Fiction, Reviews

The Identity Man, by Andrew Klavan

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I will stipulate to being a hopeless fanboy in regard to Andrew Klavan’s novels. But I insist that I came by my enthusiasm honestly. I didn’t discover Klavan after I’d learned he was a conservative and a Christian. I was a fan before he was either—decades ago, when he was still writing superior mysteries about the self-destructive newspaper reporter John Wells, under the pseudonym Keith Peterson. I recognized this Peterson fellow as an author who delivered gripping stories, made more compelling by his rare talent for crafting interesting, layered characters. It was a delight to discover that he had not disappeared, but was persevering under his true identity, going from strength to strength as a writer. His politics and Christian conversion made it perfect.

Klavan’s latest novel, The Identity Man, is less overtly Christian than his previous adult thriller, Empire of Lies. That doesn’t mean he’s hiding his light under a bushel. The Christianity is there, but implicit in the main plot, explicit in sub-plots. The theme of the story, as the title implies, is human identity. Who are we as individuals? Are we capable of choosing how we will live, or are we determined by heredity and environment and social pressure? Do we find our personal identities in our individual choices and character, or in our ethnicity? Continue reading The Identity Man, by Andrew Klavan →

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Taste Will Not Make You Superior

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Your cultural taste may, in fact, be conditioned by your education, profession, father’s profession, and aspirations to a certain social class. Mark Greif writes about unmasking hipsters and what taste really says about us.

“Bourdieu set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how ‘superior’ taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals,” states Greif.

This is a tough subject. How do we define ourselves? How can we live content with our place in life while aspiring to something better? What does an authentic, unpretentious person look like? Or to put it another way, does anything really matter? (Thanks to Mark Bertrand for linking to this.)

Authors

Christopher Hitchens Winding Down

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The Guardian has the most recent interview with the great writer and speaker Christopher Hitchens, who is suffering from cancer. In talking about his atheist efforts and others doing the same cuddly work:

Nonetheless, Hitchens mentions a “narrow but quite deep difference” between himself and Dawkins. Unlike the evangelical biologist, he has no wish to convert everyone in the world to his point of view, even if it were possible. In other words, he savours the counterargument. Like John Stuart Mill, he is aware of the empty end of achieved objectives. The true satisfaction lies in the means. Although Hitchens is often seen as a provocateur or a contrarian, and both are indeed aspects of his character, at heart he’s incurably in love with the dialectic.

(via The Daily Caller)

Authors, Fiction

Paul Auster on His Latest Book and Book Tours

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The Wall Street Journal has a good interview with Brooklyn’s finest author Paul Auster. His latest novel, Sunset Park, describes four people surviving at the beginning of the recent American financial crisis. Aside from saying he will never do another book tour, he talks about the subject of his novel.



WSJ: How do you think Americans are dealing with the financial crisis?

PA: Compare it to what’s going on in France. They’re rioting in the streets every day. Over what? Raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. The French go into the streets when they’re angry. But Americans, when they suffer, when they lose their jobs, when they lose their houses, they feel guilty. So it’s everyone’s private failure and there’s a feeling of shame rather than anger.

In a post on WSJ’s Speakeasy blog, Auster is quoted saying he does not read his reviews. They do him wrong. “I’ve learned not to look,” he says.

Publishing

Cooks Source Publisher Regrets Trouble

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The publisher of Cooks Source magazine, who also edits and distributes it herself, is sorry for the mess she has caused her publication and advertisers. If the magazine continues, she will be more careful about attributions, but she may need help with copyright law.

She questioned how a chef using a recipe he or she finds online for profit in a restaurant is any different from a magazine publishing one found online. “There’s a big question about recipes,” she said.

This is a bit said, actually. I hope she doesn’t face a lawsuit or huge debt over this, even though she appears to have neglected intellectual copyright entirely. I think the Internet is a mystery to many people who don’t ask if they should do something that their technology allows them to do.

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Unforgiving

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Look at this outdoor art installation: Work No. 700. From the London museum’s site: “According to the critic Martin Herbert writing about this piece for Art Monthly, ‘There is deep pleasure in this confluence of discipline and forgiveness, the admirable lunge for perfection offset by a recognition that we cannot reach it in real life’.”

Like the recognition that this steel I-beam won’t forgive you for stumping your toe on it. I think this work is better appreciated with a martini or three.

Writing

Tips on Writing Better Junk and Stuff

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Here’s a hit-n-miss list of writing tips. Number 1: Become a blogger. Eh, I can’t say that’s good advice. I know Lars and I make it look easy by whipping out brilliant, concise posts day after day, but does writing any type of blog make anyone a better writing? I’d think writing at all would have the same benefit.

Number two: Use self-imposed word limits. Now, this is good advice. I’ve been working on 100 words short-shorts for posting here, and the word limit push me to carefully examine otherwise serviceable sentences. I hope I don’t ruin them in the process, but you can let me know once I start putting them up.

Browse the rest of this list to see any of them inspire you.

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Fudd, Marvin Reimagined

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And now for something completely different. Two dark-side illustrations by Ben Fleuter reimagining two Warner Brothers characters

Wabbit Season



Here’s the Kaboom

One more: A cover image from The St. Canard News

This site has a lot of impressive illustration and photography on anything imaginable as well as unwholesome–no, let’s say perverse–subject matter. So if you choose to browse, be careful.

From another site on this theme, here’s a post on a book Disney has published about their princesses. I love what Maria Elena Naggi did with Belle from Beauty and the Beast. I think she’s my favorite Disney heroine, and this painting suits her perfectly.