Category Archives: Reading

Liberty Is a Growing Hunger, Like a Long Book

What is liberty? Is it different from freedom?

Do Americans know more than the first verse of “America, the Beautiful,” specifically the second verse with the words:

“America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!”

In one simple line, we see the law, not as the source of our liberty, but as a tool for protecting it against those who would take it away. But what “it” is remains a question.

It’s that loosely defined something we can’t get enough of.

“More liberty begets desire of more;
The hunger still increases with the store.”

John Dryden

Fred Bauer has a piece on the different views of freedom we’ve had since the colonial days. We had Puritans’ “ordered liberty,” Quakers’ “reciprocal liberty,” Virginians’ “hegemonic liberty,” and Appalachians’ “natural liberty.” These are taken from David Hackett Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed.

“Ethical concerns,” Bauer writes, “factor into the notion of freedom as ‘elbow room.’ Patrick Henry argued that the centralized Constitution would threaten both ‘the rights of conscience’ and ‘all pretensions to human rights and privileges.’ That ethical strand offers a counterpoint to arguments that American freedom is simply about material prosperity. The genealogy of freedom is more complicated.”

Moving on to the links, we face a new frontier for ethical freedom in the choices we make with our technology. In other words, if we can do it, should we? How is using AI as described below not plagiarism?

To repeat the July 13, 2023, tweet above for preservation, Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) says, “One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking ‘you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?'”

She retweets Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) from earlier that day, who says, “Authors: we need to stand up with the actors. AI is ALREADY HERE in our work. I just spoke to a Very Famous Author who has to remain nameless for legal reasons. They are held up in a contract negotiation because a Major Publisher wants to train AI on their work.”

I’d think training a computer to mimic a popular author’s work would fall within the bounds of plagiarism. If not that, fan fiction.

Running: In Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, Lauren Fleshman describes what she saw of a sport that interested in recognizing or catering to female athletes as the women they are. Nike, the shoe company, can be especially cruel.

Poetry: “Who Furrows? Who Follows?” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. Here’s the first stanza.

Who furrows? Who follows?
             The owl in the hollow
            The hawk in the meadow
           The jay in the hedgeapple tree
Who follows the farmer who furrows his fields?
Who furrows?  Who follows?
           We three.

Fiction: It may be common for online chat to express a desire for short novels, but do readers want them? Nathan Bransford talks about the dangers of writing shorter works. “When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!”

Trapped: In other news, 100 people were trapped for hours yesterday in Agatha Christie’s old home by a large tree that had fallen across the only access road. They hung out mostly in the tea room. One witness reported the staff were “doing a great job, they are giving us free tea’s and things. It’s a bit bleak.”

Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

Amelina: ‘My Heroes Will Not Stop Dying’

Ukrainian novelist, activist, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award for 2021 Victoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She was “with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists on June 27 when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

The IT professional-turned writer, 37, had lived in the States for a few years before returning to Ukraine to research war crimes.

In September 2022, “Amelina went to the liberated village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv Oblast and found the diary of her colleague, the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenklo, along with his father,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

“Vakulenko had buried the diary under a cherry tree in his yard before he was abducted by Russian occupation forces that March. The diary is now kept in the Kharkiv Literary Museum for posterity.”

In this 2020 interview with PEN Ukraine, Amelina offers this optimism (which I’ve had to translate via Google): To write Home for Home, I quit my favorite job, ruined the career I had built since I was seventeen. It was painful, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing – I gained a lot, but I also sacrificed a lot.

“I would not advise making decisions motivated by something external. There must be an inner readiness to live by texts, to turn oneself into texts, to write even when no one reads. No publisher can refuse this. If literature is your way of interacting with the world, miracles will happen.”

She also lists the New Testament among the books that have influenced her the most. “It seems that in the near future my heroes will not stop dying for others, but this is not about death, but about resurrection.”

Here are some other things to read.

Poetry: Last year, Steve Moyer wrote about Ukrainian poetry having depicted the corruption of war for decades. “Many of the poets writing today in Ukraine, however, compose in free verse, relying more on repetition, word play, juxtaposition of images, and rhetorical devices than on traditional forms and meter to convey the harsh reality they’re witnessing. Images such as rotting fruit occur and recur. Debris lying in snow and crumbling bridges make their appearances.”

Reading: Do you write in your books? President John Adams did, and Joel Miller offers five reasons for doing it too.

“When I was working on my Paul Revere book, I remember hesitating over Charles Ferris Gettemy’s biography, The True Story of Paul Revere. The book was over a hundred years old. I can’t write in it, can I? It felt like some sort of aesthetic crime. But then, no. I need to keep track of ideas and details. Why did I have it to begin with? To use. Once I ditched my reservations, the payoff was immeasurable.”

Reading: Chekhov said, “I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t. I have no other criterion.” Yes, but maybe there are other legitimate categories.

Photo: Sigurdur Fjalar Jonsson/Unsplash

Illinois Tells Readers to Stop Complaining about Library Books

Illinois will soon have a law designed to put silence readers who might be under a delusion that they have a voice in their community libraries. I wonder if it will matter as much as they think it will.

In his State of the State address, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said, “This afternoon I’ve laid out a budget agenda that does everything possible to invest in the education of our children. Yet it’s all meaningless if we become a nation that bans books from school libraries about racism suffered by Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron, and tells kids they can’t talk about being gay, and signals to Black and Brown people and Asian Americans and Jews and Muslims that our authentic stories can’t be told.”

The bill, that has passed both house and senate, requires libraries to adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights or to create their own policy against removing books in response to community pressure. At least, that’s the intent.

What the House bill actually says is “In order to be eligible for State grants, a library or library system shall adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.” Banning is the term used. Removing from circulation would be another thing entirely, wouldn’t it?

The ALA’s policy says, in part, “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.” and “libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”

But a library can’t hold everything, can it? Who chooses what goes on the shelf or what provides enlightenment? If the state library system has four copies of one book and 16 copies of another, is the latter book understood to be more enlightening?

This seems to be an attempt to silence reading communities, and I have to wonder if it will amount to much. Will some libraries adopt the proper policy and ignore it, going about their business as usual? Will some communities express their complaints quietly? Will some librarians be run out of town?

Book banning, as you and I both know, is not a thing. Wrestling over the moral propriety and age appropriateness of books is what the ALA calls banning, and that’s what we’re arguing over. Now, Illinois will declare that no one knows moral propriety like public librarians, so sit down and read what they give you.

What other waves are undulating the Internet?

O’Connor: “On Our Need to Be Displaced” – “The richest irony in efforts to dismiss O’Connor is that her fiction provides the insight we need right now to help heal our social and political divisions, and to temper our hostile public discourse. Because Flannery O’Connor, with her scorching wit, fingered the exact cause of all of it, including racism: fear.”

Tips for Creatives: Ted Gioia is offering advice to struggling artists who are trying to make music in the world of TikTok (which is a corrupt platform you shouldn’t use). Here’s a bit of it.

“The music itself is the pathway to joy. Getting applause after a performance is lovely, but not as lovely as the song you just played. Reading a favorable review is sweet, but hardly as sweet as the ecstatic moments of creative expression.”

Podcast: At the end of last year, Trevin Wax released a podcast on the current crises in the church and how to tackles them. It’s called Reconstructing Faith, and it’s marvelous.

Family: Roberto Carlos Garcia has a moving poem about the adults in a child’s life, called “The Tempest.” Poetry Foundation has a short passage from it.

My father was a great sailor, a seaman, navigated
Only the darkest waters—the sweetest squalls

Which is to say he was a drunk

Photo by Maxim Lugina on Unsplash

Refusing or Finding Peace, Quiet Moments, and Satisfying Reading

We live in a world that wants healthy bodies with clear minds but we eat junk food and deny the nutritional difference.

“For to set the mind on the flesh [the things of the world, only what we can see] is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Rom 8:6 ESV).

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard writes,

As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal. We are destined for a time when our life will be entirely sustained from spiritual realities and no longer dependent in any way upon the physical. Out dying, or “mortal” condition, will have been exchanged for an undying one and death absorbed in victory.

Of course that destiny flatly contradicts the usual human outlook, or what “everyone knows” to be the case. . . . We find our world to be one where we hardly count at all, where what we do makes little difference, and where what we really love is unattainable, or certainly is not secure.

He notes that Aldous Huxley thought it natural to yearn for moments of escape from the pain or monotony of living and that perhaps a new drug would be developed to help us out. He says Tolstoy became overwhelmed by the seeming futility of everything, “until he finally came to faith in a world of God where all that is good is preserved.”

We will not find peace until we acknowledge the fount from which it springs.

New Book: Poet and Author Marly Youmans has released a new narrative poem, Seren of the Wildwood. She shares a couple reactions in this post. “Marly is a gifted visionary, her many published works reflect her unique talents, in Seren she presents a tale of no particular time or place, magical yet not absurdist, familiar yet surprising.”

Ordinary Life: “If we are concerned with what’s practical, the day will come when we will look back and it will be clear to us that there was nothing more practical than prayer, nothing more practical than perseverance, and nothing more practical than praising the triune God even when evil was pressing in on us.”

Ordinary Gratitude: A mom buys her kid a yellow raincoat, tweets about the reaction, and goes viral.

Poetry: Take a moment to consider Seamus Heaney’s “The Railway Children” from the book Station Island. Just a snippet here:

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. 

Reading: “Much of mankind’s boredom derives from its inability to find satisfaction in a shelf of books.”

Photo: A painted 1969 Volkswagen, Yuma, Arizona. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

‘The Rose of Tralee’

Three posts from me in a single day. Am I generous, or what? I’ve been reading a lot of books lately, and if I get too far behind in my reviews I forget what a lot of them are about.

But I feel Father Ailill would never forgive me if I didn’t observe St. Patrick’s Day with a musical selection, at least. So here’s Daniel O’Donnell with The Rose of Tralee, a song I reference in my novel Death’s Doors.

I’ll add an ancient Irish blessing I made up a few years back on the Baen’s Bar discussion board:

“May you always have bread for your table, and more bacon than bread, and more beer than bacon. And may you have no need of any of it, having eaten yourself full at the wakes of your enemies.”

One War Began a Year Ago, And Bots Are on the Way

The Brandywine Tradition: “A Wolf Had Not Been Seen at Salem for Thirty Years,” an illustration by Howard Pyle for Harper’s Monthly, 1909.

Ukraine: February 24, 2022, was the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Yesterday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki five lessons Western countries should take into the coming years.

The distance from Kiev must not be used to appease our conscience. I am sometimes afraid that the West is indeed populated by many for whom having a lunch in a favourite caffe or watching a Netflix series is more important than the lives and deaths of thousands of Ukrainians. We can all see the war happening. No one will be able to claim that they did not know about the genocide in Bucha. We are all watching the atrocities being committed by the Russian army. This is why we must not be indifferent. Russia’s imperial plans go beyond Ukraine. This war concerns us all.

Art-Intel: Lincoln Michel notes ChatGPT doesn’t have to generate good writing to cause problems for writers. The sci-fi/fantasy magazine Clarkesworld stopped taking submissions this week after receiving a glut of AI-written submissions. They shared a graph on Twitter of the number of users they’ve banned from submitting since 2019. Just eyeballing it, they seem to have averaged only a handful per month. This month, they banned over 500.

Art-Intel: Amazon is selling AI-written shlock on its Kindle store, books that may or may not acknowledge ChatGPT as an author. Reuters describes one YouTuber who is selling his e-book for $1. “In the video, White says anyone with the wherewithal and time could create 300 such books a year, all using AI.”

In completely unrelated news, the U.S. Copyright Office has decided it won’t copyright AI-generated images. “To justify the decision, the Copyright Office cites previous cases where people weren’t able to copyright words or songs that listed “non-human spiritual beings” or the Holy Spirit as the author — as well as the infamous incident where a selfie was taken by a monkey.”

Publishing: Roald Dahl’s publisher has announced it will also publish the author’s original text in a new Classic Collection after publishing its bowdlerized one (HT to Lars for reminding me of the word “bowdlerized”).

Reading: Is it better to have a reading plan, like the great classics starting with Homer, or to read as chance would have it? “My reading has always been happily chaotic, governed more by whim than central planning.”

Interview with Stephen Hunter

Stephen Hunter has a new book out, and I’ve got it. It is, needless to say, a sheer delight to read. At the rate I’m going, I’ll probably have a review tomorrow. So, in anticipation, I post the short interview above, which is pretty old. But most of the interviews I found with him were heavy on gun topics. I have no objection to gun topics myself, being a gun nut too. But I thought, in this space, I wanted to find something focused a little more on storytelling, because, however much an expert Hunter may be on gun topics, he’s even more knowledgeable about plotting and characterization. I think this interview, from 2010, advertising his novel I, Sniper, showcases that. To an extent.

The interviewer refers to the roman à clef nature of the novel’s beginning. Most of you are probably familiar with the term, and it’s explained as they talk.

Advice to writer’s: If you’re going to write a roman à clef, aim high. Portray famous people – political figures and celebrities. Do not write a roman à clef in which you show that guy you hated in high school dealing drugs or visiting brothels, unless you’ve disguised him beyond all recognition. If he can guess who he is in the book, he can sue you. Public figures can’t do that; they’re pretty much fair game, according to law.

R.I.P., Paul Johnson

Sad, sad news. The historian Paul Johnson died today. He was born in 1928, and was a practicing Roman Catholic. He wrote more than 40 books, as well as innumerable articles. Originally a leftist, Johnson grew disenchanted with the Left, objecting especially to its blinkered moral relativism, a theme that runs through all his works. His books Modern Times and Intellectuals were formative for me (I delighted in his takedown of Ibsen in Intellectuals), and I also appreciated The Birth of the Modern.

The English Spectator has a memorial post today here. It includes a quote from an article he wrote for them on moral relativism:

As I see it, the Satan who confronted Jesus during this encounter is the personification of moral relativism, and the materialism which creates it. What we are shown is not merely ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ but the entire universe, in all its colossal extent, reaching backwards and forwards into infinity and beyond the powers of the human mind to grasp except in mathematical equations. We are told: this came into existence, not by an act of creation, but as a result of the laws of physics, which have no moral purpose whatever — or indeed any purpose. There is no conceivable room for God in this process, and mankind is an infinitely minute spectator of this futile process about which he can do nothing, being of no more significance than a speck of dust or a fragment of rock. If you will accept this view of our fate, then there is just a chance that by applying the laws of science to the exclusion of any other considerations, and by dismissing the notion of God, or the spirit, or goodness, or any other absolute notion of truth and right and wrong, we shall be able marginally to improve the human condition during the minute portion of time our race occupies our doomed planet.’

Rest in peace, Mr. Johnson. You’ll be much missed.

Reading for Fun or Bragging Rights, Language Usage, and More

I intend to read more books this year, but since I didn’t quite track how many I read last year, I don’t have an actual number to aim for this year. Goodreads has 23 on last year’s list, which includes several manga. Not sure those count, and a number of books isn’t my goal anyway. A number of pages would be more accurate.

I bought a few Christmas gifts for this purpose, and Tom Holland’s Dominion is 542 dense pages. That will take me a while to get through and in no way diminishes my enjoyment or education for being only one book. (I should take notes too.)

Writer Max Liu read a poetry anthology over two years, “each morning in the four minutes it took my coffee to brew. It was a wonderful reminder that reading is never about quantity and always about the quality of time you spend with a text.” He encourages all of us to read well and for fun, not to meet some goal. (via Joel Miller)

Christian Poetry: How would you define Christian poetry? What about a poem would make it Christian? In a new anthology, Christian Poetry in America (which I bought last month), part of that definition is placing “imitation and tradition over originality and self-expression.”

War in Ukraine: “Someone said it’s essential for Ukraine to win as it would give Russia a chance to rethink its values and undergo cleansing and much-needed change. We pray for it.”

Self-Absorbed Much? A new book is coming on the dangers of social media. The Wolf in Their Pockets is written to pastors to help them minister to “those whose online influences have filled them with cynicism and contempt.”

What’s in Icelandic? An Icelandic archaeologist and journalist is arguing that the Icelandic language was seeded with a lot of Celtic and Gaelic words from Irish and Scottish settlers. (via ArtsJournal)

Photo: Santa’s #1 reindeer, Magic Forest, Lake George, New York. 1996. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

That hideous winter of our discontent

Your correspondent is a tad down today. Translation work has been slow (read nonexistent), and it snowed and snowed for days and days. Stopped today, and we should be safe for a while according to the forecasts. But it’s… full out there. Chock full. This is one of those years when we don’t know what to do with all the accumulation. The piles along the driveway are nearly as tall as we are.

Of course my neighbor clears the snow for me with a machine, but it’s guilt-inducing to watch him at it.

The news is depressing too. I think I’m going to turn off talk radio again for a while (except for some hours of Prager). Listen to Pandora instead. Confession: I’d like to see my party, you know, pulling together. But I’m afraid that if I say that I’ll be accused of being a RINO. The arguments in favor of the Twenty make some sense to me, but I don’t like watching friends turn into enemies. Simple soul that I am, I don’t think that really helps in the long run.

Above, maintaining the theme of love for That Hideous Strength I’ve been proclaiming all week, here’s Andrew Klavan talking about it. Some of this is a little hard to understand (how can anybody not love Narnia? How can anybody read THS with ease the first time through?), but his opinions on the meaning of the book are spot on. They get him the all-important Walker endorsement, which is nice.