Category: Literature

“Maybe we need more middle-brow in our culture mix today.”

Amen…

How I Learned About Great Literature from Comic Books:

Opinion leaders nowadays would scorn these graphic novels. They would justifiably point out the narrowness of canon enshrined in their garish pages (even though, as the recurring presence of Afro-French author Dumas indicates, there was more range here than you might assume).

They would deride the corny images, loaded with anachronisms and stereotypes. And they would probably mock the middle-class aspirations of parents who bought these ten-cent classics for their children. It’s all so embarrassingly middle-brow.

But maybe we need more middle-brow in our culture mix today.

Katherine Rundell · Why children’s books?

Fun read…

Katherine Rundell · Why children’s books?:

The very first children’s books in English were instruction manuals for good behaviour. One of the earliest, The Babees Book, from around 1475, is a list of instructions: ‘Your nose, your teeth, your nails, from picking keep.’ It’s striking how many of the early children’s conduct manuals focused on nose-picking.

Music and The Hero’s Journey

There’s a reason there are always songs and music in Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and even Star Trek…

Music to Raise the Dead: The Secret Origins of Musicology:

By the way, this book could perhaps be described as the result of my own personal quest. For many years now, I have built my research and writing on a very simple statement of purpose—which I repeat, almost as a mantra, on every possible occasion, in print or public lectures: Music is a source of enchantment and a catalyst in human life, and my vocation is to celebrate its often forgotten power, not just as music history but also as a latent potentiality in our own day-to-day surroundings. In other words, songs are not just songs, but agents of change for individuals and societies.

Hauntology and Valhalla

Like many who went through college and then grad-school in the religion / literature / philosophy circles, I’ve read and pondered my share of Derrida and the consequences of ontology on our “demon-haunted world” … another reason I’ve absolutely loved playing AC Valhalla (about 125 hours in at this point since picking it up over the Holidays).

A pun coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the early ’90s, hauntology refers to the study of nonexistence and unreality (so the opposite of ontology). Contemporary philosopher Mark Fisher makes extensive use of this concept, describing hauntology in his book The Weird and Eerie as “the agency of the virtual … that which acts without (physically) existing.”

For me, there’s no greater example of this than in Valhalla’s ruins. While open-world games are often dominated by landscape, mirroring the history of art where scenic oil paintings—once considered inferior—grew into a position of relative dominance, the ruin has seen a similar ascendency. Just as Romantic poets mulled over the allure of rivers and mountains, a passion for ancient ruins bloomed too, with painters like J. M. W. Turner and John Constable touring Britain in search of architectural wreckage among the rolling hills.

— Read on www.wired.com/story/assassins-creed-valhalla-eerie-english-landscapes/

The shift from blogs to email newsletters

Ironic that you’re reading this on my blog…

Almost every writer or artist I know has a newsletter. One way to understand this boom is that as social media has siloed off chunks of the open web, sucking up attention, the energy that was once put into blogging has now shifted to email.

— Read on www.wired.com/story/future-book-is-here-but-not-what-we-expected/

Was Writing Developed by Poets, Priests, our Accountants?

Fun read:

As a writer of nonfiction, I can’t help but love writing’s roots in enumerating concrete objects and reality itself. The textual analyst part of me loves how Mesopotamian tokens were wrapped in clay envelopes after being impressed on the soft exterior – perhaps clay-wrapped tokens of meaning give rise to the notion that text is both a surface and an interior, and that that’s what leads us to talk so relentlessly (in English and other languages) about what is ‘in’ a given text. The poet in me wants to repurpose the heavy thumb of authority’s use of writing on behalf of the powerless. The linguist in me recognises the cognitive significance of the layers of writing’s invention, none of which the brain was evolved to do specifically but with which we have co-evolved. And as a partisan of text, I know its deep history won’t ever be erased.

— Read on aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-writing-lie-in-hopes-and-dreams-not-in-accounting

Wizarding School Locations from Harry Potter (or Love Letters to My Kids)

“The map above shows the locations of the 8 Wizarding schools that have been revealed so far, that exist in the Harry Potter universe.”

Source: Wizarding School Locations from Harry Potter – Brilliant Maps

I’ve always loved maps and map-making. As a kid, I filled notebooks with imaginary island countries or continents (and their cities) on alien planets. My favorite cartoon was Tailspin because of that fantastic rock formation that ringed their island. Many of the framed pictures in my office (and our home) are maps or geography related now.

My favorite class in high school was my 9th Grade Geography class. I rocked that class and I’d quit my job today and go get a degree in Geography or Cartography if I had any real guts (follow your passions, kids). Maps are time machines. They take accumulated knowledge and transport ideas into the future. They are magical and products of our best hopes (or deepest sins).

Brilliant Maps is one of my favorite sites on the web, and I highly recommend / warn you view it (serious rat hole timesuck if you’re being “productive”).

I try hard to let my daughters and my son develop their own interests and not over-influence their choices in life (well, besides Star Wars but that’s a given). I see my 8 year old constantly observing me and picking up my copies of X-Men trade paperbacks that I “casually” leave on our coffee table after reading, and my 5 year old asking what show I want to watch on Netflix. I see my newborn son tracking me with his eyes and watching my hands fly across my clickety clackety keyboard (as MH calls it) while he fights a nap as he lays on his playmat and I sneak in some work at my desk. It’s inevitable we heavily influence our kids’ choices, of course. I just don’t want to ever be that parent reliving my glory days on the baseball or golf team through them. I want them to discover agency and identity in a positive way that feels so hard to create in our over-protective-surveillance-bubble-wrapped-life that we’ve created with our mobile phones and low attention spans. Don’t get me started on GPS devices.

One of the things I secretly hope all three of them really come to discover, value, and have a life-long obsession over are maps and geography.

So, if you’re reading this MH, LC or Jr in some future time (I wonder what device my kids could possibly be reading this text on in, say, 50 years… I bet it’s some sort of a neural network link where you can dip into the stream of history and experience any recent time / place / event virtually as if you were there… possibly even talk to a person who is “dead” but very much alive in the digital universe… weird… and yes, I have a “digital death plan” in place to have this site and many other things I manage keep going in the unfortunate (?) event I kick the bucket unexpectedly) after I’ve recycled my atoms back to the universe, I hope you like maps as much as I do. You’ll find some of my favorite books on the “maps” shelf on one of our bookcases and there are some hidden surprises in there for y’all.

Otherwise, if you read this and I’m still a breathing entity…stay away from my books and go get your own from the library.

2015 and the Return to Long Form

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It annoys me beyond belief when people tell me our podcasts “should be 20 or so minutes” on Thinking.FM…

All-day podcasts and brick-sized books. Or, why 2015 was the year the long form fought back | Books | The Guardian: “There is something almost inexpressibly appealing about this, in an era when almost all other content – articles, podcasts, videos, TV shows – arrives doing jazz hands, anxiously soliciting the reader’s or listener’s or viewer’s attention by means of outrageous headlines or self-conscious gimmicks, in a determined effort to make things seem more interesting than, on inspection, they turn out to be.”

We (I think unfortunately) gave in to the loud minority on Thinking Religion, but I still very much personally enjoy the flexibility and personality of long form podcasts. And books. And blog posts. And thoughts.

Despite our newfound digital souls, we’re rekindling the notion that not everything can or should be “bite sized” to satiate our digital materialism.