Category Archives: Authors

Authors, The Press

Jon Fosse, Nobel laureate

Leave a comment
Photo credit: Jarvin: Jarle Vines

I am embarrassed to admit that up until a few days ago I had never heard of Norwegian author Jon Fosse, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. He is a novelist and a playwright – reportedly the most performed Norwegian playwright in the world after Henrik Ibsen. He was born in Haugesund (the region where my paternal family came from) and passed through a period of atheism and alcoholism before becoming (like Sigrid Undset) a Roman Catholic.

According to this article from CNE news, Fosse does not write explicitly Christian fiction, but his faith informs his work:

…Both he and his third wife, Anna, are Catholics that have explored their faith together. Fosse says that it is important to keep away from noises. He never watches TV nor listens to the radio. He rarely listens to music. In the midst of pursuing solitude, Fosse sees writing as a confession and a prayer.

“Writing is in itself a way of asking for forgiveness. I think so. And it’s probably prayer, too. When you pray, it is not the satisfied person in you who prays. Not the smug one in you. Often, I think that the worse a person has it, the closer they are in a certain sense to God,” he said.

I am planning to get acquainted with Fosse’s work, and will be writing more about him in the future.

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry

What’s a Bit of Fascism Between Friends?

Leave a comment

Fascism is a 1921 word that came from the Italian name for Mussolini’s anit-communist party, Partito Nazionale Fascista. The word Fascista actually means “political group,” but fascism has come to mean a particularly nasty political group because of its connection to the Mussolini’s policies. They were the Black Shirts, dedicated to what my 1953 Webster’s defines as a “program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition.”

Curious that today the word seems mostly applied to those who rally for beliefs with which we disagree. No forcible suppression, just public argument, and—boom—you’re a fascist. A whole political party is committed to overregulation of industry and commerce, but no, it’s the homeschool moms who are fascists. Climate change is the reason they want to take away your gas stove, but is that fascism? Stop being silly. It’s only fascism with other people do it.

This word like many others is used without meaning, showing our society to be closer to Orwell’s 1984 doublespeak than anyone wants to believe.

Book Banning: Maybe the problem isn’t that someone complains about a book, but that public schools exist at all. Neal McCluskey writes, “The very idea of ‘neutral’ education—education that favors no idea or worldview—is not itself neutral. Elevating ‘neutrality’ over worldviews that believe that some things are inherently good and others inherently bad, and that children should be taught what those are, is a values‐​driven decision, concluding that neutrality more valuable than teaching some things are right and others wrong.”

Banning Books: The American Library Association asks why they have to hide their efforts to indoctrinate our kids.

In the PEN America report, they state, “Hyperbolic and misleading rhetoric about ‘porn in schools’ and ‘sexually explicit,’ ‘harmful,’ and ‘age inappropriate’ materials led to the removal of thousands of books covering a range of topics and themes for young audiences.”

Author: Anti-racistism author Ibram Kendi has used several million dollars on plans that have not materialized. Now, he’s laying off staff.

But enough of that stuff.

Poetry: This is delightful, the poem, the painting, and the recording of the poet’s voice. “My Wife, Sewing at a Window” by Eithne Longstaff

Comic books: Penguin Classics is publishing a Marvel collection of $45 hardback reproductions of the silver age stories of X-Men, The Avengers, and Fantastic Four. But wait, there’s more! They released three such editions last year: Captain America, Black Panther, and The Amazing Spider-Man. Gosh! Who could’ve thought they’d do something like that?

(Photo: The Donut Hole, La Puente, California. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Authors, Blogs, Socials, The Press

Old Words May Help Us Understand a Minnesota Bridge

1 Comment

D’you mind if I share some things I read in the S pages of a massive Webster’s Second International? Thanks. You’re a peach.

Obsolete meanings of common words

Sorry is used as a noun in Scottish and some English dialects to mean “sorrow.” It was also once used as “to grieve.” And sorry grace was once a phrase meaning “bad luck” or “ill fortune.”

Sorrow once had a subtle use of causing actual damage, not just emotional stress.

Sore as an adjective once had a sense of criminal or wrong. As a noun, it once was used to mean disease, affliction, pain, or grief. As a verb, it used to mean “to wound.”

Sound was once used in the sense of understanding or relevance, as in, the speech had no sound for me.

Word combos

Also, on these pages are lists of combinations, like these archaic ones for sore: sore-beset, sore-dreaded, sore-taxed, sore-vexed, and sore-won.

These for sorrow are not marked archaic but have an unfamiliar sound to me: sorrow-blinded, sorrow-bound, sorrow-closed, sorrow-seasoned, sorrow-shot, and sorrow-streaming.

For soul, there’s a long list, including soul-benumbed, soul-blind, soul-boiling, soul-cloying, soul-fatting, soul-gnawing, and soul-thralling.

The Internet doesn’t have natural discoverability like this old dictionary. We could lose a lot of knowledge by limiting our systems to giving us only the answers to the questions we’ve asked, because if we ask what else we might want to know, the Internet just asks us what else we want to know.

Now that I’ve played the philologist for a minute, what else do we have?

More Words: Here are a couple videos on old words that should be brought back.

Journalism: There’s a pedestrian bridge crossing I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport that connects Bloomington to Richfield. Tyler Vigen wanted to know why it was built. Some of the readers of this very blog may be asking the same question, so Vigen did the research and has given us a full report (with excessive in-text notes).

Authors: C.S. Lewis versus T.S. Eliot with sharpened opinions

Naturalism: Does unnatural behavior exist? Is it true that “whatever is possible is by definition also natural”?

Photo: The sign on the old hotel by the tracks, Gulpwater, Wyoming. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors

Snorri’s place

Leave a comment

Tonight, in the absence of any ideas from my corner, here’s a short video from the great Jackson Crawford, filmed at Reykholt, the home of Snorri Sturlusson, the great Icelandic saga author, poet, and chieftain. Crawford explains some things about Snorri’s life. And death. Which happened right there. That pool is geothermally heated, by the way.

Have a good weekend.

Authors

Murdered Author’s Notebook on Russian Invasion Now Made Public

Leave a comment

Ukrainian father and children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenko took notes as Russian forces rolled into his Kapytolivka village in eastern Ukraine. When he knew they would take him away, he buried his journal in his backyard.

Charlotte Higgins, writing for The Guardian, put together as much of the story as can be known, working with another Ukranian author, Victoria Amelina.

“I never thought that my home village would become the epicentre of the rashist occupation,” wrote Vakulenko in the opening paragraphs of his diary. The word “rashist” is a now widespread Ukrainian portmanteau, a combination of “Russian” and “fascist”, not to be given the dignity of an initial capital. “For me, with my patriotic, pro-Ukrainian views, it was extremely dangerous to find myself surrounded by the enemy.” But, he wrote, he had little choice: moving his son seemed impossible. He added: “You can get used to anything; what matters is what sort of person you are left at the end of it.”

“The manuscript is now in the Kharkiv Literary Museum, and the text of the diary has been recently published in Ukraine, with a foreword by Amelina.”

Authors, Fiction

James Scott Bell interview

Leave a comment

Above, an interview — a few years old — with author James Scott Bell. Among the topics touched on are whether writers are born or made, and if a series character can have a character arc.

He mentions his blog, Kill Zone, which I wasn’t aware of. You can find it here.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Reading

Amelina: ‘My Heroes Will Not Stop Dying’

Leave a comment

Ukrainian novelist, activist, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award for 2021 Victoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She was “with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists on June 27 when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

The IT professional-turned writer, 37, had lived in the States for a few years before returning to Ukraine to research war crimes.

In September 2022, “Amelina went to the liberated village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv Oblast and found the diary of her colleague, the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenklo, along with his father,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

“Vakulenko had buried the diary under a cherry tree in his yard before he was abducted by Russian occupation forces that March. The diary is now kept in the Kharkiv Literary Museum for posterity.”

In this 2020 interview with PEN Ukraine, Amelina offers this optimism (which I’ve had to translate via Google): To write Home for Home, I quit my favorite job, ruined the career I had built since I was seventeen. It was painful, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing – I gained a lot, but I also sacrificed a lot.

“I would not advise making decisions motivated by something external. There must be an inner readiness to live by texts, to turn oneself into texts, to write even when no one reads. No publisher can refuse this. If literature is your way of interacting with the world, miracles will happen.”

She also lists the New Testament among the books that have influenced her the most. “It seems that in the near future my heroes will not stop dying for others, but this is not about death, but about resurrection.”

Here are some other things to read.

Poetry: Last year, Steve Moyer wrote about Ukrainian poetry having depicted the corruption of war for decades. “Many of the poets writing today in Ukraine, however, compose in free verse, relying more on repetition, word play, juxtaposition of images, and rhetorical devices than on traditional forms and meter to convey the harsh reality they’re witnessing. Images such as rotting fruit occur and recur. Debris lying in snow and crumbling bridges make their appearances.”

Reading: Do you write in your books? President John Adams did, and Joel Miller offers five reasons for doing it too.

“When I was working on my Paul Revere book, I remember hesitating over Charles Ferris Gettemy’s biography, The True Story of Paul Revere. The book was over a hundred years old. I can’t write in it, can I? It felt like some sort of aesthetic crime. But then, no. I need to keep track of ideas and details. Why did I have it to begin with? To use. Once I ditched my reservations, the payoff was immeasurable.”

Reading: Chekhov said, “I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t. I have no other criterion.” Yes, but maybe there are other legitimate categories.

Photo: Sigurdur Fjalar Jonsson/Unsplash

Authors, Writing

James Scott Bell’s best writing advice

Leave a comment

Still haven’t finished the book I’m reading for review. This would seem to argue that I’ve been busy and productive, but I don’t feel busy and productive. However, this is irrelevant. I learned long ago that my feelings are of very little practical use.

So, another video tonight. Here’s a short clip from one of my favorite authors, James Scott Bell. He’s talking about a discipline many writers have found valuable — giving yourself a daily quota of words to produce. Like compound interest, this practice yields remarkable results over time.

I have written this way at times in my long life, but it’s been a while. Most of the time, I can write only so much at a sitting. After my small ration of creativity has run out, I end up sitting at the keyboard, frustrated. I am then overcome with guilt and turn to drink and drugs.

Okay, I don’t turn to drink and drugs. But I understand the appeal.

Anyway, I just took up rising early to write, and that’s upped my output considerably. So get off my back, James Scott Bell.

Authors

Hawthorne on Having a Government Job

Leave a comment

In The Custom House essay that precedes The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne chafes at his inability to write and laments the dulling effects of his day job.

Suffice it here to say that a Custom–House officer of long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position—is, that while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength, departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self–support.

. . .

Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle’s pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam’s gold—meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the devil’s wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self–reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.

Even with this, he didn’t quit his day job. He was fired.

What do you think? Does a regular paycheck pull a man away from self-reliance, or this just the way creative types talk when they can’t sell something?

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing, The Press

The Dead White Male and the Sea

2 Comments
Hemingway writing at the Dorchester Hotel in London, 1944. Photographer unknown, public domain. By way of Wikimedia Commons.

Via Instapundit, this story from PJ Media: “The Woke Bell Tolls for Ernest Hemingway.”

The UK’s Telegraph revealed Saturday that Penguin Random House, which publishes Hemingway’s novels and stories, has slapped them with “a trigger warning” due to “concerns about his ‘language’ and ‘attitudes.’” Hapless new Hemingway readers are also “alerted to the novelist’s ‘cultural representations.’”

I can imagine what Ernest Hemingway himself would say to all this, but I wouldn’t be able to publish it. The arrogant, self-infatuated, blinkered, miseducated woke dopes at Penguin Random House don’t seem to understand that the whole idea of reading Hemingway, or any other great writer, is to encounter “language,” “attitudes” and “cultural representations” that are not one’s own, and are not the same as the language, attitudes, and cultural representations of contemporary culture.

As you may recall if you’re a regular reader here, I don’t like Hemingway much. Though his writing style was undeniably influential, I’ve never cared for his stories, and never worked up the interest to read any of his books. I don’t like his politics, and all I know about his personality repels me.

But you know how you can tell I’m not on the Left? You can tell because I think his books ought to be published straight. Adults should be trusted to have the maturity to handle ideas, words and imagery that might trouble or offend them.

Somebody made a comment on Twitter the other day to the effect that our times aren’t much fun. I replied, “Shoot, Prohibition was more fun than this.”

I think we ought to declare a new Roaring 20s. Let’s have speakeasies, places where you can speak easily. Say anything you bloody want. Leave your electronic devices in a Faraday Cage at the door, so nobody can listen in, and engage in old-fashioned forbidden conversation. All ideas permitted. No punching allowed, though.

Which would admittedly cramp Hemingway’s style.