I know readers of this blog are probably sick of hearing about it, but the iPhone is here, and I’m in love.
In writing news, if you have not read anything by Carolyn See, you are missing out. Her book, Making a Literary Life, is now one of my new top faves. I inhaled it last night from 10 pm to about 1 am. Could not put it down and most writing books don’t do that for me. Memoirist, novelist, with a nice acerbic charm to her life as a Christian (which made me laugh out loud), this book is a must-read.
[M]agic, emotions, miracles, the occult, the weird, the bizarre, and the unaccountable belong to the world of the imagination. For instance, in the first years after Christ, the Romans lived very well. They had aqueducts and temples and soldiers with fancy armor and wide roads and nice pottery and imposing statuary, and they had an okay religion, which they didn’t follow very religiously, because who needed it? Things were going fine.
But meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, the early Christians were going ape crazy. They were mesmerized, inspired, wired by the memory of a guy who, besides preaching divine love and the forgiveness of sin, would have put any [Roman god] to shame. He walked on water. He fed a huge crowd on a couple of loaves and fishes. he raised folks from the dead. He cured the sick. And maybe most telling of all, he changed jar after jar of water into wine–excellent wine–so that the people at Cana may have come expecting the dull wedding of a couple living in modest circumstances but came away from a party that will be remembered as long as there are Christians.
To things are evident from this: one, the early Christians, poor, obscure, and marginalized as they were, had a lot of fun; two, you don’t see too many people around nowadays who worship Zeus.
Behold Zeus (a reproduction bust stands in the British Library’s Expedition room)
(And no, See’s book is not on my 100 books list, because I need to read widely for that list and this is yet another book on how to write. I trust many of you seek out book lists for books on varied subjects, not an exhaustive pile of the same books over and over.)
But anyway, go get it, read it, and go write.
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