John Scalzi, author of Redshirts, which is being adapted for television, has scored a ten-year deal with Tor Books for thirteen new books.
The executive editor at Tor said that while Scalzi hasn’t had a top-of-the-list bestselling book, “One of the reactions of people reading a John Scalzi novel is that people go out and buy all the other Scalzi novels.”
I’ve been interested to read one of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion books ever since I saw Peter Davidson’s portrayal on a BBC television series some years back. Books in the series have recently become available for Kindle at low prices, so I bought Police at the Funeral.
Albert Campion, the amateur detective of these books, bears a resemblance to Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey, and it’s not by accident. Campion began as a parody of Lord Peter, but took on a life of his own. Nevertheless, they’re still alike enough to be brothers, except that Campion wears horn rimmed glasses instead of Wimsey’s monocle.
In Police at the Funeral, Campion goes to stay in a great house in Cambridge, at the request of a friend, and of his fiancee who is a lady’s companion there. The resident family is an eccentric and crotchety assortment of elderly siblings and cousins, all constantly quibbling and chafing under the iron rule of a formidable great-aunt. One of the residents has disappeared, and soon his body is discovered, bound with a rope and shot to death.
The story is perfectly a perfectly adequate example of the “cozy” English variety of mystery, but I found it less interesting than I hoped. Perhaps my tastes have been spoiled by the ugly realism of the modern mystery, or perhaps I just compared it unfairly to Dorothy Sayer’s books, which are (in my view) a notch brighter and more interesting.
Not bad, though. I’m sure many of our readers will enjoy it.
Mark Griffiths, a historian and botanist, was writing a book about English horticulturist John Gerard, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and decided to work out the ciphers and symbols on a famous book of Gerard’s. His study has convinced him that he has found the only known portrait of Shakespeare made during his lifetime. Many clues point in this direction. For example:
A figure four and an arrow head with an E stuck to it. In Elizabethan times, people would have used the Latin word “quater” as a slang term for a four in dice and cards. Put an e on the end and it becomes quatere, which is the infinitive of the Latin verb quatior, meaning shake. Look closely and the four can be seen as a spear.
“It is a very beautiful example of the kind of device that Elizabethans, particularly courtiers, had great fun creating,” said Griffiths.
The discovery was published in Country Life, which apparently is enough to make scholars mock its veracity.
First up, Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.
“I’m deeply unconvinced,” he said. “I haven’t seen the detailed arguments, but Country Life is certainly not the first publication to make this sort of claim.” (via Prufrock)
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks brings us signs with curious punctuation. There’s a sign for a nursing home that people say is “20 minutes from here,” a place with (quote, unquote) parking in the rear, ice cream that’s “homegrown” somehow, and this notice written by someone who doesn’t appear to have any idea what quotation marks are for.
Have you ever seen this kind of thing in the wild? I think I’ve only noticed misplaced apostrophes.
This reminds me of a note I put in the copy room where I once worked. “This is a Lanier copier,” I said. “You cannot ‘Xerox’ on it.”
They loved me for that.
The Museum of Biblical Art in New York will be closing June 14. Founded by the American Bible Society in 1997, the museum needed to find a new venue soon and could not do it.
“I believe that MOBIA contributes a unique element to the cultural landscape of New York and the entire country, and it is with tremendous sorrow that we close our doors,” said Co-Chair of the MOBIA Board of Trustees John Fossum.
Mike Duran states, “It is indeed a tragedy if we can’t acknowledge the Bible and its influence as one of the great sources of modern Western art and culture,” but he wonders “whether the mainstream evangelical perspective of art has created an impassable breach.” Is a secular museum on biblical art an uncomfortable topic for Americans, particular New Yorkers?
The Atlantic answers this way. “The absence of religious context for religious art in American museums was not, as one might assume, a product of the culture wars or a precocious expression of the new atheism. It was actually the result of several hundred years of aesthetic politics.”
They quote Marcus Burk, senior curator at the Hispanic Society of America, saying, “This is just a torpedo at the water-line. It’s an enormous loss to the cultural life of New York and the whole country.”
Harlan Coben is a remarkable writer of thrillers. It has been noted that he avoids profanity in his dialogue, and his use of violence is pretty restrained. Nevertheless he is capable of producing books as shocking as any you will ever read, in their own way. The Stranger is Hitchcockian in its portrayal of a very ordinary man thrust into a world of lies and mortal danger, and raises societal and existential questions as well.
Adam Price is no man of action. An easygoing type, he’s a successful eminent domain lawyer, living in a prosperous New Jersey suburb. He loves his beautiful wife and his two teenage sons. He’s “living the dream,” as one of his friends likes to say.
But, as the author is careful to emphasize, “dream” is precisely the word for their lives. Their security is insecure, their happiness fragile. Adam learns this first hand when a stranger sidles up to him after a youth lacrosse league meeting at the local American Legion, and tells him, “You didn’t have to stay with her.” Then he gives him information to prove that his wife has lied to him about something that matters deeply in their relationship.
It’s not just him who’s receiving such messages, Adam learns in time. There are people who search the internet, ferreting out secrets and blackmailing people, self-righteously believing they’re fighting the good fight against hypocrisy.
And they’re not even the worst ones….
Besides questioning our illusions of security and secrecy in the modern world, The Stranger also raises interesting questions about what they call “hacktivism” nowadays. This book is as relevant as anything you’ll read this year.
It drew me in. It fascinated me. It broke my heart. Highly recommended.
Marijuana infused coffee pods are now for sale in select stores on the left coast. One store owner said, “I liken it to a Red Bull and vodka. I had more energy, but I still had the relaxation you get from cannabis.”
Energetic relaxation, folks, can be yours with one special cup of coffee.
I’m late to the game, but I’d like to share some things I was thinking a couple weeks back, when everybody was talking about “Draw Muhammad Day” (is that the acceptable spelling this week? It’s hard to keep track). Chances are you’ve thought similar thoughts, but I haven’t seen the argument framed in exactly the terms I’d wish.
First of all, I’m all for civic courtesy. Going out and purposely insulting somebody’s religion (even if it’s Islam, which I consider a delusion of the devil) is bad taste, bad manners, and bad behavior as a neighbor. As a Christian, I consider it not only unloving but counterproductive for evangelism purposes. I would never do it, if all things were equal.
But there are events and statements that do make all things unequal. Like a planet dropped into a solar system, they change all the orbits and disrupt the orderly functioning of things.
Violence is the most radical of these. When violence is added to the mix, everything is altered.
When somebody declares that they intend to exercise a Murder Veto on the First Amendment, offending them ceases to be a faux pas. It becomes a kind of a duty for everyone who cares about freedom of expression. If you can’t insult the source of the threat yourself, you have to at least support those who will. Even if, under normal circumstances, those people are scuzzballs.
Because constitutional rights are more important than civility. Incivility will not destroy freedom. The threat of violence can.
The Murder Veto must not be tolerated, or we are lost.
Artist Hugh MacLeod asked author Seth Godin several questions last month. Here’s one of them.
HM: Back in my advertising days, a “Freelancer” was mostly considered a second class citizen- somebody who didn’t have the chops to hold down a proper, full-time salaried gig with an equally proper, established agency. A mere hired gun, maybe useful in an emergency, but no real lasting value. And here’s you, saying “No” to all that. Here’s you saying, “The reason you’re a freelancer is because it actually allows you to do important work.” Please elaborate.
SG: Think about the people who are truly great. The programmer who can save you months. The cartoonist who draws life-changing images on the backs of business cards. The guitar player who can sit in on a recording session and change everything… These people are first class. They’re in charge. Top of their game. The best of the best. That’s the freelancer each of us is capable of being.
Photo by Ben Cremin/Flickr (CC 2.0)
Aimee Byrd bruised herself working with nunchaku for her book trailer on Theological Fitness: Why We Need a Fighting Faith
“Theological fitness requires much of the same kind of fight to continue. The preacher to the Hebrews exhorts us to hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering (Heb. 10:23). If Christians are to persevere by holding fast to their confession, they are going to need to know that confession front, back, and sideways. “