Steve Kettmann recommends a few books about Germany “and the Germans in which neither the word “Third” nor “Reich” figures prominently and one finds nary a reference to that failed artist from Linz, Austria.”
Nathan Fillion Inspired Campus Violence (Sorta)
Well, not violence per se. Theater professor James Miller of the University of Wisconsin–Stout put a picture of Nathan Fillion with a quote from Firefly on his office door, and the chief of campus police, a woman, took issue with it. Read the details and see the office door poster from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “Colleges and universities are supposed to foster brave and bold environments of freewheeling intellectual inquiry and expression. If a quote from a network science fiction show is a bridge too far, something has gone seriously wrong,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said.
Praise for Dappled Things
Remarkable Legacy of Banned Books Week Founder, Judith Krug
The NY Times has an eye-opening overview of Judith Krug’s crusade against content filtering in their 2009 obit. She claimed, “Library service in this country should be based on the concept of intellectual freedom, of providing all pertinent information so a reader can make decisions for himself.” She eventually applied that concept to her arguments against filtering internet access for children using library computers and against the federal government looking into a person’s library borrowing record (The USA Patriot Act still allows “the Justice Department to conduct searches of library and bookstore records, in the investigation of suspected terrorist activity.”)*
Miss Krug credits her parents for inspiring her to stand up for readers of the world. That story comes at the end of the obit. With crusaders for immorality like this in the world, it’s no wonder parents want to pull books out of school libraries or pull their kids out of public schools.
How can moral parents raise moral children in an immoral world? Continue reading Remarkable Legacy of Banned Books Week Founder, Judith Krug
The Initial Outrage at "The Lottery"
Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery,” begins like this:
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
It’s a chilling tale, you may remember, and if you don’t, you can read it all here. I didn’t remember the first outrage to it back in 1948. “‘The Lottery’ was met with much negativity which surprised both the author and The New Yorker, and ultimately caused many subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and send hate mail.”
Nowadays, they tell the same moral in children’s movies. I remember Rabbit in one of the clumsier Winnie the Pooh movies singing about following the map over your own eyes. Ignore your senses; follow tradition and the book–which was to say how ridiculous it is to follow anything but your own senses. But Miss Jackson may have intended far more than that in “The Lottery.” Her NY Times obit states:
“Shirley Jackson wrote in two styles. She could describe the delights and turmoils of ordinary domestic life with detached hilarity; and she could, with cryptic symbolism, write a tenebrous horror story in the Gothic mold in which abnormal behavior seemed perilously ordinary.
In either genre, she wrote with remarkable tautness and economy of style, and her choice of words and phrases was unerring in building a story’s mood.”
A Word to Hymn-Writers
The great musician Fernando Ortega gives a bit of advice to hymn writers: happy church songs don’t stick to your ribs. Work on that next hymn in the light of some specific imagery or drama from the Scriptures. Ortega notes: “It’s easy to write a chorus that says:
God, you are a Holy God
I need your grace to see me through
I need your mercy to make me new
Let me live each day for you.
I just made that up in two minutes and there’s nothing wrong with it. It might fit easily and competitively among the hundreds of worship songs that are available to choose from. But compare those lines to the third stanza from the above hymn:
Let holy charity mine outward vesture be,
And lowliness become mine inner clothing;
True lowliness of heart, which takes the humbler part,
And o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.”
The Lost Carthage
The art and history of Carthage isn’t as well known as we would like, because an ancient mob boss put the hit on them. Ed Voves reviews Richard Miles’ book Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization
“Carthage, however, was not merely conquered by Rome. As the title of Miles’ book asserts, Carthage was destroyed. In three brutal wars, Carthage’s military power was annihilated by the legions of the Roman Republic. The city was ransacked and burned, down to its foundations. The people of Carthage were massacred or enslaved. The literature of the city was put to the torch. Not a stone was left upon a stone.”
Looks like a great book for ancient history readers.
The Mill and the Cross
Recommended by Jeffrey Overstreet, if it can make it to a theater near you.
"We turn to novels in pursuit of virtue."
“I believe the novel is a moral form. We turn to novels in pursuit of virtue. Through the tales fashioned by thoughtful writers we discover or reaffirm what we believe to be right and good. Our eternal subject is the nature of the well-lived life. So here’s a theory of what has happened to the middle classes and the novel. A hundred years or so ago the language of idealism changed. As Christianity fractured, the imagination of those who wanted to make a better world was seized by a new idealism: socialism. In this new understanding of society the working class had virtue and was the future; the middle class had power and was the past. Bourgeois values came to be seen as vices. The middle-class consumers of art and literature gradually found themselves cast in negative terms, as exploitative, parasitic and reactionary.
By the last decades of the 20th century, as these perceptions became the orthodoxy of the educated elite, writers and artists found they faced a fork in the road.” Read the rest
Blind Pursuit, by Michael Prescott
I found Blind Pursuit by Michael Prescott a very satisfying thriller. It’s one of those out-of-print novels that has begun to show up cheap in e-book format. I’ve had some good surprises with those.
The main characters are twin sisters, Erin and Annie Reilly, one a psychologist and the other a flower shop owner, who live in Tucson. The action starts fast with Erin’s abduction in the night.
Because the author follows her in the car trunk after she is taken, I was worried I was going to have to watch her murder, and I was ready to drop the book if that happened (I have a low tolerance for the on-stage killing of women). But the kidnapper’s plans for Erin are much more complicated than a simple sex killing. His plot is almost (not quite) beneficent and admirable, and his motives are a complex tangle that gets sorted out strategically for the reader, the enlightenment increasing with the dramatic tension.
The characters intrigue, the suspense is genuine, and there’s even a nice twist at the end. Also there’s romance for the ladies.
I enjoyed Blind Pursuit, and recommend it for adult readers.