I’ve been playing with the kids today and working on theology piece which I hope to post here soon, so while it’s still Reformation Day, let me direct you to this recreation of Luther’s Reformation acts in !!eye-poppingly realistic!! LEGO form. You will believe you are actually in Germany with these events went down.
“The pleasures of Moby Dick are more akin to the pleasures of a police procedural like CSI or NYPD Blue,” writes author and scholar Jonathan Rogers. “A better comparison, really, would be the Horatio Hornblower books or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series.”
He says Moby Dick is a book about whaling, which is the reason there are so many details about whaling in it. He notes, “The piled-on detail seems oppressive to many readers; it truly is hard to handle. But the story begins to do its work on you when you stop trying to handle it.”
Moby Dick by ~scumbugg on deviantART
Actor T. P. Cooke portraying Frankenstein’s monster in an 1823 theatrical production.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! –Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was a lustrous black, and flowing. His teeth of a pearly whiteness. But these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, 1818.
I probably won’t be posting tomorrow, as I have a thing going on in the evening. Silver bullets to shoot, stakes to drive through hearts, you know the sort of thing.
I read and reviewed one of Peter James’ earlier Det. Supt. Roy Grace novels, Dead Simple, several years back, and gave it a middling grade.
But I unwittingly downloaded the Kindle version of another one, Dead Man’s Footsteps, recently, and enjoyed it very much. I thought the characters were better developed here, and Superintendent Grace’s (to me) regrettable interest in psychic evidence only got a passing mention.
The story involves several seemingly unconnected threads, which duly come together in the end, as the real identities of various characters are gradually revealed (with some red herrings thrown in for the fun of it). Supt. Grace is called out to a construction site in his city of Brighton, where a skeleton has been discovered in an old storm drain. Several indications lead him to believe that it might be the remains of his beloved first wife Sandy, who disappeared, as if into thin air, some years ago. Meanwhile a woman is caught in an elevator in her high rise, spending more than a day in terror, unable to send an alarm or use the emergency phone. And we flash back to the morning of September 11, 2001, as a shady Englishman in Manhattan heads for a fateful meeting in the World Trade Center.
The story is long and convoluted, but that’s more a feature than a bug; there are a lot of puzzles here for the reader to work out. And this time the characters were pretty interesting, at least to me. And the story ended with a surprise neat enough to give me a little chill.
Recommended. Cautions for language, adult themes, and a steamy sex scene.
What a strange day. I was very low and very high within a few hours, and all through the mediation of the Internet. This whole thing would have been inconceivable just 20 years ago.
First, though, the weekend report. My big project was my annual ceremony of seeking out and repairing cracks in the retaining wall on the west side of my property, so it doesn’t rain chips down onto my neighbor’s driveway, or give way altogether in small landslide. The neighbor and I have discussed replacing the whole thing, but that awaits the Day When My Ship Comes In. A movie deal would do it.
I knew ahead of time that the work would leave me walking like Walter Brennan on the old Real McCoys TV series, which most of you are too young to remember. Which is just the sort of thing Grandpa McCoy would have said himself, except that he would have said it about Vaudeville or nickelodeon shows.
The other big accomplishment of the weekend was submitting my first research paper for my grad school class. Worked hard trying to master the APA style, and had to cut out half my text after I realized I’d forgotten to make it double spaced. I’ve often had people (some of them with doctorates) tell me they can’t imagine writing a novel. I for my part have a hard time imagining writing a doctoral thesis.
So I hobble into work today and check the grad school web access page, and find that my instructor has critiqued my paper, but not given me any grade points. I took that to mean I’d failed the assignment, and so plunged into Stygian depression. I have to maintain a B average to stay in school. All that was over now, I thought. I was done. Bound for unemployment and life on the street.
Then I e-mailed the instructor, asking her to explain. She e-mailed back that she just hadn’t assigned grades yet.
OK. Never mind, then.
And then I get a plug from John Wilson at Christianity Today’s Books & Culture podcast (see below). That’s like a bucket list thing for me. All my life, Christianity Today has been the standard of intellectual respectability in the evangelical world. And I made it! In a way.
My grandmother would have been so proud. Though I’d have to explain to her what the Internet and podcasts are.
Then we could commiserate about our stiff joints.
In his podcast today, John Wilson of Books and Culture talks about how much he enjoyed Lars’ latest !!spell-binding!! novel, Hailstone Mountain, and a bit about how he was provoked to read it. The world feels smaller somehow.
If you too are brand new to Lars Walker’s novels, learn more by following this wonderful, insightful, and humility-inspiring blog or through the links below:
(via Kevin Holtsberry)
Autumn always gets me thinking of early America. Maybe it seeps out from Thanksgiving, that thoroughly Pilgrim holiday. So I offer you this music which, though in theme is slightly off-season, in tone is perfectly placed. As Hawthorne said, “She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.”
Had a small adventure today, a step outside my customary work orbit. It involved a connection with a fellow blogger, too.
Dennis Ingolfsland (a fine Norwegian name) is the chief librarian at Crown College in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota, a school of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He’s also the blogger at The Recliner Commentaries, a fine blog I’ve been following for years. He doesn’t post as often as I’d wish, but then he’s a teacher as well as a librarian. Also the pastor of a church. That’ll eat into your time.
I’m in the last stages right now of composing a research paper on Theological Librarianship for my grad school class. One thing I was required to do for that project was to interview some working librarians in the field I’m covering. I e-mailed three, and they all agreed to help (librarians, I’m discovering, are a remarkably helpful and accommodating group. Which makes me wonder whether I’m cut out for the job). Dennis invited me to come out to Crown and look at their set-up, and I decided it would be a good idea.
He showed me through their library, which is far larger, better organized, and more sophisticated than mine is. He gave me some good suggestions for connections to online resources. And he bought me lunch, on the college’s dime.
I think they must have confused me with somebody else.
In any case, thanks, Dennis.
A still from Night of the Living Dead, 1968.
It’s Halloween season now, I guess, so I think I’ll speak my mind about zombies.
I don’t like them.
Not in the Bruce Campbell Evil Dead sense of, “I hate those bleeping zombies and I’m gonna blow them away.”
No, I dislike them because they’re boring. Of all the monsters invented by the mind of man, the zombie (as imagined in America ever since the movies altered a Haitian folk superstition into a semi-systematic popular mythology) is the least intriguing.
Zombies have no style, like Dracula. They (generally) have no pathos, or capacity for it, like Frankenstein’s monster. They have no tortured self-awareness, like the wolf man.
They just lurch around hungering for brains, compelled by mere appetite, without choice or agency.
They are a metaphor for modern humanity, as seen by itself.
And I hate that most of all.
Author Neil Gaiman notes that the prison system is big business. How can they predict jail cell growth? “[U]sing a pretty simple algorithm,” Gaiman said, “based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read.” Not that all illiterate people are criminals or all literate people are not, but the relationship between being unable to read and crime is strong. Sixty percent of America’s prison inmates are illiterate; 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems, according to the U.S. Dept. of Education.
Gaiman said he went to China for the first sci-fi convention ever approved by the Communist establishment. He asked an official why this was finally approved. The official replied that the Chinese had no imagination for invention, so they asked the likes of Google, Apple, and others who were inventing new technology. These people were readers of science fiction and fantasy.
“Fiction can show you a different world,” he said. “It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in.”