Photo credit: Library of Congress.

Dale Nelson sends this link from Sacnoth’s Scriptorium, discussing J. R. R. Tolkien’s familiarity with, and appreciation of, Minnesota-born author Sinclair Lewis. “…Tolkien immediately segues into saying that he is now inclined to think that the word hobbit owes something to Lewis’s BABBITT.”

Minnesota — an inexhaustible font of inspiration.

Betsy Childs says Mark Bertrand (who does not go by Russell, if you happened to pick up that nasty rumor) doesn’t write Christian Fiction. “Bertrand’s allegiance is to his genre, characters, and plot, not to a fictional conversion narrative or religious epiphany. He’s just writing good crime fiction.”

That very author is taking issue with another author, Mark Twain, who charges Sir Walter Scott with laying the groundwork for the American Civil War. “… when Twain decided to take up the mantle of Cervantes and skewer medieval chivalry, it was a Connecticut Yankee and not a Southern Gentleman he had to send back in time. The Southerner, presumably, would have been right at home and all too pleased to leave things as he found them.”

That seems simplistic to me, but books do condition minds. Perhaps Twain’s argument is a good one to some extent. Many other ideas bore their fruit in this time as well. Scott didn’t dehumanize people, did he? That idea came from outside Ivanhoe.

E.B. White explains to his publisher why he wrote his book, Charlotte’s Web. In short, he likes animals. It’s amazing that he did something like what he describes in the book with a spider’s egg sac. He discovered it, watched it, and when he had to return to New York, he cut it all down and took it with him in a candy box. The baby spiders emerged and spread out on his NY apartment dresser!

Chekov writes to his brother, a drunk in 1886: “Smash your vodka bottle, lie down on the couch and pick up a book. You might even give Turgenev a try. You’ve never read him. You must swallow your pride. You’re no longer a child. You’ll be thirty soon. It’s high time!”

Jack Handey is the gifted comic writer behind SNL’s “Deep Thoughts,” which ran in the 90s. He appears to be the closest embodiment of the comic ideal most comedians have ever known. NY Times Writer Don Kois quotes Maria Semple, another comic writer, on what’s so great about Handey.

“There is purity to his comedy,” Semple told Kois. “His references are all grandmas and Martians and cowboys. It’s so completely free from topical references and pop culture that I feel like everyone who’s gonna make a Honey Boo Boo joke should do some penance and read Jack Handey.”

She said Handey writes real jokes, not just junk that “smells like a joke, but there’s no actual joke there.”

Handey had a license plate made for his famous SNL skit series: DEEPTHT. He would have it on his car today had his brother-in-law not asked him while he was mounting it, “Why does your license plate say ‘Deep Throat’?” Now it reads DPTHOTS. (via S.D. Smith)