The Fox is Black, a design blog, has held design re-cover contests in the past. I just saw their winner for a contest on redesigning The Wizard of Oz, which adds the word “Wonderful” to the title. It is captivating.
A Heck of a Lewis site
Our friend Gene Edward Veith, of Cranach blog, linked today to Joel Heck’s Lewis Site, where the author, who teaches at Concordia University, Austin, Texas has done a lot of work compiling a chronology of C. S. Lewis’s life.
He’s now produced a perpetual desk calendar with an event for every day of the year. The perfect gift for… well, for me. And for those Lewis fanatics on your list, whose name is surely Legion.
Now You See It, by Stuart M. Kaminsky
One of the things I love about the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s novels is their general lack of sociopaths. I first encountered the sociopathic villain in the novels of John D. MacDonald, whose work I also love. It was fresh at the time. Since then sociopaths have been done to death. As mysteries have moved from being puzzles framed by characters to thrillers framed by monsters, authors have offered up an increasing number of semi-human, sociopathic serial killers for their intrepid heroes to blow away, to the cheers of the audience.
Kaminski, like all mystery writers of the later Twentieth Century, had the opportunity to go that route, but he didn’t do it. He continued to write approachable books, populated by people we could recognize. Even the villains were people like us, who’d made one or many bad choices and gotten out of their depth, some enjoying it, some not.
The seriocomic Toby Peters mysteries, of which I’ve reviewed several already, are set in Los Angeles before, during, and after World War II. Toby is a small time, low-rent PI who somehow ends up handling problems for many of the greatest celebrities of the time. In Now You See It it’s Blackstone the Magician, who was an extremely big deal just after the War, when this story is set. Actor Cornel Wilde also plays a small part.
Harry Blackstone hires Toby Peters to protect him. There’s an amateur magician named Marcus Keller who has threatened to destroy Blackstone for some unspecified offense, or just out of general envy. He’s vague about what he plans to do, but he says he’ll destroy Blackstone before the eyes of the world. When Keller finally plays his “trick” it turns out to be more horrible than he planned, and Toby is faced with the challenge of saving the magician from a murder charge.
All Toby’s colorful stock troupe of eccentric friends and allies are on hand and doing their funny stuff, but Now You See It had one change that pleased me a lot. Toby’s brother Phil, formerly a Los Angeles police detective, has retired from the department and gone into business with his brother. Phil’s dangerous temper, which has led him to punch Toby more than once in the past, is now turned to protecting him, which I found heartwarming.
Sadly, this was to be the last Toby Peters book, published the same year the author died.
Recommended.
A Few Questions for God-bloggers of 2003
Joe Carter, formerly of The Evangelical Outpost, is wicking out the nostalgia in me by profiling three God-bloggers who started blogging in 2003, a year before I started this lit-blog. Like Joe, I have admired these men for a long time. They helped shaped the blogosphere, or it feels like they did for me.
Of Tim Challies, Jared Wilson, and Justin Taylor, he asks these questions:
- What was your motivation for starting a blog?
- How has blogging changed your life over the past decade?
- What is one lesson you’ve learned from blogging about writing, communicating, etc.?
- How has blogging itself or the blogosphere changed in these ten years?
Tim says: “I learned that I think best when I write. I don’t really know what I believe until I write it down and work it through in my word processor, and in that way writing has been a critical part of my spiritual development. For some reason it took me beginning a blog to figure this out.”
Jared says: “Then one of our guys said, “Why don’t we stop the clunky email chains and do this on a weblog?” I had no idea what that was, but we all kinda said, ‘Okay.'”
Justin: “Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think we are more bored with blogs than we were ten years ago. Our attention spans are even shorter as we want to hear from and interact with more people but with fewer characters — hence the rise of Twitter. What was a short piece ten years ago is now almost considered ‘long form.'”
New Audio Drama: Ender's Game Alive
I’ve heard Ender’s Game in audiobook, but this is something new. Orson Scott Card has written a new script for his wildly popular book and it is available today as Ender’s Game Alive. Card says it’s the best version of his story yet.
Orson Scott Card – Author of Ender’s Game Alive from Skyboat Media on Vimeo.
This new audioplay is performed by Kirby Heyborne, Stefan Rudnicki, Theodore Bikel, Scott Brick, Samantha Eggar, Harlan Ellison, Susan Hanfield, Roxanne Hernandez, Janis Ian, Rex Linn, and Richard McGonagle among others. Here’s a taste of it:
Stefan Rudnicki as Col. Hyrum Graff in Ender’s Game Alive from Skyboat Media on Vimeo.
Three from the past
When you grow older, you find yourself thinking more about the past than the future. This makes sense, because you’ve got more of the former than the latter. This weekend I watched a little TV in between studying sessions, and noted the following things…
I love the new digital broadcast TV channels, like Me TV and Antenna TV, that show old programs from my childhood and youth. I watch them quite a lot, especially on weekends. On Sunday after church I had the Burns and Allen show on. They did a story centered on some absurd plan to bring a carpenter in to George and Gracie’s house to build a dresser, so they could pretend to their friends that George had built it himself. (I know that makes no sense. If you know Burns and Allen, you’ll understand sense has nothing to do with it.)
The carpenter shows up, ready to go to work.
He is wearing a suit and tie.
I’m not kidding. It seemed perfectly normal in the 1950s for a carpenter to show up at a work location in a suit and tie.
Of course it was Beverly Hills. That probably makes a difference.
On Saturday night, I was working on a paper for my class, and looked for something to watch on the tube. (I like to study in silence, but years of writing books have led me to prefer TV buzz for writing.) To my delight, Antenna TV was running a Rita Hayworth marathon. You know how I feel about Rita. So I settled in with Fire Down Below, a 1957 flick co-starring Robert Mitchum and a very young Jack Lemmon. The guys play seedy Americans running a smuggling boat in the Caribbean, who end up transporting a passportless Rita, who’s supposed to be a woman of mystery with questionable associations from World War II. Continue reading Three from the past
The first tycoon
Adventures in web searches: At some point this week I pondered, as I’ve often done before, the word tycoon. It always sounded vaguely Oriental to me (like typhoon), and it didn’t seem to have any relations or cognates that would hint at the usual Germanic or Latin origins.
So I did something I never bothered to do before. I looked it up on Wikipedia. And discovered my suspicion was correct.
The word tycoon is derived from the Japanese word taikun (大君), which means “great lord”, and it was used as a title for the shogun. The word entered the English language in 1857 with the return of Commodore Perry to the United States. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was humorously referred to as the Tycoon by his aides John Nicolay and John Hay. The term spread to the business community, where it has been used ever since.
I find it interesting that the word originally just meant “ruler,” and got applied to a president, but then migrated to the business world. The reason seems obvious. We already had plenty of good words for powerful men and rulers, but we needed a new term for a distinctively American phenomenon – the driving, dynamic, successful businessman, especially of the self-made kind. Tycoon fit the bill, and it had a good sound to it.
Two views of Joy
Over at ChristianityToday.com, Gina Dalfonzo addresses a problem with Alistair McGrath’s new biography, C. S. Lewis: A Life. In contrast to Lewis’ own account in A Grief Observed, other biographies, and the movie Shadowlands, McGrath inclines more to the view of most of Lewis’ friends, who found the unvarnished divorcee from New York abrasive, unladylike, and possibly devious.
McGrath objects to what he sees as our culture’s “romanticised reading” of Lewis’s marriage, spurred by the 1993 movie Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. McGrath seems intent on debunking that image—even though, according to those who knew them closely, the marriage was romantic before Hollywood ever got hold of it. McGrath finds the circumstances of Lewis’s marriage not quite to his taste, but it’s not Lewis himself that he blames for them….
Whatever the reason, McGrath’s attitude toward her is very negative indeed. He admits that she brought Lewis great happiness, but anyone who had known nothing of her before reading his portrayal would have trouble understanding why. McGrath paints her as an unlikable, determined seducer and money-grubber.
Some time back (I don’t have the magazine handy) the Journal of the C. S. Lewis Society reported a lecture on Joy Davidman, which the speaker began with a sentence on the lines of, “Tonight Joy Davidman will be portrayed, not by Debra Winger, but by Bea Arthur.” I’m assuming she drew material from the McGrath book (which I understand to be generally excellent. Haven’t read it).
I suspect we’re dealing with culture shock here – the effect of a New York Jew on a group of semi-cloistered English scholars raised in the Edwardian Age. It’s too bad they generally found no way to bridge that gap. But I have no doubt, personally, that Joy and Jack loved each other sincerely and worked at their marriage as a true Christian union.
Tip: Frank Wilson at booksinq.
Something rotten in Sweden
Someone posted this on Facebook this morning, and I re-posted it there, because it epitomizes everything I’ve been saying about the course of liberal Christianity. A new archbishop has been elected for the Church of Sweden – its first woman archbishop, Antje Jackelén. At another time I might have had something to say about women’s ordination, but that issue is least of the problems here. Dispatch-International’s story says:
Like kings, all bishops have their own motto and Jackelén chose ”God is greater”. If that sounds familiar, it may be due to the fact that an Arabic translation renders it as ”Allahu akbar”. There are those who believe that her choice is far from random – but very deliberate.
Many have been taken aback by the theological opinions Jackelén revealed during a questioning in Uppsala on October 1. The candidates for the highest position in the Swedish church were asked if they thought Jesus presented a truer picture of God than Muhammed. With her evasive answer Jackelén suddenly emerged as the bishop who couldn’t choose between Jesus and Muhammed. This provoked strong reactions on some editorial pages.
Kyrkans Tidning thought that the bishop’s answer might indicate that Christ is being relegated to the margins of the Church of Sweden and Dagens Nyheter encouraged the candidates to show some theological backbone. The editorial writer at the newspaper Dagen wrote that it is time to accept the idea of a split within the church – between Christians and those who think all religions are equally good.
Now let me say that this article seems just a little sensationalist to me. Its title, “Swedish Archbishop Prefers Allah,” for instance, is an exaggeration of the actual content of the text. Judging by this account, Archbishop Jackelén hasn’t said she prefers Allah to Jesus. She just refuses to make the choice.
I am fairly certain that, in the historical Christian church at all times up till the 20th Century, one thing that would always have disqualified any candidate for a bishopric is a refusal to confess Jesus Christ as Lord. That’s just basic, like failing an eye test for an airline pilot.
Which means that, as far as I can see, the Swedish church has apostasized in electing this woman. Anyone who holds to the faith of the creeds ought to leave that church. At a full run.
And don’t think it’s not happening here. I am confident, on the basis of a lifetime working in churches both liberal and conservative, that there are many church leaders and seminary professors in America (Ms. Jackelén in fact taught at the Lutheran seminary at the University of Chicago for a time) who believe – or disbelieve – in pretty much the same way.
At the risk of sounding like somebody from Left Behind, I declare ours the day of the Great Apostasy.
Bolt, by Dick Francis
Dick Francis’ character Kit Fielding is the hero of two of his novels, Break In, which I reviewed here, and the present volume, Bolt.
In Break In, steeplechase jockey Kit Fielding defeated the machinations of businessman Maynard Allardeck, who inherited a long family feud with the Fieldings, and is just insane enough to attempt murder to get his way. Now Kit is engaged to Danielle, the American niece of the most important horse owner he rides for, Princess Cassilia. The Princess is married to an expatriate French nobleman, Roland de Brescou, who has very strict ideas about honor. So when the inheriting son of his old business partner suggests that their company branch out into gun manufacturing, M. de Brescou stoutly refuses. Such an enterprise is unthinkable to a Frenchman of his class.
That’s when the new partner, Nanterre, corners the Princess in her box at the races and threatens violence unless she can persuade her husband to change his mind. Then he goes so far as to actually barge into their home and threaten them all with a gun.
And then two of her horses are murdered with a “killing bolt,” a device for humanely putting animals down.
This is a job for Kit. He moves in with them and alternates fending off Nanterre’s attacks with his regular racing duties. He’s helped by Prince Litsi, a distant relation of the Princess’s who’s discreetly courting Danielle, who seems to be having second thoughts about the engagement. Still he’s a decent fellow and good ally. And he’s hindered by Cousin Beatrice, an egregious snob from Florida who’s leaking information to Nanterre. And Maynard Allardeck paces on the sidelines, venomous as ever.
Lots of fun. Kit is as stalwart as before, and the other characters are well drawn and interesting. There is the inevitable pre-marital sex, but the language is fairly mild and the violence restrained. The book does communicate a typically English aversion to firearms, excessive in the eyes of this American. And Kit seems to have bad luck running into a surprising number of sociopathic tycoons. Still, recommended, like most of Dick Francis’ books.