A Poem Must Always Begin with the Facts

I saw a crow
with a cigarette butt
dangling from the side of his glossy beak,
Bogie style.

I said,
Humphrey, my God,
how long has it been?
It seems like a thousand years,
since Rick's place,
Casablanca,
all that.

And I said,
did you ever, you know,
find her again?
The one.

And the crow said,
beat it kid, scram, take a powder,
you're blowin' my cover.

The cigarette bobbed as he spoke,
but remained in place.
And he said,

Go on, make like a tree
and leave.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

So it's 12/31, is it? Where has the time flown?

This is the . . . let me see . . . 266th post of the year, which seems about average for me. Oh, and it's the 1865th since I started. Sheesh!

I'm actually enjoying blogging these days, and I do have some plans. For example, I'll be starting a new music series called Murder-Songs Monday. No I'm not getting all morbid in my old age, but I thought a little lighthearted ditty about death wouldn't hurt now and then. Seriously, I think I can sustain the murder-song series through the coming year (52 murder-songs), after which I'll switch to, I dunno, songs about puppy dogs or something. Stay tuned.

The general idea is of course to broaden the subject matter of this blog to include all my interests. I've been using the Internet to find music, especially lately Americana and folk music, and so I'd like to share some of that now and then. I'll also be posting, of course, about the books I'm reading, the films I've watched, etc. The usual blogging fare.

On the other hand, I'm not going to wander too far from the faith-focused blogging that has always been the common thread around here. My feeling is that we get quite enough blogging from church-leaders, but not so much from the rest of us, so I feel it's a kind of a blogging-niche for me (for whatever that's worth). My series on our rather fitful search for a new church will continue. Again, stay tuned.

I'm going to try to do at least one devotional post per week. Of course the words "I'm going to try" might as well mean "I'll never be able to," but, well, yes, I'm going to try. I'll be reading through the lectionary this year, and it will be helpful to me to regularly write something about what I'm reading, and maybe a few other people will find it helpful as well.

Oh, also, I'm continuing the monthly poetry challenge (like it or not!). I aimed at one poem per month last year, and met the challenge (quality is a only a secondary priority). Same deal this year.

So that's about it. Happy new year to one and all. See you after the zero flips to one!

Three Books

1. Looking for the King might be a good one. Here's the trailer.

2. And I definitely want to read One.Life by Scot McKnight. Scot says:

I recommend this book for those who want to see what the Christian life looks like when you begin with Jesus — when you let his kingdom vision establish the categories.

3. And from the stimulating Alan Hirsch: Right Here, Right Now: Everyday Mission for Everyday People

[See also this 20-minute video where the authors explain their book in detail.]

heh.

Christmas is to Hollywood what a bank is to a crook.

Terry Teachout

What about church? (2)

I've been reading Daniel Okrent's Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition, and it's a real eye-opener. If you ever wondered how it was that a bunch a teetotalers (in a beer-loving nation like ours) ever worked up the political momentum to actually amend the constitution in order to keep people from enjoying a snort once in a while, this book lays it out in all its surprisingly-sordid detail.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about . . .

On page 2 Okrent quotes Billy Sunday, who was a popular American evangelist of the early twentieth century, and a lifelong campaigner for "temperance." When the 18th amendment to the consitution, banning the sale and distribution of alcohol, was passed, an ecstatic Billy Sunday said this:

The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corn cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

Putting aside the extraordinary theological confusion on display here, Sunday's words are of a piece with a long tradition of puffery and hucksterism in American culture, in which a cause (or product, or diet, or lifestyle choice) is promoted with over-the-top promises of bliss, while at the same time a failure to accede to that cause (or buy the product, or choose the lifestyle, etc.) will result in untold misery and degradation.

This method of persuasion is so common in American culture as to go almost unnoticed. It is rife in commercial Christianity, with Your Best Life Now being only the most obvious example. It even colors the tone of much pulpit ministry, coaxing the pew-folk to be good, tithe, volunteer, vote, or whatever. I'll call it promoculture. In the church, promoculture language not only invites exaggeration, intentionally brushes over nuance, and conveniently ignores alternative evidence, but inevitably shades into outright legalism.

Imagine America without promoculture. It's hard to do. You'd probably have to go back to pre-industrial village life, I suppose (see this post on Christmas nostalgia). Imagine, let's say, the game of baseball without promoculture. You'd have to go back to pick-up games in the sandlot. My point is simply to demonstrate the all-pervasive nature of, and our economic dependency on, promoculture.

Now try this thought-experiment: imagine evangelical America without promoculture. Again, very hard to do, methinks. [Update: but see Lore's comment for a clue.]

See, I hate promoculture. I mute the commercials on TV, and I tune out the promo-jabber in churches. In the first post of this ongoing series, I featured a rant of Mark Driscoll's against "religion." Point being, as I look around for a church to attend, I'll be extremely wary of religion, and I'll also be extremely wary of promoculture. Don't try to sell me a book, get me excited about a program, or entice me into buying the latest must-have Christian music.

The question is, if you take promoculture out of the evangelical church, will there be anything left? Sometimes I wonder.

Thoughts on a Christmas Morning

If every Christian in America removed themselves to, say, the Australian outback, would the remaining Americans still celebrate Christmas?

Of course they would. Culturally speaking, Christmas has grown far beyond its Christian roots. We Christians might wish it were otherwise, but the cultural holiday we call Christmas does not belong to us alone. Not any more. In fact, I would say it is not particularly Christian at all. In defense of this assertion, I call to the dock Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and John "And-so-this-is-Christmas" Lennon.

American Christmas, at once glorious and schlocky, is a cultural phenomenon that is not driven by Christians, not defined by Christians, not guided or controlled by Christians. It is defined and driven to a large extent by marketers, who happen to have their finger on a deep longing in the human spirit. Perhaps we should say that cultural Christmas is ultimately defined by this longing. It is a longing that preceded even the "first Christmas," going all the way back, I suppose, to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden.

As further evidence, if any is needed, I submit to you a stack of popular Christmas songs a mile high, many of which I'm quite fond of myself. According to these, Christmas is all about gift-giving, snowflakes, going back to the old homestead, sleigh rides, etc. Even though most Americans live in places where snow is infrequent, images of muffler-wrapped carolers in the snow seem never out of place, because they touch something in us deeper than weather. Most of all these songs display a generalized nostalgia for the way we think things used to be. A desire to turn back. A longing for reunion.

Here we are as in olden days / happy golden days of yore.

Again, the evidence: a zillion greeting cards with Currier & Ives-like imagery of small towns, horse drawn buggies, gaslit streets, snowbound cottages in the country, etc. We want to fade into a charming nineteenth century lithograph of an idealized pre-industrial America. These images were already nostalgia-laden in Currier & Ives' time!

In the end it is innocence we long for, and innocence we almost seem to capture, if only for a moment, in the cloud of images and wishes that together coalesce around our Christmas celebrations. This is a deep and steady longing in all of us, I'm convinced.

And that's why Christmas now is more than a Christian holiday, like it or not. Its non-religious aspect has proven to have remarkable staying power. Cultural heft, you might say. That's why it seems foolish, in my opinion, for Christians to protest, "but Jesus is the reason for the season!" The reason for both the Christian Christmas and the cultural Christmas are ultimately the same: the understanding that we have lost our way.

We have lost our way. Everyone knows that. Christmas, however it is celebrated, reveals a recognition of this, and it is the starting place for understanding the why and the wherefore of Jesus. Why he came, why he lived the way he lived and did the things he did, and why he died the way he died.

“Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

[Update: See also Peter Berger's defense of commercialized Christmas.]

What about church? (1)

I'm not so much thinking about looking for a church as thinking about what I'd be looking for if I was looking for a church. With a new year nearly upon us, perhaps it's a good time to consider these matters a little more intentionally.

Not that I'm about to go bouncing around from Sunday to Sunday in search of "the right fit." And neither am I holding out for perfection. I know there's an element in the Christian world that holds that not having a church--or, as they are just as likely to say, a church family--is a kind of crisis. Probably I'm just being selfish, or harboring sin, or who knows what, but it can't be good.

Going to church, in other words, is for these folks a key measure of spiritual health.

Well, maybe. Then again, maybe not. But anyway, although I'm pretty happy hanging out at home these Sunday mornings, I'm still liking the idea of church. It's a good New Testament idea, after all.

So I return to the original question: if I was looking for a church, what would I be looking for? In future posts I'm going to attempt to tease out a few answers to this question. So consider this the first in a series. In the meantime, here's Mark Driscoll preaching about something I intend to avoid like the plague: religion!


Heh. "We're all jacked up, Jesus. Can you help?"

Wilderness Musings

An interesting article by Ross Douthat of the New York Times. I'm finding Douthat to be one of the best of the commenting class, and this article, called "A tough Season for Believers," is no exception. I may have more to say about some of Douthat's points, if I find the time, and if I do I might just couple his thoughts with those of Mike Bell in his post at Internet Monk, Escaping the Post-Evangelical Wilderness. Both these articles have personal relevance for me, and in the coming year I hope to occasionally write about my own trek through the "wilderness" that both of them, in their different ways, are describing.

Musical Americana

Quotatious

"Just what does it take to get into heaven anyway? According to one author, the majority of Protestants and evangelicals believe that you get to heaven by being good.... What else would we expect after a generation of churches teaching how to raise drug–free kids, how to have better marriages, how to stay out of debt, how to vote—everything but the Gospel. If our spiritual lives were Jesus-shaped instead of church-shaped, maybe we would realize that the only thing that qualifies us for heaven is death and resurrection. Try preaching that Sunday after Sunday and see how quickly you can shrink your church." Jeff Dunn at Internet Monk

December Poem

I've done it. One poem each month for the entire year. It was a modest goal, but touch and go there at times nevertheless. Sorry, the December poem is not full of Christmas cheer, but something that came to me almost whole on my way home from work last night.

Mark 5:3

He lives among the tombs
and no man can bind him.
He cuts himself with rocks,
throws himself into fire,
and wanders abroad
in the rain and snow.

You’ve seen him
on your street,
waving his hands
and answering back
to the legions
in his head--
the bitter regrets,
the posionous memories,
the repeating accusations.

Someone may have loved him
once, but no longer.

He lives among the tombs
and no man can free him.

Jesus, come.

3 Lists

The 100 Best Americana Albums of 2010

10 Best Bluegrass projects of 2010

and

Defunct amusement parks

The Rabbit Room

Have you discovered the Rabbit Room? It's a collaborative website that boasts among its several fine creative artist bloggers the wonderful Andrew Peterson. There's plenty of good stuff here, so by all means rummage for yourself, but I wanted to draw your attention to a Thanksgiving poem by Peterson. It begins,

O God, Magnificent Confounder,
Boundless in mercy and power,
Be near me in my apathy.

Be near me, Savage Dreamer,
Bright Igniter of Exploding Suns,
But not too near. ...

This poem nails the sheer human-ness of our prayers with a decisive wit. Even if you don't like poetry, you really should read it!

End of the Year Thoughts

Well, the runaway freight train known as 2010 is whistling wildly toward its collision with 2011, at which point it will abruptly turn to mist and memory. I am old enough now for the years to pass with disconcerting suddenness. Yesterday it was 1990. The day before that, I was riding the Tilt-a-Whirl at the San Souci Amusement park, aged 10.


I said I was going to take a blogging break this month, but lo and behold . . . my break lasted a day or two. Still, Wilderness Fandango is changing. The changes are self-evident, I suppose, but if you're one of those people who enjoyed my holding forth on the state of the church and such (there may have been a few such people), I'll be doing a lot less of that. But this is still one part faith-blog. My blogroll still features the Jesus-bloggers in its primary position, you'll notice.  In case anyone was wondering, I'm not saying farewell to all that.


I think, on the other hand, it would be accurate to say I'm in transition. I haven't gone to church in quite some time, and I'm not sure I want to (so sue me!). I think I will, though, eventually. I'm waiting to "want to," I guess. And I have no idea where it will be. Like I said, transition.


Speaking of which, Viola's latest post is on spiritual transitions. He writes,

Oftentimes Christians will feel stuck where they are, frustrated, restless, and lack peace . . . but will not recognize that the Lord is bringing them through a transition from one phase to another.

And also:

Transitions often include physically relocating to another place where God wants you to be for a time, to learn, to grow, to have a new life-experience. Sometimes it includes taking a break and retreating from a some specific work or activity. Sometimes it includes taking up a new activity or act of service. Sometimes it includes journeying with a new group of believers and throwing your lot in with them.

So, yeah, transitions. And another way to describe this, one with a nice biblical connotation, is "wilderness." As in, Wilderness Fandango. But Viola is again helpful, with his post, Are you in the wilderness? Viola has five major points to make about wilderness sojourns. I'll list them here:

1. First, God will always take care of His people in the wilderness.
2. Second, if you remain in the wilderness, you will eventually die.
3. Third, the wilderness has but one goal: to sift us, to reduce us, and to strip us down to Christ alone.
4. Fourth, the wilderness is a symbol of new beginnings.
5. Leaving the wilderness always involves a cost.

Yeah, it's that fifth one that kind of makes me wonder.   But anyway, all this gives a pretty good sense of where I'm at these days.  Like any good blogger, I'll keep you posted.

Richard Wilbur

And interview with Richard Wilbur. If you love poetry, you may want to read this. It was a bit of a surprise (a pleasant one) to see that he's still publishing new work.

I mentioned James Wright yesterday, and called him a great American poet. For me, the great ones are those who have written maybe a half-dozen stunningly beautiful poems. Richard Wilbur long ago surpassed that number, and may be the very finest of his generation or any that America has produced. That's my opinion, anyway. He is a very bookish and literary kind of poet at times, and really not at his best in those moments (methinks), but at his best, and he is often at his best, his poems are earthy and humble, daringly simple and yet richly evocative, and reach--as all great poems must, in my opinion--toward the numinous. This recent poem is a fine example of what I mean, as is this, and this.

"Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope . . ."

This...


the bamboo raft on yulong river 桂林阳朔遇龙河竹排 in China

reminded me this...

As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor, by James Wright

And how can I, born in evil days And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate? -- Po Chu-i, Written A.D. 819


Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.

But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?

James Wright was, in my opinion, a great American poet.

A Good Haul

I bought 4 CDs this week. The price was right, and it supported a good cause. The four were:

The Greencards - Fascination
Rhonda Vincent - Destination Life
The Steel Drivers - Reckless
The Grascals - The Famous Lefty Flynn's

4 things

I've enjoyed children's lit since, well, since I was a children, and still I don't think anyone has ever surpassed Garth Williams' illustrations for Charlotte's Web.

That Mary Karr, she can really write.

I think I might be a kritarchist.

Panoramic London: what would Dickens say to this, I wonder.

We Three Kings

My favorite Christmas carol, played on some really cool drums.

New Discoveries

I've been "traveling" to new places on the Web lately, looking for blogs that might provide the kinds of content that I want to have represented on my blogroll. You'll see I have an Americana section now, which is mostly music, and a section called "Reading Books, Watching Movies, etc." Under that heading you'll find a few classic movie bloggers, and also the Friday Night Boys. Here's the descriptive subtitle:

THE Friday Boys are a disparate group of six men spread across Tyneside who meet once a week - 'always on a Friday' - to talk about the arts, raise a glass to recently departed heroes and villains and, at the evening's end, down a whisky or two. The FB's have only one golden rule - talk of the working week is strictly off-limit.

Now doesn't that sound fine? I would love to find a Friday Night Boys meeting in my town.

I also want to bring your attention to Robert Frost's Banjo. Good stuff there.

Mountain Music and It's History

3 Lists

Best books Glynn Young has read this year.

Essential Films, according to Classic Film Guide.

The 18 Strangest Gardens in the world.

Tinkering

So I've been reconsidering this whole blogging thing.

Posting has been light this month for that very reason. I'm trying to re-imagine
Wilderness Fandango I guess. I've changed the look, tinkered with the blogrolls, and tried to broaden the content a little. I'm not averse to changing the title, as well, but nothing has come to me just yet.

In the past couple of years WF has narrowed down to a somewhat angsty critique of the church in America, and, well, I've exhausted that mine. Nothing left to say.

Which leaves me in a rather awkward spot as a blogger. That's why I decided to step back for a while (and it's not as if scads of people are waiting each day for my next post). Anyway, I have to remind myself from time to time that the reason for this blog is simply, as my new sub-title states, so that I might have my say about things. No harm in that.

And that's where the content-broadening comes in. One of my models is the Mockingbird blog, where you get an interesting level of cultural engagement on a wide variety of themes. Another example would be Glenn Young's Faith, Fiction, Friends, where you get poetry, story-telling, book reviews, etc.

So let's see, what do I like to do. Read books, watch classic movies, write poems now and then, listen to old-timey music. And talk.

So that's it. That's what WF will be all about. I'm not "on a mission from God." I'm not trying to correct the church, the world, or anything else. I'm just being myself, here. A not entirely unique rattle-bag of personally selected odds-and-ends.

Rodney Crowell

I think Rodney Crowell is a genius. He sometimes achieves a narrative voice within his music that is utterly believable and relentlessly uncompromising. I love his commitment to the story and to telling it well.



After finding this song on YouTube I discovered that Crowell has written a novel, which seems just right. The book is called Chinaberry Sidewalks. I'm going to have to look for this one. He chats about it here:



HT: Music Fog

The Past and the Future in Several Vintage American Films

I watched two old movies this weekend, one of which was a true classic, and the other not so much.

First, I went to a showing of The Wizard of Oz at a vintage local theater. The "big screen" makes a big difference. It was the first time in quite a while that I've been out to the movies, and I half-expected to look up and see the beams of light from the projector piercing the darkness above our heads, and even to hear the faint humm of the projector itself. I guess I'm the type of guy who misses that sort of thing.

The other old movie I watched this weekend (at home on dvd) was The Egg and I (1947), one of those utterly silly movies that is nevertheless interesting as a marker of its period.

Movies in the 30s and 40s often displayed a naive World-of-Tomorrow confidence about the future with alls its marvelous gadgetry and convenience. But at the same time there is often a somewhat contradictory longing for the idealized American past and/or the simple life. In the 1930s, the nostalgic longing for the past was a more likely theme, with movies often revealing a simmering discontent with the trend-lines into the future. On the other hand, in the post-war 40s the balance shifted toward the idealization of the future. Optimism about technology and economies of scale carry the day. Wizard, made in the tenth year of the depression and in the same year as the Nazi invasion of Poland, is really all about that longing for a simpler past, while (to take a seasonal example) It's a Wonderful Life (1946) in the end seems to imagine that in suburbia (the preeminent post-war idyll) these two contradictory longings will be perfectly reconciled. Family will be preserved, there will be harmony in diversity, the personal will win out over the impersonal.

In The Egg and I a city couple attempts to find happiness in country living (on a chicken farm), very much along the lines of the 60s TV show Green Acres. The farmhouse is a broken-down shack, with no indoor plumbing and a seriously leaky roof. The movie is very silly and full of more or less egregious stereotypes, of course. Produced in the optimistic post-war era (like It's a Wonderful Life), the longing for the pre-convenient simple life is here treated as noble yet unrealistic, and in the end (after some bizarre plot-twisting) the couple winds up with a chicken farm, yes, but also a beautiful modern home with all the desired conveniences. There, a happy ending!

Well, it wasn't the way of Hollywood in those days (the post-war 40s) to harbor reservations about modernity, which is one of the reasons, it seems to me, that the films of that decade are shallower than those of the 30s. In Wizard (1939) those reservations form a strong undercurrent. See also Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) and You Can't Take It with You (1938) for two films of the 30s in which those reservations are clearly on display.

By the way . . .

Well, it's quite like me to say I'm going on a blogging retreat and then keep posting nevertheless. But I wanted to mention, by way of giving my occasional visitor something to look forward to, that I've just received my review copy of Randy Alcorn's If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil. I'll be reading it in the next few weeks and reviewing it here. My first impression, after reading the introduction and first chapter yesterday, is very good.

The November Poem

Notwithstanding this, I had to stop by to record my November poem. I've been reading a history of popular music and there read about the great cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Two things I learned about Bix there seemed touching and, juxtaposed, the stuff of poetry. The poem is entitled, of course, Young Man with a Horn.

After Bix died
Hoagy Carmichael
carried the mouthpiece
of Bix’s cornet
in his pocket
for years.

Back in Davenport,
where Bix was from,
the records he’d made
and mailed home
faithfully

remained unopened.

His people, you see,
didn’t approve
of jazz.