Tripping Down the Way of Beauty

Kreeft, Pooh, Wojtyla, Dickens--It's Been a Big Week

Happy Sunday, My Friends!

And a warm welcome to all the new friends who joined us this past week here at The Comic Muse. My hunch is that most of you found us by way of all the good publicity that Word on Fire have put out since last Monday when they launched my latest book…

Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts

More on Beauty & Imitation follows just below.

But because of all these new friends, I thought it would be worthwhile, not only for them but also for many of you, to touch on the basics of what The Comic Muse is all about…

What’s the Value Proposition?

As I say on the Welcome page, here at The Comic Muse I offer unfashionable opinions on the arts, entertainment, faith, and culture, with occasional fiction and audio drama. What you can expect is insightful writing that draws on my uncommon wealth of experience both as a professional philosopher and as an author of both fiction and drama.

Here is my latest reflection on a piece of popular culture: Ethan Hawke’s new cinematic biography of Flannery O’Connor, Wildcat, “A Meditation on Wildcat in 17 Scenes,” which has become one of my most popular posts.

My latest piece of short fiction, also available as an audiobook, is “Rory Dedalus’ Religious Phase,” which I divide into two parts…

And here’s part two…

Clever writing—that’s why I’m recommending The Comic Muse

—Roseanne T. Sullivan

How Can I Get Involved?

I appreciate your considering hanging out with us here at The Comic Muse. You can get better involved

1. By recommending us to a friend

2. By becoming a free subscriber, which gives you access to most of what’s available in the archive.

3. By becoming a paid subscriber

   1. For a latte a month ($5): Monthly Subscriber

   2. For your half of one nice dinner out per year, if you’re going Dutch Treat ($60): Annual Subscriber

   3. For the full price of one nice dinner out per year ($120): Founding Member

A paid subscription gives you access to everything on the site, including, of course, what’s kept behind the paywall (such as my fiction and audio drama).

What’s more, new Founding Members will receive a signed copy of Beauty & Imitation mailed right to their door! Only while supplies last!

But don’t despair Annual Members. All new Annual Members of the site, dating back to last Monday, June 3, 2024, the launch day of Beauty & Imitation, will be entered into The Comic Muse Annual Subscriber Independence Day Lottery, in which a lucky one of you will receive a signed copy of Beauty & Imitation mailed right to your door!

But Why, Exactly, Should I Give You, A Strange Species of Philosopher-Novelist-Dramatist, Any of My Hard-Earned Money?

Simply, because the expertise, effort, and experience that I put into writing The Comic Muse is worth the value of a subscription. I wager only a minority of Substack newsletters are written by those with certified, professional expertise in any field. I am an established academic philosopher (currently associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Front Royal Virginia) with abundant scholarly publishing credentials, and I am also a published novelist. An unusual combination. Offering unusual insight.

I also bring the funny…

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I am so excited to have Beauty & Imitation out in the world, and am so grateful to my publisher, Word on Fire Academic, for all the fabulous work they are doing to promote it, and to the book’s reviewers, such as Dr. Peter Kreeft, who have been so supportive of it.

The book is, appropriately, so beautiful! The cover design is superb, and it also feels so nicely compact and weighted in your hand. To paraphrase Mr. Bennet’s praise of his son-in-law, Mr. Wickham, “I am prodigiously proud of it!”

Thank you very much to one and all who have already bought Beauty & Imitation. If the Amazon sales rank is any indication, it’s been doing quite well so far.

If you haven’t yet and you’re interested in purchasing Beauty & Imitation, you can find it at the Word on Fire Bookstore.

Clicking here will also take you to the book’s page on Amazon.

And if you’re still asking yourself, “Why should I trust McInerny on the arts?,” you can peruse an excerpt of the book by scrolling to the bottom of this page.

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What’s Beauty & Imitation all about?

It starts with the fact that Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas argue that art imitates human action. 

But what does it mean for art to imitate human action?

It means that art imitates the way human beings by nature quest for fulfillment, or happiness. In questing for fulfillment, human life takes the form of a story, and so the arts—all the arts, from painting to music, from fiction to film—are storytelling arts whose beauty reveals the truth about human happiness.

More specifically, in Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, I explore:

1. the ancient Aristotelian claim that art is mimetic and that its imitation of the human story takes the form of a moral argument; 

2. how audiences are transformed by the moral arguments the mimetic arts make; 

3. the various mimetic arts, where specific arts are considered in light of the Aristotelian and Thomistic principles advanced earlier.

I’ll talk more about the argument of the book in the coming weeks.

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Speaking of Amazon, however, I find it hilarious that, so far at least, its algorithms have categorized Beauty & Imitation in the Victorian Literary Criticism category. I assure you, my book has nothing whatsoever to do with Victorian Literary Criticism. Still, one day this past week I found the book occupying the No. 2 spot in this category. Who was No. 1?

As I joked on social media: There comes a moment in an author’s life when he can longer avoid the sobering fact that he must, for now and in perpetuity, finish second to Winnie-the-Pooh. There is no use hoping in one day becoming No. 1. All one can do is salute Mr. A. A. Milne and, mustering as much dignity as possible, quit the field. Victory is yours, you Silly Old Bear!

But then, some days later, hope was rekindled…

Take THAT, you ol’ stuffed, honey-grubbin’ bear! And just in case you didn’t realize, we only watch you for the Tigger scenes!

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I was also excited to receive this week two more 5-Star Amazon reviews of my novel,

The Good Death of Kate Montclair

The author is a modern master of dialogue. Amazing understanding of human nature, both male and female. A sensitive “mystery” and a hopeful redemption. An amazing story to heartily recommend.

—Raeleigh

This novel is difficult to classify because it does what nearly all great novels do: on the one hand, it paints a reflective portrait of minutely particular places, events, cultures, and subcultures, with detail that will be engaging and unfamiliar to many readers, and on the other hand conveys the timeless truths that are most timely to its historic moment with a denouement of eye-watering and gut-punching poignancy. Oh, it's also a fun mystery story that makes quick reading but just be ready to be drawn into deeper waters than the casual paperback thriller can provide.

—Matthew

If you’re looking for a great read to kick off your Summer Reading Season, I hope you will consider The Good Death of Kate Montclair. You can find it by clicking here.

There is also a companion short story, “Pursuit Among the Ruins,” available here on Amazon for just $2.99 or for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

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For the past couple of weeks I’ve been bearing down hard on revisions of my play, The Actor, about the subversive wartime theatrical activities of Karol Wojtyla, the young man who would become Pope John Paul II.

The on-their-feet read-through that members of the Christendom Players did at the college in March, was incredibly useful in helping me identify certain problems especially in the second and third acts, and I’ve been endeavoring to fix those problems. In doing so, it’s been both fruitful and inspiring to return to some of my favorite sources for the principles of dramatic writing: Robert McKee’s books, Story and Character, and the Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet courses on MasterClass.

Though I must say, it’s intimidating to work on a play about John Paul II when he’s staring at you like that…

The Actor is set to premiere at Christendom College in fall 2024.

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Please share what you’re reading, or planning on reading, this summer. I’d love to hear.

Recently I noticed that I had fallen out of the habit of reading fiction for nothing but plain, unadulterated fun. So I turned to Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, and, so far, I am relieved to be back in a story for PURE COMIC DELIGHT! (Which means I abandoned Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. I was utterly bored with it, and then seeing Flannery O’Connor pan it in The Habit of Being gave me the courage to set it aside and follow the Comic Muse back to the tried-and-true: Dickens!)

What are YOU reading?

Thanks for reading. Have a great week!

P.S. If you’d like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Instagram, danielmcinerny_thecomicmuse, and on Facebook, Daniel McInerny.