IVP - Strangely Dim - December 2004 Archives

Your Name Here

By David A. Zimmerman

Earlier this week I finished the third of my three big book-signing events for Comic Book Character. Boy, are my arms tired. (Ha! That's hilarious!)

Actually, it is funny that people will wait around to have you sign your name on something that already has your name on it. Prior to these signings, the only time my signature has had any value in the eyes of anyone has been when it's applied to a check or a contract--usually a contract that will ultimately involve my signing a check.

My first signing event was in Dallas, Texas. I was there for Thanksgiving with my family, and I thought, You know what might be fun--having a book signing! So I called a bookstore and set it up. Then I sat in the store and put together a puzzle while a throng of customers avoided eye contact with me. We sold about five copies--all to people who owed my mommy a favor.

A couple of weeks later I rode the coat-tails of the massive marketing juggernaut that is InterVarsity Press to Wheaton, Illinois, where my book signing was heralded by a guy wearing a cape and a spandex body suit. Fortunately for me and for everyone in the store, that guy was not me. Counting infants and my coworkers--who have different developmental capacities but similar purchasing power to one another--about eighty people showed up. Some of them even bought books.

Five days later my wife and I, after making a prodigious amount of food, watched our home fill up with friends and family to celebrate the release of my book and the birth of our Lord and Savior. All in all, sixty people came by--we've got the food on the floor to prove it. (Note to self: sweep.)

The common denominator of these events is that I had to write something pithy in each copy of the book that sold. Considering that I filled up 160 pages saying essentially "Comic books are cool; you should read them," I think it's fair to say that pith isn't one of my strong suits. But there's a fundamental weakness in books that is at least slightly overcome by a handwritten signature from the author: we read books by our neighbors, for the most part, in the same way we read books by fifth century theologians--one word, one sentence, one paragraph, one page at a time, utterly detached from the people who wrote them.

We're not free to interact with authors; we simply accept or reject what they inject into our lives. Likewise, in most cases authors get no opportunity to hear their readers. An author casts an idea out into the world and hopes that it's given some attention, that someone somewhere will take the idea to heart and make some use of it. For all their depth, books are two-dimensional artifacts in a three-dimensional world.

My three-year-old niece offered me a strict warning at one of my signing events that continues to perplex me: "Uncle Dave, don't write in books." She's speaking from experience, having learned in her short life that librarians don't look favorably on such behavior. But if books are anything, they're written in, and for that matter, what do you do at a book signing if you don't write in books?

Perhaps a three-year-old born into a postliterate world has some ideas on the matter, but until she writes a book on the subject I'll be left in the dark, nursing my poor, carpal-tunnel threatened hand back to health.

***

This may well be my last Strangely Dim of 2004. I am suffering severe writer's block. So unless my muse strikes next week, I'll say Merry Christmas today and Happy New Year next year. Thanks for reading and God bless.

Superhero Movies I May Have to Make Myself

By David A. Zimmerman

Every one of us has a choice: we can (1) sit on our hands waiting for our dreams to fall into our laps, or (2) go out and make our dreams happen.

Personally, I prefer option 1. Who has time to make all their fantasies into realities? And why should every thought in my head be actualized anyway? I mean, come on, are my thoughts really that substantial?

We live in an age, however, where so much progress is being made that every passing thought, no matter how abstract, has a certain potentiality to it. My house is littered with scraps of paper on which I’ve written the title to my next treatise or the undiscovered rhyme that will revolutionize popular music or the joke that will kill at our next party. I write these things down so I won’t lose them while I’m tending to my household chores—they’re too important to let pass.

But some fantasies, no matter how important we make them out to be, will never become reality. Films on the docket for the near future include A-list superheroes—Spider-Man 3, Superman Returns, Batman Begins, X-Men 3, Fantastic 4 (wait a minute—I never saw Fantastic 1-3!)—but nowhere to be found are the films I make up in my head using characters that only people trapped in a high school locker might recognize:

 Cloak and Dagger: Two orphans living on the street are kidnapped by drug dealers and exposed to toxins that make one the embodiment of darkness, the other the bearer of light. They’re heroes, they’re recovering addicts; they’re dependent on each other, they exist in complete contradiction to one another.
 Daredevil: Born Again: A blind devil with ESP thinks he’s an orphan but discovers that his mother is a nun after his drug-addict ex-girlfriend sells him out to the mob, which then systematically deconstructs his life and tries to kill him.
 The Black Panther: The leader of an African country summers in the United States, where he fights crime and endures systemic discrimination and rampant nationalism.

I have others, believe me. And I’m not alone. I’ve encountered people who have moved heaven and earth to see such dreams become reality: the guy who sews superhero costumes for himself and his wife every Halloween; the guy who pours money into “previews” of superhero films, such as Grayson, he’d like to see in the theater; the woman who nearly fainted from excitement when she met the guy who created the character she was dressed as.

There’s a euphoria that comes with the fulfillment of dreams—even little dreams—that can hardly be matched elsewhere. But not all dreams come true, nor should they. The life I’m living now is not the life of a rock star, a superhero, the president of the United States or a spiritual guru—all of which are lives I’ve dreamed for myself. The life I’m living now is much more simple than all that: enjoying my friends and family, finding satisfaction in my labors and trusting myself and my future to a good God. It’s a good life, and for the most part I didn’t do much to make it happen. It pretty much came to me—kind of the way dreams do.

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Check out my latest dream come true at www.ivpress.com/zimmer-man.

Playing Jesus

By David A. Zimmerman

Playing Jesus pushes all my buttons.

Our church has a drama team that occasionally supplements the service with little sketches. A recent one had me, as Jesus, sitting around whooping it up with four disciples, when a harlot friend of mine crashes our party. Jesus and his disciples didn’t have any lines; the stars of the drama were the harlot and a singer hiding out in the choir loft, singing the Ce Ce Winans song “My Alabaster Box.” The rest of us weren’t to act; we were to “react,” as they say. I didn’t get to say cool Jesus stuff like “Let the dead bury the dead!” or “You brood of vipers!” or “Get thee behind me, Satan!” I just had to sit there, take everything in and think about how Jesus would react.

All of my issues came bubbling up to the surface. I jealously guard my personal space, and yet up came my harlot friend, rubbing her hands and her hair all over my bare feet. I worried about foot sweat; I worried about foot stink. Most of all, I worried about my personal space.

And then there was the problem that my friend was washing my feet. It’s not like my friend usually does my personal grooming for me, like she used to be my babysitter; I’m old enough to have been her babysitter, actually—except I’ve known her for only about eight months.

Oh—did I mention she’s eight months’ pregnant? Here’s this very pregnant woman struggling to get her face close enough to the stinky, sweaty feet of some old guy she barely knows, all so her hair can wipe away all the stink and sweat. And I’m just supposed to sit there and take it as an offer of kindness—no, of worship! Should I even be letting a woman who’s not my wife near my feet? What’s my church thinking? What was I thinking?

And then I realized that I wasn’t playing Jesus any longer, I was playing a Pharisee.

Pharisees, in case you didn’t know, were a politically powerful religious subculture within the community of faith in Jesus’ day. They did whatever they could to avoid personal pollution, whether from unclean human contact (like dirty feet, for instance) or sinful behavior (like, say, harlotry). They kept aloof from other people, avoiding unnecessary touch and uncomfortable situations. They were my kind of people, I’m afraid.

I don’t know how Jesus made it through a day of everyone wanting to touch him, everyone trying to catch him doing something naughty or saying something stupid, everyone feeling the need to treat him as almost unapproachable and yet approaching him anyway. I don’t know how he managed to survive when he was always on display. And yet, here I was facing my congregation, called on to be Jesus the Serene Son of God.

I couldn’t tap into Jesus’ emotions for the sketch because they were so far removed from my own, visceral reaction to the scene. But I do know from the scene that Jesus knew a gift when he saw it coming, and he was gracious enough to receive it as such. In that respect Jesus showed that he wasn’t just a good God, he was a good man. And even if I struggle to be a good man, I might be able to pull it off if I pretend I’m Jesus.

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My book's out. If you've read it, do me a favor and write a review at Amazon--unless you hate it.

If you're anywhere near Chicago, come to my book release party at Borders Bookstore in Wheaton Tuesday, December 7, at 7:30pm. We'll have costumes, games, prizes, all that sort of stuff. Tell all your friends.

Hope you had a good Thanksgiving. Have a great Advent!