All posts by Lars Walker

Authors, Writing

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of Minnesota’s most famous sons, though it’s hard to imagine any author less typically Minnesotan. I once visited some people who lived in the town house he once occupied, on St. Paul’s toney Summit Avenue.

Anyway, Robert J. Avrech, one of the consistently most interesting writers at Big Hollywood, posts about Fitzgerald’s sojourn in Hollywood today. Although he doesn’t agree entirely, he quotes the opinion of one of Fitzgerald’s friends, John Lee Mahin, who blamed at least part of the author’s implosion on political pressures from the film community’s burgeoning Communist movement.

His work was condemned, they said, and he believed them. He denounced himself even more harshly than his judges, accusing his work of being trivial and superficial.

“He actually told me he’s ashamed of The Great Gatsby,” John fairly snarled. “Those cursed Do-gooders… they’ve got him believing his work isn’t worth a tinkers damn just because he wasn’t waving a banner or marching in a picket line. They’ve destroyed him, as sure as God made little apples.”

Publishing

Jeepers creepers, where’d they put the peepers?

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Joe Carter, over at First Things, blogs about an interesting trend in current book cover design—pictures of women with the eyes cut off.

In spite of one commenter who thinks it’s just a way to focus on… a different feature, I think there’s something more complex going on here.

Mystery is a very compelling quality, in men and women. I think there are still mystery men in our cultural world, but the mystery woman seems to have pretty much disappeared. Any woman who isn’t “in your face,” “letting it all hang out” is looked on as some kind of throwback to the Victorian era. Female movie stars used to keep their private lives private (the studios often made up entirely fictional biographies for them). They never showed up in public without make-up, and dressed to the nines. The mystery, the “glamor” (which comes from an Irish word meaning “a magical power to deceive”) was a major part of their allure. For most female stars today, a nude scene is a rite of passage, and their affairs and break-ups are conducted in front of a battery of cameras.

Where are the women on the book covers looking? Are their expressions quizzical, or frightened, or knowing, or arrogant? The mystery is intriguing. It draws you in. I’d be willing to wager psychologists suggested this design element, to get readers to think, unconsciously, “There’s mystery here. I must buy this book to find out what it is.”

I wonder if eye contact means as much to normal people as it does to me. Because of my shyness disorder, making eye contact is very difficult for me. I avoid it. (I expect some people think me dishonest because of it, which I regret.) I have to make a distinct effort to make eye contact. When I meet someone’s gaze, I feel almost as if I’d been shocked, as if a spark has been struck. And I feel vulnerable, as if I’d opened my door to a stranger. Even if the person is someone I know and have no reason to distrust.

The up side is, I live a life full of mystery.

Uncategorized

The queen of Asgard?

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Here’s an interesting puzzle that’s got people in Viking studies scratching their heads these days. If you go to this link at the Old Norse News blog, you’ll see a picture of a little silver figurine recently unearthed by archaeologists near the ancient royal site of Lejre, in Denmark.

The figure is seated on an elaborate throne. If you look closely, you’ll note that a bird sits on each arm of the throne.

Now Snorri Sturlusson’s Prose Edda, our chief source of information on the Norse myths, tells us that the god Odin had a throne in Asgard, and that he kept a pair of ravens, Hugin and Munin, who flew out every day to get news of the world, and then flew back to light on their master’s shoulders and whisper what they’d learned to him. Obviously, this figurine is a pretty good match for Odin. It even seems to have a damaged eye, and Odin was one-eyed.

The problem is that the clothing is clearly female.

What does this mean?

One possibility that comes to my mind is the obvious joke—it might be Odin in drag. One thing we know about his cult is that he was associated with a shamanistic ceremony called seið. There are numerous indications that seið was generally performed by women, and that men who participated in it were deemed to have performed a kind of unmanly act, comparable to sodomy.

Perhaps that’s the meaning of the figurine. Maybe Odin has changed genders to perform a seið. Purely a guess, from someone who has no great love of Odin.

One thing to bear in mind when studying Norse mythology is that, when Snorri wrote the material in the Prose Edda down, he was under the Church’s eye. He was purposely making the case that one could study the old gods academically, without falling into heathen practices.

Which makes it likely he left some stuff out.

Authors, Blogs, Socials

“Thanks for stopping by”

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This is one of the intangible rewards of blogging.

A few days ago I wrote about the death of mystery writer Stuart M. Kaminsky, mentioning how much I liked his books.

Today Kaminsky’s son Peter responded in the comments.

How very strange and satisfying.

Reviews

Disney’s A Christmas Carol

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I went to see Disney’s new A Christmas Carol on Sunday. I didn’t like it as much as Ted Baehr and Michael Medved, whose glowing reviews persuaded me to see it in the first place, did. But I did like it, and I suspect it may grow on me, and the DVD will end up on my Christmas Carol shelf, along with the Sim, Scott and Finney versions, which I watch liturgically every Yuletide.

One bit of good news is that the familiar computer animation technique, which director Robert Zemeckis seems to have infinite faith in, has improved considerably. The eye problem, especially—the way all the characters in Beowulf seemed to be blind, because they couldn’t track the objects they were observing—has been solved. Facial expressions are also much better. Still, I find the animated people—almost human-looking but not quite, and mostly with slightly enlarged heads—a little off-putting. On the plus side, Tiny Tim (with whom I’ve never been very happy ) is much less irritating than usual here, and only spends a short time onscreen.

The animation technique brings one big, solid advantage. Here, at long last, we have a Scrooge who looks like Scrooge, a Scrooge who looks like the man I imagined when I first read the story (and I’ll bet you did too, if you’ve ever read it. Which is worth the trouble). Sim, Scott and Finney, for all their excellences (and they had many) didn’t really look like Scrooge. Their noses and chins weren’t long enough, and did not incline toward one another. Jim Carrey doesn’t look like Scrooge either, but the magic of CGI changes that (he also looks like the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, as he plays all those roles. There’s a very odd scene where Christmas Past, along with Old Scrooge, is watching Young Scrooge, so you actually have a Carrey watching a Carrey watching a Carrey). Continue reading Disney’s A Christmas Carol →

Religion

Of belts and breastplates

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It’s not often I come up with anything that, I imagine, could actually contribute to biblical studies, in even the tiniest way. Like never. But I think I’ve got something. Maybe it’s old news. Maybe somebody pointed it out long ago, and I just don’t know about it. But I’ve never heard it mentioned, that I can recall.

This Big Insight does not rise from the depth of my spirituality, or from my profound understanding of the words of Scripture. It arises from the fact that, as a Viking reenactor, I wear and use armor from time to time, something your average biblical scholar only gets to do during that crazy week in the senior year at seminary, when he gets initiated into the Secret Global Conspiracy and undergoes the Unspeakable Rite.

Just kidding.

Anyway, I’m thinking of the famous “full armor of God” passage, from Ephesians 6:10-18:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes…. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place….” Continue reading Of belts and breastplates →

Fiction, Reviews

Your Heart Belongs to Me, by Dean Koontz

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Some people might not care for this book (the Amazon reviews support that contention), because it’s different from Dean Koontz’ other work. But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that Koontz frequently changes genres, and mixes and matches genres within a story. He doesn’t like to do the same thing twice (with the exception of the Odd Thomas and Frankenstein books, which just prove that he refuses to be predictable even in his unpredictability). With Your Heart Belongs to Me he has (in my opinion), not only broken new genre ground, but produced his best writing to date.

This book sings. Again and again, I paused in my reading just to savor how beautifully the author had expressed himself. The usual pattern for a popular writer, as far as I’ve observed, is to start out really good, with a book he’s probably labored over for years, and then to become increasingly sloppy, as his publisher’s demands for several books a year force him to churn stuff out and send it away in the rough. But Koontz is an infinitely better writer today than he was when he started, and the best of his recent work reaches (I think) the level of literary fiction. That’s certainly true of Your Heart Belongs to Me.

The blurb on the back told me that this was the story of Ryan Perry, an internet social networking billionaire who’s had a heart transplant and starts getting threatening messages from someone telling him, “You’re heart belongs to me.”

But in fact, Koontz takes more than half of the book to set that situation up. We see Ryan as a rich, healthy, happy young man who lives the American dream. He has an enormous house, surfs whenever he wants to, and is dating a gorgeous young woman. Then he starts experiencing physical symptoms which turn out to indicate, not a heart attack, but a congenital cardiac enlargement condition. He begins to be suspicious (the condition might have been caused by poisoning). He employs a security company to investigate various people who might want him dead. On a whim, he takes his business from the cardiologist he’s been seeing, and switches to a more famous, more expensive specialist. And along the way he has occasional visions—or hallucinations—that seem to be communicating a message. But it’s a message he can’t understand.

Finally his name comes up on the international transplant waiting list he’s on, and he gets his surgery. His recovery is good. But his girlfriend breaks up with him. (She says he knows why, but he can’t figure it out.) Then the messages start appearing—a bag of candy hearts, all with the same message, left on his pillow in a room that ought to be locked and secure. A heart-shaped pendant left on his pillow. A sudden knife attack, accompanied by a whispered threat.

It isn’t until he’s kidnapped and threatened with death that Ryan begins to acknowledge the things he’s been purposely overlooking, and to understand the meaning of the warnings he’s had. “It’s all about the subtext,” his girlfriend, a writer, once told him.

The ending is different from that of any Koontz novel I recall. But it was a good ending, entirely satisfying in its way.

I recommend Your Heart Belongs to Me highly. You’ll find yourself searching your own heart.

Reading

“This is what warriors did.”

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I’d meant to review Dean Koontz’ Your Heart Belongs to Me tonight, but it’s Veterans Day, and instead I’ll share a short excerpt from Grossman and Frankowski’s The Two-Space War, which I reviewed not long ago.

Across the countless centuries warriors have taken their cues from the “Old Sarge.” There was always an Old Sarge. He was the veteran of twenty battles, and he was calm. Weeping and becoming emotional at the memory of combat was not acceptable because, across the centuries, warriors found that the way to continue performing the desperate, wretched, debasing, dirty job of combat was by controlling your emotions, dividing your pain, and making friends with the memories. Every night, around the campfire, or over hot food with their messmates, this age-old process continued.

In these sessions the men also sorted out what had actually happened. In Alexis Artwohl’s twenty-first century law enforcement research, almost a quarter of the combat veterans she interviewed had memory distortions. They actually “remembered,” sometimes with vivid intensity, something that did not happen. And half of these veterans had experienced memory loss, with significant gaps in the memory of what happened. Left to their own devices, there was a tendency to “fill in the gaps” with guilt-laden acceptance of responsibility, sometimes even with a greatly exaggerated sense of guilt. “It’s all my fault.” “I let my buddies down.” “I was a failure.” These were the kinds of responses felt by many men after combat. Only their mates, the ones who shared the event with them, could help them fill in the holes accurately. And only their friends, their comrades who had shared the searing experience of combat, only they could give understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness of the events that had occurred.

Every day, day after day, this is what occurred. This is what warriors did.

Religion

Martin Luther, founding father

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Our friend Dr. Gene Edward Veith quotes a letter from James Madison today, in which this “Father of the Constitution” credits Dr. Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms as an inspiration for the American religious model.

It illustrates the excellence of a system which, by a due distinction, to which the genius and courage of Luther led the way, between what is due to Caesar and what is due God, best promotes the discharge of both obligations.

Religion

Happy birthday, Martin Luther

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No hidden message is implied by my noting that today is Martin Luther’s birthday. I am a Lutheran, and am grateful to God for the work He accomplished through the man from Eisleben. He had plenty of flaws and committed his share of sins, but he was God’s man.

“All who call on God in true faith, earnestly from the heart, will certainly be heard, and will receive what they have asked and desired, although not in the hour or in the measure, or the very thing which they ask. They will obtain something greater and more glorious than they had dared to ask.”

That’s probably all you’ll get from me tonight. I have a late appointment.