Monthly Archives: January 2012

Writing

Why Do I Write Novels?

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Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

So, why do I write novels?

In a writing group some years ago, maybe 20, a writing exercise turned into 120 pages of Even the Gods Must Die, a novel inspired by the Norse Ragnarök.  The doom of the gods, Ragnarök foresees the end of the nine worlds, the death of the Aesir and the Vanir with plenty of teeth-rattling battles.  Fenrir fights with and kills Odin.  Thor fights the Midgard Serpent, kills it, but dies later from its poison.  What’s not to like?

The exercise came in the midst of a writing group I formed to help me as I wrote my dissertation for McCormick Seminary.  My dissertation on the decline of the Presbyterian Church satisfied the writing requirement for a Doctor of Ministry which I received in 1991.

By that point I had met Kate and discussed with her leaving the ministry. If I left the ministry, what would I do?  The skills I’d learned didn’t transfer readily.

Well, there was that 120 page story.  Hmm.  Maybe I’ll write.

Not a big stretch, really, since my Dad had earned his living as a journalist and columnist.

Early on I decided to focus on ancient religions as a fundamental component of my novels, fantasy novels all, so far.

So, in one important sense, I wrote novels to escape the ministry after it had become a swamp.  Do I write to overcome existential alienation or do I write so that others can overcome their existential estrangement?  No.  I write because the process and the stories fascinate me.

At some point I hope I can make some money, too.  And, if you read my work and find your angst or your anomie lessened, all the better.  But I’m not counting on it.

Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

Why Write Novels At All

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Winter                                    First Moon of the New Year

I’ll respond to this in another post, but for those of you interested in the novel, it’s worth a read.  You can reach the whole article through the central question link.

The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer “How should novels be?” but “Why write novels at all?”*

*The roots of this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the ’80s promulgated the notion of “cultural capital”: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is — the novel very much included — the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that “refined” tastes have…

The idea that “the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness” crops up all over the writing of the Conversazioni group: in Franzen’s nonfiction, and in Wallace’s, and in Smith’s beautiful encomium to Wallace in her book of essays, “Changing My Mind.” It also helps to explain these writers’ broad turn away from various postmodern formalisms and toward the problems of the human heart. Indeed, when we consider the web of influence that connects them to old roommates and friends and lovers and students — a list that includes David Means, Rick Moody, Mary Karr, Donald Antrim and Jonathan Safran Foer — and to newer work by writers like Karen Russell or the Irish novelist Paul Murray, “Here is a sign that you’re not alone” starts to look like the ascendant trope of and about literature today…

But will we be alone? Literature, to a degree unique among the arts, has the ability both to frame the question and to affect the answer. This isn’t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary “literary fiction” aims to treat us aren’t an awful lot. It’s just that, if the art is to endure, they won’t be quite enough.

Travel, US History

The West

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Winter                                        First Moon of the New Year

Residuals from Denver.  Gabe saying, “Oh, no.” as he pushes his toy trains over the edge of the table.  Ruthie dancing with her stuffed horse while the US Junior Olympian dressage quadrille performed.  Jon at work on the renovation, painting doors, grouting tile.  Jen and I headed out to A-basin to pick up Jon after his head banging.

The more we go out there and, specifically, the more I go to the Great Western Stock Show, the more intrigued I get with the West.  Cowboys.  Belt Buckles.  Rodeo.  Horses.  Ranches.  Brahma bulls and Longhorn cattle.  Rhinestone belts and Stetson hats.  There is an America here that I know little about.  A part of the country’s history born in pioneer expansion and Indian oppression.  A hardy, land and livestock oriented life necessitated by land unfit for traditional agriculture.

Both the new West and the old one intrigues me.  Even the very old one.  The Anasazi west and the gunfighter and outlaw west and the rancher and cowboy and pick-up truck west.

Not sure right now what to do with this intrigue, but something will come.

Code of the West

  • ·         Live each day with courage
  • ·         Take pride in your work
  • ·         Always finish what you start
  • ·         Do what has to be done
  • ·         Be tough, but fair
  • ·         When you make a promise, keep it
  • ·         Ride for the brand
  • ·         Talk less and say more
  • ·         Remember that some things aren’t for sale
  • ·         Know where to draw the line
Dogs, Family

Ouch

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Winter                                        First Moon of the New Year

We landed.  We drove.  We napped.  Ah.

Got up, went to Armstrong Kennels to get the dogs.  While getting the dogs, Kate had Rigel, a big girl, around 100 pounds, on a leash.  In her eagerness to get in the car and go home, Rigel tugged the leash, Kate tripped, hit her head and opened a three-inch gash over her right eye.

She’s at Urgent Care right now getting it sewed up.  No, she did not want me to drive her.  She’s tough.

Rigel got in the car.  Now she’s asleep on the rug upstairs.  Back home again in Minnesota.

BTW:  It cost more to board the dogs than it did to board Kate and me at the Best Western.  Hmmm.

Cinema and Television, Family, Literature, Travel

1Q84, Girl With Dragon Tattoo and Dancing Horses

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Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

Buddy Mark Odegard told me he just finished 1Q84.  Me, too.  Last night, in fact.  This is a good, maybe a great novel.  Time will tell on the evaluation.  It has a good mix of magic realism, Kafka, contemporary product placements, love story and a peak inside Japanese society at this point in the new millennium.

It affected me in a deep way, wondering about the nature of this reality and alternatives to it.  Wondering about the origin of religious beliefs.  Wondering if the Japanese appear as similar to us as they do in reading Murakami.  1Q84 will have to set with me for a while, perhaps a long while.

Also saw David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Long and beautiful, it recreates the mood and jarring character of Lisbeth, the mystery of Harriet Vanger and the investigative tenacity of Mikhail Bloomfield.  We were part of a small crowd of gray haired folk, a quartet of women in front of us who had one woman explaining the ending to her friends.  Over and over.

We’ve also seen the Swedish version, a grittier piece with lower production values.  Naomi Rapace seemed to inhabit the angry side of Lisbeth better than Rooney Mara, though Mara exposed her gentle side.

We’re off to Dancing Horses tonight, for something completely different.  The last night here with the Denver Olsons.  Tomorrow we pack up and return home.

 

Commentary on the news

Thoughts on the News

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Winter                                 First Moon of the New Year

Costa Concordia.  A sinking, listing cruise ship sends shivers down the spine of any cruise passenger.  Those lifeboat drills, the one you grumbled about when you walked to your lifeboat station?  Turns out they’re important.  Standing on the promenade deck with others, looking around wondering how foolish you look wreathed in your bright orange life vest, seems a lot less foolish now.

Romney pays 15% tax rate?  What’s wrong with him?  Can we afford a president who isn’t clever enough to avoid taxes altogether?  Inquiring minds.

Obama ineffective?  Doubtful.  Health care reform.  Out of Iran.  Got Osama.  Finished bailing out the economy.  I may not like the bail out, giving money to oligarchs who fail so they can turn around and oligarch again seems backwards when thousands of people have lost their homes and unemployment remains stubbornly high.

Yet.  A deep depression, pulling down the rest of the world’s economies, is in no one’s self-interest.  The targets, not the fact or size of the bailout, is what bothers me.

 

Art and Culture, Retirement

65 Ahead

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Winter                 First Moon of the Winter Solstice

In February I will turn 65.  And I’m happy to do it.  Not that I have much choice in the matter.  What I mean is that I like this time of life and anticipate with pleasure the next decade or two or three.

This transition has already begun to cause changes.  Once back from our cruise in late November, I realized I needed to step back from the Sierra Club and focus on home, family and my work.

Home and family have obvious content, kids and grandkids, wife, gardens, bees.  Remaining active and engaged with all of them.  Not that I haven’t but recognizing that the grandparent and long married aspects of those relationships alter past patterns and demand new ones.  Just what those are will become evident as I live into them over the next few years.

My work has three ongoing facets:  a series of novels set in the Tailte mythos, reimagining faith and translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  To this last I have added creation of commentary similar to Pharr’s for Vergil.

The portion of my life dedicated to art will also to need to change, but I have not yet paid attention to it.  At a DAM site, the Palette Restaurant, Kate and I discussed how my relationship with art could transform.

Art could become a larger part of my writing, using techniques or artists in my fiction.  Just how, undetermined right now.

Reimagining faith has as its long term hope the redefining of our relationship with nature.  One way of rethinking, or seeing anew, our current relationship with the world we live is to investigate how artists portray nature across cultures.

A third way of integrating art in a different way might involve selecting a research project focused on an artist, a movement, a period, a culture.  This might have some written work as a component or end product.

In service of all three I could begin taking art history courses.

A significant thread of all these changes is a pulling back or away from the world, shedding responsibility to others or for others and concentrating life more at home.  This feels age appropriate and is a definite inner drive for me right now.

Art and Culture, Travel

Pacific Northwest On the Front Range

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Winter                    First Moon of the New Year

The Denver Art Museum (DAM as it describes itself) has a wonderful Pacific Northwest gallery.  Undergoing reinstallation when Kate and I visited the museum last year, I saw its bones and wanted to see what I though was a new gallery.  Turns out it’s an old gallery newly installed with several new works added.

There are two sets of two large story poles (totem poles) which have hung between them on a braided rope a puppet by Richard Hunt, creator of the MIA’s raven/sisuitil transformation mask.  A wall between them has many masks, some from the late 19th century, but many from latter decades of the 20th.

A bear clan living space partition is huge and has the usual womb located space for the chief to enter through wearing and carrying clan regalia.  The collection also includes several bent wood boxes and two story poles from the 19th century, weathered and furrowed, haunting in their quiet presence.

If you’re ever in Denver, this is a real treat.

The new DAM buildings, I’m afraid, are not so fine.  Now three years or so old, they include many dark areas with little natural light, oddly shaped galleries that draw attention to themselve rather than the art.

Family, Retirement, Travel

Free Time

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Winter                    First Moon of the New Year

The grandkids are back in school today;  Jon and Jen back in their classrooms, so we’re on free time.  I want to go to the Denver Art Museum and see a Pacific Northwest exhibit they were installing last time I was there.

Due to Kate’s impending retirement this may be the last time we travel out here together for a while.  Too expensive to board all the dogs.  While we won’t be on a fixed income, it will be less plastic than during Kate’s employment years.  Unless, of course, I finally push a novel over the transom.  Then we could a little extra cash.

Limitations are part of life so I don’t find that prospect daunting, only something new to take into account.

That’s all from the Mile High City for today.

Family, Travel

Jumping Horses

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Winter                            First Moon of the New Year

Sometimes you do something for one reason and have an unexpected outcome.  Tonight was like that for me.

The Great Western Stock Show, Colorado’s winter State Fair-like celebration of things Western, has become my time to visit with the grandkids.  I take the kids to a couple of shows, walk through the exhibition hall with them and get down into the stock barns, too.

This afternoon at 5 we boarded a shuttle here at the Best Western, making it out to the show around 5:15.  Gabe had his picture taken on a Clydesdale.  3 year old Gabe and this giant horse made quite the shot.  Very big horse, very small Gabe.

After a dinner of polish, briskets and chicken nuggets we wandered the merchandise and exhibition halls, seeing John Deere implements, cattle chutes, Western clothing, candy, baby chicks, several cages filled with chickens, a bee exhibit (I chatted with some Colorado bee keepers) and bought Ruth a lavender cowgirl hat.

Before going to the main event, we wandered through the horse barns, stopping to communicate with a few.  On the wall opposite the last of the horse stalls were some larger stalls.  In two of them  were Texas Longhorn cattle.  One came out of the stall while we watched, he had to angle his head to maneuver those huge horns through a three foot + opening.

Then we went to the event center for the Grand Prix, a $40,000 steeple chase, which pitted 27 horses and several riders against an 80 second clock and a series of jumps designed by the top steeple chase course designer in the US.

I’d never seen horse jumping live.  It amazed me.  These huge animals and their relatively small riders approached jumps of various heights, widths and construction.  One had water and another had a brick wall, both difficult for horses to cross.

The horse would gather itself in stride, then leap, stretching out those four legs, legs meant to have contact with the earth and follow their momentum across the obstacles.  This is an act of courage, skill, athleticism and beauty.  On the part of both rider and horse.

I would do this again.   Never occurred to me I might like it.