Signs of Life (elsewhere)

The road trip proceeds apace while my rate of posting slows. I've had several readable items at my side; the best fodder for thought has been the August issue of The Believer. Andy Selsberg's The Official Handbook To The Official Handbook is online in its entirety and is worth a look.

Prairie Mary informs that Peter Butala (all-around mensch and husband to prairie writer Sharon has passed away.

DarkoV unpacks Cognitive Reserve for us (and Phil seems similarly in tune).

And getting back to field guides, Yahmdallah uncovered this beaut to tattoos. We all know what mine says about me. But one question remains: what are tattoos like these trying to communicate? (HT: Boing Boing)

Tia Maria Torte: The History

My first apartment was located in an appropriately bohemian quarter of Winnipeg (Osborne Village, circa 1987). My weekends were spent typically enough for a guy my age in that part of town, and it wasn't uncommon for me to conclude a late night with a short pit-stop at Baked Expectations for a slice of Tia Maria Torte to go. At the time, it was made with enormous chocolate chip cookies soaked in a Tia Maria solution, and held together with sweetened whipping cream. I may have eaten a portion of the enormous slice before cashing in for the night but most of it was reserved for breakfast, washed down with a pot of strong black coffee.

For my fortieth birthday, my friend hosted a breakfast and served ... Tia Maria Torte, and strong black coffee. To have been observed with such care and affection was incredible. I was, and remain, grateful.

Tia Maria Torte

Text to follow.

Alive amid the roiling prairie sea

We're here! We've already had Tia Maria Torte and black coffee for breakfast, shopped at the surly-staffed McNally-Robinson superstore (thanks to their remainder purchaser, my suitcase is half-full!), and had some mighty fine vittles both purchased and home-cooked. Details and pictures to follow.

On The Road (Again)

To Manitoba via the North Superior route. Then back again, probably via the States (more hotels with pools on their side of the border). I've got our digital camera and internet access throughout, so I'll be sure to post. Just brace yourself for "vacation kwality" posting.

Cheers!

Three Books

It's been some years since I last read Leigh Brackett; in fact I was 21 or so when I finished The Reavers of Skaith and decided I was getting too old for fun fiction and should concentrate instead on writers I might work into my honors thesis — and, more appropriately, attempt to emulate in my own efforts at serious fiction.

A cover that demands to be taken seriously.

My loss. Brackett was a writer who jumped with apparent ease from one pulp genre to the next, creating clean lean stories that hewed to convention but bore enough subtle distinctions to deliver a surprising and satisfying conclusion. The Sword of Rhiannon is a first-class example of Brackett’s facility: anyone with a passing knowledge of Celtic mythology — or the Martian books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or the Sword & Sorcery tales of Robert E. Howard — will recognise the stock characters and general direction of the story. Like Howard and Burroughs, Brackett is intent on delivering a muscular narrative, but while she’s not afraid of bold-strokes description, her choice of words never gets quite so florid as her male progenitors. Brackett seemed to assume that “Brawny arms” “heaving bosoms” and other generic clichés didn't just distract her, but her readers as well.

It’s been suggested — well, it’s actually been said outright — that Brackett's script contributions are what made The Empire Strikes Back the best of the Star Wars lot. After reading TSOR, which delivered a quick Martian Sword & Sorcery punch within 150 pages — I'm pretty much persuaded. When I finished the novel, I wondered why she and her pulp creations weren’t household names the way John Carter or Conan are. It could be Brackett’s gifts were best suited to tuning up or fixing what was already there. If so, that’s no small thing. Hollywood (and I) have been missing her for decades.

Housekeeping vs. The Dirt is Nick Hornby’s follow up to his previous collection of literary reviews for The Believer: The Polysyllabic Spree. Said Spree (a variously numbered cult of young men and women in charge of the magazine) may censor his lightest attempts at snarkiness, but Hornby’s good-natured observations still cut to some critical truths. Just prior to declaring, “It goes without saying that [Ian McEwan’s] Saturday is a very good novel,” Hornby writes:

[T]he world of books seems to be getting more bookish. Anita Brookner’s new novel is about a novelist. David Lodge and Colm Tóibín wrote novels about Henry James. In The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst wrote about a guy writing a thesis on Henry James. And in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, the central character’s father-in-law and daughter are both serious published poets and past winners of Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize for undergraduate poetry. And though nobody should ever tell a writer what to write about....Actually, forget that. Maybe somebody should. Sort it out, guys! You can’t all write literature about literature! One book a year, maybe, between you — but all of the above titles were published in the last six months. Taken as a group, these novels seem to raise the white flag: we give in! It’s hopeless! We don’t know what those people out there want! Pull up the drawbridge! 

I loved it. I read it out loud to my wife as she made the Sunday night pizza, and she loved it, too. The book is worth whatever The Believer or Amazon is charging for it, so buy, take and read. Hornby is clearly having fun, and so will you.

When I first read this creative essay by Josip Novakovich, I was reminded (not to put too fine a point to it) of essays I’d written as a very young, creative type guy. I won’t pretend to have attained the same insight, prosaic quality or emotional punch as Novakovich, but that ability to just dump the brain’s filing cabinet onto the floor and choose seemingly random bits that wind up generating their own electromagnetic fields of significance ... God, I miss that capacity! I bought Novakovich’s Writing Fiction Step By Step hoping the exercises therein would pull me out of the deeper ruts I’d carved for myself as a writer, and possibly get me thinking (and working) more productively on my current novel.

Novakovich does not disappoint. In fact, he delivers with a vengeance. I’ve no doubt Novakovich has performed every one of these exercises. He cheerfully describes writing as “a strenuous sport and a demanding art,” adding, “You must be mentally fit to do it well.” In other words, this is an exercise program for writers willing to build up the mental muscles with the dedication of a would-be Charles Atlas.

This book works well as a companion piece to Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design. For a fiction writer, both books are helpful in their own distinctive way: while Bell examines the choices made by accomplished short story writers, Novakovich’s exercises offer an entry point for the writer to discover and make those choices via experience. I began the book with the intention of doing every last exercise suggested, but quickly found that just reading the exercises and Novakovich's short meditations of their possibilities was often enough to get me up and writing — often in a very different direction than the one suggested. An excellent resource for anyone (including bloggers) experiencing creative freeze.

Walking Away From Faith by Ruth A. Tucker, and a Calvinist-inspired bunny-trail of some significance

I dreamed I had a fever
I was pushin one-oh-three
My mom’s all upset - cryin’ by my bedside
Everybody’s prayin’ for me
I hear a scratchin at the window
I somehow twist myself around
I realize I’m eyes to eyes
With the fella in the Brite Nitegown

Brite Nitegown
Brite Nitegown
You can’t fight with the fella
In the Brite Nitegown

Donald Fagen (mp3 here)

“One-oh-three,” you say? That's kid stuff. The “scratchin at the window,” however, was tangible enough to put me in a metaphysical frame of mind, so among the curiosities I pulled from my laden bookshelves while I was sick was Walking Away From Faith, by Ruth A. Tucker. I'm not sure who clued me in to this book (probably JT) but I was completely taken with it. I found Tucker to be plain-spoken, and forthright about her own doubts and insecurities — a religious academic attempting to explore without guile or defensiveness the issue of apostasy. Intellectually she was both perceptive and receptive in fairly equal measure. A quick Google search reveals that this book receives glowing recommendations from both evangelical atheists (here is one such) and evangelical Christians — surely the most unique distinction for a religious book you could hope to find.

As I scanned the Google links, I was surprised to see how few of them pertained to the book. It's received precious little attention from the commercially-funded religious rags, and after investigating a little further I began to see why: the book and its subject matter have been eclipsed by the treatment Tucker has received at the hands of her former employers, Calvin College and Theological Seminary.

I would dearly love to comment on this specific case, but the only account on record is Tucker's (here). It's as surely biased as all first-person accounts must be, but she's attentive to pertinent details and the fact that Calvin remains mute in response to her objections is more than a little damning of them. Certainly church-funded academia is no stranger to immoral administration. I have a professor friend who has been the recipient of shabby treatment from both public universities and religious colleges: he asserts in no uncertain terms that Christian colleges will screw-over an exiting staff-member more thoroughly than any public institution, because a) there are fewer accountability hoops for the administrations of religious institutions to jump through, and b) the administration, whose chief concern is public perception among the school's donor base, will invoke without censure the self-serving “godliness clause” (JT unpacks it all here).

Instead I'll do the usual: speak from personal experience and make a few scandalous generalizations in an effort to provoke.

So far as I'm concerned, nothing sucks the air out of a room faster than a man intent on selling a Calvinist Benefits Package. Thanks to prolonged manifold exposure (I skulked in the hallways of the ICS and as an MCC hack did some work with CPJ in the mid-90s) on this issue my knee-jerk has been finely-tuned to a hair-trigger response. Recently, however, I've been surprised to discover two spokesmen on behalf of John Calvin (The Man) who snuck past my defences and forced me to reconsider my deeply-entrenched predjudices — and they weren't men at all. I'm speaking of Marilynne Robinson and, of course, Tucker. (Actually, Seerveld has slipped through on occasion as well, but he's a dude and I'm trying not to complicate my invective.)

It's head-slappingly obvious where I'm going with this: if today's self-styled Calvinistas want their public voice to be anything more trenchant than a nostalgic echo of post-war glory days, the fellas running the academies and churches are going to have to roll up their sleeves and work bloody hard to address gender representation, gender discrepancies and public accountability.

On all three issues George W. Bush and his administration are holding to a higher standard than Calvin College does. If that doesn't cause consternation among my neo-Cal friends, I truly fear for the soul of their religion.

****

Getting back to Tucker's book: it's well-written, well-considered and she never condescends. This is the first I've encountered anything like it on the market, so I highly recommend the book to anyone with a vested interest in the subject matter (particularly those readers who aren't as taken with Annie Dillard as I am). Quibbles: the last chapter felt a bit rushed (possibly written while her position was being terminated?), and the font used should, I think, be avoided by all publishers everywhere. I hope once Ms. Tucker has regained her footing she'll publish other books. She's someone I don't mind listening to.