Reading

I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords

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Over at I Saw Lightning Fall, our friend Loren Eaton links to a Wall Street Journal article by Joshua Fruhlinger, in which he explains why he gave up on e-book readers and went back to dead tree tomes.

I BROKE UP WITH E-BOOKS last year after a flight from Los Angeles to New York. My first-generation Kindle and I had been together for five years, but I knew we’d have to go our separate ways when, an hour into the journey, it completely shut me out. Or rather, it shut down. I’d forgotten to charge the device before I left.

Upon arrival in New York, I coolly walked into a bookstore and bought a paperback version of the book my Kindle wouldn’t let me read in the air. It felt good to be back on paper, turning real pages. I realized then: E-readers are needy, but a paperback will always be there for you.

Here I find myself in the awkward and almost existentially self-contradictory position of being on the side of progress as over against tradition. Before I owned a Kindle I had all the standard Luddite objections—I loved the smell and feel of books¹, I did not want to be dependent on an electronic device that might fail or get damaged at any time, and by thunder, paper books were good enough for my grandmother, and they’re good enough for me!

But as you know if you’ve been following this blog, those objections evaporated as soon as Hunter Baker (author of Political Thought: A Student’s Guide) gave me a Kindle 3 in a random act of kindness. I very shortly made some surprising discoveries.

The most surprising was that I don’t love the feel and smell of paper books nearly as much as I thought I did. In fact I’m able now to admit my secret shame for many years—that I’ve always had trouble holding books open (I’m not a breaker of spines), and had found it somewhat tiring, in long reading sessions, to hold a book open at a convenient angle. An e-book doesn’t have a facing page to curl back, and its lightness makes it ideal for reading in comfortable situations, like when I’m stretched out on the couch. For ease of use, the Kindle has paper books beat in almost every situation. Continue reading I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords →

Writing

Patience and Perseverance

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John Vorhaus writes about writing:

So that would seem to leave us with a pretty clear choice, wouldn’t it? Write, and improve; or don’t write, and don’t improve.

Why is it not that simple?

Because the forces of evil are arrayed against the desire to write. And the biggest evil of all is the need to be good. Burdened by the unrealistic expectation of all quality all the time, we often find that we just can’t write at all.

Religion

Risking our lives

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“Card Players,” by Theodoor Rombouts (1597-1637)

One reason why my job is better than yours is that when we have meetings I sometimes come away with spiritual insights. When we got together yesterday, for instance, somebody (I actually forget who) said something (I actually forget precisely what) about living by faith, and it sparked the following thought in me.

I’ve always been a little troubled by the resemblance between faith and gambling. I’ve been uncomfortable with the fact that (generally) we condemn gambling, while we encourage people to act in a very gambling-like way in their Christian lives—“Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Luke 17:33).

In fact, I understand a movie was made on that very subject some years back. It was about some kind of pastor, a missionary, I think, who plays cards all the time and justifies it on the grounds that gambling is just part of the life of faith.

He’s right in terms of analogy. But I think I see the difference.

Gambling as we think of it—games of chance—involves risking those things that a) are least significant in the spiritual life, and b) we are obligated to husband responsibly, remembering to assist the poor and the Lord’s work. I think if the Lord were to speak to that gambling pastor, He’d tell him that there’s a better way to throw his wealth away—give it directly to the poor. That would free him from greedy motives, benefit people who really need his money, and permit him to trust the Lord for his daily bread.

The problem with gambling for money, I think, is that it’s not risky enough. Gamblers are really playing for matchsticks, even when great sums change hands. Those who walk with Christ risk their very lives, and all the false gods that provide security in ordinary life go into the pot.

Uncategorized

Today’s orthodonture “Fail”

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Here, at last, is the photograph of me that I promised you a few days ago, courtesy of the photographer, Stephan Faerber of Minneapolis.

Aside from being an attractive image of a highly unattractive subject, like those images where photographers get interesting shots out of garbage dumps or decaying buildings through framing, composition, and lighting, this is an unusual photograph in that it shows me smiling. I’ve mentioned before that I generally avoid smiling, because it does no good either for me or for the person on whom I inflict it (P.G. Wodehouse wrote an amusing story on a similar theme). But Faerber seems to be capable of such alchemy, and more power to him.

He gave me permission to use it promotionally, with attribution.

Which is what this post is, I guess.

Uncategorized

Glowing Book Reviews to Fit Your Budget

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Two years ago, marketer Todd Rutherford began selling book reviews. Some people complained that reviews could be bought from a service; many others bought reviews from that service. And not just any reviews–gushing, exciting reviews. The NY Times walks us through it:

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Mr. Liu (an analyst) estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

Fiction

How To Be a Spy

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Mulholland Books offers spy technique pointers from Mischa Hiller’s Shake Off, and as a rank amateur who would probably get killed in a fight while trying to be brave, I feel I should counterbalance some of these tips.

  • Know your cover. “If you can believe just a bit of your cover story then you can convince your listener (and even yourself) that it is all true.”
    This a good point. When Mrs. Pollifax went to Mexico, nobody knew she was a spy.
  • Incriminating evidence to ditch? Use the restroom. “It is easier to flush soaked paper than dry.”
    And you can flush select memories by soaking and flushing your head. Actually, money, as in the wad of cash you took from that jeweler, does not dissolve in water, so if you have someone down the sewer line ready to grab it, you can pass a huge number of bills via the toilet. This is not labeled “money laundering”. That requires detergent.
  • Watch your back. “You should always sit at the back of the bus when you get on, because surveillance like to sit at the back to get a good view of you embarking without having to turn around.”
    Be sure to greet the back-seat surveillance when you sit down.
  • Finish the job.
    You’ll have to go to the post to read the explanation on this one about killing someone. I think it’s a bit confused. I know you can shoot someone in the head and not kill them, especially a small caliber weapon, but if you’re holding a gun with “a massive kick” like it says, then you’re probably holding a gun that will take the target down in one or two shots. Four to five shots? Surely that’s excessive, especially at close range. When shooting, you want to aim for the upper body, and if you take him down on the first shot (and before Interpol arrives–they’re still around, right?), then you can run up to him and plug him with your remaining bullets. I mean, what else are you going to do with them?
Uncategorized

Looking to Norway

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The eyes of the world were on Norway today. Not one but two international stories focused on that small country, something that doesn’t happen very often.

It isn’t every blogger who’s up to the job of tying the sentencing of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik together with the opening of a mysterious, 100-year-old package, but I am prepared to take on that challenge.

First of all, there’s the sentencing of the semi-human terrorist, Breivik. Early reporting made it sound as if his 21-year sentence, absurd enough in the eyes of most Americans (and plenty of Norwegians, to judge by my own contacts), might actually end up being only ten years. That doesn’t appear likely. He’ll be evaluated in a sort of parole protocol after ten years, but unless he alters the cut of his jib drastically he’s not likely to be released at that time. He has, after all, made himself hated particularly by his country’s bleeding heart class, and the law-and-order people don’t love him any better. When the 21-year sentence is finished, the authorities have the power to recycle the sentence as many times as it takes, for the rest of his life. Continue reading Looking to Norway →

Uncategorized

I Didn’t Have Time to Write a Short Letter

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You have heard it said that Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, or maybe T.S. Eliot once said, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” No, apparently Pascal wrote it somewhere and even he may have gotten it from somewhere else. This is one more bit of evidence to support my reluctance to trust unsourced quote databases.

Fiction, Reviews

Marshal of Medicine Lodge, by Stan Lynde

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There are many stories of American artists, in various disciplines, who have not achieved the public acclaim they deserve. Chief among them, of course, is me. But another is Stan Lynde, best known for a long-running western comic strip called Rick O’Shay. I was vaguely aware of Rick O’Shay when I was a kid, but I had the opportunity to follow it closely toward the end of Lynde’s run with it, when he was turning it away from what the syndicate had asked him for—a gag-a-day strip—to what he’d always wanted it to be—a serious adventure strip with continuing stories. The strip gained new depth (at least in my view) when Lynde experienced a Christian conversion and started working in religious themes.

But he quarreled with the syndicate, and quit (the strip went on for a while without him) to draw another—a post-Civil War adventure strip called Latigo. Sadly, those were not the times for westerns, and Latigo languished and died.

Today, Stan Lynde writes western novels. As a fan of his comic work I bought one to see how it was, and I’m happy to report it’s very good indeed.

Marshal of Medicine Lodge is one of a continuing series starring Merlin Fanshaw, a Montana deputy US Marshal in the 1880s. He’s a lot like Rick O’Shay—a decent fellow whose instincts are good, though he’s young enough to still need some seasoning. He gets the chance to grow up a lot in this story. Continue reading Marshal of Medicine Lodge, by Stan Lynde →

Blogs, Socials

Karnick on carnage

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Our friend Sam Karnick, of The American Culture (where I blog sometimes, though I’ve been sadly neglecting them) has an article over at PJ Media on violence and sex in the movies. He argues that violent movies are a lot less harmful, and sex in movies a lot more harmful, than it’s fashionable to say.

It seems to me, however, that those who maintain that sex and profanity in the culture should be treated more leniently than violence actually have it exactly wrong: earlier social values, which were lenient toward depictions of violence but were fairly strict about depictions of sex and the use of profanity, had it right, and the modern, more “enlightened” approach is in fact blinkered and wrong. The reason lies precisely in this matter of consequences. When sexual license is depicted without the consequences — broken homes, never-formed families, betrayed loved ones, suicides, disfiguring and deadly venereal diseases, agonizing confusion about one’s sexual role, etc. — all the audience is left with is the lure of erotic pleasure. Bad consequences are either ignored or are seen much later than the choices that led to them, thus greatly weakening any connection the audience may have between the action and any deleterious effects.

I agree entirely. I’ve also argued, in this space, that the big difference between violent movies and sexual movies is not a difference of morals but of appropriateness. Violence is essentially public, while sex is essentially private.

Another point, it seems to me, is that movies have always been about sex as much as about violence. They just weren’t explicit, in either case. Every romantic movie had one object in mind, but we discreetly averted our gazes before that object was consummated. When people were shot, we saw the gun smoke and the bad guy falling down, but we did not observe the bullet hole or the spouting blood.

Nowadays both those taboos are frequently broken.