Uncategorized

Dragons, and Pythons

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Credit ROFLRAZZI.COM Thanks to Loren Eaton for the link.



Steve Bradford, who I credited with yesterday’s link, had this link today. It’s a review of How To Train Your Dragon by Nathan D. Wilson, that draws a very, very different conclusion from mine:

But that’s not what was served up. Instead, dragons were bad. They raided the village stealing sheep. They burned it down constantly. They killed people. Lots of people. And here’s one of a few things that stunned me. Why did they do these evil things? Well, because they served The Dragon. The big one. The huge, ancient, evil one. And the story progresses not with one small boy (Hiccup) successfully communicating to his father (Stoick) that dragons were misunderstood, but with that boy crushing The Dragon’s head and . . . losing his foot in the process.

That message never even crossed my mind while I saw the movie. And frankly, I don’t think many other viewers took it that way either. But still, if that’s what Cressida Cowell, the author of the books the movie was based on, intended, I probably owe her an apology or something.

I often get things wrong. Continue reading Dragons, and Pythons →

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Sustainably Grown Coffee

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Caribou Coffee plans to be “the first U.S. coffee chain to commit to buying coffee grown only under sustainable farming practices developed by the Rainforest Alliance.” The Rainforest Alliance is a non-profit organization that works with farms to improve their crops and farming practices.

I hope they charge very little for certifying a farm. I can understand the cost for teaching farmers how to improve their work, but to merely put the Rainforest Alliance stamp of approval on a crop shouldn’t cost the farmer much, if anything. The farmers are barely making a living as it is, aren’t they? Why burden them to have their work approved by Americans?

Writing

Creating Toward a Goal

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Andrew Peterson has a beautiful post from his writing retreat. “What I do when I build roads isn’t that much different from what you do,” an old logger told him. “I have to figure out how to get from here to there. I look at a place and imagine a road. Takes a fair bit of creativity.” He goes on.

Uncategorized

The Great Books Alone Are Not Enough

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Patrick J. Deneen, the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, argues that teaching the Great Books is essentially worthless if the teacher treats them all as equally true.

contemporary arguments on behalf of the Great Books are often as pernicious, and even indistinguishable from, the forms of value relativism that they purport to combat. Many conservative academics have become lazy in the defense of the Great Books, content to let the phrase stand in for a deeper and potentially more contentious examination of the various arguments within those books and the West itself, and of the need for university faculties to provide some kind of organized and well-formed guidance to students on how best to approach these texts.

In short, teachers must have a bias for the truth in order to guide students through these great works. Reality must be recognized in the classroom. Because if an interest in ideas, no matter how ridiculous, is the highest virtue for a teacher, it barely matters what he is teaching. The outcome will be similar. Students will believe their own opinions are the only ones that matter, regardless their merits.

Poetry

Out of Light We Make a Dwelling

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Poster for National Poetry MonthThis year’s National Poetry Month promotional art quotes from this poem.

“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”

by Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one.

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.

Publishing, Religion

Bible Design Blog

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Phil, were you aware of this blog, Bible Design Blog? It’s from J. Mark Bertrand, and I’m amazed I never heard of it before (chances are, of course, you linked to it, and I just forgot.)

Anyway, it’s a cool blog about Bible design, Bible binding, and even Bible rebinding. Very nice.

Thanks to Steve Bradford for bringing it to my attention.

Poetry

A Little John Keats

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April is National Poetry Month, and I’m told today is No Housework Day. The day may be a Web Rumor from those crazy guys who writing everything on the Interweb. Regardless, this is poetry month, so here’s a bit of Keats.

“On leaving some Friends at an Early Hour”

Give me a golden pen, and let me lean

On heap’d up flowers, in regions clear, and far;

Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,

Or hand of hymning angel, when ’tis seen

The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:

And let there glide by many a pearly car,

Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,

And half discovered wings, and glances keen.

The while let music wander round my ears,

And as it reaches each delicious ending,

Let me write down a line of glorious tone,

And full of many wonders of the spheres:

For what a height my spirit is contending!

’Tis not content so soon to be alone.

Fiction, Reviews

At First Sight, by Stephen J. Cannell

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Author Stephen J. Cannell explains, in his Acknowledgments at the beginning of At First Sight, that he came up with the idea for the book while reading Andrew Klavan’s interesting and risk-taking novel, Man and Wife. He decided he needed to take some risks of his own in novel-writing, and so sat down to write a book different from his usual output. The result is nothing like Man and Wife, but it’s entertaining (and valuable, I think) in its own way.

The main character and primary narrator is Chick Best, a California dot com millionaire. He has a beautiful home, expensive cars, a beautiful wife and daughter. At first he seems a decent, amusing guy, too, with a self-deprecating sense of humor.

But gradually the picture darkens. His business is on the downslide, and he blames everyone but himself. He’s sick of his wife, and his daughter is a disaster waiting to happen (he never wonders why). He’s living far beyond his means, desperately trying to sustain the exterior trappings and the envy of others that, he imagines, are all that make life worthwhile.

While on a vacation in Hawaii, he and his wife meet Paige Ellis and her husband, and Chick is bowled over. Paige is naturally beautiful and sweet, in a way that his wife, for all her expensive physical training, can’t match. After they return to their separate homes, Chick can’t stop obsessing about Paige. Continue reading At First Sight, by Stephen J. Cannell →

Authors

Tatjana Soli on Story Types

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Tatjana Soli has her first novel in The Lotus Eaters. She writes about writing and her story on BookTrib:

What interested me about Vietnam was the impact that it had on lives — the lives of my characters, but also in a general way on the country as a whole. Life keeps on being lived — people fall in love — during and after war. It’s one of the ways we preserve our sanity as human beings during difficult times. A number of American soldiers stayed behind after their tour of duty was over. Many fell in love with Vietnamese women and had families. Many wanted to help a country that was being devastated by war. Is this a man’s or a woman’s story?

Authors, Writing

J. Mark Bertrand Interviewed by Octopus

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J. Mark Bertrand has a two-part interview on writing and shifting genres on Boxing the Octopus, which looks like a blog I should follow. Here are a couple quotes:

I don’t believe in “writing what you know,” but I do think it’s sound advice to write what you’re good at. For me, that’s turned out to be crime. The art of storytelling doesn’t change from genre to genre, and I’m more interested in telling a good story than a good genre story, if you see what I mean. The conventions are there, and for the most part I respect them, but at the end of the day I’m making use of the genre to tell a certain kind of tale about the detective as existential seeker and skeptic.

From the second part, Kathryn Paterson notes, “I find your suggestion of writing a 50-paged treatment prior to drafting to be daunting, but fascinating.” Mark replies:

In the film industry, a treatment is a summary–more detailed than a quick synopsis, but not yet a fully realized, scene-by-scene script–that communicates the rough contours of the story. Some are more detailed than others, but since Dan was convinced the problem with most of us young novelists was that we didn’t know our stories well enough, he recommended writing a fairly detailed treatment before starting. For writers who don’t like to stick with an outline, this advice can be liberating. Writing the treatment helps you to discover the story.