and
starved for knowledge.”
~ John Naisbitt
GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE: ‘A Christmas Carol’ saved Dickens from crushing debt
Philosophy now comes to us in one form: the peer-reviewed article, published (preferably in English) in an academic journal. No wonder philosophy has become so irrelevant Philosophers
I’ll have You Home by Christmas by June AllenJune Allen’s estranged husband snatched the oldest of their three children in August 1969, while the family was living in Sydney. He left June a note to say he would be back later the same day for the other two children. Terrified of losing the other children and heartbroken at having to leave 7-year-old Philip behind, June raced to the airport in the clothes she, Patti and Rex were wearing and carrying only the blanket 4-year-old Rex was wrapped in. Her father in New Zealand paid for their air tickets and later that day they were back in Auckland.
The second International Joseph Conrad Festival started yesterday in Kraków and for the second year running is putting Kraków on the map of international literature. Its impressive program features writers Herta Müller, László Krasznahorkai, Rabih Alameddine, Amos Oz, Marijane Satrapi, and Andrzej Stasiuk, as well as filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, theater director Krystian Lupa, musician Mikołaj Trzaska, scholar Walter Benn Michaels, and many other remarkable authors, artists, and scholars.
Named for the great Polish-born English-language novelist Joseph Conrad (Józef Konrad Korzeniowski), the festival conceives itself explicitly as a celebration of otherness and of international perspectives. I would guess that a corrective of a certain provincialism is implied as well — the festival is, as far as I know, the first one of this scope to be launched in Poland, and one of its stated missions is to “expose the Polish reader to little-known ways of thinking and sensibilities.”
Populist Plutocracy and the Future of America Project Syndicate
García Márquez’s Archive Is Now Available Online – For Free
“The online archive, which is catalogued both in English and in Spanish, includes drafts and other material relating to all of García Márquez’s major books, … [as well as] previously unseen photographs, notebooks, scrapbooks, screenplays and personal ephemera, like a collection of his passports. Many archives are digitizing their holdings. But to make so much material from a writer whose work is still under copyright freely available online is unusual.”
`Time and Sweat'
After telling us good writing has little or nothing to do with “brainpower,” and probably cannot be taught, one notably excellent writer says this:
“. . . there is no reason to believe that Mozart was a genius in the ordinary sense of being brainy. He was a musical genius. I think there is writing genius as well—which constitutes primarily, I think, of the ability to place oneself in the shoes of one’s audience; to assume only what they assume; to anticipate what they anticipate; to explain what they need explained; to think what they must be thinking; to feel what they must be feeling.”
When it comes to writing advice, that’s not bad, probably better than most and doesn’t presume to impose a list of how-to rules. Forget the “genius” part. Knowing your audience and your intent is essential, even among workaday tyros. Often I work with engineering faculty and students who are stymied when writing for non-engineers. They take for granted the transparency of equations and technical jargon. Some are hobbled when denied the crutches that come naturally when they write for peers. I suggest they picture their non-specialist reader sitting across the room from them. Tell a story. Don’t frame an argument. The advice given above is nicely adaptable. A chemical engineer could learn from it, and so could an eighth-grader writing a book report.
The author is the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in “Writing Well,” collected in Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017). The book of speeches is edited by his son, Christopher J. Scalia, and former law clerk, Edward Whelan. Scalia was the public servant who, during my lifetime, I have most admired and respected. Granted, the pickings have been slim, but Scalia’s “brainpower,” to use his word, and love of the Constitution were memorable. His voice was so distinct, I looked forward to reading his dissents. It helped that he liked citing Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary.
Scalia delivered “Writing Well” when accepting a lifetime achievement award in 2008 from Scribes, a national organization of legal writers. He dismisses the notion that legal writing is a discrete discipline apart from “that large, undifferentiated, unglamorous category of writing known as nonfiction prose.” A good legal writer, he says, “but for the need to master a different substantive subject,” could become a good writer of history or economics. Scalia taught legal writing at the University of Virginia Law School, where he formulated two “prerequisites for self-improvement in writing” 1. “There is an immense difference between writing and good writing.” 2. “It takes time and sweat to convert the former into the latter.” Scalia concludes his speech winningly with a pithy statement of truth: “It is my experience that a careless, sloppy writer has a careless, sloppy mind.”
Speaking of truth, I recently read a poem by Gavin Ewart, “The Premature Coronation” (Penultimate Poems, 1989), about Edward Gibbon. Ewart describes the great historian as “most fit to be loved for his long-term attachment to truth, and the style that’s so clear and Olympian. / “Rien n’est beau que le vrai. Rhetoricians avaunt! (he implied).” The French is Boileau’s old saw: “Nothing is beautiful but truth.”
