But, on to The Life You Save May Be Your Own:

Yesterday I read Flannery O’Connor’s Short Story The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

It's haunting, possibly because O'Connor freely borrows key images from a number of her other stories: For example, the image of the car as a vehicle of freedom and justification is used in Wise Blood (with its main character Hazel Motes noting that a man with a good car doesn't need salvation); and the notion of Catholicism as a dismissable unadvanced and "old" religion by a character who hasn't the patience to think deeply about spiritual things is used in The Displaced Person and other places. And, as is common, the story includes a widow with an invalid or idiot adult daughter who is unmarried. (It's interesting how often O'Connor uses this image since she was a physically afflicted, unmarried adult daughter living with a widowed mother. It's self-deprecating, perhaps, and brings recognition of her own need for grace to the forefront of her stories.)

I’ll try to explain my on-going response while reading the story. I began reading it on the subway going to work yesterday morning. I finished it last night on the return home. I’ve been thinking about it this morning and decided to pull out one of my FO’C commentaries (not intentionally a biblical reference, but it’s helpful to have someone else’s reflections and insights when reading Flannery O.)

But, back to the visceral response: As I began to read the story, I realized that I didn’t know it, which was nice because I’ve re-read so many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. As I got into it, I wanted the story to get along. I wanted it to make progress. I had the impatience common to her characters and I didn’t care for the two main characters, Tom Shiftlet (which appropriately rhymes with Shiftless and he is a scoundrel) and Lucynell Carter, the widow-mother who owned the place that Shiftlet happened upon, who has her own selfish purposes as well. I didn’t like Shiftlet and I didn’t care for his long-windedness, although that’s a usual characteristic of Flannery O’Connor characters – they cover their brokenness by talking a lot about their all-knowing perspective on the world.

Sidenote: I think that I wanted the characters to be more humorous. Like the Grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard To Find, I wanted characters that made me laugh. None of the five characters in this story entertained me. They were uncomfortably odd.

Shiftlet is physically broken. Although he has skills, he is a carpenter and he fixes Lucynell’s car later in the story, he is a one-armed man, who early on in the story stretches out both arms in a way that signals the redemptive nature of where the story is headed: "He swung out both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross." But the image is lost on Lucynell and her daughter:

“The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists.”

The story goes on with Shiftlet making references to deep things that disturb his thinking and that Lucynell thinks are plain foolish. For example, Shiftlet talks about a surgeon in Atlanta who had “taken a knife and cut the human heart” and “studied it like a day-old chicken.” Shiftlet is correct in concluding that the motives of the heart are beyond science. And he makes a reference to European monks who sleep in coffins, a reference O’Connor borrows from a James Joyce story, “The Dead,” but the reference is lost of Lucynell who responds that “they wasn’t as advanced as we are.”

Later Lucynell has Shiftlet marry her daughter in a civil ceremony. But, although it’s "legal," it’s not satisfying to Shiftlet even though it “satisfies the law” as Lucynell tells him. Shiftlet responds that “it’s the law that doesn’t satisfy” him – which expresses a deeper spiritual need that he is currently not aware of.

There’s so much more to the story that I won’t cover here. He ends up in a café called The Hot Spot – where he feels more uncomfortable, and later he picks up a boy (note: good deed to cover up guilt and sin), a hitchhiker, who quickly recognizes Shiftlet as a moral liar and calls Shiftlet’s bluff on his waxing and jumps out of Shiftlet's car in disgust. (Hint: The boy becomes the vehicle of grace in the story.)

I hope that you’ll read it. If so, let me know how you respond to The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

However, I still enjoy sitting down to read a book. I get pleasure out of “seeing” an image in my mind’s eye. And I’m glad that I have the concentration and interest to do so.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: An Education Course Puts Students in Director's Chairs

As a future teacher, Kara L. VanLoozen spends a lot of time thinking of ways to keep students from nodding off at their desks. With that in mind, her project for an education course at the University of Texas at Austin has a driving beat, cool special effects, and a story line that should keep even the most reluctant learners sitting up straight.

This project at the University of Texas appears, in my mind, to “throw in the towel” and accept that students can’t concentrate.

My cynical side concluded, as I first read this article: Oh, they’ve taken a page from the Mega-Church play book, which uses as many visual aids, lighting effects and tricks as possible to keep folks “alert” through their short, yet casual and entertaining, services.

This report is from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

New York

The populace of the United States may be divided by race, age, gender, region, income, and educational level. But according to a report released on Thursday by the National Endowment for the Arts, there is at least one thing that brings us all together: No group reads as much literature as it once did. If present trends continue, our aliteracy will only deepen over the next generation. After all, the steepest decline in reading has occurred among young adults, ages 18 to 24.

you have to make your vision apparent by shock: to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
- Flannery O'Connor (In her essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country" found in Mystery and Manners.)

This has been a difficult post for me to write because the story is so complicated - not the story line, but theologically complicated. (A reviewer called it "theologically puzzling.") One of the multiple "bottom-lines" of the story is that Harry Ashfield, a boy, who is four or five years old, drowns himself in the "River of Life, made out of Jesus' blood." At a certain point near the end of the story, "his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn't know he'd been looking for. Then all of sudden he knew what he wanted to do." Which was, "He intended not to fool with preachers any more but to baptize himself to keep on going ... until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river."

There are other characters:

Mrs. Connin is the baby sitter who takes Harry to a healing and baptism service at the river. She is a practical woman, who expresses her distaste for the abstract art in the Ashfields' apartment. The art on the walls of her house are filled with pictures and calendar, including a picture of a man who "had long hair and a gold circle around his head and he was sawing on a board while some children stood watching him."

In a few ways, Mrs. Connin reminds me of Mrs. McIntyre, the woman who owned the farm in the story, The Displaced Person because neither has a tolerance for nonsense over practical things.

Mr. Paradise is the most interesting character, in my mind. He isn't a Believer but he goes to watch the "healings" because he isn't healed. He has a cancer on his ear. (Is this O'Connor's sign of his hardness of hearing?) He watches Harry head to the river and sees him jump in and eventually drown. He's horrified by the sight.

I wonder if Harry's moment of grace - being taken by the river - is the same moment of grace for Mr. Paradise. I wonder if his seeing Harry go to Paradise, leads him there too.

This wonderfully engaging and puzzling story is well worth the read.

I read Flannery O'Connor's short story, The Crop, on the flight to Los Angeles last week.

Briefly, it's about Miss Willerton, a would be writer. Early on we get a sense that she's not a terribly reflective or creative person as she thinks about writing her next story while cleaning crumbs from the dining room table:

It was a relief to crumb the table. Crumbing the table gave one time to think, and if Miss Willerton were going to write a story, she had to think about it first. She could usually think best sitting in front of her typewriter, but this would do for the time being. First, she had to think of a subject to write a story about. There were so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never could think of one. That was always the hardest part of writing a story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something to write about than she did writing.

As O'Connor tells the story, The Crop moves into the story that Miss Willerton is writing, and it's a very good story. Miss Willerton's story is complex, interesting and filled with passion.

However, at an advanced point in writing, Miss Willerton leaves her story and goes grocery shopping, where she encounters a couple who are very much like to fictional couple she had created in her story. She's disgusted by these people and abandons what is probably the best writing of her life.

The point that O'Connor makes is the foolishness of a pride that unjustifiably leaves us thinking that we're better than the everyday life that surrounds us.

Of course, this is too simplistic of a conclusion. But O'Connor often points to the blindness of those who think that they see.

The Blooker Prize is awarded in three categories:
Fiction • Non-Fiction • Comics

This year's finalists have been announcedl

Yikes! I rencently decided to go ahead and spring for The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. However, according to Amazon, the collection is already out of stock and won't be available until sometime in April when it's reprinted.

I found one copy being auctioned on eBay.

Calvin and Hobbes on Wikipedia.

My friend Darrin in Wheaton, IL found this link and sent it on to me this afternoon. I missed this particular program from NPR's Speaking of Faith with the topic: Faith Fired by Literature.

This particular program is a conversation with Paul Elie who wrote The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, which tells the interwoven stories of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy.

I picked up What We Believe but Cannot Prove last week in Boston. It got my attention because of the philosophy class I'm teaching this semester. The short articles are interesting to read.

The articles are in response to The Edge Question, which you can read about on line.

Most of the responders are skeptics and often make very large satements. Many of them are scientists.

I like this book because the articles are short and be discussed easily.

Nothing happens in the books... I'm creating a person who's a lot like the person who's reading the books.
-Nick Hornby

I picked up A Long Way Down in the Newark Airport yesterday morning. I'm dog-earring a number of pages that I want to revisit as I make my way through the novel.

These are poignant characters who at times express angst that we all know that we could feel deep inside ourselves. Hornby gets to the core of why people hurt from loneliness and need a community to feel worth loving and that their dreams have value.

I think that I like this book because it touches the same nerve that Don DeLillo's White Noise gets to. (I think that White Noise is brilliant.)

A Long Way Down is about four strangers who meet on the roof of Toppers House, North London's favorite suicide venue. It's New Year's Eve and they each arrive to do themselves in and each of them has a story. They leave the roof as a group and their stories begin to unfold and complicate. I'm about 100 pages in but not deep enough to tell you more.

However, already I can tell that these four characters are not "Hallow Men" (to borrow from T.S. Eliot) ,

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion

I'm short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something.

I have to tell you that the language is prickly and spiced up; some readers may be sensitive to that.

I'll be back with more as I hear more of their stories.

I've posted better-crafted blog-type entries on my Gather page.

Being Good is a quick read that maintains high tension from start to finish. It’s a page turner that will keep the reader from doing other things.

Slav O Se is a great character: funny, smart, engaging - and a potentially exploding disaster around each corner, but he always manages to pull through with aplomb and on his own terms.

Being Good is a novel that was written for me to read. I’m a “school person” in that my entire career has been in “prestige collection” colleges, universities and prep schools. In just a few pages into Being Good I sent the author an e-mal to find out more about his background because he so accurately “nailed” aspects of independent school culture. At times it was laugh out loud funny. Interim headmaster Thistlethwaite is characteristically old school and out-dated, but the character works well in this novel.

A subtext of the novel takes on is a conversation as to where the line between school-life and private-life for school personnel should be drawn. That’s a large conversation that most likely would not go Slav O Se’s way in real life. But Slav’s triumph is a satisfying and hoped-for outcome in Being Good.

I am left with one haunting question at the end: Why is the creepiest character in the book – besides Thistlethwaite – named Anderson?

I appreciate Todd’s offer to send an electronic copy of Being Good to bloggers and I’m happy to post my thoughts on his novel.

technorati tags: Being+Good, Todd+Anderson

I was drawn into the novel because it started in Maine, a place that I love. And I was fascinated that an author would pick East Providence as a setting for a novel. 

There are other key characters along the way, including Norma, a very independent girl-next-door who was in love with Smithy, but whom Smithy viewed as a nuisance growing up. And the people that Smithy meets on his trek from Rhode Island to Venice Beach, California.

I liked The Memory of Running. It became particularly engaging at the mid point. I have to admit that I was more interested in the bicycle trip the first half of the novel and preferred that storyline to the high school tribulations of Smithy and his sister Bethany. The novel alternates between stories chapter by chapter. But both stories come together nicely at the middle and at that point it’s a “can’t put down” novel.

That was the case with me. I started the novel some time ago, put it down, and picked it up again for my flight from Los Angeles to Boston Wednesday afternoon. I finished the second half in a day, sneaking chapters in between presentations at the conference I’m attending right now. It’s a good novel for traveling because the chapters are short and the story is easy to pick up again.

Underlying the attraction of this novel are very human characters. Their triumphs, hurts, flaws and needs are very real and believable.

I’ve been to all fifty-states. Because of my familiarity with the country, I was particularly impressed by the detail McLarty provides of obscure places as Smithy travels off-the-beaten-path across America. The details are amazing. I have seen the desperate look of East St. Louis, Illinois. I’ve been to some of the towns in Colorado that amazed Smithy by their beauty. And I can image the route from Fontana and Pomona to Sunset Boulevard and on to Venice Beach, although I wouldn’t want to travel that by bicycle – or automobile. The attention that McLarty gives to description makes this a very alive book.

Not only does McLarty tell the stories of his characters in the book, we hear stories within the stories from the books that Smithy reads crossing the country.

I highly recommend The Memory of Running.

This isn't the first time that I've written about writer Harry Crews.

It is the first time that I've read him.

I bought Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader this afternoon. This book includes the autobiographical A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, The Gypsy's Curse, Car and a selection of essays.

Crews is very readable. He grew up in Georgia, the child of sharecroppers.

Readers of this weblog are aware of my devotion to Flannery O'Connor and her writing. Crews writes about similar characters. (There isn't much diversity in poor people in the rural Deep South when it comes to characters.) However, his characters aren't as funny as O'Connor's. Perhaps that's because he's not making his characters up.

Crews is writing about the real people who have shaped his life. (I'm reading Childhood, which is autobiographical. Perhaps his made up characters are funny when I get to his fiction.)

Here's the beginning of Childhood: The Biography of a Place:

My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew.