Photo: New York Public Library Archives



Yesterday I failed to note the birthday of G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936). Here’s a snippet from All Things Considered:

[The collectivist] knows it would be cheaper if a number of us ate at the same time, so as to use the same table. So it would. It would also be cheaper if a number of us slept at different times, so as to use the same pair of trousers. But the question is not how cheap we are buying a thing, but what are we buying? It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a slave.

Author and artist Maurice Sendak, who narrates his own book in the video below, died today at age 83. In this interview from 2006, he recalls his father telling stories.

[Sendak] says he was greatly influenced by his father, who told the sickly child stories when he was bedridden. They weren’t pretty stories — they were real-life and vividly imagined tales from his father’s life as a boy living in a little Jewish shtetl in Poland. “What I liked about his stories … they were real and true, and he could tell us them without cleaning them up.”

Sendak says he closely identified with children who died in the holocaust, because if his parents hadn’t immigrated to the United States from Poland, he would have been one of those children. “‘I always felt it was a total miracle that I had been born here.” All of his father’s relatives were killed in the Holocaust, Sendak says, and many cousins his own age did not survive,” writes Frank Rizzo of The Courant.

“Most of my important books are threaded with the Holocaust. I try not to make it obvious and bang the drum, but it’s there. My whole life was the Holocaust, unfortunately. And Brundibar seems to be maybe the place where I can stop and bring peace to myself and the subject. It’s the perfect subject: of children who lived through the worst things, who were tough, who sang and then were sent to Auschwitz to die.”

Marilynne Robinson writes, “Two questions I can’t really answer about fiction are (1) where it comes from, and (2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute. There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell.”

She writes more.

A friend on Facebook shared this article from Good Report, featuring several portraits of C.S. Lewis, taken by Life Magazine photographer Hans Wild for a feature they did in 1946. These are great shots. The ones in his study are familiar to hardcore fans like me, but I’d never seen the pictures of him in hat and overcoat, with walking stick, tramping through Oxford. Continue reading Photos of great authors →

Pastor and author Francis Chan’s books are free for Kindle at the moment. I have no idea how long this will be, so act now. Chan is good thinker and great teacher.

My wife read the first of John Christopher’s trilogy, The Prince in Waiting ~ Beyond the Burning Lands ~ The Sword of the Spirits, and wanted to know what the next book was, not even knowing this was a series. I called on the powers of the Interweb to answer our query, and behold, I learned the author died last month. Sci-fi Author John Christopher (born Sam Youd of Knowsley, U.K.) died February 3, 2012. He was the author of the Tripod series, which is a neat set of books and good, though incomplete, BBC series. Apparently, this is only one set of post-apocalyptic stories he wrote.

In the Guardian’s obituary, they report: “Youd had an unusual way of working. He did a quick first draft of the opening chapter, but for the remainder typed a ‘final’ version, with several carbon copies. When he had completed the book he would go back and redraft the first chapter.”