Tonight, another bleak and self-absorbed post about my unhappy childhood. I’ll hide the body of it behind the fold, so as not to bum you out too much if you’re not interested in going on.
But I should mention that this won’t be a war story. I’m talking statistics and news reporting tonight. Continue reading Suppressed
The original D’Artagnan (or one of them; Alexander Dumas actually conflated the adventures of two different relatives in The Three Musketeers and its sequels) died in battle in the Netherlands, during the siege of Maastricht, in 1673. Now Dutch archaeologists think they’ve located his place of burial.
The story is here.
Tip: Mirabilis.
Last night I set up a scene from an imaginary novel, in which a police detective says too much to his superior officer (a guy he doesn’t get along with). The imaginary author (who would appear to be me. I’m not sure how that works) is trying to give us some background on the tragic roots of our hero’s (his name is Slade) obsession with an unsolved child murder. But the method he chooses—having Slade unburden his heart to a guy he doesn’t even like (and certainly doesn’t trust), rings false for any reader with a minimal amount of human experience.
So how could the author convey this information to the reader more naturally? Continue reading Exposition lesson, Part 2
There’s something of a Secret Santa for book bloggers over here.
I filled up my car today for less than twenty bucks. (It should be noted that my car has a pretty small gas tank.) What a good feeling that was! That’s a genuine economic stimulus payment. I can’t help thinking that people all over this country are enjoying the feeling of extra weight left in their wallets, and are getting ready to do some spending they’ve been putting off.
I’m probably wrong, but it feels that way to me.
I’m reading another Dean Koontz novel (I’ve pretty much read all his books now). It’s one of his re-issued early works and, typically, shows numerous marks of artistic immaturity. Particularly notable are the lame jokes (his jokes tend to be a little lame even nowadays, but he’s made great progress).
But what really caught my attention was his problem with exposition, a problem I’ve discussed before in reference to other early efforts. I’m not going to excerpt any of his scenes here, but I’ll compose a Koontz-like chunk of dialogue. Continue reading Exposition lesson, Part 1
Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, is my alma mater.
Founded in the 1870s, Augsburg was for most of its early history the center of Free Lutheranism, an effort to build a pietist Lutheran church movement exercising a congregational form of church government. These principles were abandoned entirely when the Lutheran Free Church entered a merger with other Lutheran bodies in 1962. The small rabble of churches who refused to go along with the merger began the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, for which I work.
The point of all this is that, in spite of its historical heritage, Augsburg today is just another mainline Lutheran school, indistinguishable, except by geography, from all the other mainline Lutheran schools.
Which explains this story, in which we see contemporary academic standards of tolerance and the free exercise of thought demonstrated for all.
Tip: Power Line.
(The scene opens with a shot of an American suburban kitchen. AMANDA is seen standing at a counter with a cardboard box in her hand. Her daughter HEATHER enters and observes what she’s doing.)
HEATHER: Mom, what are you doing with that rat poison?
AMANDA: I’m going to put some out, honey. I saw a rat in the pantry, and I can’t stand rats.
HEATHER (putting her hands on her hips): Mom! You can’t do that!
AMANDA: Why not?
HEATHER: Don’t you listen to the news? They told us about it in school. You can’t poison rats. It’s against the law. Continue reading Public service announcement
What would you say if a student told you they were analyzing “episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’ and listening to Eminem” for a Rhetoric class? Perhaps suggest one of the Great Books.
It’s late in the day, but to all you veterans, thank you for your service. Slackers like me owe you big.
The Second Saladin, it appears to me, marks a milepost on author Stephen Hunter’s journey toward finding his niche as a novelist. Some of the elements that will make his Bob/Earl Swagger books so compelling are already there, but he hasn’t yet shaken off a tendency to demonstrate his realism through grim pessimism.
Nevertheless, I found it a compelling book. Though published in 1982 and set in that same time period, the centrality of Kurdistan to the plot makes the whole business remarkably relevant more than two decades later. Continue reading The Second Saladin, by Stephen Hunter
Thomas Sowell writes, “Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are ‘interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,’ people who “read the classics.’
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.”