S.D. Smith ruminates on reading good writing as a writer and being self-confident.
Hey, Phil!
What, precisely, is BookTrib?
Popular Plays
Terry Teachout links to lists of plays produced across America compiled by American Theatre. To Kill a Mockingbird is very popular, and Terry will have more analysis tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal. (via Books, Inq.)
Tomorrow: Terry’s article in the WSJ is here. Despite my comment made from a quick scan, To Kill a Mockingbird did not make the top 11 most produced plays list. He notes: “It suggests to me that American theaters have a pronounced bias in favor of new and newish plays by American authors, especially ones that have high public profiles. (Six of the top 11 plays of the past decade have been produced on Broadway, while five of them won Pulitzer Prizes.) Up to a point, that’s good news.”
Made in the Image of
Chad Pergram of Fox News has an interesting post on the artwork in the Capitol Rotunda. I’m sure I saw what he describes here, but I don’t remember thinking much about it. Of course, I didn’t have a tour guide.
Plastered against the arched ceiling above the Rotunda floor is a gigantic canvas called “The Apotheosis.” It shows George Washington, accompanied by thirteen maidens, rising into the heavens.
Some tour guides and Congressional staff try to downplay the meaning of the word “apotheosis.” But in its official literature about the fresco, even the Architect of the Capitol’s office says that apotheosis “means literally the raising of a person to the rank of a god.”
There’s always chatter about the U.S. being a Christian nation and holding Judeo-Christian values. But in the most-hallowed temple of American democracy, at the top of one of the most recognized pinnacles on the planet, there’s a fresco of the first American president, ascending into the heavens as a god. Alongside 13 women.
And it takes the health care bill to stir people into a tizzy?
Building a Better Citizen
With unemployment holding at a little over 10%, Sol Stern points out E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy. Hirsch observed that students need to have a core of knowledge in order to read well, despite being versed in reading skills. Skills alone are not the sum of learning.
Stern gives an illustration of the problem facing many American students.
My children were students at P.S. 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School. Our school enjoyed a reputation as one of the city’s education jewels, and parents clamored to get their kids in. But most of the teachers and principals had trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College, a bastion of so-called progressive education, and militantly defended the progressive-ed doctrine that facts were pedagogically unimportant. I once asked my younger son and some of his classmates, all top fifth-grade students, whether they knew anything about the historical figure after whom their school was named. Not only were they clueless about the military leader who delivered the final blow that brought down America’s slave empire; they hardly knew anything about the Civil War, either. When I complained to the school’s principal, he reassured me: “Our kids don’t need to learn about the Civil War. What they are learning at P.S. 87 is how to learn about the Civil War.”
So when will they actually learn details of the Civil War? When they’re trying to relax in front of the History Channel between specials on UFOs and Nostradamus?
Lookin’ 4 a Nu Hobby?
While Lars is blowing snow and avoiding cardiac arrest, you may want to pursue this list of 45 manly hobbies by the folks at The Art of Manliness. Naturally, chess tops the list. Live steel combat is on it too (aka fencing).
Lookin' 4 a Nu Hobby?
While Lars is blowing snow and avoiding cardiac arrest, you may want to pursue this list of 45 manly hobbies by the folks at The Art of Manliness. Naturally, chess tops the list. Live steel combat is on it too (aka fencing).
Blow me down!
I object.
One of the things you learn living in these Hyperborean climes, after a few winters, is that (most of the time) there is no double jeopardy.
By which I mean that, looking at winter’s two Great Evils—bitter cold, and snow—you generally get one or the other, but not both. If it’s snowing, the temperature is probably fairly mild, because extremely cold air is dry. If it’s very cold, it probably won’t snow.
The terms of that armistice were treacherously breached today. We only got a couple inches here, but it blew hard, and was enough to put me behind the snow blower after work tonight.
(Oh, that’s right. I didn’t tell you about my snow blower. We had several inches of heavy, wet snow on Christmas eve, and my neighbor who generally blows out our shared driveway was out of town [as he tends to be, suspiciously often, when this sort of thing happens]. The weather forecast called for more of the same on Christmas day. I stood in the driveway, leaning on my shovel, trying hard to breathe [I’m fighting bronchitis], and thought, “A snow blower of my own isn’t in my budget. But you know what? Having a heart attack isn’t in my budget either.” So when the driveway was clear, I employed it to drive away to K Mart to buy an 8 horsepower Craftsman snow blower. I knew I’d get a better price if I waited till after Christmas, but that would mean another day’s shoveling.
The Christmas day snow wasn’t primo stuff for blowing. Very heavy and wet (what some of us [or me, anyway] call “coronary snow” in these parts). But tonight’s snow (where was my neighbor? Probably someplace warm, I’m guessing) was as granular as Sahara sand, and fine as mummy dust.
I expect it’ll all blow back in, with the strong winds expected tonight. But I made the effort. My dad would have been proud with me.
Except that he’d have said, “You missed a spot. Over there.”
Stocking books and setting stages
A sure sign of Epiphany around my office is the ceremonial ordering of the spring textbooks for the Bible school and seminary. In spite of one accommodating instructor, who told me he made a point of ordering mostly books he’d determined to be already in stock, this batch is proving more difficult than usual. A surprising number of the books on the list are out of print, which means ordering them through Amazon. One thing I don’t like about Amazon’s system is that, when they tell you a book is available from an affiliated bookseller, there’s no information as to whether that seller has one copy or many. So I end up buying one copy each from a long list of vendors, and that drives the shipping/handling costs up.
Our buddy Loren Eaton, over at I Saw Lightning Fall, links today to a fascinating piece at Tor.com by author Mary Pearson, about the importance of setting in fiction. An excellent essay, well worth reading.
I think sometimes setting is almost relegated to the grab bag of afterthoughts when it comes to describing it, but setting is what makes the characters and plot come alive. It creates atmosphere that the reader can share. It reveals who the character is and how they came to be that person. It supports and pushes events so things happen. It is metaphor and motivation, and often even the janitor too, swishing its mop across the stage long after the performance has ended and you are still in your seat and don’t want to leave. The setting is the last to leave your memory.
I’ve never thought about setting much, because in my own stories setting usually comes pre-packaged with the story. When I write about Vikings, the locale is fairly limited (though the Vikings swung a pretty wide cat, as my latest book shows). And if I’m not writing about Vikings as such, I write Viking-themed modern stories set in the country where I grew up and live. To be honest, I hate trying to write about places I’ve never visited. I figure that, as oblivious as I am to my own home town, parading my ignorance about an exotic place would be overreaching.
But that still determines what kind of stories I can write, whether I like it or not. Or, as Loren says,
Consider how a simple tale of cunning detective thwarts career thief changes when moved from New York to Botswana or to one of Jupiter’s Galilean moons. Despite sharing similar plot arcs, Neuromancer feels worlds away from any of Richard Stark’s Parker novels. That’s because setting is more than color or icing, more than a chance for an author to wax poetic. It sets boundaries, draws lines, holds the course. It says, “You go this far — but no farther.”
The Tin Collectors, by Stephen J. Cannell
I picked up my first novel by Stephen J. Cannell with some misgivings. Cannell is, of course, one of television’s biggest producers and writers, responsible for some great shows (like The Rockford Files and The Commish) and some I consider less noteworthy (like The A Team, which strained credibility farther than I was willing to tolerate).
But being able to put together a successful TV show doesn’t necessarily qualify someone to craft a decent novel. There’s overlap in the two occupations, but big differences as well. And, like any literary snob, I suppose I looked down my nose at the TV connection.
But now I’m convinced. The Tin Collectors was a very good mystery—well written, hard to put down and graced with vivid, sympathetic characters.
Shane Scully is a Los Angeles police detective. As the story opens, he’s awakened from sleep by a call from Barbara Molar, a former girlfriend who is now married to his ex-partner, Ray. Ray has come home mad, she tells him, and he’s trying to kill her. Continue reading The Tin Collectors, by Stephen J. Cannell