Dostoevsky’s writing is so unstable that it seems to be in a constant state of trembling. Almost every page jitters and quakes with all the anxious ideas and emotions struggling to take possession of the story. The young author who started as a colleague of Petersburg radicals eventually became a reactionary conservative, a Slavophil jingoist with semi-fascist religious views. In modern American terms, he changed from a Vietnam Era hippie into a Born Again Bush-worshipper with a regular rant-show on Fox News.
By contrast:
For George Eliot, on the other hand, Mill and Darwin and Strauss are crucial figures. Her intricate evaluations of their work helped refine her forceful and compassionate mind. She was heavily involved with the Westminster Review, which Mill had edited earlier. Throughout her career, she also joined in the debates over Mill’s On Liberty and his advocacy of women’s rights. She knew Darwin’s ideas early and well. Even before The Origin of Species, she had explored the scientific theories on which evolution was partly built.
I’ll have to think about the apparent bias in this piece, but that’s normal. I cannot criticize these opinion, because I’m out of my depth. (Sure–I probably shouldn’t say that.)
Another author we know is releasing e-books. Andrew Klavan says several of his out-of-print titles are now going to be available digitally, including Agnes Mallory, “the only non-mystery among them,” which was released in the U.K. but never printed in the U.S.
Using Einstein’s E=mc² formula, which states that energy and mass are directly related, Prof Kubiatowicz calculated that filling a 4GB Kindle to its storage limit would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram, or 0.000000000000000001g.
That’s the basis for my new fitness regimen, right there.
This is supposed to be a beautiful weekend, so I guess I’d better make the most of it. Got some yard work I need to do, and I’m pretty sure there are fewer nice weekends left in 2011 that I care to contemplate. Ideally I should stay in bed again, to kill off this chest thing, but autumn dallies for no man.
It reminds me a time recently when I walked around the neighborhood with my daughters, pulling one or two in a wagon and following the others on their bicycles. One of the bikes had poor brakes, so I worried a little about the hills, but not enough. Even now if I dwell on it, I can work up my fear and self-condemnation, thinking of my daughter speeding down a hill, right in front of a truck, and crashing into the grass beyond. How could I be so naive and nonchalant? She couldn’t slow down on that hill, and if she’d crossed the street a second later, she would have hit the truck. That’s one of many ways I could convince myself that I’m a totally fool.
I feel strange tonight (not because of my bronchial infection, which seems to be clearing up, thank you), but because James Lileks is on Hugh Hewitt’s show, at a blogging convention, joking back and forth with him and various guests, some of them fairly prominent people. And I flash back to the fact that less than a year ago I sat in a radio studio with Lileks myself, joking with him on a lower plane. It somehow doesn’t compute. Something is wrong with this picture, and it’s clearly me.
Big news in Christian publishing this week. Harper Collins, which already owns Zondervan, has acquired Thomas Nelson, creating a sudden behemoth in the world of Christian letters—or perhaps a camel we have to figure out how to maneuver through the eye of a needle. Continue reading Will the Foxes spoil the vineyard?→
“And so the barriers fell: now nearly everyone in the developed world is literate, there is plenty to read, and reading material is dirt cheap. But still people don’t read. Why? The obvious answer—though one that is difficult for us to admit—is that most people don’t like to read.”
Here, for the first time on any stage, is the draft of the cover for my upcoming e-book, Troll Valley. Our own Phil Wade is the artist responsible for this work of wonder (though I took the picture of the house). And the tag line, of course, was provided by commenter Adam.
What do you think? We’re still taking suggestions, but I think it’ll look very much like this.