Entries from May 2008 ↓

That’s what Mike Dellosso’s doing these days. His new book The Hunted is about to come out from Realms, but you can already read the first chapter online at his site. In fact, Mike is so on top of the social media thing that he deserves a bulleted list of items to just to set everyone straight.

• The Hunted on Amazon.com
• Mike’s cool site website
• Mike’s cool blog wide-eyed fiction
• And BEST OF ALL the first chapter of The Hunted.

  A few weeks ago, Mike and I had a great conversation about writing, writing suspense, writing Christian suspense, and of course dealing with cancer. He’s a great guy. I really hope you’ll give this one a listen. It’s a lot more fun than the, um, rather self indulgent Whitman recitation I did earlier.

  And I think the sound editing is better, but I’m still new at this.

  If you don’t have time to sit at your computer and listen to this whole 20 minute interview (carefully edited, so all of the boring parts are GONE GONE GONE), no problem. You can download it itunes easily on my new blogomatic podcast page.

  Blogomatic = My new friend.

  Mike Dellosso = A super cool suspense writer

  Your Next Step = Listen to the podcast

  

  

The Brooklyn Bridge in New York was 125 years old this past weekend. The New York Times has some good celebration pictures of the celebration.

Since I couldn’t go hang out in New York, I’m celebrating with this super exciting educational reading of Walt Whitman’s masterpiece, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I know, I know. I’m a real wild man.

Whitman is writing during the period of Romanticism. Technically, I suppose you’d say he’s a light romantic. He fits in with other transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau. (But not Poe. His gothic stuff made him a dark romantic.)

Whether you like the light or dark, Romanticism emphasizes feelings and impressions over fact and science and form. Whitman is especially interesting to me because he’s a good bridge between romanticism and realism. He maintains the ruthless optimism of the light romantics Emerson and Thoreau, but his experiences as a nurse during the civil war give his writing a hard, visceral edge. He celebrates himself and the crowds of Manhattan and he acknowledges how beautiful people are even with all of their faults.

In one sense, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is about just that—riding across the river to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Ferry before the Brooklyn Bridge was completed. But it’s also about shared experiences and the personality of humanity, about what those shared experiences mean for the people who remember us, and ultimately about crossing the gap between the writer and the reader.

Something about this poem makes me think of blogging. Someday all of this turn-of-the-21^st-century online flurry will be staring into the faces of people in the future—speaking to them. This blog maybe. Many podcasts. The bests one anyway—the ones with the most truth and beauty will endure. And who knows but that we writers will be looking back at our future readers?

It’s a silly Romantic notion, I know.

But I always feel romantic when I read Whitman.

A few weeks ago I posted one of those whiny, doubtful things. I just wanted to say, “God cut through the crap already.” Shortly after that, he gave me a poem that seems to have been a response to that post. There are two versions of the poem, and I’ll post the short one first.

As usual, you can click on the evoca recording to hear me read it. (I’m having more and more fun with these audio productions in audacity…) If you are really a glutton for punishment, you can subscribe to my podcast! (It’s really just me at my kitchen table late at night.)

Looking for Intimacy

I want your R-rated prayers.
You think I can’t handle it?
Polite words leave me cold–
Congested and snot-filled.
I won’t use tissue. I’ll snort
You down, roll you into a ball
Of yellow phlegm with my tongue,
Hock up a church and spit it out.

Wasn’t that a happy little response from God? Happy Friday, everyone!

Here’s a little experiment. I’m using a new web browser called “Flock | the Social Web Browser.” It is a little crazy… Imagine Facebook and Twitter were Siamese twins on a blind date with Firefox, and Wordpress the waiter decides to join them.

It’s a disappointing blog post after a week of silence, I agree.

New poetry here in a minute.

Tags: flock, web, browser, silly

A million years ago when I wrote that pens should be mightier than toilet plungers, A Musing Mom commented, “Some truth stinks and we really don’t need to read the smelly stuff.”

That’s a comment that stuck with me. Because it’s such a tricky thing. See, I’m a big fan of Keats:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

If something is true, it will also be beautiful. Something that is true and stinky, still has a stinky kind of beauty. Sound crazy? Have you ever had limberger cheese? Or anchovies? They are truly delightful–and their stench is part of their beauty.

It is stench for its own sake that we need to be careful about.

For example, culling through my own Twitter comments this weekend, I found one that horrified me. Kevin Hendricks was bemoaning the fact that so many writers don’t follow the guidelines we editors send them. “Why?!” he asked.

I responded, “Because they are idiots.”

Ouch. What was I thinking? That isn’t the kind of stinky beauty that tastes good on crackers. In fact, there’s nothing beautiful about that comment at all.

But there is a kind of beauty in my ability to delete stupid, ugly twitter comments like that. So that’s what I did.

Which reminds me about something I just read on CultureSmith. More and more people are getting into the twitter thing, using services like twirl (the application that made Twitter work for me), facebook, twitpic, snurl or tinyurl, and twitterfeed.

Christians have to wonder what it looks like to be the church on twitter. In short, What Would Jesus Tweet? Or would he Twitter at all?

Personally, I think he would. Twitter may have a stinky kind of beauty. But it’s still a beauty that’s got lots of room for truth. As long as I can delete my own stupid comments from time to time.

That was Sam’s question this weekend after he watched our youtube goof-fest.

The music was by Kenny Greenberg. He is a guitar stylist who does some work in audio tracks of this kind. I think he called them “mood tracks,” though he (or his wife or assistant or fulfillment service) hand wrote “Instrumental Music” on the CD he sent me. How cool is that? Kenny is king of cool. Ashley is queen. They generously offered us those few tracks for Laity Lodge programs to use. I can’t tell you how much I love these people.

Kenny and his wife Ashley Cleveland are going to be leading worship at Laity Lodge this summer in a retreat with Gordon MacDonald, an editor-at-large for Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal.

They led the worship at the first full retreat I ever attended. I barely remember who the speaker was because the music ministered to me more than you can possibly imagine.

If you haven’t heard Ashley’s new album, Before the Daylight’s Shot, it won a GRAMMY last year. (Her third.) You can sample nearly all of her music on her site. I especially like the track “Broken Places” from Second Skin. And my wife and I listen to Men and Angels Say all the time. (It’s all funkified hymns.)

Also, you can read my interview with Ashley and Kenny on TheHighCalling.org.

But you have to watch this ridiculous video to find out who it was.

Future videos will up the production value quite a bit, but we don’t have firewire cards yet. (Durn it.)

We’re going to draw the winner of our free retreat this afternoon! Check Chris Cree’s site to make sure he’s got you listed as a participant in “retreat, retreat, retreat!”

…and Children, Television, Recreation, Relatives, Food, Pets, Automobiles, Bugs, and Bibles

You see, Robert Hruzek is hosting a group writing project where people write about a mash-up of 18 fun topics. I added bugs and Bibles to his list just for good measure and polished up a poem for his group. He says it’s the first ever poetry entry. Yea, me!

First, the poem itself. You can hear me read it on the Evoca recording, but you’ll have to skip ahead to 1:20 remaining because I get long winded in my intro. (Be sure to check out my sweet musical intro/outro. Royalty free audio is fun!)

Welcoming Summer

Two love bugs mate on my leg
Until I draw them off with this
#2 pencil. The pair crawls past
my thumb as I write—then up
to the pink eraser which must taste
funny to tongue buds on their feet.
They fly away, black-legged snow-
flakes. We think of Christmas specials
where painted children catch snow
on tongues to welcome winter.
“Open wide, kids,” I say. “There’s
never snow in South Texas.”
My son plays along and we run
up and down the blacktop lot—
heat rising in waves around us—
we must look a pair of Baptist Johns,
prophesying protein in the desert.
A voice of two calling between
parked cars: “Prepare the way
for summer bugs. Make straight
your tongues for them.” Push that
play too far and bugs become God.
All mankind finds salvation in bugs.
And why not? God can raise up
children from rocks and bugs—
even cars with bug-splattered bumpers.

Second, here’s how the poem fits the mash-up rules.

A few weeks ago, we drove (automobiles) to a family reunion (relatives) where my children and I found ourselves surrounded by bugs on our little vacation (recreation) to decorate the graveyard at the Hebron Baptist Church. In fact, the bugs were so thick, we talked about how it was like a blizzard of black snowflakes with legs. My son loved this because he keeps bugs as pets (which means he puts them in bug cages over-night and holds a daily funeral for the ones who don’t make it). You can see from the picture above what so many bugs do to a white car (automobile—again). The snowstorm made me think of the peanuts gang catching snow on their tongues (like food) in the television Christmas special. At that point, my mind took off, and I started writing this poem.

I have to ask, though. Who uses the word automobile anymore, Bob?

Also, Gordon, you asked about W. P. and decoration. I provide a long answer in the audio file above. And you can see W. P.’s grave there on the right. He is my kid’s great-great-great-great granddad. Or maybe just great-great-great, I can never remember.

One last thing about poetry. Bob’s project “What I Learned From…” suggests that I’ll have answers for you here. But poetry isn’t very good at providing answers in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I hope you’ve found some things to think about in my mash-up of mashed-up of bibles, bugs on my windshield, the subsequent discussions that followed us that weekend, and Writing, Children, Television, Recreation, Relatives, Food, Pets, Automobiles.

Buddy Greene plays Harmonica like nobody’s business. Just open his site in a new browser and listen to his music while you read this. I was reading through the lyrics on his site this morning and was struck by these lines from “Jesus Has Left the Building”:

There’s a big crowd gathered at First Church
They’re dressed up and lookin’ so fine
They lean forward in their pews to hear the good news
And get a handle on God’s design

Isn’t that just like Christians? I go to First Baptist Church Kerrville, so these lines hit home. And they remind me of something I read in Christian Century at breakfast. In his essay “Reasons to Join,” Garret Keizer talks about the importance of paradox and ambiguity as agents against heresy in the church. (Whew, suddenly this post got all theological on me!)

Seriously, though. We try so hard to “get a handle on God’s design,” we turn church into a collection of religious autodidacts who are seeking the way to know God’s will and stick to the letter of the law. We turn into people of jots and tittles. We prefer the “pseudo-clarity to the many sidedness of truth, tidiness to the mess and complexity of reality.”

That’s the same warning I hear in Buddy Greene’s song–though he makes it all folksy and fun. The warning is still the same. And we need to know where we’re headed if we fall into this trap. Garret Keizer explains it well:

The fate of most  autodidacts, a fate I happen to understand only too well, is to be perpetually reinventing the wheel, and in the course of that needless reinvention, never to achieve the wing, the propeller or the time machine.

This is another reminder why it is so important to retreat. Retreat! Retreat! When we step back, when we slow down, we have a chance to hear voices other than our own. Sometimes we just hear the crickets. Sometimes we hear the wisdom of our neighbors. Sometimes we may eve hear God in the stillness.

# # #

If you missed yesterday, Laity Lodge is sponsoring this month’s High Calling Blogs Group Writing Project: Retreat! Retreat! Retreat! You could win a FREE retreat just for participating in the project. But get hopping—you have to post before noon on Friday to be in the drawing. We’ve already had some good entries from L. L. Seedling, Carl Gyrovague, Gordon Real Live Preacher and Kathy Beyond Words. Also, Jacob Share is helping us promote the project again. Thanks Jacob! You’re welcome to participate too.

Yesterday, I promised to talk a little bit about the three retreats we’re featuring during this writing project. Buddy Greene is coming up first, May 29 through June 1. That’s right around the corner, and it’s going to be awesome.

Here are the details:

Musical Conversations with Buddy Greene and Company
(REGISTER HERE.)

May 29-June 1 (Thursday-Sunday)
Buddy Greene (AWESOME HARMONICA!)
David Dark (AWESOME WRITER!)
Sarah Masen (SUPER COOL SINGER!)
+ Raku Japanese pottery Larry Matthew (there’s a kiln and everything!)