A Little Book Every Writer Should Own I have hosted writer's groups for more than 20 years and spoken with many, many people who wanted to be writers and I believe each and every one of us has the potential to be a great writer. I've seen it happen again and again and it never fails to inspire my sense of wonder.

People write great stuff when they are released from the forces that hold them back, and for every writer, those forces are different, but there are a lot of commonalities I have observed. The first, and the most formidable, is the inner critic.

The inner critic is important, but not at the creative stage. The inner critic is an adult. The creator is a child. It's an unfair match. The inner critic has to be bound and gagged until a body of work has been created. That's a very big until.

Another force that inhibits writing great stuff is the fear of mispellings or grammatical errors. When you think about it, that's a pretty bogus concern. You can always find someone to take care of that kind of thing once you have a viable work in hand.

I once tutored college students writing for the first time, and one student I met was part of a marine rescue network up in Maine. At the age of 18, he had already saved two people's lives and had made ten thousand dollars speculating on the stock market. But he couldn't spell, and he never will be able to spell. I could tell because even if he spelled a word correctly at the beginning of a paragraph, he would misspell the same word later. They say you pick your problems.

My advice to him was to find an underemployed Ivy Leaguer for eight bucks an hour.

As far as grammar goes, do yourself a favor. Go to a used book store and ask for The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Strunk is the grammarian. White is the brilliant writer. Then read it.

It's a very short book, but it will give you confidence and command of grammar. And then, don't worry about it. Get down to the business of telling your story.  ¶ 10:25 PM 0 comments

  Movies You Would Never Otherwise See
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  A Translator After My Own Heart Finally I'm reading Livy. To understand Rome, they say, you have to read Livy. And Livy is a truly great read. His history of Rome, which he drew from sources no one else will ever see, can only be described as rollicking. You just can't summarize it.

It's like the oddly shaped terrain around my parents' house in Conway, New Hampshire. Contour maps have been made of it, but they're a joke. They miss what are, from a hiker's perspective, enormous hills and ridges and hanging canyons. The geological features of the land are so complex that it would take years to accurately map a single acre.

It's the same with Roman history. You can make some generalizations about it, but the way it unfolded was always the result of these quirky -- indeed, zany -- particulars which defy any general characterization.

But I'm very happy with the translator, Aubrey de Selincourt. In his introduction he describes Livy as a consummate stylist -- Quintilian, he says, described the "milky plenitude" of Livy's writing. But does he try to reproduce this style in English? Thankfully, no, and here's why, in his own words:

"Much nonsense has been talked about the art of translation. Translators have claimed to reproduce the 'spirit' of the original: i.e. the subtlest inmost essence of his style. It cannot be done: that subtlest essence lies within the words themselves; change the words and it, too, is inevitably changed.

"Other translators have professed to write as they suppose their original would have written, had he been their contemporary and used their language. This is absurd; if Livy, say, were alive today, and an Englishman, every influence which went to make his style -- and there are a million such for every writer -- would be utterly different from what it was.

"No: style is too serious a thing to monkey with, or to make pretences about. To try to imitate another man's style, even the style of the man next door, makes false writing; to try to imitate the style of of a foreign author who has been dead two thousand years is plain silly."

[A lot of translators -- many of them Oxford dons -- do this to great writers like Homer and Pushkin, and I think they should be shot, even though they're dead; they should be dug up and shot. They make Homer and Pushkin sound like windbags.]

"The truth is," de Selincourt concludes, "that every writer, whether he is translating or not, can write in one style only: his own. I have endeavoured to understand always Livy's precise meaning and to express it as clearly as I could; but in the following pages milky plenitude is, I fear, conspicuously absent."

*  ¶ 9:43 PM 1 comments

  Not Just Kind of Dumb I'm sorry to say I have to retract my endorsement of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael medieval murder mystery series. This is not to say I have not found many of them to be great reads, but I just ran into one that is dumb, dumb, dumb.

And I don't mean kind of dumb. I've run into that before. I mean really, really dumb, so dumb you throw the book across the room. It was okay when she had a party of Danes from Dublin raid the coast of Wales without so much as wounding a single person.

I can excuse a few courteous Danes. And I can excuse the fact that she, like Agatha Christie and, sadly, Tony Hillerman in his later books, seems to be more concerned with making sure those two nice young people settle down and get married than she is with crafting a good book.

Agatha Christie used to trade on that once in a while by making one of those nice young people the murderer, but she had to produce a book a year for eighty years, so she pretty much had to try everything at least once. Witness for the Prosecution and The Lady Vanishes are masterpieces, don't get me wrong, but her stuff got sappier and sappier and daffier and daffier.

She had a couple, Tommy and Tuppence, who constituted a special bureau of Scotland Yard: the bureau in charge of murders where the murderer, at the scene of every crime, leaves a snippet from a nursery rhyme. Apparently it happens a lot more often than you think.

Once Dame Agatha got to the end of one of these horrors, The Postern of Fate I think it was, and couldn't figure out an ending, so she had a guy come in from M5, or whatever they call the British CIA, and he said it was all "very hush-hush" and that was that. Seriously.

Ellis Peters disappointed me utterly and completely in The Virgin in the Ice mainly because it was set up so beautifully -- a body discovered frozen in the ice. OK, OK the cute young boy did have to work at it to get captured by the bandits; that I was ready to forgive. That's just kind of dumb. But when it came time for Sheriff Hugh Beringar and his men to storm the bandit fortress she reached the absolute nadir of stupidity.

These bandits have sacked and burned four or five hamlets, murdering all the inhabitants -- dozens, if not scores of people. Beringar and his men have hunted them down in their mountain fastness and are breaking down the gate after considerable loss of life on both sides, and the bandit chieftain appears on the battlements holding a 13-year-old boy and threatens to kill him unless they desist.

And what does Beringar do, do you suppose? He calls off his men. After all, the kid is the nephew of... some guy they don't even know!

I can take Benedictine abbots who are wise and fair and not the least prone to vile superstitions, even though they are a bit obsessed with the fingerbones and other unsavory relics of obscure saints. I can forgive medieval princelings who show a sense of justice and compassion for the lower orders. I guess there had to be a few of those at some time or other, even if they're unknown to recorded history.

And, as I said, I can forgive Viking raiding parties that behave like a bunch of smurfs and care bears. But a medieval warlord sparing a whole fortress full of murderous, rapacious brigands and footpads to save the life of a teenager who had to make a serious effort to get captured by them in the first place?

Sorry, Ellis, you're off my list of authors who do not disappoint. I might recommend selected titles, but the blanket endorsement is utterly and permanently revoked.  ¶ 9:46 PM 0 comments

  Orson Welles Concurs With Lincoln Abraham Lincoln liked to attend the theater with his secretary, John Hay, and saw several plays in which John Wilkes Booth acted. (I learned this from Lincoln at Gettysburg by Gary Wills.) He especially liked Shakespeare and admired the Shakespearean actor James Hackett.

Lincon and Hay disagreed about the way Hackett delivered a line of Falstaff's:

"The President criticized H.'s reading of a passage where Hackett said, 'Mainly thrust at me,'" Hay wrote in his diary, "the President thinking it should read 'Mainly thrust at me.' I told the Pres. I tho't he was wrong: that 'mainly' merely meant 'strongly,' 'fiercely.'"

"Hay is right on the narrower matter," Wills writes. "'Mainly' here is 'with might and main.' But Falstaff's account of his imaginary fight at Gad's Hill is funnier if he gives a plaintive emphasis to '[poor] me...'"

"Orson Welles, playing Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight [a movie compilation of Falstaff's scenes from Henry the IV and Henry the V], reads the the disputed line Lincoln's way, not Hay's. There was very little Hay, or any other man, could teach Lincoln about how to milk a comic remark for maximum effect."

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  The Eternal Struggle In 1848, ten years before the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, the people of Illinois voted to amend the state constitution to exclude free blacks all right of entry into the state. The amendment was carried by a margin of 70 percent, 90 percent in some communities.

As Gary Ellis points out in Lincoln at Gettysburg, "Lincoln knew it was useless to promote the abolitionist position in Illinois." The people of the state were hopelessly prejudiced against blacks.

"Lincoln tried to use one prejudice against another," Ellis writes. "There was, in Americans, a prejudgment in favor of anything biblical. There was, also, antimonarchical bias. Lincoln put the biblical text ["By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread"] in an American context of antimonarchism:

"That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between two principles -- right or wrong -- throughout the world.

"They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time and will ever continue to struggle.

"The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.'

"No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."  ¶ 6:12 PM 1 comments

  "Old Paper That Made My Dad Cry" I also write a blog for the ParkSleepFly.com website. Here's an entry I found kind of moving, in a funny way:

"Old Paper That Made My Dad Cry"

We've come a long way from the old snapshots from a Brownie camera pasted into albums with little black corner stickers. Now families can record their trips in travel blogs that are getting easier and easier to set up. Friends and relatives can hear all about your trip while you're still taking it.

In an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, Tom Wharton quotes Duane Rogowski, who found that setting up a family travel blog was surprisingly easy:

"You don't need to be computer literate at all," he said. "They have a template. I wanted my stories here and pictures there. We could pick the background and colors. It was easy to do."

Rogowski's family passed around their laptop during their trip so everyone in the family could contribute. Some of the most interesting entries are written by his six-year-old daughter Kylee:

"My Dad was driving and then he stopped real fast and told me to go save the animal in front of Tito [the car]. Chris came with me and when we got in front of Tito there was a turtle walking across the road. I picked it up and put it in the grass by the road and he let me pet his shell. I'm happy my Dad did not run the turtle over."

Here's her entry about Washington, DC: "I saw the house the president lives in. The Washington Monument has two different colors of stones. We saw old paper that made my Dad cry."

That old paper was the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.  ¶ 7:58 AM 0 comments

  It's Good to be King, Unless You're Magnus II&VII "It's good to be king," sings Tom Petty, but this is not always true. Consider the case of King Magnus II and VII. His grandfather, Hakon V of Norway, and his uncle, King Birger of Sweden, both died in 1319, making him king of both countries.

Doubly good, huh? Actually, no.

He was only two years old at the time. By the time he was proclaimed king ten years later, his mother Ingeborg and the nobles and bishops of Sweden and Norway "had secured a controlling interest in government which he was never quite able to dislodge," according to Eric Christiansen, the author of a delightful book called The Northern Crusades.

The bishops and nobles of both countries, for a lot of complicated reasons, were very anxious for him to lead a crusade in Karelia against the 'heretical' Russian Orthodox princes of Novgorod.

One reason was that the Avignon popes, Clement V and John XII, were levying a tax on all Catholic countries to finance a crusade in the Holy Land. They (the popes) were actually using the money to fight the Viscounti in Italy, but it's pretty amazing, when you think about it, that they were actually able to collect from Catholics as far away as Iceland and even Greenland.

The Swedish and and Norwegian nobles and bishops wanted in on the action, and they wanted estates and tithes and bishoprics and stuff like that. And, of course, they had a deep and abiding concern for the souls of the Karelians. This is clearly reflected in the deal the Scandinavians had agreed to with the Russians before the crusade began:

"If our Karelians flee to you, kill or hang them all. If your Karelians flee to us, then we will treat them in the same fashion, so that they shall not give rise to discord between us."

Then there was Magnus' cousin Bridget. She was made a saint, so I have to be careful here, but she was told by Jesus AND the Virgin Mary that Magnus should crusade in Karelia against the Russians. But he had to do it correctly.

Everybody in his army had to be a man of righteousness. No mercenaries. And they had to follow procedure: "This picked body of conscientious volunteers was to be marshalled under two banners: one of the Passion, signifying peace, and one of the Sword of Justice, signalling war.

"It was essential that the heathen should first be offered peace, faith and liberty, by having banner number one displayed to them, and only if they rejected the offer was the army to move on to battle under banner number two."

So much for the element of surprise.

"Once defeated, they (the heretics) could be compelled to accept baptism into the Latin faith, on pain of death. If they were killed, it was surely better for their souls than being left to drag out their lives in sinful error."

To make a very long story short, Magnus II&VII crusade in Karelia was not a success. He was later deposed and shipwrecked on Lake Lagoda, where he converted and became a Russian Orthodox monk, according to the Chronicles of Novgorod, which may or may not be trustworthy.

"Live in peace and charity," he is said to have said in a testament to his successors, "avoid all manner of treachery and untruth, renounce luxury and drunkenness and all devilish play, do wrong to no man nor violence to any, break no agreement sealed by the kissing of the cross, and go not over to the land of Russia as long as peace prevail and the cross be kissed, for we gain no joy in this life therefrom, and we lose our souls thereby."  ¶ 6:27 PM 1 comments

  Three Minutes That Transformed America "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

This statement is true on its face. Honest Abe would never lie. But the founding fathers actually meant to say that all rich white men are created equal. The US Constitution explicitly condones slavery and restricts the right to vote to white men who own property.

Abraham Lincoln changed that in three minutes on November 19, 1863, with 272 well-chosen words. He didn't scribble it on the back of an envelope on the train, as you may have been told; that's hooey. In fact he worked on it for a long time and showed it to a number of people several days before the dedication.

In his book Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills has created an invaluable work of scholarship which won the Pulitzer Prize, as well it should have. It contains a wealth of information about this seminal moment in American history, tons of stuff I never knew before.

Wills shows how Lincoln drew on sources as far back as the funeral oration of Pericles in Athens in 431 BCE, and details his indebtedness to people like Edward Everett, who gave a three-hour speech at the same ceremony, and the abolitonist Theodore Parker, who was jailed for his opposition to slavery.

The 50,000 dead at Gettysburg had been buried in shallow graves. Often arms and legs were sticking up out of the ground. Something had to be done. That's why they had the reburial and the dedication.

"Lincoln is here not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg," Wills writes, "but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution -- not as William Lloyd Garrison had, by burning an instrument that countenanced slavery. He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to its spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment.

"By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.

"The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological baggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America.

"Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely."

Wills points out that some astute conservatives immediately objected to this swindle, in particular the editorial writer for the Chicago Times, who pointed out that the Constitution didn't make any mention of equality and clearly sanctioned slavery:

"It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges."

The Times really covered themselves in glory on that point. Indeed Ronald Reagan's attorney general, Edwin Meese, and his heirs in the Bush administration, have often referred to the 'original intent' of the Constitution, meaning they want to discard the Fourteenth Amendment and all this stuff about equal rights.

"Their job would be comparatively easy," Wills writes, "if they did not have to work against the values created by the Gettysburg Address."

Does this mean the Republican Party has departed utterly and completely from the beliefs of its most prominent founder, Abraham Lincoln? In a word, yes.  ¶ 7:23 PM 0 comments

  The Mark of a True Scholar










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  An Inaccurate Map Leads to a True Conclusion
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