All posts by Phil

Non-fiction, Publishing

Of the Books Written on Lincoln There Shall Be No End

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“There are so many Lincoln geeks that buy everything new that comes out,” Cathy Langer, the lead book buyer at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, tells Stephanie Cohen of the Wall Street Journal. Cohen goes on to report Langer’s claim “that in her years as a buyer, she has rarely turned down a title about the 16th president.” One such book is Killing Lincoln, which has sold over two million since its release a year ago September. Cohen states some 16,000 books have been written about President Abraham Lincoln, and there’s more to come.

To illustrate the volume of existing Lincoln works, the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington created a three-story, 34-foot tower sculpture out of Lincoln titles, meant to “symbolize that the last word about this great man will never be written,” according to the center.

Perhaps I should start writing a series of short volumes on the ignored presidents, like Polk, Hayes, Tyler, and Garfield. I could call them Thrilling Histories, e.g. The Thrilling History of James K. Polk. Or maybe they should be called the Presidential Insider’s Guides. Or maybe the What You Didn’t Learn series. (via Frank Wilson)

Authors, Fiction

Picking Up on an Author’s Worldview

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Lavonne Neff says that despite the slow burn on J.K. Rowling’s new novel, The Casual Vacancy, the story builds out of what she believes is a “profoundly biblical worldview.” The story is one of a small English town, clearly described as post-Christian, and when the most Christian man around dies, a large body of characters step up to reveal themselves as the hypocrites they are. Neff says the story is bleak, but possibly noteworthy.

Religion

More Angels in Movies

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Joel Miller, author of Lifted by Angels: The Presence and Power of Our Heavenly Guides and Guardians thinks now is a good time for Hollywood to make more movies with well-drawn angels in them. “Perhaps all this newfound interest in biblical stories and characters offers Hollywood a chance to do it right for a change. Forget sappy, romantic, and cute. In researching my new book, Lifted by Angels, I was struck by how overwhelmingly powerful and even frightening angels are.”

Hollywood doesn’t understand frighteningly awesome angels because they don’t believe in a frighteningly awesome God. They see God mostly like Odin from Marvel’s Thor, wouldn’t you say? But as Joel says, the industry based in Los Angeles needs to overcome their biases at least once.

Religion

When Was the Last Time You Were Called Ignorant?

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Mark Liberman tells us, “When you read or hear in the mass media that ‘Only X% of Americans know Y’, don’t believe it without checking the references — it’s probably false even as a report of the survey statistics.” He cites a few sources and gives an incredible example of the answers marked wrong for an open-ended question about former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. (via Alan Jacobs)

On this point, here’s a survey that appears to be done the right way, asking clear questions about religious practice and affiliation. It concludes that though many say they pray every day and have other spiritual or religious habits or experiences, “One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation.” I wonder how much of this is a popular resistance to labeling one’s beliefs either out of a selfish desire to appear smart (like the voter who says he is undecided because he wants to appear to give both sides a fair hearing) or a belief that one cannot claim a label while not accepting absolutely everything ever claimed by someone of that label.

Uncategorized

University Teaching Can Be Torture

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Language Professor Andrew Piper writes about university teaching: “I have seen some pretty shocking stuff. The record so far was one instructor who would rewrite his lecture notes on the board in illegible handwriting and read them aloud as he wrote while facing the board. Not only was he talking…really…slowly, he was facing the wrong way! The idea of knowledge ‘transfer’ in this case seems distorted beyond all recognition.”

BTW, Alan Jacobs has praised this writer, saying “*Book Was There* may be the single smartest thing I’ve read about how book history connects to book future. Seriously.” Read more praise about the book to which this blog is tied here.

Authors

Faulkner Resigns as Postmaster

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Unless Faulkner was completely joking with his resignation letter, he apparently didn’t believe his employer deserved an honest day’s work for a day’s wage. “How can I serve you?” doesn’t appear to be in his English phrase book. I can’t say this speaks well of him.

Authors, Religion

Luther, Martin Luther. I’m an Art Critic

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The IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art)Daniel Siedell, a Christian art critic and curator, writes, “While finishing my doctoral dissertation and teaching modern art at a state university in the mid-1990s, I read Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible and H.R. Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, and I was shocked. Their conclusions about modern art bore no resemblance to the work I had devoted years of my life to understanding from within the history and development of modern art.”

He finds a path toward a theology of art with from Martin Luther and writes about it in his book God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Cultural Exegesis). This reminds me a Mars Hill Audio interview this year, which I’m too lazy at the moment to look up and link for you. Do I have to do all the work around here? (via Cranach)

Fiction, Reviews

Fun When It’s Not Disturbing

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Speaking Loren Eaton (see last post), a while back he was kind enough to send me an e-book, called Splinters of Silver and Glass, from a flash fiction friend, Nathaniel Lee. I’ve dabbled in it every now and then, since it’s the kind of book one dabbles in, being filled with 100 short short stories plus two longer ones. For the price, I can definitely recommend it for a mixed bag of story bites skewing heavy into fantasy and horror. All of them can be found on Lee’s blog, Mirrorshards, and he continues to write them, which means you can get them in your RSS feed this very day. This one, “Girl Stuff,” is one of my favorites. Here’s another that’s much more crazy.

Some of the stories have an eery sound to them, and when they come after a few humorous ones, they deflate me a bit. But the quirky and humorous ones come around soon enough. Naturally, if every story had perfect pitch, it would be easy to rave, even if I could only say that you had to read it to know what it’s like. It’s possible short short stories simply don’t reach deeply enough to stir our hearts. Perhaps they can’t, being only 100 words. I like to think they can, even though they are just snatches of stories.

Wonder WheelI still have my copies of Story quarterly from the mid-90s. They ran short short stories competitions which had to be kept under 1,500 words. Brady Udall’s piece, “The Wig,” from the Summer 1994 issues, has always stuck with me as a beautiful, human moment. The first line goes, “My eight-year-old son found a wig in the garbage Dumpster this morning.” Story‘s editor, Lois Rosenthal, said, “In three hundred words, Udall’s deft tale of an enormous loss swiftly reduced most of our contest judges to tears.” I think I cried too. At least, I felt the loss he described. (The story is available with others in Udall’s anthology, Letting Loose the Hounds.)

When I’ve posted 100 word stories here, “The Wig” has been in my ear as the pitch I’m hoping to sustain. It’s hard to tell if I have.

Oh, speaking of Loren Eaton, he has another delightful 200-word tale here: “Silver Sea, Salmon Sky.”

Fiction

Stories of the Cursed World

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Loren Eaton writes, “We love Aslan breaking endless winter’s chill grip on Narnia and Aragorn being crowned King Elessar and Christ the Bridegroom triumphing over that serpent of old. Yet in appreciating these good tales, we’ve largely ignored what Frye calls ‘the story of winter,’ those narratives that slide from bliss into torment.”

On Story Warren, he is writing about tales of winter and the virtues of exposing children to downbeat stories. It reminds me of the beautiful animated movie, The Secret of Kells, and how my girls didn’t like it. It also makes me wonder what we would have gotten if Lewis had written of the story in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe as a trilogy–longer, deeper, and probably darker because winter would have lasted for two books at least.

The Secret of Kells