All posts by Lars Walker

Reviews

In which I look more like Sherlock Holmes than Robert Downey did

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'The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual'. Dr Watson watching Sherlock Holmes going through mementoes of his old cases. From The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle from The Strand Magazine (London, 1893). Illustration by Sidney E Paget, the first artist to draw Sherlock Holmes. Engraving.

Not a bad weekend, all in all. The storms did no damage to my house that I’m aware of. I’d planned on doing something constructive and diligent in terms of house maintenance, but wasn’t able to manage it. On Sunday I gathered with other Sons of Norway members at Wabun Park in Minneapolis, and oddly enough it wasn’t for anything having to do with Vikings (much). We had a picnic to celebrate the centennial of our district. Somebody had spoken vaguely of dressing in period for 1910, so I made an effort. I wore a white dress shirt with a tie, light-colored khaki trousers with suspenders (Y shaped. You’ve got to have the Y configuration). And I topped it off with my panama hat. I actually looked sort of like I might have come from the 1930s, if you didn’t look too closely, but I made the effort. This paid off when somebody showed up with a 1913 Moline automobile, and I got to ride around in it a little because I was dressed right.

Sometimes—rarely–virtue is rewarded in this world.

Also watched the DVD of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey.

What shall I say about this very odd concoction? Continue reading In which I look more like Sherlock Holmes than Robert Downey did →

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"I'm just like you, so let me go first."

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Disabled parking sign

This morning on Bill Bennett’s radio show, they interviewed a spokesman for the Special Olympics.

Nothing wrong with that. I have no objection to the Special Olympics per se.

However, I found the spokesman irritating. He never said “mentally disabled”–that’s no surprise. People are expected to say “mentally challenged” nowadays (I think. I may have missed a memo and be a step behind).

But he didn’t say “mentally challenged” either. He used some circumlocution like “people with intellectual differences.” And he kept talking, again and again, about how people with intellectual differences were NO DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE.

I’m getting tired of this.

Logically, it seems to me, there are only two choices.

You can say, “I want to be treated just like everyone else.” Great. That’s fine. Then don’t ask for special accommodations.

Or you can say, “I need special accommodations.” That’s fine too. But if that’s what you want, don’t pretend you’re NO DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE. People who are no different from anyone else don’t need special accommodations.

I have a mild handicap. I suffer from an emotional disorder. I don’t hide this, and I let the people who become my friends know about it. I expect them to cut me a little slack, to have different expectations of me, because certain things that normal people can do easily are very, very hard for me.

I’m different from everyone else.

A lot of people in this country seem to think they can change their neighbors’ attitudes through silencing certain words that offend them. It doesn’t work. It just drives people’s attitudes underground, and breeds resentment.

I would never call a person with a mental disability a dummy. But I might use the word to describe some of their advocates.

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Link sausage

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Stopped at KFC for supper tonight. They were playing mariachi music. I suppose that’s the new normal. Even in Kentucky.

I don’t like mixed metaphors in my dining, though. Of course, my regular Chinese buffet plays Classic Rock. The last time I went there, the hostess, for some reason, was asking me if I knew the names of the various songs that were played. (Probably because there was nobody else in the place.) I think she was trying to assimilate. I only knew one of them (“We Are Family” by the Pointer Sisters). I guess I need to assimilate myself.

I re-wrote my review of the film “Elling” for The American Culture blog. You can read it here, if you want mostly the same thing, with extra pretentiousness.

Finally, here’s Andrew Klavan’s latest “Klavan On Culture” video. I liked it.

Reviews

Hot

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It’s not as hot and humid as when I stacked hay bales in the loft of my dad’s barn back in 1960, but it’s pretty stinking swampy out there. The weather forecast said 70% chance of thunderstorms this afternoon, but when I got home the sky was clear and blue, and I took my walk anyway. It rained this morning, and will likely rain again tonight, but for now the only moisture is suspended in the air, in molecule form, in high concentrations.

Last night I watched another new DVD acquisition, Robert Altman’s “Popeye.” What a strange movie. Awful script. The songs are just an embarrassment. But the actors seem to be having fun playing cartoon games, and the visuals are great, and Robin Williams sings the Popeye song all the way through at the end. It always leaves me feeling better when I’m done with it.

A Norwegian relative wrote me years ago from a vacation in Malta, saying he’d toured the Sweet Haven set, which apparently is (or was at the time) still standing as a tourist attraction.

Speaking of DVDs, I’m on the cheap plan with Netflix now, and I’m taking the opportunity to view some of the cable series everybody’s been raving about. This weekend I finished the final episode of “Rome.”

Continue reading Hot →

Reviews

Addendum to DVD review

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It occurs to me, in thinking more about the film “Elling,” that it’s actually quite a pro-American movie.

As I mentioned, Elling, who has his doubts about the whole idea of freedom, is devoted to the Norwegian Liberal Party.

Later in the movie, the great symbol of freedom becomes a big American automobile.

I smell subtext.

So there’s that.

Reviews

DVD Review: Elling

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It was probably inevitable I’d pick up the Academy Award-nominated comedy from 2001, Elling sooner or later.

First of all, it’s a Norwegian movie (English subtitles). Secondly, the name of the title character is a derivative of the old Viking name Erling, a name with which I have associations. And finally, it’s about people with emotional disorders. I have some connections to that field of experience as well.

The Elling of the film is a middle-aged man who suffers from agoraphobia and fainting spells. He spent his early life living with his mother, and was placed in a mental institution after her death. While in the hospital he made one friend, a big, strong fellow named Kjell Bjarne (first and middle name; Scandinavians generally use both if they have them). Kjell Bjarne is obsessed with sex and extremely foul in his language (even in subtitles). However, as we soon learn, he’s entirely innocent in terms of actual experience with women.

The two are set up in an Oslo apartment, on a trial basis, by the Norwegian social welfare system. If they can learn to function in the outside world, they are told, they’ll be given greater freedom.

Elling isn’t entirely sure he wants such freedom. Continue reading DVD Review: Elling →

Fiction, Reviews

Critic, spare that bird!

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S. T. Karnick at The American Culture ably responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent attack on To Kill a Mockingbird.

Gladwell’s notion that To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960, is insufficiently hateful toward white Southerners and is unsophisticated in failing to embrace radical politics is a truly breathtaking instance of ignorant bigotry. It is also not original, and it is wrong.

Fiction, The Press

…and every postmodern family is a dead loss in its own way

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Jane Austen's PersuasionOur friend Dale Nelson sent me a link to this New York Times column by Ross Douthat, all about why many “literary” authors are turning to writing historical novels, rather than setting their stories in contemporary settings. His interesting conclusion is that modern culture just doesn’t present the kind of conflicts that made the family sagas of old work so well:

You can write an interesting contemporary novel based on the “Anna Karenina” template in which the heroine gets a divorce, marries her modern-day Vronsky, and they both discover that they’re unhappy with the choices they’ve made — but the last act just isn’t going to be quite as gripping as Tolstoy’s original. You can turn the Jane Austen template to entertaining modern purposes, as Hollywood did in “Clueless” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” but the social and economic stakes are never going to be as high for a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet as they were for the Regency-era version.

I think he’s got something there. If you want to write a novel about, say, an unwed mother, you can suggest that your plucky heroine’s Neanderthal, Bible-thumping parents don’t want her to have an abortion, but there’s really nothing they can do to stop her. The only other problem her romantic passions are likely to get her into is that of sexually transmitted diseases. In that case, she either takes medication to get better, or she’s stuck with the problem for life. There’s little scope for her to heroically defy convention and shame the small minds; there is no convention to defy.
P. G. Wodehouse wrote stories about couples being kept apart by unsympathetic fathers and guardians, well past the point in history when such parental figures had “sunk to the level of a third rate power” (to quote “Uncle Fred Flits By”). He was able to get away with it because his stories were light confections, not intended to reflect real life in any serious way. If he’d been forced to be realistic, the fun would drained out like water from a lion-footed bathtub.
Is it an indictment of modern society to say that it doesn’t offer scope to certain forms of fiction? Probably not.
But I often think of the popularity of Amish stories in the Romance genre, as I’ve mentioned here before. I don’t think it’s unrelated to highbrow authors writing historical novels. I think there’s a hunger out there to be able to live in a society where people care enough about you to tell you when they think you’re messing up your life.
The autonomous life, in the end, is a pretty lonely one.

Publishing

A couple links for your edification

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I’ve got a meeting tonight, so I’m in haste, but here’s a couple links worth reading.

An editorial in the Houston Chronicle examines how the Texas Education Agency could deem thousands of students to have passed a test on which they got not a single answer right. Strange times we live in. Tip: Grim’s Hall.

The unspeakable Hunter Baker (don’t buy his book) shares a puerile review of a biography of Time Magazine founder Henry Luce.

Have a good weekend! I’ll be in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, on Sunday, doing the Viking thing at Norway Day.

Fiction, Reviews

Dark Light, by Randy Wayne White

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Dark Light is another installment in Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford series. I was quite pleased with it. The author has positioned this series so as to let his marine biologist/covert ops agent hero play around in both the international thriller and the mystery genres. This one’s a mystery, with the intriguing addition of a (possibly) supernatural element.
In the wake of a devastating hurricane that wreaked havoc on the economy and ecology of his Sanibel Island, Florida home, Ford gets drawn into a dispute between an acquaintance—an old fisherman he doesn’t even like a whole lot—and a property developer. The developer, as it turns out, is not only a crooked businessman but a serial rapist and killer. Ford and his friends end up competing with the developer and his henchmen in the exploration and salvage of a World War II wreck. This attracts the interest of an enigmatic neighbor, an beautiful old woman who sometimes doesn’t seem old at all, but is disturbingly seductive either way.
The supernatural element was what intrigued me most, fantasist that I am. Is the old woman the goddaughter of a famous beauty supposed to have drowned in the shipwreck, as she claims, or is she the woman herself, some sort of ghost?
Doc Ford and his friend Tomlinson are like the extreme poles famously described by Chesterton—one doesn’t believe in God; the other believes in anything. Ford’s unsettling experience with the mystery woman can be satisfactorily explained in purely materialistic terms. And yet, even Doc himself doesn’t entirely believe that.
You used to see this sort of story more than you do now, I think. Stories framed as realistic, but with the door left open just a crack for other possibilities. I like such stories.
Dark Light was an engaging mystery, with a pleasant aftertaste. Cautions for language and adult situations.