At a charity reading in New York, Authors John Irving and Stephen King urge J.K. Rowling to avoid doffing Potter.
King said, “I don’t want him to go over the Reichenbach Falls.”
Rowling said she has worked out the ending to her series, and no doubt someone will not like it.
A picture is worth a thousand words unless you don’t have the right words to match it. Take the photos coming out of Lebanon and Israel these days. What are the right words? As shown here, the words given them by some news editors are so wrong you have to wonder why that particular news was unfit to print. And here’s another example from the same site.
Canadian Author Margaret Atwood is quoted by Bill Moyers on his “Faith & Reason” site: “If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn’t be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that…that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn’t be a deity would it?”
That’s good. It points a problem many Christians have, because we kick around a lot of bad theology on prayer. God never announced that he would pardon us for specific sins after we repeat a memorized prayer nor does he wait for us to use specific phrases from the Bible in our prayers before acting with power. He is the Lord of all creation and everyone in it. No one can stop him from doing what he wants and no one can make him act.
For more on this idea, I recommend a book by J.B. Phillips called, Your God Is Too Small.
John Miller writes about the Soviet “Brave New World” written before Aldous Huxley’s. It is We by the shunned Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin, completed in 1921 and release in a new English transation this month. It wasn’t published in Russia until 1988 because it harshly criticized the Evil Empire. Mr. Miller describes it:
We is also the product of a powerful imagination. It describes a futuristic world dominated by the One State, which is devoted to “mathematically infallible happiness.” Because freedom is supposedly the enemy of happiness, the One State strives to eradicate all marks of individuality. “To be original means to somehow stand out from others,” says one character. “Consequently, being original is to violate equality.”
It is my birthday today. I am 56 years old.
The temperature got up to 100° today.
These two facts are not unrelated. I’m a hot day’s child, born under the Dog Star. Like most summer babies (in my unscientific experience), I handle heat a lot better than cold. Weather like today’s is an irritant, but it doesn’t prostrate me. I put on a light-colored hat and go about my business.
They had a goodbye party for someone at work today, and in the course of it somebody said, “It’s your birthday, too, isn’t it?” I conceded the fact and they sang The Song for me.
My brother Moloch called me at work, because I’d been out of town over the weekend, when he usually calls. As the conversation wound down and he was jockeying to hang up, I asked, “Is this my birthday call?”
“Oh yeah. It’s your birthday, isn’t it?” he asked. So he wished me a happy one.
Moloch doesn’t believe in cards, so he usually calls for my birthday. Brother Baal sends a card, and generally calls too. My friend Chip, who was born about a week after me, usually sends a card, but he forgot last year and I haven’t seen anything this year. My hero this time around is my uncle Orv, who not only sent a card, but included a nice “housewarming gift” inside it. Public thanks to him (he reads this blog).
When I was a kid, contemplating the likelihood I recognized even then, that I’d never find a wife, one thing I didn’t anticipate about single life was that a day would come when my birthday would not show up very large on any living person’s radar screen.
Fortunately, when you get into your fifties you don’t care much about it anymore, yourself.
It was hot in Decorah, Iowa, too, over the weekend. It was the hottest, stickiest Nordic Fest anyone remembered, and the crowds were widely dispersed—most of them miles away in their own homes. Even a lot of the vendors didn’t show up. We Vikings sat panting in the shade. The first day we couldn’t even work up the energy to do any live steel combat.
We did do some (wisely without armor) on the second day, and felt much the better for it. If my subjective scorekeeping is accurate, I seem to be the Number Two swordsman in our group, which I still find bizarre beyond words.
When it was all over, I felt like I’d spent the weekend baling hay, rather than sitting around in the shade of my awning, laboring greatly only over setting up tents, tearing them down again, and engaging in a spot of healthy recreational mayhem.
I’ll be doing it again on Saturday (hopefully without the extreme heat). We’re doing a town anniversary celebration in Bode, Iowa, and the guy heading up the celebration was in Decorah to visit us. He made a point of coming to me three separate times to tell me that he’d shown an internet photo of me and my equipment to the town fathers, and they’d all said “We want that guy here.”
It’s nice to be wanted. One would prefer, for preference, to be wanted by the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, but it’s nice to be wanted by anyone.
On top of that, I talked to the distant relative I’d contacted last week, and he gave me the genealogical information I needed for Cousin Trygve in Norway. He also extended an invitation to the family reunion, which is in Belmond, Iowa, just down the road from Bode, on Sunday. That seemed like a sign from God that He wanted me to attend both, and I’m not so sanctified in my personal walk that I can afford to refuse a divine clue-bat.
Especially when I’m this old.
Lit-bloggers are declaring their reading preferences. Scott of Converational Reading started the ball rolling. Dan of the Emerging Writers Network and Ed Champion of Return of the Reluctant pick it up.
I’d love to blog about this, but I am utterly unqualified. I still feel a strong urge to read whatever-it-is because I’m supposed to, even when I know I’m not. You won’t get preferences from me in an easy-to-read list. I could play the postmodern card and say no definite list exists, but the truth is I’m weak in the head. I’ve even read a couple Harry Potter books. Perhaps you would like to follow the lead of these lit-bloggers and declare your preferences.
It’s a Crime! has been blogging on the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. One point I note:
On Saturday afternoon Frances Fyfield conducted an excellent interview with P D James. She was sure to emphasise at the start that P D James is not just a prolific author, but also someone whose life in public service should be recognised and remembered. She brought out all the best in P D James, as an author, and as a woman whose life has inspired and motivated her writing career. P D James was wonderfully open and direct and left the room with a well deserved and respectful standing ovation.
Someone constructed a tunnel out of books for the “Diversity of Taiwan 2006” exhibition in Taipei. Here’s another photo of it. If I were there, I’d want to pull one out, but I don’t suppose they are loose.
Sherry points out Emily Bronte’s birthday today. She writes: “Some critics insisted that Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights, must have been written by a man because no woman could have written such a passionate story. Emily Bronte died of tuberculosis one year after the publication of her only novel. She was 30 years old.”
Why do critics argue stupid points like this? I guess it was a different era, when women were not considered valuable members of society or at least literary culture. Our era has its own stupid ideas, such as a constitutional right to privacy and global warming.
Husband and wife reviews of Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner. Lisa Holtsberry longs for meaningful tradition in her faith. “I want tradition to wrap me up into God’s holiness, to quietly be reminded to seek and look for him in daily reverences,” she writes.
Kevin picks it up a few days later. “In a world whose frantic pace, and often soul deadening culture, make spiritual contemplation a challenge this is an important project.”