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I meditate on the length of my hair

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My hair’s getting kind of long. It’s below my collar, and probably longer than is strictly suitable for a Bible school librarian. I take it as a sign of great sophistication around work that nobody’s brought it to my attention yet.

I intend to get it cut next week. But this weekend we have the annual Viking Feast of the Viking Age Club & Society, so I figure I’ll keep it long until then.

Also it helps keep me warm.

I’ve worn my hair longer than not most of my life, and have continued to do so even though fashion has long since passed me by. My motivations, so far as I can discern them, are historical. Continue reading I meditate on the length of my hair →

Authors

Cold weather and cold judgment

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Last night on the radio, a thoughtful newslady explained to us what she said were “warning signs of frostbite.” This is a subject of more than theoretical interest just here and just now.

“The first sign of frostbite,” she said, “is a tingling sensation in the face or extremities.”

Oh yeah?

A tingling sensation in the face or extremities is not the first sign of frostbite for me. For me, a tingling sensation is the first sign of being outside in the winter. Even when it’s a whole lot warmer than it is right now.

The stages that follow are numbness and aching.

All these stages occur within the first thirty seconds of exposure.

God bless the U.S. Air Force, which invented the arctic snorkel parka that’s the only thing that makes it possible for me to actually leave the house between November and April.

The January Smithsonian Magazine includes an article on Norman Mailer by Lance Morrow.

Here’s a paragraph that struck me:

In Mailer’s work, one feels more in the presence of energy and virtuosity than of truth… Except for some journalistic bull’s-eyes in the reportage (riffs on politicians like Nixon and Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy), Mailer simply does not feel true. Reading some of his more strenuous cosmic exertions is a little like watching an actor onstage who picks up a suitcase that is supposedly full, but is, in fact, empty: the actor by body English tries to make the bag look heavy, as Mailer tries to make the sentences profound. But the audience knows.

I get the impression that when Morrow speaks of “truth” he’s writing about something he probably can’t define and doesn’t really believe in. But even for intellectuals, the heart knows. The heart can tell.

Goofing

Dynamite, and other basic needs

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On-site report: It’s cold outside.

Editorial comment: I don’t like it.

Watch for updates as the situation develops.



Our commenter Aitchmark sent me a link to this YouTube video on the Engadget site.

The 24-barrel, tripod-mountable monster you see above, lovingly known as the Disintegrator, was rather amazingly hand-carved and assembled by Anthony Smith of the UK, who spent four months on the ambitious build. Unlike your dinky little six-shooter, this model boasts a 288-band capacity and 40-round-per-second firing capability…

You’ll note that this device was created in the United Kingdom, where gun ownership is illegal.

This, my friends is what happens when you deny men real weapons.

Actually, it puts me in mind of the days when I was an avid shooter of cap-and-ball revolvers. It took what seemed like twenty minutes to load the things (actually about five, but I was eager). Then you got to shoot for about thirty seconds. Then you had to spend an hour cleaning the things (and you’d better do a good job, because that powder residue is mostly salt).

But it’s what a man’s gotta do.

In my own part of the world (known in the reference books as the Walker Sphere of Influence) we have this story, in which a man took the utterly reasonable and sober-minded action of blowing up his old pickup truck by loading it with explosives and shooting at it from a distance with a high-powered rifle. Note that he exercised role-model-level prudence in not trying to light a fuse with a match and run away, like Wile E. Coyote. He did the job at a prudent remove. And yet people are criticizing him.

(I don’t know the guy, but the story takes place in the county where I grew up. Makes me proud, it does.)

Listen, it’s a man’s testosteronic birthright to blow things into the stratosphere and send objects hurtling at high rates of speed toward distant targets. What shopping is to women, explosions are to guys.

And if you don’t understand that, you’re a woman.

Religion

Am I completely off base here?

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What to do? The gag about how you’d welcome a little Global Warming just about now has been done to death, but honestly, remind me again why marginally warmer winters would be a bad thing?

We had global warming back during the Viking Age, and that worked out pretty well, you know. If it hadn’t been for Global Warming, Erik the Red and his son Leif would have frozen to death on a glacier in Greenland, and then Leif would never have gone on to discover America, and we wouldn’t be speaking Norwegian today.



I had a thought while reading my Bible today. I’m not sure whether it’s a good one or not. Let me run it by you.

In Philippians 1:12-18, the Apostle Paul tells his readers that they shouldn’t be troubled by the fact that he’s been imprisoned by the Romans. “Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel,” he says (NIV). Then he explains that some people are preaching Christ out of goodwill, but others are preaching Christ out of “envy and rivalry… supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains.” But, he says, “the important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.”

I’ve never been sure who these people were who were preaching Christ out of envy and rivalry toward Paul, and what sort of preaching they must have been doing. As best I can understand, scholars aren’t entirely sure whom he was talking about either.

But this seems like a likely scenario to me—I’d guess there’s a good chance the rival preachers were members of the Circumcision party, people who preached salvation through Christ plus the law. We know they were constant opponents of Paul’s everywhere else he went.

Paul opposed their legalism, and could be pretty cutting in talking about them in his letters. Yet his attitude here seems (to me) to be, “Even if their preaching is in error, the very fact that they’re talking about Jesus is a good thing in itself.” Maybe he’s saying, “I don’t really care what anyone says about Jesus, as long as they talk about Him. Because just talking and thinking about Him gives an opening to the Holy Spirit.”

And that leads me to the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to get upset over things like “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “The Da Vinci Code.” Maybe (I could be wrong) the proper attitude is that we should just be glad that people are thinking about Jesus at all, and trust to the power of His name to turn their hearts the right way.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Let me know what you think.

Music

Bach on a cold day

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Actually it’s not all that cold. About 20° F today. I’ve seen it a whole lot worse than this.

What’s got the whole state (nay, the whole region) bloodhound-faced today is the knowledge that tomorrow will be colder, and the day after that colder still, and on and on through the end of the week. I haven’t looked at the forecast past Sunday. I suspect the Monday one will say, “Supercooled through the afternoon; heat death of the universe after sunset.”

Yet we survive. We persevere. That’s what makes us better than you.



Here’s an article by Uwe Siemon-Netto, from Paul McCain’s blog Cyberbrethren, about the odd (though welcome) phenomenon of Asians converting to Christianity through the music of J. S. Bach.

I would have never expected this. I’ve always seen music as essentially non-propositional, unsuited to changing people’s minds, except by means of the lyrics.

But Bach’s music has no lyrics. It’s just very fine, intricate music on which the composer has written (at the end of every piece), “Soli Deo Gloria” (To God alone be the glory). And the testimony of an artistic job so brilliantly done seems to have an evangelistic appeal.

I suppose I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. It actually harmonizes well with some things I’ve been thinking for a while. I’m just always surprised to be right… or anything in the neighborhood of right.

Back in the misty years of the 1970s, when I was touring with the Christian musical group for which I was lyricist, a guy came to talk to us after a concert. He said he was a follower of Francis Schaeffer, and I thought, “Great. We’ll be friends.” But he wasn’t interested in being friends.

His reading of Schaeffer had convinced him that the gospel was about reason—reason and nothing else. In evangelism, no appeal should be made to anything but the “law of non-contradiction.” Because our songs appealed to feelings as well as reason, he informed us that we were heretics and tools of the devil. I suppose he’d hoped for syllogisms in song.

I hadn’t thought the whole thing out at that point (still haven’t, for that matter), but I think I argued that, although reason is important and much neglected, it’s not the only thing.

As the years have passed, I’ve grown more convinced I was correct. Schaeffer concentrated on reason in his books because that’s the element that’s being most neglected in theology and apologetics today. But if you read those books and pay attention to more than just creating bullet points, you’ll see that he talks about the importance of love and relationships and beauty, too. His book The Mark of a Christian was not about logic, but about love.

This is entirely consistent with essential Christian theology. We believe in the Incarnation. “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) It’s as heretical to neglect the soft, subjective side of our lives as to neglect the rigorous, rational side.

Which is why the Lord can even call souls to Himself through music.

Hey! Maybe He could use novels too!

Reviews

Trouble, by Jesse Kellerman

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I know you’ll all be relieved to read a review written by me which isn’t about a Dean Koontz novel. No, no. The looks on your faces are all the thanks I need.

Trouble is an extremely impressive thriller written by a young novelist. I found it gripping, frightening, and engaging. The writing was elegant and crisp, the characters real and sympathetic, and often very funny.

And yet, in the end, I found it unsatisfying.

The concept is promising. It’s the old “Fatal Attraction” scenario—the hero gets sexually involved with a woman who turns out to be a psychopath. The twist in Trouble is that the woman doesn’t want to hurt the hero. She wants him to hurt her.

The main character is Jonah Stem. He’s a medical student in his third year—that purgatorial year when you work long hours, get treated like a beast of burden, and subsist on a couple hours of sleep a night—in a Manhattan hospital. Twice a month he takes the train to visit his former girlfriend, who is sliding into schizophrenia, to help her father with her care.

Yet he’s not too beaten down to get involved when, on his way home from work one night, he sees a large homeless man standing with a knife over a young woman. He jumps in to protect her, and when it’s all over the attacker is dead, and Jonah is a tabloid hero.

It doesn’t hurt that the girl is extremely cute.

Eventually they bump into each other again, and there are sparks, and they do what modern young people are expected to do. (I should probably note here that there’s a fair amount of sex in this book, some of it pretty kinky.)

But gradually it becomes clear that this woman has something more wrong with her than simple loose morals. She wants to be hurt. She demands that Jonah hurt her. She is convinced that Jonah has committed himself to an “art project” with her, and she’s utterly shameless in manipulating and threatening him, and those around him, to get his cooperation.

And then it gets worse.

If a story like this could have been written (it couldn’t) back in the 1950s (for instance) there would have been an implicit moral lesson. “Don’t have sex with people you’ve just met,” or even, “Don’t have sex with someone you’re not married to.”

I see no sign of a lesson of any kind in Trouble, though. Not that all stories have to have explicitly stated morals. But in a classic story the hero is expected to at least learn something from his ordeal. In this book, the hero seems to be pretty much unchanged in the end by the horrible events he experiences. The only lesson the story seems to teach is that it’s dangerous to help people. But even that (bad) lesson doesn’t seem to be the point here. I guess the point is that stuff happens, and sometimes it gets really intense, you know?

Jesse Kellerman is the son of two bestselling mystery novelists, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman. I’m a big fan of his dad’s and not much of a fan of his mother’s. Jesse didn’t need their help to get published, though, I suspect. He’s a real talent, and a very accomplished storyteller. Expect big things from him.

I just hope he can find a way to write stories with something at stake in them.

Reading

“No bigger than a calf’s skin”

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The internet was down most of the day at work today, so a number of things I wanted to do either didn’t get done or didn’t get finished. Sometimes I wonder about this whole computer thing. Imagine an office in 1927, and somebody comes to the boss and says, “I’ve got great new office machine for you. It’ll allow you to do your bookkeeping in a fraction of the time. It’ll streamline your correspondence and printing in ways you won’t believe. It’ll provide information from around the world before the local newspaper knows it.”

And the boss, being no fool, says, “What’s the catch?” (No doubt he’d take a drag on a cigarette before speaking, because everybody smoked in the office back then.)

“Well, the machines will break down every down and then. Fairly regularly, really. And when that happens, your business will basically grind to a standstill. And even when it’s working, your employees will waste a lot of time playing with it”

Would he be willing to invest in something like that? Maybe he would. But I bet he’d think long and hard first.

Dirty Harry over at Libertas speculates amusingly on how “The Yearling” would be handled if it were filmed today.

Dr. John Eidsmoe, author of Christianity and the Constitution, is at our school teaching a seminar just now, and he dropped in to my office today. We got onto the subject of Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskringla (the sagas of the kings of Norway), one of our mutual favorite books. I mentioned to him one of my favorite stories from the book, one which is included in the Everyman edition, translated by Samuel Laing, but not in the other two translations I own (this is due to a difference in the source texts used).

It comes from the saga of the sons of Magnus Barefoot: Sigurd the Crusader and Eystein the Good. Eystein, being good, died young, but Sigurd lived to an overrripe old age, and appears to have suffered from dementia. Toward the end he announced that he was going to divorce his faithful and much-beloved queen, and marry a younger woman.

The bishop of Bergen at the time was named Magne. Bishop Magne went to confront the king at his hall, and brought along a younger priest, also named Sigurd, who would eventually become bishop himself, and who reported what happened.

Bishop Magne sent word for the king to come out of the hall and speak with him. The king came out, with a sword in his hand.

The bishop refused the king’s invitation to come in and dine. Instead he condemned the king’s decision and told him he forbade “this wickedness.”

While he thus spoke he stood straight up, as if stretching out his neck to the blow, and as if ready if the king chose to let the sword fall; and the priest Sigurd… has declared that the sky appeared to him no bigger than a calf’s skin, so frightful did the appearance of the king present itself to him. The king returned to the hall, however, without saying a word….

Then the bishop went to his own house, and Father Sigurd noticed that he seemed extremely merry. He asked the bishop if he wasn’t frightened, and if he didn’t think it would be a good idea to get out of town.

Then said the bishop, “It appears to me more likely that he will not act so; and besides, what death could be better, or more desirable, than to leave life for the honour of God? or to die for the holy cause of Christianity and our own office, by preventing that which is not right? I am so cheerful because I have done what I ought to do.”

If you’re wondering how it all turned out, the king got his wedding in the end, by going south to Stavanger and bribing the bishop there with a lot of gifts.

But I love that story about Bishop Magne, and particularly Father Sigurd’s description of the sky appearing “no bigger than a calf’s skin.”

I’ve never read a better description of the psychological effect of fear. That man was a storyteller.

Goofing, Religion

“Don’t go it alone,” says the loner

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Probably the most famous New Zealander in the world, Sir Edmund Hillary, died today. He was a major hero when I was a boy. We all heard the story of how he conquered Mount Everest in the company of his faithful Sherpa, Tenzing Norway. (It’s not generally known that Tenzing Norway was a cousin of the author Neville Shute Norway.*)



I finished Dean Koontz’ The Taking today. This one was pretty much straight horror, so I didn’t like it as much as some of his other stuff. (That’s personal taste. I find horror oppressive.)

Nevertheless, I ought to add that The Taking appears to be a somewhat different take on a topic covered more extensively (and not as well) in some recent fiction on the Christian market (I won’t mention any names). This book handled the subject far better, and without preaching. There was also a twist at the end that I liked a lot.

In slightly related news, this awful story has been reported all over the web. A man in Idaho, apparently convinced that he bore “the mark of the Beast” on his hand, cut the hand off with a circular saw and cooked it in his microwave. A literal reading of Matthew 5:30 is to blame, I suspect.

I hate it when things like this happen. Not only because it makes Christianity and the Bible look bad, but because of the tragedy of a man who (apparently) sincerely believes, but has gone far off the rails.

I don’t know the man’s spiritual history, but I have a guess. I’d bet he’s not involved in any kind of consistent Christian fellowship. I suspect he’s a loner, reading his Bible alone and interpreting it alone, relying on his personal feelings.

I know—I don’t have a right to criticize. I’m a loner myself, and getting more alienated with each passing year. But perhaps that makes what I’m saying “testimony against interest,” and more valuable.

The Bible is very clear. We aren’t meant to be Christians alone. Every Christian should study 1 Corinthians 12. Verse 27 says, “Now you [in the plural] are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” We were meant to function together as a body, doing together the things none of us can do alone, and restraining one another’s excesses.

Going it alone is like—well, it’s like being a hand that’s been cut off with a circular saw.

May the Lord have mercy.

*This is a gag. And a very tasteless one.

Reviews

The Good Guy, by Dean Koontz

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Sorry to do another Koontz review. But Koontz is who I’m reading just now, and the day hasn’t produced any other subject material—at least none that I noticed. If I were James Lileks, I could get a couple thousand words out of how I avoided eye contact with the guy trying to sell Strib subscriptions in the grocery store tonight.

Oh, I had my dialogue worked out. He’d say, “Interested in subscribing to the Star Tribune?”

And I’d be like, “No.”

And he’d say, “Why not?”

And I’d be like, “I can get my beliefs and politics insulted for free any time I like. Why should I pay the Strib to insult them?”

But in real life those exchanges never work out like you’ve scripted them, so I just rushed by, pretending he wasn’t there.

Anyway, to the book. The Good Guy begins with the hero, Timothy Carrier, a master mason, sitting alone in his favorite bar. A man takes a stool near him and starts a conversation as if he knows him. Assuming the man has confused him with someone else, Timothy plays along for a few minutes, just as a lark.

It stops being funny when the man hands him an envelope containing ten thousand dollars, along with a photograph of a woman he wants him to murder, and then rushes out.

Not only is Timothy not in the least interested in murdering anyone, but he finds the woman’s face extremely attractive.

So begins an odyssey in which Timothy locates the woman, a novelist named Linda Paquette, and goes on the run with her, fleeing a murderer who is a talented professional as well a total, narcissistic sociopath.

But there’s hope. Because Timothy isn’t just a good guy. He has considerable resources of his own, and the conspirators made a very big mistake when they stumbled over him.

The Good Guy is one of Koontz’ recent books, and he’s become as good at building a story as (we’re informed) Timothy is at laying bricks. Timothy is just the kind of guy the reader wants to be, and Linda just the kind of woman he’d like to fall in love with (or vice versa if the reader’s a woman. If I know anything about women. Which I don’t). I put the book down from time to time, because I had to sleep and work, but it was a struggle. The villain was interesting, frightening and believable, but Timothy and Linda caught my full sympathy and held it.

I’m kind of glad Koontz doesn’t do a lot of sequels. That means Timothy and Linda will probably live happily ever after, without running into any more ruthless serial killers. That’s kind of nice to think about.

Writing

A good year coming? Good/Bad writers?

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I can’t (in spite of myself) shake the idea that 2008 is going to be a good year. It seems to me that any year in which you’re able to fix the usual beginning-of-the-calendar problem of writing the wrong date in the checkbook, by just making a squiggle on top of the mistaken digit, has to be a good one.

Hey Phil, you live close to Tennessee. Did the recent storms knock out all the phones? It’s book ordering time at the bookstore, and I got “all circuits down” messages when I tried calling both Thomas Nelson and one other house (I forget which. I was thinking it was Moody, but that’s in Chicago, isn’t it? But maybe Chicago had storms too. I should follow the weather news more closely).

Roy Jacobsen of Writing, Clear and Simple, suggested, in a comment on my last post, that we talk about the question of Good Writing vs. Good Story.

It’s possible for a writer to be a poor stylist but a good storyteller—grabbing your attention with his narrative and invention, even as he appalls you with his writing technique. It’s also possible for a writer to be an elegant stylist but a lousy storyteller (this, I think, is a good way to be nominated for literary awards).

Any examples from the audience? Authors (or works) you can lift up as examples of Good Storyteller/Bad Writer, or Good Writer/Bad Storyteller?