Month: August 2025

Review: All Things Are Full of Gods

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This book caught my attention as a philosophical, perhaps religious book with its subtitle: The mysteries of Mind and Life. It was written by David Bentley Hart, who is a philosopher, scholar of religion, writer, and cultural commentator. His books include The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss and Roland in Moonlight. His current position is collaborative researcher at the University of Notre Dame.

David Bentley Hart

This book is not an easy read. The text brims with philosophical terms so that I found myself reading with my phone within easy reach to look up the unfamiliar terms. It is 483 pages long with 11 pages of footnotes and a 14 page index. Clearly, it is a scholarly masterpiece. And yet, one wants to keep reading to discover the revelation one can sense is coming, to achieve new insights, and to rediscover important truths. Rather than frame the book as an extended first-person lecture, the author has assigned the debate on the nature of existence to four Greek gods who have near infinite knowledge, the authority of being gods and engaging characters. They are: Psyche, the goddess of soul and life, Eros, Psyche’s husband and god of love, Hermes, the messenger of the gods and the divine intermediary between heaven and earth, and Hephaistos, the god of craftsmen and manufacturing; he is the deity of all technical virtuosity, ingenuity and skill. The dialogue takes place at the estate of Eros and Psyche, in one of its many gardens. Everything is in blossom. In that place everything always is. Psyche begins the debate by picking a rose and commenting on its beauty. She then leads the discussion of existence over the next several days. Hephaistos role, throughout the debate, is the represent the position of reductionist materialism philosophy, which takes the position that everything can be explained scientifically.Topics include mind, life, matter, brain, machine, soul and nature. Much of the discussion centers on the inability of some philosophers (current and ancient) to demonstrate that science (including nuclear physics, modern chemistry and quantum mechanics) does, in fact, answer all of the interesting questions.There are revelations about genetic science which prompt questions about how a living single cell ‘knows’ how to modify its own capability to respond better to its environment. The conclusion is that life, mind and language must be put it place by a ‘higher power’. In spite of many scientific attempts, life has never been produced in a laboratory. Likewise, there is no explanation for the existence of mind, in all its glory, including consciousness. Language owes its existence to mind.

Why isn’t there a condensed version of this book which uses everyday language to make the point that atheism is a dead end belief?

A must read!

“Government Speech”: A New Threat to Library Books

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The Atlantic Daily, August 20, 2025, has an interesting article by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell about how a new legal theory is being used by some libraries to ban certain books. The theory is that library books are government speech protected by the First Amendment. The government must be allowed to speak as it wishes. Thus, it can remove any library book it finds objectionable for any reason.

Justin Richardson is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and the director of the university’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In October, he will receive the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Bravery in Literature.

Peter Parnell is a Broadway and Off Broadway playwright and TV writer. In October, he will receive the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Bravery in Literature.

The authors say: “A decade ago, when the government of Singapore announced its decision to pulp every copy of our picture book, And Tango Makes Three, in the nation’s libraries, we felt profoundly lucky. Not for the pulping—that was alarming—but for the fact that the First Amendment guaranteed that this could never happen in America.

We’re not feeling quite so lucky anymore.

In 2023, our book was one of thousands pulled from library shelves around the country, and as we write, an evolving legal strategy being used to defend many such bans threatens to upend decades of precedent preserving the right to read. The danger this doctrine poses to free speech should worry us all—even those who would rather their children not learn about gay penguins.

In Tango, a pair of male chinstrap penguins in the Central Park Zoo become parents when a kindhearted zookeeper gives them an egg to hatch. (The story is both true and personal to us; when we wrote it, we were also trying to have a child.) Tango turned 20 in June, and for many of its years in print, it has been one of the most frequently challenged books in America. But until recently, it had never actually been removed from the collection of a public-school library, or any public library for that matter. That’s because of a 1982 Supreme Court decision establishing that freedom of speech includes the right to access the speech of others through their books. Every challenge to a public-library book since has been subject to the Court’s ruling that officials may not remove a book simply because they disagree with its viewpoint.

Things started to change for us when a teacher in Escambia County, Florida, complained that the goal of Tango was the “indoctrination” of students through an “LGBTQ agenda using penguins.” A committee responsible for reviewing educational materials for the county disagreed, concluding that the story teaches valuable lessons about science and tolerance and is appropriate for students of all ages. But the school board balked at the book’s message of acceptance. As one board member put it, “The fascination is still on that it’s two male penguins raising a chick.” Escambia pulled Tango from its school libraries, which serve roughly 40,000 children.

We sued Escambia in federal court for viewpoint discrimination (the case is ongoing). In casting about for a way to defend the ban, the school board landed on the theory that library books represent “government speech.” The government, the board explained, has its own First Amendment rights and must be allowed to speak as it wishes. Thus, it can remove any library book it finds objectionable for any reason.

When we first heard this argument, we thought it was absurd. But government-speech doctrine is not new. It was invoked by the Supreme Court in 2009, for example, to allow a Utah town to refuse to install a religious monument in a public park, and again in 2015 to permit the state of Texas to refuse to issue certain specialty license plates. Roughly speaking, the doctrine holds that any action deemed “government speech” is immune to the First Amendment claims of those whose speech is being censored.

No court had ever found that library books represent government speech before May of this year, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit swept aside decades of precedent, including its own previous decisions, to allow the removal of 17 books—Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, and Jazz Jennings’s Being Jazz, among others—from the public libraries of Llano County, Texas. Seven judges in the majority agreed that “a library’s collection decisions are government speech and therefore not subject to Free Speech challenge.” And with that, the books were gone.

The ruling will likely be appealed, and many expect that the Supreme Court will eventually have to decide whether the welter of books and opinions found in every public-library collection represents private speech that the government cannot suppress or government speech that it can censor as it wishes. Imagine the implications if the Court decides the latter. With each new school board, town council, or presidential election, a new set of books deemed out of step with the winner’s political agenda could be swept off the shelves. The government could choose with impunity to destroy any book it dislikes, whether On the Origin of Species or the Bible. The censorship of other forms of speech in public settings could soon follow.

Concern over the expanding use of government-speech claims is not limited to liberals. No less a conservative than Justice Samuel Alito has warned that the doctrine “is susceptible to dangerous misuse.” When the Supreme Court decided that Texas could censor specialty license plates, Alito issued a stinging dissent decrying what he saw as the doctrine’s encroachment on individual liberties. “Here is a test,” he offered: Imagine yourself next to a highway watching the license plates pass—plates variously honoring colleges, clubs, athletes, and cheeseburgers. “As you sat there watching these plates speed by, would you really think that the sentiments reflected in these specialty plates are the views of the State of Texas and not those of the owners of the cars?”

And what if you walked into your child’s school library and saw on its shelves Harry Potter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Captain Underpants; the writings of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Philip Roth, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Alison Bechdel? Would you really think that each of these books expressed the views of your government?

We are not legal scholars. We are a playwright and a psychiatrist who wrote a children’s book about penguins. We cannot know how the justices of the Supreme Court might parse the precedents and the details of a case like ours if and when it reaches their bench. But we know where library books come from, and we know what they are for. They are not made by the government. They do not speak the government’s mind. Even small elementary-school collections speak in hundreds of disparate voices offering a wealth of perspectives on our children’s lives and their world—perspectives that all children deserve to hear.

Our daughter is one of them. Bans such as the one on Tango have marched for the past few years under the banner of “parents’ rights.” We’re parents too. And as the fathers of a now-16-year-old girl, we are determined to defend our daughter’s right to read and write and say what she wishes.

Eleven years ago, we followed the Singapore ban from a distant position of privilege that we now find embarrassing. Today, we hope Americans can learn from that example. In a nation where public demonstrations are tightly policed, hundreds of parents stood up to the government’s threat to destroy our book. On a July afternoon, they brought their young children—some in strollers, others holding their stuffies—along with copies of our book and others like it, to the steps of the National Library Building. They sat down and read to their kids. Their quietly powerful protest made international news, and the Singapore government backed down.

As we await decisions in our case and others like it across the country, we would do well to remember the value of putting our own voices to use, even or especially when the government would speak over us.”

The Death of Reading

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Kara Kennedy has an article on The Telegraph, dated 21 August with the subtitle, “Britain is sprinting toward idiocracy with eyes glued to a screen”. It makes pretty disturbing reading.

Kara Kennedy is a staff writer at The Spectator World and serves as the royal correspondent for The Spectator. She also co-writes the Mom Wars on Substack, where she discusses contemporary issues relating to parental issues and societal expectations.

Ms Kennedy writes: “If you’ve made it this far, congratulations: you’re doing something most of your countrymen can’t. You’re reading, not scrolling, not skimming, not letting TikTok spoon-feed you dopamine while your eyes glaze over. Actual reading. Consecutive sentences. Whole paragraphs.

It’s a vanishing practice, according to new data. The numbers are apocalyptic. Researchers at the University of Florida and University College London have found that, in America, reading for leisure has collapsed by 40 per cent in just two decades.

In Britain, according to the National Literacy Trust, the percentage of children who say they enjoy reading has plummeted by more than a third, while the number aged between eight and 18 who read daily has been cut in half. The verdict is in: books have lost to phones. 

And when reading goes, so does everything else. Literacy isn’t ornamental. It is the bedrock of thought, imagination, politics, democracy itself. Strip it away, and what remains? A public incapable of parsing a story, let alone a policy. Already, 43 million American adults have what the government delicately calls “low literacy skills”.

The cheerier headlines insist that at least young women are still “reading”, thanks to something called “BookTok”. But what are they reading? According to reports, the hottest sellers are “the smuttiest, spiciest erotic novels” the publishing industry can churn out. This is not a literacy renaissance; it’s a paperback version of junk food, or, maybe more analogously, internet porn. If civilisation rests on werewolf fetishes, we may be in trouble.

Otherwise, no. Talk to teachers, and the picture turns bleak. Pupils twitch for their phones after three pages, as if suffering withdrawal. A professor told me his college students – legal adults – glaze over after a few paragraphs. He finally banned phones in his classroom. Miraculously, they began to read again.

And the official response to this collapse of attention? More screens. More apps. More “gamified learning”. The same poison repackaged as medicine.

Suggest banning phones and you’ll be accused of authoritarianism. Just this week, one prominent tech reporter, Taylor Lorenz, lamented that phone bans in schools “harm the most marginalised kids” since “for many underprivileged kids their phones are their only word processor”. God forbid children be forced to look at words on a paper page.

Meanwhile, the adults are just as guilty. Parents outsource parenting to iPads. Schools treat literacy as a boutique concern rather than the foundation of civilisation.

Politicians prattle on about “innovation” and “equity” while shrugging at the fact that an entire generation can no longer follow a story longer than a tweet. And Silicon Valley? They’re delighted. An illiterate, screen-addicted population is their dream market: easy to manipulate, impossible to resist. At home, of course, the tech elite send their children to phone-free Waldorf schools. “I don’t generally want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or a computer for a long period of time,” Mark Zuckerberg once said. Quite.

Every year, fewer children read. Every year, more adults sink into functional illiteracy. The cultural muscles of focus, imagination, and memory wither further. We are not drifting into dystopia. We are sprinting toward idiocracy, eyes glued to a screen. We’re seeing the start of it now. History becomes gossip. Politics becomes memes. Culture becomes noise. The end won’t be televised. It will be reduced to bullet points for an audience that can no longer follow a sentence.”

Kurt Vonnegut Rules for Authors

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In his Friday email, Harry Bingham gives his views on Kurt Vonnegut’s rules.

Harry is founder and CEO of Jericho Writers.

Harry Bingham

“1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

That rule, I think, is bomb-proof. And, in fact, I’d make it a little stricter. I think that even high-end literary fiction has to entertain. It can’t be enough that I have a sense of having done my duty by the Gods of Literature. I need to have had fun – or have been moved – or basically just liked my experience with the book. I think entertainment is core. I’ve never knowingly broken that rule, not even writing non-fiction.

  1. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I’ve never broken that rule either, but I think it’s probably possible to break it effectively. American Psycho is a yukky book, but it’s a work of proper genius … and its genius isn’t because its protagonist likes home-baking, cat rescue and volunteering at church-run soup kitchens. That said, it’s not even 1% of books that can break that rule effectively. So as a general guide, I’m with you, Kurt.

  1. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every character? I don’t know. If your protagonist has a momentary interaction with a receptionist, say, then does the receptionist need obvious motivation? On the one hand, no: truly minor characters can simply fall off the table of things you have to think about. On the other hand, here’s a snippet where Fiona does in fact interact extremely briefly with a receptionist – at a modern, ultra-secure, psychiatric institution for very violent, very dangerous offenders. (Fiona is the key character in Harry’s thrillers.)

The driver takes us in. Hands us over to a neat, blue-suited receptionist – Alys, to go by her fabric badge. She is almost blushingly young, a late teenager at a guess. She wears a tri-coloured scarf, like a seriously out-of-place air stewardess.

‘Inspector Rogers? Miss Griffiths? Etta is expecting you.’

The ‘Etta’ in question is, I assume Dr. Etta Gulleford, the hospital director, and the woman we’re here to see.

No badges, I think because the metal clips could make a weapon. Instead, plastic cards, like the key-cards they use in hotels.

‘Upstairs. Right on to the end. Julie-Ann will find you there.’

She does a crinkle-eyed smile at us, the sort you’d get at an upmarket spa.

There’s no obvious sense of desire there, of wanting something … but on the other hand, I think there probably IS something. She’s blushingly young. She wears a scarf like an out-of-place stewardess. And she offers Fiona a spa-quality, crinkle-eyed smile.

What does all that amount to? I think it amounts to the Alys very much wanting Fiona not to make a fuss. Not to do something that breaks the spell. And the spell is, effectively, that this place can be considered like a nice, posh, modern spa rather than a quasi-prison full of extremely dangerous men. It’s like Alys is saying – pleading – don’t call this out for what it really is.

So, OK, I’m going to go with Vonnegut on this one. Even extremely minor characters should have some kind of want, even if it’s undeclared, even if it’s trivial.

  1. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

That’s probably mostly true, but it can’t be quite literally true. I think that, in the passage I just quoted, every sentence does do one of those two things. But what about this:

We watch for a while. The gulls. The waves. The rolling print of the wind on the water. Stippling squalls that turn the sea’s smooth watercolour into something jumpy and agitated, like the surface has been rubbed with gorse.

That’s not really advancing any action and it doesn’t really tell us much about Fiona, except I suppose glancingly, in the sense that the way she expresses what she sees would be different from yours or mine. But really, the point about those lines is that they describe something – they reveal the character of a place, not a person. That’s fine with me. I expect Kurt wouldn’t have a fight with me over lines like that. I like description. It’s fine.

  1. Start as close to the end as possible.

Vonnegut thought a lot about short stories and I think this rule applies both to short stories and to scenes. Enter late. It’s really easy to write 200 words of intro before you get to the meat of a scene. It’s often better to start with the meat, then use just 20-30 words a few paragraphs in to explain to the reader how they got to where they now are.

But does this rule make sense for novels? Don’t think so – or at least, I don’t think that it’s especially useful. Most of my Fiona novels start with a corpse discovery. Yes, that’s as close to the end “as possible”, but really: it’s right at the start. So: useful rule for scenes. Silly rule for books.

  1. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Oh yes. Definitely. No quibbles here.

Here at Jericho Writers, we occasionally get books that tell a story such as: middle aged woman divorces cheating husband, feels a lack of purpose, gets diagnosed with cancer, takes up pottery, makes great ceramics, meets dashing ceramicist, gets the cancer all clear.

And, yeah, OK. I mean: in an actual person’s life, that’s all bad (to start with) then heart-warming (to end with.) But we all know people with stories like that. And – readers don’t care. They want really bad stuff to happen to characters. They’re sadists. So you have to be too. That’s just how it is.

  1. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Yes. I agree with that. (It’s also, by the way, an exceptionally good rule for marketing books too. Sell hard to your ideal reader. Bore the rest. Ignore the rest.)

But I think it’s not clear enough. Who is that person? In the end, there’s only one person who matters and that’s you. Every line you write, every word choice you make, you’re just asking the question: do I like this? Or that? Which pleases me more?

So your task as a writer is to develop your tastes as far and as finely as possible. You can’t do that in isolation from the broad sweep of contemporary writing. You have to develop your own taste with reference to what others read. But still – write to please just one person. And make it you.

  1. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Uh, Kurt? This is just BS, and he surely knew it.

I mean the cockroaches/pages thing: OK, yes, at that point, I think there is often a kind of solid inevitability in play … but not always. In one of my Fiona books, Fiona ends up clapping handcuffs on the dastardly people who tried to imprison her (in a very weird way.) That part plays out as the reader should by then expect.

But then, a Ukrainian millionaire tries to bribe her … and she (in a Fiona-y way) semi-accepts the offer.

And a girl who went missing needs to be reunited with her father, and Fiona does just that.

Both of those things make sense from what went before, but I don’t think any reader could plausibly have mapped out either scene. So, sorry, Kurt, no way. I think you were having a laugh.”

Writing a Novella

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Tara Deal has an article on the Writer’s Digest website, dated December 9, 2024 in which she talks about the’Allure’ of the novella for both readers and writers.

Tara Deal is the author of the award-winning novellas That Night Alive (Miami University Press) and Palms Are Not Trees After All (Texas Review Press). Her most recent novel, Life/Insurance, is the winner of the Fugere Prize from Regal House Publishing. She lives in New York City.

Tara Deal

Tara says, “Everyone talks about novellas getting a lot of attention these days because everyone’s attention span is shrinking (a novella is somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 words), but short books have always been around, enduring, durable, made of quality materials. Stealth Wealth. Novellas are versatile, subtle, changing to suit the times. Metamorphosis. Because think of what a novella represents. The good life! (“Instagram’s Hottest Trend? Flexing Your Favorite Paperback,” according to Nylon magazine.) 

Imagine spotting someone reading a novella from afar, the flash of a bright blue dust jacket across the subway platform, the park, the plaza, or the palazzo. And even though it does take a bit of effort to read a novella, it’s not too much. 

But what if you’re a writer rather than a reader? What if you’re at home, with a computer, rather than out buying paperbacks with abandon, traveling around the world, and enjoying life at night? Is it really worth the effort to invest your time and money and short attention span into crafting a beautifully made, eternally desirable novella? Yes!

Imagine the exhilaration and accomplishment! Mild Vertigo. But how are you going to do it? With something so slim, almost fragile, approaching evanescence, you don’t want any shoddy workmanship to slip in.

How are you going to get a handle on it? I don’t know, but I’ve been working for years on novellas, trying to get it right. Working for years, sometimes giving up and escaping, packing too much into too many suitcases, heavy books for long flights, but always coming home to strip down, pare back, refresh, and rewrite. Back to trying to write a novella that will stand out from the crowd. How?

You want to make a good first impression, ideally on the first page. Your hook doesn’t have to be flashy, but it should be substantial, weighty. Quality at a Glance. So pick out a few essentials that work together, that you can repeat (if necessary), that you can recombine as your write. 

If you focus on one or two characters (rather than a crowd) and one strong story line (rather than trailing subplots), then you need to insert only a scattering of telling details (objects, phrases, names? Who can say.). But it’s always smart to invest in those evocative (provocative?) items that can go from day to evening. 

And this is no time to be frugal. Go all out on a few well-chosen items, as if you’re in Paris. Pretend there’s Never Any End to Paris. But it doesn’t matter where you are, in a city or on an island, in an apartment, An Apartment in Athens or New York, either way, wherever. Make room for what matters.

Strip away things from your text, as if you are a devoted minimalist committed to black and white. You can cut more than you think: description, dialogue, digressions. Think of Chanel, who said to always remove something from your outfit. Think of Hemingway and his iceberg. You need see only a little to imagine the depths. The Torrents of Spring. In a novella, everything is washed away to reveal a vein of gold. Or a vein of blood, depending.

As if you’re running for a plane about to leave for somewhere glamorous (Fez, Lisbon, Osaka? I don’t know. You have your own itinerary.). Keep checking your watch to make sure things are on schedule. Keep checking your novella, rereading as fast as possible, looking for any snags in the fabric. Time is running out. You are losing hours as you travel. Flatland. 

Are there any rough edges in your reading like burrs in the desert that make you look up and think of going somewhere else? Or are you lost in a dream? Does your novella feel like an enduring design that can’t be improved upon? The Time Machine.

Like the clasp on a necklace, with a satisfying click, the end of the story feels solid, satisfying. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. You’ve strung along some scenes, some thoughts, and although they might have seem unbalanced to the casual reader, a window shopper who wasn’t committed, now everything hangs together, tight or loose, depending on your style. A gift. The Pearl.

Afterward, a moment of luxuriating. Self-Care. Whether you’re a reader or a writer. The Lover. Has the novella transported you? What do you remember? What will you tell people at dinner? Nothing. Quiet Luxury. You’re happy to have avoided the packaged tour through a bloated book that feels like a typical tourist’s itinerary with too much time wasted while waiting for those bits that are tender and delightful. 

With a novella, you always go straight to the heart of the matter, the marrow, the best parts, presented on a platter. As if on a terrace in Venice or looking out over Bangkok. The Stranger. The suburbs are far behind you, beyond you. The night turns purple. Do Not Disturb. Dream Story.“