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May 30 2012
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Classic Literature, Entertainment, fantastic points of ignorance, Harvard Classics, literary interpretation, literature, MIT 4 Free

Paradise Lost: Book One

Reading a Harvard Classic, journaling for an MIT open course, watching a Yale lecture. Buckle up, this is about to be the most literated fantastic point of ignorance yet. We’ll have a coffee shop version, an appetizer version and a full course meal for this puppy. Respond and dialog as soon as you want to jump in, regardless of how much you read on this post or in the book.

Coffee: What You Care About

Fireworks. Magic. Cosmic battle. Midgets and Giants. Demons and Angels. Ancient mythology. Modern poetry. All this and more greets us at the front door of Milton’s Paradise Lost. For those of you who enjoy modern poetry, you’ll find some of it old-fashioned. For those who enjoy old-fashioned poetry, you’ll find Milton hates rhymey-dimey verse. Any of you fantasy nerds, if you can get past the iambic-ness of the telling, will love this. And, of course, so will those of you who try to follow Jesus or at least appreciate the O.T.

[jump in]

Continue reading →

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May 23 2012
3 Comments
book review, Entertainment, fantastic points of ignorance, humor, literature, mythology

Fletching the Sandman’s Arrows

“What’s your name?”

“Fletch.”

“What’s your full name?”

“Fletcher.”

“What’s your first name?”

“Irwin.”

“What?”

“Irwin Fletcher. People call me Fletch.”

“Irwin Fletcher, I have a proposition to make to you. I will give you a thousand dollars for just listening to it. If you decide to reject the proposition, you take the thousand dollars, go away, and never tell anyone we talked.”

“Is it criminal?”

“Of course.”

“Fair enough. For a thousand dollars I can listen. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to murder me.”

Fletch said, “Sure.”

That’s how Gregory McDonald kicked off the pitch-perfect dialog in his novel Fletch back in 1974. Fletch is a jerk, an absolute pain to everyone he meets because he only cares about the story. He’s not a detective, he’s an investigative journalist and he’ll sacrifice anything–two marriages, relationships with employees, even a rich man’s life–for the sake of his column.  Continue reading →

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May 19 2012
4 Comments
literary interpretation, movie review, censored opinions, film, history, gilded age

Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen

Yesterday was a weird day for me. Really weird. Emotional and weird–not like yesterday’s post or anything, just yesterday . Since I feel like writing, but don’t want to mess with any stories or editing or whatever on Saturday, let’s chat about the best film I saw recently. It’s like a digital bowl of comfort ice cream, only with less calories and more Woody Allen.

Midnight in Paris follows a family who travels to the capital of France for business. One’s a screenwriter who wants to turn novelist. The other’s a brat-princess-daughter of some jerk Tea Party capitalist tycoon. Screenwriter and brat are engaged. Brat wants to do lame tourist things. Screenwriter wants to get in touch with his inner self and the city, as if to accommodate him, changes at Midnight into Paris of another era.

To get it out of the way, I liked the film. Maybe even loved it, I don’t know. I’ll have to see it a second time for that. Some of the imagery struck me, the poetry of filmmakers. At the opening scene, we alternate between shots of the oldest portions of the city and the newest, the ancient street lamps and the Eiffel Tower along switch places with new trees and buildings. Continue reading →

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May 16 2012
16 Comments
Classic Literature, creativity, Entertainment, Harvard Classics, literature, production, Writing

M.I.T. 4 Free

No, that’s not a typo. Thanks to Logan K. Stewart’s suggestion, I’m now going to take on M.I.T. at the same time as my Harvard Classics readings. Basically, there’s a list of classes:

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May 09 2012
6 Comments
book review, fantastic points of ignorance, life, literature

Breakfast of Champions, The Muad’dib & Hospital Visits

Thursday last I ventured with an older gentleman to some local hospitals. We called on the elderly and infirm in hopes to raise their spirits. This guy’s a pro—he’s been doing this for years, visiting sick people in the hospital, praying for any who request it, listening to them ramble about stories of the old country or of one of the many wars, always with a broader smile than I can invoke on my face, the kind of smile that gets both eyes, your nose and your teeth involved. That smile cheers them up more than anything, people who have nobody or few somebodies to come and visit them when they fall or get an infection or go through surgery or when their mind starts to wonder why it keeps wandering. Hold that thought… Continue reading →

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May 07 2012
12 Comments
Entertainment, impulsive pastimes, literature

A Comic Weekend

When I woke up early on Saturday to a barking spaniel, it took me a moment to realize what day it was. Since Mark was on a shoot and Ryan moved to Nome Alaska to watch huskies race across the arctic tundra, that left me and Nate to brave the waters of f…Fr…FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!

Now hold up, hold up.

Before you all write comparison and contrast essays about this post and the last one, let me say that I’ll drop this post and throw down right here with anyone who says graphic novels are not literature. One, you’re talking to the guy who’s reading through the Harvard Classics. (Side note: Yes, I’m still on Paradise Lost. No, I haven’t given up). I’m no lit-genius, but I think my literary opinion weighs in more than, say, the gal who offered the tip of her light saber to her infant for suckling purposes or the dude who came to FCBD sporting legit-replica stormtrooper armor. (Not that I’m against dressing up like a stormtrooper. In fact, if you choose to dress up for something like Free Comic Book Day or a midnight showing, what better choice than a stormtrooper, a bugger, a death eater, Spiderman, Bluebird or anything else that covers your face?) As a self-proclaimed lit boy, I say graphic novels count as legit-lit for similar reasons that screenplays count. Two, take your pick of brilliant books. Continue reading →

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May 02 2012
4 Comments
book review, fantastic points of ignorance, literature, production, Writing

Gunslinger and Good News

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

With that, King opens his seven-part Dark Tower series–an undertaking he originally hoped would create “the largest work of popular fiction in history.” I’m unsure as to what I expected with this one, but I received something else. Perhaps I looked for Tolkien or Lewis or McCaffrey or Herbert or Rothfuss or Martin or something.

I should have known better…

You regulars know my fascination with King’s nonfiction articles, criticism, On Writing and now Danse Macabre. Halfway through Danse Macabre, I realized that I had yet to read any of King’s fiction. Even though I consider screenplays to qualify as “literature” (Maximum Overdrive, 1408, The Shining, Firestarter, The Green Mile, Shawshank, etc) – Shame. On. Me.

The bleak environment of this first world did what he set out to do–it demonstrated the sheer size of the universe. In scope alone, this series already feels epic and the mere concept of gunslingers, of an order of fighters who work their way up to earning guns, fits Americana. We are not a people of samurai, ninjas or knights. We’re a nation of cowboys, indians and pirates. Gunslingers fit our soul. Continue reading →

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Apr 25 2012
2 Comments
book review, Cities, Entertainment, gergia, gilded age, history, literature, movie review, New York City, Writing

Of Gangs and Pickpockets

In my Storyssentials post on Research, I talked about how a storyteller must assign himself homework. Mine involves a decent amount of gilded age reading (and viewing). Some might assume I want to write steampunk. Though this coming series employs some steamy elements, I wouldn’t classify it that way. For one, few use steam. For another, I focus more on that period in American history and the issues that arose for us as a people, issues we still wrestle through today. Some of the things I’ve shared in the past were homework like the Houdini biography. Recently, I finished the film The Gangs of New York and the book A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York.

Gangs brutalized and soiled what few glimmering pictures I had left of Nineteenth-Century New York City. Had I not just finished Tale, I would have thought the violence and prostitution a bit overdone—the thing of Hollywood sensationalism where we glorify violence and devalue sex. Unfortunately, the movie treated Five Points mercy, glimpsing the crest of the iceberg of gilded age government corruption. Boss Tweed, as Gangs hints, ushered in the peak of corruption in New York City, brutalizing the poor with his police forces and gangs. I guess it’s really not that different from today’s brutality, only with shootings and stabbings and lynchings poured over the top like tar.

Timothy Gilfoyle in Tale follows around historic George Appo–the son of an Irishwoman and a Chinaman–as he works his way from Donovan’s Lane onto a juvenile delinquent work-ship called “The Mercury.” From that floating death trap (or “floating Sodom” as the people called it back then), Appo hopped in and out of prisons like Sing-Sing, Clinton, Eastern, an insane asylum and less serious places like Blackwell’s Island—DiCaprio’s prison at the start of Gangs. In reality, Blackwell’s was a joke. Prisoners checked themselves in for better living conditions than what slums like Five Points offered and checked themselves out with nothing but a couple of chums and a rowboat. Continue reading →

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Apr 20 2012
7 Comments
censored opinions, creativity, literature, The Writing Life, Writing

A Secretary and a Rocking Chair

Hard chair, soft chair.

That’s the dichotomy my greatest rhetoric professor taught me. For a twenty-minute talk, spend ten hours of research in the hard chair and the soft chair’s for the ten hours of reflection on the relevance of your talk. Hard chairs discipline us to grind through the big books. Soft chairs encourage us to think like the people. He uses both when he writes oral manuscripts.

For me, I’ve isolated my work away from my office desk and dining room table to what’s called a secretary, this wall-mounted fold-out writing desk with shelves on top for incoming and outgoing letters. (I’m still hand writing to my pen pals for those of you who want to get in on it). At first, I used this striped, low-backed wooden chair with padded seating. Hard chair with a slight cushion. Good blend, I figured. My chiropractor disagrees… vehemently. So I set that one to the side to hold my satchel (something else my chiropractor hates. He seems to think I’ve got the spine of a retiree. What does he know?)

I fell into the rocking chair by accident. It was one of those days where you’re on a roll and need to make a quick change Nascar style. I switched out chairs and went back to work. Over time, I noticed more back support, but that’s not the only thing that came…

Hard chair and soft chair. Research chair and “so what?” chair. These are the chairs where we nurse and rock our kids to sleep. Soft chair. And yet these are the chairs of old men in old English wings who still tell the old stories to their students. Hard chair. In rockers fathers hold daughters as they cry. Soft chair.A rocker tested Benjamin Martin’s carpentry skills at the start of The Patriot. Hard chair. Continue reading →

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Apr 18 2012
19 Comments
book review, Entertainment, impulsive pastimes, literature, poetry

The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry

I used to be a poet. Of sorts. At least I used to think of myself in that way when I was young. Now as an adult I rarely find time for poetry, rarely make time to think high thoughts and enjoy language for its primary purpose: intimacy. We tend to favor language for persuasion and information, but those came long after its first purpose of raw communication. When people say “Did I use that right?” or “Is that even a word?” they’re worried about information or persuasion. Typically in those moments where we worry about the “right” word, communication was already achieved and the usagery of proper-fide grammatics matters little. Ironically poetry, one facet to the language of intimacy (a space shared with coos, sighs, moans and prayer), depends on “the right words in the right order.” At least to Coleridge…

That realization and a tip on poetry reading threw me back into the game. Now I’m reading again, but not to sound smart or to get information or to persuade some girl to date me. Now I read to find those garnets and emeralds in the riverbed of poetic thought that show the way to diamonds—those phrases, those thoughts that express what it means to be human.

I started with my American anthology, moved to my Major British Writers tomes for  Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the version of Faerie Queen edited by none other than Clive Staples Lewis. Eventually, however, I started to realize that other than the New Yorker and the Missouri Review, I’ve yet to read work by living poets who influence the craft. My poetic imagination (until this week) grew no older than 1967–the death of Langston Hughes. That was forty-five years ago. That discovery threw my poetic imagination into a mid-life crisis. Continue reading →

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Apr 11 2012
11 Comments
book review, Entertainment, fantastic points of ignorance, literature

A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin

Martin should have named it A Wreath of Weddings. Yet again by content alone, I can recommend this book to no one. In fact, I hated it. I loathed this book. That’s why I’m giving it five out of five stars. I can’t call it “good” – inherent goodness exists nowhere in the pages. But “well-written” or “well-told” or “brilliantly executed” all fit. Any book that can evoke the kind of emotion this one yanked out of me deserves five stars. I was pissed when I finished.

At the close of the last book, five contended for power and one died, another settled into disfavor all during wars that rampage through the lands. Alliances connect and break. Little Joff sits his tush on the Iron Throne while the Red Lady victimizes Lord Stannis. Robb holds the North and Dany scourges her way west. Not to mention the wildlings move south to take on The Wall with The Others on their tail. Everything sets this book up for a great telling, especially the news of three weddings. Martin delivers by letting all the hope and joy collapse in on itself. Go figure.

Continue reading →

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Apr 10 2012
6 Comments
book review, creativity, Entertainment, impulsive pastimes, literature

The Independent Book Blogger Award

Goodreads believes book bloggers start and energize that conversation we all love: “Have you read anything good lately?” To reward those of us who keep that conversation thriving, Goodreads created the Independent Book Blogger Award. Four bloggers in four categories (Adult Nonfiction, Adult Fiction, Young Adult and the Publishing Industry) will win a FREE pass, airfare and hotel room for BookExpo America in New York City.

There’s no way I’m gonna win this thing, but I’m all about underdogs. I cheered for Kansas this year like I cheered Butler on last year, and I’m not a basketball guy. At all. I’m pretty sure of all the things I do in the world, my basketball skills are way in the negatives. If there was a character sheet for Lance Schaubert and all his skill points were distributed according to what I’m good at and what I’m terrible at, I’d be so colossally terrible at basketball that the moment my character tried to shoot a free throw, he’d crit-fail and accidentally kill himself. Under. Dog.

As I was saying, so many fantastic bloggers exist, I won’t win. However, I entered anyway because, well, underdogs should always enter. When enough underdogs enter things like this, eventually we get some inspiring David-verse-Goliath story worth a retelling or two. This underdog entered in the fiction category because we talk about fiction here more than children’s, nonfic and the publishing industry combined. There’s five sample posts, five glimpses at what we do here. As always, I love you guys. I’ve got the most supportive readership in the world, small as you are. You’re great people.

Voting opens today and lasts a paltry thirteen days. That leaves us little time to shock and awe the world with our dogged under-ness. Three ways you can stand with the underdog:

  1. Vote [for me].
  2. Share [this post].
  3. Revel [and bask in the glory].

Vote for this blog for the Independent Book Blogger Awards, because you’re an underdog kinda person too.

Vote

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Apr 04 2012
3 Comments
creativity, Entertainment, fantastic points of ignorance, film, literature, news

Why I Never Check the News

I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then “written up” out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind.

Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that school-boys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

– C.S. Lewis reflecting on World War I in Surprised by Joy

When I crack open a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, I’m reading the news. When I watch All the Presidents Men, Take Shelter or Citizen Kane, I’m watching the news. When I ask friends what they’ve been thinking through, what they’ve felt recently, what they’re reading or what movies struck a chord with them, I’m asking about the news.

Oxford’s American Dictionary describes “news” as newly received or noteworthy information. I’d switch out that or for an and. Most of Lewis’s last line describes newly received information, but none of it is truly noteworthy. Trains derail. Californian actresses divorce. Women give birth to quadruplets. What’s noteworthy about any of that? Nothing. Continue reading →

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Mar 30 2012
9 Comments
book review, censored opinions, creativity, Entertainment, literature, production, Proper Usage, Storyssentials, The Writing Life, Writing

Twenty Three Reads for Writers

My writing journey continually morphs this list. At times it included books like this or this, while at others it held books like this and this. These twenty-three whip me back into shape more consistently than any others. I classified each into one of nine categories – story construction, literary symbolism, poetry, editing, writing & life, fear in writing, philosophy, literary agency or social media.

(I’ve also peppered minimalistic images throughout from great stories).

  1. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (story construction) first clued me in to the basic arc within all stories – the voyage and return. The hero journeys out from the norm into the unknown, suffers trials and returns to society with some gift like enlightenment or a magic item that will somehow help society. Campbell can be best described either as a panentheistic transcendentalist or as a neo-western Hindu.
  2. The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker (story construction) takes Continue reading →
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