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Multiple hooplas, plus a likely historical exaggeration

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I didn’t sleep well last night (not unusual), and I expected today to be kind of lousy, as they so often are, for some inexplicable reason, when I’m half asleep all the time.

But it was a good day.

First, deep background. I spent most of last Saturday tinkering with my snowblower, because we’d gotten about 10 inches of dense, heavy snow overnight. I’d planned to do housecleaning that day, to prepare for the upcoming holidays, but clearing the driveway took priority.

I never did get the driveway cleared (fortunately mild weather since then has melted most of it off now). I’m new to snowblowing, and wasn’t aware of the arcane things you have to do to get one of those suckers running again after its summer vacation.

I finally gave up, and decided I’d take it back to Sears for service one night this week. But this was the first night I’d had clear to do that. Continue reading Multiple hooplas, plus a likely historical exaggeration →

Publishing, Religion

Hat tips to Veith

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Gene Edward Veith, of the Cranach blog, provides today’s subject matter.

First of all, he links to this article, which tells how the Beatles, John Lennon especially, tried to make a deal to film The Lord of the Rings back in the 1960s.

According to Peter Jackson, who knows a little something about making Lord of the Rings movies, John Lennon was the Beatle most keen on LOTR back in the ’60s—and he wanted to play Gollum, while Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr would take on Sam and George Harrison would beard it up for Gandalf. And he approached a pre-2001 Stanley Kubrick to direct.

Fortunately, Prof. Tolkien was still alive at the time, and he put his brogan down firmly on the idea.

Prof. Veith also writes about the new NIV Bible, which (most of us weren’t aware, I’m sure) is now going to supersede both previous versions of the NIV.

…But still there remains lots of interpretations for the sake of modern readers in place of simply rendering what these non-modern texts literally say, this being part of the translating philosophy of the NIV. Here too is that tendency in American evangelicalism to cut itself off from the church of the past (eliminating “saints”?). Not to mention the presumption of correcting the Bible’s “sexist” language.

This seems like an excellent opportunity to publicly thank Dale Nelson, for his generous gift of a copy of the new The Lutheran Study Bible: English Standard Version from Concordia Publishing. Thus am I delivered from the quagmire that is the NIV Study Bible.

Reading

National Gaming Day at the Library

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LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 13: Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt gives a special performance on stage as games manufacturer Konami unveils a new Sony Playstation 2 game, 'Karaoke Revolution,' at the Los Angeles Public Library Downtown Los Angeles on May 13, 2003 Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

In this photo, Jennifer Love Hewitt is performing at the L.A. Public Library in 2003 for Sony’s announcement ceremony for the Playstation 2 game “Karaoke Revolution.” It fits with Daniel Flynn’s article on libraries drifting toward amusement centers, such as renting video games and hosting noisy National Gaming Day events. Flynn writes:

Allen Kesinger, organizer of Newport Beach Public Library’s National Gaming Day, concedes that video games are entertainment but defends their intellectual merit. “Video games have evolved and instead of being endurance tests designed to eat up quarters, they have become a medium to deliver sophisticated, emotionally charged stories. BioShock is the story of an underwater city torn apart by civil war. Heavy Rain is an intense character drama surrounding a father’s loss of his child. Silent Hill 2 is a deep, psychological thriller about a man searching for his deceased wife. Because of this strong focus on narrative, we can use video games . . . [to] attract hesitant readers.” His library’s “celebration of video games” will host a birthday party for the iconic Mario (of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. fame); feature a rotation of games, including Katamari Damacy and Lego Star Wars; and participate in the nationwide Super Smash Bros. tournament.

Flynn worries that libraries have rejected a vision of cultivating the life of the mind. What is the mind, after all, but a spacesaver between your ears? I mean, if you have the right opinions, who cares if you can really think about them, right? Dude, where’s my game? (via First Thoughts)

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 →

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

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.