Bookworld

There was a  lot of discussion earlier this year and in a great  many different writing and general interest venues regarding  the success of indy writer Amanda Hocking  – which, however you slice it, remains a  self-published and e-book success story. Candidly, I think that we need another zombie-werewolf-vampire saga like Custer needed another Indian, but hey- that’s just me. Not my cuppa, but if it floats yer boat . . .   To paraphrase the lyrics of a certain old pop song I can barely run my own life, why the hell should I want to run yours? Yeah Sunshine, go away and get those kids off my lawn!

Anyway as an indy-POD-author, untrammeled by the shackles of the literary-industrial complex, I had to give the Ms. Hocking all kinds of mad respect, for writing savvy,  plus marketing skills and the sheer neck to go out and just do it. 450,000 copies of nine books, each at a price of .99-2.99 and the author getting 30-70% in royalties   . . .   is   . . .   a   . . .   a lot of turnips.*

I’m an English major, dammit! But I appreciate the business aspects of it all.

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Constitution Day

Our government department always celebrates Constitution Day and today (a bit late) they brought back one of their favorites, H. W. Brands. His talk was aimed at our students; he walked a quite straight line describing constitutional interpretations. I felt that noting the founders knew nothing of airplanes might be interesting, but is a straw man. Still, he kept his poise on that tightrope. He could aim a little higher, it seems to me, but no one can fault his passion and enthusiasm.

And I’m grateful, finding pleasure in “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Constitution” which noted that 1776 was the date of both “manifestos” – the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations. Each semester I yoke these (with religion and speech and the press) as part of the “open marketplace” with its confidence in the eventual and incremental wisdom of our nation. (Perhaps someone who puts on his biography that he spent some time traveling in the West selling cutlery is likely to see this juxtaposition in a way few others nominated for Pulitzers do.)

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The Best Reviews

I remember once when I was eleven I got a new mountain bike. It was really sweet at the time though in retrospect it was not the greatest bike in the world. It had push button gear shift which meant that under any kind of duress the bike would shift into the most inappropriate gear possible. So Im riding my new bike on this dirt trail when I come across these really gnarly jumps and I think to myself I should take my new bike off of these rad hills and totally get some air. Well, the first one I went off of I landed wrong because I didnt know what the hell I was doing, I flipped over my handlebars and dislocated my knee. I also wrecked my new bike and had to hobble home carrying it. Anyway it was a way better time than this movie.

A member’s review on Netflix of the Movie “Gor”. I wish all movie reviews where that evocative.

However,my favorite review of all times is here (second from the top):

Carl Prine: recommended reading

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — war, reading lists ]

Not exactly delighted by the reading list recently provided by the inbound Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Carl Prine at Line of Departure will be offering a “weekly discussion about how one might know one’s self” – Sun Tzu suggests that such knowledge is of value to the professional soldier — via texts other than the “middlebrow books of a recent vintage, pulp paperbacks” of the Army’s recommended readings.

Today he opened with an essay on the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, and quoted the final paragraph from Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man:

And here I was, with my knobkerrie in my hand, staring across at the enemy I’d never seen. Somewhere out of sight beyond the splintered tree-tops of Hidden Wood a bird had begun to sing. Without knowing why, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen. I sploshed back to the dug-out to call the others up for “stand-to.”

I could only respond with a passage that I first encountered, likewise, on a blog – Pat Lang‘s Sic Semper Tyrannis – from Sassoon’s friend and fellow poet of the Great War, Wilfred Owen:

For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.

And I think to myself how much more power there is in either one of those paragraphs, than in that quip about “no atheists in foxholes”.

* * *

It’s not a matter of one of those “God or no God” debates in which some clergyman might triumph over some atheist, or vice versa, on TV or at the town or village hall. It’s a matter of cultural riches, of having a reference base of image and story that’s strong enough to express the horrors of Passchendaele or the Marne in a way that speaks to the hearts of those who were not there — and of those who will find themselves there, all too really, in other times and other lands.

It’s about narrative deep enough to go with you to Golgotha and back. It’s about the words, and about the furnace.

Prine himself puts it like this:

I care only of your soul and how it might be fired in the smithy of this blog and then hammered by your experiences in the coming years.

Our culture is the smithy.

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Language varies. Color is universal.

Colorful flyers advertise entertainment and other events in Jerusalem. (Jonathan Gewirtz)

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