Here’s a somewhat technical article on disappointments in Mr. Obama’s temporary (I think) appointments to federal positions in arts and humanities. Apparently, one of them is liar and the rest have little arts experience.
Why would anyone want a cabinet level office on American culture? I didn’t think people wanted government in their lives.
There’s some home truths here. Also some nonsense.
Hat tip: Literary agent Mike Kabongo
I think this comparison is horrendous. Actor Edward Norton says the upcoming Earth Hour, where participants will turn off “non-essential lighting” for an hour for the sake of saving energy and saving the planet, is symbolic just like the march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, where participants were beaten by police, was symbolic. I wonder Norton thinks the student who stood before the tanks in Tiananmen Square were standing symbolically too.
Got this from our friend Roy Jacobsen, of Writing, Clear and Simple, who lives in Fargo:
If you decide it’s not appropriate for Brandywine Books, I understand; however, if you’d post a request for prayers for the safety of people in the Red River Valley, I’d greatly appreciate it.
They’re predicting a 41 foot crest on Saturday—that’s a foot higher than our last big flood in ’97, and the highest on record. We’re cautiously optimistic, but it’s a near run thing.
It’s appropriate, all right.
From what I hear, they’re having trouble getting volunteers to help with sandbagging up there. I can’t help wondering if that’s partly a result of one of the “lessons of Katrina”–that the federal government is responsible for everything.
For the record, Roy isn’t one of the shirkers. He’s been out filling sandbags, and the weather’s pretty nasty.
“Whenever politicians declare a crisis, or an emergency, watch out. Chances are this means they want to impose something before the public discovers the truth.”
I love this. In Bangkok, a fireman dressed as Spiderman to save an autistic boy who was sitting on a third floor balcony, trying to avoid third grade.
From Pajamas Media: Andrew Klavan writes about the success of the television show, “The Mentalist,” and the need for cheerfulness in stories.
It should be clear by now that I’m an appalling sexist, most especially in regard to novels written by women. There are certainly female authors I like (Sigrid Undset, Dorothy Sayers and P. D. James come to mind), but I approach novels written by women with almost (not quite; that would be impossible) the same level of trepidation I experience when approaching an actual woman in real life. Female novelists, in my experience, tend to a) write their male characters badly, and b) view the world through a Gender Studies lens.
I quickly decided that Ariana Franklin was an author in that mold as I read the historical mystery, Grave Goods. But persevering to the end, I decided I had been unjust (to a degree). Continue reading Grave Goods, by Ariana Franklin
Raymond Chandler, creator of the archetypal fictional detective Philip Marlowe, famously wrote of the hard-boiled hero in his essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,”
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid….
The question posed by author Philip Kerr in his Bernie Gunther novels would seem to be, “What if the streets were even meaner than those of Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles? What if a man very like Marlowe had been a detective in Berlin in the 1930s?”
I had never heard of Philip Kerr before I got the offer of some free review proofs from G. P. Putnam’s (I love being a book blogger). But I’ll have to find the earlier books in this series now. A Quiet Flame is pure, classic hard-boiled, worthy of Chandler and Hammet, with an original twist. Continue reading A Quiet Flame, by Philip Kerr
Problems or inconsistencies with English: “But Shakespeare is not assumed to have been in his cups when he wrote in The Comedy of Errors, ‘There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As I were their well-acquainted friend’ (Act IV, Scene 111). Later, Thackeray in Vanity Fair tosses off ‘A person can’t help their birth.’ …”
Because the rest of us think it’s proper English to say, “One should take his opinion outside,” one and his being singular. In the above examples, Shakespeare says, “a man I meet . . . as I were their friend.”
I’m right to complain, aren’t I?