Tag Archives: D. Keith Mano

3 things: Chapel, Mano, and red ink

Three items for you tonight. The video above, in case you care to view it, is my sermon last Thursday in the chapel of the Free Lutheran Bible College and Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. I note that it times out at 17 minutes, 57 seconds. The time frame they allotted me was 18 minutes. I did no padding or cutting on the sermon – it was the right length pretty much out of the chute. This is something I seem to have been born able to do, writing to a set time. I find it wholly inexplicable. Anybody know a politician who needs a speech writer? I work cheap. Preferably a conservative; I hate being a greater hypocrite than I already am.

Secondly, our friend Dave Lull, ever on the watch for references to the late author D. Keith Mano, for whom I cherish a fondness, sent me the link to this piece from National Review. An excerpt:

Keith was soon established within our senior ranks and was included in the periodic “off-sites,” where vexed NR policies were (endlessly) debated and (occasionally) resolved. He and I would sit together, two high-school sophomores in the back row of an algebra class, with D. Keith providing sotto voce commentary on the otherwise tedious proceedings. On one occasion I lost it and laughed out loud. NR publisher William Rusher, who on solemn occasions made himself available for hall-monitor duty, barked at us from across the room, “Perhaps Freeman and Mano would care to share that witticism with the rest of the group.” (We did not care to share it. It was about Rusher.)

Thirdly: Report from the writing front: I’m in the process of doing a paper revision on The Baldur Game. It’s well known that I’ve been almost entirely assimilated by the digital Borg; I read and write mostly electronically. Yet I retain a semi-superstitious conviction that I ought to do at least one revision per book in red pen on printed sheets. That’s what I’m doing right now.

And you know what? It does seem to be different on paper. I almost feel as if I’ve re-written the book by hand, in red ink. (Some of it’s even almost legible.)

I had thought the polishing stage was almost complete on this thing. I was surprised find so much substandard writing all of a sudden, like shining ultraviolet light on a crime scene. I’ve never noticed any difference in the reading experience between paper books and my Kindle. Yet revision, somehow, seems to be different.

Mano on the Bethsaida Miracle

Photo credit: Stormseeker (sseeker). Unsplash license.

Our friend Dave Lull, ever generously aware of my fascination with the late author D. Keith Mano, sent me to this 1997 article he wrote for National Review.

The article builds on new medical information, shared by Oliver Sacks, concerning what happens to blind people when they are given (or even regain) their sight. Lacking the experience sighted people have acquired from childhood in recognizing visual clues, these people (he cites a patient named Virgil) see the world as an incoherent jumble of shapes and lines. They can tell color and movement, but all the rest of the data confounds them. Depth and perspective are particular challenges.

Mano relates this information (never available before modern times) to the biblical account of Jesus healing a blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-25:

“And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.”

And the blind man (in what I had always considered a poetic image) replied to Jesus, “I see men as trees, walking.”

Mano notes the sequel, where Jesus touches the man a second time to enable him to process all this new information, and then draws the conclusion:

So let us suppose a man like Virgil, blind since childhood because of traumatic shock. Let us also suppose that Jesus, Messiah-as-therapist, came along and healed Virgil in a non-miraculous way. That does not (and cannot) explain Part Two. Whether Virgil’s blindness was physical or psychosomatic, still his brain would have been deprived of the visual exercise and constant drill essential to clear three-dimensional sight. Only by a miracle could Jesus provide that necessary crash course in visual recognition. Charismatic therapists may be able to unblock sight –but they cannot infuse a human brain with that lifetime of visual experience necessary for normal sight.

Read the whole thing.

Mano on the exclamation point

From Dave Lull, the following citation. I don’t know where he got it.

Priscilla Jensen’s review of “An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!” by Florence Hazrat (Bookshelf, April 7) reminds me of something the novelist D. Keith Mano wrote in National Review in 1975: “The exclamation point may be used only in dialogue and then only if the person speaking has recently been disemboweled.”

Edgar Isaacs

Salisbury, Md.

D. Keith Mano’s ‘Topless,’ reviewed by National Review

Our friend Dave Lull recently sent me a link to a National Review article reviewing the late D. Keith Mano’s novel, Topless, which was released 30 years ago and is (like most of his work) out of print.

I hope it won’t be offensive to our readers to link to this review by Michael Washburn: Topless, a Noir Tragicomedy that Anticipated the Scandals of the Present.

Topless is the first-person account, in the form of diary entries, of a Nebraska-based Episcopal priest, Mike Wilson, who comes to New York after the death of a young woman named Rita and the disappearance of a man involved with her, who happened to run the Smoking Car, a strip joint in Queens. The man is Tony Wilson, Mike’s brother. How pitifully unprepared poor Mike is for the world — of exhibitionism, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs — in which his brother thrived….

If the concept sounds salacious, it is, but the book looks at all the sleaze with a Christian (if often distracted) eye. Tony Wilson knows from the beginning that he’s playing with fire, getting involved in his brother’s world. But he is full of rationalizations. In the end, what he discovers is as much about himself and his limitations as about the solution to the mystery. And there’s a biblical twist at the conclusion that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind.

As reading matter for Christians, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the book (if you can find a copy). Author Mano, to the extent I understand him, struggled most of his life to find a Christian response to the sexual revolution, which seemed so overwhelming and permanent back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. (Little remains of it now, I’d say, thanks to Feminism and Wokeness, except for its contempt for marriage and its reverence for abortion.) I don’t think Mano ever really succeeded in his effort, even to his own satisfaction. The book does anticipate our own times in a way, as Washburn says, but in other ways it’s hopelessly stuck in a cultural moment now dead and buried.

Nat’l Review on D. Keith Mano’s ‘The Bridge’

“We of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours,” the decree states. “It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species.” The operative word is contrition. Guilt is a force eating people from inside. Citizens are too cowed, too stricken with guilt, to mount any organized resistance to the Council’s diktat. Although not all have chosen to give up on life, everything is in ruins and life expectancy for citizens is low indeed.

Our friend and instigator Dave Lull is well aware of my fondness for the late author D. Keith Mano. He sent me a link to this recent article from the National Review on one of Mano’s nearly forgotten but uncomfortably relevant novels, The Bridge.

Perhaps the scenario evoked in The Bridge is too general in nature to belong to Mano or to any one writer. But anybody who reads Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and Mano’s The Bridge, published 33 years earlier, will quickly see how much the later novel has in common with the earlier one. 

I thought myself audacious (and feared I was prescient) when in my Epsom novels I postulated a near future in which “Extinctionism” was a popular movement. I in fact cherished a hope that I could manipulate Fate by exploiting its reluctance to ever prove me right. But we’ve seen Extinctionism begin to take hold in recent years, and one looks at imagined futures like those of The Road and The Bridge, today, with growing alarm.

The Bridge, writer Michael Washburn notes, is out of print but can be obtained online. It sounds intriguing, but – honestly – I’m afraid to read it. Also, look at the price on Amazon!

Mano a Mannix

TV Guide

Dave Lull has done it again. He found an anecdote about D. Keith Mano in a posting at It’s About TV. The author, Mitchell D. Hadley, recaps an issue of TV Guide from May 18, 1967 (I was about to finish my junior year in high school that week, but we didn’t take TV Guide). Mano isn’t featured in the magazine, but Hadley has a recollection:

It reminds me of a story told by the novelist D. Keith Mano, who was teaching a creative writing class and slogging through some dreadful efforts by earnest would-be writers. When one, complaining about his low grade, protested, “But this is how it was,” Mano replied, “Yes, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” And that’s why Joe Mannix’s life is more interesting than yours, Mister Private Detective.

We watched Mannix at our house, but I was never a big fan. I remember that he seemed to get knocked unconscious roughly once a week. I was no neurologist even then, but I was pretty sure you’d be drooling in a nursing care facility if that happened in real life.

A meditation

For Good Friday (via Dave Lull) a meditation from National Review on Holy Week by the late D. Keith Mano:

Again, I think not. God prefers, when He can, to conserve terrestrial order. He has a dramatic instinct. And His own peculiar unities. The Passion is as naturalistic as frail wrist tissue shredded by a spike. Jesus could ferment water. He could infinitely divide the loaf and the fish. But here He had need of a furnished apartment. His colt might have come about providentially, as Abraham’s ram came about, caught in some thicket. But God wanted a known colt: one that had memorable references in Jerusalem. It was His purpose to leave a clear and historical track behind — evidence that might stand up in court. The presence of transcendent power among modest instruments is more persuasive than any bullying miracle could be.

He is risen!

Mano vs. the Oxford comma

Dave Lull sent me a link to this recent Boston Globe column by Jeff Jacoby. It includes a section on the Oxford comma debate, in which he cites the late D. Keith Mano:

The story reminded me of one of those great exchanges that for years made William F. Buckley’s “Notes & Asides” — the column in which he regularly reproduced his exchanges with colleagues, readers, and other correspondents — the best part of National Review. From December 1972:

“A ukase. Un- negotiable. The only one I have issued in seventeen years. It goes: “John went to the store and bought some apples, oranges, and bananas.” NOT: “John went to the store and bought some apples, oranges and bananas.” I am told National Review’s style book stipulates the omission of the second comma. My comment: National Review’s style book used to stipulate the omission of the second comma. National Review’s style book, effective immediately, makes the omission of the second comma a capital offense!”

Among the responses was this lament from D. Keith Mano, a National Review columnist, to the magazine’s managing editor, Buckley’s sister Priscilla:

“I have read with dismay WFB’s ukase on the serial comma. I can’t do it. No way. It’s just plain ugly. WFB says this is un-negotiable. . . . How serious is he? Can I arrange a dispensation?

“Look: I’ll compromise. There should be peace in the family. Instead of “John went to the store and bought some apples, oranges, and bananas” — how about if he just buys oranges and bananas? Or a head of non-union lettuce. You see what this sort of restriction leads to. And they ask me why fiction is dying. Erich Segal, I bet, uses the serial comma.

“You may tell WFB that, from now on and as ordered, I salute the red and white.”

I’m frankly a little disappointed — I’ve been won over to the Oxford comma side, myself. I have the idea the Forces of History are in its favor. Perhaps that was Mano’s fate, to be a genius forever tainted by his associations with questionable movements. Playboy Magazine. Dropping the Oxford.

Of course, my advocacy of the O.C. probably dooms it…

Landmarks and visions

Landmark Center
The Landmark Center in St. Paul. Photo 2005 by Mulad.

The old US post office, custom house, and court house in St. Paul, built in 1902 and home to much graft and corruption in its time, is now called Landmark Center. They’re a little more tolerant of architectural treasures in that city than in Minneapolis, so it was saved from the wrecking ball and now exists as a cultural center. Once a month they host events for various ethnic groups. This month (yesterday) it was the Danes, and we Vikings were asked to man a table for the event. Three of us showed up. We had a pretty good time.

Lots of visitors, and lots of questions, many from children, which is always nice. I was able to explain how people got the idea that Viking helmets had horns, and how chain mail was made. Sold a couple books and several bits of leather work.

One of the best parts was that we were right next to the aebelskiver stand. Aebelskivers are Danish pancakes, formed by secret and occult methods into spheres. They’re generally served with powdered sugar and strawberry preserves. Delightful.

I also had the pleasure, over the weekend, of receiving another tip from Dave Lull. He remembered that I’m fond of the late D. Keith Mano, and he alerted me to a reprint of one of Mano’s old columns over at the National Review. They’re going to be publishing a series of them over the next few weeks. This one concerns a series of visions of the Virgin Mary in Bayside, Queens, New York back in 1975. Mano describes his “investigation” in bemused and gentle terms.

The church of St. Robert Bellarmine—now half school, half gym—stands two blocks up. There used to be a statue on the corner: large copy of those Virgins in telephone booths that wait outside Catholic houses. Veronica had her first visions here. But, as crowds grew, an unsympathetic Mother Church had the statue sledgehammered away. So much for mariolatry. You can still see the pedestal stump, cordoned off by wooden snow fencing.

It occurred to me to do a web search on Dave Lull. Turns out he’s not merely a reader of this blog, which would be enough to adorn the fame of any man. He’s a librarian (thus one of nature’s noblemen) and a facilitator of blogs. Blogless himself, he sends tips like this to a number of book bloggers.

I am honored to be among that number.

More on D. Keith Mano

The death of D. Keith Mano continues to sadden me. I think it’s because he was a Christian author (of a sort) who produced truly excellent literature; stuff that ought to be remembered. But I’m not sure it will. To some extent that is his own fault; he was very much the product of a weird time in American history. He may be rediscovered by future generations, or he may be lost track of entirely.

Richard Brookhiser remembers him in National Review:

He had a set of rules for writing, which he never fully explained to me; the point was to avoid similar constructions in adjacent sentences. He did explain his rules for reading: He pulled books blindly from a bag. One source for the bag was the Strand, the great used-book store below Union Square. Keith would visit it with a pair of dice; the first throw picked the aisle, the second the shelf, the third the order in from the end of the book he would buy. You must have got some odd ones, I said. An Indian fiveyear plan from 1959, he answered. You read the whole thing? I asked. There were lots of charts, he said.

Our friend Dave Lull sent me this link to the .pdf of the whole issue. The Brookhiser eulogy is on page 24. I hope this is legal.