Subjects with Objects

A bit late to be doing this, but this is a really neat project. DKM is a poet, a poet with a mission. In this article on The Rabbit Room, he explains:

"Several years ago, public spaces painter Jonathan Richter invited me to create pieces with him for a gallery show. Richter spends evenings in public spaces (mostly pubs) painting an ongoing series of off-kilter, spontaneous portraits. These paintings give off a vaguely disturbing, surreal aura, sometimes seeming fraught with a subconscious and archetypal symbolism, other times feeling like fragments from the watery language of dreams. At any rate, Richter is quick to say that the pieces in this series are not created with forethought or planning. Rather they emerge from the process itself, from the layering of paint, the subjects sometimes achieving a definite shape only towards the end of the physical process. Once the paint has dried, Richter turns the paintings over to me. I meditate on the images, mulling the portraits for however long it takes to begin to tease out their secrets such that I can express something of their essence in a line or two of poetic prose. There’s something about this process of filtering a work through two imaginations that seems to put a finer edge on it. Like double-distilling a vodka....

"Some reveal their secrets within a few minutes time. Others take hours, even days before the meaning begins to emerge. I return over and over to the clearing where I sit and wait for something to step into the open and give me a clear line of sight....

"...I can’t help but believe that what I do believe is more wildly and frighteningly and wonderfully romantic than any merely emotional or sensational experience the romantics would have deemed romantic. Is it not more wildly romantic to operate from a premise that every facet, detail, and pattern in creation, even those that we perceive as random, are fraught with meaning far beyond our ability to comprehend? To believe that the stars are singing? To believe that the objective evidence points to the conclusion that we are living in an actual fairy tale?...

"Romanticism is dead. Long live romance."

DKM and Jonathan Richter only have a few more hours to complete their $7,500 goal. If they don't, all the money pledged so far will be returned. There are eight hours left. I've donated thirty dollars, which means I'll be getting a signed copy of the book, unless they don't get funding. I WANT a copy. Go here to help them out.

Longish

New Year

A bit late, but I wanted to wish everybody a happy new year. There are many CDs themed on Christmas, many more on Easter, and possibly even a few on Hanukah, but there's only one I've ever discovered that's about New Year's, and that's Eric Peters's latest offering: Birds of Relocation. Last night at our family gathering, we covertly played it while everyone was involved in Balderdash or Spoons, on our campaign to make Christian music cool. (Just for today, the CD is 20% off, and worth every penny.) But anyway, here are a few words that are far better than any I've ever written.


This is the year that something changes but nothing ever does
This is the year that all my failures turn into a pile of dust
This is the year, with fallen faces, we learn we’re not enough
This is the year to hold each other up

Oh, oh, oh it’s a new year
Oh, oh, oh it’s a brand new light
Oh, oh, oh can you believe it?
It’s the skies that we dream of

This is the year when laughter douses charred and burnt-out dreams
This is the year when wrens return to nest in storm-blown trees
Is this the year of relocation from boughs of old despair?
This is the year to perch on hope’s repair

I was pale and weary sad, tired of ghost debates
A slave to voices old and vile, bitter bones in the grave
But this is the year, it’s the year that something changes
This is the year, the year that something changes

Oh, oh, oh it’s a new year
Oh, oh, oh it’s a brand new light
Oh, oh, oh can you believe it?
It’s the skies that we dream of

Have a blessed and joyful new year.

Dream of the skies,
Longish

Beauty is truth, truth beauty - Except It Isn't

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is a line written by romantic poet John Keats. Being a Christian and having a philosophical bent, I'd always thought he meant the truth is beautiful, but as Doug McKelvey points out in this terrific article over on the Rabbit Room, he meant just the opposite. It means that if a thing is beautiful, it is the truth. If it makes me feel good, it is good.

McKelvey's article challenges the idea that art can be meaningless, an outpouring of pointless emotion. Instead, he declares the Christian belief that there is intrinsic meaning in everything, that that idea extends even to abstract art and stream-of-consciousness writing. It's also harder to do right, but it's worth it. Because, after all, if...

If things meant something, if art incarnated ideas and if ideas had consequences, if truth was not the same as beauty (at least not in the way that Keats believed it), then I was responsible for the impact of the things I made and therefore had need to be sensitive and discerning. It wasn’t enough just to spin evocative, poetic phrases that were fragments of no greater whole. This was a holier vocation than I had imagined.

Meaningless art is just the easy way out. As a writer who spends a lot of time crafting, and, as Hemingway said, "getting the words right", this affirmation of the try-again-and-again-till-it's-just-right approach versus the flash-bang!-inspiration-equals-automatic-product school is refreshing. (Even better, he called it a holy vocation. Cool.)

McKelvey believes that, as Flannery O'Connor said, there are "lines of spiritual motion" in everything, and it is the artist's job to discover them. And it might mean there's a greater romance than the romantics every dreamed. What is it? Read the article to find out.

Longish

A Christian Hobbit?

Martin Freeman as Bilbo

Over the years, I've had to argue in the favor of The Lord of the Rings as a Christian epic. At first, as a kid, I took it at face value and said, "Look, it's just a fun adventure story." But with the increase of spiritual maturity, I've seen plain Christian themes in the Rings books, and even in the atheist-produced movies. Re-reading the books for the first time in years, God has shown me things I missed for years - the overt themes of humility, trust, providence, love, mercy, hope, and heaven are hard to miss, but then, I always read Rings for the fantasy stuff. Dark Lords, battles, elves, and dwarves were much more interesting to my twelve-year-old, adventure-starved self even when couched in lessons on moral relativism and absolute truth. As a kid, I knew there was some sort of great moral goodness in these books I loved, but I wasn't old enough to understand it. Now, it's like reading them for the first time, and I'm savoring the experience. But I digress. When talking Tolkien, this is prone to happen.

Merry Christmas to everybody - and a Happy New Year to the WORLD!

I'm a big fan of A Christmas Carol (we did a podcast on it last week), and my favorite version is easily George C. Scott's. Partly, it's because of this song:

The past of man is cold as ice:
He would not mend his ways.
He strove for silver in his heart
And gold in all his days.
His reason weak, his anger sharp,
And sorrow all his pay,
He went to church but once a year,
And that was Christmas Day.

 So grant us all a change of heart,
Rejoice for Mary’s son;
Pray, Peace on earth to all mankind,
God bless us everyone!
 The present man is full of flame:
He rushes here and there.
He turns away the orphan child,
The widow in her chair.
He takes from them he merely meets,
Forgets how brief his stay,
And stands a-jingling of his coins
In church on Christmas Day.

 So grant us all a change of heart,
Rejoice for Mary’s son;
Pray, Peace on earth to all mankind,
God bless us everyone!

The man to come we do not know:
May he make peace on earth,
And live the glory of the Word,
The message of the birth,
And gather all the children in
To banish their dismay,
Lift up his heart among the bells
In church on Christmas Day.

So grant us all a change of heart,
Rejoice for Mary’s son;
Pray, Peace on earth to all mankind,
God bless us everyone!

Merry Christmas - and may you keep it in your heart all the year,
Longish

If We Survive - A Review

It seems like every time I finish an Andrew Klavan book, I’m impressed anew with how easily he can drag me into a story. I like predicting things. I like working things out. After reading his first series: the Homelanders, I thought I’d done that. Well, I thought, undoubtedly, that was great suspense, but he works with a formula. Handsome, strong, Christian patriot dude fights people that don’t agree with him and Gets The Girl.

When I got Klavan’s next book, Crazy Dangerous, I settled myself in for some highbrow criticism. Ah ha! I said. Here’s a cleancut American Christian dude—this is the same thing. But it wasn’t. If Charlie West was Jet Li, Sam Hopkins was Barney Fife. He had no super cool blackbelt skills, and his obstacles were given a quite different flavor. The suspense was nail-bitingly good. But there was a beautiful secondary character who classified as The Girl, and was there to be Got. Phew. I had predicted one thing. Obviously, there was a formula somewhere.

The Other Stocking, by G.K. Chesterton

(Thought this was rather appropriate for the holidays, so here's a guest post from our friend Mr. Chesterton)

What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the experience of most of my friends. Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has grown larger and larger in my life until he fills almost the whole of it. It happened in this way.

As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. I had not even been good–far from it.
...

And the explanation was that a certain being whom people called Santa Claus was benevolently disposed toward me. What we believed was that a certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing. And, as I say, I believe it still.

I have merely extended the idea.

Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.

Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now, I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea.

Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.

Merry Christmas,
Longish

The Hobbit - A Great Adventure, But Not as Great as it Could Have Been

Let’s be honest, I’ve been looking forward to this movie since I was about six years old. I’ve followed the process for the last year and a half. I grew up with The Lord of the Rings movies defining my childhood. So when I walked into the theater to see The Hobbit, I was muttering to myself, “Open-minded. Be critical – you’re going to write a review. Don’t get your hopes up.”

(There are spoilers – so be wary.)

But I have to admit, when I saw Bag-End, Frodo, and Ian Holm’s Bilbo, I was geeking out of my boots. In particular, the moment that Bilbo dashes, hatless, coatless, and handkerchiefless out his front door clutching the dwarves’ contract, to a backup of an upbeat version of Concerning Hobbits (a.k.a. The Adventure Begins), I was thinking…Ah, we’re back. This is Middle-Earth. On the other hand, when it was good, it was very, very good, but when it was bad…