Scanning new sci-fi titles, I feel someone’s eyes on me, but I am alone in the aisle. The books near me begin beeping and flashing. Are these interactive novels? A metal hand grabs at my finger. Eyes on tentacles spring from the novels at my feet, a gurgling cry at my back! I dash out through waving space gloves.
Between the aisles, I catch my breath.
Maybe I can find something to read among the thrillers.
Ten tiny books for your marveling.
This one with a secret compartment is from a seller of handmade dollhouse items.
I suppose it’s about time I started acting responsibly. I’m in my sixth decade, after all.
The other day I was offered this tremendous opportunity to lecture again on a Scandinavian cruise. As you may recall, I’ve lectured on a couple Norwegian cruises in the past, under contract with a company that allows you to buy your cruise at fifty bucks a day (now it’s $65), and you have to pay your own air fare. Not a way to get rich, but if you have a little money to spend it’s an inexpensive way to cruise.
This would have been the cruise of my dreams. Departure from Southampton, England, then oversea to Iceland. Then Norway and the other Scandinavian countries. It would have been the longest cruise I ever did, and an opportunity to lecture comprehensively on all the Viking stuff I’ve learned. And see places I’ve never seen, as long as places I hunger to see again.
But I turned it down, of course. I don’t have much money now, and anyway embarkation is September 1. I have to participate in Student Orientation at our Bible School on Sept. 2.
On top of that, that’s the week I start online classes for my graduate work in Library Science.
In his Nobel Prize lecture, poet Seamus Heaney said, “The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.”
Heaney, 74, died this morning just prior to a medical procedure.
Ireland Taoiseach Enda Kenny said, “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people.”
This article quotes a 1995 Irish Times piece on Heaney’s publishing success: “Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people.’”
You can hear the poet reading or reciting some of his poems here.
If you have no capacity for violence, then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.
I review a lot of books on this blog, and among those books a very small number genuinely move me – bring tears to my eyes. It was a bit of a surprise that a children’s book, Sheepdogs: Meet Our Nation’s Warriors, by Stephanie Rogish and Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, was one of those.
The passage quoted above doesn’t come from the body of the book, but from Col. Grossman’s famous essay, “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” which is printed in the back. The bulk of the book (which I got free for review, for the record) is aimed at school children. It pursues the sheep/wolf/sheepdog metaphor in an extended manner, to help kids think about force and how to respond to the sheepdogs (police, soldiers, legal concealed weapons carriers, etc.) they may encounter. I didn’t care greatly for the illustrations, to be honest, but the text works very well.
If you’re the kind of parent (or teacher) who believes that guns are inherently evil, and that there is never any excuse for violence, even to save children’s lives, you won’t like this book.
If you’re a parent who wants your children to understand the legitimate and illegitimate uses of force, and who would be proud to see them grow up to be sheepdogs themselves, you will want to have it and share it with them.
You can order it from the US Concealed Carry Association here.
I feel guilty about the savaging I’m about to deliver to the novel Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave. It’s clearly a labor of love. Musgrave attempts to craft a mystery in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, in which his hero, post-Civil War detective Pat O’Malley, seeks to learn the truth of Poe’s own death back in 1849, when he was found apparently drunk and dying on the streets of Baltimore.
Pat O’Malley is a decorated Union Army veteran working as a private detective in New York City. Because he knew and liked the poet Poe, and because he happens to be renting the cottage where Poe once lived with his doomed young wife, O’Malley decides to investigate the reported circumstances of his death (which were indeed questionable). He interrogates a series of Poe’s associates and acquaintances (including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and begins to suspect a cruel plot. This puts him in danger for his life. Continue reading Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave
Order is not any kind of moral ultimatum. The only reason to desire order is to make something else possible. Order is a means to an end. If what order gives us is not good, then we should not continue to uphold that order. For example, a dictator may give us order, but his order may not be worth preserving as we perceive ourselves to lose more by it than we gain. This takes us in the direction John Locke went with his work. Order is there only to secure something else, and something more than mere protection from violent death. What is that something more? Is it freedom? Is it justice?
Mark Twain once wrote a story called “Political Economy,” which is what they called Political Science in his time (in that more humble age political thinkers didn’t pretend to be scientists). I memorized it at one point and used to recite it to my friends when we got together, in a bargain-basement Hal Holbrook style. It told how the author sat down to write an essay on the subject (“the dearest to my heart of all this world’s philosophy”) but kept getting interrupted by a lightning rod salesman, who eventually prevailed to the extent that Twain bought his entire stock of rods and had them mounted on his roof, so that all the lightning in that region of the heavens was attracted to his house, setting off the greatest pyrotechnic spectacle ever seen.
Our friend Hunter Baker has written a short book called Political Thought: A Student’s Guide. Though not as funny as Twain’s story, it’s one of the more lively books you’ll find on the subject. Instead of doing a historic overview, telling how philosophical ideas developed through the work of various thinkers, he starts with things that most readers have experience with – families. He describes his own and his wife’s families, and how their different habits of interaction and discipline worked in different ways. Then he imagines two very different kinds of families – a tyrannical family and a loving one – and relates them to the ideas of the great political thinkers of history, especially Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke.
If you’re looking for an effective Christian primer on politics for young people, you could hardly do better than this. In fact, even I learned a few things, and it’s well known that I know pretty much everything. The only fault I can find with this book that I’m not quoted in it, a failing common to a surprising number of books on Political Science (or Economy).
Recommended.
You’ve probably noticed that, from time to time, I review a novel and tell you that I admired the writing, but did not like the book, either because of the characters or the values, or just the author’s attitude.
Henry Wood Detective Agency by Brian Meeks presents precisely the opposite situation, and I don’t recall this happening before. I didn’t think the writing was great, but I liked the book immensely, like a friend who never combs his hair and isn’t very articulate, but is still a lot of fun to be with.
The story starts on New Year’s Day 1955. Henry Wood is a Manhattan private detective. He’s a quiet man whose great pleasures are reading and woodworking.
A beautiful young woman comes into his office and asks him to help her find a journal belonging to her father, an accountant who has disappeared. He takes the case. Soon after another beautiful young woman comes to him and asks him to find the same journal. She’s the daughter of an inventor, who has also disappeared.
This is kind of fishy, but things are about to get fishier still. There’s a mob connection, and there’s a fire and a murder, and cryptic clues lead to strange – make that improbable – discoveries.
There’s also a science fiction – or fantasy — element. Henry has a closet in his house which periodically dispenses “gifts” – magazines dated in the future, woodworking tools, even a DVD player with a disk (and, thankfully, instructions).
It’s all very bizarre. I kept being reminded of Alice in Wonderland, though this isn’t the same kind of story at all. Through all this strangeness Henry Wood maintains his quiet, earnest character. He does right, and he works most of it out in the end.
Brian Meeks’ writing style is odd. It’s extremely understated. That could be a brilliant stylistic choice on the author’s part, though a fair number of common writing errors scattered through the story suggest that it isn’t. But I wish more new authors would opt for plain, simple prose instead of trying to dazzle us and failing. The dialogue is odd – the characters generally avoid contractions, saying “I will” instead of “I’ll,” and “do not” instead of “don’t.”
But reading Henry Wood Detective Agency was a very pleasant experience. The prose was almost incantatory. It relaxed me.
I enjoyed this book and plan to read the others in the series.
Recommended. It has subdued violence, no sex, and one obscenity that I noticed.
I wish I could say I thought of this myself, and maybe I did (along with you), but I never articulated it, so I can’t take credit even on my own blog.
The typical scenario Dr. Bruce Banner finds himself in, at least on film, is being the victim of gang abuse. Wrong place, wrong time or maybe he chose to stand up to someone who responded with a gaggle of thugs. They beat on him or kick him down an elevator shaft, and he hulks out.
That’s the rage-monster-as-hero idea, but Banner/Hulk is more complicated than that, as these guys point out in the middle of a long list of interesting details on Marvel’s The Avengers. If you’ve seen the movie, note #13-14. Joss Whedon sees the big guy as the beast Banner is trying to contain.
I saw a wag, making cracks about this movie, laugh at how convenient it is that Banner can control his power just when the story calls for it, but he’s missing the point. Whedon’s Hulk isn’t one who can’t be summoned; he’s one who can only barely be contained. In this movie, Banner knew he was holding a very dangerous hair trigger. He isn’t telling us, “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” He’s telling us, “Let’s keep things under control, because when I get pushed over the edge, very bad things can happen.”
Here’s a list of 18 old words that I can’t see regaining usage on 21st century tongues, these folks can: Snoutfair, Pussyvan, Wonder-wench, Lunting, California widow, Groak, Jirble, Curglaff, Spermologer, Tyromancy. There are a few others. Now, I can see bookwright as a useful word. It was apparently a bit of an insult. The others have shortcomings. Follow the link for definitions (via Lintefiniel).