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From Artist of the Month Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire Contents
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FeaturesArtist of the Month: Wim Wenders
That one of Wim Wenders’s production companies is called "Road Movies" is no accident, no casual moniker. The central metaphor in nearly all his films is that of a lone figure on a journey, even if the destination is not known. Like Walker Percy’s character Binx Bolling (from The Moviegoer), Wenders’s protagonists are on a "Search." Something has propelled them onto a path. The great thing about his films is that he never rushes his searchers; their adventures are picaresque and unfold with the sort of randomness we experience in daily life. Yet they do find a direction, a dimly sensed goal, even if more time on the road is necessary. Whether it is Harry Dean Stanton giving his son back to his estranged wife in Paris, Texas and then setting off again, or the angel Damiel (played by Bruno Ganz) choosing to become human and experience the world in a new way (in Wings of Desire), or Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) in Don’t Come Knocking attempting to go home again, each character starts as a wanderer and becomes a pilgrim. Image is proud to have one of the world’s great film directors, Wim Wenders, as an Editorial Advisor, and, more importantly, as a friend. His integrity, his unwillingness to make clever or flashy films, stands as a beacon of artistic hope to those who have a vision but may be afraid to pursue it. Wenders is on the pilgrim road, aware of the journey’s end in the distance, but fully willing to give himself up to every moment of the trip. Click here for more. Sweethearts by Sara Zarr
A novel for young adults, Sweethearts is Sara Zarr’s follow-up to her National Book Award-finalist Story of a Girl, and it marks the continuation of what should be a long and brilliant trajectory. (We take a special pride in Sara’s success because she has been part of Image’s Glen Workshop for so long--and she credits the Glen with helping her get her books finished.) As with Story of a Girl, Sweethearts delves into heavy subject matter--poverty, abuse, overeating, and sex--which Zarr handles with sensitivity, originality, and a literary touch. In elementary school, Jennifer Harris was an unconfident outcast, a latch-key kid with unwashed clothes and bad eating habits, tormented by other kids. Her only friend was Cameron Quick, whose home life was even worse than hers. When Cameron vanished one day, nine-year-old Jennifer came to believe that he was dead. The novel takes place eight years later, when Jennifer is a senior in high school. Her mother has remarried, they’ve moved to a new part of town, and Jennifer Harris has remade herself into Jenna Vaughn, thin and popular, with smart and funny friends, a devoted boyfriend, a kindly stepfather, and clean clothes. But Jenna has never quite been able to shake her old self, and when Cameron reappears, the blurry past comes back into focus. Zarr manages to avoid looking down on her teenage protagonists; their drama is real, and they are wise, generous, and brave as well as sometimes self-focused. Zarr enters fully into their dramas and concerns without ever lapsing into after-school-special pomposity. She has an eye for what matters to teens, and what makes them good--friendship, loyalty, courage, the ability to change. As with Zarr’s first novel, the secondary characters make Sweethearts a rich and irresistible read. Zarr avoids stereotypes by setting the book at a very small school for kids with learning disabilities and special needs. No Heathers or Mean Girls barracuda-style popular girls here: Jenna’s clique of friends, who seem to dominate the school’s social pond, are the kind who will invite the new kid to sit at their lunch table. Her handsome but bland boyfriend is not a football player but the director of the school play. Her boy-magnet best friend gives her sensible relationship advice. Another highlight of the book is Jenna’s relationship with her mother, which is complicated and beautifully drawn. Both women have remade themselves since Jenna was a child, and in their strange new life, they are mutually respectful and considerate, but their unease with their joint past keeps them at arm’s length. Zarr’s prose is clean, elegant and readable, the dramatic lines of the story simple and clear, as befits her young audience--but from time to time she drops in an image as gorgeous and resonant as anything in a grown-up novel. She’s not only giving her teen audience a book they can sink their teeth into now; she’s also laying the groundwork for them to read great adult fiction in a few more years. Click here for more. Visiting Home by Paul J. Willis
Just glance at some of the titles in Paul J. Willis’s poetry collection, Visiting Home, and you can tell that he has spent a lot of time in the wilderness of California and Oregon. But you can also hear it in the poems themselves, in their tone of reverence and expectancy, in the poet’s eye for the sublime found even in nature’s simplest beauties: a moss-covered road, poison oak, pinecones, fir trees, lichen, rain. Sometimes his encounters with mystery are more profound, as in "Freeman Creek Grove," where he comes upon a giant sequoia on a family hike in November snow: "the trunk rising in dusky red, in fluted columns / strangely soft to our curious touch... older perhaps than the Incarnation." But more often than not the encounters are small and commonplace, as in the poem "A Very Little Thing," where he sees a lemon rolling down the street and imagines that it might make its way to the sea, might become "a lemon buoy, / a yellow bobber, a little / sour island on the salt rim / of the little world." Wherever he goes, Willis seems to carry with him a sensitivity to transcendence learned from his time in nature. But this is no mere poetry of the sublime: Visiting Home portrays wilderness and landscape as experienced by flesh-and-blood people. Newlyweds honeymoon in the mountains, a family goes hiking in the South Sierra, children leave their Oregon homes only to lie awake and hear rain falling in new places, "thinking of the way it drips / from Douglas fir, from bigleaf maple, how it stays / in the air all day, a steam, a vapor, a long / breath left behind." Willis’s poems tap into that tension between the self and nature. Often it’s expressed as sheer delight in the pleasures of creation: "If I am tempted, it / is only to drink with the eye, possess / with the heart, what has belonged / to all of us from our first parents / on both sides." But there’s also a sense of longing that cannot quite be fulfilled. The inevitable realization comes, and not without its twinge: "we cannot lay / claim to these kingdoms. As much as we ache / to join our souls to the slopes of grace / we must wait for them. We must wait / for the land. We must wait for the condor / who spirals again in the winter sun... who sees us here / no bigger than bespectacled mice, peering / through our tinted glass until we know / as we are known." As someone who has spent a good deal of time in the company of ancient trees and mountain ranges, Willis writes poetry from that place of tension between the physical, touchable earth and the unknown, the mystery it pushes us toward. Click here for more. Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction by Rodney Clapp
Rodney Clapp, currently an editor with Brazos Press, has been a senior editor at InterVarsity Press and an associate editor for Christianity Today, and as such has made it his mission to call the church into a vital and formative participation in culture. In his new book, Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction, Clapp’s enthusiasm for country music and its roots in the American southern tradition is evident. But with no holds barred he deconstructs what he sees as a tendency toward extreme individualism, insisting that community interdependence is the only thing that keeps America from what he calls "revivalistic democracy," or insular, divisive religiopolitics. The answer, says Clapp, is where holiness meets hedonism, or "a faith genuinely held and earnestly honored, but not lived up to always and absolutely." No one illustrates this quite so vividly as Johnny Cash, the model of American virility and spirit, sometimes tender and loving in duets with June Carter Cash, sometimes recklessly critical of the status quo, as in his championing of prison inmates and Native Americans, sometimes surprisingly violent in his cowboy ballads, which likely sprung from his lifelong guilt over the death of his brother Jack. Taking the music of Johnny Cash as springboard, the book ventures into an examination of American culture at large. The scope of Clapp’s imagination and research extends far beyond the space allotted in this quick read. He calmly busts long-held myths, such as the Old West as lawless stretch of death and violence (Deadwood and Tombstone combined only saw a handful of deaths per year in the 1870s), while simultaneously revering the lonesome "hillbilly" culture of the Appalachian wild, also so familiar to us in legend. No other community except the black South contributed so much to country music, which is, Clapp argues, the heart of American music. As he delves with tenacity into the intertwined histories of American politics, country music, and American Christianity, Clapp often deviates from Johnny Cash and country music completely. In fact, rather surprisingly for a book featuring the Man in Black himself on the cover, less than two dozen pages explore Cash in great depth. But those pages simmer with images of a Cash just as contradictory as the narrators in his song repertoire, and correspond effortlessly with Clapp’s depiction of American Christianity. In the end, says Clapp, Johnny Cash "was a poet and not a critic," and there is a place for both at the table. Click here for more. When the Human Spirit Meets the Holy Spirit: Creativity as Divine GiftNovember 1, 2008 We’d like to call attention to an event organized by a couple of friends of Image, Paula Huston and Luci Shaw, both of whom have appeared in the pages of Image over the years. Paula Huston has also taught spiritual writing at the Glen Workshop, and Luci Shaw is an Image board member and the namesake of our summer intern fellowship. Together with novelist Vinita Hamton Wright, they will be organizing an all-day seminar on creativity and Christianity: "When the Human Spirit Meets the Holy Spirit: Creativity as Divine Gift." They’ll be exploring several questions: How do we identify and develop our creative gifts despite hectic, responsibility-laden lives? How do we approach creative work as a spiritual discipline? How does becoming creatively alive strengthen our faith and deepen our life of prayer? How can we be creative and lovingly available to others at the same time? In Breath for the Bones, Luci Shaw writes: "As Christians and artists, our ideas are derived not just from our own free-floating sensibilities and some accompanying aesthetic, but they have reference to a system of faith bigger than we are, with creation and gospel at its heart." And in The Soul Tells a Story, Vinita Hampton Wright says: "I have become a more spiritual person because I write. The creative process is a spiritual one, and when we receive it as such, it deepens our gifts and edifies us in general. To write true stories, I must encounter truth, and as Jesus says, the truth makes us free." The seminar will be held Saturday, November 1, from 9:00 a.m.- 4:00 p.m. at Avila Beach Community Center near San Luis Obispo, California. The cost is $85 per person, or $100 per person including lunch. The registration deadline is October 1, 2008. To register, please make checks out to Paula Huston and mail to 706 Printz Road, Arroyo Grande, CA 93420 by the October 1 deadline. Be sure to include your phone number and e-mail address with your check. For more information, go to www.paulahuston.com or write to paulahuston@earthlink.net. Gallery WatchMystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault
The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College will host an exclusive exhibition, Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, on view through December 7, 2008. It marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1958 death of the French Fauvist and Expressionist painter and printmaker, and aims to recover the artist for a new generation. The exhibition will comprise approximately 240 of Rouault’s finest paintings, works on paper and stained glass--many never before displayed in North America. Focusing on meanings preserved in the French word "masque," the exhibition explores the many outward "masks" Rouault loved to paint--those of circus players, prostitutes and judicial figures, as well as the iconic sainte face (holy face) of Christ. Employing a second sense of "masque," the exhibition presents Rouault’s representation of the human condition as a kind of "pageant" or "guising"--or as Balzac put it, a "human comedy." Rouault’s world is an often tragic comedy of errors, marked by uncertainty and misapprehension. Outward appearances misrepresent and betray deeper realities. This is true both for society’s marginal figures and esteemed ones. Rouault succinctly summed up this vision in his several studies entitled (quoting Virgil’s Aeneid), "Sunt Lacrymae Rerum"--"There are tears (of grief) at the very heart of things." Schloesser explains: "Such dark reflections are redeemed for Rouault by the human masque’s qualifier--"mystic"--which points to the centrality of Christian iconography for the artist." Arranged chronologically, the exhibition seeks to demonstrate that Rouault’s religious realism as it developed was far removed from any conventional piety. Rouault’s human comedy is simultaneously a divine comedy; it is a masque--but one that is ultimately mystic. Image: Georges Rouault, Are we not all slaves? (Ne sommes nous pas tous forçats?), 1920-1929. India Ink, Oil, and Gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 40 1/10 x 28 ¾ inches. Fondation Georges Rouault, Paris. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. For more information, click here. Beatitudes at White Stone Gallery
New Zealand oil painter Cornelis Monsma explores the Beatitudes in a series of paintings for a new exhibit at Philadelphia's White Stone Gallery. The exhibit will also include abstract stained glass pieces from North Carolina's Vanessa Wright Hollifield. The Beatitudes, which Monsma and Hollifield have translated into colorful contemporary images, will make their debut at White Stone Gallery, located in the Manayunk section of Philadelphia. The exhibit runs through September 28, 2008. For more information, click here. To contact the gallery, call 215.482.7700 or email info@whitestonegallery.com. Message BoardIf you have information other ImageUpdate readers might find interesting, share it here! Do you have a question that you hope a member of the ImageUpdate community might have the answer to? Ask it here. Have your messages posted by sending an e-mail to gwolfe@spu.edu. ImageNews -- The Scoop on Our Programs
Image Readings: Jeanine Hathaway Jeanine Hathaway is a poet who knows how to dance along the edge of the precipice. As a former Dominican nun, a mother, and a teacher, she understands that the stakes in life are high, that love is haunted by fear, faith dogged by doubt, and professional life complicated by ego. And yet her skeptical eye remains wedded to a lyrical sense of the ways in which the good can be experienced...and celebrated. Take a turn or two with her. Click here to listen. Subscribe to Image in Print and Get More Art, Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Interviews, and Every Good ThingIf you like reading about great new art and writing inspired by faith in ImageUpdate, and you're ready to get down to reading and seeing the stuff itself, it's time to subscribe to Image. Each quarter our editors comb the world of art and letters to bring you our favorite new work--work that respects transcendent mystery as well as the gritty truth of the material world that bears the divine imprint. A one-year subscription gets you four beautifully produced issues delivered right to your door. Ninety percent of the journal's content is not available on our website, but only through what we call "the sacrament of print." Click here to get the magazine Terry Tempest Williams calls "evocative and inspiring" and Bret Lott calls "the most meaningful literary journal being produced today." ImageUpdatePublisher: Gregory Wolfe ImageUpdate is the biweekly e-mail newsletter from Image, a quarterly print journal that explores the relationship between Judeo-Christian faith and art through contemporary fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, and dance. Each issue also features interviews, memoirs, essays, and reviews. ImageUpdate brings you news about books, CDs, organizations, websites, conferences, exhibitions, and tours--all of which inhabit the intersection between faith and imagination. ImageUpdate will also notify you whenever a new issue of Image is printed, an Image event is upcoming, or new content is posted to our website. Copyright © 2008 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved. |
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