landover baptist

Satire is one of thos tricky areas, where you have to balance between pointed humor and just plain old-fashioned mean-spiritedness. Landover Baptist Church is a web site where I think the owners take their satire across the line quite a lot. It's especially bad when they get onto the issue of sex.

The church has had a lot of unnecessary histironics on sex, and it deserves to be lampooned for that, but I think the Landover people go too far. It just gets too vituperative to be effective. It's hard to quit, though, because the lowest common denominator is always going to appeal to a large group of people, as they found with their Jar Jar Binks sex toy article, and there is a perverse pleasure in raising the ire of your critics.

Smirkov and I had a debate on this subject with the Brothers Grinn one time. We were doing something with Jesse Helms, and I was going the same route the Landover people do -- take someone who's already a little loud and pushy, and turn him into a real fire-breather. As Smirkov pointed out, that's the easy road, and it's not particularly funny. Everyone does that with Helms, and it just gets mean after a while.

What I did in the end was to make Jesse Helms into a deeply sensitive man who always wanted to be an actors. It's his publicist who is so vicious, and scripts everything for him so that he has earned a reputation as a bit of a bulldog. As luck would have it, the interview with the Brothers Grinn was something he was able to arrange without his publicist's involvement, and our readers were treated to the rarely seen real Helms, including his soft tears over the people he's had to hurt because his publicist made him.

Much funnier, I thought. It'd be nice if the Landover people tried that too.

the power of images

Interesting paper.

I agree with the points he's made -- and I hope some people in Hollywood read it. One of the chiefest strengths of the paper is on how the archetype is diminished once we have an image of it.

That is, I think, one of the chief failings of cinema in our age. It's not enough to let us imagine the horrible scene, we have to see it in gory detail, whether it be murder victims in movies like "Se7en," rape victims in "The General's Daughter" or what have you. The monster that we cannot see is much more terrifying than the one that we do; the crime scene that goes unshown can be far more unsettling than the one shown in full-color. Good directors understand this; more studios need to as well.

The balrog in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" that Mallinson mentions is an excellent illustration of that. The echo of its approaching footsteps sets everybody on edge, but when it appears, it's like watching a video game.

Theologian Jacques Ellul wrote a fascinating book called "The Humiliation of the Word" -- I imagine its actual title is more like "L'Humiliation de le Parole," but I bought it in translation -- that examines the role of images in Scripture.

His essential thesis is that God proscribes images much for the same reason describes in the essay: It reduces the divine to the level of the profane, and strips it of its power. An old man with a long beard sitting on a chair in the clouds is nowhere near as awe-inspiring or unsettling as an encounter with the numinous; what's more, it decreases our dependence upon God to be with us in the now.

God's spoken word is what shaped the mountains and can shatter the foundations of the earth. Written down, while still True in the best sense of the word, it can become a snare to us because we get locked into the surface of it without understanding the full import of what it says. (Such as those Christians who refuse to have Christmas trees because they believe Jeremiah spoke against them.)

Take that degradation one step further -- print the verse under the picture of a Christmas tree -- and the meaning becomes even more fixed in the minds of those who see it, to the extent that it becomes increasingly difficult to read the verse or hear it and understand that Jeremiah was referring to idolatry, without at least thinking of Christmas trees.

writing and journalism

Journalism is a great field to pursue. It pays little -- I made $40K a year only after being in the field for five years and making what proved for me to be an ill-advised move into copy editing -- but in terms of job satisfaction, I have found it to be more than fulfilling. What a journalist does matters, which is one of the reasons we get so upset when they do it wrong. There is no feeling like writing a news story and then seeing it used by both sides in a debate to support their cases.

I also found that being a reporter was a tremendous asset to me in terms of creatve writing. Because I had to write constantly to meet deadline, I learned that it didn't matter if I felt "inspired" or not. Deadline waits for no one, and if today you turn out crap, you can rest assured your editor will hand it back to you to improve. Being a reporter has boosted my understanding of the way people think, it's increased my knowledge of government at all levels (and therefore made me more effective at getting attention as a private citizen since I know which buttons to push), it's improved my sense of good and corny dialogue, and it's generally made me a better creative and nonfiction writer.

For someone planning to pursue writing as a career but not necessarily in journalism, I would recommend going somewhere other than journalism school, especially if she already has clips from the area newspaper. This will give her a broad background to draw from, rather than just journalistic writing, and will make her a better-rounded person.

In my experience, not having a degree in journalism is not a liability for getting a job in that field. I didn't have such a degree, nor have some of the best reporters and editors I've worked with. Conversely, some of the worst ones I have, do.

As to who writes better, a lit major or a J-major, that's one of the major unsettled debates of our time. J-school teaches word economy, which is essential for good writing, while most academics teach their students to write long. On the other hand, many news articles are about as exciting to read as the ingredients on a can of pop, though that may be due as much to the writer's inability to understand what counts as news and what's merely political preening as to anything else.

Back when I was managing editor at a local newspaper, I hired two full-time reporters. My interest wasn't in their college degrees -- in fact, I can't even remember for certain if my second hire had one. What mattered to me was whether they could write well enough that I wouldn't be coming back to them with oodles of questions and essentially writing the stories for them.

My first hire had a journalism degree from Columbia University, and his writing was dry, flat and lifeless. He also had, in my estimation, a skewed judgment of what made news (too much on meetings, not enough on people).

I don't recall what my second hire had her degree in; to be honest, I can't even recall that she had a college degree. But she could write. The only published piece she had before she came to the paper was a piece of fiction she had written, but it was engrossing.

Incidentally, when the New Jersey Press Association handed out awards for the 2000 press year, she picked up a first-place award in breaking news coverage and I think another award as well. The journalism grad got zilch.

Big dreams for the Brothers Grinn

Neither David nor I write humor for its own sake, at least not for a long time. We get tired of the jokes and witticisms, and can't help wondering if they're really that funny anyway.

What we do enjoy is communicating Truth and truths through what we write, humor that bites or makes a point. To do that, we need writing that is good, original, and thoughtful. And in order to get Truth consistently, we believe a thoughtful, Christ-centered writer is necessary. On top of that, the whole process can take three hours a mailing, depending on its length and subject matter, and it pays zilch. Zippo. Nada. See the trouble in getting people to help us?

We're pursuing a couple agencies to help us publish a collection of Chicken Soup for the Soulless that uses several of our recurring characters, some unpublished material, and a recurring motif to tell a story that stretches across more than 100 years, but that's a process that could take a while. When that's done, we want to turn our efforts toward our more serious fantasy writing and have no idea, quite frankly, how the list will change. Right now it's pure dissemination of our material; Smirkov wants to turn into more of a promotional tool, to draw attention to our other writing and products.

Beyond that, God knows what's in store. I've been toying with the idea of a Brothers Grinn Bible, and there are other useful applications of humor, to teach history, organic gardening techniques and who knows what else. Anything really big would require some money in our company to hire writers and editors to oversee the quality of the work to make sure it's consistent what we want.

David has done the bulk of the illustration as he is much better at it than I. He did commission a few pieces out of pocket for our Civil War 2000 section and for Smiley's Last Resort, both of which were done by Earl Oxford, whose name is just about all I know of the guy.

His feeling is that his strength lies more in writing than in illustration, and it's also where his passion lies. He does a pretty good job, I think, and I've done my best to encourage him with the drawing, but I can't tell him what he should do with his time.