Reading Slowly; Reading Out Loud

I think that I am a skillful and attentive reader: I was taught how to read and study texts carefully throughout my education. Perhaps one reason is that I read slowly. I also write about what I read (even as I'm reading), read one book at a time, and I even sometimes read aloud. There are times when the text requires reading aloud: poetry should be read by ear to hear the music (if there isn't any verbal music, it isn't poetry, no matter how wide the margins are on the page); works that were prepared to be spoken should be read aloud--I once belonged to a "Lovers of Newman" group and we met to read Blessed John Henry Newman's sermons aloud. That way we got the impact of his skillful rhetoric; the way he built his argument, used his examples, delivered his call.

Jeanne Whalen writes in The Wall Street Journal about the benefits of reading books and articles slowly and silently, getting away from social media, and concentrating on one thing: the text:

Slow reading advocates seek a return to the focused reading habits of years gone by, before Google, smartphones and social media started fracturing our time and attention spans. Many of its advocates say they embraced the concept after realizing they couldn't make it through a book anymore.

"I wasn't reading fiction the way I used to," said Meg Williams, a 31-year-old marketing manager for an annual arts festival who started the club. "I was really sad I'd lost the thing I used to really, really enjoy."

Slow readers list numerous benefits to a regular reading habit, saying it improves their ability to concentrate, reduces stress levels and deepens their ability to think, listen and empathize. The movement echoes a resurgence in other old-fashioned, time-consuming pursuits that offset the ever-faster pace of life, such as cooking the "slow-food" way or knitting by hand.

Whalen also provides insight into the way we read on a screen and how that has changed the way we read a text. We certainly can't appreciate a great work of art by scanning it--and think how scanning The Holy Bible would change the impact of reading God's sacred word!

Read the rest here: slowly.

Misquoting Blessed John Henry Newman, Example #2

I mentioned the dangers of taking a sentence or two of Newman's out of context last week, citing the example of the "live is to change" quote. On Saturday, I found this example, in which the author of an article not only takes a quotation from Newman out of context, but also, because he uses a secondary source (not Newman's letters, collected so meticulously by Oxford University Press in 22 volumes) repeats an error from that secondary source. The citation is used in the context of a review of a book about Intelligent Design, and discovering the context of the quotation includes finding out what the ellipsis left out.

Here is the quotation:

In the end, Darwin’s Doubt boils down to a fundamentally weak argument — the argument from personal incredulity about the origin and evolution of life on earth. As John Henry Newman wrote in 1872: “I have not insisted on the argument from design. . . . To tell the truth, though I should not wish to preach on the subject, for 40 years I have been unable to see the logical force of the argument myself. I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design.”

Here are the first problems--chronology and sourcing--which the author of this article discovers:

I’d now like to pass to what Mr. Farrell has to say about John Henry Newman (who was later made a Cardinal) [and is now a Blessed of the Catholic Church]. His first error is one of chronology: Newman did not write the words quoted by Farrell in 1872, but in a letter to a Mr. Brownlow, dated April 13, 1870, quoted in Volume 2, Chapter 28 of Wilfrid Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman. Why does the date matter? Actually, it’s quite informative. It is highly unlikely that two authors would independently make the same idiosyncratic error in their writings. Thus when I discover that Professor Michael Ruse, in an article he wrote in 2007, makes exactly the same error in chronology – in his article, Ruse refers to “a letter written in 1872″ by Newman, about “his seminal philosophical work, A Grammar of Assent,” and I can find no other source on the Internet making a similar mistake – I am forced to conclude that Farrell copied his information directly from Ruse’s article, without bothering to check his sources. (I hope Mr. Farrell will not accuse me of resorting to an “argument from personal incredulity” in making this inference.) But there’s more. Mr. Farrell’s quote from Newman’s contains an ellipsis … and that got me wondering what he’d left out.

Then the author, Vincent Torley, finds the entire letter and cites it:

‘The Oratory: April 13th, 1870.
‘My dear Brownlow, — It is very pleasant to me to hear what you say about my new book—which has given me great anxiety. I have spoken of the argument for the being of a God from the visible Creation at page 70 paragraph 1. “Order implies purpose”;. I have not insisted on the argument from design, because I am writing for the 19th Century, by which, as represented by its philosophers, design is not admitted as proved. And to tell the truth, though I should not wish to preach on the subject, for 40 years I have been unable to see the logical force of the argument myself. I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design. You will say that the 19th Century does not believe in conscience either — true — but then it does not believe in a God at all. Something I must assume, and in assuming conscience I assume what is least to assume, and what most will admit. Half the world knows nothing of the argument from design — and, when you have got it, you do not prove by it the moral attributes of God — except very faintly. Design teaches me power, skill, and goodness, not sanctity, not mercy, not a future judgment, which three are of the essence of religion.’ (Emphases mine – VJT.)

Now, I'm not ready to turn this blog over to a discussion of Intelligent Design, but I am ready to note that it's so dangerous not to check sources and try to go back to the original source, especially when using secondary sources. Or, as Mr. Torley so succinctly states:

If there is a moral to be drawn from the above, it is this: never quote from eminent people without checking what they actually had to say.

Two Conferences in One: the Catholic Writer's Guild Conference

From the CWG Blog:

Two conferences of awesomeness, one convenient location. You only need to register for one conference, and you get into the other on that same ticket. Your registration fee covers the cost of renting the venue and lining up the entertainment, supplies, etc., but if you would like to attend the banquets sponsored by the CMN, make sure you purchase tickets when you register.

Conference #1: The Catholic “Marketing Network” Conference.

The title is not quite what it sounds like. This is the trade organization for Catholic bookstores, and producers of Catholic books and goods.

What you’ll get:

 

1. A giant warehouse sale at what will be, for three days, the largest Catholic Bookstore in the World. Every major Catholic publisher, and a bunch you’ve never heard of. Inspirational gifts, jewelry, games, DVD’s, clothing, bumperstickers, glow-in-the-dark crucifixes — all that cool stuff and then some. Booths run by the friendliest people on the planet. And everything’s on sale, because this is where the independently-owned bookstores come to make their purchases, so the discounts are deep.
 

2. Daily Masses with some of your favorite priests, adoration chapel (run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal, if they do like last year), confession times offered throughout the week, rosary and holy hours.
 

3. Evening entertainment (included with your regular admission, no extra charge): Film previews, live music, and inspirational speakers.
 

4. Book signings and giveaways hosted by all the major publishers. 
 

Conference #2: The Catholic Writers Guild Live Conference.

 

If you like to write, and want a small, encouraging conference where people will learn your name, take an interest in you, and not try to talk you into soft porn as an “art form”, this is the place.

What you get:

5. So many workshops you can’t actually attend them all. Fiction with Michelle Buckman, marketing with one of Amazon’s top e-book bestsellers, a blogging super-panel, legal topics, writers like Teresa Tomeo and Randy Hain and Pat Gohn, and everything you need to know about getting published, from first inspiration until your book is in the reader’s hand.

 

6. Critique sessions with Art Powers — bring your work and get ready to grow your skills.

 

7. Pitch sessions: Talk face-to-face with your would-be publisher, and find out if your book is the kind they’d like to add to their line-up. (Register with CWG if you’re planning to pitch.)

 

8. Inspirational topics from folks like Daria Sockey, who knows a thing or two about prayer. How does prayer and our vocation fit in to our writing life? What does Catholic writing look like?

 

9. Ice cream. Register with CWG if you’re in it for the ice cream.

Although I cannot attend this year, I do recommend the conference highly and I do hope to attend in 2014!

Kansas Authors Club Convention in Wichita, Kansas

The Kansas Authors Club website is updated with details about the speakers and events for the annual Convention, held this year in Wichita from October 4 to 6 at the Holiday Inn, Wichita East, and hosted by District 5 (to which I belong). I bring this to your attention because I am a speaker at this event. Here's my bio and description of my presentation:

Stephanie A. Mann, author of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in English Language and Literature from Wichita State University. She has taught English and History classes at W.S.U. and Newman University, as well as ministry and spirituality-based courses at various religious venues. Working on a second book about the stories of the English Catholic Martyrs, Stephanie has also written articles for online and print publications, and blogs at www.supremacyandsurvival.blogspot.com.

Stephanie will describe strategies she has developed and techniques she employs to promote her non-fiction, historical work to a niche audience of readers interested in the history of religion in England. With humility and humor, Stephanie outlines her successes and failures, offering insights and lessons learned by using the acronym F.E.A.T.: F = Finding a Publisher and an Audience (research and success); E = Establishing a Platform (broadcast, print, and on-line social media); A = Addressing Challenges and Opportunities (current events and limitations); T = Tracking down Contacts and Customers (networking and working).

“Marketing a Non-Fiction Book to a Niche Audience: It’s Quite a F.E.A.T.”

The Convention Planners have included a wide range of topics on the schedule: fiction, memoir, historical fiction, filmmaking, poetry, etc. Here's the flyer and registration information in case you're local and you're interested.

Preview of a Coming Event

 

 

I'll update you when I know for certain in which issue of StAR it will appear (there is a plan!), but I have had an article about Pope Benedict XVI and his legacy in Catholic England accepted for publication in the St. Austin Review, published by Joseph Pearce! By the way, "The St. Austin Review is the premier international journal of Catholic culture, literature, and ideas"--and this is my first submission to them. Watch this space for more details! See the archives of this journal here and the current issue here (the table of contents and a sample article from each issue).

Not Insane Enough

Per Mark Helprin, in the Wall Street Journal:

Should you be insane enough to want to make a living in this cultural climate by writing fiction that is neither politicized, confessional, nihilistic, sexualized, sensationalist, nor crafted with the vocabulary and syntax of Dick and Jane, here are some suggestions.

I am NOT insane enough, but his next paragraph stings:

Never write in a café, especially in Europe. Ever since Hemingway, this has been the literary equivalent of what in mountain climbing is called the "tech weenie" (that is, someone who cannot get a foot off the ground but is weighed down with $10,000's worth of equipment). Literary skill, much less greatness, cannot be had with a pose, and exhibitionism extorts the price of failure. Also, have pity on the weary Parisians who have wanted only a citron pressé but have been unable to find a café where every single seat is not occupied by an American publicly carrying on a torrid affair with his moleskin.

I don't write in moleskin journals, but I have sat with coffee and water in a Parisian cafe writing away, describing my adventures of the day--and paying for it, too, Mr. Helprin (the cafes charge more for sitting at a table, inside or outside, than if you just stand at the bar--which is where most of the Parisians drinking citron presses congregate). Once, in L'Elephant du Nil in the Marais, a gentleman asked me about some things to see in the Marais while his wife used the WC. I told him about the Place de Vosges, the Carnavalet Museum, BHV, and Rue Rosiers. He complimented me on my English! So I think crazy American writers are not the only ones scribbling away in Parisian cafes.

Helprin does give some more useful advice:

In short, a pen (somehow) helps you think and feel. And although once you find a pen you like you'll probably stick with it the way an addict sticks with heroin, it can be anything from a Mont Blanc to a Bic. The same for paper. There are beautiful, smooth, heavy papers, but great works have been written on ration cards, legal pads and the kind of cheap paper they sell in developing countries—grayish white, almost furry, with flecks of brown and black that probably came from lizards and bats that jumped into the paper makers' vats.

Your most important tools will be your honesty, labor, courage, practice, luck and utter concentration. Inspiration can be magnificent. Handel wrote his "Messiah" cooped up in his room for two weeks. No one saw him, and his meals were allegedly slipped under the door. (Either it was a very strange door or he survived on fruit leather and matzah.) Then again, Voltaire—"On Sunday I was seized by inspiration"—wrote "Phèdre" in six days flat, a play that made his audiences weep not from emotion but because they had to sit through it.

The 2012 Catholic Writers Conference

Although I can't attend this year because of a European trip planned later this fall, I want to let you know about the Catholic Writers Conference, August 29-31, 2012 - in Arlington Texas at the Arlington Convention Center, held in conjunction with the Catholic Marketing Network Trade Show. According to the Catholic Writers Guild:

This year's conference will be focused on "Writing and the New Evangelization." Our vocation calls us to write, but what do we do then? Our conference allows you to connect personally with Catholic publishers and retailers, to learn more about the art, show your work, learn the craft and network.


This year we are hosting:
•workshops on marketing and writing
•presentations on marketing and selling your work
•in-person pitch sessions (Ignatius Press, Ascension Press, Servant Books and Christus Publishing)
•group critique sessions
•national CWG Members meeting (guests welcome, of course)


Our Schedule is still being finalized, however speakers will include Father Andrew Apostoli, CFR, Author Patti Armstrong, author and Ave Maria Radio personality Teresa Tomeo, and author and editor Ellen Hrkach. You'll also have lots of time to walk the trade show floor (which is FABulous). We are also invited to attend all the Catholic Marketing Network events - you don't wanna miss those. We've also arranged for our registrants to be able to attend the blogging track of the Catholic New Media Conference --occurring at the same time--at a very low fee (a fee code will be emailed to you upon registration for our conference).


All combined daily Mass, rosary, adoration - how can you go wrong?

There are also opportunities for CWG members to promote books at our show booth.
A fun, spiritual and inspirational time will be had by all!

I have attended the meeting the past two years, and even made a presentation last year, so I hope to go again in 2013. More info here.

Writing with Pen and Paper

Paul Theroux writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Writing by hand is part of my creative process. The speed at which I write with a pen seems to be the speed at which my imagination finds the best forms of words. A long-ago introduction to the Paris Review Interviews said that authors spoke of pens and rewriting with such passion that it seemed that "writing is one of the plastic arts." I agree with this metaphor of sculpting. I was gratified to read in a Newsweek piece about intelligence last January, that "brain scans show that handwriting engages more sections of the brain than typing" and "it's easier to remember something once you've written it down on paper."

"To think he wrote it all with a feather!" What Sam Goldwyn reportedly said of Shakespeare's works is not as silly as it sounds. Henry James wrote with a quill pen too, until he hurt his arm, and with dictation his style changed. I have seen examples of many writers' handwriting: Thoreau's slanting script (sometimes written with a pencil he had made himself), Naipaul's precision, always in black ink. Henry Miller's handwriting was a model of clarity; so was Anthony Burgess's—and both were also speedy typists.

I write on paper with pen and ink, too. Theroux comments that he uses Lamy pens and a certain paper. I don't require special paper! I write my drafts on paper and then edit while I type. And then I have to print out my work to proofread and edit it again. If I am editing for word count, I will do that with word processing, but otherwise I cannot do edits or proofreading on the computer.

What tools do you use while writing?

Penelope Knox Fitzgerald, RIP (April 28, 2000)

Penelope Fitzgerald was a late bloomer as a published author. Just after she died in 2000, a biography of her father and her uncles was reissued: The Knox Brothers. Richard Eder reviewed the book in The New York Times several months after her death. He situated his review in the context of her development as a writer:

Fitzgerald died last spring at 83, leaving a group of short stories that will come out in the fall. Meanwhile a new edition of the family biography, ''The Knox Brothers,'' has been published by Counterpoint, partly revised by the author in collaboration with her longtime American editor, Christopher Carduff. The original version appeared in the United States a quarter-century ago, well before the novels that would gradually win attention. It sold only a few thousand copies and received little notice.
          It is well worth notice; both for itself and for the light it casts on an author's evolution -- particularly such a late evolution -- into what she would become. In its own right ''The Knox Brothers'' is a lively account of two generations of a remarkable English family straddling the divide between late Victorian and Edwardian. Edmund Knox, Fitzgerald's grandfather, was a staunch Church of England clergyman, a Low Church doctrinal conservative with a social conscience that led him to resign the rural parish where his children blissfully grew up for a gritty slum outside Birmingham. His energy and devotion led to eventual elevation as Bishop of Manchester. Fitzgerald portrays a man whose stern rectitude was joined to the conviction that fun was essential and that children should be very happy (the late in late Victorian: think Lewis Carroll). By and large his were.
         Happiness, at least, was their inheritance; so was intellectual ardor, combativeness and a moral energy that propelled them onto the world at eccentric, sometimes painful angles. Edmund Knox (nicknamed Evoe), Fitzgerald's father, was a journalist who rose to be the editor of Punch, a post well paid and refulgent. Its incumbent was known, part seriously, as King of Fleet Street.
         Dillwyn, known as Dilly, was a Cambridge Greek scholar co-opted from his lifelong passion into an almost lifelong post as cryptographer for the intelligence services, at first in the famously cryptic Room 40 and in World War II at Bletchley Park. There he played an important role (Fitzgerald tries but fails quite to explain it) in cracking the Nazi's Enigma codes. The two brothers were unbelievers, mild and truculent respectively, thus putting them at odds with the bishop. And also with their younger brothers, Wilfred and Ronald, Anglican clergymen both, until Ronald converted and became a celebrated Roman Catholic priest, apologist and translator of a Catholic Bible. That put them at odds with one another as well; and in the case of Ronald, with their father, who cut him out of his will.

The Guardian reviewed her oeuvre in her obituary:

The novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, who has died aged 83, was one of the most distinctive and elegant voices in contemporary British fiction. Her novels, spare, immaculate masterpieces (few of them exceed 200 pages), divide into two sections; an earlier group loosely based on her own experiences, and a later group, in which she moves to other countries and periods. In 1979, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore.
"Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel," observed Sebastian Faulks, "is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality - the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window." . . .
What is striking is the accuracy of her observation, the aesthetically satisfying precision with which, stylistically, the arrow goes straight into the centre of the gold. The economy with which she achieved her effects - "I always feel the reader is very insulted by being told too much," she said - and her ability to combine a microscopic with a panoramic perspective, made most other contemporary novels appear flatulent and over-written. Fitzgerald has been compared in her qualities of social comedy and irony to Jane Austen. The comparison is just in many ways, but ultimately unsatisfactory, for she had a metaphysical quality which is less apparent in Jane Austen - and Jane Austen was not the only novelist of that period by whom she was influenced. She spoke with enthusiasm of the way in which Sir Walter Scott mixed up fictional and real characters, and this is reflected in the appearance of the dying Gramsci, in Innocence, and of Fichte, Goethe and Schlegel in The Blue Flower.

She was named one of the Fifty Greatest British Writers since 1945 by The London Times in 2008.