Journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall reports from the the second half of life -- on books, writing . . . her husband, house, aging relatives and grown-up kids.
Sunset, Lake Michigan, Union Pier. c 2009 B.F. Newhall
Another shot of Lake Michigan from the beach at Union Pier, Michigan. This one a few minutes later, as the sun moved behind a cloud.
I’m kind of worried about Lake Michigan: some invasive critters, the quagga mussel and the zebra mussel, are disrupting its ecology.
Lake Michigan sunset, Union Pier c 2009 B.F. Newhall
This is Lake Michigan at sunset from a sweet place in southern Michigan called Union Pier. I took this photo while hanging out at the beach with college friends.
A Dash of Style
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
Wow! A book on punctuation. By Noah Lukeman. The bookstore had an entire book on punctuation by this master of the dot and the dash. My heart lept.
It was called A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. I bought it.
Ever since I read Lukeman’s treatise on the comma — the comma! — in the March/April 2006 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, I have been a fan. A devotee. No, let’s face it, a groupie. This man Lukeman knows what to do with a comma. Not to mention a period. Or a semicolon. Or my default favorite – the dash.
Take the colon, for example. Maybe you write the colon off as that unassuming pair of dots found on formal business letters, or signalling an upcoming list. And that would be too bad. Because, according to Lukeman, the colon is majestic, dramatic, a writer’s most powerful punctuation tool.
“When it comes to dramatic revelation,” Lukeman writes, “the colon has no second. In this function, the colon acts as a mark point, with the text preceding it building to a revelation, and the text that follows living up to the promise.”
Lukeman suggests comparing this (colonless) sentence:
I grabbed my bag, put on my coat, and stepped out the door, as I wasn’t coming back.
With this one:
I grabbed my bag, put on my coat, and stepped out the door: I wasn’t coming back.
Noah Lukeman
See what I mean?
It’s late. I’m tired. I’m going to bed, and I’m taking Noah Lukeman with me: I want to know what he thinks of the dash.
© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall
A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, by Noah Lukeman, W.W. Norton, 2006, paper, $13.95.
Bearing the Mystery. Jacket art, Steve Hawley, c 2000.
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
Can a religious person be an real artist these days?
Can ”great” art address matters spiritual in the modern era?
In his introduction to Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image, Gregory Wolfe quotes a 2008 New Republic literary critic who asserts that ”the absence of God from our literature feels so normal, so self-evident, that one realizes with a shock how complete it is.”
Not so, says Wolfe. God is not at all absent from the contemporary art scene. Wolfe cites as just one example the fact that books by three “intensely Christian writers” held top spots in the New York Times tally of Americans’ favorite twentieth century novels. The authors? Marilynne Robinson, John Updike and Cormac McCarthy.
Wolfe is the founder of Image, a journal based on the premise that art and faith are not mutually exclusive. Four times a year, Image offers fiction, non-fiction, poetry and criticism, along with several glossy pages devoted to the visual arts.
Bearing the Mystery presents the work of nearly seventy writers and more than twenty visual artists, all gleaned from the pages of Image journal’s first twenty years. Some of the artists address Christian or Jewish themes directly. Others explore the spiritual questions less overtly. The writers include Ron Hansen, Denise Levertov, Marilyn Nelson, Ann Pachett, Kathleen Norris and Richard Rodriguez.
And so — if you are wondering whether it’s possible to grapple with issues of religion and spirituality and still maintain your integrity as an artist, this book is the place to get some answers.
© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall
Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image, Gregory Wolfe, ed., Eerdmans, 2009, $30, hardcover.
For a book about chastity, a sexy cover
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
I can’t say that I go along with the idea that one must be 100 percent sexually chaste before marriage. But I do think that the evangelical Christian culture that holds to this principle has a lot to teach the rest of us.
My Spiritual Writing group at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe last week included several evangelical Christians — young ones – for whom, I suspect, chastity before marriage is a hot topic.
A line from a book by our workshop leader, Lauren Winner – Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity — sums up just one of the helpful thoughts that I (as the ”liberal-Christian-who-finds-truth-in-Buddhism-Islam-and-heaven-knows-what-else” in the room) gleaned from my close encounter with the evangelical point of view last week.
Lauren writes that chastity and singleness “tell us, for starters, of a radical dependence on God. In marriage, it is tempting to look to one’s spouse to meet all one’s needs. But those who live alone,without the companionship and rigor of marriage and sex, are offered an opportunity to realize that it is God who sustains them.”
Mudhouse Sabbath, an invitation to spiritual discipline
Hmmmm. A refreshing thought in our happily-ever-after culture of “Sleepless in Seattle” meets “Notting Hill.” Thinking of marriage as marriage, rather than as the answer to all our troubles, takes a heck of a lot of pressure off the arrangement.
Lauren has written another book, Mudhouse Sabbath, which I’m looking forward to reading. I love Lauren’s precise mind, even when it goes places that my (foggier) mind does not readily take me. So I am going to put her Mudhouse book on my bedside table, alongside works by some authors that Lauren recommended to our group, namely Vivian Gornick and Patricia Hampl.
P.S. Another thing that I learned at the Glen about current trends in evangelical Christian sex is – it’s sexy. Note, for one thing, the voluptuously unfolding magnolia on the cover of Lauren’s Real Sex book.
© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall
Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity, by Lauren F. Winner, Brazos Press, 2005.
Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline, by Lauren F. Winner, Paraclete, 2003.
