The Rabbit Room

The Oxford Chronicles: Bod Card

by Sarah Clarkson

The room where I now sit is pleasantly dim. A fire burns in an old black grate nearby, it’s light painting gold over the dark wood wainscot on the lower walls of this square room. The bee hive hum of a pub is all round – people hunched over pints and good conversation as the evening draws to a close and the windows fog up with breath and cold. I too have my pint of cider and sit perched on a stool at a small wooden table, my eyes in a wander over the honey-toned walls with their black-and white photos in weathered frames. But one small sign catches my eye. It hangs at the archway entrance and and has two rather marvelous words etched upon it:

Rabbit Room.

That’s right folks. I greet you tonight from that Rabbit Room, the one in the Eagle & Child Pub, right in the heart of Oxford. The room where C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and a small host of thinkers like them tossed thoughts and growing tales back and forth amidst many pints and much laughter. The room in which the stories that shaped us all had at least a little of their making.

Song of the Day: Jill Phillips

by Pete Peterson

Do you ever listen to a record and think, Wow, why doesn’t everyone know about this? That’s what comes to mind when I listen to Jill Phillips’ In This Hour album. It’s crazy good. Here’s one of the ten reasons why.

“Find The Way”
by Jill Phillips

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[In This Hour is available in the Rabbit Room Store for $10 CD / $8 Download (sale price effective today only).]

The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible

by Pete Peterson

A few weeks ago a friend passed me this excellent article from the New York Times by Marilynne Robinson (the author of Gilead). My meager agreement isn’t going to do justice to Miss Robinson or her article, so I’m simply going to pass her words directly on to you. Here’s an excerpt:

Old Jonathan Edwards wrote, “It has all along been God’s manner to open new scenes, and to bring forth to view things new and wonderful.” These scenes are the narrative method of the Bible, which assumes a steady march of history, the continuous unfolding of significant event, from the primordial quarrel of two brothers in a field to supper with a stranger at Emmaus. There is a cosmic irony in the veil of insignificance that obscures the new and wonderful. Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence. The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too.

Read the complete article here.

One Minute Review: The Artist

by Thomas McKenzie

A black and white silent film? Didn’t we stop making those for a reason? What good could come out of that? Watch the One Minute Review to find out.

One Minute Review: The Artist from Thomas McKenzie on Vimeo.

Of Being Made

by Alyssa Ramsey

The painter, my husband, considered the primed surface before him. He made a decision, selected a brush, and began.

It was his fourth year of undergraduate study, and already our home was filled with the offspring of his education. His taste was bold and abstract. Chromium oxide green and cadmium orange, large format, palette knife, and heavy strokes – these were his signature elements.

On this new canvas, he melded the tendencies of his favorite artist with the professor-prescribed style: abstract expressionism. And as visions of Jackson Pollock danced with Wayne Thiebaud in his head, all the best of his skill and style came together. Color, composition, and technique – he wielded them well, and the result was his finest work yet.

The painting was highly favored. We deemed it too valuable to sell.