Dan Wickett is talking about new lit journals on his Emerging Writers Network, and his points out the closing of the Litblog Co-op. Perhaps people were too busy with other blogs, projects, and off-line things.
Tags: blogs, literary, literary journals, lit blogs
They’ve made Narnia into a pop-up book with, NARNIA CHRONOLOGY: From the Archives of the Last King. I’m tempted to get this for my children as a Christmas present. It has “pop-ups, gatefolds, pull tabs,” illustrations, and other gimmicks to present the stories from start to finish.
Tags: narnia, chronicles of narnia, illustration
I’m not bubbling with ideas for a post tonight. I think everyone in Minnesota is depressed at the moment. The snow from the weekend has finally melted off, and now we’re supposed to get more tonight and tomorrow. That’s March in Minnesota. We knew about it when we enlisted. But it gets old, it does.
No book to review tonight. I’m working on another Koontz, but I’m not done with it yet, and I’ve reviewed plenty of Koontz anyway. This one (False Memory) is kind of hard going for me. Not that I don’t like it. I do. But it’s about phobias and obsessions and dysfunctional families, and that hits pretty close to home. I pick it up each time with just a little dread.
Richard Widmark is dead at 93. I recall that my mother never forgave him for pushing that old lady down the stairs. But I liked him OK as an actor.
He was born in Minnesota, and I’ve always had the idea that he may have been Norwegian. I get that idea because a friend had relatives named Widmark (no relation that I know of), and I understood that they were Norwegian. “Vidmark” in Norwegian would mean “wide grassland.”
He played a Viking once, too, in “The Long Ships,” a movie every Viking buff hates pretty cordially. It’s a fun flick in its way, but the story’s idiotic, and the costumes are terrible.
On top of that, it was actually based on one of the best Viking novels ever written (next to mine, of course), Röde Orm (that’s the Swedish title) by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson. The geniuses of Hollywood, naturally, had to improve it. So they took a well-researched historical novel and turned it into an unbelievable quasi-historical fantasy.
Ah well.
I could comment on Widmark’s gun control views (mentioned in the Fox piece), but it’s been pointed out to me (with justice) that I’m too inclined to speak ill of the dead (I much prefer to attack defenseless people). Widmark had a very long marriage, which ended with the death of his first wife, and that’s awfully impressive by Hollywood standards. So full props to him for that. R.I.P.
“How use doth breed a habit in a man!” Valentine said, and blogging has become a habit for some of us through use. Maxine talks about her sucessful blogging experience on The Digitalist.
Many book authors are bloggers: I have had some fascinating online conversations with authors of books I have reviewed online, on all kinds of topics. When one has read a really gripping or involving book, this can be really rather a heady experience.
A library in Oxford and one in Washington D.C. are collaborating to put online all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays printed in the quarto format before the year 1641. These editions have been available only to scholars before, so this project will make them available to pseudo-scholars and failed intellectuals as well. You can brush up your Shakespeare now, if you like, with The Oxford Shakespeare on Bartleby.com.
Tags: Shakespeare, English, literary, digital
Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”
She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”
Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”
Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it.”
The article carries on to discuss press coverage and NASA’s Aqua satellite.
Tags: science, global warming, climate change, NASA
Suprasegmental: of or relating to significant features (as stress, pitch, or juncture) that occur simultaneously with vowels and consonants in an utterance. For example:
The growing list of annoying acronyms, or initialisms that the Internet encourages in the subliterate — such things as ROFL (“rolling on the floor laughing”) and the uriah-heepish IMHO (“in my humble opinion”) and, most widespread of all, the infuriating LOL (“laughing out loud”) are justified, if such awful things can be justified, among people who can’t be bothered to use words when letters will do, the fastest way to express their exaggerated reaction, which reaction might, face-to-face, be indicated, just as intolerably, by such gestures (suprasegmental features, really, but not to be found in any updated Trager and Smith) as a mouth shaped into mock-laughter, or hands placed so as to supposedly hold from bursting a mimicked heaving-with-mirth belly.
Seen here in a post on Silly Acronyms, And Useful Ones
The funniest thing I read today was Mitch Berg’s dramatic memoir about one unforgettable day in Bosnia. He “misspeaks” over at Shot In the Dark.
We’ve been talking about classic hard-boiled detectives in the Comments section lately, so I might as well review Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, which I re-read last week. So I still have some vague memory of it, in spite of my advancing age. (I also read The High Window, but I have more to say bout this one.)
It’s my understanding that The Long Goodbye is generally considered the last “good” Philip Marlowe novel. It was written in 1953. Chandler finished another one, Playback, a little later, but it’s not much liked. When he died in 1959, he was working on Poodle Springs, which was finished by Robert B. Parker and published just a few years ago. I’ve never read Parker’s extension. I used to be a big fan of Parker’s Spenser mysteries, until Spenser became utterly wussified, the perfect Brother Tom. I figure any Chandler story finished by Parker would have to include a scene where Marlowe gets all weepy and apologizes to Linda Loring for his male insensitivity.
Anyway, The Long Goodbye centers on Marlowe’s on-and-off friendship with a burned out case named Terry Lennox, a scarred veteran of World War II. When Marlowe first meets him he’s the drunken, kept husband of a rich woman named Sylvia. When he next meets him the marriage has broken up, but later they get together again. Occasionally Marlowe and Terry meet for drinks. One day Terry asks him to drive him to Mexico, no questions asked. Marlowe does this, and finds himself in trouble when he returns home. Sylvia Lennox has been murdered, and Marlowe is charged with aiding and abetting. He endures the third degree at the hands of a bad cop, and spends a few days in jail before being suddenly released. Terry Lennox, he is told, has committed suicide in Mexico. The case is closed.
Marlowe is unsatisfied by the whole business, but there’s little to be done about it. His connection with Lennox, however, gets him an offer of work from the wife of one of Lennox’s neighbors, a successful author of historical romances named Roger Wade. At the wife’s request, Marlowe locates Wade, an alcoholic, who has put himself into the care of a shady doctor. Marlowe gets the man home. He’s offered a job as a sort of muscle-nanny, but turns it down. Nevertheless, he and Roger become friends after a fashion.
Wade is an interesting character, in part because he’s clearly autobiographical. Like Wade, Chandler himself was a successful genre writer with a drinking problem, on his way down personally and professionally, unable to get a handle on his life. Although Wade is a generally sympathetic character, Chandler doesn’t cut him any slack. The man’s self-pity, self-destructiveness and occasional cruelty to those who care about him are painted in uncompromising colors.
Eventually there is more murder (of course) and secrets connected to Terry Lennox come to light.
Chandler isn’t the kind of writer who simply sets up a problem and then leads you through to the solution. (A famous example is The Big Sleep, where the chauffeur is murdered, and Chandler himself was unable to say who killed him.) His mysteries are about human passions and moral dilemmas, competing loyalties and the tension between law and morality. Marlowe picks his way through the bodies, trying to keep his integrity as clean as possible under the circumstances, often paying a high price for doing what he considers right. The endings of the books are never entirely satisfying from a puzzle-solving perspective, or from the perspective of abstract justice. Chandler’s message seems to be that pure justice is unattainable in this world, but that a decent man like Marlowe can make some small difference, and try to come out of it all with his soul as unpolluted as possible.
The Philip Marlowe books aren’t as much fun as many mysteries, but they’re right at the top of the genre in terms of craftsmanship and character depiction. If you’re interested in hard-boiled mysteries, you need to read Chandler.
Tags: Raymond Chandler, hard boiled detective, The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe, classic
To start with, Will at View From the Foothills has tagged Lars and me with a meme. Lars did this last week. The rules are as follows:
I have to ask how one can tag random people. What would make my picks random? Nevermind, here’re my six:
Now, I’ll post this entry and tag a few people later today. Feel free to volunteer.
Methane found on distant world, “a Jupiter-sized planet known as HD 189733b.”
Insert juvenile humor here.