All posts by Phil

Authors

Clive Cussler, R.I.P.

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Author and adventurer Clive Cussler (1931-2020) has died at age 88. The Guardian published this paragraph about his writing style, starting with the book that launched his career:

Raise the Titanic!, despite bad reviews, spent six months on the bestseller lists. Cussler’s prose was rarely more than serviceable; his plots and characters were redolent of the pulp magazines of his childhood, not least Doc Savage, whose technological heroism was surely an influence on Pitt, as it was on John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee, from whom Cussler also drew. He combined the exciting elements of Bond or Matt Helm spy thrillers with plot twists drawn from Alistair MacLean; his use of factual information was another MacDonald trademark, and was an influence on writers who followed, such as Tom Clancy.

Clancy died in 2013 at age 66.

The bookish site Shelf Awareness notes Cussler didn’t give a rats rear-end about criticism of his style. In 2015, he said, “I never had a highfalutin view of what I write. It’s a job. I entertain my readers. I get up in the morning and I start typing. . . . I want it to be easy to read. I’m not writing exotic literature. I like snappy dialogue and short descriptions and lots of action.”

Here’s an excerpt of Cussler from his 2004 novel, Trojan Odyssey.

An screenshot of text from Trojan Odyssey.
Non-fiction

What Environmentalism Can Teach Us About Loving the Body

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I didn’t notice Nancy Pearcey’s latest book when it was released in 2018, but I heard an interview today in which she described one of the explanations she makes that has caught the attention of many readers. Her book is Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, and it offers biblical reasons for accepting, even loving, the body God has given you.

She says we can take something from environmentalism.

The Nature Conservatory’s states, “Our mission is to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends. Our vision is a world where the diversity of life thrives, and people act to conserve nature for its own sake and its ability to fulfill our needs and enrich our lives.”

What if we applied that logic to our own bodies? We are not spirits or souls trapped in a temporal, worthless vessel. We are unique body and soul beings, and our physical form is a major part of our lives. Our physical health is a big part of a thriving life. What if we treated it as a kind of natural good, something to love partly for its own sake, not something to fight against?

There are some who say we can and should remake ourselves into whatever image we imagine ourselves to be, but that’s not how we treat nature. We want to preserve the natural world around us. How about we preserve the natural form closest to us?

This is what I took from the interview. You’ll find more good reasoning in Pearcey’s Love Thy Body.

Reading

Pushing Back on a Recommended Reading Selection

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A parent who is also a writer (one of the more dangerous kinds) wrote a long letter to his daughter’s teacher about a book on the recommended reading list for ninth-graders to read on their own. This comes from his response to the teacher’s reply.

The idea that Green and his novel Paper Towns is a good example of “the way the world operates” and “is the world we live in today” and that not reading them insinuates “ignorance as a remedy” is not defensible on any level. One of the things every generation does throughout history, especially the last 100 years of American popular culture, is maintain the erroneous belief that they invented sex, cuss words, drugs, and whatever sort of rebellious behavior that angers one’s parents. They always think they are the first to crack open a “modern world” to the stuffy, naive elders around them. We are still of the age that just can’t stop giggling about Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

S.J. Dahlstrom, “Coarsening is not education”
Bookselling, Fiction

Is the Novel on Life-Support?

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We hardly lack for prose in this online age. Digital entertainments aside, English- language genre fiction has blossomed into a startling new maturity. Popular biography conveys lessons the novel once delivered — as do popularly presented sociology and ‘New Journalism’, which uses techniques of novel-writing for essay-length reporting. Still, the novel is moribund. Its failure signals an end of confidence about the past values and future goals of what conceived itself as Western culture. The signs of a weakened, diffident and timid culture are written in the dust on the unread books of our library shelves.

Joseph Bottum writes about the decline of the novel in a book by the same name, excerpted in this month’s Spectator. He doesn’t appear to go in the direction you may expect, so read the whole thing. As I read it, I kept wondering if his point is simply a bit beyond my grasp as an ignorant student or is he measuring by a standard I don’t value as much. (via Prufrock)

Fiction, Reviews

Ragnarok: Where It All Begins

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Movie poster for Netflix series Ragnarok (2020).

Erik (teacher): Why is it of particular interest to talk about the old Norse gods? Especially right here in Edda? Gry?

Gry: Because was Edda was the last town in Norway to become Christian. Ah, and to give up faith in the Norse gods.

Erik: Yes, that is correct. One could say it all happened right here. Ragnarok. The end of the world. The final clash between the gods and the giants.

If I had seen the promotional tagline you see on the poster above, “This is where it all begins,” I might have watched Ragnarok, Netflix’s new six-episode series, in anticipation of an open, unfinished story — a part one. The series does have good character arcs and bring things together at the end, but it doesn’t wrap them up nearly as I was expecting. I kept thinking our hero would have to really lower the hammer in the next episode, but the final showdown isn’t, you know, the end of the world.

Norse myth fans will easily recognize names and characters as they appear: Odin and Frigg, Thor and Loki are represented in the old man with an eyepatch with the oddly serene, oddly prophetic wife, the mischievous brother, and the kind, justice-minded son. And the villain is named Vidar (Lars can tell us what that means).

Ragnarok is set in Edda, another nod to the myths, but it moves as methodically as any high-school superhero origin story might. Magne arrives with his family in this new town, which is his hometown but they had moved away after his father’s death several years ago; his mother’s new job at the undefined industry that supports Edda has brought them back. He befriends the “greenpeace” girl, Isolde, and learns that official accounts of the pristine nature of their town and country don’t fit the evidence they draw from the river.

Continue reading Ragnarok: Where It All Begins →
Authors

Sir Novelty Fashion Turned Poet Laureate

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Colley Cibber (1671-1757) was an actor, playwright, and theater manager who made a name for himself initially as a comic actor in his own play, Love’s Last Shift, playing Sir Novelty Fashion.

Hilliaria: Oh! For Heav’n’s sake! no more of this Galantry, Sir Novelty: for I know you say the fame of every Woman you see.

Novelty: Every one that sees you, Madam, must say the fame. Your Beauty, like the Rack, forces every Beholder to confess his Crime–of daring to adore you.

He also reworked Shakespeare’s Richard III and Moliere’s Tartuffe. It was for crimes such as these that he was made Britain’s poet Laureate in 1730, drawing ire from contemporary poet Alexander Pope and his friends. They mocked him aggressively in print, some perhaps in good fun, some perhaps with malice.

Benham’s Book of Quotations gives sixteen pages to Pope’s words and to Cibber’s one column, and lest they die their appointed death too soon, I’ll repeat some Cibber lines here.

“Poverty, the reward of honest fools.”

“The aspiring youth that fired the Ephesian dome
Outlives in fame the pious fool that raised it.”

“Ambition is the only power that combats love.”

“Dumb’s a sly dog.”

Continue reading Sir Novelty Fashion Turned Poet Laureate →
Fiction, Reviews

The Green Ember, by S.D. Smith

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Artwork from cover of The Green Ember

“How many weapons do I have?” Helmer asked. Picket took a quick inventory, though he thought Helmer might be concealing some.

“Two. Your knife and the sword,” Picket said.

Helmer responded with an immediate attack. He hit Picket, kicked him, took off his jacket and struck him with it over and over, then threw rocks at him. Picket scrambled around, trying to dodge rocks, block blows, and escape the whirlwind of whipping coat. . . .

“Lesson. Number. One,” Helmer said evenly. “Everything is a weapon.”

The Green Ember is the first of several fantasies by S.D. Smith, in which brave rabbits with swords and bows fight the hoard of wolves and raptors that has overwhelmed their land. Youngsters Heather and Pickett begin the novel playing in the fields near their country home. They have loving parents, a baby brother, and a happy, innocent life.

But this isn’t Little House on the Prairie.

Soon, enemies they hadn’t known are charging at them with torches, bows, and spears. They escape by the skin of their teeth with a bit of help, but Pickett won’t take up living to fight another. His mistakes and lack of strength during their escape weigh him to the ground. Plus, some hero rabbit, who looked about as old as Pickett, displays incredible skill, strength, and general swagger in their escape, all of which Pickett hates. He has no reason to be jealous of him, so, of course, he is.

The Green Ember is written for young readers, not very young, but this isn’t YA either. Smith assumes his readers will need a little help to understand. When characters use sarcasm, the narrator explains it clearly. It’s a fun adventure, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of them. My kids have loved them for years, and my youngest just reread all of the books in anticipation of the fourth one, Ember’s End, coming in March.

Uncategorized

How Many Filaments Did Edison Test for His Lightbulb?

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People know America’s great inventor Thomas Edison went through multitudes of material to find a good filament for his little light bulb hobby. He tested everything he could get his hands on and thought could work. Some even claim he made a large bulb in order to test the illumination of a charged cat.*

The Edison Museum states his team tested over 6,000 plant materials, many of them carbonized. The Franklin Institute makes the same claim, possibly taking it from the same source though that source isn’t clearly cited.

Rutgers’ Edison Papers says no one, not even the inventor himself, kept count of how many times they tried this or that. They quote an 1890 interview in which Edison says they tried 3,000 different theories in working out a functional and affordable light bulb, and many more experiments were conducted after they had a patent and a production factory. Edison was awarded that patent on January 27, 1880.

The number of filament experiment may be lost to history, as well as whether he actually said one of his famous quotations:

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

– Thomas Edison or Harper’s Monthly?

Ralph Keyes, in his book The Quote Verifier, notes this quote and its variations can be attributed to Edison, but the earliest version of this can be found in an 1898 Ladies Home Journal. (Check to see if you still have this edition on your TBR pile.) The magazine claims Edison offered two percent inspiration and ninety-eight percent perspiration as a formula for genius. In the years that followed, it seemed magazine writers, not the inventor, were repeating this line in different ways, but by 1932 Edison claimed it as his own.

Update: The 1932 Harper’s Monthly interview referred to above may have been a contemporary interview, an obituary, or a tribute, because the inventor died in 1931. Harper’s doesn’t make it’s archives available online for free, but I have found a citation of it saying it was the September issue of Harper’s and that Edison was thought to have said this in 1903.

Photo by Rahul from Pexels

* no one claims this.

Authors

Tolkien’s Long Procrastination in the Same Direction

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J.R.R. Tolkien wrote essays and myths for years before the publication of The Hobbit in 1937. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is also published this year. The Lord of the Rings is published in three volumes during 1954-55. And through all of this time, the author may have been thinking he should possibly find time to write something deep on Chaucer.

His research student V.A. Kolve said, “He confessed to me once that some were disappointed by how little he had done in the academic way, but that he had chosen instead to explore his own vision of things.”

Tolkien himself said, “I have always been incapable of doing the job at hand.”

John M. Bowers has written a book on the long academic project Tolkien intended to return to. He reports,

[Tolkien] confided to his publisher in 1937 that Oxford would merely add The Hobbit to his “long list of never-never procrastinations” (Letters, 18). Fiction-writing simply did not count in terms of academic production, especially after Tolkien had idled away his two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship. “The authorities of the university,” he would lament when The Lord of the Rings was in press, “might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances” (Letters, 219). He explained to his American publisher this widespread view of his failings: “Most of my philological colleagues are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is: ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years’” (Letters, 238).

Writing

Is Ghostwriting Ever Right?

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Several hours ago on Twitter, a young writer rejoiced over getting a ghostwriting gig, calling it an important step in her freelance career. For a writer wanting to work (and get this, receive money for that work as if he were a plumber or politician), an offer to write a book under someone else’s name can sound par for the course. It’s similar to other ways someone with a fistful of dollars can shove it toward a writer to ask for words in return: blogs, speeches, marketing, and corporate copy.

A friend of Orwell’s said, “There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter.” But the freelance writer hopes to forge another path.

In the current issue of World magazine, Jenny Rough quotes differing opinions on ghostwriting. Some writers would say they couldn’t compose their books alone; they needed to work with a subject expert. Some athletes, actors, and speakers recognize they don’t have the skills to tell their story on paper, so they need a writer to communicate for them; readers will likely buy a book by that actor they love before they buy one about him. Perhaps it feels more personal.

Is it a problem for readers to believe the celebrity whose name is on the cover actually wrote the words on the page, scribbled notes to himself during dull meetings, pounded his own keyboard, cried over an editor’s red ink, and procrastinated until being overtaken by the threat of an existential deadline?

In most cases, it is.

Jared Wilson has written many times on pastors who desire to write. Being known for their words in the pulpit, pastors will be expected to write their own books. If they don’t, they’ll be expected to acknowledge who did.

Author Angela Hunt told World she “realized it wouldn’t cost authors anything to reveal they had help. ‘It doesn’t belittle them to admit they’re not professional writers. Many secular writers refuse to ghostwrite for the same reason we Christian writers do—it’s not honest, and it disparages the work of the writer who has worked hard to learn the craft.'”

For January and February 2020, you can get two months of World magazine for free by referring yourself or someone you know.

Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash.