Uncategorized

An embarrassing admission–I enjoyed my birthday

Leave a comment

Birthday Candle

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.)

Non-fiction

How Beautiful, I Guess

Leave a comment

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.

Uncategorized

They can take our haggis, but they can’t take our freedom!

Leave a comment

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.

Authors, The Press

Bonnie & Clyde: Nothing heroes for a nothing world-view

Leave a comment

You already know that I keep novelist Stephen Hunter’s picture in a locket, close to my heart. He proves (once again) his worthiness of such adoration in this marvelous piece in Commentary about Bonnie and Clyde–both the movie and the actual persons.

I always held pretty much this opinion. I just didn’t know enough to say it so well.

Tip: Threedonia.

Authors, Fiction

Four Lost Wodehouse Playlets Found

Leave a comment

Four short, satirical plays written by P.G. Wodehouse between 1904-1907 have been discovered and show the great comic author’s politics. He wrote them in support of British conservatives and those arguing for tariff reform.

Literary historian Paul Spiring discovered the works. “They are quite powerful,” he said, “and show that he was very much a supporter of the Tariff Reform League and pro-Chamberlain. His writing has often given people the impression that he was above politics. But the songs show that he was quite astute.”

P G Wodehouse

September 1928: English novelist Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881 – 1975), creator of the characters Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, at the door of his home at Hunstanton Hall, Norfolk. (Photo by Sasha/Getty Images)

Fiction, Reviews

Catalina’s Riddle, by Steven Saylor

Leave a comment

I picked up a couple of Steven Saylor’s Rome Sub Rosa novels because James Lileks praises them highly, and I have a high opinion of James’ taste. Unfortunately, I find I can’t share his enthusiasm.

Not to say the two I’ve read have been bad books. Catilina’s Riddle, which I just finished, and The Venus Throw, which I reviewed a while ago, are well-researched and well-written mysteries centered on the political conflicts that convulsed the Roman republic during the ascendancy of Cicero and the rise of Julius Caesar.

This story starts in 63 B.C. Gordianus the Finder, the detective hero of the series, has settled down on a farm in Etruria, some distance north of Rome, which he inherited from a friend. His new farm is entirely surrounded by the properties of his late friend’s siblings, and they (with one exception) do not welcome him. But Gordianus has had his belly full of Rome and its intrigues. The simple life of a gentleman farmer looks very good to him.

Neverthless, his past—in the person of an agent of his old patron, Cicero—intrudes. Cicero has an odd request. He wants Gordianus to play host to (and to spy on) Cicero’s own greatest political enemy, the charismatic young politician Catilina. Gordianus is sick of Cicero, and initially refuses. But he changes his mind after a headless body shows up in one of his barns. He interprets this as a threat, and begins to realize that you can flee Rome, but Rome will always follow you. Thus he gets more and more enmeshed in the plots and counter-plots of Cicero and Catilina. As in The Venus Throw, the actual murder mystery—the question of the headless body, along with two more that follow—turns out to be a footnote to the great events that overtake them all by the end of the story. Continue reading Catalina’s Riddle, by Steven Saylor →

Uncategorized

Health Care: The Right to Grant is the Right to Deny

Leave a comment

Dalrymple on the rights of health care, the role of government, and what tax-funded health care has done in the U.K.:

. . . the right to grant is also the right to deny. And in times of economic stringency, when the first call on public expenditure is the payment of the salaries and pensions of health-care staff, we can rely with absolute confidence on the capacity of government sophists to find good reasons for doing bad things.

. . . After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe.

(via Frank Wilson)

Writing

Stylin’

Leave a comment

One of my co-workers came to see me in my office today. He said he was interested in writing. He was particularly curious, he said, as to how a writer develops a style.

Here’s the answer I gave him. It’s probably not the last word on the matter, but this is how I understand it, based on my own experience.

First, you find an author you’d like to be like. And you try to write like him (or her). This isn’t actually part of the process as such. It’s just where most of us start. You’ve got to start somewhere, so most of us start as imitators. When I was a kid, I tried to write like Poe, I recall.

This derivative writing is the raw material from which you begin to build your identity as a writer. It’s Square One, nothing more, really.

Thinkstock Single Image Set Continue reading Stylin’ →

Book Reviews, Creative Culture