Category Archives: Blogs, Socials

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Freedom of the Press, Lovejoy, and Bad Arguments

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I’ve been reading from a book of American speeches from the time of our nation’s founding to the Civil War. It’s good fodder for guilt over my short attention span and how I’ve wasted my life on the Internet. It also shows the value of knowing this kind of history, because arguments made 180 years ago are still circulating today.

John Calhoun’s defense of slavery in the South in a Senate speech in February 1837 goes from reasonable though wrong to ridiculous. We’ve heard the same fearmongering over the last couple years.

In Wendell Phillips’s response to the 1837 murder of abolitionist and journalist Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Missouri, he rebukes the characterization of the mob as patriots and bizarre criticisms of the freedom of the press. He says an Alton minister claims that no one has the right to print opinions with which his community disagrees. In fact, this minister says speaking what we think is evil.

“This clerical absurdity chooses as a check for the abuses of the press, not the law, but the dread of a mob,” Phillips states. “By doing so, it deprives not only the individual and the minority of their rights, but the majority also, since the expression of their opinion may sometimes provoke disturbance from the minority. A few men may make a mob as well as many.” No one would have a right to speak their mind, if it could provoke a mob.

Haven’t we heard similar arguments against this first freedom today?

John J. Dunphy of the Second Reading Book Shop in Alton, Missouri, reviews a new biography of Elijah Lovejoy, called “First to Fall.”

As for other links I wish to share today . . .

Publisher: Eerdmans – “We do not think it is for us as a publisher to define doctrine for the church,” but we won’t publish “false teaching.” Coming in August 2022 from Eerdmans is a transgender reading of Scripture.

Dostoevsky: “The advice every writer hears at one point or another? Write what you know. Whenever I hear those words I wonder, How do you explain murder stories?”

More important than being right: “Neither labels nor worldly ideologies require renewal or transformation. None of them require humility. And none of them bring life. They simply offer an unbalanced formula to conform to that creates a deeper divide within the church, as well as the culture at large.”

Fully human? “No true portraits of Africans by White artists existed; that White artists couldn’t see past their own ingrained stereotypes of Blackness.” The white author of this novel about two black men believes she can see past such stereotypes, but perhaps not clearly. (via Prufrock)

Photo: Main Street, Stillwater, Minnesota. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Publishing, Reading, Uncategorized

Sci-Fi Resurgence, a Publisher Drives off the Road, and Truth-telling

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I listened through Out of the Silent Planet the other day, because I’ve been reading That Hideous Strength with friends for a few months and we took a couple weeks off for multiple reasons. It’s a fun adventure that spends a good bit of time on details like the space ship and experiencing interplanetary travel with a Wells or Verne feel. It would probably make a good launchpad for discussing Lewis’s ‘scientific’ observations in contrast with current views. Science is always changing, always correcting itself or arguing over what is correct.

You could also walk away from that book with idea that submitting to God could be a very big deal. Or you could be thinking, “Words are cool.”

Here are a few, loosely related links.

Off-road: Professor Christopher Yuan notes a troubling bent in a post yesterday from theological publisher Eerdmans. Recommending reading for this month, the publisher of the theology text I used in college says, “We find ourselves at a time again where we should be willing to listen and seek to understand those in the LGBTQ+ community who are simply fighting to be seen and heard, cared for and loved.” Yuan sees this as a sign the once theology powerhouse has steered in the direction of declining mainline denominations everywhere.

Yuan’s own book on sexuality would be more insightful than any of these.

Reading Life: “[Dana] Gioia describes his ‘odd and bookish’ childhood growing up in a working-class family in Los Angeles. . . My parents never knew what to make of a kid obsessed with books.”

Interplanetary: Space opera is resurging. “Typically seen as (and often being) the least literary form of SF, space opera hasn’t gone out of style since Buck Rogers began battling galactic evils in the 1920s and ’30s . . .” (via ArtsJournal)

Children Should Know the Truth: We shouldn’t keep life realities from our children by pretending everything will be okay. “It is likely that today’s children will inherit a world more violent and more precarious in every way than the one experienced by post–Cold war generations. The belief that everything will be all right was always a recipe for fragility; now it is simply a fantasy.”

Photo: Smalley’s Jewelry Store sign, Ogden, Utah 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Religion, Uncategorized

The Christian Air We Breathe, a Memorial Day Story, and Blogroll Links

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I love discussions that delve into how the whole world has changed under the influence of Christianity. Speaking to unbelievers, Glen Scrivener writes, “You already hold particularly ‘Christian-ish’ views, and the fact that you think of these values as natural, obvious, or universal shows how profoundly the Christian revolution has shaped you.”

Scrivener has a new book, The Air We Breathe, in which he discusses how all manner of modern ideals have Christian origins, and when debating Christian speakers, atheists and other non-Christians will assume Christian positions on their way to undermining Christian principles. Black Lives Matter couldn’t exist as a popular American concept brought up in many arguments over human dignity without the foundation of God’s created image so many assume today (despite explicitly rejecting it, as some do). It’s marvelous.

Movies: The state of cinema today (via Prufrock)
“We are in the present losing more movies from the past faster than ever before. It seems like we aren’t, but the mere disappearance of physical media is already having corporations curating what we watch, faster for us,” Guillermo Del Toro said.

A Memorial Day Story: Elliot Ritzema heard from his grandpa via the marginal notes in Citizen Soldiers. “When Ambrose wrote, ‘The Ninth Tactical Air Force had a dozen airstrips in Normandy by this time,’ my grandpa added, We were one of these airstrips, 36th Fighter Group, 32nd Service Group.”

The Hobbit in Bears: Is this is a case of life imitating art?

Photo: Big Ole, Alexandria, Minnesota, 2001. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Music, Reading, The Press

Verse-picking, Lying, Singing in Cherokee, and Fiction as Discipleship

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I’ve been doing these Saturday blogroll posts for a while now, and I’m always happy to see a kind of theme emerge from the articles to which I link. This post will be more random. Sorry.

What do Red Letter Christians who disparage Paul’s words in favor of Jesus’s quotations do with the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the gospels, not Jesus himself? Jesus didn’t write anything. If you say the biblical authors may have gotten their letters wrong, it applies throughout. Or are we saying that only the parts I dislike and challenge my modern sensibilities are the parts that probably are not inspired Scripture?

Music: “There are all these different metal bands out there from Scandinavia who incorporate Viking and pagan culture into their art. I always wondered why no one that I knew of had done that with Native American culture.” Album Offers Today’s Hits — Sung in Cherokee (nextcity.org)

That’s cool in a sense, but I don’t listen to metal. Here’s a new musician singing songs I do listen to: Colm R. McGuinness sings The Rocky Road to Dublin

And I don’t know who needs to hear this, but, uh, God’s gonna cut you down.

Thrillers: 10 Best Adaptations of Legal Books to Film of All Time

Ombudsman: Media Mistakes in the Biden Era: the Definitive List | Sharyl Attkisson

Reading Fiction: Should we read fiction as part of our discipleship?

We who belong to the church, who have cognitively accepted the Unseen Reality, as Evelyn Underhill described it, also suffer from constricted imaginations. The disenchantment we have all undergone as products of the modern world has critically stunted our spiritual development, our knowledge of ourselves, our hopes and dreams for God in the world.

Photo: I-84 near Hammett, Idaho. 2004. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

The Wheel of Time Calls Roadside Assistance

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Until this week, I knew next to nothing about Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. I knew it was very long and that some people loved it. I did not know that Jordan was rewriting The Lord of the Rings and that the first of fourteen novels, The Eye of the World, was meant to be his version of The Fellowship of the Ring.

One Goodreads reviewer writes of the first book, “It is difficult to comprehend how an author could take such a simple, familiar story and stretch it out over so many pages.

The hero is an orphan who looks different, he gets his father’s magic sword, he goes on a quest with an old, wily mentor, gets attacked by evil (dark-skinned) mongoloids from the mysterious East, meets the princess by accident, becomes embroiled in an ancient prophecy, discovers a magic ‘force’ which controls fate (and the plot), &c., &c.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. 

Of the second book, another reviewer praises the overall story but recommends reading with friends to help get through the boring parts. “Jordan’s prose was super wordy and descriptive, there’s no way around it. Two books (570k words in total so far) into the series and when it comes to the actual story progression, not too much have actually progressed.”

A reviewer of eighth book notes he would have included a plot summary, but the book has no plot or development at all.

Because many TV producers want to create the next Game of Thrones, Amazon released last year an eight-episode series based on The Eye of the World, and it appears that they have done a terrible job.

Man Carrying Things reviews it in about an hour, noting some strong weaknesses in the scriptwriting such as frequent deaths that are undone a minute later. Another reviewer appeals to the book lore to say this is supposed to be a very bad move done only by evil magicians, but there’s no indication this show has that in mind. In fact, the show seems to have cliched TV formulas most in mind. It lacks continuity within single episodes. It spends too much time on exposition that doesn’t develop anything.

One major change from the source material is questioning who the chosen one–the Dragon Reborn–is among the main characters. The book tells us upfront, but the show says it could be anyone, and as a result, doesn’t explain what being the Dragon Reborn would mean. It’s apparently an open question whether this is good or bad. Maybe the writers couldn’t pull themselves away from a desire to drive the story toward a character saying, “Maybe the real Dragon Reborn were the friends we made along the way.”

Photo by Hannah Morgan on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Goofing, Poetry

When ‘Brunch’ Was New, the Limits of Science, and Worthless Commercials

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Something inspired me to look up a distinct definition for the word brunch the other day, and I happened upon this piece from Punch magazine in 1896. Merriam-Webster says the earliest brunch is believed to have appeared in print in 1894, and this aligns with that claim.

“According to the Lady, to be fashionable nowadays, we must “brunch.” Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter’s Weekly, and, indicating a combined breakfast and lunch. At Oxford, however, two years ago, an important distinction was drawn. The combination-meal, when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is “brunch,” and, when nearer luncheon, is “blunch.” Please don’t forget this. 

Tis the voice of the bruncher., I heard him complain,  
“You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again!  
When the clock says it’s 12, then perhaps I’ll revive,  
Meanwhile, into bed, yet once more let me dive! 

“The last meal I had was 3:00 AM.;  
I’m a writer, so please don’t such habits condemn!  
This cross between supper and breakfast I’ll name,  
If you’ll let me, a ‘suckfast’ –and ‘brupper’ ‘s the same!”

It goes on to lesser effect. What else do we have?

Lewis on Science: C.S. Lewis understood the limitations of science better than many scientists. Michael Ward writes:

What is frost to someone who has never encountered it? What is a degree of frost? Ordinary language would be more helpful in explaining the situation: “Your ears will ache … you’ll lose the feeling in your fingers” etc. The word numb will convey more than any number.

However, what Keats tries to convey in his poem can’t be rendered as a thermometer reading. It is not univocal or universal; we can’t translate his poem into, say, Japanese without loss or at least alteration. And yet if we want to know just what it feels like to go outside and breathe the bitterly chill January night air, Keats paints for us a very vivid and sensible picture. He communicates knowledge to us that the ordinary and scientific ways of speaking leave out.

In other words, poetry is a kind of knowledge, and since knowledge is a synonym for science we could quite legitimately say – if we wanted to – that poetry is a branch of science. 

“Numb and Numb-er,” by Michael Ward, Plough.com

Lewis on Science-Fiction: Lewis wrote about science-fiction a good bit and broke it down into several genre categories.

Poetry: How Fame Fed on Edna St. Vincent Millay

And this video by Rachel Oates, “Atticus Is Everything Wrong With Modern Poetry,” is an amusing criticism of a published writer who appears to have turned his Instagram posts into a paper-published thing.

Commercials: “If I were endowed with wealth, I should start a great advertising campaign in all the principal newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one short sentence, printed in huge block letters — a sentence that I once heard spoken by a husband to a wife: ‘My dear, nothing in this world is worth buying.’ But of course I should alter ‘my dear’ to ‘my dears.’”

Photo: The Big Shoe, Bakersfield, California. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Reviews

Reviewing Books on the Socials, Wuthering Heights, and Disney Nightmares

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All the faults of Jane Eyre … magnified a thousand fold

from The North British Review, 1847

A reviewer for a Scottish magazine, The North British Review, used the words above to dismiss Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. He didn’t believe the work would find a broad audience, but as the Narrator says, “Little did he know.”

The Examiner called it “strange.”

We detest the affectation and effeminate frippery which is but too frequent in the modern novel, and willingly trust ourselves with an author who goes at once fearlessly into the moors and desolate places, for his heroes; but we must at the same time stipulate with him that he shall not drag into light all that he discovers, of coarse and loathsome, in his wanderings …

The Spectator seemed to think it a well-written but ugly story. “The success is not equal to the abilities of the writer; chiefly because the incidents are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable, with a moral taint about them …”

And yet Brontë’s book endures. (I found these reviews on a site dedicated to the book.)

Book reviewing takes many forms today. A few weeks ago, an executive at Barnes and Noble noted upswings in sales according to the buzz on TikTok, which they call BookTok. Some authors have linked the success of a book to single BookTok videos.

On YouTube, reviewers call themselves Booktubers. Occasionally I think about recording videos or doing a podcast in order to boost this blog, but I have yet to justify the time. Anyone can jump into the video side of social media, and I think I have a good voice for it. But it takes a certain talent and good lighting to gain attention, not to mention all the visuals and actually having something to say.

Merphy Napier appears to be doing it right. Here she talks about books that live up to their hype, a follow-up to a video about hyped books she didn’t like.

Petrick Leo asked his network to nominate overrated fantasy series, talked over five of them, and shared his own list of five.

Elliot Brooks talks about good adult fantasy series with soft magic systems and hard magic systems.

Disney Nightmares: Speaking of fantasy, Helen Freeh talks about reasons parents should have been wary of Disney long before now.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s excellent essay, “On Fairy Stories,” addresses the very problem that Disney had from its inception: the notion that fairy stories are exclusively children’s stories. They are not. They are stories allowing adults to examine the world from a new perspective to find a better way to live. Tolkien asserts that people connect “the minds of children and fairy- stories,” but “this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.”

Elsewhere in shared videos, a view of the side of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

What of Our Deeds Will Matter for Long, Statesmen, and Blogroll

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“Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
                           Nothing but bones,
      The sad effect of sadder groans:
Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.”
from “Death” by George Herbert

A handful of life paths — intellectual and artistic work in particular — are about trying to create, as Horace wrote, “a monument more lasting than bronze.” They are a calculated gamble that a life dedicated to the difficult and narrow path will continue after our death, however unrewarding it might have been to experience.

But that we even have Horace’s poetry to read is as much a caprice of fate as a function of his poetic virtue. Some manuscripts survive the collapse of civilization, others do not; it seems unlikely that these survivals and disappearances precisely track merit. We have Horace and we are missing most of Sappho.

It’s Very Unlikely Anyone Will Read This in 200 Years (via Prufrock)

Statesmen: A review of The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation by Daniel J. Mahoney. “The best politician employs the intellectual and moral virtues and ‘all the powers of the soul,’ with proper humility and deference to divine and moral law, to better the community.” Has anyone in this generation or last done this? Have we lost this type of man for a while?

Racism: Albert Camus has something to teach us about anti-racism in his book The Fall. “The Fall operates as a reverse confessional with the priest as the penitent who, rather than seeking absolution, wants only to implicate us in his guilt. With this inverted symbol Camus recognizes that power often wears a priestly frock.”

Abolition of Man: Do you think you understand Lewis’s Abolition of Man? Here’s some help. “Through Ward’s page-by-page, sometimes line-by-line, and occasionally word-by-word exegesis of Abolition, we discover the wide plethora of sources upon which Lewis drew to critique his opponents as well as to appeal to Western and non-Western thinkers who have maintained confidence in reason’s capacity to know moral truth.”

Evil: A review of Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel: “The moral of this tragic story is that people are often too trusting of criminals professing their innocence, and ignore the reality of human nature: Evil exists. Heinous crimes don’t commit themselves.”

Christian Living: What do believers need today? We need power.

Photo: Brooklyn Hotel, closed. Brooklyn, Iowa. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Big Publishers, Writer’s Complaints, and Blogroll

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Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, who took up writing as a career after losing his respect and position at Dabney Oil in 1932, read a laudatory profile on Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker and said, “I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life.”

Well, someone should have told Chandler he had his own genius as well as his own version of the good life, which needed amending.

Mark Twain vented his spleen on the writing skill of James Fennimore Cooper with many accurate complaints like this one:

For several years, Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so — and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some “females” — as he always calls women — in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon-blast, and a cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn’t strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain in the dense fog and find the fort. Isn’t it a daisy?

Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 1895

What are other people saying about books?

Big Publishers: There are five powerhouses in U.S. publishing today: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. If judges approve a currently contested merger, Penguin Random House would be allowed to buy Simon & Schuster, reducing the big publishers to four. This would make German media group Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House and is already the world’s largest trade book publisher, in an Amazon-sized company. (via ArtsJournal)

Today is St. George’s Day in England, a day celebrated on par with Christmas at one time.

We fairly hope … that this day
Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.
To cry “Amen” to that, thus we appear.
You English princes all, I do salute you.

Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 5

Birthday: It is also Shakespeare’s birthday. He was born April 23, 1564, which is a date deduced by the record of his baptism in the Parish Register at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday 26 April 1564. 

Block Party: Thoughts of Shakespeare naturally turn one’s mind to Brooklyn and “a timeless block party that could be 400 years old,” notes the NY Daily News.

Word Game: And when you think about block parties, you think about the word guessing games that are all the rage amongst the hip kids. The Folger Shakespeare Library has their own version called Prattle. This one is new to me. I’ve been playing Wordle and Quordle for several weeks now.

Photo: Bus Depot, angle view, Bond Street, Bend, Oregon 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Music, Reading

Read Good Books for Your Soul, and Walk While You Read

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It’s Holy Saturday, so let’s begin with a few words about Christ.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
    and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
    stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked
    and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
    and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
    he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
    he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
    make many to be accounted righteous,
    and he shall bear their iniquities. (Isaiah 53:8-11 ESV)

As for other subjects:

Read good books: Reading thoughtfully, like having a good conversation with an author, may be the very thing you need to reset your soul and rebel against the spirit of the age. “Christians who immerse themselves in creative writing are good stewards of their time — not wasteful — because writing, reading, and ruminating on words can glorify our Maker.”

Read and walk too: Some people have taken to walking while reading; some of them really can’t see where they’re going.

Quotation Research: Who said, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell“?

Said Tolkien to Lewis: Listen, friend, I’ve based a character on you.

Booksellers New Friend? Once considered the embodiment of everything that was wrong in bookselling, Barnes & Noble is succeeding and many indie booksellers are rooting for it. (via ArtsJournal)

Isaac Watts’s “Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed” set to a common Irish folk melody