Wilson Weighs Wodehouse

Pastor and author Douglas Wilson recommends P.G. Wodehouse for two reasons:

“Wodehouse was merciless to pretentiousness, and aspiring writers are the most pretentious fellows on the planet. So there’s that spiritual benefit.”

The second reason? “Simply put, Wodehouse is a black belt metaphor ninja. Evelyn Waugh, himself a great writer, once said that Wodehouse was capable of two or three striking metaphors per page.

  • He looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.
  • One young man was a great dancer, one who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing.
  • She had just enough brains to make a jaybird fly crooked.
  • Her face was shining like the seat of a bus driver’s trousers.
  • He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”

On the eve of embarkation

By way of a friend of our friend Aitchmark, here’s a blog post from VA Viper, with an embedded recording of a linguist reading what – he guesses – the old Indo-European language, from which are descended (you guessed it!) European languages and Hindi – sounded like. It’s a guess, but an educated one.

As I’ve done for some years now at this season, I’m leaving this weekend for Minot, North Dakota and the Norsk Høstfest. This is not what you’d call a relaxing vacation. I’ll be helping to set up and tear down the Viking camp, doing three combat shows a day, and this year I’ll be helping one of our guys do lectures at local elementary schools. He injured himself with a Viking axe (I’m not kidding) and needs me to do the heavy work, including the axe demonstration. Also, of course, I’ll have to check in online frequently to keep up with my graduate school class work. I should schedule a second week of vacation to rest up when I’m done.

[By the way, for the first time that anyone can remember, they’re advertising hotel rooms available in Minot during the festival. Just in case you were thinking about going.]

I won’t be driving this year again, but will be bumming rides with friends. This prevents me visiting commenters Roy and Dale as was once my wont, but Mrs. Hermanson, my car, just isn’t up to the exertion anymore.

Not sure I am either, come to think of it.

Oh yes, some people from the History Channel Vikings series (which I’ve panned here and elsewhere) will also be hanging around. Must remind myself to be nice to them.

Chances are I’ll fawn all over them like the hypocritical sycophant I am.

Horrible Report from Former British Lad Mag Editor

Martin Daubney, former editor of Loaded, talks about how bad pornography has gotten among children in Britain. Kids us Facebook and cell phones to pass around disgusting video links. Boys are being perverted, girls enraged and scared.

“Pornography is sexually traumatising an entire generation of boys.”

The children say their parents would be shocked to learn what they’ve seen, but trust them to use the Internet responsibly. No filters. Just evil.

Ironically, this article appears in The Daily Mail, which has sidebars “loaded” with soft-porn gossip links. I link to the print version above, so you can skip that part. I got this link via Facebook, BTW.

Blessed Nonsense

Today, just a snippet from an article in the current issue of Intercollegiate Review – “The Subhumanities: The Reductive Violence of Race, Class, and Gender Theory,” by Anthony Esolen:

So much of human life, says [Marilynne] Robinson in her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is blessed “nonsense,” not overmuch concerned with survival or whatever else preoccupies the reductivists of our time. It is like the folly of God, as Erasmus reminds us, thinking of the mighty words of Saint Paul, who declares that all the wisdom of the world cannot overcome the foolishness of the Cross, which is of course the foolishness of love.

Our friend Anthony Sacramone is Managing Editor of IC.

Popular Science Shuts Off Commenters

Popsci.com, the site of Popular Science magazine, is shutting off comments, because “even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests.”

Though most Popsci.com commenters were great, the salt of the earth, spambots and trolls were present as well, and, darn it, this Interweb thing is too unruly to govern with, like, technology.

The Popsci.com editors grieve, “A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again.”

A war on expertise is being waged by spambots?

Extinction soon



Photo credit: Raysonho.

Over at the American Spectator (which seems to have rejected my last submission, but hey, I’m not bitter) Matthew Walther writes about his recent experience at the American Library Association convention in Chicago, where he particularly wanted to talk to people about the increasing trend of libraries dumping perfectly good books because electronic versions are now available.

WHICH REMINDS ME: At this gathering of a few thousand librarians, teachers, writers, publishing types, I saw surprisingly little evidence of reading taking place. With two or three exceptions—elderly women whose badges told me that they are librarians from Indiana—the only printed text I saw anyone interact with was the 308-page full-color conference guide. This also brings me to why I was there. I was trying, am in fact still trying, to understand why, with little or no visible resistance or even comment from patrons, library friends’ societies (local charities that raise funds for libraries and organize things like book signings and reading groups), school boards, members of university faculties, elected officials at the local, state, and federal government level—to say nothing of the national press—thousands of public and academic libraries across the country are all but throwing away millions of books, many of them rare, expensive, or both. Three years ago the Engineering Library at Stanford University was home to more than 80,000 volumes; it now houses fewer than 10,000….

The American Library Association is an organization which looms large in my consciousness these days. Everyone in my Library and Information Sciences class talks about it in terms of “us,” though I have no plans or need ever to join, and it’s not a requirement for the program. Mr. Walther makes no comment on the reflexive progressivism which I perceive in it, based on classroom discussions. His concern is simply to question whether libraries without physical books can really be considered libraries at all (I read the other day that a library in Texas has gone precisely that route). He seems a little Luddite about the Kindle, but at least he gave his a fair try. My own devotion to paper and ink survived my first experience by about 20 seconds. (That’s not to say I want to jettison my own personal books, whose name is Legion, or those I husband at work.)

I spoke with a former academic librarian yesterday, and his opinion was more pessimistic even than Walther’s. Once the digitizers solve the problem of copyright for more recent works (he said) libraries will simply cease to exist. They will go away. They will be made redundant. He’s studying Theology now, in order to teach that for a living.

I don’t know if he’s right. I do think the academic library will survive for a while, if only because accreditation agencies love to set requirements for collection size.

My friend suggested that I join The Association of Christian Librarians, instead of the ALA. I heeded his counsel.

I’m pretty sure I’ll need the support. I’m beginning to think I’m working very hard to prepare for the equivalent of a managership at a Barnes & Noble store.

Flannery O'Connor Wanted Proper Pay for Her Writing

The Billfold has a brief piece on Flannery O’Connor’s insistence on being paid well.

“I do believe that she was quite savvy about the business side of being a writer, and she understood the difference between art and commerce,” says Craig Amason, the executive director of The Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation.

Take your colon out to lunch

Today, according to this web site, is National Punctuation Day.

I think I’m pretty good at punctuation, generally. The problem comes with differing styles. For years I eschewed the Oxford Comma, because somebody back in elementary school told me you should never add a comma before the conjunction, as in “I had lunch with Gary, Eric and Denny.” It was only fairly recently that I learned there was any controversy. I learned this while acting as editor of the Journal of the Georg Sverdrup Society. I found out that we follow the Chicago Manual of Style, which mandates the Oxford Comma (“I had lunch with Gary, Eric, and Denny”). The Associated Press is against us, but we don’t follow them. So I learned to love it. Now I can’t imagine doing without it. And that’s good, because we use the APA Manual in graduate school, and they’re Oxfordian as well.

I keep wondering how the American Psychological Association’s style book came to dominate graduate school documentation.

The only other punctuation problem I can think of that I personally struggle with is the way Microsoft Word automatically clumps the three periods in an ellipsis together, turning them into a single, compact idiogram. Which we then have to unclump over at the Sverdrup Journal, because we want our periods separate but equal. I don’t know why. I just do it.

Happy Punctuation Day. Period.

50 Contemporary Writers of Faith

The Image Top 50 Contemporary Writers of Faith, expanded from the original 25, is a great reading list for living (or recently deceased) authors who deal with faith in their works. These are reader-recommended authors of “contemporary literature that grapple with the age-old religious questions of our Western tradition.”