World News Group’s Listening In podcast interviews Professor Karen Swallow Prior today on how reading broadly and deeply enriches our lives and encourages moral virtue. The talk anticipates the release of Prior’s book, coming out in a few days, called On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.
The talk begins by describing the classic understanding of the “good life” and spends some time on courage as a measure of how much good would be preserved over the risk of the action.
I forget what the word “blogging” originally meant. I know it involved a conflation involving the word “logging,” but I can’t remember where the “b” came from. In any case, blogging used to be a pretty big deal, but now only a few of us are left, systematically throwing messages in bottles out into the digital sea, hoping somebody will find one of them washed up on a virtual beach.
The original blogs, as I recall, tended to be rather confessional, like personal web cams, but involving only psychological voyeurism. Not many do that anymore (though James Lileks still excels). But occasionally I still cast up the odd personal log here, and today will be one of those days. Mostly because I’ve been so busy I haven’t had much time to read, so I can’t do a book review. I may finish the book I’m reading now in time to review it tomorrow.
Today was my last Monday at my job – though I’m informed they’ll be wanting to bring me in as a contractor now and then in the next few months, to do the stuff nobody else knows how to do. In my free time, I’ve been surprisingly busy. Odds and ends that demanded attention. The first inchoate stirrings of a job hunt. I haven’t spent much time on the couch watching TV, though it’s what I really feel like doing.
Friday I got a message from the woman at Meteoritt, the media translation company in Oslo, asking me if I wanted to translate an 18-page document, due Wednesday. I said sure. No problem. I’ve begun to get a handle on how long it takes to translate a script, and 18 pages is no big deal. Script pages, as you probably know, are mostly white space.
But it turned out it wasn’t a script. It was what I believe is called a “treatment” in the industry. A treatment (unless I’m mistaken) is a narrative of the story organized in paragraphs. One paragraph per scene, I think. Which means that a treatment is a pretty dense document. 18 pages of a treatment is a chunk of verbiage. Continue reading Bilingual orientation
This year, singer-songerwriter Andrew Peterson removed the Facebook and Instagram apps from his phone, because the socials, not just these but all of them, ask more from us than we can give.
We all know about the tendency on social media to make our lives look like it’s better than they really are. I’ve considered seeing what would happen if I posted a picture of myself with bloodshot eyes after a tearful argument, or a quick video clip of me grumbling about something that didn’t go right, or (the horror!) me with my shirt off to show why I’m trying to get more exercise. That’s not to mention the hellish tendency to put too much stake in how many likes or follows we got today. Comparison is the thief of joy, said Teddy Roosevelt, and social media is foundationally comparative. It’s comparison on steroids.
From Atlas Obscura, a nice article, with several impressive photos, about a photographer’s trip to Iceland.
“The Westfjords suffer from extreme weather during the winter months, and after the global financial crash of 2008, many of the properties have been abandoned,” Emmett says. “These structures are often small and empty but amazingly atmospheric, full of the strange sense of other-worldliness you often find in derelict buildings, but that strange feeling is matched by the landscapes that surround them, so you get a double dose of magic. I was totally in my element.”
It doesn’t appear in the photos, but many buildings in Iceland are covered in corrugated steel. It holds up well against the constant high winds.
Today is C.S. Lewis’s birthday. He was born in 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I didn’t commemorate the date of his death (Nov. 22, 1963) this year, as is my usual custom. This year, I’d rather think about births than deaths.
My debt to “Jack” Lewis, as a reader and a fan-boy, is beyond calculation. His work was an instrument of God’s to bring me to the faith I have today.
You may celebrate or mourn that, as you like.
How do I feel about all the sexual harassment allegations rising about us like zombies in a bad movie? I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there’s considerable schadenfreude in seeing one after another sanctimonious liberal, all of whom have excoriated conservative Christians as sexists for years, getting their sheep’s clothing yanked off their backs.
This, by the way (especially in Hollywood), is an ironic fruit of the long-standing blacklisting that has kept conservatives out of the business (unless they keep very, very quiet). It may be that conservatives would have acted equally badly if they’d had the same kind of power. But we’ll never know, because they were excluded at the gate.
I’d like to think that all this would bring a return to traditional, Judeo-Christian sexual morality. But it won’t, of course. What will happen is that feminists will gain increased power. More and more male executives will be edged out and replaced by women who, having no better values, will act exactly the same way. Men will find it increasingly difficult to get promotions, and will more and more be relegated to “menial” jobs. And the already draconian regime of the Human Resources sensitivity police will come to rival the KGB.
In closing, here’s an article from Mental Floss on how to treat your books. Guaranteed to flood you with existential guilt.
I’m late to blogging tonight. I had my semi-annual dental exam and cleaning after work. Alas, my customer rating will have to be only a C, because I didn’t draw the beautiful young dental hygienist tonight. My dentist did the job himself. Let’s hope they up their game next spring.
From Futurism.com: “Eight ‘Facts’ About the Human Body Debunked by Science.”
“It’s impossible to prove that no two [fingerprints] are the same,” Mike Silverman, a forensic science regulator in the United Kingdom, told The Telegraph. “It’s improbable, but so is winning the lottery, and people do that every week.”
I remember seeing the tongue-rolling thing used as an example in one of my school textbooks (high school or college; I forget), no earlier than the 1960s. Even though, according to this article, it was debunked around 1952.
Tip: Books, Inq.
Remember, trust no one. Except Brandywine Books. Oh, and the Bible.
In my mind, it’s a great big crisis; high drama.
What it is, is that I agreed long ago to go along with my neighbor on a mutually beneficial property improvement project. And yesterday I signed the contract and cut a check, and the work will probably start this weekend.
My neighbor has been as amiable as he could be. I’ll be slightly in debt for a few months, but I saved a big chunk of money by scheduling at this time of year, so that’s OK.
Everything’s fine. And I feel like retiring to my fainting couch.
Is this what it’s like to be a grown-up?
And now, this:
Gene Edward Veith shared this “open letter” today, taken from a comment on his blog. It’s a letter to the next church shooter, inviting him to consider the writer’s own church.
And the whole “death” thing raises a very important point. Ours is a Christian church and death is a particular interest of ours. We think we have it figured out. As you enter our sanctuary, you won’t be able to help noticing that the most prominent feature displayed there is a large cross – an ancient Roman instrument of execution. It’s our teaching that it was a death, the death of God’s Son on a cross like that, that frees us from the fear of our own death. Don’t misunderstand – we’re not seeking death, but we’re not fearing it, either. Jesus demonstrated that if we followed Him through our own death, we would then follow Him into resurrection and eternal life. He demonstrated this for us and that demonstration was remarkably well-documented both in the Book He left for us and in the lives of His closest friends and followers, most of whom died rather than deny that Jesus’ resurrection had happened. Which to our way of thinking is a very strong endorsement.
Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2017/11/dear-next-mass-church-murderer/#Mu5vrWCFBfEv2QZ3.99
Ashlee Cowles has an appreciation of the mystery novels of Sally Wright at The University Bookman:
Thematically, the Ben Reese mysteries touch on many topics that will resonate with “bohemian Tory” conservatives of the Kirkian variety, where local culture, a living connection to the past, and a love of the land are more important than the “hot button” political squabbles of the day. In Out of the Ruins, for example, Ben Reese must solve a murder linked to a historic family’s ownership of Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, “now threatened by developers and government takeover.” This notion of big business and big government as equal threats to authentic culture and human flourishing was one of Russell Kirk’s favorite themes, evident in several of the ghostly tales collected in Ancestral Shadows.
On the strength of this article, I’m reading my first Ben Reese book now.
Tip: Dave Lull.
James Como (a noted C.S. Lewis scholar) writes an insightful appreciation of the novels of Mark Helprin at New English Review (by way of Books, Inq., by way of Dave Lull).
He delivers (as C. S. Lewis has put it) a realism of presentation, a high definition intensity of multi-sensory appeal, an imagism that, blurring (as do the Romantics) the line between exterior and interior, inexorably involves the reader in its vitality. Light, blue coldness and ice, but also heat, shimmering foliage, dramatic skyscapes, the ocean, the Hudson Valley with its precipices and bays and bordering towns and pastures, a predilection for knowing how tasks are done (and in detail) and how objects work—these are touchstones of Helprin’s prose, these and a rhythmic, phonic drive. He surely writes for the ear. The style is further marked by analogy, by lists (they can make the man), and by hyperbolic wit (with every now and then a punch line).
When Dave Lull sent me a link to this article from Literary Hub, I was a little uncomfortable. Articles on women in the Viking Age, like anything having to do with male/female relations written nowadays, tend to be, shall we say, “pregnant” with sociopolitical baggage. But the linked piece by Linnea Hartsuyker is accurate in every detail as far as I can tell. I could find no fault with it.
And you know I tried.
Women warriors were a potent literary fantasy, especially in a hyper-masculine medieval world where honor and avoidance of effeminacy were key motivators of male action. In narratives that contain women warriors, it is often the role of the male hero to turn them into wives and mothers, and their submission thus enhances the male hero’s virility. Women warriors, at least in the surviving literature, are never the central heroes of the tales, but ambivalent figures to be wooed and conquered.