Also this from Ray Bradbury: Continue reading Writing with Wodehouse, Others
All posts by Phil
Get Rich By Reading Fiction
And eating sweet rolls, Ho-Hos, and Ding-Dongs. Just watch your fingers on those pages.
Jeremy Olshan gives us advice on making money found in great novels. “Don’t expect, however, to find explicit tips on spending, saving and investing baked into the texts like messages in fortune cookies. Novelists and dramatists seem suspicious if not disdainful of those who dole out advice about money — which is perhaps why, when they do offer worthwhile personal-finance counsel, the words tend to be put into the mouths of imbeciles.”
Here are his gleanings:
- Read Defoe to understand money. In Robinson Crusoe, the narrator finds a drawer full of gold while searching his ship’s wreckage. “I smiled to myself at the sight of this money: ‘O drug!’ said I, aloud, ‘what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no manner of use for thee; e’en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.’ However, upon second thoughts, I took it away.”
- Read Trollope and Dickens to spot the next Bernie Madoff. “Rereading these Victorian novels,” Olshan writes, “I’ve been struck, in a way that never occurred to me in high school or college, by how often the plots turn on bad financial decisions.”
- Read Eliot and Flaubert before swiping that credit card. “Emma Bovary isn’t brought down by cheating on her doctor husband but by racking up ruinous amounts of debt.”
- Read Dickens to learn the difference between saving and hoarding.
- Read Tolstoy before heading to the car dealership. “The old poker player’s adage that if, after a few minutes at the table, you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you, is more or less true in every financial transaction.”
Photos: How Books Are Made
Irene Gallo, an art director with Tor Books, went to their press building in Gettysburg, PA, to see A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time, Book 14)
Speaking of Mr. Eaton, his 2013 Advent Ghost Storytelling is up.
Art as Investigation In Which Facts Are Created, Changed
The trouble is that modern art in various ways abandoned imitation, representation, naturalism, and it now has to make out a case for its products’ still being truth. This is where science—certain aspects of science—are seized upon, assimilated, or sometimes simply plagiarized in decorative words, so as to bolster up art’s claim to cognitive value. One such use—and it is a curious reversal of Aristotle—is the boast of factuality: the work of the artist is said to be research; his creations are findings.
—Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (1971)
Maureen Mullarkey expounds on this remarkable idea in one contemporary art exhibit series, WeakForce.
The Bay Psalm Book
In my American Literature class, professor Ruth Kantzer instilled in me a love for the Bay Psalm Book. I could hear the music, like you can below, but the words, translated for singing, captured me. At first, I believe the congregations and families sang without instruments, so what we have below came many decades later.
One of the 11 original copies of the first book printed in America will be up for auction tomorrow at Sotheby’s. The video above will give you some details. You can buy your own copy here: Bay Psalm Book
Advice from Screwtape
What “important” books have you read that left you cold?
50th Anniversary of Doctor Who
This Saturday is Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary. A special episode, “The Day of the Doctor,” will broadcast around the world at 7:50 p.m. GST (11:50 a.m. PST/ 2:50 p.m. EST).
I don’t know who introduced me to the show. I just remember watching it through the 80s and maybe before that. PBS played whole series on Saturday nights year round, so if season 16 has six multi-part stories, then PBS played them in 6 weeks. They were playing Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor and favorite of The Countess of Wessex, when I started watching. At some point, they broadcasted all of Jon Pertwee’s episodes, picked up again with Baker, and carried on with Peter Davidson, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy until it was cancelled (or put on hiatus) in 1989. I haven’t picked up the new series yet, though Christopher Eccleston’s first episode, “Rose,” was great fun.
I’m sure you’re dying to know that my least favorite of these actors was Sylvester McCoy (who plays Radagast in The Hobbit), not because of his ability, but because of the script. Of all the shows I have seen, his version of our universe’s problem solver seemed to have read the script more than any others. The stories in the late 80s didn’t show The Doctor figuring out situations and boldly foiling the bad guys. They ran him and his companions through a variety of hoops until the curtain rose on Act 4 to depict The Doctor walking in with the solution in hand. How did he know the solution? He read the script, as far as I could tell—and crazy scripts they were.
For the series anniversary, I wanted to compile some trivia which will amuse and befuddle you. No need to thank me. The pleasure is all mine. Enjoy!
Continue reading 50th Anniversary of Doctor WhoDo We Need Another C.S. Lewis?
People have often suggested a popular Christian fantasy author is the next C.S. Lewis. I don’t think that’s an appropriate question. Few people strikes us as the same as another person only better, so why should we look for a living author to replace a dead one? That would make the dead one mostly obsolete, wouldn’t it?
Steve Harrell doesn’t think so. He says we need a new Lewis. “When we try to insert Lewis’ cultural observations into our culture today,” he writes, “we become like Indiana Jones—still fighting the Nazis through the 1980s. The Modernist war between reason and theology is over…. We live in a postmodern, post-secular age that doesn’t respond well to the intellectual arm-twisting and large-scale historical criticism that Lewis excelled at.”
Joel Miller argues Harrell is missing the point. “A vibrant intellectual life includes thoughts that span millennia. They’re not so foreign as some insist, and their differences might just keep us from going off the rails.”
Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, notes Lewis’s blessing to us is “in what you might call pastoral theology: as an interpreter of people’s moral and spiritual crises; as somebody who is a brilliant diagnostician of self-deception; and somebody who, in his own book on bereavement after his wife’s death, really pushes the envelope – giving permission, I suppose, to people to articulate their anger and resentment about a God who apparently takes your loved ones away from you.”
In related a post, Jeremy Lott notes the angst many have had over Susan’s absence from The Last Battle. Many readers think Lewis condemns her life choices by appearing to keep her out of Narnia when everything comes falling down, but Lott quotes from Lewis’ letters to show that the author simply believed Susan’s story was longer and more adult than the one he wanted to tell. “Why not try it yourself?” Lewis asked a reader, to which Lott replies, “Who has tried to tell Susan’s story?” He hopes someone will attempt to pick up the life of Susan Pevensie and finish at least part of her story.
Book Lists: Forgotten and Dystopian
For your reading pleasure (or possible displeasure):
10 Great Forgotten Books, such as The Castle of Otranto and the “unnecessarily tedious” Ravenshoe. (via Relief Journal)
15 Works of Dystopian Fiction Everyone Should Read, such as Invitation to a Beheading and The Stars, My Destination.
In other news, a sequel, “It’s A Wonderful Life: The Rest of the Story,” is in the works. The story shows Karolyn Grimes, who played Zuzu from the original movie, is an angel who visits George Bailey’s irritable cuss of a grandson, named George Bailey, to show him how much better the world would be without him. Grimes says she has seen many scripts for Wonderful Life sequels, and this one actually brings the juice. (via S. Greydanus)
Talking About Writing
