Category Archives: Non-fiction

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Publishing

Digital Lending Library in Trouble with Publishers

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The Internet Archive may have lost its struggle with publishing companies over the “Fair Use” legality of its Open Library service. It argues that by purchasing print copies of books, it could legally digitize them and lend them on a one-to-one basis to readers around the world just like a regular library.

This week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling against The Internet Archive, saying its practice of controlled digital lending does not fall under an application of the Fair Use of copyrighted materials, according to Publishers Weekly.

“We conclude that IA’s use of the Works is not transformative,” the decision states. “Instead, IA’s digital books serve the same exact purpose as the originals: making authors’ works available to read.” The practice effectively substitutes the original work, which specifically runs contrary to the intent of Fair Use.

I can’t judge whether this is an appropriate application of the law, but it doesn’t look wrong from what I’ve read. The Internet has gotten out of hand in various ways. Maybe Open Library’s concept doesn’t work, but a tweaked version of it would.

In other news of publisher lawsuits, six of the big publishers along with the Author’s Guild are challenging Florida’s new law that requires schools to remove books with inappropriate sexual content. The suit specifically claims the term “pornographic” is undefined and takes no consideration of a book’s context.

Janie B. Cheaney gives a broad view of this and similar efforts to, as the Florida bill put it, “discontinue the use of any material the [district school] board does not allow a parent to read out loud.”

Scopes Monkey Trial: Historian Thomas Kidd reviews a new book on the Scopes Trial and doesn’t recommend it. “Author Brenda Wineapple calls America a ‘secular country founded on the freedom to worship.’ But various Christian demagogues in American history have tried to force people to worship God in a narrow-minded way, she warns.”

Reading: Brad East in “The Reading Lives of Pastors”— “It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. . . . Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?”

Ye Old Shoppe: Here’s a little bit on old business cards and store signage.

(Illustration by Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator)

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

Correcting Bad History is a Perpetual Task

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This week, Tucker Carlson once again gave us a sophomoric take on world events by producing an over two hour interview with a podcaster and historian who appears to emphasize minor views. He introduces the video this way: “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.”

I listened to portions of it. The two men pressed the point that you can’t ask certain questions about this part of history, can’t try to understand the Nazi’s point of view. Cooper says he thinks Churchill is the main villain of WWII, because Hitler’s goals were limited but he was pressed by Churchill’s lust for personal glory. He also painted the killing of Jews and other prisoners of war as a logistical problem. “We can’t keep feeding these people; wouldn’t it be more humane to kill them quickly?” he says, citing a German commander who suggested this.

Victor Davis Hanson calls him out. Hitler believed he would wipe out the Soviet Union and accomplish a few goals in the process.

True, some of the invading Wehrmacht officers may have been disturbed at the sheer mass of captives and Germans’ inability to offer even the bare essentials of humane treatment. But they quickly learned from Berlin’s doubling down on earlier eliminationist directives that they were not to worry about the millions of doomed Russian prisoners or the murders of Jews, given their deaths were consistent with prior Führer directives for the future resettling of western Russia. 

At Nuremberg and after the war, many veteran generals of the Eastern Front claimed they privately opposed Hitler’s orders of total war that entailed liquidation of communists and Jews and assumed the mass death of Russian POWs. But very few could prove that they had not received such orders or had bravely opposed their implementation.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reading

When cultural worlds pass in the hallway

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Still from the trailer for the movie, ‘Bhowani.” Public domain. At least I didn’t post another cover of the Tolkien book.

I’m sorry, I’m going to borrow material from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien again. Just one more anecdote, I promise you. I think it’s too good to keep to myself – but then I’m a pathetic name-dropper (when I have a name to drop, which is rarely).

Anyway, here’s an story Tolkien relates in a January 9, 1965 letter to his son Michael:

An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves…. It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: ‘it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before’. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude; and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her….

Robert Graves was, of course, the author of I, Claudius and various other stuff. Tolkien doesn’t seem to have respected him much, but I’ve omitted his personal comments.

Fiction, Non-fiction

A Bad Star Wars Series Bites the Dust

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We learned this week The Acolyte, a Stars Wars television production, would not get a season two. The Telegraph claimed this shows the world is “bored” of Star Wars, noting fans had turned out for lousy movies in the past despite their later criticism. But there’s a big difference in The Rise of Skywalker (2019) making double its production budget in the US/Canada market and The Acolyte being a show fans refused to watch (if they had Disney+ subscriptions). That difference would be media context.

The Last Jedi (2017) was bad enough of a movie that I didn’t watch The Rise of Skywalker, but plenty of people did. It cost hundreds of thousands more to make and also earned double that in the US/Canada market. Fans hadn’t grown jaded, tired, wary–what’s the right word?–afraid that Disney-owned LucasFilms would deliver a sorry story. They learned to fear through years of disappointment with most of the TV series since. The Mandalorian began well-received, but someone took over season three and tanked it. Fans were hopeful for the 2022 series on Obi-Wan Kenobi and they were disappointed. (Earlier this year, news of the original concept came out and you have to wonder why such a good idea was ruined.) The Book of Boba Fett (2021) was dull. Ahsoka (2023) was poorly written. So it’s easy to understand how interested viewers may have little enthusiasm for The Acolyte before hearing reviews. They wouldn’t find their enthusiasm after hearing it was a such a bad show.

Now, some people are worried the show will be pulled from Disney+ all together.

In other news …

Non-fiction recs: Historian Thomas Kidd has top non-fiction and history books of the twenty-first century. Here’s just one interesting title.

Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, by Timothy Larsen. “Those who lose their faith (then and now) get the headlines, but Larsen delightfully shows how common it was for English skeptics and freethinkers to come to orthodox Christian faith.”

Poetry: War poetry ‘Some Could, Some Could Not, Shake Off Misery’

Leaf art: Take a minute to browse the images this artist shares of his paper cutting designs applied to leaves. Lito’s (リト) work is incredible.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reading

Odd bits from Tolkien

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And it’s happy Friday to you again, dear Brandywinians. I hope my repeated posts about The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien this week  haven’t bored you – I know Tolkien himself isn’t boring, but my own penchant for finding parallels to my work might easily have become tedious.

As an antidote, I’ll just finish the week out with a few choice quotations from some of the letters:

In reference to a pair of reviews of The Hobbit by C. S. Lewis, published in 1937:

Also I must respect his opinion, as I believed him to be the best living critic until he turned his attention to me, and no degree of friendship would make him say what he does not mean: he is the most uncompromisingly honest man I have met….

From the same letter:

The presence (even if only on the borders) of the terrible is, I believe, what gives this imagined world its verisimilitude. A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.

From 1941:

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.

1943:

Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men.

1944:

I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians.

1944:

The future is impenetrable especially to the wise; for what is really important is always hid from contemporaries, and the seeds of what is to be are quietly germinating in the dark in some forgotten corner….

1944:

…Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.

I think these will do for tonight. Have a blessed weekend!

Non-fiction, Reviews

Review at last: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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In no circumstances will I agree to being photographed again for such a purpose. I regard all such intrusions into my privacy as an impertinence, and I can no longer afford the time for it. The irritation it causes me spreads its influence over a far greater time than the actual intrusion occupies.

I have finished, at last, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. (I recommend this revised and expanded edition, not the one I read – which is marred by numerous typographical errors and wrongly hyperlinked notes. I found the book, nonetheless, informational, fascinating, and (occasionally) moving.

The main impression it leaves me with, though (I’m afraid), is that (having read this book as well as C. S. Lewis’ complete correspondence) all in all, I’d rather have spent time with “Jack” Lewis than with Tolkien. Lewis was – if only through self-discipline – a more easygoing man, more inclined to suffer fools (like me). This was indeed one of Tolkien’s criticisms of his friend – Lewis was always letting people take advantage of him.

Tolkien, on the other hand, seems to have been rather tetchy. He was thin-skinned and protective of his turf. I get the impression that he nursed a grudge all his life against the Protestants around him, despite having many Protestant friends. He blamed their persecutions, in part, for the early death of his mother, an RC convert. He resented being made to feel like an outsider in his own, beloved country.

Of course, knowing a man’s letters is different from knowing the man. Much of Tolkien’s correspondence deals with business – teaching at Oxford and communicating with his publishers. He was forever behind in his work – he spent decades finishing The Lord of the Rings, and further decades trying to put the Silmarillion in shape, promising his publisher all the way that he’d get back to them as soon as he was finished with grading essays or handling domestic emergencies. (The Silmarillion was finally published after his death.) No doubt the prolonged stress contributed to his occasional short temper.

I was, of course, intrigued by what we learn here of his relations with the other Inklings. I was especially surprised by his early references to Charles Williams, which were more positive than I’d expected. I’d understood that Tolkien mistrusted Williams, but he seems to have gotten along well with him. But he explains this in a long 1965 letter:

I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. whom I met in his company when, owing to the War, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels.

He goes on to say of “Jack” himself:

But Lewis was a very impressionable man, and this was abetted by his great generosity and capacity for friendship. The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien is well worth reading for any fan of The Lord of the Rings. It will take some time getting through it, but it’s worth it.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Athelstan,’ by Tom Holland

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By the time of Athelstan’s consecration, the Thames estuary, no longer churned by the oars of Viking dragon ships, had become a scene of prosperity and peace. Boats crammed the wharfs built by Alfred within the ancient walls of London; fields stretched unburnt down to the banks of the river as it snaked inland; Kingston, set amid the colours of ripening harvest, provided a fit stage for the awesome ritual about to unfold.

King Athelstan (called “Athelstan the Mighty” in the sagas), is an interesting and enigmatic Anglo-Saxon king. I remember an entry about Alfred the Great in a kids’ encyclopedia from my childhood. It said that Alfred was the only Anglo-Saxon king remembered as “the Great.” But Athelstan certainly might have shared the cognomen – he was the first king to rule a united realm called “England,” embracing all the English speaking sub-kingdoms. And he won a victory over the Vikings (and the Scots) at Brunanburh which equaled or surpassed Alfred’s triumph at Ethandun.

Tom Holland’s Athelstan is part of the Penguin Monarchs series. It’s a short, brisk book for the non-specialist, but the author brings to it scholarship, literary skill, and psychological insight. The big problem with Athelstan’s story is that (although he was as keen on learning and record-keeping as his grandfather Alfred) relatively little documentary evidence remains to us from his reign. Historical focus changed after the Norman conquest, and much was lost.

So historians have to do what they can with the sparse surviving records, supplemented by outside reports (including, with caution, the Icelandic sagas), archaeology, and informed speculation. Tom Holland provides an excellent introduction here.

Athelstan was a highly readable book, and I enjoyed it. It increased my admiration for this undeservedly obscure historical figure.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

The Scotch-Irish Led the Colonies to Freedom

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While Lars is off celebrating the history of one people, let me offer you some history of another people. One tenth of American colonists were from Scottish families who had moved to northern Ireland as pioneer farmers under the British Crown, an effort to quell “the wild Irish.” That effort worked, and Scottish Presbyterians found a measure of freedom and productivity they enjoyed. Then, as Britain has a tendency to do, the ruling class ruined it by raising taxes and trying to quell the Irish even more. The pioneer farmers felt the pressure from these measures and came to America, a place that many were told was free and like paradise.

They came to Pennsylvania first and later to all of the colonies, coloring the culture everywhere. Dr. James G. Leyburn writes, “In many ways the Scotch-Irish pioneers were indeed an augury of Americans-to-be. They were probably the first settlers to identify themselves as Americans—not as Pennsylvanians or Virginians” or any ethnic group. As such, these were colonists most vigorously in favor of rebelling against the British Crown.

“A Hessian captain wrote in 1778, ‘Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion.’ King George was reported to have characterized the Revolution as ‘a Presbyterian war’ …” Leyburn says. These British officials saw the American Revolution as a Scottish Presbyterian uprising, which is not one of many characterizations of it, according to Leyburn. No other group of immigrants was accused of fueling the war like these Ulstermen.

Maybe these characterizations were made because it put the American conflict in familiar British terms. England had wrestled against Scottish and Irish independence for generations. Scottish Presbyterians, in particular, had been a torn beneath the crown for a long time because they wouldn’t conform to Anglican unification efforts.

But maybe Leyburn’s depiction of Scotch-Irish influence in America is accurate. He says, “Their daily experience of living on the outer fringe of settlement, of making small farms in the forests, of facing the danger of Indian attack and fighting back, called for qualities of self-reliance, ingenuity, and improvisation that Americans have ranked high as virtues. They were inaugurators of the heroic myth of the winning of the West that was to dominate our nineteenth century history.” They blended with another immigrants, pushing everyone into losing their immigrant labels and becoming simply American. Those labels would return 50-100 years later as people tried to distinguish themselves from new immigrants.

There’s a lot more to the story, which you can read in this American Heritage article taken from Leyburn’s book on the topic.

In other news . . .

Movie Adaptations: Joel Miller talks about The Children of Men as a book and a movie. “We sometimes forget how radically books and movies differ as media. Jumping from one to the other requires significant adjustment. Narration and character development must change, same with the amount of material capable of inclusion.”

YouTube Reaction: How much of YouTube content is reacting to other YouTube content, generating a new form of reality show? Call me Chato, a former TV exec, talks about it.

Make your own art: How to draw a sunset by Matthew Matthysen

Non-fiction, Uncategorized

What To Do with a Dragon Hoard?

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With all the dragons in new fantasy stories today, I hope young readers haven’t been shielded from their traditional setting. The picture of a dragon hoarding treasure under a mountain is a classic depiction of greed.

The beast is at the top of the food chain. It can destroy whole kingdoms if it wanted to. If two dragons were to fight each other, the disaster to their field of battle would be apocalyptic. But a defining quality of a dragon is its hoard. Why does it sleep on a mountain of gold? Why did Smaug care that Bilbo took a cup, and how could he have noticed one cup missing from his trove of treasure? Because that’s what dragons are about. They want all the wealth for themselves, and they are powerful and conceited enough to refuse to allow anyone to slight them.

I was thinking this morning about how some of us tend to use what we have and some of us tend to keep it unused. I’m a keeper. I’ve had my favorite t-shirt for over 20 years because I don’t wear it often. When people ask, “What would you do if we gave you $1000 today,” my first thought is to put it in the bank for the future. Of course, there will be a time to use it, but not today, because if I use it now, I may not have it tomorrow.

I wonder if the idea of a dragon hoard would apply well to those of us who keep to ourselves and take comfort in what we could do tomorrow if the need arose. Maybe all we’re doing is holding on to our wealth, not out of greed but out of pride, fear, and personal comfort.

What else do we have today?

Moon Caves: In the Sea of Tranquility or Mare Tranquillitatis, there’s a 200-foot pit, one of many spotted by satellites orbiting the Moon. Scientists studying the photographs have reason to believe this pit has a cave. Why we aren’t sending people to the Moon by now is likely a political question. The current NASA plan appears to be sending a team around the Moon.

In related news, Space X has been sending astronauts to the International Space Station for a few years. They have a team, Crew-8, at the station now and will send Crew-9 in mid-August.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry

Travels to Worlds Unknown (Maybe Fictious)

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It’s been a full week and will continue to be so for rest of the month. I feel a deadline pressing upon me, so let me move quickly to these links.

Poetry: “While Observing A Summer Storm” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. “these I take as pathfinders and guides”

Art: Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) painted moody mythological scenes, like Isle of the Dead (which you’ve likely seen whether you knew what it was).

Chariots of Fire: The story of Eric Liddell’s race in the classic movie Chariots of Fire took place at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. The Scottish runner won gold in the 400-meter, breaking Olympic and world records with 47.6 seconds. World’s Paul Butler talked about it on Friday’s podcast of The World and Everything in It. I listened to a tape of the movie soundtrack during my fruitful, cassette-tape-buying years. Here’s a nice tribute to the movie and music.

The Facts Fudged: Bill Steigerwald talks about the work he put into his book dividing fact from fiction in John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. “Taking on the great Steinbeck and challenging the existing narrative about his iconic book was no big deal. I was used to being an outsider, whether it was when covering a KKK cross-burning or attending a conference of public transit officials. The process of reporting and researching Steinbeck’s travels and book was no different from what I had done in a hundred big Sunday newspaper features, just a lot bigger and on my own dime.”

Photo: Elks Lodge, Tacoma, Washington. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.