Editor Nick Harrison talks about the writing advice he dislikes, such as writing what you know and never using passive voice.
“Write even if you know you’ll never be published.” Apparently the idea is that a writer writes because he has to (which I agree with) and that writing is somehow its own reward (which I disagree with). I don’t know about you, but I’m writing to be published. I’m glad I don’t know whether or not I will have more books published in the future because if I knew my writing would never see the light of day, I’d probably be tempted to quit.
Some argue that anonymity promotes transparency, but it does not. Humility and love promote transparency. In a place where no one knows who you are, you can say anything for the attention you want. All the alcoholics in A.A. actually anonymous to each other? No. They are well-known to each other and anonymous to most people outside the group. The outsiders have proven themselves to be unsafe, prideful, and even hateful. The insiders prove themselves to be honest, humble, and loving.
Pressure to perform is one of the few constants of online conversation. We talk all the time, says sociologist Sherry Turkle in a recent interview, but “all of this talk can come at the expense of conversation.” Web communication “favor[s] showmanship over exchange, flows over ebbs. The Internet is always on. And it’s always judging you, watching you, goading you.”
It’s provoking you to market something, mostly yourself, and to talk at others instead of talking with them.
Q. Why are tennis balls fuzzy? Aerodynamics, baby.
Photo by cottonbro studio/Pexels
The fuzzy felt that covers a tennis ball helps you control it when you bat it over the net. The bounce and spin you get with a fuzzy ball is lessened by the fuzz. You would notice a difference if you hit around a bald ball after practicing with a new, fuzzy ball. The bald ball would be a little wilder on the court.
Q. If blood is red, why do veins look blue?
This gets at the reason why anything has color. The light that reflects off an object gives it the color we see. Good light has all colors in it, even colors we don’t see (e.g. infrared and ultraviolet). For the blood in your veins, light must soak into your skin before coming back to your eye. Apparently, the light in the blue spectrum is most successful at this, so that’s what we see.
The label “blue blood” to refer to aristocrats comes from fair-skinned Spainish families who lived in the Land of Castles, Castile. They argued that they had the purest breeding in their country, which could be clearly seen from the blue veins on their skin. The truth is that their skin color made their veins more visible, not that their blood was bluer than the Moors or anyone else.
Q. Why are hot dogs sold in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8?
Businessmen do this to strong-arm you into buying 5 bun packs and 4 dog packs in order to have an even amount at your house. Just this week, President Obama has drafted an executive order to require dogs and buns to be packaged together in even quantities of 8, 12, and 33.
(Photo by alleksana/Pexels)
Actually, the packaging incongruity happened for practical reasons, which we have since overcome. Buns were baked in sets of four, because that’s how large the pans were. See? Practical. And buns are not for hot dog use alone. You could cradle any sausage in a warm, whole-grain bun and shovel chili over it, so the question loses its power when the two aren’t connected.
As for why hot dogs came ten to a pack for so long, it’s because that’s the way they are found in the wild. Obviously. Berk Foods claims, “Americans enjoy seven billion hot dogs between Memorial Day and Labor Day,” which is the reason so many school children are marked “obese” on their school papers, which is important for school funding because larger kids get more federal dollars because it’s easier to leave large kids behind than small, non-hot-dog-eating kids, and as you know, no child will be left behind in American schools.
N.D. Wilson writes about “dark-tinted, truth-filled reading” for children: “I would understand if hard-bitten secularists were the ones feeding narrative meringue to their children with false enthusiasm. They believe their kids will eventually grow up and realize how terrible, grinding, and meaningless reality really is. Oh, well—might as well swaddle children in Santa Clausian delusions while they’re still dumb enough to believe them. But a Christian parent should always be looking to serve up truth. The question is one of dosage.”
He says Christians should be protecting their children, but not over-sheltering them from the real painful world. Christian kids need “stories in which murderers are blinded on donkeys and become heroes. Stories with dens of lions and fiery furnaces and lone prophets laughing at kings and priests and demons. Stories with heads on platters. Stories with courage and crosses and redemption. Stories with resurrections. And resurrections require deaths.”
Are Pynchon and Dickens essentially the same writer? Alan Jacobs notes, “The Pynchonian and the Dickensian projects have a great deal in common [big rambling eventful tragicomic books featuring outlandish characters with comical names], and as time goes on I think it will become more and more clear that there is something truly old-fashioned about Pynchon’s career.”
Jacobs says Pynchon’s style appears to be to write long, complex books about people who don’t read long books at all. His characters are caught up in the Interwebs, the TeleVision, and commercial products of all types. He says Pynchon may be driving at a warning: let the non-reader beware.
A friend asked me to read an illustration of God’s faithfulness yesterday morning. Perhaps, you’ve read or heard it. Here’s the start of one version.
A mother took her small child to a concert by Paderewski to expose him to the talent of the great pianist. She hoped as she did to encourage her son in his piano lessons, which he had just begun.
They arrived early at the concert and were seated near the front. Standing alone on the stage was a marvelous Steinway grand piano. As they waited for the concert to begin, the mother entered into a conversation with the people beside her.
Her boy had wandered up to the stage and began to play “Chopsticks” (or “Twinkle, Twinkle” in other versions). Members of the audience called out to get the boy off the stage and asked who was responsible for him, but then Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski hurried out to the piano. He leaned over the boy and whispered, “Keep playing, son. Don’t stop.” The master reached around him and improvised a piece worthy of the concert audience.
The story illustrates God’s faithful encouragement to his people. The version I read was in a Charles Swindoll book, which elaborated on God’s words to us. Keep going. Don’t give up. That’s the part where I teared up.
The story isn’t true, unfortunately. It’s a good illustration and has a bit of the variations you see in common among urban legends. Truth or Fiction says it may have been inspired by a poster for a Polish Relief event, showing Paderewski encouraging a young Polish boy at the piano.
But since we’re talking about urban legend types, you may have seen the one about the guitarist who gave a lengthy solo at the end of one of his band’s regular numbers. Someone began to boo him. The musician challenged this non-fan, saying, “If you think you can do better, come up here and prove it.” And the man walks up to the stage, showing himself to be Eric Clapton.
If religious liberty is one of our greatest national legacies, we can thank many early Baptists for being on the front lines of the fight for that liberty. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and later Rhode Island, Roger Williams was one of the first dissenting voices speaking out against a state establishment of religion, and against the state policing people’s religious beliefs. (For Williams, religion was too important for the government to meddle in it.) In the era of the Revolution, Baptists emerging from the Great Awakening wanted full freedom to create their own churches and to preach to whomever they wished. In most of the colonies, such freedom was not readily granted.
We forget that at the same time as the fight for independence from Britain, Americans were also fighting for freedom from oppressive religious laws. There were Baptist pastors being fined and even jailed for illegal preaching in Virginia in the early 1770s.
The American Policy Roundtable has a podcast this week on Dr. Martin Luther King with a pastor who knew him personally, Dr. Sterling Glover. It’s remarkable what some of us do not know about certain important figures in our country or the truth of the biggest civil problem of 20th century America.
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
…
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
“The bottom line” he says, “is that if you do the work, have a teachable spirit, are fully prepared, and with a unique idea…number five on the list shouldn’t be a problem.”
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