We’ve seen the news reports and social media videos – climate change activists or pro-Palestinian protestors attacking pieces of artwork – Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” and DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa,” to mention two. Then there was the slashing attack on the Cambridge University portrait of Sir David Balfour, author of the Balfour Declaration on Israel, the painting being attacked by a young woman wearing a $1,400 designer backpack (the protest of privilege). An editorial at New Criterionputs the Balfour attack into perspective.
John Spencer at Newsweek points out something that no one covering the war in Gaza and Israel has previously reported – Israel has created a new standard for urban warfare. Susan Feigenbaum, of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, wrote an op-ed column about the casualty numbers reported by the Gaza (Hamas) Health Authority and repeated without question by the news media: the number don’t add up.
If you visit Scotland after April 1 (and this is no April Fools joke), you better be very, very careful as to what you say, or even what you may see in the theater. David Robertson at The Wee Flea explains.
If you’d like to see media bias in action, read what might have been a rather useful article in Axios: Shards of glass: Inside media’s 12 splintering realities.Consider how the authors label each group, and which “shards” have the more flattering labels.
The title for this post is something of a “Well, duh” kind of title. For a story to work well, it’s the characters who have to take over and knock the author from his perch.
I’ve been reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough, and he says that he almost called his book Writing Better Character-Driven Fiction, until he realized it was rather redundant. “All good fiction is character-driven,” he writes. He’s not big on outlines, plotting, character sketches, erecting signposts, or anything else that might smack of planning. Instead, he says, “like real life,” he says, “authentic fiction is not planned. Like real life, authentic fiction unfolds naturally.”
Stanbrough has an acronym for this – WITD, or “Writing into the Dark.”
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
I’m not sure how to describe Robert Schultz. Poet. Novelist. Photographer. Artist. All of the above.
He’s written one novel, The Madhouse Nudes, the story of an artist who, in painting women, is trying to seem them truly. He’s co-authored an art book, War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials, which also became an exhibition, and We Were Pirates: a Torpedoman’s Pacific War with James Shell . He’s written four poetry collections. His most recent work is Specimens of the Plague Year: notes and art, the “plague year” being 2020, the year of COVID. He’s also helped translate Wonderland: New & Selected Poems by Sarwat Zahra.
What I’ve first turned to is one of his poetry collections, Into the New World(2020). In a word, it’s stunning.
The first time I was in St. Paul’s Churchyard was May of 1983. My wife and I had traveled to London to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. On a Sunday afternoon, she was resting in our hotel room, and I’d hopped a tube train to visit the newly opened Museum of London before walking around St. Paul’s a few blocks to the south. At 3 p.m., I was standing in front of St. Paul’s when the church bells began to peal. It was one of those “just stop and listen moments.”
Last fall, we were once again in the churchyard, visiting the Temple Bar exhibition just to the north of the church, and then a few days later we toured the cathedral itself. We walked around the churchyard, visited a gift and souvenir shop, and took our “standing in front of the cathedral” tourist photos. We knew the basic history of the cathedral – Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt the church followed its destruction in the Great Fire of 1666. And we knew that the area around the church had been heavily bombed during World War II; the church itself took one major hit but was protected by the firewatchers stationed on the roof and nearby.
In medieval times, the yard was host to speeches and sermons. The Reformation, Counter-Reformation and New Reformation were argued and fought here. The yard witnessed a few executions. Once the printing press was invented, printers set up shop in this area, mostly printing religious tracts and documents. They eventually evolved into book printers and publishers, both in St. Paul’s Churchyard and nearby Paternoster Row. Publishers branched out into selling books directly to the public, becoming the cradle and center of Britain’s book publishing industry.
Willes tells this fascinating history well. The chapters on the Great Fire (and how printers thought they could secure their stocks inside the church itself) and the rebuilding by Wren are especially good. She provides detail in just the right amounts. The people come alive, and their stories become the stories of the churchyard.
Margaret Willes
Willes is the former publisher at the National Trust who now writes books on cultural and botanical history. Her works include Liberty over London Bridge, The Curious World of Samuel Pepys & John Evelyn, The Gardens of the British Working Class, The Making of the English Gardener, Reading Matters Five Centuries of Discovering Books, The Domestic Herbal, and Scenes from a Georgian Life.
The story of St. Paul’s Churchyard ends when the thriving society and industry around it ended – with the blitz of World War II. Other than the cathedral itself, much of the surrounding area was destroyed. But as Willes tells it, what had been there was a wonder.
I used to read the literary magazine Guernica but stopped for an unremembered reason (probably being overwhelmed with too many subscriptions). But I enjoyed it; it had some well-written and interesting stories and articles. This past week, the magazine found itself caught in a political ringer. A moving story about Oct. 7 in Israel and what happened was published. Volunteer editors resigned, and the literary world went nuts. Naturally, the editors caved and withdrew it. And apologized. Oddly, the story is archived on Guernica’s site (at least for now).
I first read the story in my hometown newspaper: According to the annual survey of the American Library Association, the number of book challenges skyrocketed in 2023. Well, not exactly. What happened is that the number of challenges slightly declined (affecting less than one percent of the nation’s libraries), but the ALA redefined how it reported the numbers. Naturally, no newspaper or other legacy medium questioned the report.
There was a time, as recently as a decade ago, when I believed I could generally count on the reporting by the Associated Press, even if newspapers and television news seemed to be binging on preconceived narratives. That changed, and AP has seemed to be going out of its way to make up for lost time. I think I began to notice this when I’d see reports of changes in AP’s Style Guide for reporters, which is what I trained on way back when. And now the stories, or at least the ones used by my hometown newspaper, and opinion pieces masquerading as news reports, and sometimes not even bothering to masquerade. This week, two chains, Gannett (as in USA Today and other newspapers) and McClatchy, announced they were dropping AP, not for content reasons, but likely because of fundamentally changed business models.
If you write on Substack, and a lot of writers have flocked to it, you’d do well to pay attention to the recent change in terms of service. And you may find your writing is not welcome, if you espouse particular viewpoints.
James McNally is a former Marine who’s been working as a war photographer. He has plenty of work, unfortunately – Afghanistan, Iraq, other parts of the Middle East. But he’s been caught in a roadside IED explosion; several of the mend he was with were killed, and Jim nearly lost his leg.
Even now, many months later, his leg is scarred and smaller than it should be. Walking is painful, but the doctors have told him that, the more he walks, the less painful it will become over time. He numbers the pain with prescription drugs and alcohol as he spends time recovering. And recovery is happening in a coastal cottage in Maine.
He has company. A former wat photographer turned fashion photographer is doing a nearby photo shoot with several models. A young Marine who serves in the Marine equivalent of the Navy Seals is on leave and preparing to return for his fourth deployment.
Nicholas Rogers
The Maine Cottage by Nicholas Rogers looked at one point that it would sink into an endless round of parties with friends and fashion models, former Marines sharing (or not sharing) old stories and their experiences, and the women who might, or might not stand by them. And then it shifts, and the story develops into a discussion about war, war photography, how war changes people, and how participants deal with both physical and mental injuries.
If you’ve had no war experiences of your own, you simply sit and read, knowing that what you’re seeing on the page is true and real, told through a fictional story.
Rogers has previously published two novels, 29th Street South and Tides of War. A former Marine himself, he spent 26 years as a firefighter, paramedic, and city emergency manager. After he retired, he became a consultant on weapons of mass destruction. He lives with his family in Florida.
The Maine Cottage is a sobering read. And a good story.
Some Thursday Readings
The singularity of speech – Wilfred M. McClay at New Criterion on the distinction between free speech & free expression.
Wiseblood Books, which leans in the direction of being a Catholic publisher, has been issuing a series of novels and poetry collections that that interesting, thought-provoking, and broader than the idea of “Catholic publisher” might imply. Its novelists and poets include Dana Gioia, Marly Youmans, James Matthew Wilson, Samuel Hazo, Charles Hughes, Katy Carl, Sally Thomas, Glenn Arbery, R.R. Reno, and others.
What these writers have in common is that they write perceptively and unapologetically about faith, although it’s usually not that obvious. The fiction is serious, literary fiction; the poetry is just as serious, and just as literary. Both compare favorably to anything produced by mainstream, “secular” publishers. Wiseblood’s books aren’t out to score political points and tick the boxes of the latest social and cultural mania to seize the imaginations of what passes for America’s literary elites.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Top photograph by Aman Upadhyay via Unsplash. Used with permission.
Britain’s poet laureate Simon Armitage has long been interested in myth and legend. He’s published retellings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur, The Odyssey, and The Iliad, and he’s reached into the mists of medieval England to translate two famous poems, The Owl and the Nightingale and Pearl. What all of these works have in common is that they were originally created in poetry, the common language of myth.
A few years ago, before he became poet laureate, his work with The Iliad led to the creation of a play, The Last Days of Troy. It was first performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester before moving to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. Other productions have followed.
It’s a gripping piece of theater. It’s a griping piece of writing in general. Armitage doesn’t “improve upon” Homer; it’s more that he illuminates the great Greek story for a contemporary audience.
A night watchman at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, makes a startling discovery – a young man and woman are asleep in one of the galleries. They’re discovered in front of a metal sculpture entitled “Rising Sea” by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. The young man is naked; the young woman is wearing an elaborate bridal gown.
Inspector Larramendi of the Bilbao police is one the case, except he’s not sure exactly what the case is about. No one knows how the lovers got through the locked doors; the couple say the door was open. They claim they were in the museum throughout the night and never saw a guard. The would-be bride had fled her wedding ceremony, sobbing. She found a young stranger, and the got exceedingly drunk. They both independently claim the museum had suddenly appeared in front of them, like a magician’s trick.
They suspect the museum might be enchanted. Inspector Larramedi, the “Hound of Bilbao,” is inclined to agree.
Isabel Allende
Lovers at the Museum is a new short story by the acclaimed writer Isabel Allende, and the reader will be forgiven for thinking he or she has taken a step into magic realism. This might happen in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo or the Lima of Mario Vargas Llosa (in fact, I was reminded of the telenovelas of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter). The Guggenheim in Bilbao is a real museum, whose architectural style might be called “anti-architecture” or “melted metal.” The sculpture cited in the story is a real metal sculpture, and the inspector can be forgiven for at first thinking it’s a large curtain.
Allende has previously published The House of the Spirits and some 25 other books. Born in Peru, raised in Chile, and now living in California, she founded a charitable foundation after her daughter died in 1996. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2018.
