Friday Links, February 25, 2022
+ Review of a crowd-funded Vonnegut film, Unstuck in Time.
+ Review of two new books about creative types, one of which is Katy Carl’s novel, As Earth Without Water.
+ Thoughts on Amazon’s Tolkien in Rings of Power and on the Sin of Pride.
Art Born from Fire
Fr. Michael Rennier, Dappled Things web editor and contributor, recommends this essay by Mark Judge at Law & Liberty. It’s about Unstuck in Time, a film about Kurt Vonnegut that was almost forty years in the making.
“I read Vonnegut obsessively in my early 20s. I re-read some of his stuff last year and found it as poignant as ever.”—Fr. Rennier
Fr. Rennier writes more about re-reading Vonnegut here.
Portraits of the Artist: Two New Books About Creative Types
At her website, Maya Sinha, author of the well-received recent novel City Mother, reviews As Earth Without Water, the debut novel of Katy Carl, Dappled Things editor in chief, along with The Mind of The Artist: Personality and the Drive to Create, by psychologist William Todd Schultz. Rhonda Ortiz and Karen Barbre Ullo co-founders of Chrism Press both Like the post.
“As a writer slightly out-of-step with normal people, I’m glad somebody is pondering these questions. In fact, two recent books— a Catholic literary novel and a nonfiction study of the artistic personality—shed light on what it means to be a creative person in the modern age.”
The Long Defeat
Fr. Michael Rennier introduced the above-linked “The Long Defeat,” which is a ramble through J.B. Toner’s thoughts about about the new Rings of Power miniseries, this way, “There's lots of negative chatter bubbling up around this LoTR project.” Toner refers to a review by Ben Reinhard.
Two snippets from the Reinhard review that give me cause for alarm:
“The studio hired ‘intimacy coaches’ to help prepare actors for nude scenes.
“The question is whether the innovators have the wisdom to understand Tolkien’s vision, the humility to be guided by it, and the creative skill to bring it to life. In short, the question is whether the new work will be worthy of being accepted as part of some organic and authentic post-Tolkien canon or of being rejected as the product of clumsy and exploitive cynicism. . . . All signs point to the latter.”
