Sorry for the blog outage yesterday. The ever-conspiring Manx (not Manites–don’t click that link) succeeded in getting around our defenses and taking us down. We will work ever-harder to keep that from happening again. Aside from that, do you have any issues using this blog, any performance issues, I mean? Feel free to use this space to tell us about it.
(BTW, outage is one of those ugly words that looks like contemporary terminology to me, but it’s actually over 100 years old.)
Here’s some optimistic encouragement to Londoners on writing plays. Write the way you speak is fair advice, but I think many creative writers believe they are writing that way when they aren’t. And what if you want a character to sound different than you? What you do then, eh?
(ED: The title for this post reflects my disturbed mindframe.)
I agree that public libraries should have a line item in every city and state budget. Small towns particularly need libraries or cultural centers to draw their folks out of a small town mindset into the larger world, and even though this may be accomplished with private ownership, I’d think public funding or tax leniency would be needed to run a library suitable for a whole town or area of a city.
I get the impression that Charles Simic, writing in the blog for the New York Review of Books, is not reading off the page to which my book is open. He writes, “‘The greatest nation on earth,’ as we still call ourselves, no longer has the political will to arrest its visible and precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the workings of our democracy depend.”
It’s more correct to say there isn’t the political will to arrest the negligent spending in other areas–areas where new civil rights have been declared–that are squeezing out the funds for good, but unglamorous, services like libraries. Of course, there are competing voices Continue reading Maybe Apathy Isn't Closing Public Libraries
Some beautiful poetry by Kay Ryan, our current national poet laureate. Cicadas, loquat leaves, breeze, renewal. I love it.
Author Joseph Finder talks about what he does to keep distraction at bay. He’s got a new book coming too, so the YouTube page has a soft sell on that, but it’s not in this video.
Professor Erin O’Connor writes, “I’m a huge believer in reading out loud–and in having students read literature out loud, together, in real time. It creates a kind of shared, immediate experience that makes for remarkable class discussion–and it also helps hone reading skills and oral presentation skills in students who, almost universally, badly need them.”
Love it.
There’s good and bad in Seth Godin’s post on libraries, as Ben Domenech points out (Get Seth’s latest book, Poke the Box
Seth throws several ideas together, not all of them fully developed. For example, he says, “Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.” How old is the iPod now? Is it as cheap as a razor? There’s no reason for Amazon to sell Kindles at $10 in five years, and does Seth plan to write new ebooks to sell at $5 or less?
Andrew Breitbart has written a book about his political transformation from simple liberal to crusading conservative. It’s Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Host Armstrong Williams interviews him for BookTV and praises his book highly. Watch the video. It’s dynamite. He talks about the poverty of major media outlets. He describes how the Tea Party crowd was slandered when protesting Obamacare, and he explains how he created The Huffington Post.
Thomas Sowell asks what getting an education really means. He writes, “We don’t have a backlog of serious students trying to take serious courses. If you look at the fields in which American students specialize in colleges and universities, those fields are heavily weighted toward the soft end of the spectrum.”
“The left flattens people, reduces people to financial interests. Dave’s an artist. He knew people are deeper than that.”
Andrew Ferguson has a powerful article on the political conversion of the strong playwright David Mamet. Of note is the fact that one of the books that blew his mind was Chamber’s Witness
Mamet is stirring the pot on Broadway and in Hollywood with a new book of essays, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. I’ll bet it’s worthy reading.
