Learning as I Go

The writing of Jeff Minick should be familiar to Chronicles readers; he has appeared in these pages dozens of times over the past 15 years or so.  His name, however, was not always attached to his work.  Under the nom de plume Joe Ecclesia, he wrote our Letter to the Bishop column for the better part of a decade, and those articles constitute a majority of his Chronicles pieces (though that majority is getting slimmer with time).  His more recent letters from Uncle Samuel to his nephew Hobson have borne his own name.

For a couple of years now, I have had Jeff’s Learning as I Go sitting on my shelf, constantly disappearing under stacks of other books, waiting for life to slow down enough so that I could savor its contents.  But life doesn’t slow down unless we make it do so, and I finally decided to force its hand by picking up this 300-plus-page volume.  What a delight it has been to revisit the letters of both Joe and Samuel, and all of the other pieces that Jeff published in these pages up until 2013, and to read for the first time others that appeared elsewhere.  Most of the pieces in this handsome and elegantly typeset volume are only four or five pages long—a perfect length when your eyes need a rest from your computer screen, and your mind needs a rest from the inanities of the modern world.

First published in the March 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

A Walk in the Woods

Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail.  Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a much-older Bill Bryson (he is 35 years older than the author was at the time Bryson hiked the trail), optioned the rights back in 2005, with the idea of casting Paul Newman in the role of Bryson’s childhood friend, Stephen Katz, who accompanied him on most of the hike.  Newman’s death in 2008 prevented the reunion, which is just as well, because the movie would have been very different, and not for the better.

A Walk in the Woods was the expatriate Bryson’s first book to garner a significant American audience.  His earlier book on the United States, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989), was written for a British audience, and Bryson’s jabs at his native land were not so much biting as bitter.  (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, published in 2006, covers much of the same material, but through the eyes of a more mature writer who has made peace with his roots.)  Both the book and the film versions of A Walk in the Woods have increased interest in the Appalachian Trail—a good thing in a nation that values its natural and cultural resources far less than it should.

It hardly matters whether one reads the book first or watches the movie; they are two very different works, and not simply because the plot had to be changed to account for Redford’s age.  Anyone who says that Redford does not look his age is simply star-struck—at 79, he could easily pass for 80 or older.  There’s a scene where Redford and Nick Nolte (playing Katz), having departed the trail for a few nights in a town, walk across a road.  As my father-in-law noted, it requires a suspension of disbelief just to convince oneself that Redford would make it to the other side, much less hike any distance on the Appalachian Trail.  Indeed, while Katz is supposed to be the unfit one, I suspect that the rotund and red-faced Nolte would survive longer on the trail than Redford.  (While the credits were rolling at our local multiplex, an elderly lady behind me said to her companions, “I wonder how many miles of the trail they actually walked?”  My guess is that the distance could be numbered on two hands, or possibly even one; the trail portions were filmed entirely at Amicola Falls State Park in Dawsonville, Georgia, at the southern terminus of the trail.)

Bryson can, on occasion, be ribald, and there are passages in A Walk in the Woods that one might skip while reading it to children (as I did several years ago).  But the fact that the film, with some mild sexual humor, no nudity, and no violence, is rated R for a few “F-bombs” speaks volumes about the uselessness of the ratings system.

In the end, my wife and I both enjoyed the movie, though the Emilio Estevez/Martin Sheen production The Way (2010) is a much better film about a man coming to grips with mortality while hiking a trail (in that case, the Camino de Santiago).  But whether you like the film or not, read the book, and pick up some of Bryson’s other works as well (especially The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and A Short History of Nearly Everything).

First published in the November 2015 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Wayward Pines

How does an author sell over a million copies of his novels without ever learning how to write a convincing line of dialogue?  Welcome to the world of Amazon Publishing and self-published direct-to-Kindle ebooks.  Price your work cheaply enough and enable One-Click™ purchasing, and you may be the next Blake Crouch.

So why did I read not one, not two, but three of Crouch’s excruciating “novels” set in a fictional town in Idaho?  Crouch’s books were the inspiration for the recent FOX television show Wayward Pines.  Compared initially by reviewers with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the M. Night Shyamalan-produced series caught my attention with the very first episode.  It had, as they say, “great potential,” as did the central idea of Crouch’s trilogy.  Part nostalgia, part science fiction, part post-Edward Snowden surveillance-state paranoia: In different hands—say, Ray Bradbury’s—this story could have been a delight.  (Indeed, something about the premise calls The Martian Chronicles to mind.)  Instead, it feels like a missed opportunity, because no one will now be able to take this particular twist on a postapocalyptic world and do it right.  (Shyamalan had a chance, but he diverged from his source material only in frustratingly inconsequential ways, and hewed closely to it whenever he shouldn’t have.)

The only thing to be said for Crouch’s dialogue is that it is no worse than the other elements of his writing—plotting, pacing, grammar, spelling.  Amazon.com has pitched its direct-to-Kindle imprints as the future of publishing; if Crouch’s trilogy is any indication, that future looks about as bright as that of the residents of Wayward Pines.

First published in the September 2015 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Is Lying Ever Justified? →

“The problem is not that we are sinners: the problem is not repenting of sin, not being ashamed of what we have done.” In his homily at his daily Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae on May 17, 2013, Pope Francis was discussing, and commending, the example of Saint Peter, who, having denied Christ, was now (in John 21:15-19) reaffirming his love for his Lord and Savior. It is a moving yet painful scene; as Christ asks Peter three times if he loves Him, Peter’s shame over his earlier threefold denial of the Truth envelops him. Yet it is that shame, Pope Francis says, that ultimately allows Peter to repent, to return to the Lord in love, to embrace once again the Truth that he had so fervently denied.

First published on CrisisMagazine.com on June 6, 2013.