Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

The Heroes of Your Imagination

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People ask on social media to share gifs of the superhero they imagine themselves to be (when they aren’t fetching coffee for the office team or replying to emails from people who hadn’t read the original email). I don’t join the sharing, because I don’t daydream in previously defined types like this.

Sometimes I imagine catching a falling meteor and it setting my body ablaze, and maybe that’s the signal flare from an extraterrestrial being needing my help. Or I imagine I’m the one who can talk to either large, invisible beasts or poltergeist-like forces nearby, telling them no to tear up the door I’m walking through.

Lately, I’ve taken a different tack. I’ve imagined confronting the bad guys with their full names, telling them they’re on my list, and saying no one would die here except them. If they run, because maybe they shoot at me to no effect, I follow them, like the stalking killer of a horror movie. I’m not so much a superhero in this line of thought as a force of nature, literally an agent or ambassador for the office of Death. No power to use or abuse; only select authority dispassionately exercised.

That sounds like a boring character or a side character at best. But thinking on those lines got me thinking of the flipside, of someone who can heal anything. I’ve imagined putting a hand on the back of someone’s neck and getting an expanding, somewhat undefined sense of their nerves, tissues, and organs, recognizing broken parts or dead cells, and restoring them to life. Sometimes it hurts the healer, sometimes the patient. Sometimes emotional pain rushes out causing both to weep.

There may be a story with a character like that, but more likely it’s fruitless imagination.

Batman: Tim Burton’s Batman was released June 23, 1989. Michael Keaton donned the cowl in that film and again in the sequel, Batman Returns. He and Burton would have returned for a third film, but the studio didn’t like the results of the second well enough to allow it. Now that Keaton is Batman again in the recently released The Flash, Jesse Schedeen tells us what Burton had intended to do in a third film and what the DC Comics series Batman ’89 does to fill in the story.

BTW, it was Keaton who gave us the line, “I’m Batman,” when he was scripted to say, “I am the night,” according to All the Right Movies on Twitter.

Super Movies: What are the best superhero movies, in your opinion? ScreenRant has the original Superman with Christopher Reeve and Blade with Wesley Snipe at the top of their list.

Novels: Superhero novels aren’t big sellers, from what I can tell. I’ve heard writers say the boom in movie sales hasn’t translated into book sales. I heard another writer recommend against any new writer attempting to sell a superhero novel. FWIW, here’s a list of superhero novels that aren’t graphic novels.

Americans: Nabokov on “The Simplicity and Kindness of Americans” and insightful barbers.

Favorite Books: No doubt, you were asking yourself just the other day what would be Umberto Eco’s favorite books. His son, Stephano, provides few titles, including “one of the most beautiful in the world,” Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Context Is King and They’re Tearing It Away from Us

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Context is critical to interpreting words and actions. We speak and interact with each other in social contexts that include unspoken assumptions and patterns for doing things. Context tells us what’s stylish, professional, acceptable, or rude. You can’t tell jokes without context nor can you be a breath of fresh air.

Usually, we recognize the inside and outside of those contexts—an office climate, a social circle, a family. We know we won’t fit there without meeting certain conditions. If a reader tells you your writing stinks, you might respond with creative advice for him, but if an editor tells you the same thing, you may receive it willing, more or less.

We talk broadly about culture as a context we’re all in together, but in reality, we live in various, overlapping cultures at once. You and I may share a culture as English-speakers, as Americans, or as readers, and we will also contrast one another when we reveal other cultures we do not share. The blurred borders of those social contexts may or may not need definition or defense. We may just accept each other. Maybe that’s the creative act of forming a relational context.

The reason I bring up context is to say social media has almost erased the borders between our various contexts by tying us down to mostly verbal communication, removing physical and time limitations, and allowing us to stay anonymous. (Imagine if we had to introduce ourselves before joining a conversation thread.) Without context, we easily misunderstand other people and, if we are so inclined, assume the worst, and the popular climate of our country, if not all Western Civilization, encourages everyone to look for offense and confront the foolish among us.

What are we going to do about it?

Those Who Have Gone Before Us

Literary editor Robert Gottlieb, 92, died June 14. Most recently, he worked for Knopf Doubleday. Talya Zax writes the most remarkable thing about him is “how thoroughly he refuses to think about himself as a creature of distinct talents; he saw himself as talented in the context of working with others, not, necessarily, on his own. To him, there was not really such a thing as a good editor. There was only a good editor of the manuscript in front of him, or, more accurately, the person who wrote it.”

Among many other books, Gottlieb worked on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, selling it to publishing executives by saying, “The funny parts are wildly funny, the serious parts are excellent.”

Literary author Cormac McCarthy, 89, died June 13. In their statement honoring him, the leaders of the author’s society state, “He never compromised his devotion to the beauty of language and the necessary art of storytelling.”

Ten Texas Writers Remember Cormac McCarthy. Fernando A. Flores says, “Sometimes there’s a writer so singular, so pervasive, who captures a certain poetry from the region where you live so distinctly, that, if you’re also writer, you just have to pretend this other person doesn’t exist.”

Rejection: Speaking of listening to an editor, several authors didn’t listen to their editors when their famous works were rejected.

Of Moby Dick, Melville was told, “First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale? While this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device, we recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers. For instance, could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?”

And The Wind In The Willows author Kenneth Grahame got this feedback: “An irresponsible holiday story that will never sell.”

Photo by Florian Schneider on Unsplash

Authors

Pod People: All Over the Place

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The “All Over the Place” podcast, run by a couple of my old friends from the late, lamented “Threedonia” blog, interviewed me the other day, and you can listen to it at this link: https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/7fvx7nWHmeD3zJSWDr72NP?utm_source=generator

Thanks to Eric, Jim, and Christine.

Update: They’ve posted the video of this interview to YouTube.

Author, translator, and Viking weekend warrior, Lars Walker joins Team AOtP to discuss the wizened ways of the world.
Authors, Poetry, Religion

Looking for the Positives to Share

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My thoughts seem to be a wash today. Every idea I have I doubt, which is normal for me, but today I’m not getting around it. Usually when I feel like this, I try to multitask so I can get something easy done. I burned the brush in the backyard and read an article I thought I’d link to here, but no. It’s too negative. I’m tired of negatives at the moment.

I made a couple changes to comments today. You now have the ability to like comments and subscribe to posts or comments by email. Let me know if it performs as expected (not that I could do anything about it, if it doesn’t).

Faith: God is giving faith to Muslims.

It’s difficult to determine the number of Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity in the United States, but among those who have, Fouad Masri has observed the following two trends: an encounter with a practicing Christian and a vision or dream about Jesus, whom Muslims recognize as the prophet Isa.

“This is freaking out all the imams, because even imams, some of them had a dream of Jesus,” Masri said. “And they’re like, ‘Why did I not see Muhammad? Why did I see Jesus?’”

Critical Theory: Three books by Christians on Critical Race Theory

“Most stories of genies, lamps and wishes illustrate that our desires are discordantly arranged and fatally unwise. Even when we have good intentions, the results fail.” – Tim Keller, NYC

Tim Keller: Above is a somewhat random thought that relates to common themes on this blog. Keller’s last book was on forgiveness.

“At times, he writes, survivors of abuse have been pressured to forgive those abusers and just move on. Or forgiveness is used to cover up the truth about the harm people have done to others. ‘People have used forgiveness as a way of destroying the truth,’ said Keller.”

Here’s an illustration of forgiveness from the many stories people are sharing on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/TonyReinke/status/1659633050354094081
1/6 post thread from Tony Reinke of Desiring God on a time he disagreed with Keller and approached in a self-righteous way.

Ogden Nash: A great truth from this poet of light verse, the New York-born Frederick Ogeden Nash, whose great-great-grand-uncle was the General Nash of Nashville, Tenn.

In chaos sublunary 
What remains constant but buffoonery?

Photo: Postmen on Scooters (1911-17). Harris & Ewing. LOC.

Authors

Tim Keller, 72, Now with the Lord

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Yesterday, I read about a controversial figure from the 1950-60s who a thoughtful, serious man, not sticking to a party line because it was his party. His original faith group disowned him. The media hated him. At the end of his life, he was changing his mind on fundamental ideas, and because of that, some have said he was beginning to put his faith in Christ. The writer I was reading said we couldn’t know any of these things, which points to the importance of doing the Lord’s will “as long as it is called ‘today.” We have no guarantee of tomorrow.

By all accounts, Tim Keller made the most of every day. He called us to Christ our Lord and now has been called home, after three years of managing pancreatic cancer.

ByFaith magazine has a good obituary that ends with this, from Reformed Theological Seminary Chancellor Ligon Duncan: “[Tim] in the PCA was a little bit like Gandalf in the Shire. We think he’s just a guy that does fireworks at birthday parties, when he’s actually out there in the world slaying dragons and taking on evil wizards.”

Authors, Religion

Mano on the Bethsaida Miracle

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Photo credit: Stormseeker (sseeker). Unsplash license.

Our friend Dave Lull, ever generously aware of my fascination with the late author D. Keith Mano, sent me to this 1997 article he wrote for National Review.

The article builds on new medical information, shared by Oliver Sacks, concerning what happens to blind people when they are given (or even regain) their sight. Lacking the experience sighted people have acquired from childhood in recognizing visual clues, these people (he cites a patient named Virgil) see the world as an incoherent jumble of shapes and lines. They can tell color and movement, but all the rest of the data confounds them. Depth and perspective are particular challenges.

Mano relates this information (never available before modern times) to the biblical account of Jesus healing a blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-25:

“And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.”

And the blind man (in what I had always considered a poetic image) replied to Jesus, “I see men as trees, walking.”

Mano notes the sequel, where Jesus touches the man a second time to enable him to process all this new information, and then draws the conclusion:

So let us suppose a man like Virgil, blind since childhood because of traumatic shock. Let us also suppose that Jesus, Messiah-as-therapist, came along and healed Virgil in a non-miraculous way. That does not (and cannot) explain Part Two. Whether Virgil’s blindness was physical or psychosomatic, still his brain would have been deprived of the visual exercise and constant drill essential to clear three-dimensional sight. Only by a miracle could Jesus provide that necessary crash course in visual recognition. Charismatic therapists may be able to unblock sight –but they cannot infuse a human brain with that lifetime of visual experience necessary for normal sight.

Read the whole thing.
Authors, Publishing

Plum crazy

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P. G. Wodehouse in 1930

Our friend Dave Lull has shared an article about the latest sign of the Apocalypse – the bowdlerization of the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The link he sent went to an article hidden behind a paywall, but my formidable investigative skills enabled me to locate a cognate report here, at National Review:

Wodehouse joins a growing list of prominent authors, deceased and living, whose works have been tinkered with by sensitivity readers, including Roald Dahl, R. L. Stine, and Agatha Christie. Penguin Random House, which recently relented to a degree on the Dahl edits, has released new editions of the Jeeves stories that include trigger warnings, the Telegraph reported.

The warning on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank You, Jeeves reads: “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”

It goes on to state that the changes do not affect the story itself. The 2022 edition of Right Ho, Jeeves has also been edited and features the same disclaimer.

The traditional word for this kind of activity is “Bowdlerization,” named for Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), an English physician and social reformer who’s most famous for producing The Family Shakespeare, in which he (and his sister) cleaned the offensive words out of the Bard’s plays.

Thomas Bowdler used to be mentioned pretty often back in my college days, in the Age of Aquarius, when we were letting it all hang out and “keeping it real, baby.” We Baby Boomers, in the toilet flush of our youth, laughed at the weak-minded old English who’d get the vapors from hearing a dirty word or two. Thank Henry Miller we’d evolved past all that!

Well, in the 2020s we Boomers are still more or less running things, but in our dotage we’ve succeeded in sinking beneath Bowdler’s level. It ought to be noted that old Thomas did not hold a copyright on Shakespeare’s works. He never made any attempt to remove the original versions of the plays from the literary market; he simply offered an alternative to people who wanted one. Penguin Random House has changed the official, copyrighted text of Wodehouse for all readers, young and old, wise and foolish. “We have a responsibility to shield the public, you know.”

The Great Pendulum swings in accordance with implacable laws of physics. Swing too far toward license in one generation and you’ll swing back to authoritarianism in the next. It seems we humans live just long enough, generally speaking, to betray our principles.

Authors, Writing

Mano on the exclamation point

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From Dave Lull, the following citation. I don’t know where he got it.

Priscilla Jensen’s review of “An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!” by Florence Hazrat (Bookshelf, April 7) reminds me of something the novelist D. Keith Mano wrote in National Review in 1975: “The exclamation point may be used only in dialogue and then only if the person speaking has recently been disemboweled.”

Edgar Isaacs

Salisbury, Md.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

Snow and hope

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Photo by hideobara. Unsplash license.

Disclaimer: You did not mistake the date on your calendar. This is a rare Saturday post by Lars Walker. Due to a certain weirdness in my life right now, I’m posting book reviews every day (two yesterday). What you’re reading now is a personal post, so I’m squeezing it in on the weekend.

March did not go out like a lamb in Minnesota last night. It went out like Mike Tyson, or Chronos the Titan, or a Frost Giant, or any kind of large, brutal mythological creature you might want to imagine. Yesterday the spring melt was well underway. Today it’s underway too, but with a difference. Nearly ten inches of snow fell overnight, even though the temperatures only slipped below freezing for a few hours. We woke to piles – sometimes towers – of thick, heavy white precipitate, already congealing into a dense, waterlogged mass. My neighbor with the snow blower cleared the driveway. But I had to clear the steps, front and back. And that meant hacking through knee-high piles of white stuff that looked like Styrofoam but weighed like sandbags.

But I cleared it out, and didn’t have a heart attack. I went to a restaurant for lunch (went to the farther Applebee’s rather than the closer Applebee’s, because they just closed the closer Applebee’s forever. More fruits of scientific, infallible Progressive governance). It was a strange environment in the parking lot. The sky is clear and the sun shines with full force, producing that wonderful effect (it’s called “apricity”) in which one feels warmer than the actual temperature, due to the intensity of the light. Yet all around us were mountains of snow. Kind of an alien, fantasy world for a day, where the physical laws are different.

Anyway, that’s not what I came to post about. Just thought I’d mention it.

Thursday night I attended a lecture in St. Paul. I don’t generally go out at night anymore; I have gained that wisdom of age that tells me very little good is likely to happen to me after dark in the urban area. But a friend invited me and urged me to come, so I acquiesced. In the end I was glad I did.

The lecture was held at the Cities Church on Summit Avenue, which is the Beacon Hill of St. Paul. It’s where James J. Hill and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived. Where the governor has his mansion. (The roads, by the way, are full of potholes. Even plutocrats can’t get basic services in that city.) The lecture was part of a series sponsored by Bethlehem College and Seminary, a small Baptist school.

The lecturer was one of their professors, Professor Matt Crutchmer, who looked impossibly young to me. He spoke on “Hope Beyond the Walls of the World” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The core of his theme – as I understood it – was the nature of Christian hope, as portrayed by Tolkien. Hope for the Christian, he said, is not attached to any particular thing in this world (I wish I could recall the word he used for this idea, but it’s slipped my mind). Our hope isn’t for a good election result, or a military victory, or for rain or a successful business deal or a stroke of luck. Our hope is a more basic one – like the star Earendil that Sam spied through the clouds on the way to Mordor. Our hope is just there. It’s part of God’s creation and immovable. We may be defeated; we may suffer; we will surely die. That affects our hope not at all. “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo.” We believe that God shapes all ends, regardless of what we do or what happens to us now. In that lies our peace.

I needed that message just now, for reasons I won’t detail. I was just glad I heard it.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Conforming to a Hot Topic World

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Many weeks ago, I was in a small group that considered how we might tell we were conforming to the world (Romans 12:2). I suggested one way would be to notice where and how we self-censor, which is a touchy subject for the 21st century social media user.

On one hand, social media encourages us to say outrageous things and to share our opinion on every topic we can articulate into at least a gif. And Christians may recognize this danger and their own ignorance and regularly avoid hosing down the Internet. That’s good.

On the other hand, social media has enabled small groups of people to pose as massive mobs to shout down, dox, and ruin the lives of anyone they target, so we may avoid commenting on select hot button topics to avoid getting caught by such a mob. That’s the self-censoring I’m talking about. It makes me uneasy to talk about it even now.

I’ve argued with myself over whether I should state one of my opinions, well-founded and potentially life-changing as they usually are. I wonder if I shouldn’t stick to posts on books and writing in order to stay in my lane, as it were. But sometimes I just retweet a link or someone else’s opinion because it’s important and I want to amplify the reach. If I hold back because the topic is too hot, is that conforming to the world?

Here’s a troubling video on the censoring publishers are doing to select authors poke the bear by not conforming to unspoken expectations.

Also, a woman with experience in college diversity efforts couldn’t overcome the mindset of her own office. “Orthodoxy superseded all else: collegiality, professionalism, the truth.”

A proper feature: Esquire magazine has published its own feature of author Brandon Sanderson, and with over 5,000 words, it’s what you’d expect from a feature article. It’s good and interesting, pulls in some relevant criticism, and remains positive overall.

More sensitive: New Agatha Christie novels have been submitted to sensitivity readers and thus altered for modern, ahem, sensibilities. The copyright holder, Agatha Christie Limited, has the author’s great grandson at the helm and, I suppose, responsible for this.

Publishing among friends: Publisher Richard Charkin has written about his years in the British book business. “In fact, agent-editor ‘negotiations’ makes it sound more adversarial than it actually was. Editors and agents were usually friends, and had often worked together previously. All too often this led to an unhelpful tendency among some editors to see “management” as the enemy, and they would readily side with their authors and agents against the company that employed them.”