Edgar Poe looks Odinesque in this cover, don’t you think?
Book Covers: Allan Poe's "The Raven" (by Emmanuel Polanco) and George Orwell's "1984". pic.twitter.com/ZcW7G2N652
— ✍ Bibliophilia (@Libroantiguo) March 6, 2015
How ‘Person of Interest’ Is Dying
“What do Person of Interest and Eddy/MacDonald have in common?” asks John Mark Reynolds. “They are the Scylla and Charybdis of making art, building a business, or running a church: never forget what got you there, but never become stale or trapped by what got you there. Without a vision the art or the project perish, but being held hostage to a stale vision can be just as bad.” (via Lars on Facebook)
Addicted to Novel Reading
Oh god. Put down your books. STOP READING. (Actual article from San Antonio Texan newspaper, August 26, 1858) pic.twitter.com/2edR2nR8U9
— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) March 5, 2015
Writing for Eternal Fame
“There’s no such thing as a writer who yearns to be ignored. But writers thrive only in hushed vassalage to their own imaginations, shackled to their desks, trying to hear hints of that ancient inward thrum. When Montaigne proposes ‘an unimportant life without luster,’ you take his point. ‘A talent,’ said Goethe, ‘is formed in stillness.’ It’s called the limelight for a reason: Sooner or later you get limed by the light—burned, smeared, blinded.”
“There was a moment in Rome, writes H.J. Jackson in her new book, Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame, ‘when writers were elevated to a place among the immortals,’ and litterateurs have been dazzled by that elevation ever since.” (via Books, Inq.)
Strunk & White Approaches 55
Geoffrey K. Pullum of the University of Edinburgh hates the popularity of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. He doesn’t believe the frequently recommended little book deserves it.
Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them, but that is not true of the grammar stipulations.
“Use the active voice” is a typical section head. And the section in question opens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.
We are told that the active clause “I will always remember my first trip to Boston” sounds much better than the corresponding passive “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows “by”).
For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.
Of course, many writing teachers and word lovers like the book. NPR talked to Barbara Wallraff about why she’s a fan.
“There’s a certain Zen quality to some of [the book’s rules], like, ‘Be clear,'” Wallraff tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. Continue reading Strunk & White Approaches 55
Book, Music Sale
The Rabbit Room is having a sale on good books and music.
Taking a Break from Contracts
History author Susan Wise Bauer talks about taking a break from writing under deadline–well, behind deadline–for a few years.
“So about a year ago, I promised myself that when I hit my last big deadline, I wouldn’t sign another contract immediately. Instead, I decided to take six months and just write. Go down to my office and work on anything that struck my fancy. Read, reflect, experiment, let my horizons expand.”
A few weeks into this hiatus, she entered ‘fish mode’, and you’ll never guess what happened next. It completely blew my mind. I was weeping by the end of her story. Ok, I’m not saying what you might easily conclude I’m trying to say. All I’m saying is click the link to her post to see what ‘fish mode’ is and how Bauer feels it.
That’s all I’m saying. Really.
Oh, and I should also say that Bauer is the excellent author of several history books, such as The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. Her newest book is The Story of Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory.
Why Star Trek Matters
Steven D. Greydanus writes about the important contribution Star Trek made to American or world culture.
“Star Trek as a whole promoted techno-optimism and wound up instilling countless fans with a love of science, space and technology, not to mention inspiring a number of real-world inventions — but Spock in particular helped make being a scientist, along with being smart and calmly rational, cool for countless Americans.”
Asking Honest Racial Questions
When testing the instincts of police officers, subjects in Josh Correll’s test revealed that they usually saw young black men as threatening, but they did so much less often than civilians did. “’We’re more likely to shoot a black man with a wallet,’ Semien (a former officer) says, ‘and we’re less likely to shoot a white man with a gun.’”
With this background, we must ask why we perceive young black men the way we do (and other types of people as well) and how we can make better judgments.
The Hunt for Michigan’s Best Coffeeshop
I don’t know if any of these places ship their beans via civilian drone, but if you’re in Michigan, you may want to look one of these up. “For the last 5 days,” John Gonzolez writes, “I traveled to 22 shops that were nominated and voted on by the readers of MLive. Along the way we discovered some true hidden gems, and some coffee shops known for roasting incredible, award-winning coffee.”