Here’s something for y’all to gnaw on while I curse Movable Type for deleting my entry on Elder Oaks and the Second Coming.
Stuart Buck’s running great excerpts from Chesterton essays. The original collection’s here. I printed it off and enjoyed it.
Chesterton in a very Burkean moment.
On parenting.
On why religions have added their rules and mystifications to Christ’s simple doctrine of Love.
On the special knowledge that doctors and scientists have of the existence of the soul.
The best of the lot.
Adam:
Anti-literaryite.
What’s the point in writing novels if you can’t make grandiose claims about your courage in dealing with subjects that no one else has before?
Next thing we know you’ll be spouting nonsense like shocking the bourgouisie shouldn’t be the goal of all good writers. I bet your even one of those “entertain *and* instruct” reactionaries.
I guess we won’t be seeing you at our annual “Bravery in the Face of Book Bannings by School Districts in the South and/or Burnings by Evangelicals” awards luncheon.
William,
I’m going to worry more about what the goal of good writers should be once I become one, per impossible.
Get thee to a Creative Writing MFA program, Adam. They’ll make a writer out of you — or at least make you be able to talk like one.
Adam, I just want to express sympathy for losing your post to the MT dragon. I hate that so much! It just happened to me last week. It’s completely infuriating because it never seems to come out the same the second time, and rewriting it takes so much time for something that has lost its freshness in your mind, and you just feel like screaming.
Raaaarrrr!
I don’t know about you, Logan, and it sure wouldn’t be apparent to the reader, but I really labor over these things, looking for the right word and phrase and all that and then, phhtt! it vanishes into airy nothing. It makes me mad. I feel like dropping into one of the controversial threads on the blog and heaping abuse on somebody.
my condolences as well. happily, when MT fails me…I can usually hit the back browser button to cut/paste & save the work…or it will save, albeit not post, what I wrote, even if it does blank out.
Adam…you have fabulous capacity & already shine your brilliant diction forth. don’t let some MFA program spoil you. demosthenes didn’t need one; nor locke.
MFA programs don’t spoil, they ferment!
—
Okay, I’ll stop now. I just find it completely hilarious that we have this whole industry of MFA programs where the goal seems to be to create writers who will end up teaching in other Creative Writing programs.
It’s like a white sauce that had too much flour added to it and so keeps growing and growing in volume but not in flavor.
Chesterton didn’t need no MFA program.
BTW, if you all haven’t already, check out Buck’s reply to criticism of the Chesterton quote on doctors/scientists and special knowledge. Good stuff.
Yes, Adam. Writing a post is be a creative experience where you feel like you get in a groove. You work at it, and you feel like you get it right (or acceptable, at least). Then if you have to replicate it, the groove is gone.
By the way, if you go looking for trouble in controversial topics, I’ll back you up.
I’m surprised to find that anyone can compose in MT or any medium other than either paper and pen or word processor. I compose on a word processor and then copy and paste into MT. It saves a lot of headache, and I think it makes composition easier.
OK, so am I the only one who finds it hilarious that C. writes about “men” taking in the baby-linen and caring for babies out of the force of “his” affection for his young? I wonder how much baby-linen Chesterton ever saw, let alone washed and hung to dry!
(And just because of the difficulty of getting tone just right, let me say that I really do find it *funny*–I’m wearing a smile as I type, in contrast to my usual grim feminist face :) )
Shouldn’t Grim Feminist Face be capitalized? You know, it being iconic?
NB, I’m smiling too.
I think so–GFF for short. My favorite Sunstone cartoon ever was a picture of a woman behind the counter of a bookstore, saying “This is a feminist bookstore. We don’t have a humor section.”
[...] usly played a role in C.S. Lewis’ conversion. Both Lewis and Chesterton fascinate me, so it’s a wonder I haven’t read the book yet. In answer to t [...]