David Mamet offers strong advice in this pared down clip from movie commentaries, such as this:
It’s hard to write a drama — because it’s hard to write a drama with a plot, because a plot means that you have to at the end of the drama resolve that problem which gave rise to the drama in such a way that it’s both surprising and inevitable as per Aristotle. The thing is, can you turn the film around in the last 10 seconds — one of the hardest things in the world to do.
“When all the others were away at Mass” by Seamus Heaney has been named Ireland’s best-loved poem from the past century.
Find it in this collection of Heaney’s poetry.
“But Klavan is not only a provocateur—he’s also, Stephen King says, ‘the most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich.’ And Werewolf Cop (so I say) is his best book yet, one that starts with a rush and never lets up, dark and funny, with the bittersweet taste of the knowledge of good and evil.” John Wilson of Books and Culture praises Andrew Klavan and his latest novel–naturally.
See Lars’ review of Werewolf Cop, if you haven’t already.
“DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING,” said Death. “JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
Many people are talking about fantasy author Terry Pratchett, who passed away this week of a chest infection (He also had Alzheimers). Though he supported allowing people to give their doctors permission to kill them, he died of natural causes.
Fans continue to honor him with quotations and memories. “After losing the ability to touch type in 2012,” reports the Telegraph, “he used voice-recognition technology to complete his much-loved new works. He went on to become one of the most prominent and influential voices in the campaign for research into the disease, and was a patron of Alzheimers Research UK.
“When asked about his career in May 2014, he said: ‘It is possible to live well with dementia and write best-sellers ‘like wot I do.'”
Pratchett said many good, witty things, such as, “The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.” The Guardian has fifteen of the best.
Over 2,500 fans, so far, have petitioned Death to reinstate the author.
“[Michael] Horton shows how the Christian meganarrative is a ‘counterdrama’ to all of the meganarratives and metanarratives of this passing age,” blogs Justin Taylor.
Family Christian Stores (FCS) is filing bankruptcy with the desire to claim several million dollars worth of inventory that they haven’t purchased. Publishers, who consigned that inventory to FCS, is suing to have their merchandise returned or purchased.
“As the nation’s largest retailer of Christian books and gift items with 266 stores in 36 states, Family Christian said it needed to restructure its debt in the face of sales that had fallen from $305 million in 2008 to $230 million in 2014,” reports Jim Harger.
Anthony Bradley has written many articles on the labels that are popular among many in the church today, saying they can be problematic. Communities that push themselves to be “radical,” “missional,” or “organic” may set themselves up for an alternative legalism that measures other believers by their activity instead of looking to our hope in Christ.
“To be fair,” he writes, “the impulse that formed these tribes comes from a good place. They are all seeking to be faithful to what the Scriptures teach and are reacting to real problems that exist in the life of God’s people. The problem is that tribalism can cultivate a debilitating sense of shame and feelings of unworthiness that discourages God’s people from enjoying simple norms expressed in the dynamism of the ordinary.”
He goes on to give seven points of garden-variety Christianity that will change the world. “The good life, then, the one that God has always used in his redemptive mission, is the one that brings glory to God by loving him and loving neighbor.”
Here’s a fun song about how there are too many Irishmen in the world. I first heard this on a cassette many years ago. For our younger readers, a cassette was like a hard drive made from black tape, which was held in a tape deck that would play non-digital audio that sounded way better than anything we have today. It was as if you were in the room with the musicians.
Poet Anne M. Doe Overstreet describes thinking about when she became a writer.
I come from a family that read hungrily and constantly; there was music—banjo to clarinet to piano—and hikes beside copper-colored ponds, beneath the huff and shrug of spruce at places like Peaks of Otter, reciting the names of deciduous trees. In between, stillness, time to reflect. And within that, Walter Farley’s novels and Webster’s Dictionary, the 1970 edition, I Capture the Castle and World Book Encyclopedia, which opened up the universe and made me hungry to understand why a Tennessee Walking Horse was what it was. But I cannot tease it apart, say, here I begin, here I turn my face toward a different tree line, moving from reader and listener to writer. It doesn’t begin. It doesn’t end.
I attended a reading of her poetry many months ago. I loved the sound of her words. You can read them for free through Noisetrade now, though leaving a tip would be kind. She’s a poet who rewards her audience with beautiful mystery and perhaps inspiration.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry read C.S. Lewis’ The Allegory of Love and became enamored with the author’s style, which he says is a dangerous thing. So he picked up Out of the Silent Planet and loved it. The other two books? Perelandra, “the most disappointing of the three” and That Hideous Strength, “clearly the strangest.”
“The overall impression is that Lewis’s heart was never into science-fiction. He decided to get into it for some reason–maybe he perceived the same lack as I did, maybe he wanted a challenge, maybe he lost a bet–and poured all his ideas and energy into the first book . . .”
Will Duquette took a different approach. “Lewis was writing at a time when little was known about Mars and the other planets, and one could still reasonably write about Martians; and it was also a time when it was assumed in much of science fiction that mankind would conquer the stars and would bring a Wellsian secular humanism with them. His great question was, is that really the right thing for us to do? To export our wars and politics and brokenness to the heavens? This theme appears in Out of the Silent Planet, but receives its full treatment in Perelandra.”