Another week, another passel of links into the wide, wide world of wondrous word-smithery.  This week closes out with a bit of verse from Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was born on July 28, 1844.

Short Fiction:

• “The Doors” by E.B. White
• When Jane Met Rochester – A scene from Libby Sternberg’s soon to be released novel Sloane Hall
• The Sisters of the Sacred Heart

Criticism and Commentary:

• The Real Carver: Expansive or Minimal?
• “The Designs of E.B. White” by Gerald Weales
• What is Art?
• A Fish Studying Water – On studying and teaching one’s native language
• Comics and Graphic Novels vs. The Critics
• Fritz Leiber Tackled the Oil Spill First

News and Reviews:

• “If any form of pleasure is exhibited, report to me and it will be prohibited…” – A brief review of Lars Walker’s West Oversea.
  
• In Defence of Amazon – The online bookseller isn’t to blame for the book industry’s failures
  
• Point Break - John J. Miller’s brief comments on Stephen Koch‘s The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles
• Andrew Klavan reviews David Wong’s John Dies At The End

The Writing Life:

• Wright’s Writing Corner: Cotton Candy Writing

And now for some of that high culture stuff. A bit of poetry from Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, who would have celebrated his 166th birthday on Wednesday, July 28th.

‘The Alchemist in the City” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

My window shews the travelling clouds,
Leaves spent, new seasons, alter’d sky,
The making and the melting crowds:
The whole world passes; I stand by.

They do not waste their meted hours,
But men and masters plan and build:
I see the crowning of their towers,
And happy promises fulfill’d.

And I – perhaps if my intent
Could count on prediluvian age,
The labours I should then have spent
Might so attain their heritage,

But now before the pot can glow
With not to be discover’d gold,
At length the bellows shall not blow,
The furnace shall at last be cold.

Yet it is now too late to heal
The incapable and cumbrous shame
Which makes me when with men I deal
More powerless than the blind or lame.

No, I should love the city less
Even than this my thankless lore;
But I desire the wilderness
Or weeded landslips of the shore.

I walk my breezy belvedere
To watch the low or levant sun,
I see the city pigeons veer,
I mark the tower swallows run

Between the tower-top and the ground
Below me in the bearing air;
Then find in the horizon-round
One spot and hunger to be there.

And then I hate the most that lore
That holds no promise of success;
Then sweetest seems the houseless shore,
Then free and kind the wilderness,

Or ancient mounds that cover bones,
Or rocks where rockdoves do repair
And trees of terebinth and stones
And silence and a gulf of air.

There on a long and squared height
After the sunset I would lie,
And pierce the yellow waxen light
With free long looking, ere I die.

Brian Thomas at ICR reports that “100 Years of Fruit Fly Tests Show No Evolution”:

Fruit flies, with their short generation times and only four pairs of chromosomes, presented prime testing ground for evolution. In laboratories worldwide, they have been subjected to all manner of mutation-inducing phenomena, including hosts of chemicals and radiation treatments, to try and accelerate evolution-mimicking mutations. After all this, fruit flies should have certainly exemplified evolution by now. But they haven’t.
…. mutating (through substituting, deleting, or duplicating) developmental genes like HOX has only ever yielded a dead fly, a normal fly (if the mutation happened to have no noticeable effect), or a tiny monster. None of these results match the “positive improvement” expected of Darwinian evolution.

—Mike Gray

Reuters, a not altogether reliable news agency, reports that

the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is being revised now for publication in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), could devalue the seriousness of mental illness and label almost everyone as having some kind of disorder.  Citing examples of new additions like “mild anxiety depression,” “psychosis risk syndrome,” and “temper dysregulation disorder,” they said many people previously seen as perfectly healthy could be told they are ill.

The implications of this, as the National Center for Policy Analysis points out, could be that

technically, with the classification of so many new disorders, we will all have disorders.
This may lead to the belief that many more of us “need” drugs to treat our “conditions,” and many of these drugs will have unpleasant or dangerous side effects.
The “psychosis risk syndrome” diagnosis is particularly worrying, since it could falsely label young people who may only have a small risk of developing an illness.

Homosexuality used to be classified as a mental disorder until politics overwhelmed science.

And let’s not forget that, always lurking in the background, is the argument that if you don’t like Big Brother’s policies, why, you must be crazy!

—Mike Gray

Well, it’s sort of a smackdown, with a dead man exhibiting far more good sense than a living one. Americans for Limited Government have posted a video comparing and contrasting two diametrically opposed world views. Run time: 6 minutes 1 second.

—Mike Gray

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is conducting a summer tour of twenty-three cities promoting the Biblical mandate of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Needless to say, a small but vocal segment of the population doesn’t like it, as Brian S. Brown of NOM observes:

They’ve come to our peaceful marriage rallies in city after city to harass and intimidate us. We’ve seen men harass a nursing mother, refusing her request to feed her children in private and instead stare at her and block her ability to watch our rally from a safe distance. We’ve seen protestors draped in the rainbow flag storm the stage and scream, red-faced into the microphone to prevent our speakers from talking. We’ve seen them bait a five year old child, asking her if she’s being raised by her mother to be a bigot. We’ve even heard a gay marriage supporter threaten to kidnap a child in attendance at a rally.

It would seem to be the usual suspects, the politically oppressed and socially persecuted darlings of the liberal-progressive establishment media. Typically, these people have no respect for traditional institutions or their representatives, as Brown notes:

We were honored to have Bishop Robert Morlino of the Diocese of Madison address the crowd. Bishop Morlino spoke of the need to love one another even as we disagree on the issue of same-sex marriage. Yet when he led the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer, the gay marriage radicals screamed and booed him. This is the face of intolerance. Isn’t it something when people who so loudly demand tolerance from everybody else, show such intolerance for those who simply wish to pray to God for the preservation of His sacred institution? [Video is available]

The National Organization for Marriage isn’t a hate group, Brown asserts, because

at every rally we make it clear that our fight is not with gay Americans, it is with a bad idea. The Lord teaches us that we are to love all His children. We approach the issue of marriage from the perspective of love.

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Resources:

National Organization for Marriage homepage.

Video of Bishop Morlino being harassed in prayer.

—Mike Gray

Even where one might think it to be popular, patriotism is not an easy sell. In Georgia, some folks just aren’t that into the ‘Spirit of ’76′, if the fate of the National Museum of Patriotism tells us anything.

[T]he National Museum of Patriotism in Atlanta closes this week. … [T]he institution, whose jaunty slogan is “Come for a memory, leave with a mission”, is the latest victim of the economic downturn. “Therefore, The National Museum of Patriotism had to answer the call of the new economy to find a new way of doing business. The National Foundation of Patriotism will become a virtual museum online,” according to the museum website.

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing the “silent majority” demands? More museums that promote America and American values? So why aren’t people buying?

A while back I read Dick Francis’ mystery, Decider, and decided I’d be reading more. So I picked up the collection Triple Crown (comprising Dead Cert, Nerve, and For Kicks) and read it last week. It was an intriguing reading experience for me.

I have a hard time pinning down what’s so compelling in a Dick Francis mystery. Most of the stories revolve around the sport of racing (with the corruption that racetrack betting invites), and that’s a field of endeavor in which I’ve never had any interest at all (though I’ll admit that if I have to watch a horse race, I’d prefer a steeplechase, which is the kind of racing Francis concentrates on, at least in the novels I’ve read). I can’t say he’s a brilliant stylist—in fact I’d characterize him as the kind of author who disappears totally, which isn’t a bad way to get your reader invested in your story. I can’t say he’s especially skilled at crafting vivid characters. And yet I found myself horizontal on the couch for hours, turning page after page, absolutely under the spell of the stories.

Dead Cert, I understand, was Francis’ first published novel. It’s good, but I think he was still feeling his way. Nerve was his second book, and by then he’d already found his pace. This was possibly the most satisfying tale of revenge I’ve ever read. And For Kicks amazed me. It was the compelling adventure of a man who takes a dangerous job for money, endures great suffering and violence to complete it, and in the end learns something about himself that changes his life.

I think what I particularly like is that Francis writes about manly men. Men blessed, and burdened, with strength, integrity, and courage, Churchillian in their resolve never to give up.

What a joy to discover an author you didn’t know before, who has a long list of published works you can look forward to!

Lars Walker is the author of several fantasy novels, the latest of which is West Oversea.

Gary Wolfram, in a commentary on The Business & Media Institute website, notes:

Today, in the year [Milton] Friedman would have turned 98 years old, we are even more in need of a resurgence and rediscovery of his ideas. Examples of this need abound in the economy, education and other realms of public policy.

As Wolfram points out, Friedman understood the inherent dangers in granting government greater control over our lives “for our own good” when he wrote in Free to Choose:

The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States. Those ideas are still very much with us. But we have been straying from them. We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.

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More Friedman quotes:

“The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”

“Governments never learn. Only people learn.”

“So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.”

“The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.”

“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

“What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system.”

“History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.”

“The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.”

“The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.”

“The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.”

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Resources:

Gary Wolfram’s Business & Media Institute tribute article.

Several of Friedman’s books are still available on Amazon.com: Free to Choose - Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman on Economics.

—Mike Gray

If you think scientists and the media that “report” their findings are somehow “objective” and above criticism, think again, says Christine Dao on ICR:

… just how much can the lay public trust science news when it enters the mainstream media? The answer may frequently be, “Not much.”

Even under controlled laboratory conditions, major mistakes—and, less frequently, outright instances of fraud—have occurred:

… despite the rigors under which scientific investigations are supposed to be conducted, the lay public should understand that scientific results and conclusions reported in the news will not always be entirely accurate—not just in the reporting, but possibly in the research itself.

The common picture of the purely objective scientist is a myth; a credulous and scientifically ignorant media compound the error every day.

—Mike Gray

By Mike Gray

On The Freeman Online weblog, Wendy McElroy sees something profoundly un-American in the recent proliferation of fusion centers, data coordination units that can, on the one hand, help in law enforcement or, conversely, become Big Brother in a heartbeat if the political situation deteriorates:

Violation of privacy rights, excessive secrecy, lack of congressional oversight, the inevitability of inaccurate and noncorrectable information, the lack of due process for the accused, the encouragement of racial/religious profiling, the creation of a “snitch” nation, the merging of the military with the private sector, the political abuse of dissidents – the objections scroll on.

They’ve already abused citizens’ rights, according to McElroy:

… the elaborate infrastructure of fusion centers has spied on peaceful citizens. Those who believe the abuses are aberrations, rather than an inherent or intended function, may argue that increased transparency will bring accountability and solve the problem. But that belief is naive.
…. A massive database on peaceful citizens, a tip hotline that encourages turning in of neighbors, the casting of suspicion on daily activities, enlisting private workers as national surveillance agents — this is a police state in the making.

Technology is amoral; the uses that people make of it can either improve life or make it a living hell.

—Mike Gray