Porcine liberation

I’ve marvelled at the creativity of a couple of children’s books we’ve been enjoying this week. This Caldecott winner by David Wiesner is the most fun.

I’m not a deconstructionist, but this story deconstructs the story of the three little pigs in ways my creative writing teacher in college would have approved. She used to have us twist nursery rhymes from time to time; I remember writing one about an ambulance crunching across fallen branches on its way into the woods to collect an injured Goldilocks, who had collided with the big bad wolf (fleeing from the woodcutter) as she was running from the three bears. The bears were trying guiltily to justify themselves to the other animals for accidentally causing harm to the intrepid lass.

Wiesner’s story begins in the usual way. But the wolf huffs and puffs so hard at the first little pig’s house, he changes the course of history. Look what happens:

What would you do if you found yourself outside the bounds of your story? This pig frees his two brothers, and the three of them wander in and out of a couple of other tales, taking on the illustrative style of each story they enter. Eventually they liberate the cat and the fiddle and a warm-hearted dragon about to be assassinated by a knight. After a bit more exploring, they end up back in their own story, but with the power to change the ending. There’s no place like home — especially if you’re the master of your fate there.

It’s not exactly a read-aloud, because the story unfolds cartoon-style, with the characters’ speech in word-bubbles. I read the words, but on the whole it’s more of an experience-together, observe-together story. My children are delighted by it, and so am I. When all that we read (or for that matter, experience) pools together in our minds, that inner world isn’t much different than the hall of stories in this book: a giant warehouse of characters and plots, and the boundaries between them are often blurry. I love the way this book dramatizes the making of a story as a series of choices, a negotiating of possibilities. It’s a cooperative venture between author and characters. I hope my children discover the same freedom the three little pigs have in this book, and make a place in the world strong enough to withstand the huffing and puffing of wolves.

Images from Amazon.

America America

My favorite English teacher gave me a copy of Ethan Canin’s Emperor of the Air[1988] when it first came out. Certain details from those short stories have stayed in my mind for years: the golfing fanatic who makes little putting motions with his hands during pauses in conversation; the daughter whose mother is caught shoplifting; the old man who kisses his wife after a long period of parallel living, and “has the feeling of a miracle.” It sits on my shelf beside Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, my two favorite short story collections side by side. Both are the work of graceful writers with an unbelievably keen observing eye. What makes Ethan Canin stand out even more is that his collection was published when he was 27 and a medical student. It was his first book, but what a stake in the ground it was.

America Americais a jewel that sparkles just as dazzlingly, but testifies as well to the depth and reflectiveness of maturity. His hair, in the photo, has whitened a bit. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Worskshop as well as practicing medicine. It was a pleasure to get reacquainted again in the pages of this book, which came out in June.

As its title suggests, this is a double vision of America, full of contrasts – past and present, idealism and pragmatism, optimism and heartbreak. The action, told in retrospect by newspaper editor Corey Sifter, takes place during the Nixon era. It’s pre-Watergate, during the Vietnam War and Nixon’s second bid for the presidency, and a New York senator, a man of “public idealism and personal ruthlessness,” has decided to run for president. Corey, then a high school student, works for the wealthy family backing the senator’s campaign. For a fuller summary of the action, and some good discussion of the novel, check out reviews in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Sun; both are excellent.

The book is intricately plotted, and though it took me awhile to get into it, once I found a groove I couldn’t put it down. It’s suspenseful, thoughtful, and filled with the same sort of gems that made Emporer of the Air such a joy to read. These characters are real people, with their share of eccentricities, all of them unfolded by a writer who has observed people with careful and loving attention and is prepared to celebrate them all: a plumber who becomes a voracious reader at the end of his life; a granite miner who’s lost his voice and has to write everything, misspelled but testifying to a shrewd intelligence; a wealthy man wrestling with his legacy.

This story is fiction, but the action is woven seamlessly into a fabric of real historical events and characters. The point of view spins around between present and past, picking up the story at different points along the continuum, and it’s masterfully done; somehow I always knew where I was being set down. But I never lost my frame of reference in my own present, so I found myself asking how the blows to trust that occurred in the timeframe of this story have shaped us: our politics, education, media, views on wealth and class.

I wish I could do the book justice, but there’s too much to it. I’ll just let the book speak for itself, and conclude with one of many passages that will be running through my mind during this campaign season: 

One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead… For a man on the rise in politics, power first comes through character — that combination of station and forcefulness that produces not just intimidation, which is power’s crudest form, but flattery, too, which is one of its more refined. After that, power begins to grow from its own essence, rising no longer exclusively from the man but from the office itself. And this is where some balance must be found between its attainment and its allotment, between the unquenchable desire of any politician to rise, and the often humbling requirement that one’s station must now be used to some benefit. And here, of course, is where corruption begins…

This review is linked to The Saturday Review of Books.

Celebrate the Author: Tasha Tudor

Tasha Tudor is an author and illustrator I’ve become more aware of as an adult. Her birthday is August 28, 1915, and I chose her for my author this month in the Celebrate the Author Challenge because my daughters and I have checked her books out of the library and thoroughly enjoyed them. Often compared to Beatrix Potter for her illustrative style and citizenship in an earlier era, one key difference between the two authors is that Ms. Tudor’s books are more sentimental and idealized. They’re nostalgia at its best, as far as I’m concerned — the kind that throws a golden haze over the past and makes you indulge in a longing for a more innocent time.

Our favorites (so far) are A Time to Keep, Give Us This Day, and The Dolls’ Christmas. All are illustrated with Ms. Tudor’s warmly lit, detailed watercolors that often frame the text in a delicate visual counterpoint. A Time to Keep is about the holidays of the year, and it recounts the charming celebrations and traditions of the past. It’s a magical place where people make all sorts of beautiful handmade gifts, float birthday cakes down streams with all the candles lit, have fabulous picnics, and the like. Nearly every page is populated with a thriving community of children. Isolation, loneliness, drab industrial settings, broken families — none of these figure into this world. Imagination, joy, cooperation, and harmony between generations prevail. It’s a gorgeous book, and one that equips you to rethink your own traditions and priorities.

Give Us This Day is the text of Lord’s Prayer — William Tyndale’s 16th century translation — embellished with Ms. Tudor’s illustrations. Publishers Weekly complains that it instills a hellfire and damnation conception of God, but it certainly didn’t have that effect on my kids. Children and corgis frolic through the pages, each of which is beautifully bordered. The pictures illustrating parts of the prayer that speak of needing forgiveness or deliverance from evil suggest the darker side of experience, as well they should if religion has anything to do with the real world. But the dominant mode of the book is extremely gentle, and the illustrations make the archaic text accessible.

The Dolls’ Christmas stars two carefully kept dolls with beautiful clothes and a fully equipped home — the mother of all dollhouses! Pumpkin House is as big as the two little girls who play with it, ornately accessorized without a trace of plastic. I never played with dolls growing up, but this book would make me reconsider (or, more likely, would tempt me to become a dollhouse collector, furnishing my dream home on a small scale). I like the way the book teaches children how to play in a more structured way; my girls are energetic players, and this book lays out a more sedate alternative, equally as imaginative as riding in a rodeo through the house, but QUIETER. (Oh, and by the way… it’s a nice story too. :-)

All this talk of the nostalgia, the gentleness, and the sentimentality of Ms. Tudor’s books probably makes it unsurprising that I pictured this author in very stereotypical terms: a grandmotherly woman, smelling of baby powder, practiced in the disciplines of a producer rather than a consumer, who lived a life as idyllic as that depicted in her stories. The photos I’ve seen of this author (as on the book at lower right) have cooperated with this view. But in reading about Ms. Tudor, I did find a few facts that surprised me, and began to bring her out of the dusty museum case of a stereotype and into the more multidimensional world of human beings:

• Her name at birth was Starling Burgess; she changed it to Tasha Tudor
• Her parents divorced
• She was herself married and divorced twice
• She raised her four children in a farmhouse without electricity or running water until her youngest was 5
• She believed herself to be reincarnated, formerly a wife of a sea captain in the early 1800’s; this is the era she emulated in her own lifestyle
• She died just a few months short of her 93rd birthday, on June 18 of this year 

Some links of interest:

• Tasha Tudor obituary
• Wikipedia entry
• Tasha Tudor Museum in Vermont
• Tasha Tudor and Family

This review is submitted to the Celebrate the Author Challenge, the Saturday Review of Books, and the Semicolon Author Celebration.

Poetry Friday: Celebrating the “not yet”

A few months ago at Cloudscome’s suggestion, I made some Rainer Maria Rilke a summer reading goal. I’ve been acquainting myself with this poet in small bites. In “Blank Joy” (whole poem is here), the speaker begins with an acknowledgment that certain longings can shape us even more than satisfactions:

She who did not come, wasn’t she determined
nonetheless to organize and decorate my heart?

The conclusion is hymnlike:

Lovely joy left blank, perhaps you are
the center of all my labors and my loves.
If I’ve wept for you so much, it’s because
I preferred you among so many outlined joys.

I like this poem, but the more I’ve thought about it, the less confident I feel about its meaning. Is it despairing, or affirming? I can see both sides, actually.

On the affirming side, one thing that comes to mind is how often the empty spaces are as defining as the filled ones within the total “outline” – in visual art, poetry or story, an expression on a face, a relationship, a life. It’s an affirming way of seeing the world: even nothing becomes a positive quantity when it’s looked at this way.

This way of seeing the poem seems to go along with Rilke’s exhortation in the 4th of his Letters to a Young Poet  to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer…” By this reasoning, maybe the speaker of “Blank Joy” will live his way into “Full Joy.”

What do you think?

Poetry Friday is at Becky’s Book Reviews today. More Rilke poems here. And for a good laugh on the subject of thinking too much instead of just enjoying the poem (sigh), here’s a link to Billy Collins’ “Workshop.”

Gardens of books

We have a little garden,
a garden of our own,
and every day we water there
the seeds that we have sown.
We love our little garden
and tend it with such care
you will not find a faded leaf
or blighted blossom there!

Beatrix Potter, from Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes

My daughters have been listening to an audiobook of the complete works of Beatrix Potter this week. Gardens figure prominently in these stories, especially for Peter, Benjamin, the Flopsy Bunnies who eat “soporific” lettuce, and the woefully unprepared Farmer MacGregor. How can he be so slow? How is he foiled again and again?

Lots of famous literary gardens spring to mind. Part of the reason I’m thinking about them is that we got this audio collection from our public library. We haven’t been to this branch in awhile, and this time we noticed the two huge concrete planters on the sidewalk out front – filled, I was delighted to see, with tomatoes, potatoes, sunflowers, and a few pansies.  

Isn’t that great? Food for the mind, and food for the body, all on the same plot of ground — and not stopped by all the concrete around, either. It seems like it begs for poetry:

Shelves are garden furrows,
lined with seedling books
sending tendrils reaching
in amongst the nooks
eagerly awaiting
in my feeble brain
rays of written sunshine
and fancy’s gentle rain…

Or maybe:

Germinating rapidly
marching ‘cross the page
letters quickly weave a rug
of wordlings fit to phrase…

*Sigh*  To say I’ve plowed myself under is desperately inadequate. I guess we’ll have to leave this fertile idea to the truly talented… Speaking of whom, Cloudscome, who hosts the Sunday Garden Stroll, is both a poet and a librarian. Stop in at a wrung sponge to see what’s growing in others’ gardens!

The Doors of the Sea

David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? is a short (104 pages), challenging, in many ways satisfying theological discussion of the problem of evil. Recently I’ve read reviews by some bloggers I respect (here and here), and I was intrigued enough to buy a copy and read it this week.

The argument itself is satisfying in the sense that it articulates the struggle any thinking person has when we look at the world, see its brutality on a grand, impersonal scale, and try to reconcile it with a good, loving God. I don’t think I’ve ever read such a full-throated description as this from a Christian perspective:

It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creating and devouring all things with a terrible and impassive majesty. Nature squanders us with such magnificent prodigality that it is hard not to think that something enduringly hideous and abysmal must abide in the depths of life.

One of the reasons we read is for passages like that, which affirm our own feelings but then — as this book does — move us beyond them as a map can help us find our way out of a dead end. 

I felt something similar after reading Lewis’s Problem of Pain. It’s not identical, but it covers a fair amount of the same ground, and it’s equally satisying in its acknowledgment that nature as we experience it has never been the ground of religious faith; we’re not supposed to look at pain and suffering as evidence of God’s goodness, or his chosen materials for bringing his purposes to pass. But where Lewis’s book is directed primarily at skeptics (his aim is to “show that the old Christian doctrine of being made ‘perfect through suffering’ is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design”), Hart’s is aimed equally at the careless and often callous arguments of professing Christians. In that sense this book shows itself to be a work of a different age — an age when the Christian mind is under attack on all sides (including the shunning of rationality in some quarters of Christianity itself), and those who can give voice to a Christian worldview in what Nancy Pearcey would call the “public square” are needed both to elucidate and to exhort.

This book is an expansion of a Wall Street Journal article Hart wrote shortly after the tsunami in Asia in 2004. Hart himself is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and teacher, and there’s plenty of instruction packed between the covers of even this short book. I liked the way Hart laid out arguments by atheists against God, by deists as apologists for God, and by professing Christians responding to the tsunami. I liked the way he examined and exposed the fallacies of these arguments. Most of all I liked the way he disentangled the God of Scripture from the various ways he’s been mischaracterized by foggy theology, anthropomorphism, and faulty thinking. I have, I think, a clearer picture of who I’m praying to now; the glass is a little less cloudy. A passage like this gives a whiff of Hart’s final resting place in the argument he’s making, and from me it calls forth an amen. Central to the Gospel, writes Hart, is

the evil of death, its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity; the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of evil, that he is the conqueror of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the knowledge that God is life and light and infinite love, and that the path that leads through nature and history to his Kingdom does not simply follow the contours of either nature or history, or obey the logic immanent to them, but is opened to us by way of the natural and historical absurdity — or outrage — of the empty tomb.

The only thing about the book that I haven’t come to terms with yet is its intellectual showiness. Many of the reviews at Amazon complain that the book’s language is so erudite as to be inaccessible. I wouldn’t go quite that far. But Hart’s vocabulary seems needlessly sophisticated — distractingly so. It made me wonder if there’s a subtext of “I am smart” in reaction to the condescension of some of the atheistic pronouncements made in the aftermath of the tsunami.

When it comes to intellect, Christ himself takes the prize. As Dallas Willard points out, Jesus “is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived.” Yet his method was not to dazzle with his erudition. He walked and ate and camped and performed miracles and opened the glories of his Kingdom among uneducated people, working class people, people who certainly had not read Thomas Aquinas or The Brothers Karamazov. My liking for this book is tempered by a mistrust for its intellectual glitter and its tone of (sometimes scornful) impatience. These could very well be traits that mark Hart as a prophetically gifted thinker. But they work against the life-giving quality of some of his insights here, and make the book less palatable to me than if it were narrated in a spirit of humility.

This review is linked to the Saturday Review of Books.

Edited to add: For further reading, here’s an interview with David Bentley Hart.

Poetry Friday: Afternoon

I’ve been reading in this collection of Jane Kenyon’s poems. In this one, “Afternoon in the House,” she’s noticing something subtle in the air. It wafts around her as she seems to be focusing on other things, but out of the corner of her eye, she’s aware of it — and at just the right moment, she reaches out and nets it with words. Maybe because it’s an afternoon poem, I think of Emily Dickinson’s certain slant of light, but Kenyon’s treatment of it is more this-worldly (?); she’s as alert to the world without as the world within, and she locates her poem astride both.

It’s quiet here. The cats
sprawl, each
in a favored place.
The geranium leans this way
to see if I’m writing about her:
head all petals, brown
stalks, and those green fans.
So you see,
I am writing about you.

I turn on the radio. Wrong.
Let’s not have any noise
in this room, except
the sound of a voice reading a poem.
The cats request
The Meadow Mouse, by Theodore Roethke.

The house settles down on its haunches
for a doze.
I know you are with me, plants,
and cats–and even so, I’m frightened,
sitting in the middle of perfect
possibility.

Winslow Homer, On the Fence

New toy

Thanks to Sara at Read Write Believe, I’ve discovered Wordle. Wordle creates a summary of your blog — or whatever text you want — reconstructed as a word cloud. Here’s Findings:

Go see how yours shapes up! :-)

“New” name

I realize this may be confusing for awhile (small though my niche in cyberspace is), but I’ve decided to change my handle from “writer2b” to my real name, ”Janet.” For several months now I’ve felt kind of silly using the other title, which seems to belong on a license plate, and which suggests writerly aspirations more lofty than I intend here. So I guess I’ll be “the blogger formerly known as writer2b” for a time… then, hopefully, just Janet. 

Pleased to make your acquaintance!

Speaking the truth in love

Yesterday I read a meditation about “lost sheep” — people who are part of a fellowship who then drop off the map. Do you know any? Have you ever been one? it asks. How did it all end up? I love the way the piece originated: in its author sitting in church and noticing, “Some are missing.”

The subject seems to touch on some other themes I’ve had on my mind lately. One is the idea that the gospel isn’t meant to be kept in the womblike bag of the Christian subculture; it speaks to all of life, and this means something more or other than voting Republican. It means coming out of the sealed bag and working for justice, like this essay by Philip Berrigan advocates. And it means being “missional,” to use the emergent term, rather than “attractional;” taking faith into the world, rather than just inviting the world into church. I guess it’s the theme of “going after” that brings these to mind, rather than staying in the bunker.

The other theme that seems relevant to the subject of “lost sheep” is our reluctance to confront each other. In my limited experience, churches generally leave confronting up to the pastor or the busybodies. But it’s an art we should all be practicing with our friends, however difficult.

I’ve been on both ends: a lost sheep myself that God brought back despite the lack of anyone confronting me, and someone on the confronting end. A few years ago as part of helping with community-building on a large worship team, I created the list of principles below. When I made it I was thinking of one friend in particular who was on a dangerous road, and I’d tried to help. I remember being pleased with this list I’d made; it represented some lessons learned.

But now, looking at it, I notice it exudes a certain “Do this and everything will be okay” spirit. I think now, I would add another point to the list: sometimes you can do everything right and it still doesn’t “work.” The other person may blow you off. A conflict may not get resolved, and there may be a parting of ways.

But if you’ve spoken what God wants you to, it’s all right. I think rejection is sometimes God’s Plan A, yet we have the idea that we’re supposed to achieve true community without any hurt or offense. Maybe God has purposes to achieve through hurt and offense. Or maybe it’s for someone else down the road to reap the harvest of whatever crop you’re helping to sow. Or maybe you’ll be miserable for a season, and then God in his grace will give you a new perspective. But pain-free community, and confrontation-free fellowship, are really not options.

Here’s the list. It’s been good for me to look at it again; since I first wrote it, it’s been tested. What do you think? What would you add or remove or alter?

Basic Principles for Speaking the Truth in Love

• Bathe your conversations in prayer. Let the Holy Spirit prepare the ground, and you may be surprised at the opportunities he will create for you. That potentially painful truth you long for your friend to see? They just might ask you for it if you submit it to God and ask him to provide you with the opening, and the words, that you need. 
• Bathe your mind in scripture. (Need we say more?)
• The aim in opening someone’s eyes to the truth is to help them see it for themselves, so let them do the work. Ask questions, come alongside them in their experience, rephrase what they’re saying and say it back to them so they can better recognize when they are believing lies, but realize that God is going to come to them in a radically personal way, and they will have to put the encounter into their own words.
• Qualify your statements. No matter how great your discernment may be, not everything you see is absolute truth. J Present your perspective with the attitude of, “I might be wrong, but I’m going to tell you what I see and you can evaluate it. It’s between you and God how well the shoe fits.”
• Be bold, but not blunt. Truth bluntly stated can crush someone; Proverbs speaks often of the effectiveness of a gentle tongue. But if we are going to speak the truth, we are going to have to be bold in the sense that we always run the risk of feeling—or flat-out being–intrusive.
• Serve your friends. This is the way we earn the privilege of being listened to.  According to Jesus, it is the meek who inherit the earth, not the high and mighty. We are least threatened by the truth when it comes from a humble heart.
• Avoid confusing your own issues with someone else’s. Respect the boundary between being honest and transparent about your own life and struggles, and projecting yourself into others. #1 and #2 are the best antidotes for this.
• Know when you need help or support, and ask for it. None of us have to be spiritual superheroes who have all the answers. When you need advice or feel like there are significant problems that you aren’t equipped to deal with, seek out someone wise and pray with them.
• Be trustworthy. It’s possible to seek help without naming the people involved or giving details, so maintain confidentiality. We lose all credibility when we fail to respect one another. 
• Be a rememberer. How many times does God admonish the Israelites to remember the ways God has delivered them in the past? You can help to keep your friend’s perspective clear by reminding them where they’ve come from. When they can’t see the forest for the trees, you can do it for them.