All posts by Lars Walker

Religion

I, bully

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News item: This story from CBS Dallas-Fort Worth seems to have surprised a lot of people. But I suspect there were a lot of us for whom it was no surprise at all. The story has to do with a study done at the University of Texas, Arlington which indicates that anti-bullying programs in schools don’t seem to do any good, and indeed may do harm.

The student videos used in many campaigns show examples of bullying and how to intervene. But Jeong says they may actually teach students different bullying techniques — and even educate about new ways to bully through social media and texting.

This is what happens in a post-Wisdom world, where experts have replaced sages, grandmothers, and the Scriptures. Experts believe that children are basically good, and desire to learn how to avoid bullying. Those of us who are familiar with actual children know that the true situation is different. You can’t divide kids up into “bullies” and “victims.” The categories are fluid. Every kid has it in him to bully, by the same kind of instinct which causes chickens to single out a member of the flock who’s been wounded, and peck it to death.

I’ve spoken of being bullied here before. I was bullied a lot, both at home and at school. There were few safe places in my world.

But I was also a bully, now and then, when fate chose to make me the alpha dog in some tiny situation. I never even thought about it. It came naturally. Today I’m hotly ashamed of those incidents, but at the time it just seemed like the obvious thing to do.

We won’t make progress until we recognize human nature for what it is. And we won’t do that until we start reading the Bible seriously again.

Fiction, Reviews

The Severance Kill, by Tim Stevens

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I reviewed a previous novel by Tim Stevens, Ratcatcher, a while back. I liked it, but thought it went a little over the top, demanding the kind of suspension of disbelief that’s better suited to action movies. Severance Kill dials the improbabilities back a little while remaining a fast, tense, wall-to-wall action story.
Martin Calvary works for a top-secret English intelligence organization called the Chapel (and yes, I’m sure the names are significant). The Chapel specializes in assassinations, deniable by the government. Martin joined up after a military stint in Bosnia, where he spared someone’s life with horrific consequences. For a time he was content to kill the bad guys good and dead.
But recently he’s grown weary of the exercise. Perhaps they deserve to lose their lives, but does he have the right to take them?
So he quits. Only his boss has incriminating evidence on him. He wants one more job out of him. There’s an English traitor, a defector to the old Soviet Union. It’s been decided he has to die. If Martin will just do this one, he can walk away free.
Martin doesn’t trust his handler, but he goes to Prague to do the job. Before long he’s tangling with Russian spies, Czech mobsters, and a group of naïve young activists. Martin gets attacked repeatedly, captured, and tortured, gradually figuring out he’s been lied to, and setting a trap of his own.
Severance Kill is not for the squeamish. There’s lots of violence – the scenes of Martin’s torture are particularly intense. As in Ratcatcher, one wonders how the hero can continue functioning physically, but it’s less of a stretch this time out. The plot doesn’t bear close analysis, but taken as an action romp the book works very well indeed. The characters are especially good. Recommended for those who like this sort of thing (I do). Cautions for the aforementioned violence, some sex, and language.

Fiction, Reviews

The Unburied Dead, by Douglas Lindsey

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I finished this book before I left for Minot, but a review of The Unburied Dead by Douglas Lindsay didn’t fit my schedule at the time. As a result my memories of details are a little faded. But I’ll give you my general reactions, which remain vivid.

G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that there are two meanings of the word “good.” If a man could shoot his grandmother with a rifle at 500 yards, he would call him a good shot, but he wouldn’t necessarily call him a good man.

In the same way, The Unburied Dead is an excellent book in terms of technical achievement. It provides a grim and gritty picture of police life in Glasgow, where Detective Sergeant Thomas Hutton gets involved in a hunt for a serial killer. Thomas is a relatively honest cop, in an indifferently honest department where the police aren’t above “stitching up” a suspect if they know he’s guilty. But some cops have gone over that fuzzy line, and it only serves to muddy the investigational waters. Thomas himself is contemplating a reconciliation with one of his ex-wives, the mother of his daughters, but he can’t resist a dalliance with his sexy boss.

In short, this book is extremely short on sympathetic characters. The violence is horrifying, the language filthy. The Unburied Dead was a masterful piece of contemporary noir, which I was delighted to be done with when I finished it.

Uncategorized

Picture from an alternate universe

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The Most Interesting Viking in the World

Photo credit: Kelsey Patton

In a moment, the story behind the photo above, tentatively titled, “The Most Interesting Viking in the World.”

Høstfest 2013 is history, but my aches and pains linger. Those aches are not, as you might think, primarily the results of bruises suffered in fighting. I actually took remarkably little damage this year. It helps to have enthusiastic young men to bear the brunt of the combat. No, it just seems I have reached an age where sitting in unfamiliar chairs and car seats causes you to stiffen up.

Høstfest as a whole seemed to be quite a success, so far as I could tell. Minot, North Dakota hasn’t fully recovered from the flooding a couple years back, but the festival and the visitors have. Not the busiest festival I’ve seen, but plenty lively.

The interesting thing this year (as I mentioned before I left) was the involvement of the History Channel “Vikings” TV series people. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have almost no respect for that production, which sins against history in all kinds of significant ways. And pretty much everybody in our Viking Age Club & Society feels the same way.

But we have a relationship with Høstfest itself, and they asked us to welcome the History Channel people and participate in the promotion, particularly a “Viking cosplay” contest in which people were invited to upload photos of themselves in Viking costumes in order to win prizes. This we did. The “people from the History Channel,” in fact, proved to be (aside from a PR guy) the four lovely girls you see above, who wore copies of the battle costume of Ragnar Lodbrok’s wife in the series. They were not in fact actors, or even Hollywood people, but models recruited from an agency in Fargo. So it was easy to be nice to them, especially for me, whose idea of being nice to pretty girls is to leave them strictly alone, out of fear that they’ll think I’m hitting on them.

Nevertheless, somebody in the club – I won’t say who – thought it would be hilarious to do the photo above. And I was not hard to persuade.

As for fights, I won a few and lost a few. As so often happens, the younger guys seemed to figure out my moves as time went on, and my score went down.

I sold nearly all the books I brought. This will be the last event where I sell The Year of the Warrior paperbacks, as I’ve nearly run through the stock I acquired in my divorce settlement from Baen Books. In future I’ll just direct people to the e-book, available due to the Baen Reconciliation (new from Robert Ludlum!).

And now, pardon me while I lapse into a brief coma.

Uncategorized

On the eve of embarkation

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By way of a friend of our friend Aitchmark, here’s a blog post from VA Viper, with an embedded recording of a linguist reading what – he guesses – the old Indo-European language, from which are descended (you guessed it!) European languages and Hindi – sounded like. It’s a guess, but an educated one.

As I’ve done for some years now at this season, I’m leaving this weekend for Minot, North Dakota and the Norsk Høstfest. This is not what you’d call a relaxing vacation. I’ll be helping to set up and tear down the Viking camp, doing three combat shows a day, and this year I’ll be helping one of our guys do lectures at local elementary schools. He injured himself with a Viking axe (I’m not kidding) and needs me to do the heavy work, including the axe demonstration. Also, of course, I’ll have to check in online frequently to keep up with my graduate school class work. I should schedule a second week of vacation to rest up when I’m done.

[By the way, for the first time that anyone can remember, they’re advertising hotel rooms available in Minot during the festival. Just in case you were thinking about going.]

I won’t be driving this year again, but will be bumming rides with friends. This prevents me visiting commenters Roy and Dale as was once my wont, but Mrs. Hermanson, my car, just isn’t up to the exertion anymore.

Not sure I am either, come to think of it.

Oh yes, some people from the History Channel Vikings series (which I’ve panned here and elsewhere) will also be hanging around. Must remind myself to be nice to them.

Chances are I’ll fawn all over them like the hypocritical sycophant I am.

Reading, Religion

Blessed Nonsense

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Today, just a snippet from an article in the current issue of Intercollegiate Review – “The Subhumanities: The Reductive Violence of Race, Class, and Gender Theory,” by Anthony Esolen:

So much of human life, says [Marilynne] Robinson in her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is blessed “nonsense,” not overmuch concerned with survival or whatever else preoccupies the reductivists of our time. It is like the folly of God, as Erasmus reminds us, thinking of the mighty words of Saint Paul, who declares that all the wisdom of the world cannot overcome the foolishness of the Cross, which is of course the foolishness of love.

Our friend Anthony Sacramone is Managing Editor of IC.

Reading

Extinction soon

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Photo credit: Raysonho.

Over at the American Spectator (which seems to have rejected my last submission, but hey, I’m not bitter) Matthew Walther writes about his recent experience at the American Library Association convention in Chicago, where he particularly wanted to talk to people about the increasing trend of libraries dumping perfectly good books because electronic versions are now available.

WHICH REMINDS ME: At this gathering of a few thousand librarians, teachers, writers, publishing types, I saw surprisingly little evidence of reading taking place. With two or three exceptions—elderly women whose badges told me that they are librarians from Indiana—the only printed text I saw anyone interact with was the 308-page full-color conference guide. This also brings me to why I was there. I was trying, am in fact still trying, to understand why, with little or no visible resistance or even comment from patrons, library friends’ societies (local charities that raise funds for libraries and organize things like book signings and reading groups), school boards, members of university faculties, elected officials at the local, state, and federal government level—to say nothing of the national press—thousands of public and academic libraries across the country are all but throwing away millions of books, many of them rare, expensive, or both. Three years ago the Engineering Library at Stanford University was home to more than 80,000 volumes; it now houses fewer than 10,000….

The American Library Association is an organization which looms large in my consciousness these days. Everyone in my Library and Information Sciences class talks about it in terms of “us,” though I have no plans or need ever to join, and it’s not a requirement for the program. Mr. Walther makes no comment on the reflexive progressivism which I perceive in it, based on classroom discussions. His concern is simply to question whether libraries without physical books can really be considered libraries at all (I read the other day that a library in Texas has gone precisely that route). He seems a little Luddite about the Kindle, but at least he gave his a fair try. My own devotion to paper and ink survived my first experience by about 20 seconds. (That’s not to say I want to jettison my own personal books, whose name is Legion, or those I husband at work.)

I spoke with a former academic librarian yesterday, and his opinion was more pessimistic even than Walther’s. Once the digitizers solve the problem of copyright for more recent works (he said) libraries will simply cease to exist. They will go away. They will be made redundant. He’s studying Theology now, in order to teach that for a living.

I don’t know if he’s right. I do think the academic library will survive for a while, if only because accreditation agencies love to set requirements for collection size.

My friend suggested that I join The Association of Christian Librarians, instead of the ALA. I heeded his counsel.

I’m pretty sure I’ll need the support. I’m beginning to think I’m working very hard to prepare for the equivalent of a managership at a Barnes & Noble store.

Writing

Take your colon out to lunch

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Today, according to this web site, is National Punctuation Day.

I think I’m pretty good at punctuation, generally. The problem comes with differing styles. For years I eschewed the Oxford Comma, because somebody back in elementary school told me you should never add a comma before the conjunction, as in “I had lunch with Gary, Eric and Denny.” It was only fairly recently that I learned there was any controversy. I learned this while acting as editor of the Journal of the Georg Sverdrup Society. I found out that we follow the Chicago Manual of Style, which mandates the Oxford Comma (“I had lunch with Gary, Eric, and Denny”). The Associated Press is against us, but we don’t follow them. So I learned to love it. Now I can’t imagine doing without it. And that’s good, because we use the APA Manual in graduate school, and they’re Oxfordian as well.

I keep wondering how the American Psychological Association’s style book came to dominate graduate school documentation.

The only other punctuation problem I can think of that I personally struggle with is the way Microsoft Word automatically clumps the three periods in an ellipsis together, turning them into a single, compact idiogram. Which we then have to unclump over at the Sverdrup Journal, because we want our periods separate but equal. I don’t know why. I just do it.

Happy Punctuation Day. Period.