Parts of Speaking Publishing

 I get the substack of a writer named Joel M. Miller. His short bio says,  Chief content officer at Full Focus. Former VP of editorial and acquisitions at Thomas Nelson. Author of several books, including The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future. This man knows books. I find his substack worth reading (not all are, and most are not worth paying for). In today's article, he interviews a veteran English teacher, Matt Ryan, of Massachusetts, who started a TikTok group/channel/hashtage (I don't know the lingo for it) called CanonChat. Here is a part of the interview.   As an educator, you’ve been critical of the move by the National Council of Teachers of English to “decenter” book reading (which seems utterly bonkers, if not cultural suicide). What’s the strongest version of the argument you’re opposing—and where does it go wrong? The strongest version of NCTE’s argument is a claim that is undeniably true: Students now live in a world that bombards th...

 You can probably find articles on the Internet about the "study" where subjects were shown two a "Monet" painting of waterlilies and asked if it was a real Monet or an AI-generated image. Most got it wrong; the "painting" really was one of Monet's work (although a photographed image, which makes a difference), but most said it was AI-generated.  Of this, Spencer Klavan says:   "the Monet 'hoax' only shows that people on the Internet have opinions without much bases. They don’t know a Monet enough to discern if it’s real or an AI copy. Edmund Burke, in his wonderfully Burke-y sort of way,  put it beautifully   when he wrote that what sets good critics apart is chiefly the keenness of vision they develop 'from a closer and longer attention to the object.' The sensibilities take time to train. . . . M y weirdly optimistic take is that all these artificial imitations aren’t so much displacing reality as reminding people what they  lo...

 I am trying to wean off political podcasts. They get incredibly repetitive, and of course depressing.  So the alternative is to listen to the classical music station out of Collegedale, Tennessee, run by the Adventists at Southern Adventist University. Yesterday at 7:15 as I travelled up I-75 to spend my morning watching my granddaughter, I was treated to John Williams' Star Wars themes (I think they play it in the credits) and The William Tell Overture.  What fun! What a way to get the energy to play with a toddler!

This is borrowed from The Rabbit Room newsletter. I truly recommend The Habit podcast.   I n an exchange that didn’t make it into the final episode, one of my recent podcast guests—Tish Harrison Warren? Alan Noble?—got on the subject of training montages in sports movies. Everybody knows that athletes have to train. We admire grit and hard work. Training can even be picturesque (especially Rocky training in Russia’s wintry countryside while Drago gets fine-tuned in a Soviet robotics lab). A training sequence is good for any story about overcoming hardship. But the long, grueling, possible boring aspects of physical training—the aspects of training that actually transform the mind and body of the athlete—don’t make for great cinema. The training montage telescopes all that slow grinding down to something that is visually pleasing, fast-paced, and enlivened by jaunty music. Thomas Aquinas talks about the bonum arduum , the difficult or steep good. The training montage gives u...

  “ If you’re tired of narratives that paint Appalachians as helpless, backward caricatures. . . “, This phrase, from an anonymous Amazon review of bell hooks’ poetry collection, Appalachian Elegy , captures part of the reason I write about Appalachia. Thank you for reading The Foark River Salon and Bait Shop . It may not strike you as an Appalachian novel because it does not come anywhere near some of the standard themes and tropes that Appalachian novels are traditionally expected to use. That is exactly why I want it to be considered Appalachian; not only is it set smack dab, as we say, in the middle of Southern Appalachia (south of the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee) but it purposefully does avoid stereotypical themes. Or does it? One standard trope is the outsider coming in to “save” the benighted mountain people. Another is that the characters are benighted: poor, ignorant, uneducated, barefoot, addicted, outlaw, religiously fanatically, sexually or morally devian...

  “Barbara, I found it!” My brother Donald called out to me from across the lush, overgrown grass and mostly obscured grave markers of Fort Lincoln Cemetery. For the past twenty minutes he and I had been on a hunt in this long-established resting place in Colmar Manor, Maryland, right outside the District of Columbia. Rush hour traffic sped by on the other side of the iron fence, mostly moving east into Maryland’s Prince George’s County suburbs or on to Anne Arundel or Calvert Counties. I looked up from the marker where I stood, about 100 feet from my brother. I had been scraping cuttings of dried grass from its face, mostly with the tip of my New Balance shoe, trying to decipher the name. So far I had cleaned off dozens of markers, all of which were level with the ground. I had used my foot and sometimes by hands, quietly disappointed by each. A few swipes across each marker showed either letters that did not fit the name of my query or dates of birth and death that did...