In no particular order, some highlights from the many, many tabs I’ve had open on my Web browsers the past forever.
The heading “Every Sufficiently Large Web Company Wants to Become the Internet” is the primary thesis of this Lifehacker story. Its evidence is Google.
The story of how communion wafers are made and who makes them is the story of the twentieth century overtaking the thirteenth, as churches, already consumers of one sort, become consumers of another, and it’s really quite fascinating.
My grandfather James D. Bales was a prolific writer, and in his time, his books and many tracts circulated widely within the Churches of Christ and founding organizations of the modern conservative movement like the John Birch Society.
A couple of years ago, when I was visiting my family in Arkansas, my great aunt (on my mother’s side) told me she had been cleaning out her mother’s attic and had come across some papers I might be interested in, and then she pushed an envelope into my hand. Inside was a copy of the only book of my grandfather’s that he had disavowed, The Christian Conscientious Objector, in which he recommended that Christians not participate in war—a bold claim in 1943. Inside was also a mimeograph, on yellowing 8-inch-by-14-inch paper, of a lecture my grandfather had written, “The Christian’s Relation to Civil Government.” It was a rebuttal to The Christian Conscientious Objector.
The lecture lays out with some care how it was that my grandfather came to disavow his previous work. It is undated, but it was written sometime in the mid-1950s, not long after the Korean War. Whether my grandfather delivered the lecture while teaching at Harding University or preaching; whether he included copies of it when he sold The Christian Conscientious Objector; whether he published it separately in a magazine, I don’t know. But I suspect others may find it as historically interesting as I do. Below the fold, I have reproduced the lecture in its entirety.
The most inspired shot in episode 7 (“Nebraska”) of Dexter’s sixth season (best summarized as “Dexter goes to Nebraska in his head”), occurs in the midst of act 4, just after Dexter has murdered a tire-fixing, pot-growing, knife-stealing, callous-obsessing motel manager. After stabbing the man clean through with a pitchfork, Dexter steps back to survey his work; his phantom brother, here an embodiment of Dexter’s wilder nature, steps back, too, and voilá, a homage to American Regionalism!
American Gothic via Dexter (season 6, episode 7; pictured are Christian Camargo, left, and Michael C. Hall. The episode was directed by Romeo Tirone.)
Lynne Barrett has written a capital essay in The Review Review apologizing for literary magazine editors and offering some advice to writers submitting to literary magazines in light of that apology. It’s in the vein of the essay by Miller Williams which I discussed here, but Barrett is much more practical and directed in her advice than Williams. For one, she writes with more sympathy for editors than Williams. The slush pile is a cruel master, she says; an editor sidles up to it with only the dimmest of hopes for an approving word. Perhaps that’s a function of her audience: she’s writing explicitly for writers who are just setting out to remind them that getting published is hard work beyond writing. It’s also reading and researching and keeping good records and taking even small encouragements for the encouragements they are.
Note
This post has was revised after its original publication. A paragraph about my own whereabouts during a longish hiatus was deleted and a few sentences were edited to better focus the post on Barrett’s essay.
