/ lit
In an interview with Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio, Alan Jacobs discusses the novels of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass).
Cormac McCarthy's Satan-figure judge
In all this time the judge had spoke hardly a word. So at dawn we were on the edge of a vast malpais and his honor takes up a position on some lava rocks there and he commences to give us a address. It was like a sermon but it was no such sermon as any man of us had ever heard before. Beyond the malpais was a volcanic peak and in the sunrise it was many colors and there was dark little birds crossin down the wind and the wind was flappin the judge’s old benjamin about him and he pointed to that stark and solitary mountain and delivered himself of an oration to what end I know not, then or now, and he concluded with the tellin us that our mother the earth as he said was round like an egg and contained all good things within her. Then he turned and led the horse he had been ridin across that terrain of black and glassy slag, treacherous to man and beast alike, and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith.
Amy Hungerford, Professor of English, teaches Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in the first of two lectures (I’ll post the second later in Lent). If you strictly go in for page turners, romance and that sort of thing—if Melville and Faulkner and The Iliad are not among your favorites—then you may not have the eye for McCarthy’s vision. But if you are a member of the Church—that support group for adult children of Adam and Eve—and remember that the first fratricide was Cain; if you hear the slogan “Yes, we can!” and are skeptical of hubris wherever it may be found—then Blood Meridian can take you to the north plains of the human soul. In such parts, the hunger is as dangerous as anything on the Texas frontier.
In October 2008, John Updike spoke with Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the NY Times Book Review, about the craft of fiction and the art of writing.
Updike’s Rules for Reviewing
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
Auden at midcentury
Auden always argued that few could match Kierkegaard’s acuity of insight into the historical (choice-driven) aspect of human experience. But he came to believe that for Kierkegaard—and many who succeeded him, “bowled over” by his brilliance as Auden had been—our life in nature is at best an embarrassment. (With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one “could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.”) And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God’s redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation.
Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a “monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament—in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice—but is deaf to its rich polyphony.” And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume, the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and—decisively in Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection—how they may be reconciled. In a 1955 essay about his conversion—the only straightforward one he ever wrote—he put the main point in this way:
As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, though faith and grace, a unique “existential” relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, every man, in common with everything else in the universe, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin.
And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done
As Mendelson points out in Later Auden (1999), the best book anyone has yet written about the poet, it was in 1948 that Auden “began to write poems about the inarticulate human body”—the part of us that does not and cannot talk, or think, or have faith in God, but which Christ died to redeem, along with the rest of creation which, as St. Paul says, groans in anticipation of its deliverance. Cardinal Newman distinguished between “notional” and “real” assent, and while Auden gave notional assent to the physical Resurrection of Jesus, and to the credal claim that “we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” he always struggled to make that assent real. But he understood these affirmations to be absolutely central to orthodox Christianity and necessary to a true embrace of the goodness of Creation.
from Alan Jacobs’ The Poet’s Prose, in B&C
Fyodor Dostoevsky died January 28, 1881 in St. Petersburg. Rowan Williams, Archibishop of Canterbury—see his Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction—speaks of Raskolnikov, Sonja, and Crime and Punishment, of Ilyusha, Ivan, Dmitri, and Father Zossima of The Brothers Karamazov. An excerpt: “[Dostoevsky] wrote occasionally as if he thought the Russian Monks’ discourses were the answer to Ivan’s great revolt against God but I think in the logic in the drama of the book it’s almost admitted there’s no answer in words. When Ivan’s finished the great indictment of God for allowing suffering the only answer that Ilyusha gives him is to go and kiss him. And in a sense Dostoevsky leaves it there; there is appalling unspeakable evil in the world and he’s drawn from the newspapers, these dreadful stories of cruelty to children particularly and abuse of children – nightmarish stories, and it’s as if he says ‘That’s real; so is love, so is compassion – make what you will of it. I’m not going to give you any theoretical answer but it’s as much of a puzzle and a challenge that there is compassion in the world as that there is unspeakable cruelty.” From the BBC.
Dana Gioia talks about the life and work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and reads his poem inspired by the death of his wife, “The Cross in the Snow”
From the novel by Ron Hansen
A great wave boomed against the ship, and cannoning white seawater that seemed high and heavy as a house hit Sister Henrica full on, joining her to its onwardness. She screamed and could hear other men and women screaming as she and they were carried on the raft of its swift, stinging journey across the width of the ship. She flailed in a last chance for the ship’s railing, but she was plunged over the side of the Deutschland and into the coldest cold of water she’d ever felt. She lost all air; she lost a shoe; she could not tell up from down. She was suffering and terrified and helpless, and she could not claw up to the surface. Her black veil smothered her face, her black cloak furled around her like the strips of burial cloths binding Lazarus in his tomb, and she could not help it: she gasped, and seawater filled her. She coughed and convulsed and took in more. Weakening and in pain, she slashed out with her hands and kicked her feet in the finality of a wild rage. But she was burdened and yoked by her habit, and demanded by the sea. She remembered as she sank: Jesus wept.
See Hansen’s Exiles, which tells the story of the five Roman Catholic nuns exiled from Germany by Bismarck, the wreck of their ship off the coast of England near the Thames, and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s writing of The Wreck of the Deutschland to commemorate their deaths. The five nuns are commemorated every year in a memorial service held on 6 December by the Wheaton Franciscan Sisters of Wheaton, Illinois, the destination of the five Sisters.
Raise a glass and give thanks to the Most High for J. R. R. Tolkien, born 117 years ago today. “To the Maker of the Feast, to the power of loaf and yeast, ‘til broth and bread doth cease, gratefulness is joy!”
JRR Tolkien biography, part 1
JRR Tolkien biography, part 2
It’s not every brain scientist who explains her research using Shakespeare. But University of Michigan psychology professor Cindy Lustig describes brain development over a lifetime as a correlation with Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man.”
Using behavioral tests and brain scans, Lustig and her collaborators, Drs. Randy Buckner and Denise Head, study how age affects the brain’s ability to multitask. While the young child’s brain is only capable of focusing on one thing at a time, as the brain develops it is able to switch between tasks quite quickly, reaching a multitasking peak in the 20s or 30s, says Lustig. Beyond that, the brain experiences “internal chatter” and has to work a lot harder to suppress distractions and maintain focus.
