Our Names Are Dropped in the Latest B&C Podcast

In his podcast today, John Wilson of Books and Culture talks about how much he enjoyed Lars’ latest !!spell-binding!! novel, Hailstone Mountain, and a bit about how he was provoked to read it. The world feels smaller somehow.
If you too are brand new to Lars Walker’s novels, learn more by following this wonderful, insightful, and humility-inspiring blog or through the links below:

(via Kevin Holtsberry)

Heart-Warming Songs from Early America

Autumn always gets me thinking of early America. Maybe it seeps out from Thanksgiving, that thoroughly Pilgrim holiday. So I offer you this music which, though in theme is slightly off-season, in tone is perfectly placed. As Hawthorne said, “She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.”

Networking

Had a small adventure today, a step outside my customary work orbit. It involved a connection with a fellow blogger, too.

Dennis Ingolfsland (a fine Norwegian name) is the chief librarian at Crown College in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota, a school of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He’s also the blogger at The Recliner Commentaries, a fine blog I’ve been following for years. He doesn’t post as often as I’d wish, but then he’s a teacher as well as a librarian. Also the pastor of a church. That’ll eat into your time.

I’m in the last stages right now of composing a research paper on Theological Librarianship for my grad school class. One thing I was required to do for that project was to interview some working librarians in the field I’m covering. I e-mailed three, and they all agreed to help (librarians, I’m discovering, are a remarkably helpful and accommodating group. Which makes me wonder whether I’m cut out for the job). Dennis invited me to come out to Crown and look at their set-up, and I decided it would be a good idea.

He showed me through their library, which is far larger, better organized, and more sophisticated than mine is. He gave me some good suggestions for connections to online resources. And he bought me lunch, on the college’s dime.

I think they must have confused me with somebody else.

In any case, thanks, Dennis.

The Boring Dead



A still from Night of the Living Dead, 1968.

It’s Halloween season now, I guess, so I think I’ll speak my mind about zombies.

I don’t like them.

Not in the Bruce Campbell Evil Dead sense of, “I hate those bleeping zombies and I’m gonna blow them away.”

No, I dislike them because they’re boring. Of all the monsters invented by the mind of man, the zombie (as imagined in America ever since the movies altered a Haitian folk superstition into a semi-systematic popular mythology) is the least intriguing.

Zombies have no style, like Dracula. They (generally) have no pathos, or capacity for it, like Frankenstein’s monster. They have no tortured self-awareness, like the wolf man.

They just lurch around hungering for brains, compelled by mere appetite, without choice or agency.

They are a metaphor for modern humanity, as seen by itself.

And I hate that most of all.

Gaiman: Kids Need to Read

Author Neil Gaiman notes that the prison system is big business. How can they predict jail cell growth? “[U]sing a pretty simple algorithm,” Gaiman said, “based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read.” Not that all illiterate people are criminals or all literate people are not, but the relationship between being unable to read and crime is strong. Sixty percent of America’s prison inmates are illiterate; 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems, according to the U.S. Dept. of Education.

Gaiman said he went to China for the first sci-fi convention ever approved by the Communist establishment. He asked an official why this was finally approved. The official replied that the Chinese had no imagination for invention, so they asked the likes of Google, Apple, and others who were inventing new technology. These people were readers of science fiction and fantasy.

“Fiction can show you a different world,” he said. “It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in.”

Beautiful Redesign of Classic Book

The Fox is Black, a design blog, has held design re-cover contests in the past. I just saw their winner for a contest on redesigning The Wizard of Oz, which adds the word “Wonderful” to the title. It is captivating.

Paul Bartlett's recover of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

A Heck of a Lewis site

Our friend Gene Edward Veith, of Cranach blog, linked today to Joel Heck’s Lewis Site, where the author, who teaches at Concordia University, Austin, Texas has done a lot of work compiling a chronology of C. S. Lewis’s life.

He’s now produced a perpetual desk calendar with an event for every day of the year. The perfect gift for… well, for me. And for those Lewis fanatics on your list, whose name is surely Legion.

Now You See It, by Stuart M. Kaminsky

One of the things I love about the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s novels is their general lack of sociopaths. I first encountered the sociopathic villain in the novels of John D. MacDonald, whose work I also love. It was fresh at the time. Since then sociopaths have been done to death. As mysteries have moved from being puzzles framed by characters to thrillers framed by monsters, authors have offered up an increasing number of semi-human, sociopathic serial killers for their intrepid heroes to blow away, to the cheers of the audience.

Kaminski, like all mystery writers of the later Twentieth Century, had the opportunity to go that route, but he didn’t do it. He continued to write approachable books, populated by people we could recognize. Even the villains were people like us, who’d made one or many bad choices and gotten out of their depth, some enjoying it, some not.

The seriocomic Toby Peters mysteries, of which I’ve reviewed several already, are set in Los Angeles before, during, and after World War II. Toby is a small time, low-rent PI who somehow ends up handling problems for many of the greatest celebrities of the time. In Now You See It it’s Blackstone the Magician, who was an extremely big deal just after the War, when this story is set. Actor Cornel Wilde also plays a small part.

Harry Blackstone hires Toby Peters to protect him. There’s an amateur magician named Marcus Keller who has threatened to destroy Blackstone for some unspecified offense, or just out of general envy. He’s vague about what he plans to do, but he says he’ll destroy Blackstone before the eyes of the world. When Keller finally plays his “trick” it turns out to be more horrible than he planned, and Toby is faced with the challenge of saving the magician from a murder charge.

All Toby’s colorful stock troupe of eccentric friends and allies are on hand and doing their funny stuff, but Now You See It had one change that pleased me a lot. Toby’s brother Phil, formerly a Los Angeles police detective, has retired from the department and gone into business with his brother. Phil’s dangerous temper, which has led him to punch Toby more than once in the past, is now turned to protecting him, which I found heartwarming.

Sadly, this was to be the last Toby Peters book, published the same year the author died.

Recommended.

A Few Questions for God-bloggers of 2003

Joe Carter, formerly of The Evangelical Outpost, is wicking out the nostalgia in me by profiling three God-bloggers who started blogging in 2003, a year before I started this lit-blog. Like Joe, I have admired these men for a long time. They helped shaped the blogosphere, or it feels like they did for me.
Of Tim Challies, Jared Wilson, and Justin Taylor, he asks these questions:

  1. What was your motivation for starting a blog?
  2. How has blogging changed your life over the past decade?
  3. What is one lesson you’ve learned from blogging about writing, communicating, etc.?
  4. How has blogging itself or the blogosphere changed in these ten years?

Tim says: “I learned that I think best when I write. I don’t really know what I believe until I write it down and work it through in my word processor, and in that way writing has been a critical part of my spiritual development. For some reason it took me beginning a blog to figure this out.”
Jared says: “Then one of our guys said, “Why don’t we stop the clunky email chains and do this on a weblog?” I had no idea what that was, but we all kinda said, ‘Okay.'”
Justin: “Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think we are more bored with blogs than we were ten years ago. Our attention spans are even shorter as we want to hear from and interact with more people but with fewer characters — hence the rise of Twitter. What was a short piece ten years ago is now almost considered ‘long form.'”

New Audio Drama: Ender's Game Alive

I’ve heard Ender’s Game in audiobook, but this is something new. Orson Scott Card has written a new script for his wildly popular book and it is available today as Ender’s Game Alive. Card says it’s the best version of his story yet.

Orson Scott Card – Author of Ender’s Game Alive from Skyboat Media on Vimeo.

This new audioplay is performed by Kirby Heyborne, Stefan Rudnicki, Theodore Bikel, Scott Brick, Samantha Eggar, Harlan Ellison, Susan Hanfield, Roxanne Hernandez, Janis Ian, Rex Linn, and Richard McGonagle among others. Here’s a taste of it:

Stefan Rudnicki as Col. Hyrum Graff in Ender’s Game Alive from Skyboat Media on Vimeo.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture