The Rogue Scholar

Happy Holidays From the Rogue Scholar

Haiku Y'All

You might not know that

December Twenty-first is

U.S. Haiku Day.

Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing Fiction

I am posting these here more for self-reference than anything else. The book I wrote for this past National Novel Writing Month is in its editing phase now and having thse rules easily accessible might--I hope-- makes considerable difference in the quality of the editing.  That said, why keep them to myself?

At any rate, here they are:

Kurt Vonnegut

Eight rules for writing fiction:

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

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

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

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

-- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.

Enjoy! 

Best Career Choice 2009: Librarian

U.S. News & World Reports has named Librarians as Best Career Choice: 2009. 

Forget about that image of librarians as a mousy bookworms. More and more of today's librarians must be clever interrogators, helping the patron to reframe their question more usefully. Librarians then become high-tech information sleuths, helping patrons plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records, often starting with a clever Google search but frequently going well beyond.

Who knew, huh?

Read the entire article here.  Enjoy!

Pearl Harbor Reader's Advisory

This December 7, a lot of people will be asking you to remember the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941. I won't say not to do that--memory  fades despite our best effort and remembering such events is important on that basis alone. But being a librarian, I will ask you to read a book as well.

At Dawn We Slept: The Untold History of Pearl Harbor, by Gordon W. Prange remains to my mind the best written account of the events of that day in history. During World War II Prange served as an officer in the Naval Reserve and during the occupation of Japan (from December 1945 to July 1951) he joined General Headquarters, far East  Command, Tokyo, as a civilian. From October 1946 to June 1951 he was chief of General Douglas MacArthur's G-2 Historical Section, and from June to July 1951 he was acting director of the Military History Section. He thus brought an unusual experience and background in the Army, Navy and academia to his research and writing about Pearl Harbor. Additionally, Mr. Prange spent 37 years of work preparing this book. By the time of its publication he knew more about the subject than anyone else. He interviewed virtually every surviving Japanese officer  who took part in the Pearl Harbor operation as well as every notable or important American source. The scope of this work is without equal.

7 Things Making You Miserable

I expect to find many things in my travels along the Intarwebs--usually the stuff I happen to need for work, like subscription lists, ISBN and ISSN numbers, LOC catalog data, etc.  Occasionally I'l find something I didn't expect but like, and very rarely I'll come across something that not only did I not expect but cannot stop reading.

I certainly did not expect to find any example of the last category in the online pages of Cracked Magazine.  But here it is, an extraordinarily well written article titled "7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable." It's the best thing you'll read today. Trust me.

Enjoy!

Digging the Truth Out of the White House

I found this artcle at Truthout.org this morning. Archivists and historians should read this. And so should everyone else. 

Here is the excerpt:

Last Secrets of the Bush Administration

by: Charles Homans, The Washington Monthly

How to find out what we still don't know.

  In March 2001, U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin received a letter from Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the newly inaugurated president George W. Bush. It concerned an important deadline that was looming-one that Bush owed to Richard Nixon.

  In 1974, Congress ordered a lockdown on all records kept by the Nixon White House, afraid that the outgoing president would try to wipe out the paper trail of his disastrous second term and chastened by the recent destruction of decades' worth of FBI files by the late director J. Edgar Hoover's loyal secretary. That order was expanded four years later into a law requiring that all presidents' papers-everything from briefings to personal notes and everyday communications between the president, vice president, and their staffers-be handed over to the National Archives twelve years after their terms ended for eventual public release. Ronald Reagan was the first chief executive to whom the Presidential Records Act applied, and his papers were due to be turned over to Carlin at the beginning of Bush's term.

  Gonzales wanted Carlin to delay the release until June. His letter didn't say why, but Carlin agreed. Then in June, Carlin got another memo from Gonzales-Bush's attorney now wanted until the end of August. Carlin agreed again. The extensions continued until November, when Bush issued an executive order: effective immediately, the release of presidential records would require the approval of both the sitting president and the president whose records were in question, rather than just the former. It was what open-government advocates would later describe as a two-key system: under Bush's rule, Nixon could have buried the Watergate tapes without explaining himself to anyone.

  Bush's executive order had little to do with any concerns of Reagan himself, whose estate has since shared his papers enthusiastically. Some administration critics theorized at the time that Bush was trying to shield from scrutiny his father's vice presidential records, which were among the Reagan White House documents-but ultimately it wasn't really about George H. W. Bush, either. It was about the new president and vice president, and the kind of government they intended to run. Bill Clinton's White House had been relatively obliging in matters of secrecy, handing over millions of pages of documents-down to the White House Christmas card list-when Congress demanded them. Things would be different under Bush. "I think they thought Clinton was too open, had caved in to Congress too much," Carlin says. "It was a different philosophy."

And here is the rest of the article. Enjoy!