They both go digging around. Man, that’s bad. Gimme a minute to come up with a better answer. In the meantime, Athol Dickson has returned to blogging and talks about the similarities betwixt novel writing and gardening.
hmm, how is a novelist . . . The good ones call a spade a spade?
I am told the Congressman John Conyers, seen in this video, has argued in the past that congressman should read the bills they are passing. Through the link, you’ll see him making fun of that idea.
Voting on legislation you have not read is completely immoral! I can understand partial readings and using summaries in part, but more than once congressmen have been surprised by the bills they voted into law, and that must stop. Throw them out, if they can’t keep up with things on Capitol Hill, and for the leaders in both parties who encourage herd mentalities with our congressmen, throw them out too or raise the noise make them slow down to represent us, not their party or lobbyists or any special interests other than us.
John Wofford reviews Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for Patrol. He writes:
“In Smith’s promises that Zombies transforms Austen’s ‘masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read,’ and press materials that declare Austen ‘unavailable for media contact,’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies becomes a calculated twist on our own media-saturated, nothing-as-sacred/everything-as-entertainment approach to … well, everything.”
I’m not sure what all Czeslaw Milosz is thinking about in his poem, “A Song On the End of the World,” but the closing seems to speak to those who could take up a higher call, but do not because they are too busy.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
No other end of the world will we anticipate, because we have today’s simple worries to occupy us. No high calling is on us than to clothe and feed ourselves. Some of us could be prophets, teachers, leaders, or encouragers, but we aren’t because we’re too busy or maybe too distracted. Maybe we’re blogging too much.
I suppose the first step out of this is prayer.
Where are you in the grammar debate/squabble over singular third person pronouns? When anybody is opening a door, should we write that anybody is opening his door, his or her door, or their door? I’ll state upfront that using his or her is just a waste of words and speedbump in your sentence. The issue is really whether we should use the singular his or the plural their, becoming comfortable with their being used for one person.
Until today, I thought his was the singular, gender neutral pronoun, and unless you’re talking about girls (like I am when I talk about the little people in my home), then you should say things like everyone should use his napkin, not his shirt. This afternoon, I read in an NYT article that they has been used for individuals for centuries, and a grammarian named Anne Fisher changed it.
Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes. . . . Meanwhile, many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars, never mind the grammarians.
Well, if Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, et al used it, I’m not going to complain ever again.
Travis Prinzi writes about fantasy in literature, leaning on Tolkien’s Fairy Stories essay. He asks why do many readers assume authors are just writing for the fun of it, not crafting an artwork to one degree or another.
The real “gnosticism” in this discussion is not the artist who builds a story on an imaginative key, but one who thinks that books provide some “escape” from the “real world,” and that this escape is a good thing. Tolkien wrote,
Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
For Tolkien, the pejorative use of “escapism” was married to the false belief that current trends define Real Life – the electric street lamp, for example, is nowhere near as permanent as Lightning. But most of us know more about the lamp, because it’s more relevant to our daily existence. The fairy-tale takes us to the lightning, the “more permanent thing.”
More permanent things–that’s what I want to write about.
Heirs to the Tolkien Estate say they are owed money on The Lord of the Rings and want to stop the production of The Hobbit. Speaking at Comic-Con, Peter Jackson said The Hobbit has yet to gain funding.
Bill quotes a bit from Jared Wilson’s new books, Your Jesus Is Too Safe (coming to a blog near you). In short, Jared observes that healing grace burns.
Charlie Lowell of the band Jars of Clay talks about coffee (shout out to Crema in Nashville) and a little about the band’s mission work, Blood:Water.
Q: You guys do a lot of work in Africa with Blood:Water. Do you ever think about how some of the coffees you drink, obviously the ones from Africa, are impacted by the work you do getting clean water wells and HIV medication to a lot of those villages that include coffee farmers?
CL: Yes, that’s quite a connection. We watched the documentary “Black Gold” a couple years ago on our bus, and it was crazy how things trickle down- little decisions we make day in and out do affect others around the globe. It is simply amazing to see how village/community life changes with the addition of a clean-water well. Kids are in school instead of fetching dirty water, women can work on micro-finance, and general health is improved greatly.
The Editor at Large for Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski, is tweeting on word searches. He notes there have been many requests for the definition of “stupidly,” due to President Obama’s press conference last week. Do the citizens of the Interweb not know what “stupidly” means? Looking up “nefarious” I can understand and “avuncular” got a boost from talk on W. Cronkite, but “stupidly”?