Kyle Ambrose is talking Scrabble and words what begin with x. Before I press the “Publish Post” button for this one, let me take a moment to say that I enjoy using the word “what” as I did in the first sentence. It’s a British dialect thing, isn’t it? Probably marks me as nerd for laughing about sentence structure. Better to laugh than to complain. Ah, well . . . where’s that button?
Does Teaching Literature Kill a Student’s Enjoyment of It?
Harrison Scott Key points out an article on how teachers can distance themselves from those who have not read, say Keats and Donne, repeatedly with analysis, forgetting what it was like to read their poetry for the first time.
Calvin & Hobbes
Sitting in bed in the dark, Calvin says, “Sometimes at night I worry about things and then I can’t fall asleep. In the dark, it’s easier to imagine awful possibilities that you’d never be prepared for. And it’s hard to feel couragious in loose-fitting, drowsy bear jammies.”
Hobbes replies, “That’s why tigers sleep in the buff!”
I just found this search website of Calvin & Hobbes comics and some other popular cartoons. I don’t see how copyright allows for this.
(More of Calvin’s wisdom: “What good is originality if you can’t crank it out?”)
Writing is Work
To the untried writer, John Milton says, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
To which the modern would-be writer replies, “Word up.”
Suing Father Brown
Here’s an odd, and somewhat troubling, story from my own state.
It seems a boy was killed in 1957 in what appeared to be a car accident. Years later, a priest investigated the matter and decided the boy had in fact been murdered. He wrote a book that claimed to prove his theory, substituting fictional names for the real characters he blamed for the death.
Problem was, it was set in such a small community that the fictionalized characters were easily identifiable.
So the people the characters were based on sued the priest. They have now won a settlement out of court.
I guess that without a judgment, this doesn’t create a legal precedent, but it’s bad news for authors. It should be noted that just changing a person’s name and giving him a different hair color doesn’t necessarily protect you from a libel suit.
I’ve never heard of this book. I doubt it was a bestseller, so there can’t have been a lot of royalty money in the pot. I suppose the priest’s order ended up paying the lion’s share of the settlement.
That must be frustrating. This time (for a change) the priest wasn’t even accused of the crime.
A Good Health Study for Coffee
Frank Wilson points out a good report on coffee consumption. Drinking a lot of coffee isn’t bad for you, according to this report, but usually people who drink a lot also have other habits which do promote bad health.
The concert was too short, and so was the hair
The Sissel concert on PBS last night was great. It was filmed in the picturesque Norwegian town of Røros in wintertime, the music itself performed in a historic church there. Very classy and reverent, I thought. And, needless to say, The Greatest Voice in the World soared through the pure, arctic air, delivering beauty like an angelic UPS truck. Or something.
My only unhappiness concerned Sissel’s hair. As is so often the case.
I care about women’s hair. It has something to do with an experience I had once, which it would be lugubrious to recount now (I suspect I’ve already told the story in this space, or on the old site, anyway). But I’ve always had strong opinions on women’s hair.
If you look at pictures of Sissel in the early stages of her career, you’ll see a lovely young girl with long, thick, honey-colored hair. That’s how she looked when I first became a fan, and that’s the image I imprinted on.
But it all changed around the time of the Winter Olympics in Norway in 1994. There she appeared, suddenly, and to the great shock of most, at the opening ceremonies with short, dark hair. Her hairstyle has changed constantly in the years since, but has generally been more or less that sort of thing.
Since her marriage broke up she seems to have grown it out a little, but for the concert she appeared in some kind of avant-garde coiffure that looked both oily and swirly. It was not becoming, in the eyes of this obsessive fan.
Why do women do this? I don’t know a lot about women, it goes without saying, but I’m pretty sure they tend to be more insecure about how they look than men are. That being true, why do they consistently put themselves in the hands of hairdressers of ambiguous gender, and trust them when they say, “Oh, darling, we’ll just streak your hair with purple, and lacquer it, and make it stand out straight from the left side of your skull so you look like a character from Anime! You’ll look divine!”
Any man can easily tell you what we want in a woman’s hair. Like most things about men, it’s very simple: “Long. Grow it as long as you can. Never cut it. Split ends? What are those? Dry, fly-away hair? Who cares?”
Show me a woman who wears her hair extremely long, and I’ll show you a woman who understands men deeply.
Of course a woman who wears her hair extremely short probably understands men deeply too.
Which sort is wiser, I’m not qualified to say.
Pullman Against The Theocracy–Whatever That May Be
And it isn’t just the God-fearin’ folk [Philip Pullman] finds frightening—he duly recognizes the atheistic USSR as one of the most cruel and effective theocracies in history. In an essay in the Guardian, he explains that “the real division is not between those states that are secular, and therefore democratic, and those that are religious, and therefore totalitarian. . . . You don’t need a belief in God to have a theocracy.” It’s no coincidence that he often refers to the poseur-God who is murdered in his trilogy as “the Authority,” for it is the enforcement of any authority he despises more than God. His opinion of Catholics who take offense at his book? “Nitwits,” he says.
One is tempted to write a book with a main character named “Philip Pullman,” described with his background and vital statistics, then replace his personality with that of a power-hungry tyrant who kidnaps and slaughters children to further his own goals. Perhaps go so far as to make the literary “Philip Pullman” responsible for the enormity of pain and suffering in the world. If he objects, call him a nitwit for failing to see the deeper meaning in your work.
Did you borrow my dictionary?
As long as I have a post idea I haven’t used yet, I feel rich in material. What I always forget is that my idea bench is usually about one player deep.
I’d been meaning to do a post about how Christians have gone from complaining about the commercialization of Christmas to complaining about being left out of the holidays entirely, for some time. Last night I used it, and tonight I find myself swept and garnished of topics.
Which won’t stop me from posting. I’ll just write about myself. Haven’t tried that in, oh, a day or two.
I’m in the midst of a Christmas card crisis. I’m one of those tedious people who send a Christmas letter with their cards, and I have an annual protocol for it. First I write the letter. Then I translate it into Norwegian, so I can send it to my friends and relatives in the Old Country first, since mail takes longer to get there.
An indispensable tool for me over the years, in setting those letters in Norwegian, has been a book I acquired (oddly enough) during my sojourn in Florida. It’s an English-Norwegian dictionary, where you can look up the word in English and find the Norwegian equivalent (“Boat,” for instance, is “båt.” “Tree” is “tre” [which also stands in for “wood.”]. Squirrel, oddly enough, is “ekorn” in Norwegian. I’m not kidding).
But this year I’m being handicapped by the complete disappearance of my dictionary. It ought to be somewhere right around here by the computer, since I always leave things where I last used them, and never straighten the desk up. But I’ve been through all the piles and it’s nowhere.
I blame the elves (“nisser” in Norwegian).
Speaking of Norwegian, I see that my PBS station is broadcasting the new musical production, “Northern Lights: An Evening With Sissel” tonight. Chances are your PBS station is broadcasting it too, one of these nights, during the sacred Pledge season. I’m no great booster of PBS, but this is your chance to discover why I’ve been promoting this woman all these years. I expect you to watch it. You will be tested on the material.
Human depravity
By way of Powerline: A splendid piece in the Chicago Tribune, by Barbara Oakley (an agnostic and author of a book on Evil Genes). Looks like evidence of Original Sin to me.