Jen Campbell will be writing 100 poems this weekend in an effort to raise money for EEC International, which is researching a cure for Ectodermal dysplasia. Read about it, watch the video, and consider buying one of her poems on a postcard.
High Price of Fighting Evil
Here’s a personal letter from Richard Helms, who later become director of the CIA, to his three-year-old son, written on Hitler’s stationary.
Mody Dick in Pictures
Tin House has an illustrated edition of Moby Dick and a video to promote it.
Temporary Duty, by Ric Locke
First of all, the disclaimer: Although I didn’t get the book free, I should probably note that Ric Locke is a Facebook friend, and has been giving me helpful advice on e-publishing, at which he has been (very deservedly) successful.
I have good and not-so-good things to say about Temporary Duty
Considering its length and its price ($2.99 for the Kindle book), Temporary Duty is one of the best reading entertainment values you’ll find today. It’s quite long, and it’s simply lots of fun. If you go back far enough to remember the sheer pleasure of the old space opera novels, like Heinlein’s juveniles, that same pleasure is here in abundance—the wonder of space, the fascination of exotic aliens and strange cultures, the excitement of human ingenuity applied to interstellar challenges. You’ll have a good time reading this book.
For the negative… well, I’ll leave that for further along.
The time is about 40 years in the future. There have been big changes in the world. A terrorist war and a financial collapse have turned America into a highly regulated, rigidly stratified society. The American military mirrors that stratification. There’s very little mobility between the upper and lower ranks.
So when history’s first alien contact occurs, and the aliens—the mercantile Grallt—ask for an advance party to prepare quarters on their ship for the humans who have contracted to join them on their merchant voyage, the Navy asks for two initial volunteers. They are to be lowly Petty Officers, and their duties will be simply to clean the place up and make it ship-shape. Still, John Peters and Kevin Todd are eager to volunteer, partly for the adventure and partly for the (seeming remote) possibility that they’ll be able to better their prospects. Continue reading Temporary Duty, by Ric Locke
Dost Twitter Dismantle One's English?
Mark Liberman takes issue with the criticism Ralph Fiennes has for Twitter, in which he says our language is being “eroded” by our habitual use of “truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter.” Twitter restricts posts to 140 characters, though there are several ways around that. Liberman did some word analysis and reports, “The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP’s tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters.” He says the character restricts motivates some of us to pack the information into our tweets.
Leberman also reports on the word and sentence lengths in U.S. Presidential addresses, in which mean word length has dropped 5% in Inaugural and State of the Union addresses since George Washington’s first speeches and mean sentence length has dropped 50%.
Clearly, the presidency must go, for the sake of American English.
DVD review: "Troll Hunter"
Since I’m in the middle of a course of antibiotics to kill off my bronchial infection, I took the excuse to spend most of the weekend in bed, watching movies on Netflix. Picked off a couple I’d been meaning to get to, the Norwegian movie Troll Hunter being one of them.
This is an interesting movie. The one thing you need to understand when you approach it—and I suspect some people will miss this—is that it’s a comedy. A particular kind of Scandinavian comedy, and an extreme example of its kind.
To a very large degree (and you’ve probably have noted it in my own writing), Scandinavian humor is dry. We love to tell a story that gets increasingly ridiculous, straight-faced. To put it plainly, we may be laughing with you or at you, or both, depending on your reaction. We judge your intelligence by how long it takes you to grasp the absurdity.
That’s what Troll Hunter does. It’s kind of like a cross between The Blair Witch Project and The Office.
At the beginning we are following three Norwegian college students doing a documentary journalism project. They think they’re following a bear poacher, which would be dangerous and ill-advised enough on the face of it. But when they follow him into the woods one night, he suddenly shouts, “TROLL!” and they find themselves scrambling away, with a huge, three-headed creature at their heels. They escape, but one of their members is bitten. Continue reading DVD review: "Troll Hunter"
Poems on Violence
Tom Nolan quotes Philip Dacey on his poetic depiction of a poisoned Russian agent poisoned in “With or Without Milk”: “I drank a tea not made in front of me. / Beware tea brewed in ways you cannot see.”
“The poetry of violent death,” he says, “spans hundreds of years.” (via Books, Inq.)
Abraham Kuyper
Saturday was Dutch Reformer Abraham Kuyper’s birthday (1837-1920). The man who wrote: “When people recite the Lord’s Prayer, they all pray, ‘Deliver us from the evil one,’ but in free, spontaneous prayers we seldom call upon God to cover us with His shield against the poisonous arrows of Satan. Therefore, if the Kingdom of Christ is to regain its glory also in our eyes, it is imperative that we emphatically insist that Jesus Himself saw His life struggle as one fierce battle against Satan.” George Grant has a brief tribute to him.
We have a winnah!
Thanks to all who made suggestions for the tag line for Troll Valley.
Although I had decided to go with something else, I thought it over and concluded that commenter Adam had the best suggestion. His tag line will go on the book, in a slightly modified form:
“The Fairy Tale Your Grandparents Never Told You.”
Adam will receive a free copy of Troll Valley once the thing is published. Assuming he has the capability to download e-books.
More Lewis than Lovecraft
William Peter Blatty, best known for writing the horror classic, The Exorcist
…for the humiliating God’s-honest truth of the matter is that while I was working on “The Exorcist,” what I thought I was writing was a novel of faith in the popular dress of a thrilling and suspenseful detective story – in other words, a sermon that no one could possibly sleep through — and to this day I haven’t the faintest recollection of any intention to frighten the reader, which many will take, I suppose, as an admission of failure on an almost stupefying, scale.
I’ve read the original book, though that was a long time ago (I clearly remember reading it in the Minneapolis bus station while waiting for transportation home to the farm for Christmas, and I haven’t ridden a bus or had the farm to go home to in a long, long time). My memory is faint, but I’m pretty sure he’s telling the truth. The book is a thriller about a crisis of faith, not a work of horror in the usual sense. Even the movie bears the marks of that purpose, although the pea soup and revolving head tend to dominate one’s attention (Did her head spin around in the book? I don’t actually recall).
Anyway, if you’re looking for Halloween reading that’s strong-flavored and faith-friendly, you can do worse than The Exorcist.
On a side note, when I hear Blatty’s name, I don’t think first of The Exorcist, but of a TV movie he wrote earlier, a comedy western movie called “The Great Bank Robbery,” starring Zero Mostel, Clint Walker, and Kim Novak. I particularly recall one scene where Kim kisses the shy and quiet Clint, making him visibly uncomfortable.
“Did you like it?” she asks with a smile, as she walks away.
“Ma’am,” he replies, “Just ’cause I talk slow don’t mean I’m peculiar.”