Some provocative questions by Thomas Mallon on American writing and scholarship at The American Scholar. I’ll point out one of them.

How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web page?

Well said. We must learn to use our communication/entertainment equipment (PCs, PDAs, phones, TVs, and radios) instead of submitting to them. Do you do anything to help you think deeply or keep the demands of your electronics at bay?

“Among this host of would-be writers, the majority have no literary gift. This is not surprising in itself. A marked gift for anything is not very common. What is surprising is that such a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession should think of writing as the solution.” Read on. [by way of Books, Inq.]

The amusing Dr. Luther at Luther at the Movies was playing with an aristocratic title generator yesterday. I went over and checked it out, and frankly it didn’t amuse me much. Too easy.

But at that site I noticed a link to this site, where you can purchase an official Scottish lairdship. Or so they claim.

Don’t say I never did anything to improve your quality of life.

How am I today? Much better, thanks. I went to bed about 9:00 last night, and slept till 6:00 a.m., and I woke up much improved.

My working hypothesis on what happened to me is that my body was overwhelmed by the unprecedented amount of sound sleep it’s been getting lately. It had to shut down for a while to recalibrate.

I was listening to talk radio today in the car, and when I got where I was going I turned it off. I noticed immediately how much more pleasant the silence was than the preceding discussion had been.

That put me in mind of a saying attributed to Calvin Coolidge (which means somebody else probably actually said it): “I try never to say anything that won’t improve on silence.”

Those words have been guiding lights to me all my life.

You might not realize it, knowing me only from these posts, but I’m known as a man of few words. Partly because I grew up in a situation where saying the wrong thing was physically dangerous, I learned to keep my own counsel and save my fire for the moment when I can drop one pithy, memorable, and possibly funny statement into the mix.

Because of this policy I have a reputation for being smarter than I am.

I’m perfectly OK with that, by the way.

But I think it might be a help to me in writing too. Less isn’t always more, in spite of the cliché, but in modern writing it definitely helps.

An example comes from one of my favorite books, Heimskringla, (or The Sagas of the Kings of Norway) by the Icelander Snorri Sturlusson—the most exciting and readable history book written in the Middle Ages.

There’s a scene in the saga of King Harald Hardrada (who deserves to be much better known than he is). Harald has come into open conflict with one of his jarls (earls), a man named Haakon. who spared an enemy of Harald’s against his orders. Harald goes out to attack Haakon with an army. He defeats him, but it’s uncertain whether the jarl survived or not. As the king’s army is going home, a man suddenly leaps from the forest into the path, grabs the jarl’s captured standard, kills the man carrying it, and disappears into the trees again.

In the earlier versions of the saga that Snorri used for sources, Harald replies with a fairly long speech about how dangerous an enemy Haakon is, and how everyone should be on guard.

In Snorri’s version, Harald just says, “The jarl is alive. Bring me my armor.”

Think of the impression Clint Eastwood made by doing the Man With No Name westerns almost entirely without lines.

Writers do well to remember how powerful a few, well-chosen words can be.

Wow! It’s snowing hard out there.

Winter is alive. Bring me my sweater.

They’re playing Hangman over at Dictionary.com with an opportunity to win Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson’s Stranger Than Fiction.

Also on Dictionary.com, does this list of “Words of the Year 2006” tell us anything about our culture? The “Top 10 Looked-up Words” last year are love, affect, effect, good, beautiful, metaphor, integrity, experience, irony, and happy. From my scant research, integrity appears to be a perennially popular words for online dictionaries. I wonder if it and the words love, good, and beautiful reveal a yearning for meaning and purpose among internet users.

Maybe it just reveals a strain of schmaltz in me.

Lars Walker futures took a sudden surge upward today, still down from their 1996 highs but well above their recent bargain basement valuation.

Investor interest rose on news of Walker’s sale of an opinion piece to The American Spectator website. The essay, reported to be a humorous attack on the fashion habits of American seniors, is expected to appear on the magazine’s online service some time this week….

Thanks are due to Hunter Baker, a TAS writer and a frequent commenter here, for badgering me into trying something I’d never done before in a paying market, something I was quite certain I couldn’t carry off. Ben Stein writes for the Spectator site, for Pete’s sake. Who am I?

But man, acceptance feels good.

It’s really pathetic, you know, how much I require tangible validation, how needy I am for credentials. Paul Johnson, in his wicked, marvelous book Intellectuals, tells how Henrik Ibsen (one of my least favorite Norwegians, right down there with Vidkun L. J. Quisling) used to petition the Swedish crown (Sweden ruled Norway in those days) whenever he heard about a medal he hadn’t been awarded yet. And then he’d wear his whole collection on his suit—not just the ribbons but the actual “gongs”—whenever he went out, jingling down the street like a horse with bells on.

I understand why he did that. If I had a medal I’d be tempted to do the same thing. Because I feel inferior to every human being I’ve ever met, including criminals and the mentally disabled. Credentials give me something to wave—“See! See! I’m somebody too!”

Sad as it is, that’s how I am, and that makes today a pretty good day.

In other positive news, I found out Saturday that Sissel will be doing two concerts at the Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota in October. This means, it goes without saying, that I’ll have to make that ten-hour drive in the fall. It also means that I’ll have to try to do both that and the Norway trip I’m trying to arrange, which means I need more money, and I don’t think the Spectator gig will pay that well. Gotta get that renter in the spare room.

I learned about the Sissel concert in Hutchinson, Minnesota, where I drove for a Viking Age Society event. We did live steel in an empty store in a mall there. Every time I have a sword fight, I think it adds an hour to my life. Sold several copies of my books, too, in spite of the low turnout due to weather.

The weather sucked. The blizzard had ended, and the sky was clear, but there was a stiff wind out of—I actually don’t recall where it was coming from. But it was cold. And Highway 7 from Minneapolis to Hutchinson was coated with about a 75% covering of ice. The county, in its wisdom, had apparently elected not to waste any of the taxpayers’ money on fripperies like sand and salt.

So by the time I got to Hutchinson (Sissel playing on the CD player, of course), I was ready to hit something with a sword. Hard.

Technical note: This entire post was written in a reverse chronological order. That’s the kind of textural richness that makes my writing so much in demand among the more discerning of the online media outlets.

Mr. Bertrand blogs, “For all our speculative theorizing, precious few of us can make our theories work out on paper. The rhetoric of Christian fiction is a more exalted thing than the reality, in part because we understand our ambitions better than we do our abilities, but also because rhetoric is always more exalted than reality, no matter who’s talking.”

Read “The Whole Truth.“

Mr. Bertrand blogs, “For all our speculative theorizing, precious few of us can make our theories work out on paper. The rhetoric of Christian fiction is a more exalted thing than the reality, in part because we understand our ambitions better than we do our abilities, but also because rhetoric is always more exalted than reality, no matter who’s talking.”

Read “The Whole Truth.“

The New Yorker asks what phrase, thought, or bit of instruction isn’t quotable. “Whenever I take a plane, I am struck by ‘Secure your own mask before assisting others’ as advice with wide application.”

That’s sage advice, don’t you think? How about these potential quotations?

• “Walk. Don’t run.”
• “Do not microwave.”
• “Toughest on grease.”
• “No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.”

You know what an “earworm” is, don’t you? One of those tunes that get stuck in your head, and you can’t seem to not hear it.

On the Northern Alliance Radio Network show on Saturday (the second act, featuring Mitch Berg from Shot In the Dark and Captain Ed from Captain’s Quarters), they used up valuable radio time playing Frankie Valli’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice,” in its entirety. I’m still not sure why. I think it might have been an oblique comment on something Nancy Pelosi said.

In any case, it’s been my off-and-on earworm all week, and it’s a weird one. Strangely fascinating, though repellant, like seeing Mickey Mouse in a Tennessee Williams play, or watching a man dancing the tango in clown shoes.

I wrote the other day about the problem of villains in books (or any storytelling medium). Villains, being villainous, generally wish to dominate the world, and they definitely want to dominate your story.

The thing about villains is that they do stuff. They get out there and mix it up. Unencumbered by concern for the comfort and convenience of others, they disrupt lives and systems and whole nations in order to get the bright shiny things they covet.

Your hero, on the other hand, is probably heavily encumbered. He’s nice. He’s not going to break down anybody’s door to find out what nameless evil is looming in the shadows. He’s got a job (probably). He’s got responsibilities.

To put it bluntly, he’s kind of dull. He might be nice to have as a husband or a friend, but he’s not very interesting to watch.

This, I suspect, is why many popular heroes are a little nuts. Sherlock Holmes, besides his drug problem, is bipolar, antisocial and narcissistic. Hercule Poirot is narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive. James Bond is a charming, psychopathic satyr.

But you can only take that so far. Make your hero too proactive and he becomes a busybody or a bully.

So the usual solution is to get him into trouble. Bring the villain to him, let the villain do something he can’t overlook, then let them mix it up. Make the villain formidable, give the hero lots of failures and set-backs and close misses to overcome, and you’ve got a story.

But the whole thing’s unsatisfactory to me, as a Christian writer. I believe that good is not essentially quiescent (I’m not a Buddhist). My Lord was contemplative when it was appropriate, but could be extremely proactive when faced with evil. He even picked fights (rhetorically), and once used a whip on some guys (or at least their livestock).

When I created my favorite character of my own, Father Ailill, I had the idea of a mad Irishman coming to live among a lot of dull Norwegians. It might have been good if I’d done it that way, but I came to feel that I’d be able to write him better if he were more like me. So I made him an essentially brash and aggressive guy who’s been broken (I know all about being broken). This added a Flashmanesque element of cowardice (although Ailill is less cowardly than he thinks). I believe it worked all right (I’m not fishing for compliments, I’m just telling you how I dealt with the problem).

But I’d like to figure out a way to build more proactive heroes.

Shoot, I’d like to figure out a way to be a little proactive myself.

“Crowdsourcing” may be a good word for it, but it’s probably a bad idea. Penguin has launched a novel writing project in the style of Wikipedia, allowing anyone–anyone–to contribute and edit the novel.

“Day by day, night by night, fantasies and tales emerge. Collaboration is about to unveil and sparkle, witness the amazing power of a WikiNovel.”

Did the guys who came up with this idea ever spend time with writing stories as a group? It can be fun, but it can’t be serious unless everyone in the group is committed to serious writing. A million writers the world over won’t be serious. “Big Bababoobey Ooby flexed his pinky . . . “? Give it up.

In this post on their blog, the administrators describe their difficulties with vandalism.