Goofing

What Do The English Do on the Fourth of July?

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A genuine Englishiander gives us this rundown of what his people do on The Fourth of July (besides watching American TV). One thing they do is watch fireworks:

“Crowds of people dress in red coats and gather under large scaffolds, which are extensively rigged with explosive fireworks. At an agreed-upon time across the country, the fuses are lit and the fireworks shoot downward, into the throng that has gathered underneath. This serves to remind the British people of the pain and suffering that came from the defeat endured by the King’s Army, and to prepare younger generations of English men for the eventuality of a second battle in which the Crown retakes what is rightfully British land.”

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World Illustrations for The Hobbit

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Tove Jansson illustrated this for the Swedish edition of The Hobbit:

From the Swedish edition

Brain Pickings has several illustrations from the British, Swedish, Japanese, and Russian editions. Mikhail Belomlinsky made this for the Russian edition printed in 1976:

From the Russian edition

Authors, Publishing

Tolkien Had Words To Say to Nazis

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When The Hobbit was to be published in Germany, the publisher asked for Tolkien’s Aryan street cred. Tolkien’s personal reply to this English publisher began like this: “I must say the enclosed letter from Rütten & Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of arisch origin from all persons of all countries?”

By way of accommodation though, the author wrote two letters which could be sent to the German publishers, one a bit more harsh than the other. That letter, marked July 25, 1938, began:

“I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”

Authors, Publishing, Religion

Publisher Put a Hold on Mark Driscoll’s Next Book

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“Tyndale House confirmed to The Daily Beast that it does not plan to reprint Driscoll’s 2013 book, A Call to Resurgence, and have put his forthcoming book, The Problem with Christianity, on hold. Once slated to be released this fall, The Problem with Christianity now has no publication date scheduled.” (via Prufrock)

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The Problem with Transformers

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Why are the Transformer movies so cool and yet so dumb? Or is that how coolness works? Is there an inverse ratio between coolness and smartness? No, that’s not right. Perhaps the formula is that the probability of dumbness increases 2x the coolness, so the more fun, cool ideas you have, the more likely you are to say, “Who cares how it happens? It’s cool!”

Two self-professed Transformer experts are talking about the latest movie (spoilers aplenty) and not understanding what they saw.

Swansburg: ‪Let’s talk about how Cade Yeager and his leggy daughter meet our old friends the Autobots.

Wickman: ‪Right. They find a truck inside a movie theater, of course.

Swansburg: ‪Obviously. The movie theater scene was really weird. There were several possibly meta jokes about the movies that didn’t really land. Could you distill a message from those musings?

Wickman: ‪I could not. There was definitely a part where someone complained about how all the movies these days were sequels and remakes, but it didn’t seem like the makers of Transformers 4 were the butt of the joke. It felt more like we were the butt of the joke, for watching.

Here’s a helpful review of a previous Transformer movie from Steven Greydanus in which he describes how Michael Bay makes disaster films in contrast with Roland Emmerich (2012, Armeggedon, etc.)

On a loosely related note, Alan Jacobs just posted this question: why should we expect intelligent alien life would want to explore and/or colonize other planets?

Authors, Reading

Your Reading List for Muriel Spark

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Philip Christman has ranked and encapsulated (sort of) 22 works by Muriel Spark. He says, The Hothouse by the East River comes off like overripe fruit. For Robinson and The Bachelors, he says “Spark was pretty much kicking ass right out of the gate; these are ‘the worst’ of her early novels, and yet they would have represented a quite respectable peak for anyone else.”

The Girls of Slender Means Christman considers Spark’s best. Have you read any of these works? What do you think of them? (via John Wilson)

Fiction

The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

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This first of three books is free for Kindle, and I suspect you may enjoy it. It’s a western-style fantasy framed by the stories of a deceased fantasy author. Fans of his books discover they aren’t entirely fictional, and there are big stakes at risk in the war they find.

Writing

Words at Leisure in Unanchored Intelligence

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Essays are a dead form, says author David Hughes. “But today we no longer have access to the state of mind in which such useless but diverting conceptions appear in the unanchored intelligence [another nice phrase]. Our conceptions must be vast or hasty or topical; to ride the storm of the uneasy mind we are in, an idea must be sensational, it must walk on the water or fly faster than sound. A poet manqué does not write essays: he joins the staff of an advertising agency, where one word is an expensive item, or he talks about the films he is going to make.”

Patrick Kurp spells out the joys and perils of Hughes’ opinion on essays in today’s post. “Good essays,” he says, “even the most impersonal, are suffused with the essayist’s sensibility. No one else could have written them.”

Publishing

Hachette Buys Perseus, More Clout Against Amazon

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Hachette, one of five largest U.S. publishers, has acquired the imprints of Perseus Books Group, giving it more clout in its dispute with Amazon, though that’s not the reason they made the deal. It follows the pattern of a major merger 2011 of Random House and Penguin. The new publishing megagroup is said to have the most bargaining ability with Amazon, which controls a third of bookselling market.

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Little Free Library Shut Down by Kansas Officials

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The city of Leawood, Kansas, shut down a nine-year-old boy’s free book exchange or “Little Free Library” after blood tied to a grisly murder was found on several pages of the books inside.

Ok. The blood part is an irresponsible lie, but the city did shut down the kid’s library this month because it violated an ordinance against detached structures. The news reports tie the decision to a complaint, leading me to wonder if the covered bookshelf would have been left alone had no one complained. The boy is wondering whether tying his library to his house with a rope would make it an attached structure and circumvent the code. He is also studying the law with plans to speak to the city counsel in the near future.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture