Category Archives: Blogs, Socials

Revisiting Fascism, Dune, blogroll, and Family Bonds

November 13, 2021 Phil Leave a comment

It’s full strength for fall colors in my area this week, at least on my morning commute when the sunlight is set to Golden Hour status. The same trees don’t look quite as vibrant at noon. I’ve taken a few short videos while driving to or from work and this morning when taking the trash to the dump. I’ve been recording second-long videos this year. It’s been fun, but I’m not sure I’ll do it again next year.

Today, November 13, is Felix Unger day.

Dune: Herbert uses a steady stream of inner dialogue throughout the two Dune novels I’ve read, which is one reason Dune may work better as a book than a movie.

From the new biography on Czesław Miłosz: “In immigrating to the United States, and specifically to California in 1960,” Haven writes, “he thought he was coming to the timeless world of nature. However, Berkeley was about to become a lightning rod for […] the world of change […] and he would be in the thick of it.” (via Books, Inq)

Gene Veith is revisiting his book on contemporary fascism: “The rise of Donald Trump has caused many people to worry about the emergence of a new fascism, but hardly anyone seems aware of what the fascists actually believed.”

Sophia Lee is a solid young reporter with World News Group. She got married during COVID restrictions, which they streamed over Zoom. A virtual wedding ceremony meant her parents met his parents for the first time in August. A month later, her mother-in-law died.

Chocolates and Caramels: With Christmas and other holidays coming up, allow me to link to Monastery Candy “by the contemplative nuns of Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa.” They say their hazelnut meltaways are their favorites.

Photo: Diner (American and Korean food), Route 27, Columbus, Georgia 1982. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Goofing

New Words, Smiles, Blogroll, and Our Man in Havana

November 6, 2021 Phil Leave a comment

Merriam-Webster added 455 words to their dictionary last month, both new terms and new definitions. Because gets a new meaning as a preposition, “often used in a humorous way to convey vagueness about the exact reasons for something,” as in, “She drove all night because Daryl.” A new word is copypasta, something that has been spread around online.

Also new are deplatform, digital nomad, Oobleck, zero day, fluffernutter, and ghost kitchen.

Michael De Sapio describes the moral imagination of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, a spy comedy. “Dana Gioia writes that Catholic fiction, contrary to what a secular reader might expect, ‘tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent.’ This is true of Our Man in Havana, which jostles us through brothels and nightclubs and striptease houses, conveying the dinginess of a decaying city side-by-side with the sanctity of the Church. The comic juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane points up the duality of human nature in the most visceral way possible.”

Speaking of Cuba, playwright Garcia Aguilera, who has been promoted by the government in the past, is now calling for political reform and peaceful protest. He has become what Cuban officials call a “counterrevolutionary.”

“In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines smile as ‘a slight contraction of the face.'” Yeah, but there’s more to it than that.

Allergies of the Gondolier, as told by Damian Balassone
“From the monstrous canals of his nose
a tsunami of mucus arose.”

Marvin Olasky summarizes John Frame’s A History of Western Philosophy and Theology. “In discussing early Christian philosophers, Frame criticizes those who have an insufficient sense of antithesis between Christian and Greek philosophy. Frame states that ‘the attempt to make Christianity intellectually respectable, and therefore easy to believe, is one of the most common and deadly mistakes of Christian apologists and philosophers throughout history.'”

Photo: Texaco gas pumps, Milford, Illinois, 1977. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion, Writing

Writing by Hand, Beastly Boy band, Blogroll, and Fear

October 30, 2021 Phil Leave a comment

Paul Auster has written a biography on Stephen Crane and several other works without a word processor. He drafts by hand and types a paragraph with a typewriter (via Literary Saloon).

I have shelves of encyclopedias, foreign dictionaries, and all the reference books I use. And I must have five or six English dictionaries of various sizes and editions. I even have slang dictionaries. When I’m really stuck I look at a thesaurus, but it never helps me. I know all those words, but I always think, “Well, there’s one word I’m not remembering that would be better than the one I’m stuck on.”

City of Fear, by Alafair Burke, “a tight, pacy police procedural, in which three Indiana college girls hit New York for their spring break.” One of them doesn’t come back.

The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory, “deliberately and imaginatively breaks every one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rules of Detective Fiction.'” It’s a crazy premise, a genetically engineered boy band who find their producer dead in his hotel room, that apparently works.

Martin Luther: How Luther helped my depression. “I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton.”

Why should we fear the Lord when perfect love casts out fear?

Halloween meditation: Jesus defines hell as the place when everyone is “salted by fire.”

No matter what you call your church or church movement, I think you’ll go astray if you claim your side is the one breathing life into dead orthodoxy. The message of the Reformation is still needed.

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry

A Fictional Lewis, Miłosz in California, and Blogroll

October 22, 2021 Phil Leave a comment

Gina Dalfonzo reviews Once Upon a Wardrobe, the second book from author Patti Callahan with a fictional story that draws in many actual details of C.S. Lewis’s life and habitat.

Czesław Miłosz, born in Šeteniai, Lithuania, 1911, spent 40 years in California before his death in 2004. Cynthia Haven has labored over a book on this great poet of last century and Czesław Miłosz: A California Life released this month.

“The Nobel poet spent more time in California than any other place during his long 93-year life,” Haven writes. “He wrote poems about the California landscape, engaged with our culture, and taught generations of students at UC-Berkeley. Some of those students became eminent translators of his work.”

David Zucker has written some pretty funny scripts, which cross the line too often for my taste. In Commentary, he writes about an opinion he often hears from fans: “You couldn’t do that scene today.” (Via Books inq)

Humor happens when you go against what’s expected and surprise people with something they’re not anticipating, like the New York Jets winning a game. But to find this surprise funny, people have to be willing to suppress the literal interpretations of jokes. In Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges’s character tries to quit smoking, drinking, amphetamines, and sniffing glue. If his “addictions” were to be taken literally, there would be no laughs. Many of today’s studio executives seem to believe that audiences can no longer look past the literal interpretations of jokes.

Dracula: How did Bram Stoker’s novel become a pop-fiction hit?

Malcolm Muggeridge: “If it should prove to be the case that Western man has now rejected these origins of his civilization, persuading himself that he can be master of his own destiny, that he can shape his own life and chart his own future, then assuredly he and his way of life and all he has stood and stands for must infallibly perish.”

To close, here are a few words plucked from Miłosz’s “City Without a Name,” written in California, 1968.

The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atrocious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire.
And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights,
there was not less bitterness but more.
If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is
transformed, at last, into harmony.
Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun’s secondhand-book shop, I am put to rest forever between two familiar names.

Photo: George Joe Restaurant, La Mesa, California, 1977, John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

A Closed Bookstore, Blogroll, and Love for Eastern Lit or No?

October 16, 2021 Phil Leave a comment

I’ve mentioned before that this blog shares a name with a bookstore but no other relationship. Brandywine Books of Winter Park, Florida, was a cute seller of used and well-kept book. The owner knew about our blog and I believe delighted in its existence. I know this because my sister stopped by a few years ago. The shop closed within the past two years.

Japanese readers are hooked on the belief that bestselling author Haruki Murakami should have won the Nobel for literature by now. The Japan Times claims Murakami is “best known for his 1987 bestseller Norwegian Wood,” but he has many other titles and presumably outpaces all other Japanese authors in sheer Nobel potential. The article notes a few reasons why he could contend for the prize and a few reasons he might not win it. (via Literary Saloon)

South Korea has been successfully exporting K-pop and K-drama for several years, but K-lit has not found a similar place. Perhaps the time for Korean literature has come. (via Literary Saloon)

Did Ernest Hemingway actually say, “The rain WILL stop, the night WILL end, the hurt WILL fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found”? The Quote Investigator looks into it.

Author Glynn Young reviews the second Will Benson thriller, Blind Defence by John Fairfax, “so engrossing that the reader finds himself on the edge of his seat.”

The Cambridge Dictionary offers up a few new terms: nanolearning, cradle-to-career, and panic master’s.

Photo: Power’s Hamburgers, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1993. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.Purchase; John Margolies 2015 (DLC/PP-2015:142).

Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Uncategorized

Nobel Prize for Lit, Blogrolls, and Other Reading

October 9, 2021 Phil Leave a comment

We started this blog in May 2003. I’ve impressed very few people with my posts here. I would have benefitted by having an editor, someone to tell me to press on to a better idea or a better development of the idea I had.

My writing process, in case you’re wondering, is to think about a post for a while, begin to write it down, distract myself with tangents or diversions for far too long, and after a couple paragraphs shoved into the blog engine, to doubt the point of it all. As Descartes once quipped, I doubt therefore I’m not.

Blogs have changed a lot in the last twenty years. Most people chatter into social media apps and discussions board communities. Having a blog is no longer the easiest way to publish your words online, and one part of blogging that has gone the way of yesteryear’s Internet is the blogroll. Most blogs, even those updated infrequently, had lists of websites down one side to other blogs that they presumably admired and even read. One of our readers said he missed our blogroll when we moved to this WordPress platform, and because I’m nowhere near as smart as I used to think I was, I have now concluded I might start linking to other blogs in regular weekly posts. That’s not what a blogroll was, but that’s what I’m going to do.

The photo above is of The Donut Hole in La Puente, California, circa 1991, from the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive. It’s a picture of the quality of another day. Let that inspire you.

The Literary Saloon has been going since Creation. I think it was the second blog to have ever been launched, right after Justin Hall created the first one from a faux-swarthy corner desk at Swarthmore College. They focus on international and translated fiction, so naturally they have the goods on the Nobel Prize for Literature this week. M.A. Orthofer notes, the books of winner Abdulrazak Gurnah haven’t sold much in the U.S. Only three thousand copies of all of the books combined.

“It’s not like his work hasn’t gotten any attention,” Orthofer says, “The New York Times has reviewed six of his novels — but they certainly do not seem to have found readers — no wonder his latest, Afterlives, hasn’t found a US publisher.”

Word, a poem by Andrew Frisardi that reads like spoken word, is in the Fall 2021 issue of Modern Age. (via Books, Inq. – Frank has been old-school blogging since 2005.)

October 9th is Leif Erickson Day, a day that has yet to catch much heat from those who demonize colonization. Erickson and crew stayed at L’Anse aux Meadows for many decades, well before Columbus landed in the south, and they didn’t take over the continent, which makes them more immigrants than colonialists.

Eudora Welty’s first collection of Southern gothic short stories was released in the fall of 1941, 80 years ago this season. I confess I haven’t read any of them yet, but that’s normal for me. I barely read as it is. Gregory McNamee of Kirkus Reviews offers this appreciation.

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Book Reviews, Creative Culture