All posts by Lars Walker

Blogs, Socials, The Press

“Better is One Day in Your Courts”

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Mike Adams over at Townhall.com (sorry for the pop-up rich environment) posts what seems to me a splendid piece today. It’s in the form of an address to his students at UNC-Wilmington, which he plans to give at the start of the school year. In it he throws down a gauntlet, declaring that he plans to violate the school’s speech code, and see how the administration defends the suppression of ideas in an academic setting.

By the time these three speakers are finished, at least one of you will have filed a formal complaint claiming I have created a “hostile environment.” You’ll be relying, of course, on one of our university’s illegal speech codes.

I will respond by doing something that may surprise you: I will use the same illegal speech code to claim that the speech in your complaint is hate speech, which creates a “hostile environment” for people of faith.

Bookselling

Book-ordering day, 2009, fall edition

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Today was one of the great, dreaded days of my year as a bookstore manager. I finally had in hand the book orders from all (and by all I mean most) of the instructors, for texts they want their students to have this fall. So I sat down at the phone and started placing orders, relying on my efficient and elegant Microsoft Xcel-based system.

And it went pretty well. I finished all the orders, I think (got to double-check tomorrow), except for the one publisher who put me in a call queue this morning until I gave up, and then put me in a call queue this afternoon when I tried again. I left my number on voice mail.

The most harrowing order is always Zondervan (last in sequence because it starts with “Z”). They have a fully automated ordering system which depends entirely on pressing the buttons on the phone dial. I ought to love it, as it involves no actual human interaction, but I think I fear numbers even more than I fear people.

It’s an odd phenomenon I’ve noticed in the last few years, that I never seem to experience particular satisfaction anymore when I finish a major task. Even when I complete a whole novel, I’m left with the feeling Flashman had at the end of Flashman at the Charge, when he’d finally made his way over the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, having fought, lied and skulked his way through fire, blizzard and carnage, to reach a British post at last, and all the official had to say to him was, “Very good. This is a customs post, among other things. Have you anything to declare?”

The reason for the dysphoria, of course, is that I don’t try enough new things.

Oh well. I can live without particular satisfaction.

Fiction, Reviews

The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly

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The Brass Verdict is Michael Connelly’s second novel about his new character, lawyer Mickey Haller. I wasn’t too sure whether I liked Mickey much when I read the first one, The Lincoln Lawyer, but this book definitely warmed me to him.

Mickey Haller is a defense attorney. He’s just coming off a one-year hiatus when he gets the news that an old friend, another defense lawyer named Jerry Vincent, has been murdered, and has left his stable of clients to him. One of them is a “franchise case,” a big-paycheck, high-profile case involving Walter Elliott, a Hollywood movie mogul.

There are problems with defense lawyers as heroes of stories. We all know that in the real world they’re not Perry Mason. They defend the worst people in the world, and if they’re good they get very rich off it. What makes Mickey Haller sympathetic is that he feels that moral tension, on a deep level. It probably had a lot to do with the cocaine-and-alcohol habit that destroyed his marriage, alienated his daughter, and nearly cost him his life.

On moving into Jerry’s office, Mickey finds two policeman going through the case files—illegally. He kicks them out, but oddly finds himself drawn to one of them, who turns out to be Harry Bosch, the hero of the majority of Michael Connelly’s novels. This is an excellent strategy on the author’s part, and helped me settle into the story.

Harry asks questions—who had Jerry Vincent bribed? How was the FBI involved? Mickey doesn’t know the answers. Harry doesn’t believe him. But they will still be drawn together into the double mystery of Jerry’s murder and the Elliott trial, which turn out to be linked. And the killing isn’t over.

A good story by a master storyteller. Connelly did telegraph one surprise though, at least in my case. He generally keeps politics out of his books (for which I’m eternally grateful), but here he did mention one character’s conservative affiliations. I immediately thought, “I’ll bet this character turns out to be a villain.” And behold, it was so.

Maybe Connelly’s done the same thing with liberal characters in the past, but I never noticed it. (Then again, I probably wouldn’t.)

But storytellers, be warned—we know your poker tells.

Authors

Klavan on death panels

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Andrew Klavan has an opinion on whether “death panels” are a legitimate concern or not.

It begins to occur to you that this is how you are going to die: by the fiat of fatuous ideologues—that is to say, by the considered judgment of a government committee. They are going to snuff you out and never lose a minute’s sleep over it, because it’s only fair, after all.

The basic fallacy, it seems to me, is the assumption that “socialized” and “compassionate” are the same thing. This is where liberals are blinkered. They believe that their virtuous intentions (and in most cases they are extremely virtuous) will guarantee virtuous outcomes. “Don’t talk to me about real-world consequences! I’m talking about my feelings here!”

Thanks to Dave Lull and Loren Eaton, who both sent the link.

Fiction, Reviews

Frankenstein: Dead and Alive, by Dean Koontz

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If I were actually the kind of industry insider I pretend to be as an author/blogger, I would have been aware that Dean Koontz’ long-awaited final volume in his Frankenstein trilogy was coming out at last. (He delayed it, he has reported, because New Orleans, the setting of the books, had suffered enough after Hurricane Katrina, and deserved a break. I’d been very worried the story would go forever unfinished.)

Koontz dedicates Frankenstein: Dead and Alive to “the late Mr. Lewis, who long ago realized that science was being politicized….” It would appear that C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength was an inspiration for this book and for the whole trilogy. That gives me particular satisfaction, as I did an homage of my own in Wolf Time.

Although it’s not necessary to read the first two books before reading Dead and Alive, I would recommend it. It’s a pity there was such a long lag between books, because, in my opinion, this book works best as the capstone to the trilogy experience. Continue reading Frankenstein: Dead and Alive, by Dean Koontz →

Writing

The last day of my writing vacation

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About 1,100 words today. That’s not bad. I shut down the computer thinking there hadn’t been any fireworks again, but I was premature.

Shortly after saving and exiting, I suddenly realized why one of my characters had done something he’d done. I wasn’t entirely sure at the time, and thought maybe it was inappropriate to the scene. But afterward I figured out his motivation, and said, “Yes! Of course! That’s exactly what he’d do!”

These are the “that’s my boy!” moments for a writer, when characters you aren’t sure have any life to them, suddenly show signs of getting a job and leaving home. It’s a sort of pale imitation of parenthood, in a remote, attenuated form.

I’ve never written a book in quite this way before. My standard novel-writing system, as I’ve said many times, is to scribble notes on slips of paper as characters and scenes and themes occur to me, and then arrange them in an MS Word document, in more or less the order I expect them to occur. When I’ve got enough stuff there to qualify as an outline, I then begin writing my story at the beginning of the document, and removing each plot point from the end as I use it. Eventually I have a completed book with a little rubble of discarded mental detritus at the end, which I then erase (although it was pointed out to me recently that I ought to keep my character lists, at least, in a separate document, for use in sequels, if any. Good idea).

But this book is being written blind. I’ve got characters, setting, and a basic idea for the book which I can best describe as a sort of rhythm. There’s an “impossible” event which happens, and then happens again, and then happens again, at intervals in the story. Everything else reacts to that.

So this time, the writing itself is an adventure. I keep discovering my own story. I’ve always considered writing without an outline kind of a lazy technique, but it might be the best way for me. I suspect that, sometimes in the past, I’ve twisted my characters’ arms to do things they didn’t really want to do, in the service of a predetermined plot.

Uncategorized

John Quade dies

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You may not have known his name, but you certainly remember his face. Red-haired, fat, aggressively ugly, John Quade generally played villains during his Hollywood career. Remember the leader of the Comancheros in “The Outlaw Josey Wales?” Remember the motorcycle gang leader in “Any Which Way But Loose?” Remember Sheriff Biggs in “Roots?” That was John Quade. He has died, I’ve just learned.

He was also a Christian convert who involved himself in somewhat radical antigovernment movements, according to his Wikipedia article.

Authors, Poetry

Master on Master: Andrew Klavan writes of Wordsorth

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Andrew Klavan, at City Journal, presents an essay on William Wordsworth as a precursor to the present-day neocon movement. It’s gooooooooood.

Around the same time, the poet married Mary Hutchinson, a woman of such quiet serenity that a friend once joked that she never said anything but “God bless you!” The needs of their rapidly growing family necessarily turned his thoughts to more practical, and therefore more conservative, concerns. The financial help and patronage of Lord Lonsdale gave him new sympathy for the aristocracy. And the more he mulled the philosophical consequences of the French disaster, the more he came to respect the institutions and traditions that had guided Britain’s more stately procession toward greater freedom.

I might have made made more of a point of the connection of Wordsworth’s final philosophy to the doctrine of the Incarnation, but then I couldn’t have written the essay in the first place.