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.
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.
This battle ends with a nice sweeping of the legs, but it appears to me the swordsman strikes the axeman once or twice. What do you think?
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.
Had an eye examination after work tonight. They dilated my pupils, so the drive home in the dark was kind of like Christmas, or very slow fireworks, with great dazzling daisies of colored light all around. I can work at the computer, but it flashes at me in a way that’ll probably give me a headache if I persist too long.
Sam Karnick tells me Andrew Klavan read the review I wrote yesterday of The Truth of the Matter at The American Culture blog, where I crossposted it. I am gratified. Tomorrow, I’ll review The Identity Man, barring acts of God.
It’s late in the day, but I want to officially thank all our veterans. I’m particularly thinking of the Vietnam vets. One of you went over there because I had a deferment. I owe you. And when I think how you were robbed of your honor, it still makes me mad, after all these years.
“The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins is the topic of this podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf, by the Poetry Foundation. It’s a good 11 minutes of poetry discussion, which perhaps you can’t get at the local pub.
Douglas Van Belle of Andromeda Spaceways humbly offers “A Comprehensive and Totally Universal Listing of Every Problem a Story Has Ever Had” for your consideration. Things like starting in the wrong place, story pacing, and mundane dialog are only some of his suggested story criticisms.
This leads me to ask when did we begin to believe zombies wanted to eat brains? I remember they come from Voodoo lore, but where was the brain-eating part introduced?
Learned from a new blog called Evolving English, Old English used the word “hi” or “hie” for third person plural. The vikings changed that around 1200 A.D. “The word ‘they’ was introduced into English by Viking settlers and completely replaced the original Old English word,” according to a language quiz on the British Library’s new language blog. “They” is obviously a better word than “hi.” Who could dispute that?
I scored 4/6 on each difficulty level, which tended to skew toward British English, but I’m not going to complain. No, I’m not.
If what you’re looking for in a book is subtlety and nuance, Andrew Klavan’s Homelanders series of young adult novels is not the place to go.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a book to appeal to young males (the explicit target market for the books), you’ve come to the right place.
These are books for boys who like video games (at one point Charlie West, the book’s hero, even gets to use an actual weapon that works like a video game controller) and extreme sports. “Extreme” describes The Truth of the Matter well—not in the sense of extreme shock content or extreme edginess, but in the sense of action that never slackens, but constantly ratchets up the dramatic tension. Poor Charlie barely gets a chance to grab a nap or anything to eat through the whole story. Wherever he turns, he’s got enemies on his tail. The premise isn’t terribly realistic, but that’s the whole point. This roller coaster of a story isn’t intended to give you time to consider its plausibility. The only drawback is that it’s so compelling that it’s hard to stretch the reading of it longer than a day and a half or so, and you want more. On the other hand, Charlie’s earned some rest. Continue reading The Truth of the Matter, by Andrew Klavan
If you’ve read my novel West Oversea (you have, haven’t you?), you may recall a mention, at the end of the story, of a massacre of the English Danes by King Ethelred the Unrede. (This isn’t really a spoiler, since it happens off-stage.)
It appears that evidence of that atrocity has now come to light in Oxford, according to this article from Press TV.
Remains of 34 to 38 young men were discovered in March 2008 during excavations for a new college building.
The bones dated back to between 960 and 1020 CE and included cracked skulls. Some of the skeletons bore stab wounds in their spines and pelvic bones. There were also signs of burning.
Five had been stabbed in the back, and one had been decapitated.
Thames Valley Archaeological Services (TVAS) found the skeletons beneath St. John’s College, which led them to a historical incident, which happened in 1002 CE.
Scientists believe the victims were killed on St. Brice’s Day, November 13, 1002 CE, when King Aethelred the Unready ordered Englishmen to murder their Danish neighbors.
I think it’s generally agreed that the murders did not extend into the northeasterly region called the Danelaw, where Danes (and, obviously, their law) dominated. I believe the Danelaw wasn’t considered properly part of England at that time.
But there were plenty of Danes in other places too. The forensic details of wounds and burn marks seem to support a contemporary account that told how the Danes of Oxford sought sanctuary in a church, but the mob burned it down, then put the survivors to the sword.
On a more amusing note, The Art of Manliness has posted this piece on the seafaring origins of much of our English slang.
My only disagreement is with the origin of “son of a gun.” I think it highly unlikely that prostitutes were brought along on sea voyages in the British navy. As I understand it, the substitute for shore leave of the day (you can’t give impressed [kidnapped] sailors shore leave, because they’ll run away) was to bring “soiled doves” on board to entertain the crew. This “entertainment” happened on the gun deck where the sailors’ quarters were. Thus, to call a man a “son of a gun” was to imply that he was conceived on a gun deck, that his mother was a prostitute. Which comes down to the same thing, but I’m a stickler for details. Even when I’m wrong.