Grasping the Reading Nettle

Right. That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m making a stand. Apathy, I’m kicking your unmotivated candy-ass, but I’m letting you live, just so you can tell procrastination that I’m coming and hell’s coming with me!!!

Sorry. Just having a moment.

See, a while back I wrote a post on how I’d lost my reading mojo. I got some nice suggestions in response to it, and now the time has come to put them into practice. I’m going to put an extra page on the blog where I track the books I’ve read – probably not reviews, because I’m not that organised, but the accountability is important. I’m taking my bookcase back.

And so the first book to go on the list is The Wrong Messiah by Nick Page, which basically gave me about half the material I needed for the Bible Study I lead this week. Books are awesome.

PS. I should note that the idea of having a blog page for reading lists came from Deborah Bryan over at The Monster in Your Closet (and she’s having her first author interview released today, so check that out) and egb63. Thanks both!

 

 

Banned Books Week 2011

Over in the States it’s Banned Books Week, run by the American Library Association to celebrate and promote freedom of speech. It’s worrying that such a celebration is actually needed, and as someone who’s always been a reader, I was curious to find out how many of the titles appearing on the ALA’s list of ‘Books Challenged or banned in 2010-11′ I’ve actually read (not many as it turns out, although bannings depend on context – here’s why Charlotte’s Web got banned in Kuwait).

Like most of us, I guess, the idea of banning books, especially in long-established democracies, feels wrong. It’s thin-end-of-the-wedge stuff; ban a book because of bad language or a sex scene and suddenly you’ve set a precedent for the next person who comes along wanting to ban something because it’s politically inconvenient or because it promotes manmade climate change. Librarians are on the frontline of this particular battle, but this has ramifications for a world where public funds to libraries are being cut at a rate of knots. Will privatised libraries have that same dedication to freedom of speech, or will the potential threat to profit margins be more influential? It’s a question worth asking.

But then, banning books is only part of the issue. Somewhere along the line the Internet got intelligent; now personalisation is its watchword and news, search results and retail recommendations get filtered based on our ‘preferences’. And sure, this can be convenient but it runs the risk of turning the internet, the great electronic frontier into a billion echo-chambers, one for each of us. Cyberia has become Cyburbia, and that’s when we become digital NIMBYs. Not purposefully, maybe not even knowingly, but sel-selection and software conspired to keep us disengaged from all those other voices out there. At least we can see when someone tries to ban us from reading a book.

(For example, look at the phrasing I used a couple of paragraphs ago. I’m not a fan of swearing at all, but calling it ‘bad language’ sets up a dichotomy that I’m not entirely comfortable with – what exactly would count as ‘good’ language?)

But this is my pessimistic streak coming out. As long as there are passionate, dedicated readers and librarians out there, literature and journalism will have their defenders. Saturday saw the Word on the Street festival hit Toronto; the Hay Festival does a similar job in the UK and around the world. Voices will be heard; words will be read. And no stories that get banned stay banned.

Because while information may or may not want to be free, stories always do.

Grails and Grace: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

“Ask yourself, why do you seek the Cup of Christ? Is it for His glory, or for yours?“

Yesterday I wrote about Raiders of the Lost Ark and about how great it is. But let’s not forget it’s part of a franchise, one of the rare kind where the other films mostly stand up to the original. And, as I was talking about how Raiders is based in Judaism and the Old Testament, today I figured I’d go to the other end of the Bible: step forward Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and its quest for the Holy Grail.

Only despite the whole Da Vinci Code kerfuffle, there’s a problem. Because the Holy Grail isn’t in the Bible, or at least not in any direct way.

Jesus coins the wine/blood symbolism at the Last Supper but there’s no great description of a Grail, they just use a cup to drink from. Boring and conventional I know, but there you go. No, the Holy Grail is basically a medieval plot device.

See, somewhere between 1181 and 1190, a French poet called Chretian de Troyes wrote Perceval: The Story of the Grail. During the poem, Perceval manages to impress King Arthur, fall in love, meets the Fisher King and has a vision of the Grail. Here it’s an object of power, capable of healing the Fisher King if only Perceval asks the right questions – which he fails to do. It’s nothing to do with the Bloodline of Christ, it’s just the cup that the King’s communion is carried in, important because that’s the only food and drink he’s receiving.

The Grail became holy around a decade later, when Robort de Boron fills in the gaps of its history – Joseph of Arimathea uses the cup from the Last Supper to collect some of Christ’s blood after the crucifixion, eventually making his way to Britain (which links in with an early tradition that had Joseph and a bunch of other minor characters from the Gospels making their way across Europe, as well as being the source of the idea that Jesus once visited England as a boy – cue Jerusalem). None of this really has anything to do with the Bible – effectively it’s New Testament fanfic. Somewhere along the line the Grail became the object of a quest carried out by Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and it became enshrined in literature as a sacred macguffin.

And in a lot of ways, that’s the Grail’s purpose in The Last Crusade – it’s an excuse to reconcile Indy with his father, and once this happens, the Grail is lost again. However, it’s this story, contrasted with the actions of the film’s antagonists, that shows that Indy is capable of understanding, and experiencing grace.

Look at the film’s bad guy. Donovan is a suave but ruthless businessman obsessed with the Grail and its potential to bring him immortality. To this end he aligns himself with the Nazis and manipulates both of the Joneses; after all, they’re all really just tools to help him live forever. It’s that arrogance, however, that ultimately damns him – when confronted with a roomful of potential Grails, from which he must drink to receive eternal life, he picks the most ornate. He sees the world from a pedestal and the Grail as his prize – of course it’s going to be shiny and jewel-encrusted. But whoops, it’s the wrong one and it ages him to death instead – “He chose…poorly,” the Grail’s guardian wryly comments. Donovan’s Grail quest was all about the prize, not the lessons learned along the way – after all, he never learned them because the other characters did all the work.

Indy, on the other hand, has purer motivations – he just wants to save his dad’s life and go home. And yet because of this, because his quest is noble and involves risking his neck for that of another, Indy is able to succeed. He does his homework (“Jehovah is spelled with an ‘I!’”), he risks his life, and he’s finally able to act with humility and wisdom – he doesn’t want to be a king, he just wants his dad back. “That’s not the cup of a carpenter,” he mutters about Donovan’s false grail, before picking the cheapest and most inconspicuous cup on offer. This is the right choice, because this is the Cup of Christ and the Grail and it’s associated quest reflects this – humility, wisdom, self-sacrifice, reconciliation. The Christian concept of humanity being reconciled back to God is symbolised through the Spielbergian theme of a son’s relationship with his father, and once this happens the Grail is no longer needed – it disappears and its temple collapses, job done, and all that remains for our heroes to do is return home wiser than when they set out.

Heck, even the audience is enlightened in the final moments – we find out that Indy named himself after the family dog.

I guess it’s appropriate that a trilogy (let’s put aside The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the moment) that began with Indy confronted by the Wrath of God (in the form of the opened Ark of the Covenant) should end with him encountering God’s grace – judgement and mercy meet around the Easter story in which the Grail myth has its origins. The prodigals return home and a fracture family is reunited. We’ve seen wrath – and melted Nazis – now we get to see healing.

There’s another Indy film after this, of course, but that plays with sci-fi more than it does with myth and somehow it’s weaker for it – it tries to emulate fifties B-movies, but bringing in aliens and Communists (the interchangeable ‘Other’ of films like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers) weakens it somehow – Indy seems to be the detrrmined hero who doesn’t know when to stop even when divine forces are moving around him. It’s that determination and heroism that brings him a measure of healing in The Last Crusade. I’d say he deserved it, but that wouldn’t be grace – Indy’s always been a rough diamond for all his heroism.

But even rogues can sometimes be pilgrims.

Crazy Old Bookstores vs the Internet

I gingerly entered the second-hand bookstore, having little idea of its contents. The light was poor, windows blocked by bookcases and other random furniture, and I caught myself before standing on a book on the floor.

I say ‘book’, but there were hundreds of them, piled on the tiled floor in no particular order. You couldn’t really call it a floor, it was more a pathway, a maze, the books defining the space, like something out of a fantasy novel, books of magic hidden somewhere in its depths but no-one knowing where they were shelved.

It didn’t take long to realise that this wasn’t a shop, this was just where the owner kept his books. There wasn’t really much of an effort to sell anything – the opposite in fact, this place was a token gesture towards a viable economic concern, technically a business but run by someone who devoutly believed that books shouldn’t be sullied by crass commercialism. I’m not even convinced there was a till.

Borders has entered liquidation, Waterstones was recently sold at a knock-down price, WH Smith always seems to be fighting off economic woes. Bookstores, sadly, seem to be slowly fading into the past, and maybe the same is true of physical books themselves. The whole business of books, reading them and selling them, is transitioning into the ether, all things being digital nowadays. And I’ve helped encourage that – I have an eReader, I use Amazon.

But earlier I read this post by Maggie Cakes, about the death of ‘real-life’ books and bookshops. I don’t want to steal from that, but should books become mere information and data, I’ll miss the physicality of it all.

But one of the things that I’ll also miss is the eccentricity of bookstores. Like the shop I described earlier, there’s something…odd about small independent bookstores that is largely lost with the bigger chains, and totally non-existent with two shelves dedicated to books in major supermarkets.

The internet has a lot of things to recommend it, and its fast become a defining force in society. No arguments there. But it’s not as good at capturing the essential ‘stuffness’ of stuff – I remember going on the Maid of the Mist trip around Niagara Falls, and so many people were experiencing it through a lens. The internet is a little like that, mediating experience through a screen, and that’s a shame.

(I’m also reminded of something I read somewhere about an artificial beach resort in Japan next door to an actual beach – the artificial one, the product, the artifice, was by far the most popular among visitors. I don’t know why this springs to mind but it seems pertinent somehow.)

The world’s changing, and some of the things we expected to be forever – like books – might not be. But before we dive headlong into the brave new world, let’s think about the things we’re losing, and the ways in which we experience them. And learn to love those crazy old bookstores before they fade from our high streets forever.

Pick Up Your Pen

There’s a concept in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics that, somewhere in the halls within which the anthropomorphic personification of dreams resides, there is a library that contains all the books that were never written, including Road Trips to the Emerald City by L. Frank Baum and The Bestselling Romantic Spy Thriller I Used To Think About On The Bus That Would Sell A Billion Copies And Mean I’d Never Have to Work Again by…well, most of us actually.

I love that concept, that somewhere out there is a copy of the book I never wrote. I mean, it was something I always wanted to do, but it got pushed aside once bills had to be paid, and yes, now I’m a blogger and a writer for work, but it’s not the same is it? It’s not the same as seeing something you wrote on someone else’s shelf.

Because books have power, don’t they? We still remember the books we read as children. I recall being a voracious reader as a child, always with my nose in a book, reading as I walked along. My reading has slowed down since then; I blame it on being busy and getting old, but really it’s because I don’t make enough time for it. That’s sad and a shame.

So I guess that’s my plea to anyone out there who wants to do something creative but never gets round to it: just get on with it. Get on with it because you’ll never get any more time and because inspiration won’t strike if you never bother to pick up a pen or a paintbrush. Go ahead and do it – carve that sculpture, compose that symphony, paint that painting, write that book. Use it, don’t lose it.

(I stole “Use it, don’t lose it” from an obscure favourite book of mine, Mid-life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders tour with three chords and an attitude, in which a group of middle-aged writers, including Stephen King, form a rock band and tour America… Which, I guess, is also about seizing opportunities while you’ve got the chance.)

So pick up that pen and write for your life. The readers of the future await you.