To What End, Publicity?
Maybe publicity doesn’t lead to book sales. Maybe an author sitting on the couch for seven minutes with Gretchen Carlson on Fox News doesn’t sell 10,000 of his books. Are book sales the whole ballgame?
Elsewhere on the web, Lindsay Buroker asks what’s a good price for ebooks? Are new authors pricing their books at $0.99 hurting everyone?
Courage, New Hampshire: Sons of Liberty
We founded our country on liberty within the confines of law, a theme that would likely challenge many grade-school students today. It’s on full display in the second episode of Courage, New Hampshire. The show starts with a hanging. A preacher declares to the audience, “The wages is death,” and so the counterfeiter must die. For unexplained reasons, a burglar is spared a hanging and instead branded with a “B” on his forehead.
Silas Rhodes is the justice of the peace in Courage, and he’s worried that he should have brought in a preacher years ago. He lists the various crimes and vices committed over the past few years and blames himself for spending more time on building the economy than nurturing community faith. So he hires a recent graduate of Harvard, to preach for eight sermons, saying if the township doesn’t like him, they can look for a preacher themselves. No doubt they will be looking for a new preacher soon, since this one proves himself a louse as soon as we meet him.
The burglar may be the most fascinating character in this story. He confesses to having a vision while on the hanging block, seeing the devil lusting for him and Christ Jesus standing between them. Later on, he appears to be chaffing under the preacher’s Scripture-less sermon. I look forward to seeing him become a courageous patriot.
This episode smolders in tension a while and blazes up at the end. It reveals an induction ceremony for The Sons of Liberty, a secret band of patriots which I believe was launched in response to the Stamp Act in 1765. Each colony had their own society of patriots, and after the Stamp Act was repealed and the larger organization dispersed, John Adams notes, “Many Sons of Liberty groups, however, continue to remain active in local community affairs.” It will be fascinating to see how these men take up a higher law to fight against a heavy-handed British government in future episodes. The third show releases next week, May 6.
Find Courage on Facebook. Watch the shows, buy the DVDs, or contribute to the production on their website.
I am not blind…
…to the irony of the fact that I’ve auditioned for a reality TV show almost exactly a year after posting this piece ridiculing the whole phenomenon. I’m not sure my lapse rises to the level of hypocrisy, but it’s uncomfortable. Still, doing a reality show isn’t actually an immoral act, and one expects an author to play the buffoon a bit, if it will sell some books. At least in our time.
I was all ready to write a scathing post about kids working on farms, when word came out that the Labor Department has quickly withdrawn its proposal to outlaw agricultural chores for children under 16.
But I am not one to be deterred by mere real world events.
I’m not going to rhapsodize about my childhood among the chickens and cows. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ve guessed that it wasn’t Little House on the Prairie for me. If I grew up to be a slacker and a layabout, it’s partly because my farm childhood was an unusual and dysfunctional one.
But I see the value of a proper farm childhood every day. The Bible school I work for is perhaps one of the purest pools of rural youth in our metropolitan area. Most of our students come from our historical center of gravity, northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota, with a lot of farm kids from other places as well. We’re not immune to demographics, of course. We have lots of city kids. But if you’re looking for a kid who grew up getting up at 5:00 a.m. to milk the cows, our school is a good place to look.
And people do. Our students generally have little trouble finding part-time jobs to pay their way through school. The word is out in the western suburbs—AFLBS students are better workers than kids from, say, the University of Minnesota.
This is one thing that worries me about the future. Agriculture is changing, and in many ways the changes are good. Food is cheaper, which helps the poor, for one thing. But efficiency means bigger farms, which means fewer farm families.
Throughout the history of the republic, we’ve had an inexhaustible supply of farm kids who were sick to death of Ma and Pa and the cows and the pigs, and dreamed of a better life in the city. They’ve carried their farm-bred work ethic into the cities and helped to make American industry the envy of the world. When they went to war, they were objects of marvel to Europeans and South Sea Islanders. When they went into politics, they tended to be moderately honest, at least at first.
We’re losing that supply of farm kids. All the kids are city kids nowadays, even if they grew up in small towns.
It troubles me.
But then everything troubles me.
When Will the Masses Just Give Up?
Fred Siegel of St. Francis College in Brooklyn argues that the highbrow class has killed culture.
Mencken and Huxley shared an aristocratic ideal based on an idyllic past. They romanticized a time before the age of machinery and mass production, when the lower orders lived in happy subordination and when intellectual eccentricity was encouraged among the elites. In this beautiful world, alienation was as unknown as bearbaiting and cockfighting, “and those who wanted to amuse themselves were,” in Huxley’s words, “compelled, in their humble way, to be artists.”
They considered the egalitarianism of American democracy a degraded form of government which, in Ortega’s words, discouraged “respect or esteem for superior individuals.” Intellectuals, they complained, weren’t given their due by the human detritus of this new world. Huxley, a member of the Eugenics Society, saw mass literacy, mass education, and popular newspapers as having “created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid.” He proposed the British government raise the price of newsprint ten or twentyfold because “the new stupid,” manipulated by newspaper plutocrats, were imposing a soul-crushing conformity on humanity. The masses, so his argument went, needed to be curtailed for their own good and for the greater good of high culture.
I will probably not be America’s Next Top Swordfighter
If I’ve seemed more preoccupied lately than just a trip to Missouri would warrant, there’s a reason for that. I, along with other members of the Viking Age Club and Society of the Sons of Norway, have been slogging through the logistics of a television audition. I didn’t want to talk about it until I actually understood what was going on, but now I think I can. Because it’s probably nothing.
Our club president was contacted a while back by a representative from a Hollywood production company that specializes in reality programs, among them several I’m sure you’ve heard of. They wanted to arrange to meet with us and do some filming, intrigued by the fact that we have whole families (three generations in one case) involved, and by the “live steel combat” we do.
It took some time and some scheduling, but we finally met with one of the executives, a camera man, and a sound man, yesterday afternoon at one of our members’ homes. They interviewed us on camera and filmed our combats and drills.
Does this mean we’re going to be celebrities? Probably not.
As I understand it, what they’re doing is blitzkrieging the genre. They’ve located a large number of people and activities across the country which they think they might conceivably make a show out of (tomorrow, the executive told us, he’d be filming the biggest strawberry shortcake in the world). Then they’ll cut the footage into teasers, and submit them to the networks in batches. Most, obviously, will be rejected. I have no reason to think we’re likely to make the cut.
But it was a fun experience, and the executive was not at all what I expected a TV producer to be like.
I’ll tell you if anything more happens.
Which I doubt.
Where’s Me Mother?
Joyce Gemperlein writes about Nancy Drew and her absent mother. “Nancy immediately goes out on a rainy night with a revolver and falls through the floor of a spooky mansion that she’s broken into in The Hidden Staircase. Then, in The Bungalow Mystery, she escapes a sinking boat, once again sneaks into a creepy house and is clobbered senseless with the butt of a gun.”
Nancy Drew is one of many leading fictitious characters who seek danger without a hovering parent, and her can-do attitude may be something the hovering parent should consider cultivating in their children. For another girl of strong spirit, but with a difficult mother-daughter relationship, see Pixar’s Brave this summer.
The Fulcrum Files, by Mark Chisnell
What was it really like, living in England in the days leading up to World War II? Judging by Mark Chisnell’s novel The Fulcrum Files, it was a time of great confusion and self-delusion. I suspect that picture is accurate.
Ben Clayton, our hero, is an engineer for a British aircraft company, but has been assigned to work on preparing a racing yacht for the America’s Cup race (aeronautics and shipbuilding being sister enterprises). Ben was, as a teenager, one of Britain’s best prospects as a boxer, but he nearly killed another boy in a fight. Horrified, he gave up boxing and became a pacifist.
Pacifism is highly popular and respected in England in 1936. As author Chisnell deftly portrays the era, everybody’s got an ideology—pacifism or communism or Labour or Fascism or Aristocracy, and almost everybody has good intentions. The one thing almost everyone agrees on is that there will not be another war. Impossible. The people wouldn’t stand for another bloodbath like the Great War. Hitler has some legitimate grievances, so throw him a bone and everything will settle down.
But when Ben’s best friend is killed in an accident while fitting a new mast, and that friend is found to have been deeply in debt and involved with shady people, Ben sets out to clear his name. He learns things he’d rather not learn, and eventually has to make choices he’d rather not make. It does no good to avoid the war. The war will not avoid you.
I particularly liked the characters in The Fulcrum Files. They seemed authentic and complex, doing very different, even appalling, things out of a desire to do right. We tend today to see World War II (properly) in very black and white terms, but nobody knew those things in 1936, and Chisnell excels at psychological realism. There’s a love story for the ladies, and lots of boats for those who (like me) enjoy reading about the sea.
The Fulcrum Files does not rise to the heights of the thriller genre, but I enjoy a book that tells a smaller story well. Mild cautions for language, violence, and adult subject matter, but the book is suitable for teens and up.
Gleanings
There are a few things I’ve been meaning to mention lately, and hadn’t gotten around to, largely because of my Missouri trip.
The day I left, The American Spectator published Smoker’s Pride, a little parable I wrote. The comments were amusing, but troubling. It appears that a large percentage of the readers couldn’t take the story beyond its literal meaning. Hint: It’s not actually about smoking.
Bryan Preston at The PJ Tatler gave Troll Valley a nice plug in a post on What’s On My Kindle App.
And finally, one more memory from Ravensborg. One of the meats featured at this year’s Viking feast (though no real Viking ever ate it) was raccoon. And yes, I ate some. Fatty and stringy, in my opinion. Many said it tasted like beef, but I thought it was more like pork, with high notes of… yes, chicken.
Hey, if you were surrounded by Vikings and somebody asked you if you wanted to try raccoon meat, would you wimp out?
What Do Children Read, Publishing Predictions
An editor talks about how J.K. Rowling’s books opened up the world of children lit, and he strays into how nice he thinks it would be to have fewer books printed.
Roger Sutton says we’re pressed to believe children don’t want to read, but they are “reluctant to read what? If you put down that novel and look around, you will see that lots of so-called reluctant readers are reading plenty; they just aren’t reading fiction, which in this age constitutes ‘real reading’ as defined by ‘real readers’—mainly teachers and librarians.”
On the future of print publishing, he says, “Every author in this room is going to disagree with me on this, but there are too many copies of too many books being published. A little curation would be a good thing.” So if libraries were the place to go for holding a book in your hand, then we would have a sane publishing world. Is he ignoring home libraries, or does the future have room for that?