continued miscellany

I. The Worst Journey in the World   Francis Spufford is an excellent writer best known for his nonfiction, which includes a profanity-laden defense of Christianity called Unapologetic. He's British, so the book was painful for him to write, as it's always painful for the British to be vulnerable. His latest (first-ish) novel Golden Hill came out this year and got basically rave reviews. Now he's in LitHub to convince us to read The Worst Journey in the World. Maybe you've heard of it. If not, imagine Into Thin Air only it's the Antarctic instead of Everest, and no one's discovered Columbia ski jackets. Someone please read this with me, because Spufford sells it well:
 

The Worst Journey in the World is the single greatest book in the literature of polar exploration.. . . There are many [others] that deal with a wider sample of humanity in the polar landscape...[but] there are none that have anything like The Worst Journey’s power to evoke a time and a place, and to bring us intimately, almost eerily, inside the small world of an expedition: its sounds, its straining physical life as bodies in canvas harness pull sledges through smooth or granular snow, its chatter, its personalities, its moments of awe when the sweating humans in the foreground catch their breath and the picture opens out (and out, and out) upon the vastness of the Antarctic ice.

Always happy to read of braver men dying in a place I'll never go. (Ahem.) 

II. Come for the Angels, Stay for the Artistic Self-Awareness

In a great post on alternative reads for Halloween (uh, Happy Thanksgiving, I'm late to this), Matthew Walther at The Week suggests Iris Murdoch's The Time of the Angels. It's the first of Murdoch's books I've read and, well, maybe you should read it, too? Look, this isn't an advice column, but the book is gothic, philosophizing fun. Here's a delicious burst of insight into writerly despair to post above your desk either way:
 

Was the poem any good? Muriel wondered. Could one really tell with one's own stuff? She was well aware of that golden glow of ideal intention which, for the artist, covers so often the achieved reality of his own art so that it is hard to see the contours of what he has done amid the shimmering lights of what he might have done. 

The vision obscures the newly living work because it imputes a false sheen; that's it exactly, I think. For me, at least.

III. Oxford is Great But Only If You've Read Enough Children's Books

Few places are more endearingly fictionalized than Oxford (not Mississippi), and here's a little piece on it. Good piece? Bad piece? I mean, he takes some swipes at Philip Pullman, so it's your call.

Oxford grows stories as other places grow apples or mushrooms. It produces more melancholy than it can consume locally.. . . [A]s I walk along the riverside pathways, or slip into the college gardens at dusk, as autumn turns to winter, I am seldom free of the fictional Oxford, or of the small part of its immense, intricate past that I myself have seen.

IV. Harper's Magazine, Doing God's Work

Someone should:

Roy Moore, a 70-year-old lawyer and Republican candidate for the US Senate who once accidentally stabbed himself with a murder weapon while prosecuting a case in an Alabama courtroom, was accused of having sexually assaulted two women, Leigh Corfman and Beverly Young Nelson, while he was an assistant district attorney in his thirties and they were 14 and 16 years old, respectively. Moore denied knowing Nelson, and Nelson showed reporters a copy of her high-school yearbook, which Moore had purportedly signed. Moore said he did not "generally" date teenage girls, and it was reported that in the 1970s Moore had been banned from his local mall and YMCA for bothering teenage girls. Moore's wife published a letter of support signed by more than 50 pastors, and four of those pastors said they either had never seen the letter or had not seen it before Moore was accused of sexual assault and asked to have their names removed.

Doesn't even include his anti-religious liberty stance re: Muslims becoming judges. 

V. Opinion

I've changed. I'm listening to Christmas music. There are good reasons to restrict the season to Advent proper, if you celebrate Christmas at all, but save them. Tell them to someone else. I won't tolerate early decorations, to be clear; I haven't gone pagan. But, honestly, life's too short to restrict Sufjan Stevens' carols to once a year, to say nothing of old school carols like Gaudete, Christus Est Natus. Other than diluting Christmas, people worry we're undermining Thanksgiving. But I gotta tell ya, as someone who sang carols for choir from October to December all through high school, it doesn't feel much like Thanksgiving without some fake wassailing anyway. Still, Chesterton's pretty funny on this, as on most things (uh, maybe less things than I thought), and thinks pre-celebrations are the worst:

There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article. It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is.

Finally, I have no dog in the insipid war over Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays, except that Merry connotes festival making, which means drinking, and at the very least we should be saying Merry Holidays. Keep the beer in the holiday cheer, everyone.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Joel