Last Night
Last Night
Last night, I headed up to First Hill for a reading by former Stranger writer Phil Campbell in the penthouse of the Sorrento Hotel. (The event was arranged by restaurateur/über-organizer Michael Hebb.)
Campbell, in town for the filming of his first book Zioncheck for President, which is about Grant Cogswell's idealistic 2001 city council campaign , was reading from his newest book-in-progress, Memphis Del Mar. (Cogswell was there last night, too). The book is a satire set 20 years after floods created by global warming inundated much of the South.
Campbell read what he called a "set piece" from the book—a sermon by one of the characters, a Southern Baptist minister in Memphis (where Campbell used to live), who blames the floods on people's sinful ways.
I didn't really follow the theology—something about Jeremiah, Lamentations, and turning one's face to God—but as someone who's sat through more than my (fair) share of Southern Baptist sermons as a child in Mississippi, I thought Phil's sermon was pretty true to form.
For one thing, it was extremely long. For another, it took Phil (playing the minister in a stilted "Southern" accent) forever to circle back around to his point. That said, it was pretty damn compelling. Closing my eyes, I could imagine sitting in the vast air-conditioned Memphis chapel that Phil visited during his research for the novel, reading scripture from two giant video screens and staring up at the wide baptismal pool.
I thought a few of his details from the sermon were off-point—conservative Southern Baptists, in my experience, don't hesitate to denounce Catholics as anti-Christian—but in general, I was impressed by how well Campbell captured conservative Protestants' antipathy to logic in general and science in particular.
Campbell, in town for the filming of his first book Zioncheck for President, which is about Grant Cogswell's idealistic 2001 city council campaign , was reading from his newest book-in-progress, Memphis Del Mar. (Cogswell was there last night, too). The book is a satire set 20 years after floods created by global warming inundated much of the South.
Campbell read what he called a "set piece" from the book—a sermon by one of the characters, a Southern Baptist minister in Memphis (where Campbell used to live), who blames the floods on people's sinful ways.
I didn't really follow the theology—something about Jeremiah, Lamentations, and turning one's face to God—but as someone who's sat through more than my (fair) share of Southern Baptist sermons as a child in Mississippi, I thought Phil's sermon was pretty true to form.
For one thing, it was extremely long. For another, it took Phil (playing the minister in a stilted "Southern" accent) forever to circle back around to his point. That said, it was pretty damn compelling. Closing my eyes, I could imagine sitting in the vast air-conditioned Memphis chapel that Phil visited during his research for the novel, reading scripture from two giant video screens and staring up at the wide baptismal pool.
I thought a few of his details from the sermon were off-point—conservative Southern Baptists, in my experience, don't hesitate to denounce Catholics as anti-Christian—but in general, I was impressed by how well Campbell captured conservative Protestants' antipathy to logic in general and science in particular.
