A bookstore affiliated with the National Air & Space Museum has sold 13,200 copies of the book Hell Hawks! The Untold Story of the American Fliers Who Savaged Hitler’s Wehrmacht by Robert F. Dorr and Thomas Jones. How? Location and what’s called hand selling. (via Books, Inq.)
All posts by philwade
The Social Cost of Pornography
A study by the Witherspoon Institute gives us the terrible social cost of porn.
From their website, they give this answer to the question of free speech and the first amendment:
In a series of cases decided since the middle of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of what counts as obscene, and society has simultaneously grown more permissive regarding explicit portrayals of nudity and sex in magazines, in film and on television. Nevertheless, material that meets the Court’s definition of obscenity – that appeals to the prurient interest, that is patently offensive, and that lacks serious artistic, social, or scientific value – can be suppressed, while material deemed indecent though not obscene can be regulated as to the time, place, and manner of its availability. There is little question that hard-core pornography does not receive constitutional protection, even though many jurisdictions now permit its dissemination.
In their report, they give evidence for the rise in crime, trafficking, and family disruption due to our casual acceptance of pornography.
She's Broken. We've Known It for Years.
Lawrence Meyers is writing about what’s wrong in Hollywood this week and next.
Here’s the diagnosis regarding Hollywood’s present malady:
1) Movies operate in a statistical environment of extreme uncertainty
2) Uncertainty creates fear
3) Fear creates a desire to control
4) Desire to control has resulted in a multi-layered, needlessly expensive studio bureaucracy, resulting in sub optimal risk management.
5) The goal of each individual level of the bureaucracy is to insulate itself from criticism from the layer above it.
6) This results in the hiring of the most expensive, but not necessarily most talented or suitable, creative team to manufacture product that audiences are losing interest in and are not designed to achieve maximum ROI.
I Can't Believe It
Writing and performing believable characters. D.G. Myers writes, “At all events, critics say this kind of thing all the time (‘the character comes to life,’ ‘the character just never seems real’), but only now do I realize that I have no idea what they mean.”
Was it for crimes that I had done . . . ?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
(mertala/Flickr)
Lessons to be Learned Here
In this article on Russian censorship of independent publishers, the writer reports:
Two years later he found himself in much more trouble over Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, a heartwarming narrative in which clones of Khrushchev and Stalin enjoy some tender sexual moments together. In fact Blue Lard had been published in 1999 but it was not until 2002 that anybody took offense. Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth movement flushed copies of Sorokin’s works down a giant toilet erected outside the Bolshoi Theater, apparently as part of a battle against “…immorality, cynicism, and the humiliation of our culture.” Sales exploded, reaching a total of 100,000.
. . . [Ad Marginem’s publisher, Alexander Ivanov, said of their arrest over publishing this book,] “We felt danger, but our main sensation was… surprise at the idiocy of the situation, that we had to discuss literary issues with the police. It seemed to me that they themselves were a bit shocked by this investigation.”
(via Books, Inq.)
Irish Comfortable Familiarity with Death
Great Irish Lives is a collection of Irish obituaries from a people who appear to relish the news of someone stepping into the great beyond. Suzanne Strempek Shea, writing the review, quotes from one obit, “We believe there is no doubt that Mr O’Connell expired on Saturday, the 15th of this month, at Genoa. He yielded up his latest breath at the distance of many hundred miles from the remains of [his] humble dwelling….” She then writes:
Don’t let language stop you from reading, and learning. The obituary of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Jan. 13, 1941, includes the story of his meeting as a student with W.B. Yeats, whose obit resides nearby. The back-and-forth: “We have met too late,” the budding novelist said, “you are too old to be influenced by me,” to which the poet answered, “Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.”
Francis Chan on Finding Power in the Holy Spirit
DreamWorks To Film "The Help"
DreamWorks has acquired the rights to produce Katheryn Stockett’s debut novel, The Help, is a good read in Southern literature. They hope to begin filming this summer in Mississippi. The book is good, and the author has consulted the script, so the movie may be passable.
Spelling Chaos
The Spelling Society has “The Chaos,” what they call “the well-known versified catalogue of English spelling irregularities.” It’s a bit too much for me at the moment. Have you seen this before? (HT:SB)