Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

Johnny Hart, Cartoonist, Creator of "B.C." and Co-creator of "Wizard of Id" Has Died

Update 4/10/07 - Tribute to Johnny Hart from  Rick Newcombe, President and Founder of Creators Syndicate:

Johnny Hart was a towering genius among cartoonists. He had a profound influence on my life. Johnny stands out as one of the kindest, most generous, patient and all-round decent people I have ever known.  (More from Newcombe, and from other cartoonists)

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Michelle Malkin provides an excellent survey of Johnny Hart's life via quotes and links.  A man gifted with wit and brilliance, his work incorporated his deeply held Christian faith.  "B.C." appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers worldwide.  I would read his work every day with anticipation and admiration.  We may be grateful to the Author who invented Johnny Hart.

MOZART - AN APPRECIATION

Here is an excellent article by Jon Pott titled "The Triumph of Genius: Celebrating Mozart."  2006 is the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. One brief excerpt in a long and helpful article:

Mozart has probably received more attention from theologians than any other composer save Bach. Most famously, there is Karl Barth, who began each day by listening to Mozart and found in him as he found in no other a transporting freedom and play within order, an affirmation "of a world which in sunlight and storm, by day and by night, is a good and ordered world." Barth is quite sure that in heaven, the angels, when left to their own devices, play Mozart, the good Lord listening in with special pleasure.

A Fresh Assessment of Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran"

Thomas Hibbs' begins his essay on Reading Lolita in Tehran this way:

"Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place — the foreground.” Saul Bellow’s description of the function of art under the regimes of totalitarianism is a recurring motif in Azar Nafisi’s book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, an autobiographical/literary study of the power of literature in the Islamic Republic of Iran. A brilliant and dramatically moving exposition of the power of literature to transform souls and create spaces for the retention of community and identity in the midst of totalitarian oppression, Nafisi’s crisply written book has come under fire as an alleged instrument of neoconservative imperialism. An article by Hamid Dabashi from Columbia University has given rise to mainstream treatments of the controversy in the Chronicle or Higher Education and in major newspapers. In an odd and mostly contrived controversy that says less about contemporary global politics than it does about certain pockets of the contemporary academy, what is at risk of being lost is Nafisi’s powerful account of the nature of liberal education.

REBIRTH OF CHRISTIAN FICTION

Christian fiction is coming on strong in sophistication and depth.  Charles Colson's highlights this renaissance in a good Breakpoint Commentary.  Some of the modern authors he mentions include Susan Howatch, Jan Karon, Tim Winton, Leif Enger, Marilynn Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.   Breakpoint articles are generally very good in themselves, and especially appreciated are the list of "resources" at the end.

GEORGE WASHINGTON - A CHRISTIAN AND NOT A DEIST

Michael and Jana Novak, father and daughter, are authors of Washington's God,  to be released early next month.  National Review magazine gives a preview of the book in an interview here.    The Novaks conclude that George Washington was a Christian far more than he was a Deist, and offer reasons for their conclusions.

SOLZHENITSYN'S "FIRST CIRCLE" ON RUSSIAN TELEVISION

The New York Times reports  that Russian national TV is currently showing a 10-part dramatic series of Alexandr I. Solzehnitsyn's  novel "The First Circle."    How tremendous.   I wish it could be exported and subtitled for showing in the United States.

The great Russian dissident, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, now 87, lived a 18 year exile in Vermont while he continued to churn out masterful literature depicting life under Communism in the Soviet Union.  I remember reading, about 20 years ago, his memoir, The Oak and the Calf described by one commentator as "a personal narrative of Solzhenitsyn's ten-year war to outwit Russia's rulers and get his work published in his own country.   The self-portrait of the author--in his loneliness, his courage, his skill in defense and attack, his savage wit--truly reveals to us a hero of our time."   All of that is very true.  It's the only book I vividly remember rereading immediately upon finishing it. 

How well I remember also the commotion he stirred up by speaking forthrightly about the West in his Harvard speech  of 1978 ...   but additional comment on all that will have to wait another post.  For now, it is wonderful to know that one of his novels has been made into a film.

Hat tip: The Corner

Current Absurdities in Art History

Roger Kimball, a distinguished art critic, editor of "The New Criterion," and author of The Rape of the Master: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art  offers a commentary on his encounter with Michael Fried, a celebrated art historian from Johns Hopkins University.  This is a long article but worth reading if one wants an immersion into the esoteric, truly weird, sicko world of academic art history.  Kimball will have none of it.

Kimball has the quaint idea that "we teach and study art history to learn about art. . . The answer furnished by the academic art establishment, however, is that we teach and study art history in order 1) to show how clever one is and 2) to subordinate art to a pet political, social, or philosophical agenda."

Hat tip: Corner National Review Online