All posts by Lars Walker

Poetry, Writing

Limericks limited

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During the last couple days, as some of you know, I’ve posted limericks on my Facebook page. I’ve done this because I couldn’t think of a mortal thing to say about my life that could possibly be of interest to anyone.

I hasten to add that I’m talking clean limericks here. My favorite limericks come from a collection of light verse that was in my childhood home (all decent). I did not learn about the scrofulous mass of the genre until I was a grown-up. According to Wikipedia, the experts say that “the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene.” I have no standing to challenge the experts, but the limericks I like are the ones that are clean and clever. Some marvelous effects have been achieved by geniuses (some of them anonymous) who used the form to create what seems to me transcendent nonsense. (I do not include Edward Lear in this group. I hate Lear’s limericks. His technique of repeating the first-line rhyme in the final line, in my opinion, destroys the very things that make limericks wonderful.)

Continue reading Limericks limited →
Fiction, Reviews

Gone For Good, by Harlan Coben

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Oh my goodness, Gone For Good is a splendid novel.

I hate to blaspheme Andrew Klavan by calling it the best suspense novel I’ve ever read, but I’ll go so far as to say I’ve never read a better one.

Will Klein, the hero and narrator, is a do-gooder. He works in New York City for Covenant House a (real-life) humanitarian organization that tries to reach out to street kids and (when they’re lucky) help a few of them escape that world before they’re irreparably damaged (which doesn’t take long).

He lives with his girlfriend, Sheila. She’s his “soul-mate,” and he’s planning to propose soon. The only reason he put it off was because his mother died of cancer recently, and life got complicated.

It didn’t help that, shortly before her death, his mother told him his older brother Ken was still alive. Obviously she was just raving.

Ken had been Will’s hero as a boy, up until the day his girlfriend (Will’s former girlfriend) was found murdered, and Ken disappeared. The official assumption has been that Ken killed her and ran.

Believing his brother innocent, Will has always assumed he was also murdered, his body never found.

Then Sheila receives a mysterious phone call, leaves a note saying, “Love you always,” and vanishes completely.

Will has always been a passive guy (I identified with him heavily). But now, the weight of personal loss becomes too heavy to endure, and he sets out (with the help of his friend “Squares,” a millionaire yoga guru) to find the woman he loves. Quickly he learns that it has something to do with his brother’s disappearance. And we are given just enough glimpses (in Hitchcockian fashion) of the plans and deliberations of his enemies to understood the extreme danger he’s walking into. Very powerful, very ruthless people are interested in the whereabouts of Ken Klein. But even this information leaves plenty of surprises along the way. The twists come relentlessly, right up to a jaw-dropping revelation at the end.

What I loved about Gone For Good was that the plot and the surprises all rose from believable, complex characters. Coben understands Solzhenyitsin’s dictum that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Every character in this book is flawed, but also well-meaning (by his own lights). The wide disparity between the things that individuals consider right and necessary is almost a part of the background scenery, like the Grand Canyon.

Outstanding. Recommended highly for adults.

Uncategorized

Our Viking republic

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I don’t generally post on Saturdays (I have a life, folks! Well, actually I don’t, but I like to schedule my time as if I did), but I want to say something about the Declaration of Independence today.

Have you noticed the opening paragraphs? How strange they are?

The framers start out saying (in brief), “Because we plan to separate from Great Britain, we feel an obligation to explain to the world why we’re taking this drastic action.”

Then they make this statement in Paragraph 2, which must have seemed very odd to many European readers:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it….

The very first reason cited for the existence of government is securing the rights of the people.

Not maintaining order and restraining social chaos.

Not the promotion and protection of trade.

Not the enforcement of godliness.

Certainly not the provision of social services to all citizens.

Securing the rights of the people.

Essentially (the authors were saying), government exists to do as little as possible, except when basic rights are threatened.

Where did this idea come from?

Much has been written about the sources of American political ideas. I haven’t read most of this material.

But I have a few ideas of my own. Continue reading Our Viking republic →

Uncategorized

Try, try again

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My publisher tells me we got a glowing review for West Oversea from the Norwegian-American Weekly. I was nonplussed for a moment, having never heard of this publication.

It turns out it’s the last man standing among all the Norwegian-American newspapers.

At one time there were more than 50 papers published in Norwegian in this country. Around these parts, Decorah Posten was the big player, but I think the Nordisk Tidende in New York was bigger. There was also Washington Posten out in Seattle.

A few years ago, it was down to Nordisk Tidende (which became the Norway Times) and Western Viking, which was a consolidated paper.

Apparently they merged Norway Times and Western Viking recently, and thoughtlessly failed to inform me.

All in all, I think our Norwegian conspiracy to undermine the republic isn’t going very well.

I’ve been listening to talk radio most of the day. At one point somebody (I think it may have been on Mike Gallagher’s show) referred to Thomas Paine’s words in “The American Crisis,” “These are the times that try men’s souls.” And it occurred to me that, like so many statements written in the past, it’s misunderstood today. Continue reading Try, try again →

Writing

And you may “quote” me

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Quotation marks, like pretty much every element of punctuation and orthography, are a subject of much contention and fun-poking nowadays. (There’s even a blog devoted to unnecessary Q.M.s.)

When I became the editor of the Journal of the Georg Sverdrup Society, it was patiently explained to me by our president (who is an educator) that I’d been using quotation marks wrong all these years. I’d been putting closing quotation marks before punctuation marks in the case of partial quotations—for instance:

He used to talk about pancakes, which he called “flapjacks”.

That just seemed right to me. And our president told me that would actually work in England, but not in America. In America we write:

He used to talk about pancakes, which he called “flapjacks.”

The English also indicate “quotes within quotes” (were those unnecessary quotation marks? Suddenly I’m all insecure about it) differently. In America, we start with double quotes and then switch to single quotes, while in England, it’s the opposite. Thus:

American: John said, “My father used to say, ‘Never trust anybody from Chattanooga.’”

English: John said, ‘My father used to say, “Never listen to anyone from Minneapolis.”’

Some countries don’t even use quotation marks. In French (at least when I studied it in college) they indicated quotations with a tilde at the beginning of the sentence.

Il dit, ~ Je ne comprends pa.

I’ve also read some Norwegian texts that used that form, though I don’t think it’s very popular over there anymore.

And then there’s the Spanish with their upside-down exclamation points: “¡” which just weird me out. That has nothing to do with quotation marks, but I’m groping for a way to end this post, and that seems as good as any.

Fiction, Reviews

The Venus Throw, by Steven Saylor

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I was trying to figure out why I feel so depressed today, and then I remembered that Al Franken is going to be my new senator.

In related news, the official Minnesota State Accessory is now the red rubber clown nose.



I decided to try reading a mystery by Steven Saylor on the recommendation of James Lileks (not, I probably ought to add, a personal recommendation, but one heard on the Hugh Hewitt Show). I’m glad I did, and I’ll be reading more. But they’re odd books.

The hero of The Venus Throw is Gordianus the Finder, an established private detective in Rome in the time of Julius Caesar. This story takes place in the year 56 BC, and is based on actual events.

Gordianus is visited, unexpectedly, by an acquaintance from the past, an old Egyptian philosopher named Dio, with whom he used to have informal dialogues when he lived as a young man in Alexandria. Dio explains that he is part of a delegation from Egypt which has come to petition the Roman Senate. One by one or in groups, most of the original 100 emissaries have been murdered or scared off. Dio asks Gordianus for just one favor—to do a sort of security check on the house where he is staying, so that he can eat the food without fearing poison.

Gordianus, very regretfully, has to refuse. Not only does the case involve political risks, but he is leaving on a trip to visit his oldest stepson (a soldier of Caesar’s in Gaul) the next day.

On his return from Gaul, Gordianus learns that Dio was murdered that very night. Continue reading The Venus Throw, by Steven Saylor →

Blogs, Socials

Alias Smith

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Our friend and commenter S. D. Smith has changed his blogging digs from The Maple Mountain Story Club to a blog simply (and modestly) called S. D. Smith. No explanation is given for this change, nor any apology for the inevitable disruption and social chaos certain to ensue.



Update: Actually he does give an explanation. But it’s pretty unconvincing.

Religion

Hauge and social change

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(Due to popular demand, or at least my own demand not to have to come up with an idea tonight, here is the text of my talk at the 150th anniversary celebration of Hauge Lutheran Church, Kenyon, Minnesota, on June 28, 2009.)

At 10 o’clock on the evening of November 22, the bailiff came and delivered to me the provincial government’s order to read, which said that I should, under strict guard… be transported to Christiania…. The bailiff brought only his servant along and drove me to Christiania. He expressed his opinion that I would either be imprisoned in Munkholmen [prison] or exiled to the islands of the South Seas, so that I must not expect ever to see any of my faithful friends again. I answered him that as long as there is life there is hope of better things; and that if his prophecy should be fulfilled, my God would certainly take care of me, and “I am in His hands and satisfied to accept whatever tribulations He wills that I encounter.” With such thoughts and words I kept my courage up, and since the bailiff, as I experienced, did not care for my religious conversation, I spoke mostly with him of various projects for the public good of which I, here and there in the country, had been the initiator, of which I said, “It is sad to think that they should all be shipwrecked. Many will thereby lose their livelihoods. But even concerning that I will be at peace, if only I am myself satisfied that I have done what I could for the benefit of my homeland and my fellow men’s benefit, both temporal and eternal.”

These are Hans Nielsen Hauge’s own words, from his account of the arrest in 1804 which led to his long imprisonment. I read them here because they express something we sometimes forget about Hauge. He lived his message. He preached, first of all, that the gift of salvation must be received in the heart, and secondly, that true salvation must lead to good works. And he demonstrated that teaching by doing good—getting his hands dirty, sharing useful information and ideas, and building businesses that provided jobs.

It’s interesting that, while early critics of Hauge and his followers accused them of being shiftless, superstitious vagrants, later critics accused them of the exact opposite—they worked too hard, studied too much, were obsessed with money and profit. They didn’t have enough fun, and tried to spoil the fun of others.

These changes in criticism are really testimony to Hans Nielsen Hauge’s tremendous success. He changed the very character of his country. When Hauge was born, the best the average Norwegian could hope for was to be just what his father had been—and that was only if he was lucky enough to be the firstborn. If he wasn’t firstborn, he was lucky to make a living at all.

After Hauge, all Norwegians knew they had a multitude of possibilities. They could go into business. They could be teachers or pastors. They could write for a newspaper. And many of them did what was perhaps the most Haugean thing of all—they emigrated to America, where there was no class system and no state church, and no law prevented anyone from improving his situation and “edifying” his fellow men. Continue reading Hauge and social change →