I wish, often, that we cared as deeply about other things here in my native South as we do football. “It has become,” Rable says, “what’s important,” sometimes to exclusion. My wife, who knows everything, says not to fret. We are going to be football crazy anyway, she told me, so we might as well beat everyone else. The fact is, it lifts our hearts. It always has.In the winter of 1993, in an attic apartment in Cambridge, Mass., I sat homesick and watched Alabama beat the trash-talkin’ Hurricanes – I mean beat them like they stole somethin’ – to win its first national championship since Bear died. Late that night I walked through a deserted Harvard Yard, through snow and bitter cold, and thought I might yell “Roll Tide,” though no one would hear. I did it anyway.
iTypewriter by Austin Yang (via things)
The view from the airplane of the future
Back at the hotel afterward, Dylan looks about as satisfied as a man with his restless creative spirit can be. It’s nearly 2 a.m. by now and another pot of coffee cools. He rubs his hand through his curly hair.After all these hours, I realize I haven’t asked the most obvious question: Which comes first, the words or the music? Dylan leans over and picks up the acoustic guitar. “Well, you have to understand that I’m not a melodist,” he says. “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form.
“What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate. A lot of people will look at a crack on the wall and meditate, or count sheep or angels or money or something, and it’s a proven fact that it’ll help them relax. I don’t meditate on any of that stuff. I meditate on a song.
“I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly – while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”
He’s slowly strumming the guitar, but it’s hard to pick out the tune. “I wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That’s the folk music tradition. You use what’s been handed down. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ is probably from an old Scottish folk song.”
As he keeps playing, the song starts sounding vaguely familiar.
That being said, I can only confess to being repeatedly humbled and reconverted by Lewis in a way that is true of few other modern Christian writers. Re-reading works I have not looked at for some time, I realize where a good many of my favorite themes and insights came from, and am constantly struck by the richness of imagination and penetration that can be contained even in a relatively brief letter. Here is someone you do not quickly come to the end of — as a complex personality and as a writer and thinker.Rowan Williams on C S Lewis. I resonate with this very strongly. Lewis was fairly important to me when I was a young Christian, but not nearly as important as several other figures, and for many years I largely ignored him. Only when I was asked to write a biography of Lewis did I confront the uncomfortable fact that I was keeping Lewis at arm’s length not because of any of his own failings, but because I was tired of dealing with vast hordes of evangelicals for whom whatever CSL said about anything was the last word on that topic. It wasn’t Jack that I was tired of, but Jackolatry. When I had to read everything that he wrote in preparation for writing the biography — no small task, let me tell you — I was forced to see that his was a far more copious and supple mind than I had ever realized. Like Archbishop Rowan, I occasionally had the uncomfortable experience of finding in Lewis the source of some idea that I had believed to be my own, and further had believed to be very up-to-date, responsive to the moment — not the sort of thing that would ever have occurred to an old dinosaur like CSL. Those were telling moments.
We have three minds, I reckon, one of which is the body, while the other two are forms of mentation: daylight consciousness and dreaming consciousness. If one of these is absent from a work, it isn’t complete; and if one or two of them are suppressed, kept out of sight, then the whole thing—whatever it is you’ve created—is in bad faith. Thinking in a fusion of our three minds is how humans do naturally think, at any level above the trivial. The questions to ask of any creation are: What’s the dream dimension in this? How good is the forebrain thinking, but also how good is the dream here? Where’s the dance in it, and how good is that? How well integrated are all three; or if there is dissonance, is that productive? And, finally, what larger poem is this one in? Who or what does it honor? Who does it want to kill?
After all, the relationship between human reader and “animated” book has been forged over centuries. The Bible, perhaps the first book to be characterized in these terms, was thought to be the material embodiment of Jesus Christ, “a living and breathing likeness of Him” in the words of Erasmus. Since Christ was understood to be the carnal manifestation of the Scriptures — the Word made flesh, according to the literary scholar James Kearney — the Bible was reflexively endowed with human properties. “The leaves of this booke be the armes, the handes, legges and feete” of Christ, said Bishop John Fisher in an early-16th-century sermon. The capital letters dyed in red are “the great wounds of his body, in his handes, and in his feete, and in his side.”
The press loves inspirational stories about Kindle prospectors like Hocking or crime writer John Locke striking it rich, but unfortunately this has fostered a bonanza mentality around the subject of self-published e-books (even among people who have no intention of actually writing the “books” they plan to sell). This is what Morrison means when he writes, “I’m convinced that epublishing is another tech bubble.” E-books, of course, are here to stay. Many, many readers love them, or at least find them addictively convenient. But the delusion that a writer can come out of nowhere and use assorted social networking tools to engineer a bestseller overnight is untenable.It’s untenable not because it hasn’t happened at least once or twice among the 1.1 million Kindle authors, but because readers aren’t cattle to be milked. They’re human beings who do writers the great favor of spending their time and attention (and sometimes their money) on authors’ work. Their good faith, once lost, is unlikely to return. They’ve become leery of the glut of off-brand e-books being peddled to them by retailers and of incessant Facebook and Twitter pitches from people they barely (or don’t even know). Most of them still believe that the fellow readers who recommend books to them online are sincere and actually exist, but how much longer can that last?
Consumerism now wants you to be single, so it sells this as sexy. The irony is that it’s now more radical to attempt to be in a long-term relationship and a long-term job, to plan for the future, maybe even to attempt to have children, than it is to be single. Coupledom, and long-term connections with others in a community, now seem the only radical alternative to the forces that will reduce us to isolated, alienated nomads, seeking ever more temporary ‘quick fix’ connections with bodies who carry within them their own built-in perceived obsolescence.The solution: Get radical, get hitched, demand commitment from partners and employers. Say no to the seductions of the disposable singles market.
Readers would be rightly insulted if they felt I’d assumed they were less smart or less sophisticated than I am. That would be unbearably condescending. And anyway they like some puzzlement, some baroque, perhaps, and certainly some material that doesn’t release all its savor at a first lick. Really, writers and readers alike, as you know, we work beyond our own intelligence; necessarily so. That’s the raison d’etre, the road to the trance that art exists to provide. The significances in a poem ought to be latent as well as patent: You find them as a matter of pleasure as you are reading; you don’t need a critic to tell them to you.