D a l l a s R o b b i n s

The mystery of unbelief...

James Wood, an avowed atheist and one of the best literary critics currently working, in a recent lecture tackles the New Atheism's simplistic explaination of religious belief.  Instead he encourages fiction as a better vehicle to explore the nuanced way belief and unbelief actually work in the lives of real people.  Good stuff.

Part of the weakness of current theological warfare is that it is premised on stable, lifelong belief – each side congealed into its rival (but weirdly symmetrical) creeds. Likewise, in contemporary politics, the worst crime you can apparently commit is to change your mind. Yet people's beliefs are often not stable, and are fluctuating. We are all flip-floppers. Our "ideas" may be rather as Woolf imagined consciousness, a flicker of different and self-annulling impressions and convictions...

An essay or work of polemic finds it hard to describe the texture of such fluctuation, whereas the novelist understands that to tell a story is to novelise an idea, to dramatise it. There is no need to make a tidy solution of belief; to the novelist, a messy error might be much more interesting.

I would agree to a certain extant.  In fact I may even go furthur, and suggest that great fiction helps explain the complexity of human nature and offers much wisdom in understanding our world and the people in it, more so than traditional non-fiction narratives.   What say you?

 

"The Apostate"

Once in a while you read a work of investigative journalism that blows your mind.  This one did.   You might have already heard about or read this article, but if you haven't, then do yourself a favor. It reminds me why blogging, etc, can not hold a torch to the long-haul work of a journalist discovering a world that needs to be revealed.  Amazing work that deserves the attention of everyone who dares calls themself a journalist.

Books for Christmas!

 To me there is nothing better than getting books for Christmas.  Here's the skinny on what I received this year.  (Friends are awesome!)

Pen of Iron: The simple yet grand language of the King James Bible has pervaded American culture from the beginning--and its powerful eloquence continues to be felt even today. In this book, acclaimed biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some of the fascinating ways that American novelists--from Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy--have drawn on the rich stylistic resources of the canonical English Bible to fashion their own strongly resonant styles and distinctive visions of reality. Showing the radically different manners in which the words, idioms, syntax, and cadences of this Bible are woven into Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sun Also Rises, Seize the Day, Gilead, and The Road, Alter reveals the wide variety of stylistic and imaginative possibilities that American novelists have found in Scripture. At the same time, Alter demonstrates the importance of looking closely at the style of literary works, making the case that style is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but is the very medium through which writers conceive their worlds.

 

What Even Happened to Modernism: The quality of today’s literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing—a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why.

Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism’s key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.

 

The Word Exchange: The dazzling variety of Anglo-Saxon poetry brought to life by an all-star cast of contemporary poets in an authoritative bilingual edition. Encompassing a wide range of voices-from weary sailors to forlorn wives, from heroic saints to drunken louts, from farmers hoping to improve their fields to sermonizers looking to save your soul—the 123 poems collected in The Word Exchange complement the portrait of medieval England that emerges from Beowulf, the most famous Anglo-Saxon poem of all. Offered here are tales of battle, travel, and adventure, but also songs of heartache and longing, pearls of lusty innuendo and clear-eyed stoicism, charms and spells for everyday use, and seven "hoards" of delightfully puzzling riddles.

Featuring all-new translations by seventy-four of our most celebrated poets—including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Robert Hass, Gary Soto, Jane Hirshfield, David Ferry, Molly Peacock, Yusef Komunyakaa, Richard Wilbur, and many others—The Word Exchange is a landmark work of translation, as fascinating and multivocal as the original literature it translates.

 

Journey of the Magi

Every year I read this poem during Christmas time. Whether you are of a religious persuasion or not, these is much pleasure and wisdom in Eliot's sounds and images.  The picture above, Adoration of the Magi, is from one of the my favorite artists Hieronymous Bosch.

 

Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped in away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no imformation, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This:  were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

 

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

In the latest Sunstone, a special comics-themed issue, I have contributed a review of R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis.  An excerpt::

With his singular artistic vision, Crumb, godfather of the “underground comix” movement during the late-60s and 70s, has inspired literally thousands of comic artists.  Having such characters as Mr. Natural, Devil Girl, Felix the Cat, and Joe Blow, his comic stories didn’t simply push the boundaries of good taste, they ignored them.  Many of his stories are filled with pornographic perversities, earthy obsessions, racial stereotypes, social satire, or just plain indecent fun where censorship is the only offense. With such a long history of unscrupulous sequential art, Crumb’s turn to Genesis may seem odd.  But in the introduction, Crumb shares what attracted his drawing pen to the first book of Moses,

“…I, ironically, do not believe the Bible is “the word of God.”  I believe it is the words of men. It is, nonetheless, a powerful text with layers of meaning that reach deep into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness, if you will.  It seems indeed to be an inspired work, but I believe that its power derives from its having been a collective endeavor that evolved and condensed over many generations…”

One of Crumb’s primary sources on Genesis, Robert Alter, provides additional reasons for the irreligious to take the book seriously,

 “Nowhere else in ancient literature have the quirkiness and unpredictability of individual character[s?] and the frictions and tensions of family life--sibling rivalry, the jealousy of co-wives, the extravagance of parental favoritism--been registered with such subtlety and insight.”

To read the full review pick up an issue of Sunstone today.  There's lots of good stuff in this one.

Re-Creating the Bible

 
In the latest issue of Dialogue, I have a review of The FOB Bible.  From the intro:

Lately the Bible has been getting a bum rap. Christopher Hitchen's calls it a “nightmare,” and blames it for much of humanity’s suffering - everything from sexism to genocide.  At the same time, literalist approachs to the Bible has produced narrow theology and tendecious unscientific speculation.  With these sorts of extremes touted by reductionist pundits and preachers, people are left with a false dichotomy of Biblical proportions.  Historian of religion Karen Armstrong reminds contemporary readers that, “…many modern assumptions about the Bible are incorrect.  The Bible did not encourage slavish conformity…From the first, the Biblical authors contradicted each other and their conflicting visions were all included by the editors in the final text.”

Pick up a copy to read the full review.

The Story of the Cathedral of the Madeleine by Gary Topping: City Weekly

The history of a cathedral is not just about another nice building, but also about the struggles, triumphs, and personal histories of a people. Gary Topping, professor of history at SLCC and archivist for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Utah, chronicles in his new book The Story of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, the first 100 years of that magnificent building and the stories and voices of Utah Catholics.

Sunstone Symposium: City Weekly

The Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium is an annual gathering of scholars, historians, novelists, feminists, activists, and anyone intellectually curious about Mormon culture and history. Now in its 30th year, the symposium is a forum for liberals and conservatives, heretics and orthodox, atheists and believers, a place where free and open discussion is explored and encouraged.

The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams: City Weekly

Living in Utah, you’ve heard it before: old creepy guy marries prepubescent virgin on polygamous compound. When explored in fiction, such stories can be as over-baked as last Sunday’s casserole. But Carol Lynch Williams does the improbable in her latest novel The Chosen One. She takes a far-too-common headline and creates a brave, uncommon voice in the character of 13-year-old Kyra.

George D. Smith's Nauvoo Polygamy

With an endless stream of books on polygamy and its discontents, do we really need another one? If the answer includes mention of Nauvoo Polygamy: "… but we called it celestial marriage" by George Smith, it would be a definitive yes. Ten years in the making, Nauvoo Polygamy traces the origins and establishment of Joseph Smith's vision of "spiritual wives" before it ever stepped foot in the State of Deseret. The book should dispel forever the common misperception that Joseph pined after only one wife and that polygamy was Brigham's idea while crossing the plains.