Here’s what Ken Kesey had to say about Wendell Berry:

“Wendell Berry is the Sargeant York charging unnatural odds across our no-man’s-land of ecology. Conveying the same limber innocence of young Gary Cooper, Wendell advances on the current crop of Krauts armed with naught but his pen and his mythic ridgerunner righteousness. One after the other he picks them off, from the flying bridges of their pleasure boats as they roar through his native Kentucky rivers, from beneath the hard hats in the Hazard county strip mines, from the swivel chairs in the Pentagon where they weigh the various ways to wage war on all forms of enemy life beyond the end of their own friendly chin. He’s a crackshot essayist and, for those given to capture, a genial and captivating poet. He boasts a formidable arsenal of novels, speeches, articles, stories and poems from his outpost in one of the world’s most ravaged battlefields where he writes the good fight and tends his family and his honeybees. Consider him an ally.”

The thing is, Kesey said this in 1971. Full Story »

Zombie: Don’t worry. Only people with brains
get eaten. You’re safe.

They aren’t sexy. They aren’t romantic. They aren’t tragically doomed.

In fact, they’re ravenous, violent, and virtually unstoppable. They ooze all sorts of bodily fluids. And they want to eat your brains.

So how come zombies are getting such mainstream media treatment?

As a culture, we love and loath things that go bump in the night. We have to have boogeymen, for all sorts of reasons. Because they touch deep psychological fears in profound ways, our boogeymen serve as a kind of moral check on behavior that laws and rules just sometimes can’t. At the other end of the spectrum, we seem to have a lot of fun being scared. Boogeymen do that for us, too. Full Story »

Edgar Allan Poe is – despite or perhaps because of  his proclivity for writing scary stories – one of our most beloved writers. Chief among Poe’s charms for the reader is his ability to grab us with a riveting opening line. As proof of Poe’s rare talent for the stunning opener, here for your Halloween Arts Week pleasure is a sample of great opening lines from the master of terror….From “The Tell Tale Heart”:

“TRUE! – nervous – very, very nervous I am and had been and am; but why will you say I am mad?”

From “The Fall of the House of Usher”:

“DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country ; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.” Full Story »

Not that this should come as any surprise, but we now have confirmation that the Bush administration refused to award Harry Potter author JK Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom because the books “encouraged witchcraft.”

For a second, let’s set aside any arguments over whether or not Rowling’s work merits such a lofty honor and do something that we simply don’t do enough these days. Let’s dig beneath the surface silliness and examine the deeper implications of what this revelation really means.

Put simply, would you be worried about “encouraging” something you didn’t think was possible? It’s one thing to want to discourage, say, meth use or binge drinking or texting while driving or unprotected sex. Those things are real and they have real, observable consequences. Full Story »

Today we’re putting Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) on the masthead. Chances are that you already know all about his thought and work without realizing it. When George Lucas wrote the first few drafts of Star Wars, it was shaping up to be standard, 70’s sci-fi action schlock. Then he put the screenplay aside to settle and re-read Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. That changed everything. Sculpting his imaginary galaxy around the skeleton of Campbell’s monomyth thesis produced a set of films that took a generation by storm and still reverberates through popular culture. Full Story »

I graduated from college in August, 1981 and took a job as an English teacher/assistant football coach at a junior high school in Columbia, Tennessee. You may ask why an English teacher would think he could coach football? I had a plan. I was a fairly decent high school football player in the early 70s, First Team, All Mid-state, a three year letterman, a genuine football fanatic. So, using another English major football coach (Joe Paterno) as my inspiration, I boldly took my place along the sidelines. True, as a player I tended to be more cerebral than reactive. Many times my high school coach would stare at me when I asked to deploy my famous symbolic blitz or offered to confuse the opposing quarterback with a barrage of metaphor. Coach Crabtree just didn’t understand. Full Story »

by JS O’Brien

Today is April 23, the day we celebrate as William Shakespeare’s birthday – though this date is derived by counting backwards from his known christening date, so his actual date of birth is uncertain. Every year at this time, periodicals across the country feel compelled to revisit the issue of whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays and poetry attributed to him, and they do this for good reason: everyone loves conspiracy theories, no matter how absurd they may be.

It is this very absurdity and the accompanying cloudy thought that make the question extremely important to all of us, because the “debate,” itself, is rooted in a very dangerous and destructive human trait: the tendency to decide what is true based on little or no evidence, and then to seek only evidence to support one’s ill-conceived position while ignoring evidence – even overwhelming evidence — to the contrary. In other words, the tale of the Shakespeare conspiracy theorists is a tale of the anti-science that lives in all of us, and its ramifications for all of us. Full Story »

First, just in case you haven’t seen it, please review the video (in three parts).

Full Story »

by Lara Amber

I’ve never been an early adopter of technology. I, like most people, come in at wave two or three, but well before grandmas finally get that machine everyone else had for a decade. So ordering a Kindle 2 the day it was announced by Bezo goes against the grain. I’ve had it for a day, and let me tell you it’s going to change the world.

I’m not talking about the sleek design, the high price tag, or the status symbol of carting around the next hot gadget. This, as has been said before, is the iPod of the book world, and its effect will be just as profound. Full Story »

If you pay attention to my music entries, you may have noticed a recurrent theme. It seems a lot of the bands I hear these days, many of which I really like, remind me of bands from the past. Like The Mary Onettes:

I recently tripped across one such example, Sweden’s The Mary Onettes. They can’t seem to make up their minds whether they want to be The Church, Echo & the Bunnymen, or maybe something along the Joy Division/New Order continuum.

And The Flaws:

In a nutshell, The Flaws are [Joy Division] meets The Killers with a smattering of Johnny Marr. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Wendy Redal

Hermann Hesse, especially for Narcissus & Goldmund: His study of the tension between reason and emotion as told through the 14th century lives of these two protagonists has served as a backdrop for my enduring awareness of this often troubling juxtaposition — throughout culture and in my own life. I grew up as cool Narcissus — a means to cope with a childhood fraught by chaos — and have been wrestling ever since with how to handle my inner Goldmund. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Denny Wilkins

I wrote and edited news and commentary for a living for 20 years. I, as they say, “pumped out lots of copy” in two decades. That necessarily had as much of an impact on my progress and perspective as a writer as reading the well-regarded and much-honored fiction and non-fiction of others. Those people with whom we personally engage as mentor and mentee often play critical roles in our development as writers. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

J.S. O’Brien

The most influential writer and book of my life didn’t influence my writing style one bit (thank God!), but he and his book changed completely changed my life. Most deeply rural, Southern kids back in the day were exposed to no ideas outside the generally accepted ones of their fiercely insular society. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was my first look at American social institutions and mores from outside the mainstream, and it instilled in me a voracious appetite for moving my frame of reference outside the superego to get a wider, and extremely useful, perspective. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Lex

As a reader of mostly non-fiction, with its division by subject rather than author, this is kind of a tough one for me. It forces me pretty far back, and hence sounds cliched to me…but here goes.

Conrad and Dostoevsky for their examination of the dark recess of the human psyche. Dickens for teaching me that it’s okay to laugh at starving orphans. Melville (Billy Budd) and Conrad (Heart of Darkness) have always impressed me enough to reread and reread for the admirable ability to get whole novels into very short works. I’ve been through Billy Budd looking up and writing down every word that I couldn’t define and would probably have to look words up if I read it again tomorrow; that impresses me. Moby Dick needed an editor. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Jim Booth

F. Scott Fitzgerald for his prose style –  Ernest Hemingway for his prose style — Thomas Wolfe for his prose style

Jane Austen for her prose style — Doris Lessing for her prose style — Shirley Barker for her prose style

John Lennon for his prose style — Richard Brautigan for his prose style — Thomas Pynchon for his prose style Full Story »

The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked   off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural  mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.

In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess.  Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times? Full Story »

When we created the new WordsDay graphic above a few weeks back we challenged everybody to name all the authors. Some of you took a shot, and I think the best set of guesses got about 10 of 15 right.

So, for those of you who have been dying of curiosity, here are the answers. Left to right:

1. William Butler Yeats
2. Audre Lorde
3. Bill Shakespeare Full Story »

by Patrick Vecchio

I got home from running a few errands today and the numeral “1″ was flashing red on the answering machine. The message was for me — and it was from Caroline Kennedy.

“Hey, Pat,” said a cheery voice. My heart stuttered. “It’s me: CK!” As if I hadn’t known instantly.

CK. That’s what I used to call her 30 years ago, when she and I used to perch on stools at our favorite bar every night but Sunday, down doubles of tequila, and feed quarters into the jukebox to listen to Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Marvin Gaye. Ah, the clink of the shot glasses, the splashes of tequila on the bar, the salt on the back of the hand, the lemon wedges, the neon beer signs in the window reflecting in her bloodshot eyes as I stared into them while the whole room spun — it all comes back to me now through a mescal haze. Full Story »

Mike Sheehan:

I’m reading Marty Beckerman’s Dumbocracy (Disinformation, 2008). Beckerman, who proudly boasts that Hunter Thompson called him a “morbid little bastard,” is an engaging, sharp, equal-opportunity ballbuster who revels in taking to task extremists of the “loony left” and ”rabid right” infecting American sociopolitics. Armed with factoids, anecdotes and amusing personal experiences (such as his brief encounter with Rev. Jerry Falwell), he gleefully skewers self-righteous ignoramuses on both sides from his perch in the middle.  While his distracting sexual braggadocio and gratuitous profanities betray his age (he’s in his mid-20’s), he’s clearly on his way to becoming a top satirist.  One to watch.  His official site: Marty Beckerman. Full Story »

It has been alleged that Scholars & Rogues is not, strictly speaking, a political blog. Sure, we write about overtly political issues and devote our share of time to things like media policy, energy and the environment, business and the economy, and international dynamics. Yes, we were credentialed to cover the DNC, but we don’t really do hard, insider, by god politics. Daily Kos is a political blog. Firedoglake is a political blog. Little Green Footballs, The Agonist, Politico, The Seminal – these are real poliblogs.

S&R, on the other hand, writes about music. About literature and poetry. About art. Education. Sports. Culture and popular culture. The Ramsey case and what it tells us about the state of media. And now that the election is over, S&R is writing about politics less than ever.

So really, what is S&R? Full Story »