Friday, August 1, 2014

The Pen is more Intimate/ Heaven is for Real



This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Jul. 9 The Pen is more Intimate: I was going through some news articles I cut out.  In the Edmonton Journal article “The pen is more intimate than the keyboard” by Noel Taylor on Jun. 30, 2011.  This is a really good article about how no one writes letters anymore, but people use email these days.  Here are some excerpts:

“We transmit our feelings through it. Once we used to feed it, a fountain pen.”

“There is a uniqueness to someone else's handwriting that is at once pleasurable, and in its familiarity, comforting. It takes time to read, something the e-mail skimmer is denied.”

“What it gains in speed, however, it loses in privacy. What was once a private mailing is no longer so. Once sent, it is an open invitation to the most contemptible of all viruses, the hacker. The personal can quite readily become public; the e-mailer is never quite sure. The letter-writer on the other hand, remains smug about his certainty that no one else but the named recipient will read his thoughts. An envelope is a trusty lock.”

“Whole volumes have been filled by the exchange of letters between writers who have something to say to each other, and by extension, the rest of the world outside.”

“Take Oliver Goldsmith: "No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.''”


My opinion: Noel Taylor is right that letters are more personal, but I want to reach to all my friends, family, and blog readers about topics like news and jobs faster by email and blogging.  There are still hand-written notes like thank you notes.

Heaven is for Real: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article “Boy’s tale of trip to heaven becomes a bestseller” by Julie Bosman on Mar. 11, 2011.  I found the article and here are some excerpts:

Just two months shy of his fourth birthday, Colton Burpo, the son of an evangelical pastor in Imperial, Neb., was rushed into emergency surgery with a burst appendix.

He woke up with an astonishing story: He had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus, who had eyes that “were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle,” Colton, now 11 years old, recalled.

Colton’s father, Todd, has turned the boy’s experience into a 163-page book, “Heaven Is for Real,” which has become a sleeper paperback hit of the winter, dominating best-seller lists and selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Much of the book’s success has been fueled by word of mouth, since it did not begin with the usual best-seller channels: there has been no elaborate book tour, big-name publisher or brand-name author. But it has gained traction with a few well-placed appearances on the morning show “Fox & Friends,” “The 700 Club” and CNN.

“We all are perhaps desperate to know what is on the other side of the veil after we die,” Mr. Baugher said, adding that his initial skepticism about the Burpo family’s story was short-lived. “

Patricia Bostelman, the vice president for marketing at Barnes & Noble: “But what was unusual about this book was that it was the story of a little boy. It deactivated some of the cynicism that can go along with adults capitalizing on their experiences.”

“People say we just did this to make money, and it’s not the truth,” Mr. Burpo said, referring to anonymous online comments about the book. “We were expecting nothing. We were just hoping the publisher would break even.” (He said he planned to give away much of the royalty income and spend some of it on home improvements.)

Colton told his parents that he had met his younger sister in heaven, describing her as a dark-haired girl who resembled his older sister, Cassie. When the Burpos questioned him, he asked his mother, “You had a baby die in your tummy, didn’t you?” While his wife had suffered a miscarriage years before, Mr. Burpo said, they had not told Colton about it. “There’s just no way he could have known,” Mr. Burpo said.

Telling his story matter-of-factly, Colton said he was pleased that people were finding the story inspirational.
“People are getting blessed, and they’re going to have healing from their hurts,” he said. “I’m happy for that.”


My opinion: I’m not really religious, but I thought it was a cool article.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: I wrote a little about this before in a 2010 post:


I never read the books, but here is a good Globe and Mail article “Should the little wimp grow up?” by Marsha Lederman on Nov. 9, 2010.  Here are some excerpts where she interviews the author Jeff Kinney:

"I'm using it as a metaphor for whether or not these characters are cartoon characters or if they're literary characters," series author Jeff Kinney said in Vancouver recently. "I've had to make the decision of whether or not the kids should grow up."

The Diary books are not graphic novels in the traditional sense; they're more like hybrids of fiction and cartoons. Written in journal form, the text appears hand-printed on lined paper. The diarist is Greg, a wisecracking, weaselly but fundamentally loveable middle-schooler and video-game wiz who's pretty sharp, but doesn't apply himself at school. He has a simple and kind-hearted best friend, Rowley, and a mean older brother, Rodrick.

Should it continue in the direction of a comic book, where the characters never grow up, à la Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang? Or should it go the direction of other successful young-adult series ( Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl) where the protagonist ages and matures, along with his readers?

"When I set out to write these books, I always had it in mind that the characters would grow up and that my readers would expect the story to have a neat, nice ending," Kinney said. "I always expected to wrap things up basically on the eve before high school and to never progress the characters beyond that point. But the more I've thought about it, I've really wondered if the DNA of the series lives more in the comics world where ... my readers might just enjoy reading about Greg year after year."

He came to the Wimpy Kid idea basically through failure. "I was trying to be a newspaper cartoonist and I didn't have that professional touch, and I couldn't break into that business so I eventually realized I might have a shot if I wrote and drew as a middle-schooler [Grades 5 through 8] which is sort of where my artistic talents maxed out."

He then spent four years trying to remember everything that happened to him when he was in middle school - consulting yearbooks and his younger brother - and writing down 13,000 pages of jokes, which he then pared down to the best ones.

He draws heavily on his own middle-school experiences, such as dodging swim practice by telling the coach he had to go to the bathroom, then spending the entire time hiding out in a change room so cold (if he'd taken his towel, it would have alerted the coach to his scheme) that he wrapped himself in toilet paper.
"I remember thinking, is this actually worse than being in the pool right now?," he said. "But now I'm cashing in."

"I worked all my adult life to get to be a cartoonist, which was my dream, and then to think that it might be over in 3 1/2 years is kind of shocking," he said. "I definitely don't want to go back to the well again and again. I want to know when it's time to give it up. I do think that these things have a life span. I'm definitely not in the business of milking cows as much as I can. I definitely feel that I've gotten what I was chasing after. So now I have to figure out what's right artistically and what my readers will enjoy."


My opinion: It was kind of inspirational and fun to read that article.

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