Ethos by Randy Elrod - How To Create Culture

Do We Dare Emulate Montaigne?

I have been fascinated with the French philosopher Montaigne since Hugh Hewitt challenged me to emulate him and stand as a "Montaigne" beside a like-minded social early adopter.

Have you ever read Montaigne's Essays?

He had a wonderful life. His father waked him each morning with music and he did not speak his own language until he was six, having a German tutor who did not speak French. The Latin authors remained his closest literary friends throughout his life.

Many of his essays are well worth reading; most are much more than that. "Of Idleness," "Of The Education of Children," "Of Cannibals," "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions," "Of Giving the Lie," "Of Repentance," "Of Vanity," "Of Experience" - that is just the beginning of a list of recommended selections.

Montaigne wrote about himself, but you will recognize yourself. That is the mystery, the secret of his greatness. He knew himself so well, he looked at himself so honestly, that he saw through himself to the general human nature, which is ours as well (it has not changed much since the sixteenth century). He knew other men, and women too, I think, in high places and in low, and he also forgave them. For they too were human. He would forgive you - even you!

This is the way Essays ends. It is Montaigne's gift to all of us.

"It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being lawfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own behind."

-Excerpted from The Joy of Reading by Charles Van Doren

The Power of Story...

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens - second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

--Reynolds Price

A Tribute to Theresa Duncan "may she rest in peace" .

C.S. Lewis Foundation...

I enjoyed a wonderful Friday evening dinner with Stan Mattson who serves as Founder and President of the C.S.Lewis Foundation. Pictured with me are: (L-R) Dr. Mattson, my daughter Lauren, myself, and Byron Spradlin of A.C.T. International. Byron was kind enough to arrange the evening.

Fascinating conversation included the new C.S. Lewis study centre at Lewis' home "The Kilns"...and included an invitation for me to travel to the Kilns to continue work on my present book. Let's see...YES!!!

Also, the Southeast Regional C.S. Lewis Conference "Faith Set Free:C.S. Lewis and the Quest for Joy" has been rescheduled for September 15 here in Nashville, TN.

Conversation also included dreams of a "Great Books" University inspired by the legacy of Lewis.

We also discussed the dream of Kalein, the artist development center that is my mandate.

All in all, a fascinating evening. Many more stories were told about Oxbridge (the gathering sponsored by the Foundation at Oxford and Cambridge) and tall ship cruises and dances in candlelight.

A New Epic by Tolkien ...

To Be Released Next Week...

One of the publishing world's best-selling franchises is getting a long-awaited new installment. Nearly 34 years after the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, his publisher has set a big U.S. press run of 250,000 copies for a new novel.

The book, "The Children of Húrin," which comes out Tuesday, is set about 6,000 years before the period depicted in "The Lord of the Rings." For Houghton Mifflin, it's perhaps the last opportunity to build on a franchise that it estimates has sold 80 million books in the U.S. since the 1938 publication of "The Hobbit."

Christopher Tolkien, the author's 82-year-old son, has been working on "Children" for three decades, stitching together outlines, notes and unfinished drafts his father left behind, including an incomplete version of the tale written as an epic poem. The result is entirely in the elder Mr. Tolkien's words, with only minor grammatical changes in things such as verb tense, according to Webster Younce, the editor who oversees the Tolkien list for Houghton Mifflin.

Read More HERE.

Unfinished J.R.R. Tolkien Work To Be Published Next Year...

An unfinished tale by J.R.R. Tolkien has been edited by his son into a completed work and will be released next spring, the U.S. and British publishers announced Monday.

Christopher Tolkien has spent the past 30 years working on "The Children of Hurin," an epic tale his father began in 1918 and later abandoned. Excerpts of "The Children of Hurin," which includes the elves and dwarves of Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and other works, have been published before.

"It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of the 'Children of Hurin' as an independent work, between its own covers," Christopher Tolkien said in a statement.

The new book will be published by Houghton Mifflin in the United States and HarperCollins in England.

The Fine Art of Balance...

The following is a blog entry from A Life in Pages written by one of my dearest friends Angela (Angie) Hunt.  Angie is a prolific writer and one of if not the most creative humans in the known universe. I have  read many of her books including an  uncensored pre-edited version of one of the most romantic books I have ever read, "Afton of Margate Castle". She indeed knows a thing or two about story. Details, sweat, grime, love, laughter, hatred, evil, fear, irritation, pearls of perspiration upon a lover's upper lip...ah, yes...read on...(By the way, double click Angie's picture to animate)

"Yesterday I went through about a dozen manuscripts I'll be critiquing at a Writers' Conference. Several times I found myself underlining a phrase and simply writing "NO" in the margin. Since I meet with these folks face-to-face and discuss my comments, that "no" is shorthand for "this isn't what you meant to say--back up and try it again."

I think it was Mark Twain who said that writing isn't finding the right word--it's finding the exact word, for there's a vast difference between lightning and lightning bug. So many times I find that beginning writers get caught up in the story and they dash off the first metaphor, phrase, or word that comes to mind.

But writing that makes the reader stop and go "Huh?" isn't effective writing. The writer has jerked the reader out of what John Gardner calls "the vivid and continuous dream." A good writer, says Gardner, revises and revises until he gets it right, and captures it in language so "that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again."

Occasionally, however, I run across a manuscript that errs in the opposite direction--a writer who cares more about words than story. Gardner says this writer "is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much--in his poetic drunkenness, he can't tell the cart--and its cargo--from the horse." Gardner says (and this makes me smile) that such a writer should switch to poetry or find an editor and a body of readers who love fine language. "Such editors," says Gardner , "and readers do appear from time to time, refined spirits devoted to an exquisitely classy game we call fiction only by stretching the term to the breaking point."

Gardner says this kind of writer "is not likely to feel passionate attachment to the ordinary, mainstream novel. The novel's unashamed engagement with the world . . . all these are likely to seem, to the word fanatic, silly and tedious; he feels himself buried in litter."

It is at this point that I must confess my attraction to this so-called "litter." On a plane recently, I read a much-heralded book which was much-praised by the literari last year. Yes, the writing was beautiful, but I found the whole thing a snooze. If I'd had anything else to read, I would have put the book away. The novelist deliberately kept the characters at arms' length, and I really didn't care about what happened to them.

Ah, give me a story. Give me details, sweat, grime, love, laughter, hatred, evil, fear, irritation, pearls of perspiration upon a lover's upper lip. Let me live inside your villain's skin. Let me tremble with your protagonist and quake with her fury. Give me images and real life, and, if you have room, toss in a few lovely words.

As the farmer said, "That'll do."

~~Angie

Venture Capital + Literature = ...Um, We'll See...

Four o'clock this past Friday found book publishing's annual promotional schmoozefest, BookExpo America, in full swing. Thousands of booksellers will swarm endless aisles of publishers' displays at the Washington Convention Center. Publicists, agents and editors will gossip, network, fret about the Googleized future and anticipate the evening's dissipations. Meanwhile, inside Room 204A, a group of (choose one) bold visionaries or deluded utopians will explain how they're trying to change the literary landscape they think a book bazaar like BEA represents.

The Literary Ventures Fund is a tiny nonprofit, founded last year with offices in Boston and New York, that "seeks to challenge the status quo of literary publishing," as its Web site boldly proclaims. LVF hopes to help exceptional works of fiction, literary nonfiction and poetry find the readership they deserve -- by using an economic model more frequently associated with Silicon Valley.

"It's a wonderful idea," says Jonathan Karp, a veteran editor now running the Warner Twelve imprint of Warner Books who agreed to serve on LVF's board. "Basically they're trying to take the idea of venture capital and apply it to literary publishing -- to view books as individual enterprises that would benefit from special attention."

"It's a courageous venture and we'll see how it goes," says publisher Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which recently negotiated LVF investments in two of its upcoming titles. "I don't really know of any other projects quite like it."

Here's how it's supposed to work:

LVF invests in books it believes to have both literary merit and commercial potential that might go unrealized without an added push. So far, its investments (there have been fewer than 10 to date) have been made in partnership with the books' publishers, though it plans to work directly with authors as well. The extra money, along with LVF's connections and expertise, can be employed in many ways, with the most obvious being increased marketing to help a book cut through the noise of a crowded marketplace.

If its investment pays off, LVF will take a cut of the book's profits. If it doesn't -- like a venture capitalist funding a high-tech start-up -- it will swallow the loss.

"Publishing is a ridiculous model and we're trying to fix it," says the fund's executive director, Jeffrey Lependorf. "Not that we think we can single-handedly change the way all publishing works."

Well, no. But you have to give LVF credit for chutzpah.

Its initial investment pool is $250,000. With this, it is trying to influence a blockbuster-obsessed enterprise willing to throw that much cash at a single crock of chick lit by a teenage Harvard plagiarist -- not to mention 34 times as much at a book by Alan Greenspan, that well known Washington literatteur . Read more HERE.

By Bob Thompson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 18, 2006;

Note to Hollywood: Great Art Plus Great Subject Matter Equals Success???!!!...

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe helped melt a box office in winter. With a dose of broadly appealing fantasy based on C.S. Lewis' famous novel, overall business was up 17 percent from the comparable weekend last year, and, with King Kong looming, 2005 is poised to end on a high note despite being the first down box office year since 1991.

Playing on about 6,800 screens across 3,616 locations, Narnia drummed up an estimated $67.1 million, exceeding industry expectations in the $50 million range. The opening was the second-biggest ever for December behind The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King's $72.8 million and the third best start for distributor Buena Vista, behind The Incredibles and Finding Nemo.

Saturday exit polls by Buena Vista indicated that families made up 53 percent of Narnia's audience, and that 55 percent of moviegoers were under 25 years old and 52 percent were male. Audiences generally liked the picture, grading it an "A+" in CinemaScore's opening night surveys, which also showed that the "subject matter" was by far the top reason people saw the movie.

"No movie can do this kind of business on this weekend of the year without playing to everyone," said Chuck Viane, Buena Vista's head of distribution. "When you look at the balance of this film, every part of the country is playing at its potential."

Read more HERE

 

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