Jul. 9 The Pen is more Intimate: I was going through
some news articles I cut out. In the Edmonton
Journal article “The pen is more intimate than the keyboard” by Noel Taylor
on Jun. 30, 2011. This is a really good article about how no
one writes letters anymore, but people use email these days. Here are some excerpts:
“We transmit our feelings through it. Once we used to feed
it, a fountain pen.”
“There is a uniqueness to someone else's handwriting that is
at once pleasurable, and in its familiarity, comforting. It takes time to read,
something the e-mail skimmer is denied.”
“What it gains in speed, however, it loses in privacy. What
was once a private mailing is no longer so. Once sent, it is an open invitation
to the most contemptible of all viruses, the hacker. The personal can quite
readily become public; the e-mailer is never quite sure. The letter-writer on
the other hand, remains smug about his certainty that no one else but the named
recipient will read his thoughts. An envelope is a trusty lock.”
“Whole volumes have been filled by the exchange of letters
between writers who have something to say to each other, and by extension, the
rest of the world outside.”
“Take Oliver Goldsmith: "No man was more foolish when
he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.''”
http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/ideas/story.html?id=b9191dc2-f88b-4afb-8cbd-abe05200111b
My opinion: Noel Taylor
is right that letters are more personal, but I want to reach to all my friends,
family, and blog readers about topics like news and jobs faster by email and
blogging. There are still hand-written
notes like thank you notes.
Heaven is for Real: I cut out this Edmonton
Journal article “Boy’s tale of trip to heaven becomes a bestseller” by
Julie Bosman on Mar. 11, 2011. I found the article and here are some
excerpts:
Just two months shy of his fourth birthday, Colton Burpo,
the son of an evangelical pastor in Imperial, Neb.,
was rushed into emergency surgery with a burst appendix.
He woke up with an astonishing story: He had died and gone
to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John
the Baptist; and Jesus, who had eyes that “were just sort of a sea-blue and
they seemed to sparkle,” Colton, now 11 years old, recalled.
Colton’s
father, Todd, has turned the boy’s experience into a 163-page book, “Heaven Is
for Real,” which has become a sleeper paperback hit of the winter, dominating
best-seller lists and selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
Much of the book’s success has been fueled by word of mouth,
since it did not begin with the usual best-seller channels: there has been no
elaborate book tour, big-name publisher or brand-name author. But it has gained
traction with a few well-placed appearances on the morning show “Fox &
Friends,” “The 700 Club” and CNN.
“We all are perhaps desperate to know what is on the other
side of the veil after we die,” Mr. Baugher said, adding that his initial
skepticism about the Burpo family’s story was short-lived. “
Patricia Bostelman, the vice president for marketing at
Barnes & Noble: “But what was unusual about this book was that it was the
story of a little boy. It deactivated some of the cynicism that can go along
with adults capitalizing on their experiences.”
“People say we just did this to make money, and it’s not the
truth,” Mr. Burpo said, referring to anonymous online comments about the book.
“We were expecting nothing. We were just hoping the publisher would break
even.” (He said he planned to give away much of the royalty income and spend
some of it on home improvements.)
Colton
told his parents that he had met his younger sister in heaven, describing her
as a dark-haired girl who resembled his older sister, Cassie. When the Burpos
questioned him, he asked his mother, “You had a baby die in your tummy, didn’t
you?” While his wife had suffered a miscarriage years before, Mr. Burpo said,
they had not told Colton
about it. “There’s just no way he could have known,” Mr. Burpo said.
“People are getting blessed, and they’re going to have healing from their hurts,” he said. “I’m happy for that.”
My opinion: I’m not really religious, but I thought
it was a cool article.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: I wrote a little about this
before in a 2010 post:
I never read the books, but here is a good Globe and Mail
article “Should the little wimp grow up?” by Marsha Lederman on Nov. 9, 2010. Here are some excerpts where she interviews
the author Jeff Kinney:
"I'm using it as a metaphor for whether or not these
characters are cartoon characters or if they're literary characters,"
series author Jeff Kinney said in Vancouver
recently. "I've had to make the decision of whether or not the kids should
grow up."
The Diary books are not graphic novels in the
traditional sense; they're more like hybrids of fiction and cartoons. Written
in journal form, the text appears hand-printed on lined paper. The diarist is
Greg, a wisecracking, weaselly but fundamentally loveable middle-schooler and
video-game wiz who's pretty sharp, but doesn't apply himself at school. He has
a simple and kind-hearted best friend, Rowley, and a mean older brother,
Rodrick.
Should it continue in the direction of a comic book, where
the characters never grow up, à la Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang?
Or should it go the direction of other successful young-adult series ( Harry
Potter, Artemis Fowl) where the protagonist ages and matures,
along with his readers?
"When I set out to write these books, I always had it
in mind that the characters would grow up and that my readers would expect the
story to have a neat, nice ending," Kinney said. "I always expected
to wrap things up basically on the eve before high school and to never progress
the characters beyond that point. But the more I've thought about it, I've
really wondered if the DNA of the series
lives more in the comics world where ... my readers might just enjoy reading
about Greg year after year."
He then spent four years trying to remember everything that happened to him when he was in middle school - consulting yearbooks and his younger brother - and writing down 13,000 pages of jokes, which he then pared down to the best ones.
He draws heavily on his own middle-school experiences, such as dodging swim practice by telling the coach he had to go to the bathroom, then spending the entire time hiding out in a change room so cold (if he'd taken his towel, it would have alerted the coach to his scheme) that he wrapped himself in toilet paper.
"I remember thinking, is this actually worse than being in the pool right now?," he said. "But now I'm cashing in."
"I worked all my adult life to get to be a cartoonist, which was my dream, and then to think that it might be over in 3 1/2 years is kind of shocking," he said. "I definitely don't want to go back to the well again and again. I want to know when it's time to give it up. I do think that these things have a life span. I'm definitely not in the business of milking cows as much as I can. I definitely feel that I've gotten what I was chasing after. So now I have to figure out what's right artistically and what my readers will enjoy."
My opinion: It was kind of inspirational and fun to
read that article.
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