It’s Hell, I Tell You
“Banned Books Week,” episode 743
I hesitate to call Dennis Ingolfsland, of The Recliner Commentaries, a “fellow librarian,” since he’s the real thing and I’m an on-the-job-trained poseur. But I know enough to recommend this piece about the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week.”
The fact is that there are no banned books in America. Maybe I missed it but I don’t recall seeing any articles in the Library Journal or American Libraries protesting that other religion and those other countries which really do ban books.
(Picture credit: Jupiter Images)
The secret history of Times Roman?
Do typeface fonts fascinate you the way they do me? Then you’ll enjoy this story from the Financial Times about a HUGE controversy raging now in the typesetting world. Typography expert Mike Parker is promoting a theory that the venerable Times New Roman font was not invented by the man traditional given credit for it. Instead, he contends, it was stolen from the forgotten work of an American naval and aeronautical designer.
…After a lifetime spent in typography, Parker was well aware of the controversy he was getting involved in: typography may present a genteel exterior, but it’s an art form punctuated by bitter rivalries and rampant plagiarism.
The case that Parker makes about the real origins of Times New Roman stands on narrow foundations. The sole piece of surviving evidence for his version of history is a brass pattern plate bearing a large capital letter B. He holds the plate up to show the familiar form of the letter, its characteristic curves and serifs. The point, he says, is that such pattern plates represent a technology that was not used after 1915. The creation of Times New Roman was announced in 1932.
I myself have strong feelings about fonts. In general, I don’t like sans serif fonts (the ones without little tails). My favorite fonts are those in which the capital “J” extends below the baseline.
Tip: Mirabilis.
Selling books
Today, like so many days, was about West Oversea (pictured above, in case you’ve forgotten what the cover looks like).
Our friend Dale Nelson (who is a gentleman and a scholar) posted the first reader review at Amazon.com today. With typical understatement, he compares my work favorably to that of Robert E. Howard and John Buchan. (My publisher tells me, by the way, that the book will soon be available directly on Amazon through their Advantage program. And Christianbook.com says they’ll have it in stock beginning mid-September).
I ordered a dozen copies for our campus bookstore a little while back, and today I sold out the last of them (I then ordered more). I’d already sold a few, but we’re running our annual Summer Institute of Theology just now, and Dr. John Eidsmoe, who wrote a blurb for me, is one of the instructors. He recommended the book to his class, with immediate retail results.
The fellow I talked to at Nordskog, when I called to re-order, told me they’ve been pleased by the “buzz” we’ve gotten on the blogs, and that they’ve had several orders as a result of them. So thanks particularly to our blogging friends.
Why Most Journalists Are Democrats
Barbara Oakley, a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, write in a blog on Psychology Today’s site:
Soviet Socialism, as it turned out, was a perverse system that killed motivation even as it made fear as natural as breathing.
Why wasn’t this widely reported in the Western press?
As it turns out, the preponderance of journalists are Democrats. And socialism, with its idyllic, “progressive” programs, has formed an increasingly important role in Democratic policies. Who wants to investigate a possible dark side of your own party’s plank?
… there’s a critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely taught. It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in capitalist societies with an open press. But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes.
(via Frank Wilson)
The 2008 Election: VPs and Racial Politics
Authors Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson have a book released today on last year’s election, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election. World’s blog points to some details about who John McCain had on his vice-presidential running mates list and how those who vetted Mrs. Palin believed she could be a great VP, though probably not on Day One. “She had knocked some of the broader questions out of the park, [former White House counsel A.B. Culvahouse] told McCain. She would not necessarily be ready on Jan. 20, 2009, to be vice president, but in his estimation few candidates ever are.”
On The Politico, the authors discuss Senator Kennedy’s reaction to former president Bill Clinton’s treatment of candidate Obama.
If She Doesn’t Go In . . .
An embarrassing admission–I enjoyed my birthday
It was, honestly, one of the best birthdays I can recall.
Like so many aging people, I’ve become less and less enthusiastic about birthdays as the novelty of the first one has faded. It gets worse as you approach the big decade mileposts, and I’m within a year of another one of those now.
It’s become my custom to spend my birthdays in a self-pitying funk, contemplating the wasteland that is my personal life, and meditating on the fact that my birthday isn’t (at best) very important to many people who are still alive.
But Friday I had nice greetings in the Comments here. And even more on Facebook. There were cards. And in the morning I had a call from my brother, who arranged to meet me “halfway,” in the town of Owatonna, for dinner.
I was also contacted, entirely out of the blue, by two people who only know me through comments threads on other people’s blogs, but who are interested in my books.
It was all so nice that I realized God was trying to tell me something.
I’m trying to listen. I really am trying.
(Picture credit, Corbis.)
How Beautiful, I Guess
Beauty was once the goal, at least in part, of art, music, and poetry. Now, it is the antithesis of them, states Roger Scruton, who has written a book on the subject.
Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.
They can take our haggis, but they can’t take our freedom!
The BBC reports that a historian has announced that she has located an English recipe for haggis that dates to 1616. The earliest reference to the delicacy (which I’ve described in this space as “liverwurst-flavored oatmeal”) in Scotland comes from 1747. Thus, haggis was probably borrowed by the Scots from the English, she argues.
Read for yourself.
The question now is–is this good news or bad news for Scotland?
Tip: Cronaca.