Gene Edward Veith at Cranach links to an article by Chad Bird on how fiction brought him to Christian faith.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, however, something else was happening. The God against whom I had rebelled, and from whom I was fleeing, began to use these very works of fiction to beckon me home. As it turned out, the novels in which I had sought escape, became part of the means whereby the Lord rescued me from my own death.
For several months, the publisher Scholastic had plans to release a book this year called A Birthday Cake for George Washington in which slaves in the Washington estate scrambled to make a cake after running out of sugar. School Library Journal said the beautifully illustrated book painted a “dangerously rosy impression of the relationship between slaves and slave owners.” Particularly troubling was that the slave were shown to be smiling.
Activists on one side are pleased the book has been pulled, but activists on the other side are saying they’re shocked.
The National Coalition Against Censorship and the PEN American Center argued in a official complaint, “Those who value free speech as an essential human right and a necessary precondition for social change should be alarmed whenever books are removed from circulation because they are controversial.”
I have to wonder what Scholastic was thinking when they edited, reviewed, and produced this book. Were they of the same mind as the NCAC to publish anything of a certain quality? And what of that mindset; is no topic, view, or depiction of history unpublishable? If Scholastic had rejected this book upon its proposal would that have been the same censorship they are decrying now?
Freedom of speech or expression is a great principle within a sound moral framework where truths and recognized authorities can be appealed to. But secularism and its attending ills have pulled the banner of freedom from its pole and dragged it with them wherever they go, saying freedom is meant to be sullied, torn, and battered because it is a virtue on its own. Liberty in law is bound by the privileges of patriarchy, but freedom means whatever the ___ I want or anyone else wants with the enabling of the rest of us. That’s unsustainable.
Read this review of Nicholas Sparks‘ latest novel and his work at large. Thank you, Heather Havrilesky, for these words (via Prufrock).
Young neurotics are sometimes haunted by the recurring impression that dumb people are much happier than they are. Sparks’s oeuvre seems to suggest that this fabled shadow world of earnest, satisfied simpletons is real. All you need to do to be contented is power down the gears of your useless, overworked brain, the author tells us. Go make some tea and sit on the porch and marvel at the turn of events that brought us to this point, already!
…
It’s strange how literary and commercial works continue to adhere stubbornly to two opposite poles: poetically expressed skepticism versus clumsy, cliché-driven optimism. If our next great American novelist injected Sparks-style earnestness and stubbornly upbeat resolutions into the next great American novel, would we recognize that novel’s greatness?
When you’re a wit, you can be humble. When, like me, you’re a half-wit, you have to brag about it.
Today on F*cebook, a female friend who runs a small business announced that she’d just gotten a call from a place she hadn’t heard from before – the Yukon.
I responded, “You got the Call of the Wild.”
[Cue laugh track.]
I don’t know what I’d do for fun if I didn’t amuse myself.
Here’s where I’m at in the Long March toward my Master’s Degree. I’m formulating a theme for my capstone project.
It’s a humbling experience. Everybody seems to have a fairly clear idea what a capstone project is, except me.
Apparently it’s a research project, but a small one. Targeted, constrained. We do the research, we present the short paper, we get our sheepskins if it’s good enough, and they hold a secret ceremony in which they bestow on us the Sacred Rubber Sorter Finger.
At this point I’ve got a general direction, but not a specific topic.
I fear I’m going to have to do some actual research, to clarify my thinking.
Yes, it’s as bad as that.
Oh yes, I’m going to get my last vestigial hip replaced later this month. Expect not to expect me for a while at some point.
Dr. Carl Ellis describes what he calls “ol’ redneck culture” in the South and how it produced a group of African-American underachievers who celebrate the ghetto. “The values of this culture,” he says, “produced self-sabotaging, self-destructive behavior patterns, including: drunkenness, gang formation, ‘talkin’ trash,’ a scornful attitude toward education and boisterous exhibitionism, to name a few.”
[The achievers] who participated in the great northern migration generally succeeded in spite of racial discrimination in housing and employment. However those who continued to wallow in the ol’ redneck culture became what I call “non-achievers.” Unlike the achievers, they generally did not succeed when they migrated to the urban North. Thus, for many non-achievers, the ol’ redneck culture morphed into what we now recognize as “ghetto culture.” The values that governed their lives included devaluing work as a means of getting ahead, instant gratification with a disregard for the future, and crisis orientation with no planning.
Hey, did you hear Amazon may be opening several brick-and-mortar bookstores? Someone said it, but whether it’s true is another thing.
Is the free two-day shipping available to Amazon Prime members hurting the company? When customers buy something small, like a jar of Nutella, and choose their free two-day shipping option as Prime members can, it costs the company a good bit. Amazon is working on multiple schemes for getting their products in your hands quickly, but their current schemes are soaking them. Perhaps if they can only drown all of their competition, they’ll start making money.
In the wake of my enjoyment of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation (reviewed a few inches below), I bought another of his vintage thrillers, Last Train Out. I enjoyed it quite a lot. Unlike Impersonation, which came near the beginning of the author’s career and involved the beginnings of World War I, this book was written about 1940 and is set at the start of World War II. I’m happy to report that the author’s eye had not dimmed, nor his natural force abated in the intervening years.
Charles Mildenhall is a young Englishman in the diplomatic service. He’s been found to be valuable in troubleshooting crises, so he flits about and puts his hand in wherever trouble pops up. In that capacity he enters Vienna around 1938. He makes the acquaintance of Leopold Benjamin, an immensely wealthy and much respected Jewish banker. Charles is invited to a dinner party at Benjamin’s palatial home, hoping to get a look at Mr. Benjamin’s fabled art collection. Alas, he is told that it’s not available to view at the moment. Mr. Benjamin’s American secretary, Patricia Grey, explains to him, confidentially, that efforts are being made to get the treasures out of the country before the Nazis march in. He almost meets Marius Blute, a mysterious international dabbler who is assisting Mr. Leopold.
Returning to Vienna a few months later, Charles finds both Patricia and Marius in desperate conditions, penniless, cut off, and with their job unfinished. Charles immediately puts his own funds at their disposal, and happily volunteers (partly because he’s fallen in love with Patricia) to assist them in the desperate enterprise of getting the paintings, packed in coffins, to Switzerland by rail. Both Germans and organized crime figures are hot on their heels.
The realism level isn’t very high, but it never is for this generation of thriller (come to think of it, all thrillers are unrealistic. Different generations just demand different kinds of realism in different subject areas). The final resolution might be seen as a kind of deus ex machina, but it’s been fairly set up by the author, though it’s perhaps a little far-fetched. (But certainly no more far-fetched than Bruce Willis driving a truck into a helicopter in flight.)
It should also be noted, for those who care, that the two main female characters in this book are more active and assertive than the women in his earlier work.
Pretty high quality fun. Nothing objectionable. Recommended.
Frankly, if I’d known the kind of show Fortitude was, I probably wouldn’t have watched it. I took it for a police procedural, sort of an extreme Broadchurch, but it turned out to be more like science fiction/horror (though the Wikipedia article calls it a “psychological thriller”).
It is sort of an extreme Broadchurch, though. Extreme in every way – more violence, more blood, more sex, less plausibility, and a far more extreme geographic location.
“Fortitude” is a fictional mining town on the Norwegian arctic island of Svalbard (though the filming was done in Iceland). It’s illegal, we are told, to die in Fortitude, because any pathogens in a body would be eternally preserved in the permafrost. Times are hard. The mines are playing out, and the governor is trying to interest investors in the idea of a “glacier hotel” to bring in the tourist trade.
There’s a heavy element of soap opera in the production. The central character seems to be the “sheriff,” a seemingly decent man with a dark secret. He’s obsessed with the hot Spanish waitress in town, but she’s having an affair with the rescue pilot, a married man. He sneaks out for a few minutes from watching his sick son to have a slap and tickle session with her. When he gets home he finds that the boy has wandered out into the snow. When he gets home, he’s covered in blood, which turns out to be that of a local scientist, who was murdered with a potato peeler and a cleaver.
Meanwhile, a couple local miners have discovered a frozen mammoth, which they hide away, hoping to sell it for a fortune. A detective from Scotland Yard (why would a Scotland Yard detective work in Svalbard? Something to do with mine ownership. It gets worse – he’s an American) comes to town to investigate the murder (a different one) of a mining engineer. A local photographer, who is dying of cancer and due for sanitary deportation, knows something about the death, but isn’t talking.
As I said, if I’d known the sort of story it was I probably wouldn’t have watched it, but by the time I figured that out I was seven episodes in (there are twelve in all) and too interested to stop. The mystery is intriguing, the acting excellent, and the visuals stunning (I was very impressed with the effects the cinematographer achieved with snow).
There’s lots to warn you about here. Sex, nudity, violence, graphic blood and guts, lots of foul language. But it caught me up, I’ll admit it. Not only the Icelandic locations, but the interesting character interactions. There’s some dialogue that questions the goodness of God. But the character dynamics actually argue to the contrary, it seems to me.
So it’s a good series, from the technical point of view. I can’t recommend it to our readers on moral grounds, but you can make your own judgments.
Reader Nigel Ray recommended E. Phillips Oppenheim to me as an author, so I downloaded The Great Impersonation. I was pleased. This is an author I mean to get to know better.
Oppenheim had a long career, spanning the first half of the 20th Century. I’m embarrassed to have been only vaguely aware of him, because he was very good at his craft.
In The Great Impersonation, we follow Leopold Von Ragastein, a German agent operating just before World War I. He can easily pass as an Englishman, since he spent many years there and was educated at Oxford. While there he met Sir Everard Dominey, a disreputable and alcoholic young Englishman who, everyone noticed, looked enough like Leopold to be his twin. A chance meeting in Africa years later gives Leopold a perfect opportunity. All he has to do is dispose of the real Everard, assume his identity, and return to England (financed by German gold) to pay his debts and resume his place in society.
Most people are taken in. The only two people in England who seriously doubt his identity are a jealous old lover – who may mean real danger – and Everard’s wife. She went mad on a terrible night when Everard (she believes) killed a man who was obsessed with her. But that has nothing to do with Leopold, she insists, as he is not really her husband.
Leopold is an interesting character – a patriot and a man of honor torn between feeling and duty as Lady Dominey gradually regains her faculties, and he comes to love her.
The climax offers a very neat plot twist.
Although The Great Impersonation is technically a thriller, there’s actually not much action in it. And that’s fine with me – the drama is in the increasing tension between Leopold’s conflicting duties of honor and love. Modern readers will probably find the main female characters stereotyped, especially the childlike Lady Dominey, but I put up with that sort of thing just fine myself.
Well written, well plotted, and morally unobjectionable, The Great Impersonation was a pleasure to read. Recommended.
Answering a question no one was asking (and possibly procrastinating on other projects (or likely having lost a bet (or very likely using grant resources that they’d otherwise have to return (and/or definitely exercising strong nerd power)))), physicists have found that many great works of literature resemble fractals.
The academics put more than 100 works of world literature, by authors from Charles Dickens to Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco and Samuel Beckett, through a detailed statistical analysis. Looking at sentence lengths and how they varied, they found that in an “overwhelming majority” of the studied texts, the correlations in variations of sentence length were governed by the dynamics of a cascade – meaning that their construction is a fractal: a mathematical object in which each fragment, when expanded, has a structure resembling the whole. (via Prufrock et al)