Listening to Kerouac

February 17, 2012 in General, Staff Posts with 2 Comments

Buy the album

Kerouac on CD

Jake Slaughter is inspired to seek the voice of a generation.

Maybe it isn’t the case for everyone, but I tend to think of poetry as being a primarily written form of communication. Spoken word poetry, while certainly enjoyable, is always risky. While the written poetic voice typically inspires a familiarity with readers, the spoken voice allows for no ambiguities: once heard, it cannot be unheard.

Have you ever seen an interview or heard a reading from an author whose voice is either off-putting or ill fitted to their work? I certainly have. Maybe it is a good thing that we don’t have recordings of any of the historical literary greats. Can you imagine our horror if Shakespeare had a high, squeaky voice? I remember when I found a recording of T.S. Eliot reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It’s not that I think it bad, simply different. Eliot certainly has the type of voice I would imagine him to have, but there is little of the emotion I would expect to hear in such a poem.

Part of this comes down to cultural convention. Many of the earliest recordings of poets from this era have a similar persona. This persona almost unanimously suggests the authoritative sage, content with reading a poem rather than performing it.

In direct contrast to these types of poetry recordings stands Jack Kerouac, specifically his 1959 album Poetry for the Beat Generation. Within the first few seconds the contrast is made apparent, for Kerouac’s poetry is accompanied by some jazzy piano music played by the television personality Steve Allen.

I had read some of his works throughout high school and I was hesitant to listen to his recordings for fear of it hurting my enjoyment of the fascinating Kerouac persona. But when I finally sat down with my iPod, I was more than pleasantly surprised: I was captivated.

There is something unique about Kerouac’s voice. He is both regional and universal, both dated and modern. Most importantly, he gives life to his work. There is no monotone in Kerouac’s performance style. He finds a way to make known all his little poetic tricks: alliteration is biting, assonance abounds, and his timing is impeccable.

Kerouac is one of those rare authors whose reading voice makes me enjoy his writing voice all the more. And for me, he is representative of all his generation.

As part of the Beat Generation, Kerouac’s writing voice is obviously memorable and distinctly important in the history of American literature. I sense a kinship between my generation and Kerouac’s. For just as the Beats decided to hitchhike across America in search of both personal and national identity, we seek identity through our journeys on the World Wide Web. Inevitably, the same loneliness is there, along with the same need for answers to life’s ultimate questions.

What are the answers being given in response to the loneliness of our generation? And more importantly, what are the answers we ought to be giving?

The true answers to life’s questions are like the spoken voice of the poet: once heard, it cannot be unheard.

Jake Slaughter is an editorial intern with Relief. He will graduate this spring with a degree in English from Trinity International University.

Lisbeth Salander vs. The Powerful idea

February 13, 2012 in Faith and Culture, Staff Posts with 0 Comments

Lisbeth Salander

Lyle Enright thinks it’s crazy not to take Lisbeth’s craziness seriously.

There’s something that I’ve noticed is often lacking when Christians talk about culture – namely, culture. There are several publications (I will not name-drop) that are more than happy to tell you how many f-words need to be spat before a film becomes anathema and just how much breast is considered “damning.”

Well, Relief doesn’t believe f-words will cost you your salvation or that Genesis 2 should be X-rated; discernment isn’t so simple. Take 2011’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, an adaptation of the novel by Swedish author Stieg Larsson directed by David Fincher. It has profanity, nudity, brutal violence and human dysfunction pouring out from all sides. From a “Christian” (or, if you’re feeling snarky, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) standpoint, one might wish to write it off as “bad” and so avoid it, but I’d like to focus on what the material and its themes mean in a fuller, more implicative light: what, exactly, does the film say about our world, our culture?

It’s a question worth asking considering how popular Larsson’s posthumously-published “Millennium series” has become since the first installment was printed in 2005. Young people and adults alike have turned page after gripping page through the stories of Lisbeth Salander and her encounters with murder, white-collar crime, trust issues, relational tension and (light this one up as the arguable theme throughout the series) sexual abuse. These are stories that are not afraid to examine the repercussions of some very dark and, despite the desires of many to believe otherwise, very real circumstances that combine to make a single young woman’s life nigh unbearable. To watch Lisbeth for even half an hour in Fincher’s film leaves you wondering just how this girl can cope with what happens to her.

Well, she doesn’t cope; she acts: after being raped by her ward and brutalizing him in retaliation, Lisbeth visits him one more time to remind him that she holds his reputation in the palm of her hand in the form of video evidence of his abuse. She demands that he fill out her psychological evaluations in more flattering ways, except that she does not seem to mind that he consistently calls her crazy. “Because I am crazy,” she announces.

This is the film’s stand-up-and-cheer moment – I know because that’s almost what I did. There is no other moment quite like it, nothing that comes as close to driving you to your feet on behalf of this be-inked heroine. As such, considering and coming to realize what  you’re cheering for can be an almost mortifying process.

The fact is that Lisbeth has in a significant way placed herself in this situation; she has allowed herself to be abused for the sake of collecting evidence against her abuser. In a world where violence is cycled and recycled, Lisbeth has allowed herself to a part of the system for just long enough to discover the way out: “I am crazy.”

It is a paradigm that seems to be making its way into modern entertainment with more and more gusto. In this post-modern society, “The Madman” is the one who holds the secret truth, the way out. Even Nietzsche’s Übermensch has been replaced by The Joker. Indeed, if you were to take that archenemy of the Caped Crusader (courtesy of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, 2008), victimize him to the point of sympathy and recast him as a twenty-something young woman but leave the personality largely intact, you would not be very far off from the character of Lisbeth Salander.  Why does this work?

Because insanity, says the philosophical climate of the day, is the way out; it is what breaks the cycle and allows us to not only cope with but transcend this karmic world that constantly victimizes us to be forever scarier than the things that scare us. It is a very bleak, very final way of looking at things.

But another way of going about it occurs to me – something with the same result but by drastically different means. Say what you will about U2’s Bono (I in no way wish to begin deconstructing and analyzing his character or beliefs here), he has a very appropriate last word to share on this topic:

“The universe operates by Karma,we all know that.  For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction:[but] Grace enters the picture to say, I’ll take the blame, I’ll carry the cross.  It is a powerful idea: Grace interrupting Karma” (Bono in U2 by U2. London, 2006. Page 300).

Lyle Enright is an editorial intern with Relief. He will graduate in English from Trinity International University this spring.

Happy Birthday, Boz! Dickens Turns 200

February 7, 2012 in General, Staff Posts with 2 Comments

'The Inimitable', who also liked to write under the 18th-century moniker 'Boz'

EIC Brad Fruhauff reminisces on his relationship to the great Victorian novelist.

On midnight, February 7th, 200 years ago, Charles John Huffam was born to John and Elizabeth Dickens. He would grow up to become the most famous and best-selling novelist of his day and arguably one of the finest talents for character and wordplay since Shakespeare.

I tell my students that if they don’t like Dickens there’s something wrong with their souls. I’m only half kidding. How, after all, can you not love a man who had such great love for his characters and for his native tongue? One of my favorite examples of his skill at mixing evocative description with the absurd comes from the opening paragraph of Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

That Megalosaurus is simply unimaginable in a Thackeray or Trollope or even Joyce (in whom much is imaginable).

In high school, I read an abridged version of Great Expectations and hated it. I knew what a novel was like and this wasn’t it. The writing was verbose, the characters exaggerated, and the angst was completely inaccessible. Later, I discovered a small cadre of friends who similarly disliked it, and it became a point of pride among us that we had “found out” the great Dickens to be an over-rated windbag.

It took eight years for me to give Dickens another chance, and that after I had read through most of the rest of the century’s authors: Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Thackeray, Hardy. I began with Hard Times, which is probably now my least favorite, but at the time it was a revelation: Dickens wasn’t trying to write a novel like any of those other folks. He was reimagining what the novel was, and what it was was a playground for his infinitely flexible imagination.

The quintessential Dickens scene is a meal

Dickens gives us a world of characters who are alive because they are larger than life, and if they are not always fully aware of themselves (few, if any, are at all), they are no less lovable for being caught up in the same egotism that affects us all. More than that, his portrayals teach us to love even the grotesque and bizarre, to appreciate the carnival of life in the midst of our strivings.

More still, and most significantly, I think, for the Christian, he insists on a world infused with moral purpose and even clarity. His villains are punished and his heroes rewarded with a self-consciously fairy-tale consistency. Social causes pervade his novels, but he never gets so bogged down in the brokenness of reality that he can’t simultaneously remind us where grace and beauty shine through.

And he does it all in an ebullient prose that reminds us why we love novels in the first place: their ability to wrap us up in words and convince us that some parts of the chaos of our lives are intelligible, if only for a little while. Dickens’s facility with the English language is a joy all its own, and it’s why I tell my students they need to enjoy the ride.

He wasn’t a perfect man, but what man is? We remember him not as a saint but as an artist who left us with a great gift.

If you haven’t read any Dickens, you might start with Great Expectations (unabridged) or David Copperfield. Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend all rank high among his “five or six masterpieces,” but may be harder to get into until you get a feel for him.

Brad Fruhauff is Editor-in-Chief of Relief. He wrote his dissertation on ethics and genre in the work of Dickens and so has a personal investment in this bicentennial year’s celebrations.

Christianity and Yarn Barf: A Yarnie’s View

February 6, 2012 in Faith and Culture, Staff Posts with 0 Comments

Relief intern Jazz Eisinger plays at spinning her own parables.

Okay, so this title might be a stretch, or at least unnecessarily unpleasant. Never fear – whatever images of fiber-induced vomit you may be entertaining will be much worse than what I’m actually talking about.

Yarn barf, in essence, is the coiled and knotted ball of nastiness that comes out of the middle of the yarn ball. A yarnie (or crafter, if you prefer) will pull out the center to find the end of the ball for a project or to wind the yarn into a more manageable size. However, though the strand was wound into the ball of yarn once, it doesn’t come out as easily all the time. There are often knots, tangles, and even the occasional Gordian knot that befuddles one into believing that the continuous string is out to thwart itself.

What to do? There are three main approaches: patience, skill, and force.

Patience involves simply using the yarn, pulling the strand through the mess until it resolves itself. This is by far the slowest but often the preferred method.

Skill requires a good set of eyes and nimble fingers to untangle the knot. This also takes patience, but also a willingness to loosen the yarn from itself and solve the problem one part at a time.

Finally, brute force is sometimes the only answer. A pair of scissors will alleviate the problem quickly, but also causes a break in the line, which will show up in the final product.

So how does this relate to Christianity?

Simple. As Christians, and even as the Church, we often disagree within ourselves or with God. One person fights with another, and soon others are brought into the fray. Someone fights against God’s will, thinking that their own direction looks better – and only succeeds in creating a bigger mess.

And yet, grace prevails. God is creating a product far greater than the knots or tangles, and he’s been forming the pattern since well before you were born and he’ll continue long after you’re gone. Despite our best efforts to thwart him, he is faithful to untangle our messes and create something beautiful.

Question for Thought:

Does thinking in terms of a creative God inspire or change your perception of him?

Jazz Eisinger is an editorial intern with Relief. She will graduate from Trinity International University this spring with a degree in English.

The Way of Grace: Malick’s Tree of Life

January 30, 2012 in Faith and Culture, Staff Posts with 0 Comments

 Relief intern Jacob Slaughter can’t stop thinking about this “filmmaker’s film.”

“There” says the Mother to her three sons, pointing into the sky as the theme from Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava (Moldau) elegantly guides the viewer through the earliest years of a child’s life. “That’s where God lives.”

When Terence Malick’s film The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival last May, I was excited. Somehow the movie had worked its way into my cultural radar, and I was glad to hear positive commentary on the overall quality of the piece. To my mind Malick, like Cormac McCarthy, is one of those recluse creators who makes exactly what he wants and follows no one’s schedule but his own. Since 1973 he has directed and written only five movies, but these movies include Badlands and The Thin Red Line.

It is understandable why he is not a household name. His movies cannot be passively watched and enjoyed; they demand something which many people nowadays are unable or unwilling to give: attention. Malick’s style of filmmaking is like cinematic poetry. He is a filmmaker’s filmmaker.

Reviews of The Tree of Life exemplify this disconnect between critics and audiences perfectly. Websites that rely on content created by critics rank this film as among the best of the year. Websites that have primarily user-created content show that audience’s opinions are more polarized than I have ever seen. We’ve all said it about some piece of art before, but I think The Tree of Life is a modern example of the old cliché at work, “You either love it or hate it. Nothing in-between.”

I think it is a film better experienced than described, so I will avoid giving an intricate summary or an in-depth analysis of specific symbolism. From my own experience I can simply say that this movie has constantly been on my mind since I first saw it last summer, waiting to be watched again, once I get some time away from mountains of homework.

The movie starts with a quote from Job 38: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” We are introduced to a family in pain, a family experiencing the loss of one of their own. We are given insight into the mind of the Mother as she mourns the passing of a child. We hear the thoughts of the oldest son Jack as he tries to come to terms with the death of one of the people closest to him. This particular death is more than just a human tragedy, it is the cause for a religious depression. As they struggle to understand, they ask the inevitable question:

“Why? Where were You?”

The response? A twenty-minute sequence of the creation of the universe that contains some of the most awe-inspiring images in recent cinematic history.

Yet, that is not the whole response. There comes a sudden shift from the large and cosmic to the subtle and deeply personal history of the family. Through one of the better examples of montage, Malik takes us through the experiences before birth until that point of childhood in which we begin to understand the world on our own.

“There are two ways through life,” the three sons are told, “the way of nature or the way of grace.” As Jack and his two brothers grow up they have these two ways exemplified by their Father and Mother, respectively. This conflicting duality will be a part of Jack’s own journey to understanding the faith of his parents in an attempt to make it his own, and the bulk of the film functions as Jack’s bildungsroman.

The film ends with a vision of the afterlife, a moment of reconciliation between loved ones on a beach in which all that can be seen is the never-ending horizon. The scene makes sense, after all, “That’s where God lives,” as Jack was told earlier.

The last words are uttered by the Mother, “I give him to you. I give you my son.” While the meaning is explicitly an acceptance of her son’s death, I think the Biblical framework allows for one to see a secondary implication: a John 3:16 reassurance of the love of God for not only the world, but for the individual. In light of that Son, the Mother is able to trust her own into the hands of God.

As I said, I’ve just skimmed the surface of what is to be realized throughout The Tree of Life. I’ve barely mentioned any of the symbolism at play throughout the film, but hopefully you are intrigued enough to experience it for yourself. I am willing to admit that I may be inserting aspects of my own biases onto the piece, but you can’t watch The Tree of Life without engaging with the Christian faith. While Malick may not have set out to make “Christian Art,” I cannot think of a better work that portrays the tension between God’s unimaginable immensity and his love and interaction with the individual through the world He created and the people placed in one’s life.

Do yourself a favor: see this film.

Jacob Slaughter is an editorial intern with Relief. He will graduate from Trinity International University this spring with a degree in English.

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