All posts by Lars Walker

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Autumn’s best

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I got off a line today that I thought was pretty good. Over at Threedonia, Mike Kriskey had posted a link to this article about all the trouble scientists have been having with the Large Hadron Collider. The article quoted Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute, who, along with Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan wrote a series of articles over the past year and a half in which they (semi-seriously) suggested that the project wouldn’t work because God “rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

I wrote in a comment that, according to recent reports, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is drafting a resolution to bestow its blessing on Higgs particles.

Well, I thought it was funny.

What a nice weekend. I don’t think I’ve been able to say that a single time before since last winter. Finally now, when the kindly part of the year is almost past, we’ve actually gotten a stretch of good days.

Saturday was especially nice for me, as I did absolutely nothing in the way of chores or maintenance (except for washing clothes, which is a Friday night job and therefore doesn’t count). Instead I spent the afternoon with four other Vikings at one of the guys’ houses, training for live steel combat. We have a new guy, a college student, who seems to be as unhappy as I am to be stuck in this millennium, and was champing at the bit for some cold steel action.

But it was a good exercise for all of us, and did my spirit a world of good. Afterwards our host made hamburgers and brats, and we watched the almost good Viking movie, The Viking Sagas (better than most on authenticity, weak on story, characters and acting). It was the kind of guys’ outing I haven’t had enough of most of my life, because of my peculiar tastes and interests. How bully to have a gang of like-minded sociopaths to hang out with in my old age.

Religion

A beiger shade of pale

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Joe Carter at First Things passes on a story about the “average color” of the universe, according to astronomers. You’ll quickly note that it’s about the same shade as the walls of a doctor’s waiting room. The joke is that this must be “God’s favorite color.”

It reminds me of an old Reader’s Digest story about a pastor who shows friends around his new parsonage. “Why are all the walls beige?” one of them asks.

“Because that’s the only color a committee can agree on.”

Is beige God’s favorite color? I doubt it very much.

In the first place, how do we know this universe is the only one there is? Perhaps there’s a bouquet, a rainbow of universes, running the full spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. Perhaps we live in one of the dull ones.

My experience with God is that He Himself is anything but dull, and he doesn’t make decisions by committee. Like Aslan, He’s not a tame Lion. He has a taste for extremes, and the average beige of our universe represents a mean between the extreme joys and the extreme horrors of existence.

I have to imagine that His favorite color (like mine) is red. Because when He looks on the red of His Son’s blood, He is pleased and forgives our sins.

Fiction, Reviews

Stuart M. Kaminsky: Toby Peters books: An appreciation

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Last night I noted, belatedly, the passing of author Stuart M. Kaminsky last month. Purely by happenstance, I was reading several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the time, and was already planning to post about them.

The hero of the series, Toby Peters, is a shabby, distinctly down-market private eye working in Los Angeles in the late ’30s and the ’40s. Despite the fact that he can’t afford any better office than a closet in a dentist’s office, lives in a seedy boarding house overseen by a batty landlady, drives a tiny old Crosley automobile, and can never find a clean shirt to wear, he continually takes cases involving prominent personalities, especially movie stars.

It has occurred to me that Kaminsky was having a joke on us, and that the real secret of Toby Peters is that he was delusional.

But when I look past that bit of spontaneous deconstruction, I find the Peters mysteries simply a lot of fun. Peters is no Philip Marlowe. Although he can handle himself in a fight (he used to box and his face shows it), he injured his back doing bodyguard work for Mickey Rooney a while ago, and has to sleep on a mattress on the floor. He doesn’t drink at all, and his favorite food is cold cereal. He has an ex-wife whom he loves, but she won’t go out with him because he’s immature. He has a brother who’s a cop, and who generally seems to hate him (he gave him his first broken nose), but who usually comes through for him in a pinch. When he needs help with his cases, he can sometimes hire an old cop or security guard, but most of the time he ends up enlisting his friends—Gunther, his next-door neighbor, who is a three-foot-tall Swiss translator, Sheldon, the fat and unhygienic dentist from whom he rents his office, and Jeremy, the retired wrestler and poet who owns the office building. The result often resembles a Keystone Kops chase more than the elegant “payoff” in a William Powell movie.

The books I’ve read in this spree were Down for the Count (concerning Joe Louis), Think Fast, Mr. Peters (concerning Peter Lorre, a splendid opportunity for some Sam Spade dialogue), Buried Caesars (Gen. Douglas MacArthur) and Tomorrow is Another Day (Clark Gable).

They were fast reads. They didn’t offend me (though there’s a little rough language and implied sex). They were often very funny, and always well-written.

Recommended.

Uncategorized

Outrage

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If anyone reading this has friends or family at Fort Hood, especially if any of them are among the dead or wounded, our prayers are with you.

I had not known until this afternoon that military personnel are forbidden to carry weapons on military bases.

This strikes me, an ignorant civilian, as not only idiotic but oxymoronic. They’re known as our “armed forces,” after all.

The last people who should be defenseless in this country ought to be soldiers, and the place least vulnerable to a shooting spree ought to be a military base.

Or so it appears to me.

Reading

Christian Authors Show, A Christmas Carol, and Kaminsky

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I did a webcast radio interview on Saturday, with an operation called The Author’s Show. (You go to this site and then click on The Christian Author’s Show on the tool bar.) Supposedly my segment has been posted now, and you should be able to select it from the menu. But I can’t make it work. Maybe you can. Maybe it’s just my computer.

Dr. Ted Baehr (with whom I apparently have some distant connection, through my publisher) loves the new animated A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carey. I guess I’ll have to see it. If I love it too, it’ll mean I’ll have four different versions to keep on DVD and watch each Christmas. I’m not sure I can carry (or Carey) all those Carols.



Noodling around the internet, I discovered the shocking news that Stuart M. Kaminsky died, just about a month ago. I’m bereaved.

Kaminsky was one of the best, inadequately appreciated, mystery writers in America. He won awards and all, but he never really broke out as I would have wished for him. Instead of writing creepy thrillers full of gore and psychopaths and cannibalism, he wrote old-fashioned whodunnits, frequently brightened by his wit and always lightened by his human compassion.

As it happens, I just found several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the bookstore, and am almost finished with them. I was planning to write an appreciation when I finished the last one—maybe tomorrow.

I haven’t made up my mind entirely whether I prefer his Toby Peters stories (Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, with our shabby detective pulling a succession of big movie stars out of the soup) or his Lou Fonesca stories (about a sad sack Sarasota process server who mostly gets around on a bike). I’ve read one of his Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov novels, set in Soviet Moscow, but it struck me as kind of claustrophobic and depressing. His Abe Lieberman books were good, but not as good (in my opinion) as the Peters and Fonesca stories.

We’ve lost a true professional, and someone I suspect I would have liked if I’d met him. Rest in peace, Stuart M. Kaminsky.

Bookselling

Not without honor in my own city

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Today provided another of those little rewards that make being an author almost worth the trouble. I spoke on the phone to a lady from Ingebretsen‘s Scandinavian store.

If, for some obscure reason, you don’t live in the Minneapolis area, you probably don’t know about Ingebretsen’s. It’s a community institution. It started (if I have the story right) as a neighborhood grocery on Lake Street, catering to Scandinavian immigrants, back in 1921. The neighborhood remains an immigrant center even today, except that the immigrants now tend to be Mexican and Sudanese. But through all the decades, Ingebretsen’s has remained on the old corner, faithful to the neighborhood, dispensing lutefisk, flatbread, goat cheese and herring to a small but grateful public.

Somewhere along the line they expanded to include a Scandinavian gift shop, and they’re the best and most successful brick-and-mortar enterprise of that sort in the metropolitan area. I make a pilgrimage every Christmas season, and it’s usually a long walk from wherever I can find a place to park. Before stepping inside to join the throng, I have to make a conscious effort to abandon all concept of personal space.

I wrote to Ingebretsen’s, along with a couple other midwest dealers in the same sort of line, after West Oversea came out. I enclosed copies of reviews and a free copy of the book. The lady at Ingebretsen’s told me she’d read the book and enjoyed it, and had added it to their winter catalog (which I knew about) and to their web site (which I didn’t).

Don’t mess with me. Among Minneapolis Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns, I now have street cred.

Religion

Egalitarian gnosticism?

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This will be a short (as short as I can make it) meditation on a subject that deserves a far more comprehensive treatment. Chances are the idea I’ll raise isn’t original to me, and somebody else has already written about it, probably far more sensibly.

I was recently sent .pdfs of a couple open letters from prominent figures in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The first was this letter, written by former presiding bishop Herbert Chilstrom. In it he defends recent ELCA decisions that placed a blessing on the practice of homosexuality. The decisions, he says, are consistent with a Lutheran understanding of the Word of God. He quotes in particular the theologian Carl E. Braaten, writing, “The ultimate authority of Christian dogmatics is not the biblical canon as such, but the gospel of Jesus Christ to which the Scriptures bear witness—the ‘canon within the canon.’”

I was also sent Prof. Braaten’s response, which you can read here. Although Prof. Braaten is not someone I myself have ever looked to as a model in matters of scriptural interpretation, there are some things that can still make even an advocate of the higher criticism gag. Prof. Braaten answers, “You are right that the Word of God can mean one of three things, the incarnate Word, the written Word, or the proclaimed Word. In this case, the context makes it clear that it means the written Word of God, the Bible. I do not believe that the other two meanings of the Word of God diminish by a single iota the authority of the written Word of God.” Continue reading Egalitarian gnosticism? →

Religion

On not being afraid of the dark

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Back in my low-rent Christian singing group days, we met a pastor who ministered in a southern Minnesota town. He was a fascinating fellow, an eccentric dresser, and a great extrovert with many wild stories to tell. He’d been a hippie before his conversion, and he told stories of his adventures with some occultists he’d lived with for a while in California. (Rory Bohannon in Wolf Time is based, in part, on him.)

Thinking back on our acquaintance, I don’t believe he was a fraud. His stories were sometimes spooky, but they lacked the self-aggrandizement of Mike Warnke‘s fabulations. I believe he was seriously trying to convey spiritual truth, and using the stories to draw us in.

And there’s one thing he said that I’ll always remember. “When you talk to people about the occult,” he said, “they almost always respond in the same way. They say, ‘I don’t believe in it—tell me about it.’” Continue reading On not being afraid of the dark →

Fiction, Religion

A couple of things

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Came across this in my reading today, and thought it was good:

I dreamt. Jeremy tells me that we all dream every night but we don’t remember our dreams. The trick to remembering is to wake up during a dream. Poets, he said, are particularly good at waking up during or immediately after a dream. Something lets them know some good stuff that they might be able to use has been going on. Jeremy’s current favorite poet was Byron. I read a few Byron poems. The guy had nightmares. I preferred the book of William Blake poems Jeremy had given me, though I didn’t understand most of them. I just liked the way they sounded and it was the only poetry book I’d ever seen with drawings in it.

(Stuart M. Kaminsky in Think Fast, Mr. Peters, p. 90)

I’m still not sure this story is authentic, but if true, it’s just delightful. Apparently Larry David did an episode on his Curb Your Enthusiasm HBO series about urinating on a picture of Jesus. Hilarity ensues as those stupid Christians react in their simple-minded, provincial way.

However, now the Council on American-Islamic Relations has sent a letter to HBO, expressing their offense at an insult to someone they revere as a great prophet.

What a dilemma for a citizen of Hollywood—“Do I apologize, and please Christians (which is unthinkable), or do I insult Islam (also unthinkable)? How can this have happened? I’m so sensitive!”

That sound you hear is me chortling. Chortling evilly. In a simple-minded, provincial way.

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In which I explain my crush on a younger woman who’s not actually younger, and died long ago

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Rita Hayworth

Sunday evening I watched my DVD of the movie, “You Were Never Lovelier,” starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth.

Now I’m not normally a huge musical fan. I find Fred Astaire’s movies entertaining, but I wouldn’t actually spend money to acquire one.

But Astaire and Hayworth? That’s a whole different matter.

It’s not the greatest musical. Only one song became a standard (“I’m Old-Fashioned”). A silly plot, worthy of a P.G. Wodehouse novel (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It has the added eccentricity of featuring band leader Xavier Cugat in his pre-Abby Lane, way-pre-Charro days. Although it’s set in Argentina, everybody speaks in American accents. Except for Cugat. Quick! Don’t think about it!

Astaire and Hayworth only did two films together (I’ve still got to acquire “You’ll Never Get Rich”). Though they were miraculous as a team, and Astaire said he’d never worked with a better partner, he refused to do another with her because, he said, he didn’t want to be permanently paired with anyone again, as he had been previously, first with his sister, and then with Ginger Rogers.

I’m sure it had nothing at all to do with the fact that when Rita’s dancing, it’s impossible to see anybody else.

I know it’s mostly illusion. I know her real name was Margarita Cansino, and that her hair wasn’t really red, and that the studio gave her electrolysis to raise her hairline. I know that she once said, “Men marry Rita Hayworth, but wake up with me.” I know about her alcohol problems, and the string of awful marriages. And the final tragic descent into Alzheimer’s.

But movies are illusion. Rita was born to be a movie star, and nobody was ever lovelier on screen.