How is the real story developing?

Read this first. Then this. I read them in the opposite order, but I'm afraid you won't last through the second one in time to read the first one, which is shorter and more edifying. Enough with the mystery already!

The first article is by Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, and he talks about two of his favorite authors (Salinger and Hemingway) and how their books enraptured him with romantic lies about times and places that hardly existed.  A creator of wonderful imaginative literature can still waste their life. Miller urges us toward a better reality, saying, "the only story that actually tells the truth is the story you have lived, good or bad."  He calls his piece: "For a creator, there's no benefit to romantic preoccupations."

The second article is by Matt Thorn, a cultural anthropologist who studies Japanese manga and their fans. His article is called "Girls And Women Getting Out Of Hand: The Pleasure And Politics Of Japan's Amateur Comics Community." This article is a major step for me toward understanding gender phenomena in East Asia. Thorn talks about his observations at different amateur comic book shows in Japan throughout the 1990s, how idealized gay themes featuring pretty-boys have become the center of comics written by and for young women, how surrogates like this help wealthy girls escape from cultural expectations about their gender roles and relationships, and yet how either through or in spite of their manga obsession, these girls manage to develop normal relationships with people of either gender.

Don't expect me to start accusing at this point, because it was just such escapist voyeurism that brought me to Matt Thorn's piece. But I do want to let you know that I've woken up to the realization that it's my life that matters, and not the stories in my head that make part of its chapters. And it's not my life, if it's to be a life that matters.  Because the life I now live in this wonderfully earthy, preoccupied, and gendered body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)

Do you love performativity like Audrey Hepburn? Do you hate it like Betty Friedan? Do you just watch it to name it like Judith Butler? Either way, every action and the thought within it is the site of Relationships, human and divine, taking place in a field whose boundaries were created by Someone more imaginative than I. As long as I and my little brain can rattle around in that, it's all right.

Now that you've heard my take, I hope you'll live more consciously. But if you haven't yet got to the primary sources of this post, please read this first. Then this.

Schlatter on Nietzche's teaching style

"[As a college student, Adolf Schlatter] heard Friedrich Nietzche lecture on Plato. Nietzche was one of his professors. But the impression was not positive. Years later, he recalled chiefly Nietzche's 'offensive haughtiness. He treated his listeners like despicable peons. He convinced me of the principle, that to throw out love, is to despoil the business of teaching. Only genuine love can really educate.'" - Robert Yarbrough, "Adolf Schlatter and the Future of Christianity: Schlatter's Life and Legacy," 1995 Francis Schaeffer Lecture Series at Covenant Seminary.