Category Archives: Books

To Lulu or To CreateSpace?

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How recently would that question have made no sense at all?

Having played around a bit with Amazon’s CreateSpace service (Those books on the sidebar: They’re mine, I swearsies), I find it functional, intuitive, and free. Zero complaints about how the system works or how Amazon pays out. Yeah, you don’t make tons of money, thanks, everyone who’s ever tried to be an author. If you want to see your name on a book cover, they will take care of that for you and even throw some royalties your way. I haven’t heard that Random House does differently.

But I’m not the kind of guy who never wonders whether that turf on the obverse of the palisade is indeed more verdant. I bought the Wife a Nook HD+ for Mother’s Day, even though we’re an Amazon/Apple family, as much to check out a different platform as because of the sale. Since self-publishing had the Stigma Removed, I have looked about at all manner of publishing sites. Smashwords seems altogether too “YEAH! PUBLISHING!” But Lulu.com and I have had a long online flirtation. I like the aesthetics of the place, the cornocopia of services, the lure of publishing a HARDCOVER BOOK (that’s right, Millenials: Generation X still reads books printed on Paper, because we’re old).

The only thing that’s held me back is the suspicion that to really get anything that looks like a saleable book, I’m going to have to plunk down a not inconsiderable amount of money. One thing CreateSpace does is offer up a free library of images to help you design a cover: I’ve used that, and I’ve used my own images. Lulu only seems to offer a set of Modern Library-esque texture covers for free (and, of course, anything you own the rights too). Which, for certain monographs, wouldn’t be bad, but not for the sort of books I have in mind.

It’s something to wrack the brain about.

Why You Should Read the Classics

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Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that nothing is new under the sun, and the old books remind us that we’ve been here before. (via Ace)

We can learn from classics that most of us are more likely to resent superiority than to reward it, to distrust talent than to develop it. With classical training, our impatient youth might at least gain some perspective that the world is one where the better man is often passed over — precisely because he is the better man.

There is a profundity about the human soul in that truth. It grates. It offends. Man is not Just. Man is indeed wolf to man, as the old Roman proverb goes (homo homini lupus). We find ourselves then seemlingly forced to choose between abandoning justice or abandoning man. But neither choice seems right, does it?

And thence, to the discussion of the rerun of the decadence of ancient Rome that we are experiencing:

It is not just that plenty of slaves, purple dye, marble, forced vomiting, and piped-in water mean that we don’t have to rise at dawn to hoe the vineyard and bathe in ice-cold streams and therefore become lazy, corpulent, and decadent. Rather, material progress is usually accompanied by moral regress largely because of the leisure to master a critical consciousness and intellectual gymnastics well apart from the fears of religion: if we can explain, in a sophisticated and convincing manner, why something bankrupt is true, then it surely must be true: Vero possumus! Who is to say that Lindsay Lohan is not more interesting than Gen. Mattis?

Language in the postmodern world becomes more layered — and fluid — (compare “overseas contingency operations“ for terrorism or “investments” for deficit spending). The sophistic citizen has the leisure and training to third-guess ancient protocols. Without a soul, the good life here is it. Sarcasm, cynicism, skepticism, and nihilism so abound that there must always be a third and fourth meaning.

Languages ceases to be a tool and becomes a game, and then a hustle, and finally an incomprehensible fog. We wound our own nature, as creatures which name things, when we dance these monkeyshines. We condemn ourselves, as creatures of rationality, to confusion, and helplessness, and ignorance, because we have convinced ourselves that knowledge is impossible.

The good news is, as the classics remind us, is that these moments of decline are not the end. Falseness and weakness do not survive. Achilles may suffer at Agamemmnon’s hands, but Agamemmnon is going to get got.

The truth will set you free.

Mid-Way on Our Life’s Journey…

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…I found myself overladen with Things to Do. You know the story. Blogging will be light for the forseeable. Right now, enjoy some Dante:

I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
about those woods is hard – so tangled and so rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
the old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well,

I’ll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunder

Off the true path.

The only way out is through…

George Will Not Finish the Book(s)

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[The following post will be of no interest to people who are not fans of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.]

This is me, calling it.

(h/t: Finish the Book, George)

When the HBO series started, I knew this wouldn’t work. I knew that the series would go faster than the books, and run the risk of hitting the end with the books unfinished. The third season, which covers the third book, is starting on HBO soon. There are five books total. The math simply does not work. Even if Martin manages to bring in Winds of Winter in his promised two-year time frame, (which, one doubts) what then? Do we really hope that the seventh book will finish it off?

So don’t be surprised if HBO finishes the story. That might end up being for the best.

winteriscoming

P.J. O’Rourke on Thoreau

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Since I began the process of attempting to read Civil Disobedience, I’ve had in the back of my mind a typically starchy takedown of him by P.J. O’Rourke in his 1996 book All the Trouble in the World. I quote at length:

Thoreau took the bad ideas and worse ideals of the primitivists, added the pitiful self-obsession of the romantics, and mixed all of this into transcendentalism, that stew of bossy Brahmin spiritual hubris.

The transcendentalists were much devoted to taking the most ordinary thoughts and ideas and investing them with preposterous spiritual gravity. They saw the divine in everything, even in long, boring lectures about how everything is divine. Any random peek into the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson will show you the method by which “don’t Litter” has been turned into an entire secular religion.

In 1845 the twenty-eight-year-old Thoreau (having failed to read Rousseau closely enough) built himself a little cabin near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The land was owned by Emerson and was about as far out of twon as the average modern driving range. Thoreau frequently wen to dinners and parties in Concord, and, according to is list of household expenses in Walden, he sent his laundry out to be done. Theoreau lived in his shack for two years devoting his time to being full of baloney…

We have hear the worst sort of person, the sanctimonious beatnik. Thoreau is the progenitor of the American hipster arrogance we’ve been enduring for the past century and a half. And he is the source of the loathsome self-righteousness that turns every kid who’s ever thought “a tree is better looking than a parking lot” into Saint Paul of the Recycling Bin.

Keep in mind that in 1996, the word “hipster” did not have the same resonance it has today. O’Rourke was referring to the whole hip tradition, rather than the particularly ridiculous exemplars of trendy vapidity emanating from the newly gentrifying parts of Brooklyn and Austin and the like. One might be worried about the relevance of this book today, if one were a preening hipster.

I’m not done with Thoreau. This has the makings of a book.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Legal Conundrum

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Over at Wired, a lawyer named James Daily has done a quick (to the extent that lawyers do anything quick) analysis of the legal contract drawn up between Bilbo and the dwarves in The Hobbit.  It’s a fun read for those interested in the intricacies of law, and manages to avoid turgidity. For the most part, Daily concludes, the contract appears solid, but he does fund a possibly significant hole:

The one thing that leaps out at me about this contract is that it doesn’t contain a choice of law clause.  Such a clause allows the parties to specify what jurisdiction’s law will govern the contract. This is particularly useful when multiple jurisdictions may potentially apply. The area of the law that deals with figuring out which court has jurisdiction and which law applies is known as conflict of laws.

Conflict of laws is a complex subject. Typically it is a stand-alone course in law school. So we won’t go into too much detail here, but suffice to say that arguably both the law of the Shire and the law of the Dwarven Kingdom could conceivably apply to this contract. Some of the factors that a court might consider include:

  • The parties are a Hobbit of the Shire and a group of Dwarves.
  • The contract was signed in the Shire.
  • The contract concerns services to be performed in the Dwarven Kingdom.
  • The most likely source of the breach of the contract occurs in the Dwarven Kingdom.

Since the applicable law is debatable, this is precisely the kind of case in which a choice of law clause makes sense, so its absence is notable.

This is the sort of question that leads to other questions:

  1. What Dwarven Kingdom? At the signing of the contract, there is no Dwarven Kingdom to have jurisdiction. Thorin is a King in exile, and the re-establishment of the Kingdom Under the Mountain is a result of the Adventure that neither party can reliably foresee. Unless the Dwarven realm of the Iron Hills counts as a Dwarven Kingdom, but I believe that the Iron Hills and Erebor were founded at the same time, and not one as a successor to the other. Then again, Dain Ironfoot, the ruler of the Iron Hills, is universally accepted as Thorin’s successor.
  2. What Shire Law? The Shire has a Mayor, and Shirrifs, and a postal services, and Bilbo’s journey does seem to create some issues about the ownership of Bag-End, so they obviously have some kind of legal framework. I suspect that a good bit of it is a common-law tradition deriving from the law of the Kingdom of Arnor, to which the Shire was initially subject. The Thain of the Shire held a kind of feudal sovereignity granted by the King of Arnor. Of course, at the time of the contract, there is no such Kingdom anymore, nor has there been for some time. The Shire is in this sense a rump state, and I don’t know how much respect the laws of such a small, unknown place commands. It’s hard to see Thorin willingly submitting to that Law.
  3. What About the Lakemen? If the Dwarves have respect but no regime, and the Hobbits regime but no respect, the men of Esgaroth upon the Long Lake near Erebor have both. In fact, you could make a pretty fair case that the Lake-Men have local jurisdiction, inasmuch as theirs is the only jurisdiction anywhere near the Lonely Mountain. But it’s a jurisdiction of Men, not of Dwarves or Hobbits (even if Hobbits are essentially of Man-Kind). The Men of the Lake certainly feel as though they have a claim upon the treasure of Smaug.

I have no good answers to these questions. Contemplating Tolkein sometimes bears resemblance to contemplating the Divine Mysteries (a comparison that would have gratified the old master, I am sure).

Thoreau Merits a Response

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Civil Disobedience was a quick read, and provocative, if also strangely tedious, and occasionally downright whiny. So provocative, in fact, that I feel an essay coming on. I’m thinking long form, semi-fisking, rather like the opening chapters of John Locke’s First Treatise on Government. Check this space for further details.

"What, me worry?"

“What, me worry?”

Greg Gutfeld Wins at Life

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I received The Joy of Hate for Christmas yesterday, and devoured it in a day. It’s a quick read, and most of it tells me something I learned long ago: that “tolerance” is a rhetorical slight-of-hand whereby progressives grant themselves a license to demonize, terrorize and condemn. So to the extent that it didn’t reveal anything to me, I was disappointed. One encounters this in reading books by conservatives and libertarians: a lot of “Right on, brother,” and very little “I did not know that.”

Plus, I was looking for something on the order of the book’s tag line “How to Triumph Over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage.” Most of the book served to point out the phony outrage, which, as said, I didn’t quite need.

The final chapter “The End of Hate,” however, came close. An excerpt:

A few months ago, I came up with something called the Mirror Jerk Effect. This is how it works: Let’s say Ed Schultz makes a crack about Sarah Palin that I don’t like, because I like Palin and I don’t like Schultz I create a mirror effect. I say to myself, What if, instead of Schultz and Palin, it’s Rush and Garafalo? If I don’t care about Rush’ opinion of a silly lefty, then I shouldn’t care about a lefty’s opinion of a conservative I like. This little mental exercise eliminates so much wasted energy that I now have time to help the poor and needy (i.e., myself).

For the most part you gotta think like one of those lions on the Serengeti, which I beleive is in Canada. Conserve energy and then expend it when you need it most. Responding toe very stupid remark or caustic joke will wear you down. That’s why bitter people look decades older than they really are. I’m told Ed Schultz is really twenty-six.

That’s the kind of happy-warrior mentality that Breitbart, who gets a chapter devoted to him, exemplified. Breitbart didn’t just attack the news; he made the news. He didn’t just snipe at the media; he made them dance to his tune. And they hated him for it, and he reveled in their hate.

This is the lesson that the tag-line promised: the triumph lies in absorbing your enemy’s rage and continuing on anyway, because for all their fury they remain powerless to stop you. Sandra Fluke was supposed to end Rush Limbaugh; he’s still there.

Determine yourself. Know who you are and what you are about. Figure out what you will and won’t stand for, and then the Great Hypersensitive diminish to the background noise in the annals of history that they truly are.

You can be a Millionaire, once you figure out how to earn a Million dollars

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Am currently reading The Education of Millionaires: Everything You Won’t Learn in College About How To Be Succesful, on Instapundit’s recommendation (how much money do use suppose Reynolds has made Amazon over the years). It’s maybe the book I’ve been looking to read for a long time.

Money quote, on the Art of Earning a Living:

The Art of Earning a Living requires a great deal of self-inquiry into what, exactly the difference you want to make is, and also a lot of creative, entrepreneurial problem-solving to figure out how you could make decent money while making that difference.

In other words, the dichotomy between earning and creating is the falsest of all dichotomies. True creation invariably creates value.