted by Roland at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been reading Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism by Henry T. Edmondson III, a book I've mentioned in an earlier post.

To say that I'm a Flannery O'Connor fan is a mild term. I'm devoted to her writing and characters.

Edmondson's book is a great read and it's incredibly insightful into Flannery O'Connor's intellectual and spiritual development, through her reading of Thomistic philosophy and her response to Nietzsche, nihilism and the concept of the Superman or Overman.

Like me, Edmondson is a Southerner. There are nuances to being a Southerner that are not easily communicated. However, O'Connor draws large comedic characters in her fiction that I readily understand. More often than not the characters are tragic; however, their tragedies produce moments of grace that are transforming.

As an example, in O'Connor's short story, The River, a story I've puzzled over in this blog, a child drowns himself in search of the transformation of Baptism. Edmondson quotes Walker Percy, another favorite author,

How else can one possibly write of baptism as an event of immense significance when baptism is already accepted but accepted by and large as a minor tribal rite somewhat secondary to taking the kids to see Santa at the department store?

Edmondson quotes O'Connor's response to a request that she write about nicer people: "The world of near-perfection seldom makes good fiction."

O'Connor's characters are freaks, drawn dramactically, largely and shockingly. But, in honest moments, I can't help but seeing some of their prideful self-deception in my own life.

Posted by Roland at 05:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jason [Sailor and a Scholar: Great Article] picked up on Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink.

If you go to Gladwell's site, he has a teaser article on the book and he uses the example of bad quick decision making - thinking that tall people are naturally better leaders.

I called up several hundred of the Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. and asked them how tall their CEOs were. And they answer is that they are almost all tall. Now that's weird. There is no correlation between height and intelligence, or height and judgment, or height and the ability to motivate and lead people. But for some reason corporations overwhelmingly choose tall people for leadership roles. I think that's an example of bad rapid cognition: there is something going on in the first few seconds of meeting a tall person which makes us predisposed toward thinking of that person as an effective leader, the same way that the police looked at my hair and decided I resembled a criminal. I call this the "Warren Harding Error" (you'll have to read "Blink" to figure out why), and I think we make Warren Harding Errors in all kind of situations-- particularly when it comes to hiring. With "Blink," I'm trying to help people distinguish their good rapid cognition from their bad rapid cognition.

Of course, those of us with a biblical background can't help but think of the story of Samuel and David's brothers in this context.

Posted by Roland at 06:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Upon a recommendation:

Yesterday afternoon I picked up When We Were Orphans, a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I began reading it last night. It's immediately engaging.

Posted by Roland at 05:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just watched an amazing show on the Public Broadcast Station, Between the Lines with Barry Kibrick, which I'd not heard of before.

Tonight he intervied Randall Wallace, a novelist and film writer, who wrote Braveheart, Pearl Harbor and others. Wallace is from Tennessee and studied literature at Duke and went to seminary. It was a phenomenal interview because Wallace is bright and interesting.

Tonight's interview was on Wallace's book, Love and Honor.

Posted by Roland at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A lot of people wonder about the meaning of songs on U2's new album, particularly now that How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is officially on the streets. For people like me who are aware of and can make sense of some of the spiritual nuances in Bono's lyrics, this is an exciting and deeply moving album.

Literally, Beth Maynard wrote the book on this topic. And she's an avid and notable blogger.

Here are links to a couple of interviews with Beth:

One is by culture watcher Dick Staub, the other by urban youth worker and blogger Rudy Carrasco.

Posted by Roland at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My friend Erik Lokkesmoe asked if I�d be willing to spread the word about his new book.

Erik is a Washington, D.C. speechwriter and now serves as the communications director for the National Endowment for the Humanities. His co-author, Jedd Medefind, is a former press secretary and currently chief of staff in the California Legislature.

The Revolutionary Communicator: Seven Truths Jesus Lived to Impact, Connect, and Lead (Relevant Books) has just hit the shelves!

Most of us desire to build more tangible bonds between spiritual truth and our Monday-morning, workaday lives. We want real connection with others, and enduring impact on the people and culture around us.

The Revolutionary Communicator offers practical paths for pursuing this way of life as apprentices to Jesus in the way we communicate.

Building from Jesus� life and stories from other great communicators who followed his lead, the book explores seven principles that defined Jesus� communication.

These principles are not merely tips or techniques. They are as radical as they are simple. Attentiveness. Meeting others on their turf and in their terms. Question asking. Authenticity. Storytelling. Solitude. Defining true success.

Living out this way of communication, every interaction � whether in front of a crowd, leading a small group, or in intimate discussion with a spouse or children � holds more richness and opportunity than we may ever have imagined.

Please check out the book, or read the free sample chapter online. We believe it will provide a refreshing encounter with Jesus, and will leave you richer in all your interactions.

Sincerely,

Jedd Medefind & Erik Lokkesmoe

FREE SAMPLE CHAPTER and other info at: www.revolutionarycommunicator.com

The Revolutionary Communicator is at your local bookstore or on Amazon.com.

�Simple, powerful truths are here for all to understand.� --J.C. Watts, former Congressman and political commentator

�Medefind and Lokkesmoe insightfully explain the principles at the heart of Jesus� skill in a practical way. At the same time, they remind the reader of his redemptive spirituality that goes far beyond mere technique.� --Chuck Colson, author, speaker, and founder of Prison Fellowship

�The Revolutionary Communicator will make you a better communicator, while giving you a dramatic view of the greatest communicator of all.� --Bert Decker, best selling author, communications commentator for the NBC TODAY Show.

Posted by Roland at 06:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've never met Tobias Wolff, even though he teaches at Stanford. But I picked up his new novel his afternoon, Old School.

There's a paragraph worth sharing at the start of the book:

How did they command such deference - English teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They'd stitch it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion, and even, on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.

Posted by Roland at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm reading Goodbye My Brother, the short story by John Cheever. I'm not familiar with Cheever, but this story is, in my view, thoroughly New England and its Puritan roots.

I've not finished reading the story, but this description that the narrator gives of Lawrence, the brother who is the subject of the story, who is sitting with his wife, Ruth, paints a picture of the burden of self-righteousness. Diana is his divorced sister.

Lawrence and Ruth were sitting at the edge of the terrace, not in the chairs, not in the circle of chairs. With mouth set, my brother looked to me then like a Puritan cleric. Sometimes, when I try to understand his frame of mind, I think of the beginnings of our family in this country, and his disapproval of Diana and her lover reminded me of this. The branch of the Pommeroys to which we belong was founded by a minister who was eulogized by Cotton Mather for his untiring abjuration of the Devil. The Pommeroys were ministers until the middle of the nineteenth century, and the harshness of their thought - man is full of misery, and all earthly beauuty is lustful and corrupt - has been preserved in books and semons. The temper of our family changed somewhat and become more lighthearted, but when I was of school age, I can remember a cousinage of old men and women who seemed to hark back to the dark days of the ministry and to be animated by perpetual guilt and the deification of the scourge. If you are raised in this atmosphere - and in a sense we were - I think it is a trial of the spirit to reject its habits of guilt, self-denial, taciturnity, and penitence, and it seemed to me to have been a trial of the spirit in which Lawrence had succumbed.

Posted by Roland at 03:32 PM | Permalink

This report is from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

New York

The populace of the United States may be divided by race, age, gender, region, income, and educational level. But according to a report released on Thursday by the National Endowment for the Arts, there is at least one thing that brings us all together: No group reads as much literature as it once did. If present trends continue, our aliteracy will only deepen over the next generation. After all, the steepest decline in reading has occurred among young adults, ages 18 to 24.

Continue reading "Fewer Literati" »

Posted by Roland at 04:38 AM | Permalink

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

A glance at the spring issue of "Doublethink":
Short stories get short shrift

The short story, which used to be a mainstay of popular
magazines, is now "confined to an elegant ghetto" of a handful
of literary magazines and journals, and to the academic world,
says Kelly Jane Torrance, an editor at "Brainwash," the
journal's online sister publication.

Many of the most prominent writers of short fiction teach
English and writing at colleges, and "it is a common complaint
that university writers, while protected from starving in
garrets, write for each other," she says.

Arguably it could be a good thing for short fiction that
less-serious writers are discouraged from taking up the form.
However, the lack of a significant commercial market for short
stories, combined with the structure of graduate writing
programs, has led to the perception that short fiction is
primarily for beginning writers, she says.

"It is difficult to complete a novel in the course of earning a
master-of-fine-arts degree and even harder to critique one in
progress in workshops, so most students write short stories,"
she says. "The rigors of academic and workshop training, more
than anything else, may be why short fiction tends to be
something of a young person's game."

AFF's Doublethink - Short of Glorious

Posted by Roland at 04:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design."

I'm posting about Harry Crews because of his quote about "well-rounded" people. Those of us in my profession are saddled with educating kids about the myth of the "well-rounded" person, who is, truth be told, boring.

The Writer's Almanac, Monday, June 07, 2004, from Minnesota Public Radio had this piece on Harry Crews:

It's the birthday of novelist Harry Crews, born in Bacon County, Georgia (1935). He's the author of many novels, including The Gypsy's Curse (1977), Body (1990) and Celebration (1997).

Posted by Roland at 03:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

Those who are quick to promise are generally slow to perform. They promise mountains and perform molehills. He who gives you fair words and nothing more feeds you with an empty spoon. People don't think much of a man's piety when his promises are like pie crust: made to be broken.
- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Quoted in The Micah Mandate, p. 17.

Posted by Roland at 08:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism

I posted on this book back in January.

I haven't read as much scholarly material on Flannery O'Connor as one would think. This book looks to be sophisticated and philosophical, which is a form of reading I haven't done much of in recent years! Yet, I am interested in and look forward to learning more about O'Connor's moral vision.

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

I love knowing how things work. I also love Florence, Italy. This book is about Filippo Brunelleschi's design for the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence.

I picked this up Sunday night. It gets so-so reviews, but I think that it'll be an interesting read.

The Micah Mandate

This made the list because Jim Belcher recommended it. (Jim is an old friend who is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Orange County.)

Posted by Roland at 12:45 PM | Permalink