Loren Eaton talks about how weird Oregon is and introduces his new short story, “Fostering.”
“You, uh, may not want to watch this.”
All posts by Phil
Revisiting Catherine Cookson
Dominic Sandbrook talks about the virtues of author Catherine Cookson, who published 104 works before her death in 1998. “She is not cool or trendy. Cookson was sneered at a lot in her lifetime because her readers were the antithesis of the readers usually celebrated by literary critics: predominantly middle-aged and elderly women, often working class. Her books are conservative.”
Sandbrook has produced a biopic for BBC2 on Cookson. (via Prufrock)
Bertrand: Let Me Design a Bible
The Bible Exchange labels J. Mark Bertrand “the most interesting man in the (Bible) world” as a way to soften him up before peppering him with questions. What’s his favorite Bible? The ESV Reader’s Bible
“Every so often people will ask me, ‘Why don’t you design your own Bible?’ I’d really like to. I’ve gone so far as to create the proposal to see whether any publishers are interested in the project. Meanwhile I am staying away from boats and airplanes for fear of being prematurely stranded.”
Who Looks at Your Book Before It’s Published?
Bethany McShurley spells out the reasons a book could use multiple editors.
Pilgrims’ Hymn
This piece by the late Stephen Paulus bears repeated listening. The video was recorded last year in the Milwaukee Art Museum with the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire Choir under the direction of Dr. Gary R. Schwartzhoff.
Two Dangers
Randy Boyagoda of Ryerson College talking about Richard John Nauhaus:
What happens when you’re not allowed as a person of faith to speak from your deepest convictions to matters of singular importance in the world around you. Fr. Neuhaus made this case against two groups. One would be secular progressives who would want no place whatsoever for religion in public life. Probably for most of us, these are the groups we would think of as the great challenge to a religiously informed public philosophy. But Fr. Neuhaus actually argued that there was another group that was somewhat just as problematic. For him it was the Moral Majority. In other words, a Christian fundamentalism that had no publicly available account for how religion should matter in politics and public life but instead says, “you need to believe this because we believe this about the Bible.”
Could Use A Few Jokes
As the gods would have it, someone is talking about the fictitious author Neal Stephenson over on The Millions.
In the 1990s, Stephenson looked like the best thing to happen to science fiction since William Gibson blew things open with Neuromancer the previous decade. Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995) tangled with big ideas like the onset of the Web and nanotechnology years before they entered the popular nomenclature and knocked them into dramatic shape with humor and pop-culture savvy. Here’s the famous opening of Snow Crash, establishing the character of one Hiro Protagonist, a master of samurai sword usage, hacking, and near-future high-speed pizza delivery.
Apparently, his novel Seveneves
John Scalzi Lands 13-Book Deal
John Scalzi, author of Redshirts, which is being adapted for television, has scored a ten-year deal with Tor Books for thirteen new books.
The executive editor at Tor said that while Scalzi hasn’t had a top-of-the-list bestselling book, “One of the reactions of people reading a John Scalzi novel is that people go out and buy all the other Scalzi novels.”
A Portrait of Shakespeare Made During His Lifetime?
Mark Griffiths, a historian and botanist, was writing a book about English horticulturist John Gerard, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and decided to work out the ciphers and symbols on a famous book of Gerard’s. His study has convinced him that he has found the only known portrait of Shakespeare made during his lifetime. Many clues point in this direction. For example:
A figure four and an arrow head with an E stuck to it. In Elizabethan times, people would have used the Latin word “quater” as a slang term for a four in dice and cards. Put an e on the end and it becomes quatere, which is the infinitive of the Latin verb quatior, meaning shake. Look closely and the four can be seen as a spear.
“It is a very beautiful example of the kind of device that Elizabethans, particularly courtiers, had great fun creating,” said Griffiths.
The discovery was published in Country Life, which apparently is enough to make scholars mock its veracity.
First up, Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.
“I’m deeply unconvinced,” he said. “I haven’t seen the detailed arguments, but Country Life is certainly not the first publication to make this sort of claim.” (via Prufrock)
Here’s a “Great” Idea
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks brings us signs with curious punctuation. There’s a sign for a nursing home that people say is “20 minutes from here,” a place with (quote, unquote) parking in the rear, ice cream that’s “homegrown” somehow, and this notice written by someone who doesn’t appear to have any idea what quotation marks are for.
Have you ever seen this kind of thing in the wild? I think I’ve only noticed misplaced apostrophes.
This reminds me of a note I put in the copy room where I once worked. “This is a Lanier copier,” I said. “You cannot ‘Xerox’ on it.”
They loved me for that.
