Dom Robert Heinlein, OSB

There's something Benedictine about this typical bit of Heinleinian exposition from his 1956 juvenile novel Time for the Stars:

"Well, think about it. The greatest menace in space is going coffin crazy. You are shut up for a long time in a small space and there is nothing outside but some mighty thin vacuum ... no street lights, no bowling alleys. Inside are the same old faces and you start hating them. So a smart captain makes sure you have something to keep you interested and tired - and ours is the smartest you'll find or he wouldn't be on this trip."

I suppose that's the same problem faced by the abbot of a monastery - how to keep the crew from going coffin crazy and killing each other. Keep them interested with prayer & liturgy and keep them tired with manual labor, as discerned by St Benedict some 1500 years ago. Or maybe it's the other way around, come to think of it: keep them tired with liturgy and interested with stuff to work on.

Keeping them interested and tired is decent advice for parents, too.

Hitch

How can you not love a man who writes like this? And aside from the offhand beauty of his prose, look at his metaphors from the old days of the Cold War and the fortified border between West and East - how easy it is to find yourself suddenly, one day, on the other side of that stark frontier, having to make do in an alien land. God spare him so he can write some more.

NEP News!

It's time to grab a favorite drink, settle back and read a nice long essay by Neil Peart - now with baby pictures!

Tolkien fan fiction

As I was drifting off to sleep last night I thought that surely someone has written short stories based in Tolkien's world - it might be interesting to read about the little-known areas of Middle-Earth and the parts they played in Tolkien's history. Hollin, for instance, when Elves still lived there. It was such a bang-up good going-to-sleep idea that I traced the phrase "TOLKIEN FAN FIC" on my arm in the hopes of remembering it this morning. It worked. Behold.

What to write about

It seems the early Romans didn't find much to write about. From Edith Hamilton, The Roman Way:

A sense for poetry was not strong in the Roman people. Their natural genius did not urge them on to artistic expression. Rome was said to have been founded in the year 753 B.C., and the earliest piece of literature we know about is a translation of the Odyssey made at the end of the First Punic War, some five hundred years later. For all these centuries it would seem that the Romans felt little impulsion to express in any form what the world was showing them and life bringing them.

Bubba's Bar-n-Grill is open for business

Get thee there now and read one of the best writers around.

The quest for the Eye of Satan

The latest from Neil Peart, who changed the color scheme of his updates! It used to be a nasty blinding white-on-black that left an afterimage when I looked away from the computer; now it's a readable dark red on gray parchment. Thanks, Neil!

Neil Peart can flat-out write

New essays at NEP News and Bubba's Book Club. Now if he'd just do something about that blinkin' fargin' blinding white-on-black color scheme in NEP News.

In NEP News he mentions Deal's Gap, North Carolina, whose 318 turns we navigated downhill in a Dodge Grand Caravan loaded with camping gear back in 2002, on our Tsali trip. Near the bottom of the "dragon's tail" we watched an old bald guy in a midlife-crisis Corvette miss a turn and head off the road.