All posts by Phil

Fiction

Sustaining Hope at the World’s End

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Nick Ripatrazone writes about a few dystopian novels published in the past few years. In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a group of actors struggle to survive and elevate the spirits of other survivors they find. Enter the villain, a religious huckster.

This leader of a doomsday cult reveals an interesting trope in the dystopian universe: it’s not enough for the world to end. That plot element is too grand, too distant. The characters need an immediate, human foil. Catastrophe turns them inward.

It’s the inner story that is most compelling.

Authors

The Catholic Sci-fi Author

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R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) stands out as a faithful Catholic who wrote science-fiction. Neil Gaiman called him “undoubtedly the finest writer of whatever it was that he did that ever there was.”

In her review of The Man with the Speckled Eyes, the fourth and newest volume of a collection of short stories, Helen Andrews describes the man and some of his ideas. (via Prufrock News)

Running throughout the book is Lafferty’s cyclical theory of world history. Mankind builds civilization generation by generation and, periodically, destroys what he has built, so cataclysmically that the next generation has to start from the beginning. Fourth Mansions, his novel based on Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, follows the same theory. Just as the individual soul ascends from mansion to mansion, mankind ascends through levels of civilization; the higher it gets, the more demons try to assail it. Teresa wrote of vipers and toads. In Lafferty’s cosmology, these are “tentacled liberalism (the python-hydra)” and “Communism, from underground (the toad with the tantalizing jewel in its head).”

Authors

Jane Austen’s Enduring Popularity

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Has it been simply, unquantifiable choices that has kept Jane Austen’s works so well liked or could it be her word choices? The Upshot spells out some research into what types of words Austen used compared to many other authors in a two century span. (via Alan Cornett)

In other news, Jane Austen’s letter hilariously mocking a gothic novel will be auctioned for the first time at Sotheby’s tomorrow.

Fiction

John Grisham’s Novels in Film

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The last adaptation we saw of a John Grisham thriller in theaters was Runaway Jury in 2003. A TV version of The Firm aired on NBC in 2012 for one season. Clearly adaptations, even of successful novels, take a lot of skill from a lot of people to work on screen.

Now, The Rainmaker is being considered for a TV series, but Grisham doesn’t have any news on when filming will begin, if ever. He says it’s hard to make a good movie any more.  Good adult dramas are hard to find, he says. If it doesn’t have a costumed character in it, the story won’t find much support in present-day Hollywood. (via Prufrock News)

Non-fiction

The International Support for American Independence

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“Americans today,” Ferreiro says, “celebrate the July Fourth holiday under somewhat false pretences.” Yes, the colonial-wide support of Boston in the wake of the Coercive Acts (1774) was a factor in pushing British Americans toward independence. So was the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. So were the ideas of the founding fathers and the activism of ordinary colonists who destroyed the homes of tax collectors, tarred and feathered loyalists, and burned tea. Yet, as Ferreiro shows us, the men sitting at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia during the Second Continental Congress also realized that a declaration of independence was their only real chance of securing the foreign aid necessary to defeat the mighty British army and navy. As Virginian Richard Henry Lee put it in June 1776, “It’s not by choice then, but necessity that calls for independence, as the only means by which foreign alliance can be obtained.”

John Fea draws these ideas from Larrie D. Ferreiro’s Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It. He says French and Spanish diplomats wanted to push back Great Britain’s power (particularly the French after their defeat in the French and Indian War) and exploited ways to encourage our War for Independence. (via Prufrock News)

Fiction

Harry Potter Gets Native Tongue Translation

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J. K. Rowling set her school of student wizards and snake-devoted fiends in Scotland, somewhere north of Edinburgh, but her books have been published only in English and 79 other languages, not in Scots. For the 80th translation, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone will read like this:

Mr and Mrs Dursley, o nummer fower, Privet Loan, were prood tae say that they were gey normal, thank ye awfie muckle. They were the lest fowk ye wid jalouse wid be taigled up wi onythin unco or ferlie, because they jist widnae hae onythin tae dae wi joukery packery like yon.

 

Publishing, Reading

Is a Golden Age of Short Stories Around the Corner?

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According to Chris Power, a golden age of short stories has always been shrouded in a misty past and was on the verge of reemerging.

H.G. Wells thought the short story thrived in the 1890s. H. E. Bates said it was the 1920-30s. William Boyd said 1981 was a great year for the story form everyone secretly loved and read quietly in corner booths with their third beer.

While bitter experience has shown poetry exactly where it stands in the marketplace, and the novel has shrugged off multiple reports of its death and maintained pre-eminence, the short story is continually characterised as the neglected form that will be great again. The funny thing is, when you explore its history you find the perception of a distant golden age, an undistinguished present and a return to glory has always been around: the short story has a problem with reality.

(via Prufrock News)

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

25 Uses for Leftover Coffee

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I can’t entirely vouch for this list from Roasty Coffee, but I do compost, add grounds to select houseplants, and may have done one other thing I’m presently forgetting. Most of this list looks solid enough to try, unless you know recycled coffee will not be as good as fresh for your beverage, icing, whatever (I don’t want to think about the last one on the list–what in the world?).

Fiction, Reviews

Redshirts by John Scalzi

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via GIPHY Warning posted: “Watch for Exploding Rocks.”

It’s a common sci-fi truism that the guy wearing a red shirt on a new away team mission will be killed. Of the original Star Trek series, Wikipedia reports, “59 crew members killed in the series,” of which “43 (73%) were wearing red shirts.” John Scalzi asks, what if those were actual lives in a galaxy far, far away?

In his comic novel, Redshirts, Scalzi spins the tale of several minor crewmen on the Universal Union flagship Intrepid who start to ask why their teammates act strangely when senior officers are looking for away team members. One guy who has hidden himself in the bowels of the ship has a crazy theory, but when none of the sane theories pan out, you go with the crazy one.

It’s a funny book, but I didn’t start laughing until at least halfway through it, and the ending parts stretched my patience almost to the point of putting it down unfinished. There’s a point when that weird joke has been explained enough and going over it again will just kill it. Unfortunately, this joke gets run over a dozen times. But there are sweet moments in those ending parts that may be worth reading, if you’re into that sort of thing. Heh.

Uncategorized

The Only Right Feeling Is Guilt

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Writing from the British Isles, Brendan O’Neill describes an old man he remembers from his childhood neighborhood, one he says he in every neighborhood. One who is friendly and racist. What reminded him of this man is Lena Dunham’s support of an argument against sushi being prepared and served by white college kids. Because Asian food should not be made, served, or, I guess, eaten by non-Asian people due to the sin of cultural appropriation.

‘Barbecue is a form of cultural power’, says a writer for the Guardian (where else). It’s a tradition of ‘enslaved Africans’ and you insult those people when you peel the pork off a pig belly in some Hackney hangout. Eating, like everything else, is racism. Even tea is under attack. It’s a ‘boring, beige relic of our colonial past’, says Joel Golby, a writer for Vice, the bible of Shoreditch bores. You can’t even have a cuppa without being induced to feel colonial guilt.

(I wonder if Joel Golby is being honest there. He may just be griping over his own cup of tea.)

I was thinking that might leave us with a simple dietary rule: if your grandmother wouldn’t have made it, you can’t eat it. But even that doesn’t work. The sins of the past, if they cling to our food stuffs today, will never leave us.

There’s no logical end to this rationale. I saw Christophe Gans’s marvelous version of Beauty and the Beast this week. It’s a movie in the vein of Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, though a step more edgy. If we apply to it this cultural appropriation logic, Gans was right to make his movie, because he’s and his actors are French and the original fairy tale was French, whereas Disney is a bunch of cultural thieves for making what may be the best animated movie ever and their new live-action edition is like a sushi taco.

I have a volume of the works of Chekhov behind me. It was printed in the US in 1929 by Black’s Readers Service Company. If I enjoy reading this book, am I guilty of taking from Chekhov’s culture? Is the publisher? Is the translator?

O’Neill’s point is that the old racist in his neighborhood is now the new racist in the college commons, both telling him not to eat that junk from another culture and stick with the meals his mama makes. And the old racist may being living by his creed, but the new one doesn’t have the time to think about it.  (via Prufrock News)