The Invisible Library

Jane Espenson the great TV scriptwriter* makes an interesting point about writers and aspiring writers:

[Branko in Croatia] points out something I hadn’t consciously noticed, which is the tendency of aspiring television writers to get hyper-critical about television. Good point. This does happen. In order to acquire tv-writing skills, you have to start applying critical thinking to those shows you want to emulate. And the side effect of critical thinking is that you start thinking critically. You notice things: Hey! That important event happened off-screen! Hey! That moment sold out that character! Hey! That act break didn’t leave me wanting more!

Keeping Steve’s letter in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the same thing happens to writers of other kinds as well.

It very much does. Case in point: For the last week or so, I’ve been reading J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. Now, I was never a huge Salinger fan in High school. I tried reading Catcher in the Rye but I think I was too old (I was 17 and if you haven’t read it by the time you’re 15, don’t bother. Everything that strikes a 15 year old as startling and profound hits your jaded 17 year old like a sack of doorknobs. “Yeah, great, Holden, I figured that shit out a while ago.”) But lately, every writer I read about or story I find interesting circles back in some way to Salinger and his extra special Nine Stories. So I decide to try him on for size again. So far, I’ve read about half of them and they are hit or miss. My attitude is probably colored by my poor reception of his only previously perused work but I’m just finding these stories to be lacking something that other people claim to find there. Sure, the dialogue is decent (though dated) and he is a technically good writer. But still, something is missing. Most of the stories I’ve read so far start off week but build to an interesting if not altogether satisfying ending (except for, For Esme, With Love and Squalor, which goes in the oposite direction).

But perhaps this is just the over-analytical side of my writing getting the better of me. The stories work, most of the time and for your average reader, I’m sure they’re great (so long as you aren’t yet out of your early twenties. Salinger may have broken ground in the world of Serious Fiction 50 years ago, but today he would be a Young Adult Author).

of course, having said that, I’ve decided to borrow Salinger’s structure for my novel-in-progress and am writing it now as a series of interconnected stories. So he’s clearly doing something I like, it just isn’t telling a story a 29 year old can relate to.

So yeah. We aspiring writers can get hypercritical but it helps hone our craft. Maybe when I’m done with Nine Stories I’ll pick up The Martian Chronicles again. Ray Bradbury is the antidote to age and overanalysis.

The Secular Outpost reviews a fascinating new book, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously, by Jacques Berlinerblau.

Berlinerblau premis is that Secularists don’t take religion seriously:

Today’s secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one’s identity against something that one does not understand? And what happens when these secularists weigh in on contentious political issues, blind to the religious back-story or concerns that inevitably inform these debates?

It’s a bit of a generalization but he has a point: Sometimes, for some of us, we define ourselves by what we aren’t. I disagree that we need to take religion as serious as the true Believers would like. That gives the fundies too much leeway. If we start granting their beliefs prima facie value, they have enough wiggle room to build their usual wicker traps, “But you agreed that the Bible has some validity, and God wrote the Bible, therefore you admit there’s a God!”

But that’s not really what Berlinerblau is suggesting, which makes this book sound all the more intriguing:

Jacques Berlinerblau suggests that atheists and agnostics must take stock of that which they so adamantly oppose. Defiantly maintaining a shallow understanding of religion, he argues, is not a politically prudent strategy in this day and age. But this book is no less critical of many believers, who–Berlinerblau contends–need to emancipate themselves from ways of thinking about their faith that are dangerously simplistic, irrational and outdated.

To this, I wholeheartedly agree. You must know your enemy and why they believe the crazy ass shit they do. You also need the scholarly tools to pick those irrational beliefs apart, leaving the rational though dodgy bits intact so that, eventually the believers begin to doubt their long held superstitions and reject them on their own terms. That’s how you help people see the light without being thought of as an asshole. But to suggest that Secular thought is in some sort of crisis, as Berlinerblau does, is a bit of a stretch. Tanner Edis, from the Secular Outpost made a similar point:

So I’m not sure about secular thinking about religion being in a state of crisis. I don’t want to deny that Berlinerblau has a valid point, and that it would be good if there was more explicitly secular reading of the Bible going on. This would have immense practical value, and it might even help break the isolationism within religious studies. Nevertheless, there’s a lot more secular thinking about religion going on that Berlinerblau does not recognize. And in this wider context, I suspect that a certain lack of interest in the Bible is more understandable.

still, it sounds like a fascinating book and will be added to my Amazon wishlist, forthwith.

I don’t know why the news of Steve Irwin’s sudden death has made me so sad. It’s not as if a man who swings rattlesnakes around by their tails dieing of a stingray sting is all that big a surprise. I’d go so far as to say that he would have wanted to go out in the wild, filming, just probably not now.  But his loss will be felt in the  world of wild life conservation. There hasn’t been a conservationist who stirred the minds of children and adults like this since the Great Jacque Cousteau and there probably won’t be another like him for a long time.