One of the things The Most Reverend Henry Luke Orombi, Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, said tonight to a packed sanctuary was “Jesus of Nazareth is the only person who draws people to himself. The church must lift him up so He can draw all men to himself.” I was blessed to sing “We are God’s People,” “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” and “Christ Shall Have Dominion” with Presbyterians and Anglicans. It’s too easy to doubt the faith of those unlike me, especially with news of terrible things in the other denominations. It’s too easy to broadbrush without learning any details about individual congregations. But tonight we celebrated Jesus in unity under the teaching of a man, from halfway around the world, who is just like us.
All posts by Phil
Book Giveaway: Cooking for One
Didn’t I say there’s a book about everything? The blog Apartment Therapy is giving away an essay/recipe book on eating alone called Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. Only one copy will be given away, so act now. Deadline is 5:00 p.m. Friday (Eastern).
D’ya Feel Lucky, Punk? Then Plug Your Book
The NY Times is talking about the Internet’s effect on book promotion. Publishers try to control the release of an attention-grabbing book and are undermined by newspapers or networks who work the system to their own advantage. How can we blame them unless bribery is involved?
Publicizing a book is a tricky game.
Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, said that sometimes “there’s an argument that early leaks fan the flames, and in a sense everybody benefits from it at the end of the day.” But that depends on whether readers want more or feel as if they gleaned everything there is to know without buying the book.
The article does not mention a great source on this topic, that is Plug Your Book: Online Book Marketing for Authors by Steve Weber. I have intended to review this book for weeks. What I have read of it is hard-hitting, honest, and informative. Weber writes about many publicity ideas, both good and bad, helping us understand what we’re getting into, not selling us on a promotion designed more for making him a bit of cash than promoting our book. Read the book online here.
A Personal Post
Whereas I once was on vacation, I have returned to the office. As you can see from my new webcam, I am hard at work.
Don’t Leave Me
I occasionally think about writing personal posts, but I usually avoid it. You don’t want to hear about me, and if you do, maybe I don’t want you to hear about me. It’s probably just my selfishness, which is why I could never be The Next Food Network Star–along with other, larger reasons. Anyway, I may write something personal later this week.
So, Lars was talking about actors a few days ago (Garage door blues), and coincidentally Delancey Place quotes from one of those odd books which lends support to the notion that there are books about everything. Wait, it’s an article, not a book. Still there are books about everything out there, such as The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. But to the point of this post–Delancey Place quotes Laurence Olivier on his stage fright: “Olivier wrote of his famous performance in ‘Othello,’ ‘I had to beg my Iago, Frank Finlay, not to leave the stage when I had to be left alone for a soliloquy, but to stay in the wings downstage where I could see him, since I feared I might not be able to stay there in front of the audience by myself.'”
Just when you think some guys have it all together.
To Say Goodbye, The Reason I Came
I’m going to stay away from the blog for the next several days, so be sure to tell all your online friends it will be safe to read Brandywine Books for a while. Start up a campaign, if you like. Send out the emails, saying, “Phil’s gone now, so go read his blog.” Of course, you can always say people should read Lars’ great blog, but now you have another reason to promote it.
Before I go, let me leave you with a snippet of fiction I wrote. I want to call it short short story, but it’s so brief it may not qualify even for that. Perhaps it’s a blog short. Anyway, have fun while I’m gone.
The Reason I Came
When they invited him to make himself at home, were they planning to treat him like the furniture? He wandered through rooms, receiving muttered acknowledgements from his hosts, who were busy paying bills, cleaning counters, and talking on phones. Maybe welcome was not their native tongue.
He found his nephew’s door ajar, inside the boy just waking up. He closed the door behind him and crossed the room to pick up a familiar book.
“Shall we read more about Robin Hood and his men?” he asked.
“Yeah,” the boy yawned, “I was just thinking about them.”
“That must be the reason I came,” he replied.
Poems for Every Situation
No, really–every situation, such as “Ten Poems to Read When You Get Stuffed in Your Locker.”
Free Running
This is cool. I’m reading JXIIH’s novel, The Dark River, the sequel to The Traveler, and just finished a part describing free runners in London. “Ever hear of the Vast Machine?” one of the London characters asks. “It’s the computer systen that watches us with scanner programs and surveillance cameras. The Free Runners refuse to be part of the Vast Machine. We run above it all.”
Now I see an article on an actual free runner climbing walls and jumping between buildings. “Free running,” reports Brendan O’Neill, “or ‘le parkour,’ its original French name, is all about overcoming obstacles.” Sadly, these men and women give themselves to overcoming constructed obstacles when real, harder obstacles abound, but I don’t really blame them. I do the same thing in a quieter way.
The Surest Signs of Vocation
“In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation. It exists on the lowest scale, and, in the art of fiction, belongs as much to the producer of “railway novels” as to Balzac, Thackeray or Tolstoy; yet it almost always marks the great creative artist. Whatever a man has it in him to do really well he usually keeps on doing with an indestructible persistency.”
Goodness, that’s something to pray after. Mark Bertrand comments on this quote from Edith Wharton.
What to Do with Dirty Moral Laundry
Terry Teachout advises us on “what to do when an artist is discovered to have dirty moral laundry.” He offers five points to remember.