C. S. Lewis, the Thief

This book brought to you by Paradise Lost (among others).

If you want a really boring drinking game, read modern Christian non-fiction and take a drink every time one of the authors quotes C. S. Lewis.

It’s boring for two reasons: first, because they all do it. So there’s really no suspense. But it’s also boring because they’re only going to do it every few chapters, and so you’re going to stay stone-cold sober.

Now, if you want an interesting drinking game, read the old Western canon of classics and take a drink every time you find something that was stolen by C. S. Lewis.

You’ll still be sober (‘cause the classics take a good long while to read) but you’ll come away astonished by what a thief Lewis was.

Make that: what a skilled thief.

My favorite is probably his theft from Milton. You know that memorable passage in The Magician’s Nephew where the lion, Aslan, sings Narnia into creation? The dirt around him starts bubbling like an unwatched pot and out of each bubble springs a new animal: an elephant, a dog, a jackdaw.

It’s such a beautiful passage, and such a beautifully odd passage. Very Lewisian.

And he completely lifted it from Milton’s Paradise Lost.  My jaw dropped when I stumbled across that one.

It’s like that for a lot of Lewis’ brilliant passages.

I remember reading through Aristotle for the first time, and thinking, Oh, this is where Lewis got his stuff about habits, and about what a thing is vs. what it’s made of. When I got to Boethius, I realized, Oh, this is where Lewis learned that it is the person we become that is more permanent and important than the hardships we suffer. When I read Plato…

Well, it’s all in Plato, isn’t it? (Bless me, what do they teach them in these schools? DRINK.)

Once I saw it in Lewis, I started seeing it other places, of course. Authors have been stealing from each other forever and—even better—riffing off each other. (“Oh, you liked Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, did you?” asks Sir Walter Raleigh. “Wait till you read my The Nymph’s Reply!”) Once you twig on to it—and I imagine most readers do somewhere around high school or college—playing “find the stolen source” can liven up just about any reading experience.

But Lewis thefts are still my favorite. Maybe it’s because he’s the best at integrating everything he takes into one, coherent worldview. (And aren’t we all going for that? Hoping to make sense of the world on that level?) Maybe it’s because being already familiar with his work when I approached those daunting, dusty Greek and Roman texts made them feel almost homey, and I’ll never cease to be grateful for the help.

Or maybe it’s just because he’s the author who seems to be having the most fun doing it. I mean, lifting the phrase “for tool, not toy meant” out of a serious, devout poem by a Roman Catholic priest and then placing those same words (slightly twisted!) into the mouth of Father Christmas in a fairy tale for children?

That’s skill. That’s delight.

So, try the Lewis game! But remember, to really play it right, you have to read lots of books. And lots of your lots of books should be old books. Always remember, as the great writer C. S. Lewis said:  “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds…can only be done by reading old books.”

(And that was a freebie for you: me quoting Lewis to give you more points. DRINK!)


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell



p.s. The drinking game suggestion is a joke, folks, don't yell at me...

This post contains Amazon affiliate links; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.  (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Weekend Links - Memorial Day Edition

SOME GOOD READING FOR YOUR SUNDAY AFTERNOON, SET OUT IN MY USUAL CATEGORIES OF FAITH, AND FAMILY, AND FICTION) ...

But first, on this Memorial Day, here is a prayer from the BCP, in remembrance of those who have given their lives for our country:

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead: We give thee thanks for all thy servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Grant to them thy mercy and the light of thy presence; and give us such a lively sense of thy righteous will, that the work which thou hast begun in them may be perfected; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Amen.

 

Faith 

-"Gandalf, Job, and the Indignant Love of God":

So what of God’s opening lines? Is he not dealing forcefully with Job? Is he not angry? Even indignant and sarcastic? Yes, but none of this means he’s acting with anything less than merciful lovingkindness.

-"How to Glorify God By Being a Generalist" 

-"A (Very) Brief, Gospel-Centered Defense Against the Problem of Evil"

-"The Phil Vischer Podcast: Religious Liberty with Russell Moore"

-"A Call for Plodding Bloggers"

-"Is Your Pastor Happy to See You?":

To be a Christian is to be a churchman or churchwoman. The New Testament knows of no vibrant discipleship apart from life in the local church, no authentic Christianity divorced from the covenant of life together according to the biblical structure of the local church. And if this is true, it behooves us to be the best churchmen and churchwomen we can be. And good churchfolk love, respect, and submit to their pastors.

Family

-"Keeping the Calendar to One Day" - an inspirational idea from Ann.

-"Don't Dismiss Housework":

This is where, I would argue, the moral imagination comes in. The task of cleaning itself may not require a lot of intellectual prowess—but it does require a great deal of imaginative skill and understanding. The work of maintaining a home is tied up inexplicably in the question of what it means to be human, and the person who cares for the home must adhere to a set of underlying ideas and mores that make his or her work meaningful. After all, why is it that we do not wish to live in squalor? Why do we see cleanliness and order as essential tenets for human flourishing? It must be because these constitute basic understandings of what human life should constitute—ideas that have a moral and spiritual tradition.

-"What I've Learned in Twenty Years of Marriage": I love the difference he articulates between a "merger marriage" and a "start-up marriage".

-"Blue-Collar Contentment"

-"Talking to My Boys After the Transgender Talk at Their Public School" - a helpful article.

Now, onto the links...

Fiction

- "Save the Allegory!"  - allegories: both different and cooler than you might have thought they were.

-"'Gossamer', by Stephen Baxter" - this beautiful short story pictures life (a very different sort of life) way out on the cold plains of Pluto.

-"A Letter to Friends Looking to Break into a Part-Time Writing Career" - not strictly regarding fiction, but good writing advice all the same.

Finally, if you haven't yet, please come and enter the giveaway for a copy of "Not Alone"!  The stories in it of faith during suffering are truly inspiring.

Have a good and meaningful Memorial Day, folks!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekly Links - Christmas Edition

I know, I know, it's not weekly at all. But, Christmas!

Okay, here's my list of good reading for what's left of your weekend - and I've been saving links the whole time I've been on holiday, so this particular link entry is particularly full of goodness!

It IS still Christmas, for two more days, so I'll start with the seasonal links:

-"Christmas Can Be Creative!" - fun (mostly easy!) group-oriented ideas for the last few days of Christmas.

-"The Party Has Just Begun" - I'm a bit late linking to this one, but it's good for the last few days of Christmas this year, and it's also so resource-full that it's a good one to bookmark for when the season rolls around again.

-"Every Shepherd Soul" and the Invisible Mission of the Son - a good meditation on a mostly-forgotten hymn.

-"The Slaying Song Tonight" - Unlike the rest of the links on the list, this one isn't informational. It's a piece of holiday flash fiction by Lars Walker, one of my favorite authors. Flash fiction often requires at least two readings, because the ending can change your perception of the beginning so much. That's certainly so in this case.

-"Christmas Traditions Without Kids" - Another good one to bookmark. So many holiday activities are planned around children, but not everyone is a parent, and Lisa has lots of good thoughts on how to celebrate with your loved ones if that's the case for you.


Now, moving on to the more general interest links:

-"Making Home" - Jessica Brown is one of my new favorite authors (I might have had a sneak peek at her upcoming book project), and I thought this meditation of hers was really beautiful.

-"You Don't Need a Date Night" - for all of us who love just living ordinary life with our spouses!

-"Why Is English So Weirdly Different From Other Languages?" - my fellow etymology nerds will love this one. (Especially when you read here that etymology isn't really a big deal in languages that aren't as weird as ours!)

-"King Lear: The Syntax and Scansion of Insanity" - Another good one for English nerds - esp. if you're into not just etymology, but also literature.

-"The Secret to My Productivity, Or: Thoughts About Luxury and Privilege" - a lot of home truths here.

-"Writing Wednesday: Are Short Stories Worth It?" - Yes - but only if you sincerely like them!

-"7 Reasons to Join the Liturgy of Life Reading Group 2016" - Another one from Erica and, yes, I might have personal reasons for thinking this looks like a great reading group, but even aside from those: Folks, this looks like a great reading group!



Happy Christmas, dear ones!

-Jessica Snell

Long thoughts on short stories

The fun of writing short stories is that you can write the “what if?”, but you don't have to write the whole arc. You can write a disaster, but you don’t have to solve it.  If in a novel (at least, in my novels), you have to have the triumph of the hero who struggles against a tragedy, in a short story you can just depict the tragedy itself.

The short story form is freer. You don’t – ha! – you don’t have to tell the whole story. Yes, it has to have movement. You have to have a change, or a decision, or a revelation. It’s not a static scene. That’s not interesting. It has to have movement.

But for someone like me, who believes that the story of, well, everything has, at its heart, a redemptive arc, and that that arc is at the heart of every good story – or that it at least has to be possible (there are tragedies where redemption is refused) – the short story allows for more experimentation. Because it's not the whole thing. It’s a small sliver. It’s a piece. It’s five minutes of the two-hour movie. It’s a scene.

And it better be a compelling scene. It better matter, it better mean something . . . but it doesn’t carry the weight that a longer piece of art – like a novel – has to carry. It can’t.

It can let you feel something – let you feel something exquisitely – without explaining all the rest of it. You get a little piece. It’s a sketch, a snippet, a sample.

And it’s fun to get to do that, especially when you’re used to writing things that take you months and months to complete. It’s fun to do something quick – something whose composition takes you a day, an hour – maybe only a few minutes.

I imagine the feeling is similar to what artists who work on 6’ canvases in oils feel when they get to do a 5-min. watercolor sketch.

Sometimes, short stories come out of “this feels like a little idea. I want a little canvas for it.”

Sometimes, short stories come out of the “this feels like a big idea, but I just want to highlight this tiny piece of it.”

They’re their own art form. And I’m not arguing that the short story is either inferior or superior to the novel.

It’s just that, as a novelist who’s now experimenting with shorter forms, I’m enjoying figuring out what works here, and why it works.

It’s fun!


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekly Links

My weekly round-up of interesting reading from around the web:


"A Sonnet Is Not a Martini: the Art of the Narrative Turn":

The problem, in a nutshell, is that our minds habituate too quickly to mere escalation. We adjust too readily to the simple addition of orcs. Plenty of films seem not to realize this, relying on faster car chases and more elaborate fight scenes to keep us engaged. Far more effective is a narrative turn.

"Open Letter to a Trapped Wife":

Abigail dealt with her blockhead husband with all wisdom, and everything consequently came to a head. She was submissive to him, up to a point, and went completely around him in another sense. In this way she was very much like her future husband David, who honored the Lord’s anointed, refusing to take Saul’s life when he had the opportunity, while at the same not cooperating with Saul at all. David honored Saul as his anointed king, even while disobeying him. David did not turn himself in. Abigail did the same kind of thing. She honored her husband as her husband, but also did what was necessary to save her household. This was not simply a discrete, stand-alone action, but was rather a step in the story that helped bring everything to a head.

"20 Years":

More than a decade ago, I wrote “Marriage is work. It never stops being work. It never should.” I stand by that observation. Krissy and I were in love the day we were married and are in love now, twenty years later. But that love is not a default state of being. It is a choice we make every day, and work follows that choice. Work is the proof of that choice. Love is the result of that work. Love gives us another day together, and the opportunity to make that choice once more.

"Prepping for an Author Visit? Read This!": for my fellow authors. Good stuff.

A Goodreads Q&A with Lois McMaster Bujold:

"How high is up?" is one of those dangerous questions that each writer must answer for themselves. Setting goals unrealistically high guarantees frustration, too low risks not challenging oneself to do as well as one otherwise might. (As a rule of thumb, it is also better to focus on what you can do, and not on other people's non-controllable responses. "Finish a book" is controllable, "sell a book" less so, "become a bestseller or win an award" still less so. Unhappy is the writer who boards this train wrong way round.)

"The Preach Moment":

And so here's what's wrong with Andy Stanley, and everybody else really, because I know you're longing for my summation of three minutes of TV preaching. Here it is, ready? I Can't Do It. I can't do the work you're telling me to do. I can't be welcoming enough. I can't be happy enough. I can't be positive enough. I can't be good enough. I can't be sinless enough. I can't pray enough. I can't rest enough. I can't do it. I'll just repeat that, as if I were actually saying this to Andy Stanley, I Can't Do It. And you telling me to work harder actually just makes me angry and slightly hating of God. Stop piling work on me. I can't do it.

Weekly Links

"Guy in your MFA":

 Guy In Your MFA (Guy) was born out of a big stack of pieces I needed to critique for the next day and my frustration with this whole culture of pseudo-pretentious literary works, both in myself and in my colleagues.

"Five Things Every Christian Should be Doing with God’s Word"

. . . Psalm 119 is one of the best examples of Scripture speaking about Scripture.  It is the Word about the Word.
And in it, we find David interacting with the Word of God in five ways that should be paradigmatic for all believers . . .

"The Most Qualified By Far: On Clinton and Qualifications":

Mrs. Clinton is one times more qualified than Mr. Bush . . . at best.

"A Composed Salad Is a Meal Unto Itself":

 . . . it can contain almost anything the cook wants to arrange, roll, roast, poach, bake or grill, from thin shavings of fennel and whole kernels of local corn to dollops of ricotta and shards of country ham. Tossed together, the result would be sloppy and monotonous. A bit of order makes it satisfying and elegant.

Weekend Links: poetry, P. D. James, Lord of the Rings, and more!

Some good reading from around the Web for your weekend:

"Across the Grey Atlantic": a gorgeous piece of poetry from James Harrington:

Across the grey Atlantic,

Across Saint Brendan’s sea,

Is the land where the lairds wear sackcloth

And all the serfs are free . . .

Click through the link to read the rest.

"The Last Man and the First Man":

Scanning half a dozen major journals for obituaries devoted to the most important mystery writer of our time, P. D. James (1920–2014), I was astonished to find that not one of them mentioned her serious Anglo-Catholicism, much less its shaping presence in her fiction . . .

"Can you tell me why Frodo is so important in lotr? Why can't someone else, anyone else, carry the ring to mordor?"

but someone else could.

that’s the whole point of frodo—there is nothing special about him, he’s a hobbit, he’s short and likes stories, smokes pipeweed and makes mischief, he’s a young man like other young men, except for the singularly important fact that he is the one who volunteers. there is this terrible thing that must be done, the magnitude of which no one fully understands and can never understand before it is done, but frodo says me and frodo says I will.

"Things I Love about the Things I Love. Part One: Knitting, Top Five":  this GIF-full post gets it exactly right.

"Ezekiel, 'Uncommon and Eccentric?'": I found this very helpful in understanding a bit more about this hard-to-understand OT prophet.

"SDfAoWOP: the Girl":

There is a God, she says, who can heal and save. How can this be? You wonder. How can a little girl, a child, know this God? How can she set aside the bitterness of abuse and loss? But her clear firm gaze, the strength of her words win you over and you go and tell your husband and he listens.

St. Augustine's "The City of God", Book 2

I admit that this chapter was harder going for me than Book 1 was. A lot of it is Augustine recounting the sins of the Roman empire and their pagan way of life.

But, on the other hand, it's the indictment of a luxurious, over-ripe, falling empire in its twilight years. I hope I'm not living in one such myself, but reading this made me wonder.  Try this on for size:

Only let it remain undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace; and what matters it to us? This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities . . . Let  the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure.

Yeah . . . that's reading for an election year.

Loud and Immodest
Augustine points out that sacred entertainment - the plays and festivals put on to honor the gods - has become sacred because it's entertaining. Everyone wants to be entertained and to party. And he says:

If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it, let him be silenced, banished, put an end to.

Reminds me of the loud outcry on any internet forum if you suggest that some show or movie might be too unedifying to watch.

Evil has limits
And, finally, something comforting. The good bishop reminds us:

. . . for as wicked men on earth cannot do all they would, so neither can these demons.

Amen!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

p.s. I have to include this quotation too, because it's awesome:

Awake more fully: the majesty of God cannot be propitiated by that which defiles the dignity of man.

Book Notes: "Persuasion" by Jane Austen

Persuasion by Jane Austen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The thing that surprised me most about this book was what a fast read it was.

I've known the basic plot points of "Persuasion" for awhile now (my first introduction to the story was a truly horrible dramatization of it, watched about two decades ago), but it's only recently I had the urge to pick it up.

It was wonderful. I gobbled the story up, and it was easy to do so because this is such a lovely, light, compact little story. And I don't mean "little" in any slighting way. It's small and perfect, the way miniature models are small and perfect.

Our heroine was persuaded, years before the start of the story, to reject the man who loves her. Her friends explained that he's not good enough for her, and even compelled our kind-hearted heroine to believe that saying "no" to him is the kindest thing she can do . . . for *him*.

She spends years regretting this.

Near the beginning of our story, the hero comes back into her social circle, and the whole first 9/10ths of the book is spent exploring the simple question, "is it too late for us to be happy together?"

If you know romances at all, you'll know the answer, but Austen gets us there masterfully, introducing us to some of her best satirical characters along the way (the heroine's father and sisters! *shudder*). "Persuasion" doesn't have the yawningly slow pace of "Emma" (don't kill me, I still love it!) nor the giddy society whirl of "Pride and Prejudice", but it has a lovely heroine, a compelling question to answer, and a very well-earned happy ending.

View all my reviews

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

A Response from Lois McMaster Bujold about "Borders of Infinity" and Dante

Okay, I just barely resisted titling this post, "Because Bujold is Awesome, That's Why." :D

Earlier this year, I posted my theory that "Borders of Infinity" by Lois McMaster Bujold was at least partly inspired by Dante's "Inferno". A reader of the blog later encouraged me to send my thoughts to Bujold, and, eventually, I did.

She wrote me a fascinating response in return, and kindly gave me permission to share it here.

Here it is:

  Insofar as I can remember what I was thinking back in 1986 when I wrote this novella, yes, the shout-out to the Divine Comedy was intended -- but not entirely consciously, and_ certainly_ not in advance. It came glimmering up out of the material as I wrote, as such things do, and I took what fit and served the story. (As opposed to devising a story to embody some preselected template.) So a point-by-point analysis is bound to fail at some points.

  You can also get a glancing reference to Eurydice out of Beatrice, if you squint. (As, in the tale of Orpheus-and-.) I'm an equal-opportunity culture thief.

  There is certainly a... metaphor? parable? to be had out of the story, if one is inclined that way, about grace having to be something that breaks in from outside; you can't pull it out of your own ear unaided. Or the tale can be read on the surface, skimming along as a straight-up milSF adventure. What sort of reading each reader gets from it will depend sensitively upon the prior contents of each head. Sort of like a Rorschach blot, that way. But that very quality is just what makes books and stories so endlessly debatable.

  Good on you for spotting the Bunyan take. (That passage gave my French translators fits, by the way, Bunyan not being a common cultural reference in France at all. Nor, admittedly, among Americans, but let them hear who have ears and all that.)

  I have an amusing story about the Bunyan quote. I was hand-writing the first draft of this in the Marion Public Library, where I fled to work at this period of my life since it was not possible to do so at home with kids, and came upon that point where I needed something that sounded scriptural but wasn't actually Biblical. I bethought myself of Bunyan, whom I had read some years before, went to the shelves, found a copy (I don't think it had been checked out for quite a while), and flipped it open more-or-less at random to right there, or at least in the first few pages I glanced at. Stole it immediately, slapped it in where needed, and went on. But the story was already partly written and plotted at that point, so any homage was _ad lib_, not designed.

 My initial internal vision of the prison camp was more WWII barracks-like, but first, it wasn't very SFnal, and second, as a person who values and needs her solitude, my idea of hell is to be trapped with a gazillion people and be unable to get away from them. So that dome has to partly be chalked up to my personal taste, as well.

I did have a WWII veteran remark recently that "Borders" was the most perfect WWII story he'd ever read. Still thinking about that one.

Bujold has long been one of my favorite authors, and this thoughtful response just put me over the moon. My thanks to her for letting me share it.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Links: Single Motherhood, Sex, Star Trek, and more

"The Kids Are Not Really Alright":

Take two contemporary social problems: teenage pregnancy and the incarceration of young males. Research by Sara McLanahan at Princeton University suggests that boys are significantly more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by a single mother. Specifically, McLanahan and a colleague found that boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity.

"Sex, Submission, and Evangelicals":

Weirdly, Evans’s admission seems to suggest that the language of violence does more harm than the actual practice of violence within the home, even if such violence is itself consensual. But while reforming a culture’s attitudes toward sex is all sorts of difficult, it seems like beginning at home is a pretty decent start. Allowing couples to play at domination simply because they both like it strikes me as incommensurate with decrying the practice elsewhere. Our playing, simply put, matters and we get our ideas for it somewhere. The bedroom is not so self-contained and isolated from the rest of our lives as Evans seems to imply, and if looking at porn implicates us in a culture of hostility toward women, than certainly playing with sadomasochism must do the same.

"Where Are the Cast of Voyager Now?": Fun trip down memory lane for those of us who were teenage nerds (and maybe had a poster of the cast on their walls back in the day).

"Created to be his Helpmeet" (a review):

Pearl seeks to be the Titus 2 woman, sharing with her readers wisdom that she has accumulated in many years of being a Christian, of being a wife, of raising a family. But there is a serious problem. Throughout the book, Pearl shows that she is a poor and unwise mentor. In place of the wisdom and the fruit of the Spirit that ought to mark a mentor, she displays a harsh and critical spirit, she offers foolish counsel, she teaches poor theology, she misuses Scripture, and she utterly misses the centrality of the gospel.

Second part of the review is here.

"Top 5 First Lines" - Matt listed his. I listed mine in the comments. Go add yours!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

the Zombie Apocalypse: what is it we're so scared of?

Zombies are really big in sci-fi right now. So are post-apocalyptic novels. So are post-apocalyptic zombie novels.

The Story Behind the Story
I had a professor who pointed out that the thing about the gospel is that there's no story behind that story: God becoming incarnate to save fallen humanity? That's the story. That's the real story, and it's not symbolizing something else or foreshadowing anything. It is The Story. It means exactly what it says. It means itself.

But sci-fi isn't like that. Oh, there's a place for a good tale well-told that earns its hearing just because it's a good tale, well-told. Your humorous romp through the galaxy. Your gorgeous space opera adventure that's just plain fun.

But lots of sci-fi is about the story behind the story. You get a big change in society - like the prevalence of television as entertainment - and you get Fahrenheit 451. You have a new common enemy - like communism - and you get 1984.

Speculative fiction's always done this. Sometimes it's a warning (you can't ignore the "repent or you will likewise perish" implicit in The Hunger Games' premise). Sometimes it's just a way to figure out the implications of a new piece of technology. Sometimes it's both (see M.T. Anderson's Feed).

So, What's with the Zombies?
What is with the zombies? Why are they the current enemy of choice? What are we so scared of?


I have some ideas:

1) Death. This is the most obvious - I mean, zombies are death itself - living death - chasing you. Our society ignores death as much as it can, hides it away in hospitals and funeral homes. Maybe death has become so unknown that it's become a terror, and zombies are a way to make it visceral again, with the idea that if you can stare your fear - in all it's gory horror - in its decomposing face, and come away unscathed, then your fear isn't so fearful anymore.

2) An enemy that isn't any of us. It's not PC to have enemies. Throughout human history, the enemy has been the one who lives somewhere else and might come invade us. The one we don't know, who we don't understand. One of the good things about technology is that it's made it easier to learn about other cultures - video even lets us feel like we've traveled the globe! But that means we can't dehumanize other humans easily. This is good, but we still want stories about real enemies, so we can have real victories we feel good about. Zombies? Not human. You can hate them as much as you want.

3) Which leads us to . . . unhuman enemies. We've hidden death, and learned to disbelieve in the supernatural. But much like death, the supernatural is still there. Zombies are easily a substitute both for the demonic and for infernal passions. What lies underneath, what we don't want to look at . . . well, we're still scared of it, and we still want stories that offer us hope.

4) Comfort. Zombie stories and post-apocalyptic novels are all about worse-case scenarios. And why are those so fascinating? Well, because we want hope. We need hope. And it's backwards, it's completely backwards, but it's so human to gloomily try to think of the worst possible thing that could ever happen . . . and ask, "then what?" We ask, "what would I do? What could we do? There is something we could do, right?"
        And zombie apocalypse novels say, "right," and then construct their survival scenarios. That's comforting.

And End to Fear
So . . . I think those might be the stories behind these stories. But they're not entirely satisfying narratives, are they? No one ever beats death in these stories, though sometimes the implication is that there's a racial victory, humanity triumphant. You're going to die, but your people will live on.


That's the best they offer though. It's hope, of a sort. But you're still left with death, in the end.

Could there be a Christian take on the zombie story? I don't know. Maybe. I'd certainly be interested in reading a good  effort at it. But eventually, really, I think in the end you need to go back to The Story, to the gospel. Because that one is about how a Man actually beat Death - really. Truly. No zombies included.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell


p.s. There's something else going on in the straight-forward post-apocalyptic novels. They're very much like the "the government is going to kill us" old-school science  fiction. They just put a world apocalypse as the catalyzing event, and then get on with the Evil Government story. Maybe I should write a blog about those next!

Chapbook Entry for "The Elizabethan Wolrd Picture" by E. M. W. Tillyard

"The greatness of the Elizabethan age was that it contained so much of the new without bursting the noble form of the old order." -pg. 8

"Indeed all the violence of Elizabethan drama has nothing to do with a dissolution of moral standards: on the contrary, it can afford to indulge itself just because those standards were so powerful." -pg. 20

"The chain [of being] is also a ladder. The elements are alimental. There is a progression in the way the elements nourish plants, the fruits of plants beasts, and the flesh of beasts men. And this is all one with the tendency of man upwards towards God." -pg. 28

". . . the chain of being . . . made vivid the idea of a related universe where no part was superfluous; it enhanced the dignity of all creation, even the meanest part of it." -pg 31, emphasis mine.

"Far from being dignified and tending to an insolent anthropocentricity, the earth in the Ptolemaic system was the cesspool of the universe, the repository of its grossest dregs." -pg. 39

"Our own age need not begin congratulating itself on its freedom from superstition till it defeats a more dangerous temptation to despair." -pg. 54

On Fortune and the Fall:
"It was the Fall, then, that was primarily responsible for the tyranny of fortune, and, this being so, man could not shift the blame but must bear his punishment as he can." -pg. 55

"But however pessimistic orthodoxy could be about the heaviness of the punishment inflicted through fortune on man for his fall, it always fought the superstition that man was the slave as well as the victim of chance." -pg. 55


"Raleigh . . . begins with saying that it is an error to hold with the Chaldaeans Stoics and others that the stars bind man with an ineluctable necessity. It is the opposite error to suppose that they are mere ornament." -pg. 56

On Knowledge and Reason
". . . one of man's highest faculties is his gift for disinterested knowledge. It was through that gift that he might learn something of God." -pg. 72, emphasis mine.

"Far from being a sign of modesty, innocence, or intuitive virtue, not to know yourself was to resemble the beasts, if not in coarseness at least in deficiency of education. to know yourself was not egoism but the gateway to all virtue." -pg. 72, emphasis mine.


"Morally the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, if taken seriously, must be impressive. If the heavens are fulfilling punctually their vast and complicated wheelings, man must feel it shameful to allow the workings of his own little world to degenerate." -pg. 93

Bujold's "Borders of Infinity" and Dante's "Inferno"

It's pet literary theory time!

Here is my theory - and if anyone besides me has noticed this, I haven't read about it, so it's just begging for a English term paper to be written on it - I think that Lois McMaster Bujold's novella The Borders of Infinity is (among other things) a riff on Dante's Inferno.

Why? (Here there be spoilers. For both works.)

1. The Borders of Infinity opens with Miles Vorkosigan thinking, "How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?" Hell. Yes. That one word is part of my evidence.  But, folks, it's the paragraph, and it sets the tone for the rest of the story. Miles is in Hell.

2. The prison camp is circular. So is Dante's Hell.

3. There are circles within the circles (see the women's section of the camp).

4. Miles has a literary (okay, at least literature-obsessed) guide. Yes, I am saying that Suegar=Virgil.

4a. You could argue that Oliver=Suegar. Okay, go ahead: convince me.

5. There is even someone running in circles. Yes, I know that sounds more like the Purgatorio than the Inferno, but, you know, it's still Dante.

6. BEATRICE LEADS HIM UP.   Yes, I'm shouting. Yes, that's my biggest piece of evidence. (Term paper folks still with me? Okay, here's your paper topic: why does the Virgil figure go up in Bujold's version, while the Beatrice figure falls?  Aaaa. Yes. Hmm.)

6a. If Beatrice is Beatrice, does that make Cordelia the Virgin Mary? C'mon, you can't argue that that's pretty much Cordelia's place in the Vorkosigan cosmology.

7. Just try to count the references to damnation (all the things the prisoners have done with and to each other), redemption, and sin. Just try.

8. What's the theme? The harrowing of hell. Yes it is. (Term paper people: is Miles a Christ figure? What does that mean for his relationship with his mother? Make sure you use the pond incident from Komarr in your answer. Also, reference his fourteen-shuttle-groups-for-the-fourteen-apostles statement.)

9. The saints (i.e., the Dendarii observers, Elena and Elli) are watching and listening to Dante's (Miles') prayers. (Term paper people: is this evidence against the thesis put forth in point 8?)

10. Suegar's scripture is from Pilgrim's Progress, about when the pilgrims finally make it to Heaven. HA! "HA!", I say.



Hee, hee, hee. Okay, that was so much fun.

What do you think? Did I make my point? More importantly, did I miss anything?

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you purchase something through these links, I'll receive a small percentage of the purchase price - for my own shopping! :) (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Top 10 Romantic Heroines of Literature

The twin of this post (Top 10 Romantic Heroes) can be found here. You'll notice that not every half of each couple is on both lists, and that's because some heroes are better than their heroines, and some heroines than their heroes, at least when it comes to loving their mate. Or perhaps it's just that they face sterner competition on their side of the dividing line.

Be that as it may - in no particular order - here are my votes for the Top 10 Romantic Heroines of Literature:

-Britomart, from "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser.
-Ekaterin Vorvayne, from "A Civil Campaign" by Lois McMaster Bujold.
-Harriet Vane, from "Gaudy Night", by Dorothy Sayers.
-Jane Eyre, from "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte.
-Beatrice, of "Much Ado About Nothing", by William Shakespeare.
-Viola, of "Twelfth Night, or, What You Will", by William Shakespeare.
-Prudence Tremaine, from "The Masqueraders", by Georgette Heyer.
-Phoebe Marlow, from "Sylvester, or, The Wicked Uncle", by Georgette Heyer.
-Eowyn, from "The Lord of the Rings", by J. R. R. Tolkien.
-Elizabeth Bennett, from "Pride and Prejudice", by Jane Austen.

In case you're curious, the couples which contain individuals who BOTH made their respective Top 10s are:

-Miles Vorkosigan and Ekaterin Vorvayne
-Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey
-Prudence Tremaine and Anthony Fanshawe
-Pheobe Marlow and Sylvester, Duke of Salford.
-Eowyn and Faramir

And, of course, I have a few runners-up:

-Ginny Weasley
-the Essie Summers heroine
-the Carla Kelly heroine

What do you think? Do you agree? Did I make a villainous omission anywhere? Or just a thoughtless oversight? Is there anyone there you think doesn't belong?

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Dr. Who + Captain Picard + Shakespeare = AWESOME!

As I type, this is winging its way to me from Amazon. I can't wait! The clips I've peeked at on youtube are great. David Tennant as Hamlet? Patrick Stewart as Claudius (and the ghost!)? Could it get any better?

If any of my friends/family who read this blog and are in the area want to watch this with me, let me know! I know some of you are as nerdy as me. :)  Popcorn, beer and Hamlet?

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Book 8 of 15: Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard

I have to admit that when I picked this up I was expecting something like Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird", a contemplation of the writing life. But this is actually a book of literary criticism, and, sadly, of the deadly kind.

Not that it's not well-written. It's Annie Dillard; it's perfectly written. There's not a clunker of a sentence in the whole thing. And that sort of fits her theme: that the art of fiction is in the art, and not in the story.

She spends the first half of the book describing modernist fiction as the sort of fiction whose strength is art, not story. To decide on a given piece of fiction's excellence, then, you would ask not "is it true?" but "is it well-done?". And to this, I found myself asking, "why wouldn't you ask both questions?" She spent some time deploring the fact that the masses would rather have "realized content" or "depth" in their stories instead of the self-referential integrity of "form" within their stories.

Yes, yes. Some of us think fiction is about the characters and the narrative. We poor, ignorant, bourgeois clods. We'd rather you told us a story than that you showed off your skill at word-arranging. (Again: can't we have both? The beautiful prose, the elegant structure - and the compelling plot?)

I am also one of those ill-educated clods who think that language can actually correspond to objects in the real world. I know. Dillard, to her credit, does eventually come down on the side that language can have shared meaning among different people, albeit imperfectly shared meaning.

Dillard then goes from performing literary criticism to singing a paen of praise about literary criticism. She declares that fiction itself is impotent until someone critiques it. Not merely reads it. Critiques it. Fiction interprets the world, but critics interpret fiction, and the works of fiction are mute until the critics do their job.

Yes. Of course. I'm sure that's exactly how it goes. Forget arguments about author's intent vs. what the reader brings to the story - it's all about what the critic brings to the story. Uh-huh. That's even better!

So, I spent the beginning of this book being angry (hard not to be when she keeps asking questions like, "after you have read a detailed analysis of Eliot's 'Four Quartets' . . . why would you care to write fiction like Jack London's . . . ?", as if the world weren't big enough for both), but I ended it just feeling sad.

I mean, here is Annie Dillard: brilliant, talented, writer of unmatchably elegant prose, a woman who cares deeply about literature, and she's left at the end unable to assert that literature actually does anything useful in the world. She hopes it does. She's inclined to think it does - she's especially inclined to think that fiction can interpret the human (as opposed to the natural) world to us. She says "art remakes the world according to sense," and I can see what she's saying. But she can't, in the end, actually assert any of these beliefs, because her philosophy of knowledge keeps her from saying, "I am right," or even "this, at least, I know."

I am with her when she says that not knowing completely doesn't keep us from not knowing at all. But she seems to lose even this conviction by the end of the book. This is - I kid you not - the final paragraph, and the point at which I gave up my (faint, but persistent) hope that all of these chapters were leading up to some variation of "of course, I am only joking":

Which shall it be? Do art's complex and balanced relationships among all parts, its purpose, significance, and harmony, exist in nature? Is nature whole, like a completed thought? Is history purposeful? Is the universe of matter significant? I am sorry; I do not know.

Now, please, tell me I am not the only person who reads that and wants to weep for the woman. This poor lady, spending so much time, caring so much, and being left only with the cold comfort that at least within the text there are balanced relationships. No wonder, I realized at the end, she is so adamant that art be prized for art's sake. She doesn't think there's anything outside art that art could reflect. To be left with only the formal and cold beauty of Modernist fiction for your comfort? Only with the sop that at least, in this or that story, there might be internal integrity? That this or that artist made his little world have a formal logic, and so at least there, in all the huge universe, there is order? That's a small, lonely comfort indeed.

I think I'm going to go cry now.

But I also have to say: there's none so blind as those that won't see. There is a paragraph where she says:

Can we not loose the methods of literary criticism upon the raw world? May we not analyze the breadth of our experience? We can and may - but only if we first consider the raw world as a text, as a meaningful, purposefully fashioned creation, as a work of art. For we have seen that critics interpret artifacts only. Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial filmmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer.

But then, she says,

And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcendentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers.

Okay: I do understand that rational people can be atheists or agnostics (though I would argue they've followed the data incorrectly), but this seems to be a case of being unwilling to even take up the argument at all! Firstly, "no one"? Really? She must be limiting those she would consider people to, what? Academics in her own social circle? Second of all, does she have a bias against taking arguments from her ancestors? That seems very narrow. Why assume that ancient man is less intelligent than modern man? Especially when so much of what we know has built on their work? This last sentence just seems very close-minded to me. "Of course, it could be there is a meaning to the universe, but no one I know has thought so for at least a hundred years, so oh well."

I might be doing her a disservice (I hope I am), but it really does seem to be a dismissal of the bulk of humanity in favor of her own class and era of people. I guess we all have our faults. (And I do mean that - we all do, and maybe this is just where she falls down. I can feel for that, as I hope others have compassion for me in my errors.)

So, I go back and forth between being upset at this book and being saddened by this book. There is some good stuff in here (observations about artistic integrity, and the effect of an audience on the artist), but that just makes it worse, because at the end the author is not sure any of that good stuff means anything. Again, I just found this a very sad read, all the moreso because I have fond memories of her other work, and now I realize that I might ascribe more meaning to her work than she could herself.

More on the 15/15 challenge can be found here.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

a few reasons I love homeschooling

My five-year-old just picked her next poem to memorize, and chose one by Christina Rossetti. She doesn't know who Rossetti is; she just liked it. 

(Reason #1: my kids get to fall in love with the great writers before they know they're great, thus proving that very greatness.)

Her brother heard her reciting it, and memorized it too, even though he's not technically in school yet.

(Reason #2: there're more chances for the younger ones to catch virtue from the older ones.)

Her brother's loud and happy recitation prompted her to learn the poem quickly and shout it all around the house.

(Reason #3: there're more chances for the older ones to catch enthusiasm from the younger ones.)

The shouts of the five-year-old and the four-year-old led to the two-year-old twins shouting lines from the poem ("Baby, honey!")

(Reason #4: the younger sibs get to know their school-age sibs - I know I sure missed my little brother when my sister and I were both in school.)

These are not a complete apology for homeschooling or anything like it, but they are perks I'm surely enjoying right now.

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Shakespeare

I recently read a couple of great posts about Shakespeare, and so, wanting to hear a bit of the Bard myself, I put the soundtrack to this excellent performance of Twelfth Night on while I was doing the dishes. 

And, hands deep in the suds, I felt like thinking something deep about Shakespeare. But I couldn't think of anything deep. So instead, I just thought about why Twelfth Night is my favorite play of Shakespeare's. 

I don't think it's the best. (My vote on that - at least currently - is for Othello.) It's just my favorite.

And I'm still not sure why (Ben Kingsley's Feste doubtless has something to do with it), but I think part of it has to do with the cross-dressing part. Not because I think cross-dressing is a good idea. But because in the play, it's used as a device that allows the hero and heroine to fall into friendship before they fall into love. (Well, at least the hero falls into friendship first.)

And the more I think about it, the more I think that Twelfth Night is my favorite for a very biased reason: I fell into friendship before I fell into love (no cross-dressing involved). And I like reading a love story that reminds me of mine.

And my own love story? Probably not the best. But it's absolutely my favorite.

So, I'm curious, what's your favorite Shakespearian play? And which do you think is the best? And - here's the kicker - are they the same play? Or not?

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

p.s. Anyone want to do a challenge to read the Complete Works of Shakespeare? (Not to be confused with the Cmplt Wrks of Shkspr, Abridged.) Like I need another challenge. But . . . maybe in 2011?