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Story

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I don’t know how many people have ever heard of Robert McKee; I imagine all true cinephiles and cineasts have, but I hadn’t. For those as ignorant as me, here’s some of the dust-jacket copy from his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (which describes him as “the world’s premier screenwriting teacher”):

For more than thirteen years, Robert McKee’s students have been taking Hollywood’s top honors. His Story Structure seminar is the ultimate class for screenwriters and filmmakers, playing to packed auditoriums across the world and boasting more than 25,000 graduates. . . .Unlike other popular approaches to screenwriting, Story is about form, not formula.

I have to say, I’m honestly impressed. McKee shares my belief in the importance and power of story (if anything, he takes it too far; I get the sense that story has taken the place of religion for him), he’s all about teaching people to write good stories, and he has a lot of helpful advice and examples. (I had originally been thinking to quote a passage or two, but there’s too many good ones.) I don’t think he gets all the examples right, but most of them, he does—he really understands what he’s talking about; and while his book is focused strictly on screenwriting, so far, I think everything he says applies to anyone writing fiction in any form.I should note that one of the reasons I appreciate McKee’s work is that he doesn’t buy the pretensions of the artistes. Here’s what he has to say about the “art film”:

The avant-garde notion of writing outside the genres is naive. No one writes in a vacuum. After thousands of years of storytelling no story is so different that it has no similarity to anything else ever written. The ART FILM has become a traditional genre, divisible into two subgenres, Minimalism and Antistructure, each with its own complex of formal conventions of structure and cosmology. Like Historical Drama, the ART FILM is a supra-genre that embraces other basic genres: Love Story, Political Drama, and the like.

Being more of a novel guy than a film guy, I tend to run into this more with the art film’s prose cousin, literary fiction, where I’m regularly irritated by the pretensions of its practitioners and fans that lit fic isn’t a genre and is therefore superior to “genre fiction.” McKee’s right, this is naive; unfortunately, as B. R. Myers has pointed out in his “Reader’s Manifesto,” it’s a naivete that has led to some real distortions in people’s understanding and appreciation of literature. It’s good to have someone come out and say, “You know what? This kind of thing’s a genre just like any other, with its own conventions and expectations, and some of it’s good and some of it isn’t, just like any other genre.”Anyway, coming back to the book: it’s a very good book about writing stories, and I recommend it—especially to fellow aspiring writers, but not only.

Is it Barack Obama’s time?

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It certainly could be; he’s a gifted campaigner with a strong core of support running in a year when the opposing party is weak and unpopular. On the other hand, there are several good reasons to think it won’t be.First, the circumstances that made the GOP unpopular and led to the debacle of 2006 are shifting, and Sen. Obama isn’t shifting with them. For one, he continues to stick to the narrative that “Iraq is spiraling into civil war, we invaded unwisely and have botched things ever since, no good outcome is possible, and it is time to get out of there as fast as we can” (even though he only took that stance out of political expediency) when more and more people (including even the editorial board of the Washington Post) are noticing that the surge has changed all that. As Michael Barone writes, “It is beyond doubt now that the surge has been hugely successful, beyond even the hopes of its strongest advocates, like Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. Violence is down enormously, Anbar and Basra and Sadr City have been pacified, Prime Minister Maliki has led successful attempts to pacify Shiites as well as Sunnis, and the Iraqi parliament has passed almost all of the ‘benchmark’ legislation demanded by the Democratic Congress—all of which Barack Obama seems to have barely noticed or noticed not at all. He has not visited Iraq since January 2006 and did not seek a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus when he was in Washington.” This is particularly a problem for Sen. Obama given that John McCain can take a sizeable measure of credit for that success: he didn’t order the surge, but he’d been pushing for it since 2003, even when the whole idea was wildly unpopular—which means that he can legitimately associate himself with our current success in Iraq while avoiding any blame for the failure of the pre-surge approach, since he’d opposed that all along.Another change from 2006 is that Congress is no more effective or popular now than it was then, but now the Democrats are running it; which is to say that running against “those incompetent do-nothings in Congress” is a strategy that should still have bite, but now it will be biting Democratic candidates rather than Republican ones. This is particularly true since, as both Barone and Dick Morris point out, the dramatic rise in gas prices has put the Democratic Congress over a barrel (so to speak). Sen. McCain can campaign against them hard on this issue, pushing for offshore drilling (where, as he’s taking care to tell voters, even Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any spills), drilling in ANWR (especially if he has the wit to put Sarah Palin on the ticket), and even nuclear power (which has worked fine as a major power source in Europe for years now with no problems), and the Democrats will have a hard time countering him; as part of a broader argument that “you voted Democrat two years ago, and what have they done for you? Not much,” this could be devastating.Second, Sen. Obama has a major demographic problem—and no, it’s not the one you think. (Taken all in all, I’d guess that racial prejudices will mostly balance each other out.) The problem, which Noemie Emery laid out in a piece in the Weekly Standard, is the cultural divide among white voters which Barone identified in the Democratic primaries. In Barone’s terms, the split is between Academicians and Jacksonians; Emery defines it this way:

Academicians traffic in words and abstractions, and admire those who do likewise. Jacksonians prefer men of action, whose achievements are tangible. Academicians love nuance, Jacksonians clarity; academicians love fairness, Jacksonians justice; academicians dislike force and think it is vulgar; Jacksonians admire it, when justly applied. Each side tends to look down on the other, though academicians do it with much more intensity: Jacksonians think academicians are inconsequential, while academicians think that Jacksonians are beneath their contempt. The academicians’ theme songs are “Kumbaya” and “Imagine,” while Jacksonians prefer Toby Keith . . . Academicians don’t think “evil forces” exist, and if they did, they would want to talk to them. This, and not color, seems to be the divide.

This division in the electorate would be the reason that, even after the May 6 primaries turned out far below her hopes, Hillary Clinton was still able to crush Sen. Obama in Kentucky and West Virginia—an outcome RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost predicted. Sen. Obama is an Academician to the bone, perhaps the most non-Jacksonian presidential candidate the Democrats have ever nominated (recall John Kerry’s emphasis on his military experience, and the powerful effect of the Republican attack on that experience); Sen. Clinton, through her toughness and tenacity, was able to keep her campaign going against him by recasting herself as a Jacksonian Democrat (something she certainly had never been before), and thus giving those voters someplace to go against Sen. Obama. Now, in the general election, we’ll see the quintessential Academician, a modern-day Adlai Stevenson, up against the quintessential Jacksonian, a warrior politician for the 21st century. Sen. Obama can certainly pull it off, if he can stop talking to Iowa farmers about arugula, but that’s a matchup which Jacksonians tend to win.Third, just as the “bimbo eruptions” didn’t stop with Gennifer Flowers, so there’s no guarantee we won’t see more problems arise out of Sen. Obama’s friends and associates. We’ve already heard about a number of his unsavory connections, but every so often, a new one makes a scene (as Fr. Michael Pfleger recently did, driving Sen. Obama to finally remove his membership from Trinity UCC); and while it might be possible to defend him by saying, “these are all past connections—Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, James Meeks, Bernadette Dohrn, Nadhmi Auchi, Michael Pfleger, they’re all past history, old stories, irrelevant to who he is now,” that doesn’t hold up very well when you look at the people he continues to associate with. How is it possible to dismiss his connections to the Chicago political machine, racist preachers, American terrorists, and international criminals as irrelevant when his first appointment as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was Eric Holder, to chair his effort to choose a VP candidate? At some point, you just have to say, this pattern of associations tells us something important about Sen. Obama—who he is, how he thinks, what he values, what matters to him; and at some point, you have to figure that the problems his associates have already given him aren’t likely to stop coming. Again, he could overcome this; but depending on what happens and when, he might not.Taken all in all, I have to say, I don’t think he will; I think it will be close, but I think in the end, Sen. McCain will come out on top. Sen. Obama might steal a few states out of the GOP column, but between Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania, I think he’ll lose a couple as well, and I think the end result will look a lot like 2004 at the presidential level—and at the lower levels, maybe not good, but not a worst-case scenario, either. (And maybe I’ll be wrong about all that; as I’ve already noted, nobody’s been right about much, this campaign season.)

Memo to self: don’t get cocky

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“Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.”—1 Corinthians 10:12 (ESV)The present is no guarantee of the future; the moment when we’re surest we’re standing firm is the moment we’re least likely to notice the ground eroding out from under our feet. May we always, in humility, be on guard against the temptations of the Enemy, and the worse angels of our nature, remembering that the fact that we stand now is no promise that we’ll still be standing five minutes from now.“Be careful, little eyes, what you see . . .
“Be careful, little ears, what you hear . . .
“Be careful, little feet, where you go . . .”

Song of the Week

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OK, so it isn’t winter; but it’s a grey, growling, blustery Midwest thunderstorm out there, and the song suits both the weather and my mood anyway.

Winter: A DirgeThe wintry wind extends his blast,
And hail and rain dost blow;
Or, the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snow;
While tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And roars from bank to brae;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.”The sweeping blast, the sky o’er cast,”
The joyless winter-day
Let others fear, to me more dear
Than all the pride of May:
The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,
My griefs it seems to join;
The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine!Through the night, through the night,
Through the night and all,
Tho’ all my strength be sorely spent
And stars do die and fall,
To Thee, my King, I gladly cling
When black winds howl and blow;
When all is done and battle won
Let Christ receive my soul.Thou Pow’r Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfill,
Here, firm, I rest, they must be best,
Because they are Thy will!
Then all I want (Oh! do Thou grant
This one request of mine!),
Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,
Assist me to resign.ChorusVerses: Robert Burns, 1781; chorus: Tony Krogh; music: Tony Krogh
Chorus and arrangement © 1991 Grrr Music
From the album Dancing at the Crossroads, by The Crossing

Surprised by respect

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Bishop N. T. Wright went on The Colbert Report last night, and the results weren’t what I would have expected. Stephen Colbert (as some have complained) wasn’t at his funniest, but it seems to me that that’s because he was actually interested in having a serious discussion with Bishop Wright about his book, Surprised by Hope. It’s probably just as well, since it seemed to me the good bishop got a bit testy as it was—I’m not at all sure he would have handled an all-out Stephen Colbert assault. Taken all in all, I think it’s a pretty good discussion, with some of the trademark Colbert humor and a pretty good exposition of Bishop Wright’s understanding of the concept of heaven (which I don’t agree with, though I still appreciated the clip); seeing a little of Colbert’s serious side as a man of faith, as I think we did, was a bonus.

Radicals & Pharisees

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The quote heading the page today on The Thinklings is, “The radicals of one generation become the pharisees of the next.” I don’t know who said it (since they don’t, and I hadn’t heard it before), but whoever it was got the matter significantly wrong. The fact is, the Pharisees were the radicals of their own generation (or at least, they were one of the radical groups—there were certainly others); it was the Sadducees who were the Establishment. This isn’t an isolated phenomenon, either, as the pharisaical spirit is far more often found among the radicals and other fringe groups of the day than it is among those who are established and in positions of authority; the Establishment rarely has the energy to be pharisaical, and it has any number of other concerns to distract it from such efforts and attitudes. Radicals, on the other hand, have both energy and reason for it, just as the original Pharisees did: if you’re trying to build a movement to change society, that’s the most efficient way to do it.Our problem in understanding the Pharisees is that we only see them through the lens of the New Testament and their reaction to Jesus, who was, in essence, one of their own outflanking them from an even more radical position. Their faults are magnified, and their approach is interpreted in terms of centuries of subsequent Christian legalism; this is understandable, but does skew our picture somewhat. As a consequence, we miss the very real energy of their reform movement, and the hope it generated for some—and thus we interpret them as stick-in-the-mud never-change reactionary old-guard Establishment conservatives, when in reality they were anything but; when in reality, their problem was that they were leading change in the wrong direction, and not far enough.

There’s a parable in here somewhere . . .

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. . . but at the moment, it’s beyond me to know what it is. This from Neil Gaiman (who is, as my wife notes, an unabashed pagan):

I wound up strangely out of sorts today, after my journey down to Dave [McKean]’s. The toilets on many trains in the UK have ridiculously unintuitive ways to open and close doors, with mystery buttons inside the toilet to close and lock the door that are hard to find, even for the sighted. I watched a blind man head into the train toilet. He couldn’t find the door to close it, said “excuse me, can some[one] help me?” until a fat man in a suit sitting next to the toilet stopped pretending he wasn’t there and pressed the close door button for him. Then I watched the fat man hurry down the aisle and past me and back into the next compartment for all the world as if he was embarrassed by what had just happened. Soon enough there came a frantic knocking on the toilet door as, obviously, the blind man couldn’t get out (secret, randomly placed buttons would do it, but you have to find them first). And there was a carriage full of people between me and the toilet, so I waited for someone to get up, press the outside button and let him out. And nobody did. now the knocking started again, louder, and more panicked, and I looked out at a carriage filled with people who were pretending very hard they hadn’t heard, and were all now gazing intently at their books or papers. So I got up and walked down to the toilet and let the man out, and showed him back to his seat, because it’s the least I’d want if I was blind, and it’s how you treat a fellow human being, and for heaven’s sake. And then I went back to my seat, and everyone looked up at me and stared and smiled with relieved “thank god someone did that” smiles, and I sat down grumpy and puzzled and remain grumpy and puzzled about it still. I’m still trying to work out what on earth was going on there—I don’t think I did anything good or clever or nice. I just did what I would have thought anyone would do. Except a train filled with people didn’t, and in one case actively appeared to be running away in order not to. And I puzzle over, was this a carriage filled with particularly self-centred or embarrassed people, has something fundamental changed in the years I’ve been away from the UK (unlikely, and I don’t believe in lost Golden Ages), did those other people really somehow blindly fail to notice that there was a blind man trapped in the toilet…? I have no idea and I write it down because, as I said, it puzzles and irritates me, and if it ever turns up in a short story you’ll know why.

“It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.”

—Romans 2:13-16 (ESV)

HT: Sara

Praying on the front line

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Something else I’ve been meaning to post is this passage from Tim Keller:

Biblically and historically, the one non-negotiable, universal ingredient in times of spiritual renewal is corporate, prevailing, intensive and kingdom-centered prayer. What is that?

  1. It is focused on God’s presence and kingdom. Jack Miller talks about the difference between “maintenance prayer” and “frontline” prayer meetings. Maintenance prayer meetings are short, mechanical and totally focused on physical needs inside the church or on personal needs of the people present. But frontline prayer has three basic traits:

    a. a request for grace to confess sins and humble ourselves

    b. a compassion and zeal for the flourishing of the church

    c. a yearning to know God, to see his face, to see his glory. . . .

  2. It is bold and specific. The characteristics of this kind of prayer include:

    a. Pacesetters in prayer spend time in self-examination. . . .

    b. They then begin to make the big request—a sight of the glory of God. That includes asking: 1) for a personal experience of the glory/presence of God (“that I may know you”—Exod. 33:13); 2) for the people’s experience of the glory of God (v. 15); and 3) that the world might see the glory of God through his people (v. 16). Moses asks that God’s presence would be obvious to all: “What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” This is a prayer that the world be awed and amazed by a show of God’s power and radiance in the church, that it would become truly the new humanity that is a sign of the future kingdom.

  3. It is prevailing, corporate. By this we mean simply that prayer should be constant, not sporadic and brief. . . . Sporadic, brief prayer shows a lack of dependence, a self-sufficiency, and thus we have not built an altar that God can honor with his fire. We must pray without ceasing, pray long, pray hard, and we will find that the very process is bringing about that which we are asking for—to have our hard hearts melted, to tear down barriers, to have the glory of God break through.

This is the kind of prayer the church needs to practice, and the kind of prayer meeting it really needs to hold (not that there isn’t value to maintenance prayer meetings as well, as part of the pastoral care of the church); it’s the kind of prayer which I’m working to encourage in the congregation I serve, which means first of all in myself. It’s hard; it takes faithfulness and commitment and attention; but I do believe the fruit is more than worth it.HT: Joyce

This week’s sign that the Apocalypse is upon us

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(to borrow from Sports Illustrated, since it’s an old SI writer)

I’d call this unbelievable, but that’s not strong enough; it’s been a long time, even in this culture, since I’ve seen anything this despicably dishonorable. In this year’s Georgia Class AAA high school baseball championship game, the pitcher and catcher of the losing team (Cody Martin and Matt Hill, respectively) colluded to bean the plate ump with a four-seam fastball (this just a few minutes after said ump called strike three on the pitcher’s brother, Dodgers first-round pick Ethan Martin).

I agree with Rick Reilly: What are we turning into in this country, anyway?

Sarah Palin for VP

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So far during this craziest of presidential-election seasons, I haven’t been right about much of anything yet (though I take solace in the fact that neither have many other people). Still, I keep hoping that will change; and in that spirit, I’m officially hopping on the Sarah Palin bandwagon. Gov. Palin isn’t all that well known as yet, since she’s the governor of Alaska, which isn’t exactly a media hub, and an Alaska native to boot; that’s the one argument against John McCain choosing her as his running mate. The rest of the arguments all line up in her favor. Ann Althouse points out a few, Jack Kelly of RealClearPolitics adds some of his own, while Fred Barnes’ piece in The Weekly Standard, though written last year, lays out a few more, and they’re compelling; aside from the fact that she’s not from a populous, media-heavy state, she’s about as perfect a fit for Sen. McCain as one could imagine. (Update: Beldar thinks so too, as does Jonah Goldberg.)One, she’s young, just 44; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s age.Two, she has proven herself as an able executive and administrator, serving as mayor, head of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and now as governor; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s legislative experience (though he does have command experience in the Navy).Three, she has strong conservative credentials, both socially (she’s strongly pro-life, politically and personally) and fiscally (as her use of the line-item veto has shown); she would assuage concerns about Sen. McCain’s conservatism.Four, she’s independent, having risen to power against the Alaska GOP machine, not through it; she’s worked hard against the corruption in both her party and her state’s government. She would reinforce Sen. McCain’s maverick image, which is one of his greatest strengths in this election, but in a more conservative direction.Five, for the reasons listed above, she’s incredibly popular in Alaska. That might seem a minor factor to some, but it’s indicative of her abilities as a politician.Six, she has a remarkable personal story, of the sort the media would love. She’s a former beauty-pageant winner, the mother of five children (the oldest serving in the Army, preparing to deploy to Iraq, the youngest a Down Syndrome baby), an outdoorsy figure who rides snowmobiles and eats mooseburgers—and a tough, take-no-prisoners competitor who was known as “Sarah Barracuda” when she led her underdog high-school basketball team to the state championship, and who now has accomplished a similar feat in cutting her way to the governor’s office. No one now in American politics can match Sen. McCain’s life story (no, not even Barack Obama), but she comes as close as anyone can (including Sen. Obama); she fits his image.Seven, she would give the McCain campaign the “Wow!” factor it can really use in a vice-presidential nominee. As a young, attractive, tough, successful, independent-minded, appealing female politician, though not well known yet, she would make American voters sit up and take notice; and given her past history, there could be no doubt that she would be a strong, independent voice in a McCain administration, should there be one.Eight, choosing Gov. Palin as his running mate, especially if coupled with actions like giving Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal the keynote slot at the GOP convention, would help the party going forward. The GOP needs to rebuild its bench of plausible strong future presidential candidates, and perhaps the best thing Sen. McCain can do for the party is to help with this. The party needs Gov. Jindal to stay where he is for another term or two (as, I believe, does the state of Louisiana), but in giving him the convention slot that launched Sen. Obama to prominence four years ago and putting Gov. Palin on the ticket, Sen. McCain would put two of the GOP’s best people and brightest hopes for the future in a perfect position to claim the White House themselves; in so doing, he would make them the face of the GOP for the future.