Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

The Vietnamese Love Edgar Allan Poe

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A hundred years ago in Vietnam, when the French controlled their education, Edgar Allan Poe was believed to be “America’s literary giant.” They were familiar with eerie stories of supernatural beings, which a long-standing Chinese genre gave them, so discovering Poe was like grandkids discovering Mam-ma.

“Poe’s name evoked liberation of the mind, and he was praised as someone who had ascended from the mundane by the power of imagination,” Nguyễn Bình writes for Literary Hub, offering several examples of Poe’s influence on the nation’s literature.

In 1937, author Thế Lữ began writing detective fiction. “In the story “Những nét chữ” (Letter Strokes), [Hanoi-based hero] Lê Phong told the Watson-like narrator: ‘The stuff about reading people’s thoughts from their faces like Edgar Poe and Conan Doyle said… I’m only more convinced that they’re true. Because I just did so.'” (via Prufrock)

A couple more links for today.

Ted Gioia says the big guys are out to get independent creators. For example, Apple is squeezing Patreon. Google says it can’t find select websites. It’s ugly. Gioia writes, “I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.”

And is this the best sci-fi classic most fans have missed? “Though it routinely ends up on best-of-all-time lists, somehow, the 1974 science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye never actually seems to get read.” A quick glance at the first of 2200 reviews on Goodreads suggests the book hasn’t aged well.

Photo: Dinneen Standard station, Cheyenne, Wyoming. (John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Dale Nelson, part 2

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The Fellowship & Fairydust blog has posted the second part of its interview with our friend Dale Nelson. This portion concentrates on his work on Inklings scholarship:

So, much that keeps me interested in the Inklings is not just academic curiosity or opportunism but a concern for the moral imagination incarnated in our lives and homes; and these books are delightful to read. At the moment I’m reading The Lord of the Rings for the 14th time.

Read the whole thing here.

Authors, Religion

‘The Thurber Carnival,’ by James Thurber

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, Columbus won out, as state capital, by only one vote over Lancaster, and ever since then has had the hallucination that it is being followed, a curious municipal state of mind which affects, in some way or other, all those who live there.

I had read bits of it already. I remember finding “The Night the Bed Fell On Father” hilarious when I was a boy. So I looked forward to reading A Thurber Carnival.

To be honest, I found it less funny, and more troubling, than I expected.

James Thurber is a classic American humorist, one of the founding fathers of The New Yorker. Some of his pieces, especially the story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” have become classics. Even legends.

As I worked my way through this collection of essays, stories, and cartoons, I was surprised how dark I found it. Not overtly – there was no obvious self-pity on display here. But I thought I felt the presence of a bitter spirit behind it all.

James Thurber, born in Columbus, Ohio, suffered the loss of an eye in a game of William Tell as a small boy. For the rest of his life, he lived with the fear – then the certainty – that the other eye was going to fail. He lost his sight entirely in the end, a terrible fate for a man of letters. For this reader, that unspoken fear seemed to form a background to everything. Here is not the lightness of Robert Benchley. Here is a humorist cracking wise on the scaffold.

Or so it seemed to me.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m not bright enough to appreciate the sophisticated gags.

Anyway, it’s a classic. You should probably read it. You might enjoy it more than I did.

I should perhaps warn that there’s some casual racism, characteristic of the time but not vicious, in descriptions of black people.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

A friend interviewed

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Dale Nelson, retired professor of English at Mayville State University, North Dakota, is a good friend of mine and one of the more frequent commenters on this blog. He is also a presence in the world of Inklings and fantastic fiction scholarship.

Linked here is a recent interview he gave to the Fellowship & Fairydust web site. The interview actually comes in two parts. This is the first, and deals mainly with horror literature.

A second segment, more about the Inklings, is coming soon. I’ll post that too.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry

Have We Forgotten Too Much?

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Peter Hitchens blogged about memory a couple months ago, noting Orwell’s 1984 naturally, pointing out “Orwell’s description of the sort of things people actually do remember: ‘A million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago.'”

He spent half of the post on the former Communist novelist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). He said at one point everyone with a decent education on world affairs knew about Koestler and the novel Darkness at Noon. “It was perhaps the most devastating literary blow ever aimed at Communist tyranny,” Hitchens said. Important because it exposed truths the world didn’t want to believe. In WWII, Stalin joined the Allied forces, and people wanted to forget any crimes he may have committed before that. Others wanted to believe Marxism was a force for good in the world, so they waved away evidence to the contrary.

“For a large part of my life,” Hitchens wrote, “this potent political novel, and its accompanying volume Scum of the Earth were vital parts of human knowledge and understanding.” Those who had read them were “the undeceived, and the hard-to-deceive.” Where are those people now?

“What if the past has already disappeared?”

Rings of Power: In far more trivial news, reviewer Erik Kain argues that defending Amazon’s ‘Rings Of Power’ by claiming Tolkien had no canon “would make Sauron proud.” A professor with ties to the show has said, “Tolkien’s ideas were ever evolving,” meaning all of his notes and drafts demonstrate none of his ideas, even the published ones, are fixed.

Poetry: To end on cheerful note, read this delightfully modern love poem by Daniel Brown. Here are the first three lines.

A first “I love you” still implies the start 
Of serious, but we moderns also have 
Recourse to a preliminary move; ...

Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Douthat Novel in Serial and Pranking Academic Journals

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Fantasy: Ross Douthat has written a fantasy novel and is releasing it as a serial via Substack. Author Frederick Gero Heimbach reports Douthat shopped his novel around but no traditional publisher would take it. You can start that novel, The Falcon’s Children, here. Heimbach also laments that sci-fi author Tim Powers no longer has a publisher.

Quotations: Here’s a great example of how asking the simple question, “Who said that?” or “Who was the first to say that?” can lead to nowhere interesting. Consider the origin of this statement: “Thinking is the hardest work many people ever have to do, and they don’t like to do any more of it than they can help.”

Quote Investigator also points out that AI programs can miss what doesn’t seem possible to miss, as in a line in an Edgar Allen Poe story.

Pranking Academic Journals: I remember the journal article Boghossian refers to as the one that busted them (the dog park article) and I thought I blogged about it at the time, but perhaps I didn’t. I tend to shy away from topics even loosely related to sex. In this video from Dad Saves America, Boghossian discusses his attempt to expose peer-reviewed journals that are willing to publish any nonsense that falls within accepted dogma. It’s incredible.

Authors, Bookselling, Publishing

‘Hailstone Mountain’ in Paperback

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This is to announce the momentous (or mountainous) news that my novel Hailstone Mountain is at last available in corporeal, paperback form.

I’m working at getting all my books incarnated, but this is a start.

Authors

A Touching Tribute to an Intellectual Woman

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Author and economist Glenn Loury lost his wife, Dr. Linda Datcher Loury, in September 2011. “Around this time every year, I reflect on how lucky I was to know her at all,” he says. He wrote this tribute for a memorial service in November of that year.

You see, I suffered from the theorists’ disease of glossing too quickly over the facts in my rush to find an elegant, abstract formulation of some issue. “An idea so beautiful it must be true,” was my attitude. Linda, with feet planted firmly on the ground, would invariably say something like, “How could you possibly know that?”; “What evidence is there for this assumption?”; “How would you test that implication?”; “How could we, even in principle, take this to the data?” She helped keep me grounded. She had terrifically good commonsense. In matters of economic research, Linda was a wise woman.

Loury published a memoir earlier this year, entitled, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. Deseret News called it a book “about telling the truth, not just to readers, but to himself.“

Authors

The double roots of a one-legged pirate

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Captain Kidd, by Howard Pyle.

Aye, it be Talk Like a Pirate Day, ye scurvy lubbers! It beseems me we’ve been lax in its observation in the last few years, but ye can lay to it I’ll show proper reverence today. Albeit, by thunder, I refuses to say “Argh!”

Belay that; I just did.

All right, enough of that. Pirates historically were not all that romantic, except in the abstract – the idea of escaping from the tedium and brutality of merchant sailing into a more-or-less democratic and potentially profitable criminal enterprise. They were cruel men, but they lived in a cruel age. Still, I’ve always disliked them. I root for the pirate hunters. Let ʾem swing, says I.

The most famous literary pirate of all, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver, was inspired, according to my reading, by two different men, one of them an actual pirate. (I’ve written about this here before, but I’m confident you’ve forgotten.)

In August of 1720, an East India Company ship called Cassandra, under the command of Captain James Macrae, encountered two pirate vessels off Johanna Island near Madagascar. These ships were commanded by Edward England and John Taylor. The pirates captured Macrae’s ship after a long battle, and Macrae and some of his men fled ashore, where they hid for ten days. Then Macrae, hoping the pirates’ blood-lust had ebbed, approached them to try to negotiate the recovery of his vessel and goods. The pirates responded by debating whether to kill him or not.

Fortunately for Macrae, he was a good captain and several of the pirates had served with him before. Suddenly a heavily bearded, one-legged pirate, “swearing like a parrot,” his belt stuffed with pistols, stomped up to the deck, took Macrae by the hand, and said he was very glad to see him again. “Shew me the man that offers to hurt Captain Macrae,” he said, “and I’ll stand to him, for an honester fellow I never sailed with.”

The pirates let him and his crew go in a secondary vessel with half their cargo. They made it to India, starving but alive. (Source: The Pirates, by Douglas Botting, pp. 61-63, c. 1978, Time-Life Books.)

A century later, R. L. Stevenson would make that rescuer one of his models for Long John Silver.

But there was another model, according to Stevenson himself. This was a personal friend of his, William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903), an English poet, writer, critic and editor. He is most famous for the poem “Invictus,” which I dislike as a Christian and will not reproduce here.

Henley had a reputation as a brave and honorable man. He suffered from tuberculosis of the bone, which forced the amputation of his left leg below the knee in 1868-69. Although he suffered from the effects of his illness all his life, he played the staunch, cheerful Englishman to the hilt, and others found him an inspiration. Stevenson stated in a letter to Henley that he had inspired the Silver character.

As a sideline, Henley’s daughter Margaret was the inspiration for Wendy in J. M. Barrie’s play, Peter Pan.

(Source: Wikipedia, of course.)

Authors, Music, Religion

This is my Father’s world, no matter what Weldon thought

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I thought, since it’s Friday, I’d post some music consistent with my overheated musings in yesterday’s post. So here’s a lovely arrangement of “This Is My Father’s World,” one of my old favorite hymns. It was originally published in 1901, with lyrics by Rev. Maltbie D. Babcock (1858-1901), a sadly short-lived Presbyterian pastor who published several popular hymns. The tune is Terra Beata, based on an English folk song. (And I’m pretty sure they cribbed the first line for the Shire theme in the Lord of the Rings movies.)

Here’s an interesting item from the latest issue of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. It’s all the better for being written by our good friend Dale Nelson:

Pages 22 and 23 feature Dale’s article on Thomas Dewar Weldon (1896-1958), with whom Lewis had a variable relationship. They came to Oxford at the same time, and were good friends for a while. But even before he stopped being an atheist, Lewis grew weary of Weldon’s relentless, materialist cynicism. As a tutor in Moral Philosophy his teaching method (according to R. W. Johnson’s book, Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age) was to first demolish his students’ conventional beliefs, and then to demolish whatever new beliefs they constructed, until they were left “in a state of free-floating agnostic cleverness.”

 Weldon declared, in a 1944 lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, near Oxford, that the carpet bombing of German cities was justified because it would shorten the war and save lives. Lewis was already on the record, along with a number of Anglican clergy, as rejecting that argument categorically.

Weldon was (according to George Sayer) that “hardest-boiled atheist” who remarked to Lewis in his rooms one day that the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ was remarkably good, saying, “Rum thing,” as Lewis recalled in Surprised By Joy.

Weldon was also the model for the Dick Devine, the cynical, flippant character who’s so annoying in Out of the Silent Planet and (promoted to the title, Lord Feverstone) in That Hideous Strength.