Walker goes to church. Nation reels.

I went to church Sunday, for the first time in about a month. I’ve been out of town, for various reasons, several weekends in a row.

Frankly, I’d have been inclined to skip it, if I didn’t have absences to make up. I prefer to skip Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in church, for personal reasons. Please understand that I don’t object to the honoring of parents, just because I myself chose my mother poorly, and have not achieved fatherhood. Heaven preserve me from the kind of people who run around being all outraged all the time, because everything doesn’t include them.

But I prefer to let other people alone in their observances. I’d rather stay home in the bosom of my own bosom.

(Also, I think it would have been nice if Trinity Sunday had gotten at least equal billing. Just sayin’.)

But I went, and it was as uncomfortable as I feared. All the men were given numbered tickets as they came in, and then at a point in the service we were all asked to come forward. It wasn’t just fathers, but all men, so it was inclusive and all that. I stayed in my seat anyway, because I didn’t want to presume to patriarch status, whatever they said.

After congratulations and a prayer, they drew two ticket numbers and announced the winners of the Father’s Day drawing. I think the prizes were restaurant gift certificates.

In the cases of both winners, though, the claims came, not from the men up front, but from their wives back in the pews. Both winners had given the tickets to their wives to hold.

I think there’s some kind of profound lesson, or caution, there.

Don’t know what it is, though.

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The Breaking by Loren Eaton

Our friend Loren Eaton has a short story in the latest issue of Port Iris.

In “The Breaking,” a cripple named Moses struggles to beat back ever-encroaching growths named krim as they slowly advance upon his rag-tag village. For help with the work he has only an orphan, a ditchdigger’s son and the indolent child of a wealthy trader. Blasted and apparently barren, the krim look like dead, weather-beaten bushes. Yet they continue to spread, inexorable and merciless, and no one in the village heeds Moses’ warning of a flame that will soon sweep through them, devouring as it goes. …

Not exactly the code of the West

I made a discovery lately, while in my Wild West mood, that clears up a mystery that’s bothered me, off and on, for most of my life.

My maternal grandfather had a few shelves of books in his home. One which I read with interest, and took as my own after his death, was the extravagantly titled tome, Capt. W. F. Drannan, Chief of Scouts, As Pilot to Emigrant and Government Trains, Across the Plains of the Wild West of Fifty Years Ago (As Told By Himself, As a Sequel To His Famous Book, “Thirty-One Years On the Plains and In the Mountains”). Published in 1910.

The frontispiece is a studio portrait of the old scout:

The book tells of the narrator’s adventures, first as a young protege of Kit Carson, then as a wagon train scout, and also as an Army scout fighting Indians. It’s an interesting book in the old style, with similar pleasures and difficulties as the Buffalo Bill memoir I reviewed the other day.

The books seem to have been fairly popular in their time. A source I’ll link to further along quotes a letter to H. P. Lovecraft by Robert E. Howard, who’d seen Drannan in a Texas town as a boy:

…wandering about the streets of Mineral Wells … trying to sell the pitiful, illiterate book of his life of magnificent adventure and high courage; a little, worn old man in the stained and faded buckskins of a vanished age, friendless and penniless…. what a lousy end for a man whose faded blue eyes had once looked on the awesome panorama of untracked prairie and sky-etched mountain, who had ridden at the side of Kit Carson, guided the waggon-trains across the deserts to California, drunk and revelled in the camps of the buffalo-hunters, and fought hand to hand with painted Sioux and wild Comanche.

Over the years, as I’ve read this and that about the West, I’ve looked for other mentions of Col. William F. Drannan.

To my puzzlement, there was never one. Not one. I think I recall a passing reference in an article in a Western history magazine, but nothing, ever, in a book.

I began to smell a rat. Continue reading Not exactly the code of the West

Left Turn and Stomp On the Gas

“The liberal bias of the mainstream media tilts so far left that any outlets not in that political lane, like the Drudge Report and Fox News Channel, look far more conservative than they really are, according to a UCLA professor’s new book out next month.” writes Paul Bedard in a review of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind

Do They Have Crime in Ireland?

John Connolly talks about Irish readers’ lack of interest in crime novels. He says the Irish naturally clash with systemic qualities of crime fiction, such as urban life and respect for police. An Irish inferiority complex may come into play too.

After all, crime fiction is less about the world as it is than the world as it should be. As William Gaddis wrote in his novel JR (1976): “Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”

Crime fiction refuses to accept that this should be the case, and in doing so it reflects the desire of its readers for a more just society. Even at its darkest it is, essentially, hopeful by nature.

Perhaps, for the Irish, that hope is yet to come. (via Books, Inc.)

Midnight Pass, by Stuart M. Kaminsky

I believe this is the last “new” Lew Fonesca book I’ll be able to read, and that makes me sad. Midnight Pass isn’t the last book in the series (that was Always Say Goodbye, which I’ve already reviewed). But it was the last one I found. Stuart M. Kaminsky’s bald little hero, whose stories would never have appealed to me purely on the basis of their synopses, won me over completely. I miss all the books Kaminsky might have written if he’d lived, but I miss the Lew Fonesca stories most.

Lew Fonesca, if you’re not familiar with him, is a man hiding from life. After the death of his wife he moved from Chicago to Sarasota, where he lives in a room behind his tiny office. His existence consists of delivering summonses during the day and watching old movies on his VCR at night. At least that’s his plan. But life keeps intruding. People need help. He helps them. They tend to become friends. Lew’s saga (I only realized it after reading this book) is the story of the gradual re-integration of a traumatized personality. These books could have been downers, but in fact they’re full of hope.

In this story, Lew is hired by a minister, also a city council member, to find a fellow councilman who has disappeared and whose vote is needed to fight a development project. He also gets involved in the problems of a married couple, involving the wife running off with her husband’s business partner. There’s kidnapping, and shots are fired. Meanwhile, Lew keeps his appointments with his therapist, and contemplates becoming a Big Brother. In the end he solves the mysteries and averts some evil.

Reading a Lew Fonesca mystery is like spending time with the best friend you ever had. I’ll miss you, Lew.

Cautions for language and violence, but nothing over the top.

Self-prescribed Tunnel Vision

Goggle Make-up TestIf we continue to watch only the titillating shows and avoid the thoughtful ones, if we get out of the house only for novelty, then eventually all of entertainment will be sequels, writes A.G. Harmon in Image Journal. “If to exercise the body we must accept discomfort, pushing beyond pain,” he states, “to exercise the mind requires a related effort, an involvement that rejects the passive, formaldehyde bath of strobing visuals. A human is more than his eyes—certainly more than his ocular reflexes—and to be human means breaking free of this dangerous trap.”

We could easily dismiss this if Harmon was referring only to popular entertainment, meaning that which is nationally distributed in some way. But I’m sure he is urging us to embrace our local culture by attending concerts, plays, art shows, story-tellings, jamborees and town hall meetings (touching on the civic side of public involvement). By seeking only the exciting or shocking stuff, we risk narrowing our vision, withdrawing into our inner space, and closing off most of the world. Harmon warns us against an obsession with personal comfort.