All posts by Phil

Fiction

A Literary History of Sci-Fi

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Jules Verne speaking of H.G. Wells: “I go to the moon in a cannonball discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars [sic] in an airship which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça c’est très joli…. But show me this metal. Let him produce it.”

“In this put-down of one of the ‘Fathers of Science Fiction’ by another,” writes Alexi Sargeant, “we see the future of the field.”

Long before anyone coined the terms “hard sci-fi” and “soft sci-fi” or used them as badges of pride or disparaging slurs, long before the “holy war” between old school pulp and the ’60s era New Wave, we have this demand from the cranky old school to the squishy new school: “Show me this metal.” Wells, whose social activism permeated his fiction, would no doubt claim that Verne was rather missing the point. But what becomes clear from a survey of science fiction’s history is that, if there’s one thing these authors love more than cosmic wonder and terror, it’s petty fights about what constitutes “real” science fiction.

(via Prufrock News)

Authors

Min Jin Lee: Writing as Vocation, Not Career

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Min Jin Lee, a New Yorker who came to America from South Korea at age 7, has written a couple strong novels and many columns and essays. She spoke with World Magazine’s Marvin Olasky about growing up, overworking herself as a lawyer, being a mother, and writing. She said she thinks “of God as a writer and a publisher,” because of the importance of His Word.

Writing is really hard. Fiction students or earnest fiction writers come to my readings and go, “What do I do? How do I get published?” I say, “Forget that it’s a career. It’s a vocation. It’s really, really difficult. Earn a living somewhere else.” I know very successful writers, and they don’t make money from selling their books. You do it because you love it, but don’t do it because you think it will deliver something in your life. Your book is not redemption. It will not redeem all the pain and suffering in your life. It’s something you feel called to write. If you don’t feel called to write that story, don’t write it. Do something else. Take up golf.

Poetry

Amis: Poetry Stops the Clock

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LARB: The authors you write about in your book are mostly novelists. Do you read much poetry, contemporary or otherwise?

Martin Amis: “Yeah, I do. It’s much harder to read poetry when you’re living in a city, in the accelerated atmosphere of history moving at a new rate. Which we all experience up to a point. What poetry does is stop the clock, and examine certain epiphanies, certain revelations — and life might be moving too swiftly for that.

“But I still do read, not so much contemporaries, as the canon. I was reading Milton yesterday, and last week Shakespeare — it’s the basic greats that I read.”

From “The Age of Acceleration: An Interview with Martin Amis” by Scott Timberg for the LA Review of Books

Authors, Poetry

American Poet Donald Hall, 89, Has Died

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Poet Donald Hall, 89, has passed away. David Kirby has this in the New York Times obit:

“Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet,” Billy Collins, another American poet laureate, wrote in The Washington Post in April 2006, two months before Mr. Hall himself was given the post.  . . . He was a staggeringly prolific writer who chose freelance work over teaching — a decision, as Mr. Collins put it, “to detach himself from academic life, with its slow but steady intravenous drip of a salary.”

Back in 2001, Hall called for a death to the death of poetry. Here’s how that essay begins.

Some days, when you read the newspaper, it seems clear that the United States is a country devoted to poetry. You can delude yourself reading the sports pages. After finding two references to “poetry in motion,” apropos of figure skating and the Kentucky Derby, you read that a shortstop is the poet of his position and that sailboats raced under blue skies that were sheer poetry. On the funny pages, Zippy praises Zerbina’s outfit: “You’re a poem in polyester.” A funeral director, in an advertisement, muses on the necessity for poetry in our daily lives. It’s hard to figure out just what he’s talking about, but it becomes clear that this poetry has nothing to do with poems. It sounds more like taking naps.

Poetry, then, appears to be:

  1. a vacuous synonym for excellence or unconsciousness. What else is common to the public perception of poetry?

  2. It is universally agreed that no one reads it.

Fiction

Found in Anthologies

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John Wilson writes about a couple story anthologies rescued from a library trash heap:  Fiction of the Fifties: A Decade of American Writing (1959), edited by Herbert Gold; and Stories from the Sixties (1971), edited by Stanley Elkin. He points out some differences and quotes from their introductory essays, but one thing unites them. “Both of these volumes are haunted by an absence. They are, with a few exceptions, radically secular.” But Wilson recommends one stand out story, which I see is the title of an anthology of its own.

Reviews, The Press

What’s a Movie Critic to Do?

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The stars of the new heist release Ocean’s 8 (are the estates of Frank, Dean, and the boys still making money on this?) aren’t wild about critical reaction to their film.

Cate Blanchett said, “A studio can support a film and it’s the invisible faces on the internet, and often male reviewers, who can view it through a prism of misunderstanding.” I gather that means they don’t like it because they don’t get it because they’re men. Sandra Bullock followed up, “It would be nice if reviewers reflected who the film is for, like children should review children’s films, not a 60-year-old man. I guess his opinion would be kind of skewed.”

And if children were the driving forces behind children’s movies, it wouldn’t be long before all we’d have is Axe Cop. May I remind our studio audience that Milne first wrote Winnie the Pooh when he was 44 years old?

But the stars are talking about critics, not producers or directors, on which point Alissa Wilkinson replies to say critics aren’t being paid to support films. They are paid to write essays (sometimes works of art in themselves) about the movies they watch. With many reviews of one movie, you’ll want a diversity of perspectives, because that makes for better reading and understanding in general.

In short, a good critic develops a large capacity for imagination. They can’t know what it would be like to see the movie as someone other than themselves. But the good critic tries very hard to put themselves in those shoes anyhow, especially when they detect that the movies’ target audience will be someone other than themselves.

That’s very different than saying a movie wasn’t meant for you, so we don’t want your professional review possibly prevent our target audience from watching what we made. As Wilkinson points out, most studios want to attract a wide audience in order to make money on a single film. Discounting someone’s opinion because he’s not the right type of person doesn’t help.

Reading

Go Read, Young Man

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Barnabas Piper recommends reading stories more than guidebooks, saying, “If men read fewer books on manhood and more really good stories they’d be much better for it.” He offers six reasons for this, one of them is on expressing emotions.

Men are often (not always) inhibited in our expressions of emotion. We can struggle to know when and how to give voice to our passions, both positive and negative. Stories give both example and lessons in how to do this. They show the benefit to being open and the harm that comes from locking feelings and passions away. But they do so in a palatable way by showing it in the lives of others.

Many of us define productivity in a way that rules out stories. We think reviewing a line of argument or series of purported facts accomplishes more than simply entertaining ourselves with a story, but as Piper says, we change, we influence ourselves, by the environment in which we live. Stories are part of that environment just as dinners with friends, serving our community, and riding horses may be.

If life is about learning, what do we learn from our environment? Who loves us and how do we know? Is it because they’ve said so or because we’ve understood their love from being around them, their actions, tones, and expressions? We know all manner of things without direct expression, not necessarily in the absence of such expression but more through living in the light of them. The Lord tells us repeatedly of his faithfulness, but how do we really know he is faithful? It’s when we see it in our lives–in our own story.

Reading fiction and non-fiction stories from others helps us understand ourselves and how other people think. If we ever ask, “How could anyone think that way?” stories will help answer that question. I remember a friend saying he thought a character in Lewis’s Great Divorce was unrealistic because he’d never known someone like him. The man didn’t want to know the truth; he only wanted to talk about issues and offer his opinion. Settling on an established truth meant the conversation and his contribution to it would be over. My friend thought this was ridiculous until he met someone who actually thought this way. His understanding of human nature was stretched before he knew it was possible.

But life isn’t about learning, is it? That’s only a part of it. Perhaps I’ll write about that another time, though it would be better to write a story about it.

Authors

Samuel Johnson’s Half-Blind Guide to Life

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What makes Johnson’s righteousness bearable is the fact that nothing he read himself — and he devoured more or less every word ever written — was able to guide him through the problems of his own life. Half-blind and wracked with self-disgust, Johnson was consumed by horrors: of annihilation, of madness, of destitution — what Beckett described as ‘the whole mental monster-ridden swamp’.

Frances Wilson describes the good and bad about a new book on Dr. Johnson’s thoughts, saying literary self-help guides are generally rotten, but Samuel Johnson is particularly good subject for the genre. (via Prufrock News)

Johnson gave us many points of advice, like these I pull from my broken down book of quotations.

“A man, sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.”

“Be virtuous ends pursued by virtuous means,
Nor think th’ intention sanctifies the deed.”

“Men do not suspect faults which they do not commit.”

“Of all the griefs that harass the distressed,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest;
Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart,
Than when a blockhead’s insult points the dart.”

“A man guilty of poverty easily believes himself suspected.”

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

What’s the Best Coffeeshop in Your State?

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Food & Wine magazine offers this list of the best places to buy coffee in every state, plus one runner-up. Is your favorite place on the list? I have consumed several wonderful cups from Mad Priest in Chattanooga, so I’m happy to see they made runner-up in Tennessee. Naturally our readers in Delaware will expect to see Brandywine Coffee Roasters and their Brew HaHa! stores in top place for their state (our cultural influence knows no bounds).

And the best place for coffee in Minnesota is Culver’s.  j/k

Authors

Krauthammer, World Changer

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Charles Krauthammer told The Washington Post yesterday that his cancer is not going to be completely removed or beaten into submission. “It is aggressive and spreading rapidly,” he said. “My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live. This is the final verdict. My fight is over.”

Many readers, friends, and colleagues began sharing the news and chatting of memories.

Brit Hume (@brithume) said, “The news that Charles Krauthammer’s condition is terminal is heartbreaking. Beyond the brilliance of his analysis and the paralysis he so remarkably overcame, there is his extraordinary personal grace and kindness. I have missed him very much. I always will.”

Hume also spoke on radio about his friend. “I told him I would keep praying for him. Although I knew he’s not a believer, I am, and that the God that I worship would unquestionably want him in his presence, because anyone who had the chance would.  I don’t think there’s anyone alive that I admire more than I admire Charles.”

Bret Baier (@BretBaier) tweeted, “Charles @Krauthammer is a dear friend -his voice has been sorely missed in our daily discussions of the world. While this news is so so sad- I’m happy that we heard it from him with time to show him how many people love him and how he changed the world w/ his thoughts & words.”

He also recommended this 42-minute special report that he and others assembled in 2013.

Bill Hemmer (@BillHemmer) wrote, To honor the life of @krauthammer, read “Marcel, My Brother.” https://t.co/TSLEb4c5wJ

Krauthammer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 “for his witty and insightful columns on national issues.” This personal column was written in January 2006 and is also the first one printed in his essay collection from 2013, Things That Matter. In it, he writes, “Whenever I look at that picture [of he and Marcel], I know what we were thinking at the moment it was taken: It will forever be thus. Ever brothers. Ever young. Ever summer.”

Of course, we do not live in a delusional youth. Summer turns to autumn and soon the ice creeps over everything on this side of the veil.  God raises up many stewards to work out his purposes in the world, both believers and non-believers. More like Krauthammer would be good, though let’s join Hume in praying for the gift of faith  for everyone.