The Thinklings have a good, long interview with the author of The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game and The Devil Is a Gentleman. In the second book, Hallman says he toured the religions of the world with William James as a type of guide. “It’s kind of a revisitation of the basic thinking of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience,” he says. Is chess a religion? Find out in this interview.
Category Archives: Authors
Norwegian Wins World’s Largest Literary Prize
From the AP–“Norwegian author Per Petterson won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award on Thursday for his novel, Out Stealing Horses, which charts how a child’s death and a family breakdown end a teenager’s innocence and haunt him into old age.” Out Stealing Horses is favorably reviewed here by The Complete Review.
In which I flatter myself by comparison to a much better writer
C. S. Lewis, in the introduction to the 1961 edition of The Screwtape Letters, tells of one subscriber to the Manchester Guardian, which originally published the series, who canceled his subscription because “much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical.”
Today I got an e-mail from someone who read my latest American Spectator Online article. In the interest of objectivity, I shall quote a portion of his opening paragraph unedited:
You are the most out-of-touch, backwards-thinking, and plain ignorant author I have read on the subject of Islam. Your blatant, and apparently deliberate, disregard for the abhorrent inequalities and lack of human rights inherent to Islam is despicable.
He goes on to castigate me for my defense of Islamic culture.
Now this certainly doesn’t prove…
a) that I’m as good an author as Lewis, or
b) that my correspondent is as dense as the Guardian subscriber.
It’s possible, for instance, that I’m just a bad parodist, and that thousands of readers came away with the very same impression, but weren’t exercised enough to write to me.
And there’s always the possibility that my reader’s letter was itself parody, and that I didn’t get it.
Hey, Boy, You Want Danger?
Author Max Elliot Anderson is hoping the buzz over The Dangerous Book for Boys will stir up sales for his young adult novels. “Guys want to get right to the adventure and action,” he says in a press release today. He appears to publish his own books and blogs at Books for Boys.
“We Need to Talk about Structural Things”
From a UK Times interview with Orange prize (fiction) winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
Perhaps because she is young, beautiful and internationally successful, [Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie] has almost a paradoxical relish in hailing from a global underdog: “When you come from Nigeria, which doesn’t have very much power, you can better examine the dynamics of raw power.”
Something she does not relish, however, is the overriding view of Africa as a doomed basket case: “There is a famous saying, ‘Africa is my brother, but he is my junior brother’, which comes from a 19th-century missionary in the Congo. It really sums up the way that people look at Africa today.
. . . Nobody helps Africa by adopting its children. We need to talk about structural things like loans and trade. I just wish I wasn’t from a continent about which everyone has to feel sorry.”
Adichie is indignant about the type of news coverage that Africa usually ends up with: “On TV you never see Africans involved in helping Africa. It’s always some kind westerner. If I got my information only from American TV, I would think Africans were a bunch of stupid idiots.”
Her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, tells the story of two sisters living through a Nigerian civil war. (via Books, Inq.)
Susan Wise Bauer at BookExpo
Here’s a brief report with photos of BookExpoAmerica from the author of some great history books.
Letting Lewis be interesting in my place
Pretty good weekend. My big project Saturday was to take a plane to the tops of a couple doors. The bedroom doors in my house haven’t closed properly since I’ve been here. I suspect it has to do with their being painted at some time in the past, while most of the woodwork in the place is original finish (and beautiful). I, being me, was willing to live with it, but my renter asked to get it fixed, and I could hardly deny the justice of that request. It was a little more work than I expected, and I never got his door completely right. I’ll have to take it off the hinges to do that. Maybe one day. For now, both doors will close and latch, which is a major improvement.
Sunday was a Viking occasion, at the annual Danish Day at Danebo Hall in Minneapolis. Because of weather we had to set up inside the building, which cramped our style a bit. Our combat was a scheduled portion of the program, so we only got one set of three fights in (it was just Ragnar and me, and I got one kill, which is as good as it gets for me). I sold a total of four books, two of them to members of our own group.
I also finished The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III, another accomplishment not to be sneezed at, even in allergy season. Here’s a few more excerpts, which attentive readers will recognize as a pretty good sign that I’m in a vegetative mental state today:
From a letter to Joan Lancaster, Aug. 11, 1959:
I’m all for the Gauls myself and I hate all conquerors. But I never knew a woman who was not all for Caesar—just as they were in his life-time.
From a letter to Father Richard Ginder, Aug. 18, 1960:
I wonder do we blame T.V. and the Comics too much? Was not a certain sort of boy in a certain sort of home wasting his time just as badly in other ways before they were invented? It annoys me when parents who read nothing but the newspapers themselves—i.e. nothing but lies, libels, poppycock, propaganda, and pornography—complain of their children reading the Comics! Upon my soul I think the children’s diet is healthier than their parents’.
From a letter to Mrs. R. E. Herman, Oct. 10, 1960:
The queer thing is that this horror of the [mentally] deficient is quite modern. Our ancestors don’t seem to have felt it at all. On this, as on many other subjects, we have grown odiously and wickedly ‘refined’.
From a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, July 31, 1962:
Yes, it is strange that anyone should dislike cats. But cats themselves are the worst offenders in this respect. They very seldom seem to like one another.
That’s all for tonight. Now scroll down and watch the Sissel clip again.
Ray Bradbury Says, It Wasn’t About Censorship
Ray Bradbury tells LA Weekly that many critics have missed the point of his book:
Fahrenheit 451 is not, [Bradbury] says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands. . . . Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
As a follow-up, Frank makes a couple points on this conversation.
O frabjous day!
This has been a good day. I’ll say it openly, knowing it’s entirely contrary to my idiom, and throwing myself open completely to all kinds of joshing from commenters.
The air conditioning guy came today to do the warranty work. I had to take the afternoon off work to be here.
The first pleasant surprise was that, instead of just replacing the condenser (as I’m sure the woman on the phone said) he replaced the whole unit.
The second pleasant surprise was that he asked for no more than the regular deductible in payment. The woman on the phone had said there’d be extra charges for parts.
Oh, I expect the other shoe will drop in a couple days, and some kind of horrendous bill will hit me like a cosh to the back of the head, but for today life is good.
More snippets from The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III:
From a letter to Mary Van Deusen, July 7, 1955:
Don’t let anyone bully you into avoiding sentences with a preposition at the end! It’s an arbitrary rule that most great writers took no notice of. The Authorized Version and E. Burke thought a preposition a very good word to end with. So there!
From a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, Sept. 8, 1956:
…(that journalists can be saved is a doctrine, if not contrary to, yet certainly above, reason!).
From a letter to Martin Kilmer, Jan. 22, 1957
The (Narnia) books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get into Aslan’s country in the end—in her own way.
From a letter to Clyde S. Kilby, Feb. 10, 1957:
The children (in Till We Have Faces) made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do.
From a letter to Francis Warner, July 15, 1959:
So many people, when they begin ‘research’, lose all desire, and presently all power, of writing clear, sharp, and unambiguous English. Hold onto your finite transitive verb, your concrete nouns, and the muscles of language (but, through, for, because etc.).
A good weekend to all of you.
Lewis-ly translated
It isn’t every day I get a cartoon dedicated to me. Thanks, Phil.
Now try and get your comment utility fixed.
Haven’t live-blogged The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III, for a few days. I’m still at it. I’ve gotten through Lewis’ death, thinking dark thoughts of mortality, and now I’m in the resurrection land of the Supplement section, where Hooper prints some letters he left out of the earlier volumes, then decided he wanted to include after all. After this comes the “Great War” supplement, in which all Lewis’ letters to Owen Barfield, arguing about Theosophy, are gathered in one place.
Anyway, here are a few excerpts that interested and/or amused me:
From a letter to Mary Van Deusen, Oct. 3, 1953:
It is hard, when difficulties arise to know whether one is meant to overcome them or whether they are signs that one is on the wrong track.
From a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, Jan. 30, 1954:
The trouble with Thackeray, is that… all his ‘good’ people are not only simple, but simpletons. That is a subtle poison wh. comes in with the Renaissance: the Machiavellian (intelligent) villain presently producing the idiot hero. The Middle Ages didn’t make Herod clever and knew the devil was an ass. There is really an un-faith about Thackeray’s ethics…. No conception that the purification of the will… leads to the enlightenment of the intelligence.
From a letter to Katharine Farrer, Feb. 3, 1954:
The bearings of this are wide, as you’ll see if you reflect on the difference between drawing a nude and verbally describing it, or the impossibility of mentioning Cheko-Slovakia (is that how you spell it) at the apex of a lyric however deeply one may feel about that country.
From a letter to Chad Walsh, Dec. 3, 1955:
I’ve often thought that if I wrote a play I’d do it in verse but type it as prose. In the present state of the human ear no publisher, manager, actor, or audience wd. recognize it, not even if it was in heroic couplets or the metre of Hiawatha.
One thing that constantly exercises my limited powers of charity throughout these books is the fact that Lewis consistently spells “all right,” “alright.” I personally consider “alright” an atrocity against the English language. However, as one quickly learns in reading the letters, Lewis wasn’t a very good speller.
In relation to that, it’s often been said that Lewis had a photographic memory. Someone who knew him wrote somewhere (I can’t find it; I can never find the Lewis reference I want. No photographic memory here) that if you named a page number from any book Lewis had ever read, he could recite the contents of that page verbatim for you. This would seem to be an exaggeration. He uses many quotations in the letters, and the notes show that they’re only approximately correct, like his spelling. His memory was obviously phenomenal, but it wasn’t exact.