File this under: #Shutupandwrite
She doesn’t appear to be keep up her blog, but Karisha Prescott does have this post on why you (generally speaking) won’t ever finish that novel you keep talking about, aside from the money you still owe the Don. You don’t make time to write. You don’t work to improve your writing. You over-edit what you have written, and you can’t take feedback.
I have achieved a sort of anonymous immortality through this post at Pajamas Media by Bryan Preston. Bryan’s a Facebook friend of mine, and the Facebook friend he quotes at the bottom of the first page, the one who came up with the Homer Simpson gag, was me.
(Caution for the faint of heart—political snark abounds.)
Roy Jacobsen came up with the answer to my Filing Cabinet Drawer Label Joke Challenge yesterday. As he notes, my labels are based on some lines from Harold Arlen’s classic song, “Blues In the Night.” I admit I cheated, rearranging the towns so they’d be alphabetical. But I still think it’s funny.
“From Natchez to Mobile,
From Memphis to Saint Joe,
Wherever the four winds blow,
I’ve been to some big towns,
I’ve heard me some big talk,
But there is one thing I know…”
Here’s Rosemarie Clooney doing the song sometime back in the 1950s.
I like the arrangement, and the guys with hats and cigarettes. And it’s documentary evidence of how smokin’ hot (and talented) Rosie was back in the day.
I want to watch Brazil, but I don’t think my sweet wife will want to see it with me. I’d like to see Blade Runner again too, since I’m sure I didn’t understand it as a kid. The WebUrbanist has a list of “Nightmare & Dream Designs” for cities.
Kevin Ryan talks innovation and technology in this post on AdAge.com, particularly targeting Google’s new Instant Search–have you seen it? If you’re looking for one the major websites/companies that usually top your search list, now you won’t have to wait three seconds. Ryan opines:
For most people, search is just search
My favorite scrap with my wife co-starred a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. In the middle of a partial light to medium domestic storm, she poured herself the last two fingers of a liter bottle. A bottle, mind you, that I had carried back from China many years ago.
I instantly forgot what we were quibbling about. As she finished the last drop, it occurred to me: In a distracted environment, my wife’s understanding of Johnny Blue was that of any other bottle of Scotch. For me, however, a bottle of the Blue lasts about five to seven years and only makes an appearance on or around my birthday.
To my wife, Scotch is Scotch and it all tastes like recycled tires. To the consuming public, search is search and the issues we face are unique to us. Do-it-all devices and features are engineered to deliver a unique customer experience by offering everything, allowing consumers pick what they like. It’s a nice idea that really doesn’t apply to search.
James Lileks blogged about many things today, but among them was labels on filing cabinet drawers. This prompted me to mention, in the comments, a secret joke I’ve been carrying on for years.
I was working at my student job, sitting behind the library desk at Waldorf College, Forest City, Iowa, back around 1968, when I came up with what I thought was a hilarious filing cabinet drawer label joke. (This is a small, rather specialized field of humor.)
Two file drawers, one above the other.
The first is labeled, MEMPHIS to MOBILE.
The second is labeled, NATCHEZ to SAINT JOE.
I’ve had those labels on filing cabinets wherever I’ve lived and/or worked ever since. I don’t think anyone has ever gotten the joke.
Do you? (You get no points if you read down the comments on Lileks’ post and see what I wrote there.)
12 Steps to Identifying Your Functional Saviors On this point, John Calvin wrote in The Institutes:
Every individual mind being a kind of labyrinth, it is not wonderful, not only that each nation has adopted a variety of fictions, but that almost every man has had his own god. To the darkness of ignorance have been added presumption and wantonness, and hence there is scarcely an individual to be found without some idol or phantom as a substitute for Deity. Like water gushing forth from a large and copious spring, immense crowds of gods have issued from the human mind, every man giving himself full license, and 60devising some peculiar form of divinity, to meet his own views.
Literary agent Elisabeth Weed answers questions on what she sees as an agent. “Much of this business is based off of personal relationships that have been built over time over lunch,” she says.
Photo copyright: Newscom.
Joi Weaver at the Evangelical Outpost has recently “discovered” Beowulf, through experiencing it in the way it was originally intended–as a performance. She’s pretty excited about it, and the performance she recommends–that of actor Benjamin Bagby–sounds delightful.
What followed was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Benjamin Bagby, founder of the medieval music group Sequentia, sat on a bare stage, and sang the first part of the Beowulf story in Anglo-Saxon, accompanying himself on a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon harp. Over the next hour and a half, the story of Grendel’s attacks unfolded, culminating with the coming of Beowulf and the defeat of the monster. I hadn’t gotten any work done–instead, I was perched on the edge of my seat, hanging on every word of the performance. Reading Beowulf had stirred nothing in me: hearing it set my mind and heart on fire.
A DVD is available.
(By the way, my friend Sam the Viking has built a Viking hall at his farm in Missouri. Recently he hosted a Beowulf night for a college professor and her class, during which they recited Beowulf in that historically authentic setting. Wish I could have been there.)
Dale Nelson sent a link to a blog post by Inklings aficionado Jason Fisher. He believes he’s discovered a previously unrecognized influence on Tolkien’s concept of “the Circles of the World.”
I’ll attempt to show how Tolkien’s figurative “Circles of the World” may have emerged from three such disparate sources: the Ynglinga Saga of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla; the Latin Vulgate Bible, with particular emphasis on the Book of Wisdom; and perhaps even the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a medieval map of the world on display in the West Midlands of Tolkien’s youth. In the end, at this late stage in Tolkien source-hunting, it can be difficult to uncover substantially new (and sufficiently verifiable) source-traces; however, in this case, I believe I have something new to offer to Tolkien Studies.
Check out the blog as a whole. Looks good.
Lars is not in Norway at the moment, and if you look closely at this image of Nusfjord, Norway . . . you still won’t see him. Now would be a great time to buy his latest book as a vote in favor of seeing another such book come to press.
Amazon.com’s top sellers in fiction at the moment are Stieg Larsson’s novels–all of them, I think–Jonathan Franzen’s latest called Freedom, and something from unknown author Nicholas Sparks. What? You’ve heard of Sparks? Is he any good? (No offense, Mr. Sparks. May I give your shoes another shine?)
Thriller writer nonpareil Andrew Klavan reviews James Ellroy’s new memoir, The Hilliker Curse, for the Wall Street Journal.
He admires the book, but sees (plausibly, in my view) some things the author apparently hasn’t noticed.
It would be pretty to think so. Yet one has the feeling that there is as much hidden here as revealed, that Mr. Ellroy’s belligerent candor disguises some deeper and still secret shame. How could it be otherwise? Every confession is also a mask. As all good crime writers understand: There’s no bottom to the perversity of the human heart.
