All posts by Lars Walker

"Skin"

Allan Sherman was an entertainer from the days of my youth, who had no particular talent except for his ability to write clever parodies of popular songs. I was a great fan of his, and even tried to write parodies of my own. But I was never as good at it. The clip above is perhaps my favorite of his works, a take-off on the song, “You Gotta Have Heart,” from the musical D*mn Yankees (fifty years after the show opened on Broadway, I still can’t bring myself to spell out the title). It came to my mind today, heaven knows why.

The bearable lightness of being orthodox

I’ve been reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I’ll review it later, as if its reputation depended on me to any extent. But here’s a quote:

It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern “force” that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile and full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.” They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

Mountainous Praise

Pastor and writer Frank Luke gives my Hailstone Mountain a very nice review today:

The strongest theme I saw was honor and duty in a person’s life. Duty means doing what needs to be done whether you like it or not. Especially if you like it not. The book revolves around honor. Men go to great lengths to gain or keep honor. Things they will not do for themselves, they do to help others. Men they would otherwise befriend they may not because of differences in spirit or blood. When people do their duty to God, the right things happen. When they forget, they and all those who serve under them suffer.

Sock it to me

I mentioned that I’d be doing a Nordic Music Festival this past Saturday. This I did, along with other members of the Viking Age Club & Society. The day was perversely hot for September, perhaps to make up for the perversely cold days we had in spring. We ended up doing two, rather than three, fight shows, and I didn’t wear my armor. They tell me I won a couple fights, but I actually have no memory of it. I remember the losses, of course. At one point I grew concerned that I’d dehydrated myself, in spite of drinking water pretty steadily all day. I went and got some french fries from a vendor, just for the salt.

But what I remember most of all is a gift I was given, a delayed birthday present. It (or they) came from Kelsey Patton, proprietress of Spindle, Shuttle, & Needle, your best source for historical costumes of any era (You think free gifts don’t buy a plug from me? Try me. I’m for sale).

The gift was the pair of socks shown above. These are no common socks, not in our century. They’re made by an ancient process called nålebinding, which goes back to the misty dawn of antiquity. It’s a method of knitting that uses only one needle, and it was how the Vikings made their socks.

I’ve yearned for a pair of nålebinding socks for years now. They’re an important part of a really authentic Viking costume, but not the sort of thing I was in a position to spend money on (they don’t come cheap, and let’s face it, they’re socks. I can sneak by with dark ankle socks, if no one looks too close). So this gift delighted me beyond all decent proportion. My Viking costume would now be almost entirely passable in a fairly tolerant reenactors’ encampment, except for my underwear, which I tend to keep to myself anyway.

So thanks, Kelsey (and Philip, her husband). You have the blessing of an ancient sage.

How Conservatism Can Rise From the Ashes, by Andrew Price

A friend recommended I read Andrew Price’s How Conservatism Can Rise From the Ashes, by Andrew Price, in hopes of raising my optimism about the political future.

This was kind of him, but the results were not as advertised. It’s a well-written and well thought-out argument, but I found little in it to cheer me.

First of all, Price criticizes conservatives for concentrating on the wrong things, and delivering losing messages. One of the wrong things he wants jettisoned is what he calls “theology,” which I take to mean pro-life and pro-family principles. I’ve said it before – I don’t really care much if the Republicans start winning elections again, if they win by dumping conservative social values. I’d probably still vote for them, because low taxes are better than high for everybody, but I’d nevertheless consider my country lost.

Secondly, this book depressed me because Price outlines a series of radical changes in the Republican platform – an “assets tax,” toughening regulation of corporations and the environment, new retirement and health care programs, radical changes to education funding. He might be right, but I rate the likelihood of any of these changes being enacted pretty low. If this strategy is the only one by which we can win, it seems to me we’re probably doomed.

Finally, I question the logic of one of his contentions – that the public hates conservatives because we’re mean and call people names. If calling names turns the public off, why do they vote for the people who keep calling us Nazis?

How Conservatism Can Rise From the Ashes is a perfectly good, thoughtful book, but it did not raise my spirits. It might work for you, though.

September song

And so ends my first week of grad school. I have a little better understanding of what my work load will be, and I think I can handle it. Of course I’m only taking three credits this semester. The plan is to take six per semester starting next spring.

And there are the imponderables. Will my professors hate me because I’m a conservative? Will my fellow students hate me for the same reason? Would I do better to sound off on my opinions, or try to keep my head down? Will I live long enough to finish this thing?

Ah well. If you want to give me moral support, and are in the area, I’ll be with the Vikings at the Nordic Music Festival in Chanhassen, MN tomorrow. The weather is supposed to be hot.

Henry Wood: Time and Again, by Brian Meeks


I reviewed Brian Meeks’ first Henry Wood novel, Henry Wood Detective Agency, not long ago, telling you that I enjoyed it very much in spite of some stylistic flaws. Henry Wood: Time and Again affected me the same way. I liked it a lot, and I suspect you will too.
Henry Wood, New York private eye in 1955, is a quiet man who occasionally gets gifts from the future, deposited inexplicably in a closet in his basement. When he gets word that his former partner and mentor, Mickey Moore, has been murdered, he sets about going through his friend’s notes in search of clues leading to a motive. Meanwhile, a beautiful woman from his past has come back into his life. She involves him in a quest for a mysterious, ancient device by means of which, the legend goes, one may speak to God.
There’s more than a hint of The Maltese Falcon in Henry Wood: Time and Again, but it’s a very different world. I tried to express, in my last review, the remarkably quiet and peaceful atmosphere that pervades these books. Even when the tension rises, there’s serenity here. I can’t explain it. Even occasional infelicities, like not knowing the difference between “part” and “depart,” don’t shake it for me. Meeks continues his odd habit, in dialogue, of avoiding contractions. I didn’t care. I also noticed that the writing, when it was good, was better than I remembered. I particularly enjoyed an idiosyncratic scene where one character, formerly a complete monster and bully, decides to turn his life around and starts acting differently. Such things do happen occasionally in real life, but you rarely see them in books.
Mild cautions for language and sexual situations. I recommend the Henry Wood books, thus far.

Enlighten me not

I’m just dipping my toe into the boundless sea that is online graduate study, and I got involved in a discussion the other day that I thought I’d post something about. The instructor wanted us to share our feelings about the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, in case you haven’t brushed up your history in a while, was an intellectual movement that flourished in the 18th Century. Thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire were leading lights. It was a reaction against the religious passions that had caused so much death and suffering through religious wars like the Thirty Years’ War. We religious types had made ourselves look pretty bad, and decent people began to think we’d all be better off if we jettisoned God entirely. But on what would we base our morality, without a God?

Oddly enough, Isaac Newton (himself a devout, if unorthodox, Christian) gave them their answer. Newton discovered what looked like absolute, immutable laws in the universe. Everything could be explained in terms of mathematics. Ultimate truth, for the fervid Newtonian, was mechanical, impersonal. Obviously morality was also a matter of eternal rules. Identify those rules and that was all the revelation you needed. Human nature was ultimately simple too, and soon we would know how it worked. Then we’d be able to establish a rational government which would permit everyone’s natural goodness to blossom like a flower.

The problem with the Enlightenment was that it was over-simple. Human beings just aren’t that neat (neither is the universe, as we’ve learned since). Human beings, and the universe, are like Doctor Who’s Tardis, bigger inside than outside. As you go deeper in, you discover new levels of complexity.

This, I think, explains the horrors of ideology in the centuries since the Enlightenment. Every tyrant thinks he’s found, at last, the simple key to human nature. It’s economics (Marx). It’s frustrated sex (Freud). It’s race (Hitler). Despot after despot tries to impose his simple solution on the people he rules, and the people stubbornly refuse to respond in a scientific way. So he’s forced to kill them, and to try to find some better people.

The difference between post-Enlightenment horrors and pre-Enlightenment horrors, it seems to me, is the industrialization of evil. The religious fanatic may kill you because he considers you evil, a tool of Satan. But the statist kills you without caring who you are. You’re just in the way, like a tree in a building zone.

The Return, by James D. Best


I’ve read, and reviewed, one previous Steve Dancy western adventure/mystery by James D. Best – Murder at Thumb Butte. I found it a well-written tale with good, but somewhat irritating, characters.
The Return, another Dancy story, is another well-written tale. But it turned me off the series, not because of the writing, but because of one of the themes.
Although technically a western, The Return is actually set mostly in New York City. In the first, shorter section of the story, Steve and his friend Jeff Sharp are closing out their business in Leadville, Colorado. They’ve made a lot of money, and now they want to go east to see their friend Edison, hoping to secure distribution rights for his electric lights for use in mining. They have a little trouble – the kind you handle with a gun – before they go, but they take care of that with the help of Virginia Baker, a storekeeper with whom Steve finds himself, unexpectedly, in love.
Going home, they find that Edison is having some trouble with sabotage in his project to electrify a section of New York City. With the help of Virginia and their old Pinkerton friend, McAllen, they start investigating, and soon find themselves in danger.
It was a subplot of The Return that irritated me. Dancy is the son of a wealthy New York family, and his surviving parent, his mother, is a tremendous snob on top of being deeply involved in political corruption. She is shocked that Steve is sharing a hotel room with Virginia, and the author devotes a fair amount of time to making sure we know how hypocritical and judgmental her attitude is. Steve’s ability to defy her through premarital cohabitation is presented as a sort of moral triumph.
I’m too old-fashioned for that kind of newfangled, Victorian morality.

Film review: Whit Stillman's 'Damsels in Distress'

The first time I watched Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s most recent (after a twelve-year hiatus) film, I thought it was very funny and full of great, surreal dialogue (Stillman’s characters talk like people in books, but then so do I, so I feel right at home), but I wasn’t sure it succeeded as a total work of art. After a second viewing, and a third with the commentary track on, I’m now convinced that it actually works very well, taken on its own terms. In fact, it’s now my favorite of Stillman’s movies.

The film (set, like much of Stillman’s work, in a universe a little loosely moored in time) starts with Lily (Analeigh Tipton), a transfer student, enrolling at Seven Oaks College in New York State. She meets the Girls With Flower Names, and accepts their offer to let her move in with them. Their leader is Violet (Greta Gerwig), who speaks with great conviction and eloquence, and is wrong in almost every factual statement she makes. But she has a great heart, and has devoted her life to helping others. She and her friends run a campus suicide prevention center, where they offer donuts and tap dancing lessons to the clinically depressed. Her great dream is to benefit mankind by starting a dance craze, like the Charleston or the Twist. She prefers to date guys who are neither especially good looking nor especially bright, feeling she can help them achieve their potential, if any. Continue reading Film review: Whit Stillman's 'Damsels in Distress'