The Painful Nowning Process

Become Robin Swicord and write and direct plays and films, such as Little Women and two forthcoming projects related to the works of Jane Austen.

Ms. Swicord began writing and making short films when she was at Florida State University, studying English literature and Theater.

The book on which Swicord’s next movie is based, The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler, is a pretty good read, too. Who knows how the movie will turn out, but the cast looks good.

I actually read Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God a few weeks ago, and of course it was published in 2002, so I’d been hearing about it for several years and kept thinking, “I really want to read that.” Especially since every article I read by Winner was—well—winning (like she never heard that one before!). On the other hand, it’s a spiritual autobiography, and one sort of has to be in the mood for that kind of thing—unless one is Lauren Winner. But I really shouldn’t have waited because it’s just a joy, in the C.S. Lewis- “Surprised by Joy”-sense of the word.

I must quote a few passages that jumped off the page for me:

Sometimes people wonder how babies can be baptized; indeed, that very wondering is the genesis of the Baptist church…. Hannah, who’s a Baptist, often says that a baby can’t promise to do everything one promises in baptism. I have never found this a very persuasive argument. It strikes me as too individualistic. The very point is that no baptismal candidate, even an adult, can promise to do those things all by himself. The community is promising for you, with you, on your behalf. It is for that reason that I love to see a baby baptized. When a baby is baptized, we cannot labor under the atomizing illusion that individuals in Christ can or should go this road alone. When a baby is baptized we are struck unavoidably with the fact that this is a community covenant, a community relationship, that these are communal promises. (80)

A child (not a baby) was baptized in our church yesterday, old enough to make her baptismal promises herself, illustrating both elements of the covenant Winner discusses in this chapter—that the congregation promises to support the new member of the Body, and that the person being baptized promises to live her Christian life “with God’s help.”

Winner writes about the virtues of liturgical prayer for helping the believer to focus:

When I am unable to pray, the prayer book gives me the words. Liturgical prayers, Edith Stein once wrote, “support the spirit and prescribe it to a fixed path.”

Sometimes I think I have come up with something poetic. One day, when I was full in the flush of agony about what I should do with my life…I heard, reverberating around my brain, “Go out to do the work I have given you to do.” The work I have given you to do. The work I have given you to do.

This phrase turned out to be from the closing prayer of the worship service, which she had not remembered until the next Sunday. Nevertheless, writes Winner,

what I am learning the more I sit with liturgy is that what I feel happening bears little relation to what is actually happening. It is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done whether I feel it or not. Sediment is being laid. Words of praise to God are becoming the most basic words in my head….

Maybe St. Paul was talking about liturgy when he encouraged us to pray without ceasing.

But those two bits are by no means the best reasons to read this book. So please do read it.

1. Finished HP7—for those who haven’t yet, I’ll just say that I was very pleased with the resolutions. The series as a whole will never replace Lewis’s Narnia or Tolkien, for me—the writing is too flat and Harry spends a bit too much time tearing his hair—but obviously millions of people adore it. As for those who think it promotes the occult, I refer them to the brilliant Hogwarts Professor (beware of spoilers!) and to the eloquent Connie Neal. Also recommended: my former Biola colleague JMNR on Five Things to Learn from Harry Potter, and 3 More Things I Learned at the End of HP (with SPOILERS FOR HP7!!!)

2. At the AP-Lit scoring, many were discussing the ongoing effort to accredit highschool AP courses, which seems to be continuing with variable success. One more thing for college admissions personnel to consider. The article points out, and our experience as scorers certainly showed to be true in many cases:

The Advanced Placement program is an odd hybrid of exam and coursework. Any student can take any exam, without taking an AP class. …

Conversely, students who take AP classes need not take the AP exam. Some skip the exams because they know they will fail; others never planned to take the exam, enrolling in the class mostly to look good in the college admissions process.

Of course, many colleges and universities only accept AP course credit with a corroborating AP exam grade. It’s a complex web.

Thanks to my uncle and aunt, who invited me to join their family at Pawley’s Island for a couple of days, I’ve been able to get some much-needed R&R while also reading most of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (a.k.a. HP #7) and avoiding media stories about the ending. Shh! Don’t tell me!

I also enjoyed visiting my cousins, whom I rarely get to see.

Now that I’m back (and finishing the last few chapters of HP7), I also recommend the Pop Culture Heroines series on professional women on screen. I hope they’ll also take a look at Kyra Sedgwick’s Brenda Johnson in The Closer.

I’m catching up on work this week after a long weekend on Edisto Island with my in-laws. We enjoyed visiting (including an afternoon with my dad, who drove down from Summerville) and typical beach activities. On the way home, my husband and I and his sister’s family stopped to see the Edisto Island Serpentarium, just in time for the snake show and the alligator feeding. Fun AND educational. We recommend it—at least for those who don’t mind reptiles.

My dad brought a DVD preserving a film made in the mid-70’s (we think) which shows my grandfather’s mobile eye clinics in India. My grandfather died in the late 80’s, but the mobile eye service is still in use in India. What a joy to see him and my grandmother again in this movie—not to mention some footage of my 25-years-younger father. We’ll treasure this bit of family history!

The Arthurian Legends course has left the foundational medieval texts and is moving into the modern era this week, starting with Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

I’m teaching summer school, as often happens this time of year, only this summer I have the pleasure of teaching one of my favorite courses, “Arthurian Legends,” for our M.Ed. program. We cover the entire history—highlights at any rate—of the origins and development of the legend and literary manifestations of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, from Roman era Britain through the present, and try to figure out its ageless appeal.

Thus, I’m always looking for new versions of these timeless tales, and today I came across a new theatrical production, The Arthur Cycle, by Jeff Berryman. Coming someday to a stage near you, perhaps.

What’s your favorite story about King Arthur?

She’s working with the Military Child Education Coalition. The MCEC is a

non-profit, world-wide organization that identifies the challenges that face the highly mobile military child, increases awareness of these challenges in military and educational communities and initiates and implements programs to meet the challenges.

As a Third Culture Kid (like me) and the mother of two military kids (AKA military brats), she’s eminently qualified. Plus, she’s just a great person—talented, smart, educated, and empathetic. I admire her very much. This MCEC gig is just one of the many good things she does.

Thanks again to my book-a-day calendar, as well as the local county library, this week I’m pleased to recommend:

Black Robe, by Brian Moore—the store of a 17th century Jesuit missionary venturing into deepest, darkest Canada. Made into an equally compelling film, directed by Bruce Beresford.

Always interested in a good mystery. The Mourning Sexton, by Michael Baron, is a “legal thriller…set in the world of Orthodox Judaism.” Described as delving into “themes like sin, redemption and justice…complicated, gripping and intelligent.” Who can resist that?

This one is for my nephew about to start his sophomore year at the Naval Academy—To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, by Arthur Herman. My brother-in-law and his dad might enjoy it as well.

The book I’m actually reading right now was on best-seller lists a few years ago: The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan. She has a way of making individual and particular cultural experiences universal.

As one who’s always been interested in words, I was interested by this WSJ article about trends in baby-names. I’m named very traditionally after my grandmothers, in case anyone’s interested. And for mysterious reasons, my husband’s & my combined extended families have an absurd number of Jameses, Davids, Williams, Sara(h)s, and Louises.

Nature news!

1. The Durrell Wildlife Preservation Trust has saved India’s pygmy hog. My family read all Gerald Durrell’s nature books when we were living in the Congo. He started out collecting animals for zoos, and eventually established the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust on the Isle of Jersey to preserve endangered species. We visited once—what a pleasure! Funny AND educational books, highly recommended, but I was never able to take his brother Lawrence Durrell completely seriously after reading My Family and Other Animals.

2. Hummingbird species discovered. I just like hummingbirds. I’m thinking of putting up a feeder on our front porch to entertain the cat, who sits on the landing looking out the window, wishing he were chasing things.

There’s a difference? Well, yes. Several years ago, at the Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA) conference, I found myself in a hotel elevator with some non-conference guests and couldn’t help overhearing their conversation.

“I hear there are medievalists in the hotel,” said one.

“Maybe we’ll see people wearing costumes!” said the other.

Meanwhile, I and a medievalist friend from grad school were standing next to them, wearing our ordinary 20th-century clothes, because we were medievalists, not members of the Society for Creative Anachronism. But sometimes the line is pretty thin, as described in this report from the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And maybe getting thinner:

[F]ar away from the movies and festivals and virtual worlds, medieval scholars do the arduous detective work of unearthing, interpreting, and contextualizing the evidence that has survived from the actual Middle Ages — a period when real people lived, labored, imagined, and died. Yet it was also a period when knights and monsters were pressing literary concerns.

“There’s so much about the medieval that’s associated with the juvenile, the popular, the low,” says Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a professor of medieval English literature at George Washington University. As specialists in Arthuriana and other literature heavy on adventure and light on introspection, he says, medievalists already dread being regarded as scholars of so much juvenilia.

And so sometimes their responses to the truly puerile strains of pop medievalism are downright grouchy and exasperated — as when medievalists point out for the umpteenth time that turkey legs, consumed with such gluttonous abandon at Medieval Times restaurants, did not exist in medieval Europe.

But another factor that heightens the tension between medievalists and their dress-up counterparts is this: Alongside the painstaking manuscript work, medievalists have a lot of fun.

Yes, we are serious. And many of us got into medieval studies because we read J.R.R. Tolkien or some version of Malory at an impressionable age. But now we want to do this thing right. And dance, too. Next year in Kalamazoo!