Collected Miscellany

I have been busy with various things and so am behind on reviews, etc. So I must instead offer you another generic link post. So check out these offerings and be sure to check back here for updates.

– There is good stuff over at Books & Culture as usual:
–> Here is an interesting interview with Henrik Syse a professional philosopher who was brought in to help with Corporate Governance for the Norwegian government’s Petroleum Fund. In this work he helps coordinate the fund’s “long-term dealings with more than 3,000 companies from all around the world.” “The Petroleum Fund is one of the world’s largest single-owned institutional funds, with approximately $210 billion in assets, of which 40 percent is invested in stocks.”

Here are some questions and answers I found interesting:

How can investment and moneymaking go hand in hand with ethics?

We create value by investing so that other people can start new projects, and that is a good thing. And we do it on behalf of future generations. You could of course ask if capitalism itself is ethical. I think it is a system with inherent temptations and possible cruelties that we have to be aware of, but it is the best system we have for spreading prosperity. So I am not troubled working inside the system, but I’m glad that I’m working with the framework of the system, and hopefully helping to improve it.

How do you reflect on the strong interconnectedness between religion and politics in the United States?

In general I think it’s positive that Christianity can be a basis for politics. In Europe there has been much illiteracy about how important religion is to human beings—Americans understand that much better. But the Bible can’t be used for single political decisions; religion should be a motivation and a moral obligation, not a political program. Most fundamentally, it gives us a set of values. What the Religious Right did with Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair, for example, was in my view far from the ideals of the Founding Fathers, and not in tune with basic Christian values.

–> Also, at Books & Culture is a review of The Fragrance of God by Vigen Guroian. You gardeners will want to check this one out:

For Guroian, the making of gardens is inseparable from the spiritual journey. The act of gardening brings him closer to God. “I spend more time on my knees in the garden than in holy sanctuary,” he writes. The garden is full of symbols of the Divine, which “testify not only to [God’s] existence but also to the goodness of his Creation.” And the beauty of the garden, Guroian suggests, can transform us. When we learn and name things we didn’t know, we exercise gratitude to the One who made them. (Judging by the number of field guides on my shelf, I’m exercising a lot of thanksgiving). Certainly, anyone who ever babied along their peonies, then watched them come to glorious full bloom the day of the first spring hailstorm, will agree that gardening teaches us humility.

Guroian’s meditations begin in autumn, move through the cycle of the seasons, and end at the start of winter. The garden location changes as he moves from Reisterstown, Maryland, to Culpepper, Virginia. This is not so much a book describing the detailed glories of his personal gardens, however, as it is a theological take on gardening as an act of spiritual formation. No plant lists, no rapturous descriptions. In fact, one leaves the book without a clear visual image of what Guroian’s two gardens looked like, although there are some lovely descriptions (daffodils spilling down a bank like a tipped-over can of yellow paint, as one example). What one does discover here is a reasoned yet passionate window into why gardening is true soul-work.

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– As I have noted in this space before, one of my favorite authors, Richard Brookhiser has a new book out. What Would the Founders Do?:

In the only book of its kind, Brookhiser uses his vast knowledge of the Founders and of modern politics to apply their views to today’s issues. Brookhiser also explores why what the Founders would think still matters to us. After all, the French don’t ask themselves, “What would Charlemagne do?” But Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams and all the rest have an unshakeable hold on our collective imagination. We trust them more than today’s politicians because they built our country, they wrote our user’s manuals—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—and they ran the nation while it was still under warranty and could be returned to the manufacturer. If anyone knows how the U.S.A. should work, it must be them.

There is also a webpage where you can read blogs by Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and George Washington. You can also read an excerpt from the introduction.

– Another National Review author, John Derbyshire, has an article on Lolita up today at NRO. Here is his recollection of reading it for the first time:

I suppose—though I honestly can’t remember—I had heard that it was a dirty book, and been attracted to it for that reason, having, like every other healthy 16-year-old male, a dirty mind. I very soon discovered my error. Much more important than that, I found myself in a new and very strange imaginative space, like none I had ever visited before, and filled with such wonders and delights that if I experienced any disappointment at not having been titillated, that disappointment was swamped by sheer esthetic pleasure, so much so that I retained no memory of it.

If numbers are more your style, you could always read his new book: Unknown Quantity: A Real And Imaginary History of Algebra.

– Dave over at Faith In Fiction is continuing his discussion of Density in Writing:

I think the first rule of dense writing should be that our language must be precise. We need to understand the words we select (choose, pick, proffer) entirely (fully, wholly, in a biblical sense.)

Not only do we need to understand what they mean on a denotative level (literally) but what the shadings of the word imply as well. (I’m going to stop with the little paranthetical games for the moment. You should get the point.)

Precision on a word-by-word basis is not about mining your thesaurus–although it likely will mean expanding your vocabulary. This isn’t random substitution of words merely for effect. It’s being conscious (likely during rewrite!!) of how word selection shades and changes voice, tone, style, etc.

One of the things that causes me continual amazement, and often annoyance, is the hyperbolic throwing around of terms like the ones used in the title of this post. People are quick to claim the mantle of victim and at assert that we live in oppressive times. I find it odd that people who live in a time and place that is as free and as rich as ours can cry oppression at the drop of a hat. They seem to have no grasp on what real oppression and tyranny might look like.

Let me give you an example I stumbled on today. It concerns children’s book author Patricia Polacco. I don’t know her from Adam, but came across this story and was dumbfounded. I thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast the School Library Journal article on the controversy with Polacco’s hyperbolic and outraged Open Letter on the subject.

I found it ironic that this author apparently lacks a basic understanding of the First Amendment and the normal process of doing business. I am not sure who is sympathetic to her ridiculous rant, but I for one can’t take her seriously. I won’t subject everyone to this silly imbroglio, bu if you find this topic interesting, click below.

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There has been a conversation about books and publicity bouncing around the literary blogosphere of late. I am just catching up to it, but it is an interesting one. The general sentiment seems to be don’t spam bloggers with requests that are impersonal and irrelevant. The vast majority of bloggers work full time and blog about books because they love literature and are passionate about books. Sure, they love to get free books and to interact with authors. But that doesn’t mean they want to waste their time sorting through emails that are randomly sent to a massive list of unrelated bloggers. If you want success it makes sense to focus your energies on those who are most likely to be interested in your project. I am sure some of the people involved mean well, but this type of communication just ticks people off. And isn’t that the opposite of good publicity?

So in case any publicists are reading, here is some free advice:

– M.J Rose lays it out in simple terms with Don’t Do This!:

Publicists, please, don’t do this! (Authors don’t hire publicists who do this!)
Don’t write to bloggers without knowing our names.
Don’t send us blanket emails.
Don’t treat us like fools.
Don’t market to us.
Don’t try to hype us.

Use your brains. There are books I’d love to blog about. Clearly. I do it all the time. But it takes time and effort to figure out which ones.

[. . .]

Handpick the blog.
Get to know the host.
Fit your book to the blog.
Write a personal letter.
I know it takes time. Anything valuable does.

– Dan Wickett echoes that theme. I think the title says it all: Please Read the Freaking Blog First.

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Mr. Birnbaum has another interview posted over at The Morning News. This time it is David Mitchell. As always read the whole thing, but here are a couple of snippets I found interesting.

In case you are wondering about Mitchell’s latest book, Birnbaum gets right to the heart of the matter::

RB: OK, tell me why you wrote it [Black Swan Green].

DM: [longish pause] OK, I wanted to map what I think is an interesting kind of a gap here between boyhood and adolescence. You called him an adolescent earlier. I argue it’s an in-between time he is in. He isn’t an adolescent yet. But he is no longer a boy, and the strategies you need for either of those stages don’t work. I wrote the book because I wanted to take a photograph of England, where I am from—in a way the place made me, for better or for worse. In what to me was an interesting time, the end of the long, slow death of agrarian England. There are now no farmers. The ‘80s was about the last time when you’d go to a village like that and find almost a majority of people working in agriculture. I kind of wanted to get that, too. The Falklands was a really kind of interesting event in my youth and I wanted to recreate just the fervor and mass insanity—

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I came across a couple of links dealing with the art of writing fiction and thought I would pass them along.

Olen Steinhauer has a post on Where Characters Come From. Here is a teaser:

There are different ways of going about creating, or dealing with, fictional characters. Some writers do take them directly from reality, but like I said, I’m not that kind. In fact, I seldom really get a character until a story is completely finished.

Books on writing will tell you this is foolishness, that you should know at least your main character before writing anything. Make biographical charts! What movie star does she look like? What’s his sexual experience? Give him a hobby!

No, none of that’s for me. It’s just a waste of time.

Dave at Faith in Fiction has a post discussing density in writing:

What I want to begin chatting about is the notion of density in writing.

When I was a Nittany Lion I grew weary of writing short stories because they were just at the length where an instructor or those annoying poetry students could insist on “getting every word right.” You can “perfect” a twelve page story. You can be held accountable for every word. Not so in a novel. It was too big a beast. Too sprawling. The language wasn’t tantamount anymore. Important of course, but not perfectable.

It’s a lazy way of thinking. Lazy and, I think, wrong.

The story we write rests on every word we choose. There’s really no other way of looking at writing. If were not focusing on the words…what in the world are we looking at?

Great writing hones and focuses language. They make their sentences work for them.

Some good food for thought for you writers out there.