Sunday Salon: The Plight of Modern Man and Bookshelves Again

Jul27

My reading has been rather grim this week, which befits my mood, unfortunately. I read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer for Eldest Daughter’s book club. It won the National Book Award in 1961. Then I started reading them by Joyce Carol Oates. It won the National Book Award in 1970. I can tell you that neither novel wins my book award . . . unless it’s the Semicolon Grim, Disturbed and Neurotic Book Award.

So, to think of brighter things, I turned my thoughts toward bookshelves in which to keep the Grim, the Disturbed, the Neurotic, the Hopeful and the Joyful books, all on shelves touching and informing one another. With the right kind of bookshelf, the books might be able to talk to each other in the night, rub covers, even make friends. Jan Karon’s Father Tim could tell Dostoyevsky to cheer up and pray the prayer that never fails. Or Richard Adams’ Bigwig might give some advice to Alice about rabbit holes. Or maybe Edgar Allan Poe will scare the stuffing out of some pompous old bore from one of Dickens’ novels. Who knows? With the right sort of bookshelf and the proper arrangement of the books, Nonfiction and Fiction and the Memoir-in-Between might even come to some agreement or at least peaceful co-existence. (A new blog/reading meme: Describe a meeting between . . . two disparate book characters. This week: describe a meeting between Winnie the Pooh and Becky Sharp.)

Thanks to Fuse 8 for the link to the Opus Shelving System. My regular bookshelves already look sort of like these with the books on top of books, sideways and every which-a-way. But why not just go with the flow and wedge them in any old way to vary the decor?

30 of the most creative bookshelf designs is a series of pictures and descriptions of bookshelves that a designer has found to be, well, creative. The author didn’t say they were terribly practical, and in fact most of them won’t hold very many books. But they are fun to look at.

Someone named Alex has an entire blog devoted to bookshelves. His entries seem to be more innovative than practical, too.

Maybe you just can’t beat ye old wooden bookshelf stuffed full of books. Small World is looking for book shelving suggestions. Tell her what you think.

Random Movie Blog-a-Thon

Jul25

This sounds like fun. Buy or rent a movie that you wouldn’t normally be interested in watching. Watch and then write a review. From the originator of the idea at Cinexcellence:

This doesnâ€™t mean that it has to be one that you would probably hate. It could be one of those DVDs that you walk by all the time but never took a chance on it. But it could be one that you hate. . . . hey, we might discover some hidden gems along the way.

I think I’ll try this out. Something rated PG or G that nevertheless sounds stupid.

Poetry and Fine Art Friday: Edmund Spenser

Jul24

Spenser is most famous for his famously l-o-n-g poem, The Faerie Queen, which I, like 99% of the world, have never read. He lived in Elizabethan England, a contemporary of Shakespeare and a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Spenser wrote the following poem, and my question to you is: what is the poem about? A hunting expedition? A woman? Both? Something else?

The Tamed Deer

Like as a huntsman after weary chase
Seeing the game from him escaped away,
Sits down to rest him in some shady place,
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
So, after long pursuit and vain assay,
When I all weary had the chase forsook,
The gentle deer returned the self-same way,
Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook.
There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide;
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own good-will her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild
So goodly won, with her own will beguiled.

The Hunted Roe-Deer on the Alert, Spring, 1867

Giclee Print

Courbet, Gustave

Buy at AllPosters.com

More Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading: Two Teachers Who Read. A Lot.

Author Celebration: Alexandre Dumas, pere

Jul24

I missed last week’s celebration on the July 17th, the birthday of Isaac Watts, because of my blog issues. (Nasty old spammers!) However, I am just barely here in time to celebrate with you all the birthday today, July 24th, of Alexandre Dumas, French playwright and novelist who was born in 1802 and died December 5, 1870 at the age of 68. His grandmother on his father’s side was an Afro-Carribbean former slave, and his father was a general in Napoleon’s army who fell into disfavor and poverty. Alexandre’s father the general died when Alexandre was three years old, and his widowed mother tried to give him an education. He loved books and read everything he could.

Tous pour un, un pour tous, c’est notre devise.
Translation: All for one, one for all, that is our motto.
The Three Musketeers, Ch. 9: D’Artagnan Shows Himself

Dumas moved to Paris when he was twenty (similar to D’Artagnon), and he began to write plays and magazine articles. His first plays were quite successful, and he soon began writing novels in serieal form for the newspapers. He eventually became so popular that “Dumas became known as the King of Paris and a saying held that, ‘when Dumas snores, Paris turns in its sleep.'”

He hired a stable of writers and assistants who helped him turn out novel after novel in addition to a prolific number or journal articles and nonfiction books on crime and French history and politics. His most famous novels are The Three Musketeers and its sequel Twenty Years After, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask.

How can we celebrate the birthday of this very popular author, perhaps the most widely read French author of all time?

1. Start reading one of his novels. I’m planning to check out Dumas’s Le Reine Margot, which purports to tell the story of Marguerite de Valois, the daughter of the infamous Catherine de’ Medici and King Henry II of France.

2. Listen to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. The story of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King was written by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of the story was set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

3. Teacher notes for The Three Musketeers.

4. Enjoy a Three Musketeers bar.

5. Watch a movie based on one of Alexandre Dumas’ books. Dumas’ works have inspired more than 200 films. I recommend:

The Three Musketeers (1973) with Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Michael York. The newer one (1993) with Kiefer Sutherland and Chris O’Donnell is OK, but I like the old one better. Oliver Reed will always be my image of Athos.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). The story’s better than the movie, but the movie’s not bad. Rated PG-13.

6. Play Three Musketeers. Have an adventure. All for one and one for all. Do kids pretend such things anymore?

7. Make a musketeer costume.

8. Teacher activities for The Count of Monte Cristo.

Do you have anything to say about Alexandre Dumas or his books? Share a link here for his birthday celebration.

1. Nick Pelling (The Dumas Club)
2. Barbara H. (The Count of Monte Cristo)

3. Becky (The Three Musketeers)
4. SuziQoregon (The Three Musketeers)

Meta-Blogging Blog Recovery

Jul24

I’m back. If you didn’t notice I was gone for the last week and a half, please know that I did. Notice, that is.

As far as we can tell, someone hacked into my blog and caused it to use a lot more CPU on the server than it should, which in turn shut the whole thing down. I could get the front page to load, sometimes, but couldn’t get to the pages where you post or any other pages for that matter. When it looked as if my blogging days were coming to an abrupt halt since the webhost people couldn’t fix the problem and Computer Guru Son didn’t know what to do, I was rather unhappy and sad.

At first, I wondered if I was too attached to blogging. Maybe the crash of my blog was a sign that I should step back, reevaluate, and give up blogging gracefully. However, as I thought and prayed (yes, prayed) about it some more, I realized that my blog is an aspect of my work. I feel called to blog about books, and ideas, and faith and the intersection of those areas of life. I’m under no illusions that what I say here is going to “change the world”, but I am called to be faithful in small things. And this blog is one of my small things.

So, I am very thankful todayto Mr. Bill of Thinklings and Out of the Bloo who helped me to figure out what was wrong and then fix it. He deserves a medal, but for now all I have to give him is a great big THANK YOU.

Hooray! Later today we celebrate Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and other great adventure stories. And on Saturday, the Saturday Review is back and running . . . the Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Jul14

Where have I been, and why haven’t I read any novels by Wendell Berry before? Why hasn’t this man, Wendell Berry, won a Pulitzer Prize or something? He writes about real people, the kind of people I knew growing up in West Texas, even though his people are in a fictional place called Port William, Kentucky. His people say things and talk about things that I heard growing up, like:

filling stations
the jumping-off place
finicky
I reckon
sick as a dog
minnnow buckets
toe the mark

And Mr. Jayber Crow is one of the most thoughtful characters I’ve read about in any book. He’s a homespun philosopher, and better yet, a loving man.

And this is what is was like—the words were just right there in my mind, and I knew they were true: ‘the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God move upon the face of the waters.’ I’m not even sure that I can tell you what was happening to me then, or that I know even now. At the time I surely wasn’t trying to tell myself. But after all my years of reading in that book and hearing it read and believing and disbelieving it, I seemed to have wandered my way back to the beginning—not just of the book, but of the world—and all the rest was yet to come. I felt knowledge crawl over my skin.”

That last sentence, can’t you just feel it, too? I really had an experience somewhat like Jayber’s myself when I was about thirteen years old. I wondered if all I had been taught and all the Bible knowledge I had memorized was really true. I thought and prayed for an entire Sunday afternoon, by myself in the churchyard, and at a point I just knew. No audible voice, but I knew that God was there, that He was the Christ, that the Holy Spirit spoke to me.

“And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly. I had almost no sooner broke my leash than I had hit the wall.”

I have come to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here. And when I think about it, it can seem strange beyond telling that this particular bunch of us should be here on this little patch of ground in this little patch of time, and I can think of other times and places I might have lived, other kinds of man I might have been. But there is something else. There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, with one another and with the place and all the living things.

Jayber Crow is a book about community and about the secret life of a Kentucky bachelor and about love that is love even when it’s unconsummated. Mr. Berry has an axe to grind in his antipathy for modern farming and agri-business, but he also has a story to tell about the goodness of country life back in the 1930’s and 40’s. And there’s another, deeper theme to this book, about the surprising twists and turns of a life lived for an audience of One, lived before God, even in the times when God seems to be far away.

“Nearly everything that has happened to me has happened by surprise. All the important things have happened by surprise. And whatever has been happening usually has already happened before I have had time to expect it. The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?”

An eternal story that is happening partly in time. What a great description of the sense that we have that we are somehow trapped in time but not meant to be there, mortal but meant to be immortal.

I also read Hannah Coulter a couple of weeks ago, and I’ll just say that I’m hooked. I think you might be, too, if you try either of the two books I’ve just finished. Port William, Kentucky is a place I want to visit again and yet again; I might even like to settle down there, even if I am a city girl at heart. Mr. Berry makes country life sound awfully enticing.

Mere Comments on the News

Jul14

S.M. Hutchens on education: Maieusis, the work of midwives, involves knowledge and opinion about the process and what its ends are. Those who practice it must understand what is normal and desirable, know error or anomaly, and take steps to correct it with as much force as is required to accomplish the right end. The teacherâ€™s task, to be sure, is essentially that of a guide and encourager, but to do this he must know the path to be taken, and equally, what is not the path, and is to be discouraged. His knowledge of his subject is not to be imparted or simply transferred as much as put forward for the advantage of the learner–who is to make of it what he can, and may be examined by the master on that making, the examination, ideally, being for the master’s learning as well as the student’s.

Anthony Esolen on conservatism and so-called homosexual marriage: When a high court overthrows over two millennia of western tradition, all English common law, and the express will of the people, to engage in an unheard of experiment touching upon the most intimate matters of human society — marriage and the family — and when the people supinely put up with it, at best hoping to tweak the decision or overturn it in some vainly hoped-for election, then it is not the case that civic liberty will soon be lost. It already has been lost. Quit looking at the ephemeral! Your forefathers rebelled over a few high-handed taxes without parliamentary representation. They and their descendants for a hundred and fifty years would have tarred and feathered the silly members of that court, denouncing them as fools and tyrants, and putting them back in their place.

Celebration Reminder

Jul14

Please note that the third installment in the Semicolon Author Celebration Series takes place on Thursday, July 17th, as we celebrate the birthday of musician and poet Isaac Watts. If you have something, anything, to say about Mr. Watts, please write it up and bring your link to the party on the 17th.

Here’s a little preview from a past post.

Would that be a retro-preview?

The Sunday Salon: Ruminating and Rambling

Jul13

I just joined Sunday Salon this week, and I’m planning to use it as an opportunity to think about what I’ve been reading and watching and studying for the week, maybe figuring how my “media intake” has influenced my thoughts and decisions and what I might want to do in response to what God is teaching me.

I watched a couple of movies this week: Becoming Jane, the fictional story of author Jane Austen’s doomed courtship with an entangled and ultimately unavailable young man, and Finding Neverland, the somewhat fictionalized story of author James Barrie’s doomed and irresponsible courtship of a widow and mother of four boys. I’ve seen the second movie before, and I reviewed it here. I was not quite as disturbed by Finding Neverland this second time as I was the first; I had more hope that J.M. Barrie would do the right thing and grow up for the sake of his young friends. There is a theme that runs through both movies of taking responsibility, self-sacrifice, and romantic dreams being subordinated to duty. Those are not easy lessons to make palatable on film in this day and age of self-actualization, irresponsibility, and romantic delusion. So I applaud both movies for the attempt.

I’ve also finished Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, and I find that I want think about that book a bit more before I write much about it. I started reading The Deadliest Monster: An Introduction to Worldviews by J.F. Baldwin, an examination of currently popular worldviews and a comparison of those philosophies to the Christian view of life. Baldwin uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster and R.L. Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde as icons of two opposing worldviews: Mr. Hyde represents the Christian idea of original (innnate) sin and the necessity of God’s grace for salvation, and Frankenstein’s monster typifies the belief that men are only monsters because of their environment and influences and can perfect (save) themselves by their own efforts and good works.

Baldwin reminded me that none of us is truly able to perfect or redeem ourselves, that our own hearts are deceptive, and that we are all sinners in need of the mercy of God. And I have need of such reminders since I ruefully saw myself in these words from the book:

“As we grow in our faith, the little light bulb comes on that says, ‘Hey, Christ really meant it when he called himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Christianity really is true, and the rest of the world really is deceived!’ And then, unfortunately, a prideful voice whispers, ‘Aren’t I perceptive to see that Christianity is true and that every other worldview is bankrupt? I am one smart monkey.’ If we listen to this whisper, we allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking that we somehow rescued ourselves by being clever enough to see the truth.”

AH, yes, clever me, saved by grace and smart enough to do God a favor by recognizing His favor! If only that miserable tax collector were like me!

God, forgive us our pride and help us to see ourselves for the monsters we are apart from Him.

Exit Lines

Jul12

American Book Review picks their 100 Best Last Lines from novels.

I’ve posted here before about first lines, but not about closing lines. My favorites from the ABR list:

5. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally sheâ€™s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I canâ€™t stand it. I been there before. â€“Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

8. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. â€“Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

57. “All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”
â€“Voltaire, Candide (1759; trans. Robert M. Adams)

77. Tomorrow, Iâ€™ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day. â€“Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)

There were others that read pretty well, but I hadn’t read the books they came from and so couldn’t be sure that they meant what I thought they meant.

Can you guess which books end with each of these famous lines?

1. He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” he said.

2. And there they died upon a Good Friday for God’s sake.

3. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

4. Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.

5. He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.

The end. At last. An essay on last lines from The Telegraph.