Terry Teachout talks landscapes, Santa Fe, opera noir, and Willa Cather in these posts:
In the News
Perhaps you are fed up with silly or at least slightly amusing news articles, but I feel compelled to share a few links to funny stories this afternoon.
1. A recent Pew poll found 48% of the roughly 1000 people surveyed are tired of hearing about Mr. Obama. A third of the Democrats polled said the same.
2. “Burgeoning jellyfish populations in coastal waters around the world is proof oceans are being impacted by global warming and overfishing, Spanish experts say.”
3. Jay Leno reportedly said, “Obama’s supporters got him his usual birthday gift of gold, frankincense and myrrh.” But maybe you’re tired of hearing about that.
4. Newspaper companies are suffering “in large measure to a marked reduction” in want ads. The Classifieds just aren’t classy anymore.
5. Tips for encouraging childhood reading (or should that be “underage reading”): “Give them books to use in their play, such as car manuals with toy cars, recipe books with a toy cooker . . .”
6. In a Knoxville, Tennessee Barnes & Noble, you can get rolled or TPed if you stand still too long.
The Great Library of Timbuktu
Some used to say, “The treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu.” Now researchers and scholars are rushing to preserve those treasures. “The French are developing a database, while the United States has donated a device to digitize the damaged documents. The Norwegian cities of Oslo and Bergen are training locals to become conservators.” They hope to capture the ancient wisdom before the ink recording them fades completely.
Repost: Damnation Street, by Andrew Klavan
(Tonight, another reposted Klavan review.)
One-line review of Andrew Klavan’s Damnation Street: “Woo-hoo!”
I got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for Christmas, and Damnation Street was one of the books I chose to get with it. I don’t generally buy hardbacks, but I felt this was a special case.
It was, in fact, a more special case than I knew. Because it appears that Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop books (the previous ones are Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley) are not going to be an ongoing series, but a trilogy (unless I read the ending wrong). Continue reading Repost: Damnation Street, by Andrew Klavan
Pauline Baynes, 1922-2008
Thanks once again to reader Dale, who alerted me to the recent death of Pauline Baynes, illustrator for both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. He also sent this link to an entry on her from Brian Sibley: The Blog.
Can Protestants Do Good Art?
Harrison Scott Key says, “I’m just not convinced that the Protestant Evangelical Church can do art.” He lists several problems.
On this subject, I came across this passage in Les Miserables last night, which I believe gets to the heart of the matter.
We must say, by the way, that the hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of the arts. Nevertheless, among churchmen, beyond their rites and ceremonies, luxury is a crime. It seems to disclose habits which are not truly charitable. A wealthy priest is a contradiction. He ought to keep himself near the poor. But, who can be in contact continually, by night as well as day, with all distresses, all misfortunes, all privations, without taking upon himself a little of that holy poverty, like the dust of a journey? Can you imagine a man near a fire, who does not feel warm? . . . The first proof of charity in a priest, and especially a bishop, is poverty.
Trolls
The Times Magazine as a piece on “several popular and well-known trolls who share their expositions and explanations of what they do and why.”
The article opens with an account of a child who killed himself, was honored by friends on MySpace, was dishonored by trolls online, and then dishonored by them offline. They started calling his parents’ home. They kept calling for year and a half.
How do you tell a whole generation not to waste their lives?
I suppose this is another reason the Internet is terrible place.
Another Reason the Internet Is a Wonderful Place
You can review candy, like “The Original Celebrated Altoids, Dark Chocolate Dipped Mints – Creme de Menthe” which I would not have know about had I not seen this post.
A thumbs up
Our commenter Dale directed my attention to this very generous review of my book Wolf Time, at the Nearly Impossible Adventures blog.
My thanks to A. Walter.
A little slice of immortality
I got a nice “birthday present” last week. It was a free copy of this book. It was sent to me by its designer, who is the son of the author.
The story behind the gift goes like this. In the course of my researches for my novel, The Year of the Warrior, I made contact with a fine woman associated with a historical society in the Stavanger, Norway area. She put me in touch with Dr. Torgrim Titlestad of the University of Stavanger. Dr. Titlestad might be called a man with a mission. He’s a proponent of a revolutionary view of Norwegian history which traces the origins of the Kingdom of Norway to the western part of the country, rather than to the Oslo area, which has been the traditional, authorized view.
I promote the traditional view in TYOTW, by the way, mainly because I wasn’t aware of the new one when I wrote the first part of the book. If I’d known about the controversy, I’d have found a way to weasel around it. Continue reading A little slice of immortality