All posts by Phil

Reading, Writing

What Makes Good Writing?

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Barnabas Piper offers the one key component to good writing: playing baseball. (Double-check me on that.)

On that topic, Stephen King says in his widely praised book On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. . . . If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

He also says, “Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”

Goofing

Eponyms and Jokes

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An eponym is “a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named.” An example given by Merriam-Webster goes, “Toadfishes burp the songs of their eponyms; one sort of toadfish is called the singing midshipman. —John Hersey, Harper’s, May 1987.”

The now defunct Schott’s Vocab blog offered a few humorous eponyms some years ago.

  1. Bruckheimer: To catastrophically destroy.
  2. Edvard Greed: Norway’s most well-known banker.
  3. Apostrophes: The Greek God of Punctuation.

There are a few more.

In another post, he has a collection of jokes, including this one submitted by Paul.

Harold Camping, the minister who predicted the end of the world on May 21, is a former civil engineer. Which just proves what we always knew: NEVER trust an engineer when he gives you a schedule.

Fiction

The Resurgence of Ghost Stories

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Haunted?

Several new books intend to supplant vampires and others horrors in popular imagination with ghosts, writes Sarah Hughes, such as books by The Woman in Black author, Susan Hill, and Kate Moss, who’s latest, The Taxidermist’s Daughter: A Novel, will be released this spring.

Hughes writes, “Not since the heyday of MR James and WW Jacobs has the ghost story been so in vogue, but why? ‘We’re definitely seeing a resurgence after horror has held sway for a long time,’ says Mosse. ‘The thing about horror is that it’s not that subtle; it’s a straightforward chase about the terrible thing that’s going to get you. With a ghost story the whole thing is, “Is it coming? Is everything in your head?” Ghost fiction plays on those fears – which is why I describe The Taxidermist’s Daughter as not a whodunnit but a whydunnit.'”

Editor Angus Cargill tells Hughes genre fiction is growing in popularity. “We’re definitely seeing less of the sort of snobbery there used to be. I love it when writers cross genres, so it’s great to see someone like William [Gay], who was known as a literary southern gothic writer, move more towards horror, or [David] Mitchell writing a ghost story.”

Not quite in this vein, but I’m told the movie Lake Mungo is a quite scary ghost story, which while having a feel like Paranormal Activity, puts it to shame with a substantive story and acting.

Authors, Non-fiction

Distinguishing Between Real and Fancied Injury

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In Anthony Daniels’ review of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, he says:

Baldwin writes, with commendable honesty:

In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down . . . it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish real from fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so.

The distinction between real and fancied injury is a crucial one, of course, for fighting chimeras is not merely a waste of time and effort but positively destructive of all that is valuable in life. Just as paranoia eliminates that important distinction, so the incentives to emotional entrepreneurialism blur the distinction between real and simulated emotion, and veil the distinction from the phoney himself. Anger is not its own justification—there is no Cartesian syllogism in moral philosophy, “I’m angry, therefore I’m right”—and any honest person will admit that there is a seductive pleasure in anger. I have mistrusted my own rage ever since, as a student of physiology, I saw a cat stimulated to insensate rage by the discharge of electrodes in its amygdala.

Uncategorized

Clever Guys Getting Paid Now

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Ted Kluck offers us a picture of today’s American self-loathing.

What’s disconcerting is that the youngish, dirtbag American male no longer has an obvious “look” inasmuch as he no longer has tattoos or long hair or some obvious “tell” – the likes of which your mother used to tell you to avoid. The new self-loathing American male probably went to college and has a decent job. What’s interesting is that they obviously and intentionally didn’t use attractive or charismatic people in these ads, rather, they cast the guy next door (subtext: your next door neighbor is just picking his players and getting paid immediately, so why aren’t you?).

This is the picture of who we are when we follow our heart without reflection, without a challenge from someone who has tasted real life. (via Barnabas Piper)

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Just Pull a Chair from the Ceiling

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World coffee shops with remarkable, ye, conversation halting for some, interior design. Brother Baba Budan in Melbourne, Australia, has chairs on the ceiling to give you that look-out-everything’s-falling! feeling you love so much.

Fiction

Perfect Book Trailer

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This may be the perfect book trailer for this collection of bizarre short stories by Lincoln Michel, which might be what one should expect from a writer whose work has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, and The Believer. Notice it doesn’t describe the book directly. It appears to give us a flavor of the character of at least some of the stories in it.

The Millions writers say, “Michel’s stories are often an uncanny combination of sinister and funny, tender and sad. Laura van den Berg calls them ‘mighty surrealist wonders, mordantly funny and fiercely intelligent,’ and many of them will soon be released together in Michel’s first story collection Upright Beasts.”

From the book: “Children go to school long after all the teachers have disappeared, a man manages an apartment complex of attempted suicides, and a couple navigates their relationship in the midst of a zombie attack. In these short stories, we are the upright beasts, doing battle with our darker, weirder impulses as the world collapses around us.”

Religion

Thomas R. Schreiner on Value in Hebrews

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“Why does it matter that Christ’s sacrifice is superior to Levitical sacrifices?​ The author emphasizes that Christ’s blood truly cleanses our guilt, and thus we can enter God’s presence boldly and confidently. As believers, we can be full of joy because our evil is cleansed forever. People today aren’t tempted to offer animal sacrifices, but they struggle mightily with guilt. They aren’t tempted to look to Levitical priests for salvation, but they find great comfort in knowing that Jesus is an exalted priest who intercedes for them at the right hand of God.” – See more in this interview.