All posts by Lars Walker

Religion

“Bad Saturday”

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I think I’ve written about this before, but it’s something I’ve come to believe.

I don’t know if there’s an official, ecclesiastical name for the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. But I call it Bad Saturday.

It doesn’t have a name (or not a well-known one, anyway) because it’s a kind of a nothing. The bad thing happened yesterday. The good thing hasn’t happened yet. It’s the day of disappointment, of shock, of depression. The day when the scattered disciples hole up and try to figure out the safest way out of the province. The day when everything has fallen apart, and you don’t know what’s coming next.

The day when all you’ve got to go on is a promise. And that promise that doesn’t look very promising, in the wake of what happened yesterday.

In other words, it’s the day in which we live most of our lives. True, Easter has happened, but Easter isn’t finished yet. We seem to be in the third act of God’s great drama, and we can’t see the climax from here. So we wait, and we say our lines, and we follow our stage directions, but the Happy Ending is still waiting in the wings, behind a curtain.

We’re trying to get through Bad Saturday as well as we can.

Easter is our hope. It’s a thing that has already happened, and has not yet happened, for us as individuals.

It’s a question of perseverance. Today might be called the Day of Perseverance. Hang on. The Feast comes tomorrow.

Writing

The complex origins of language

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I enjoyed Roy Jacobsen’s comments on a speech by Christine Kenneally at the Writers USA Conference in Portland.

One of the interesting things about language is that it’s not a single ability, but rather a suite of abilities. We’re all born with this innate suite, but the ability to speak seems to develop only if we are spoken to; it does not arise spontaneously on its own. Thus, if we learn to speak only because we are spoken to, how did language arise?

Fascinating subject, with profound philosophical and theological implications, I think. The power of speaking, and the significance of the word, are part of the very architecture of biblical thinking.

The Press, Writing

The friends of Carl

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As I re-read Andrew Klavan/Keith Peterson’s books starring newspaperman John Wells (see yesterday’s review), I couldn’t help (though heaven knows I tried) thinking back to my own short, undistinguished career as a small town radio news reporter.

When I consider that time, I find incomprehensible that I could have actually believed that I (that is, me, this guy writing what you’re reading now) might possibly, under any circumstances, be able to do the job of a news reporter. Going out and speaking to strangers. Asking them questions. Pressing them when they’re reluctant to answer. I actually had the idea that I could learn to do those things.

Well, I was young then. All my life I’d heard people saying, “I used to be pretty shy, but I learned how to just get up and talk to people, and I found out there was nothing to be afraid of.” I figured I’d be the same, with time.

But enough of that. Enough to note that I tried it, long, long since, in the early 1980s.

And for some reason, reading about reporter John Wells and his dangerous life as a reporter reminded me of old Carl (not his real name), the guy who taught me the ropes at the radio station.

I don’t know why I’m disguising his name. I’d say the chances that he’s still alive are about the same as the chance that a top-flight literary agent is reading this right now and getting ready to e-mail me, offering me representation.

Because like John Wells, Carl was a degenerative (Not degenerate. There’s a difference). He smoked constantly, drank heavily and was in terrible physical condition (John Wells in the books was much the same, though thinner). When Carl showed me the job routine, it proved to consist of reading the morning paper, driving downtown, talking to a guy at the police station, and then adjourning to a local bar for refreshments.

Carl was not a motivated guy.

And then I remembered something I’d forgotten about Carl. Carl had odd fingers.

His fingers weren’t straight. They were crooked. They kind of zigzagged as your gaze followed them from knuckles to fingertips. They looked very odd when he typed.

His fingers looked, in fact, as if somebody had put his hand in a desk drawer one day, and then slammed the drawer shut. Like in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

And it occurred to me, I wonder if Carl got those fingers on the job.

Maybe once he’d been a hotshot, dynamic young reporter, out to break big stories and pull the curtain away from crime and corruption.

Maybe he made the wrong people mad. And maybe they taught him a lesson about going along and getting along, through introducing him to a desk drawer.

Maybe that’s what made him the sad case he was when I got to know him.

I have no way of knowing.

But it makes a story.

Reviews

The Trapdoor, by Keith Peterson

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Christopher Hitchens had a great line on Hugh Hewitt’s show a few minutes ago. He said (I’m quoting from memory), regarding Barack Obama’s religion speech yesterday, “I’d often heard of a politician selling his grandmother. This was the first time I ever actually saw one do it.”



I’m re-reading some old books just now, simply because my energy’s too low to run to the used bookstore. Tonight I want to review The Trapdoor by Keith Peterson, and record a general appreciation of the entire John Wells series.

Keith Peterson, as I’ve mentioned before (but you probably forgot. Pay attention!) is a pseudonym for Andrew Klavan. I was a Keith Peterson fan before I ever was aware of Klavan. His John Wells books, written under the Peterson name, plus an excellent one-off called The Scarred Man (which I reviewed on the old site), were published in the late ’80s, and did pretty well as far as I can tell. However, Klavan chose, for some reason, to round out the John Wells series at four books. I wish it had gone further, but on the other hand the tetralogy is pretty complete in terms of its hero’s character arc. Here you see an early exercise in which Klavan allows us to see his hero grow over a series of books (as in the Weiss and Bishop novels). And that hero, in many ways, is a precursor to Steve Everett, the obsessive reporter hero of True Crime.

John Wells, the hero of The Trapdoor (and of its sequels, There Fell a Shadow, The Rain, and Rough Justice) is a crime reporter for the New York Star, a tabloid paper. He’s a reporter’s reporter. When he finds a real story he’ll work any hours and go to any lengths to get it. He has no life outside the job. His apartment, as a lady friend comments, looks like a place where nobody lives.

What he won’t write is fluff. This puts him in conflict with his managing editor, in the first three books. The managing editor was hired by the owners to give the paper what he calls “relatability.” This means sex and sleeze. John ignores the managing editor, not because of his high moral standards, but because fluff demeans his profession, and his profession is all he has. He’s able to get away with this (most of the time) because he’s the best crime reporter in the city.

The managing editor gets petty revenge one day by assigning Wells to cover a series of teenage suicides in a town upstate.

This assignment shocks even Wells’ most cynical colleagues. Because everyone knows the reason why he’s cut himself off from life. Five years ago, his own teenaged daughter hanged herself.

Wells accepts the assignment, though. He won’t be intimidated.

It’s not easy, but he’s a pro. He does the job. He interviews the grieving families and writes a sensitive series on the tragedies. Then he faxes the stories back to the paper.

And the hot-shot managing editor re-writes the stories (still under Wells’ name) to make them “relatable.”

Suddenly John Wells is the most hated man in the town.

And that’s not good, because Wells needs to go back there. He’s starting to suspect that at least some of the suicides were murders.

I loved the John Wells series because Peterson/Klavan focused it on a complex, deeply sympathetic main character, and surrounded him with an equally believable supporting cast.

The world-weary, cynical detective is a staple of hard-boiled crime fiction. Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade weren’t stereotypes in their own time, but they’ve become stereotypes. We take them for granted, and rarely ask ourselves what made them the loners they are.

John Wells’ alienation is the central problem of the series. He’s been hurt so badly in the past, first by the failure of his marriage, then by the suicide of his daughter, that he’s walled himself off from humanity. Most of his co-workers like him, but he keeps his distance. His protégé, a beautiful young reporter named Lansing, is crazy in love with him, but he treats her like a kid sister—not really because of the age difference, but because she’s alive, and he doesn’t dare get too close to life. In The Trapdoor, he does get involved with a woman, a suicide counselor (remarkably, one of the few instances I’ve ever seen in a detective novel where the hero connects with a woman specifically described as not beautiful), but they’re both so damaged that they know nothing can come of it.

As each book in the series progresses, however, Wells is forced to deal with one of his personal devils, to break down another of his psychological walls. The last book, Rough Justice, has the earmarks of an attempt to re-launch the series on a new level. But it also serves as a satisfactory climax. John Wells at the end of Rough Justice is a very different man from the John Wells we started out with in The Trapdoor.

This is early, pre-Christian Klavan, but many of the themes that inform his later work are already there. The books are out of print, but you can get them second hand. I recommend them highly.

Reviews

Malice, by Robert K. Tanenbaum

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I write this review in deep sorrow. I’ve been a fan and booster of Robert K. Tanenbaum for some years now. But that’s all done, now that I’ve read Malice. Tanenbaum has lost my imprimatur. He’s become an author I can no longer support.

What hurts most is that I’m certain it’s my own fault.

If you’re an old timer here, you may recall my history with Tanenbaum. I discovered his Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi books back in the ’80s, and enjoyed them for their vivid characters and Rabelaisian humor. But then I felt his books were getting a little raunchy for my taste, especially in terms of language, and I dropped him.

In the late ’90s I picked him up again, and it seemed to me he’d grown a great deal as an author and thinker. By this time Butch and Marlene (he’s a New York District Attorney; she’s a former lawyer, later a personal security specialist, now an independently wealthy hobby artist and dog breeder) had gotten married and were raising a family. Of particular interest was their daughter Lucie, who was both a language prodigy and a devout, practicing Catholic. Tanenbaum (like Butch Karp) is clearly Jewish himself, but he showed unusual sensitivity to Christianity in his portrayal of Lucie.

I was especially impressed with the novel True Justice, in which Karp dealt with the issues of abortion and infanticide. Although it understandably attempted to square the circle and present all sides, it depicted (through Lucie) an understanding of the pro-life position, without caricature, hard to find in contemporary literature. I was so pleased that I wrote a fan letter to Tanenbaum, telling him how much I valued his effort.

This, I’m confident, spoiled everything.

Tanenbaum, no doubt, checked out my web page, discovered what sort of a right-wing yahoo I am, and vowed on the spot to drive me, and everyone like me, away.

Not immediately. Not right off. But gradually. By stages.

First of all, he gave Lucie a boyfriend, an Arizona cowboy. And sent her happily to bed with him, without benefit of clergy. Without even any Catholic guilt.

Secondly, he introduced the character of John Jojola, a Taos Navajo reservation policeman and Native American shaman. He has led Lucie into a “deeper” spiritual understanding through his Ancient Wisdom.

And now, for the coup de grace, the first time we see Lucie in Malice, she’s taking a trip on peyote, under John Jojola’s supervision.

OK, Mr. Tanenbaum. I get the message.

The plot of this book centers on a sort of busman’s holiday for Butch Karp. On medical leave from the DA’s office (he got shot at the end of the last book), Butch is asked to help out the brother of an old teammate from his basketball playing days, a college baseball coach who’s been wrongly suspended by his college and the league.

But that’s tied to the action back in New York, where Butch’s colleagues and friends are discovering evidence of massive, world-wide criminal conspiracy. An Ancient Secret Society, a Shadow Government, an Unseen Hand behind world events.

A rip-off of The DaVinci Code, to be honest. Tanenbaum has apparently figured out that paranoia fiction is where the money is these days. Gone are the days when Butch Karp hunted down ordinary criminals and corrupt politicians. Now he’s pulling back the veil that covers the True, Occult History of the World.

You think our biggest danger today is Islamic terrorism? Ha! You’re a dupe!

The real danger is… wait for it… MANXMEN! That is, guys from the Isle of Man. (Because, I suppose, God forbid there should be any evil in the world that doesn’t spring from white males.) Islamic terrorism is just a sideshow that the Manxmen have orchestrated, to allow their puppets in the government to trample on our civil rights through the Patriot Act. (There are many references to “the loss of our civil rights” under the Patriot Act. Oddly, what rights we’ve lost is never explained.)

In other words, Tanenbaum has completely buckled to contemporary liberal dogma. Oh, he concedes, in a talky and poorly written epilogue, that the war on terror is a serious matter, but the plot as a whole gives no support to that view.

I’d probably be willing to forgive all that, because it’s still a Tanenbaum book and therefore a lot of fun.

But putting peyote into Our Lucie’s mouth?

That, sir, I cannot forgive.

Reviews

Old movie review: “Algiers”

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Watched a few more of my renter’s crime movies this weekend, and I want to comment briefly on a couple of them.

I watched “They Made Me a Criminal,” with John Garfield. I had the idea this was considered some kind of classic, and maybe it is. But it did not impress me.

The acting was consistently over the top. The character arcs (Busby Berkeley directed it, and it bears all the psychological insight of his average musical) follow plot points, but don’t seem to proceed from any actual change in the characters. In other words, the characters change their behavior because “it’s time for them to change,” but it’s hard to say why they do that from their own perspective. Also present are The Dead End Kids, who fill the sort of place in the film that a rap artist would fill in a movie today (and about as effectively), and even Claude Raines, as the Inspector Jauvert-like detective, nearly mugs his teeth out.

I hated it.

Raines gave a much more subdued, and effective, performance in his most famous role, that of Capt. Renault in “Casablanca.” We all know “Casablanca.” A perfect, small, jewel of a film that tells a tight, heartfelt story that somehow seems inevitable, inescapable, unforgettable. It sits in your memory and colors all your experience forever after.

But are you familiar with the film that inspired the makers of “Casablanca?” A film that also inspired a thousand bad French dialect imitations, chief among which was “Pepe le Pew” in the Warner Brothers cartoons?

That movie was “Algiers,” with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamar. I’d seen it in bits and pieces on TV years ago, but this was the first time I watched it from beginning to end, and I was completely enthralled.

Charles Boyer plays Pepe le Moko, a Parisian gangster who has fled to Algiers and is hiding in the native quarter called the Casbah, where the police dare not follow. He has made himself, for all practical purposes, king of the Casbah. He controls crime there, deals out justice, and enjoys the favors of a beautiful mistress (who seems to be a gypsy or something, though she was played by Sigrid Gurie, a Norwegian).

The French authorities are frustrated by their inability to lay hands on Pepe. Only Inspector Slimane (wonderfully played by Joseph Calleia), apparently a despised “half-caste,” understands Pepe’s essential weakness. Slimane is a patient man, and knows that he will catch Pepe, and even how he will do it.

Because he understands that Pepe cannot stay forever in the Casbah. That tortuous tangle of streets and stairways, where even the roads have walls, is in itself a kind of prison. Pepe’s confinement there is slowly, insidiously, driving him out of his mind. Driving him to forget his own safety. He looks out over the sea and dreams of Paris.

And it all comes to a head when he meets Gaby (Hedy Lamar), a gorgeous young woman from home who has come on holiday with her fiancé, a fat, unpleasant, but rich man whom she is marrying purely for his money. Pepe and Gaby see in each other the fulfillment of their mutual forbidden dreams.

There’s a scene at the end, when Pepe looks through a barred gate in the harbor and gets just a glimpse of Gaby on the ship’s deck, sailing away to her loveless marriage, and you see her through his eyes and it goes through your heart like a knife.

Old movies and old movie techniques can be ridiculous and dated, or sublime and timeless, depending on the skill and vision of the moviemakers. “Algiers” is a classic by any definition.

And no, he never says, “Come with me to the Casbah!”



Addendum: Here’s a bit of trivia. Sigrid Gurie (refenced above), who played Pepe’s mistress, was the twin sister of Knut Haukelid, one of the leaders of the Norwegian resistance group that blew up the German heavy water operation at Vermork, Norway, thus denying important nuclear technology to the Nazis. Richard Harris’ character in the movie “Heroes of Telemark,” seems to have been based in part on Knut Haukelid.

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Six: The meme of the beastie

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I’m back. Somewhat. To an extent.

I actually went back in to work Friday, for about six hours. But when I dragged myself home, I was too beat to post. Today I managed to stick it out for the whole eight hours, and I’m going to try to do a couple posts here, tired or not, because I’ve been piling up stuff I want to post about for the past week, and I’m going to explode if I don’t get some of it off my chest. And exploding will do my health no good.

To start with, Will at View From the Foothills has tagged Phil and me with a meme. Although telling you unimportant things about myself is hardly a departure in this space, I’ll go ahead and do it. The rules are as follows:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.

2. Post the rules on your blog.

3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.

4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.

5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll start out my list on an Irish note, and let it blow where it lists from there.

1. Green is my least favorite color. Oh, I love the green of springtime, which can’t come soon enough for me, but when I contemplate the visual spectrum objectively, I pass over green. I don’t think I own any green clothing (lucky for me I’m not Irish). I think the reason comes from candy. In the Rules of Candy, at least from when I was a kid, green meant lime. And I hate lime. Red, on the other hand, could mean either strawberry or cherry, either of which pleases me. Nowadays you sometimes get green candy that’s apple flavored, but that’s a postmodern aberration. Apple candy ought to be colored yellow, like it says in the Bible.

2. I always resented the Irish as a boy. Partly because I hated green (see above). Partly because I couldn’t understand why the Irish deserved all this attention and Norwegians didn’t (you can say that there are a lot more Irish than Norwegians in this country, but you didn’t grow up in Kenyon, Minnesota). But when I grew to maturity, I discovered Irish music and was completely won over, to the extent of developing an Irish alter ego to narrate The Year of the Warrior. Since I got into Father Ailill’s skin, I’ve found myself occasionally thinking I am Irish, and having to remind myself I’m not.

3. In my opinion, the most beautiful woman to show up on the scene in my lifetime was the tragic Swedish-American actress Inger Stevens. She had all the standard attributes of the ice princess, the untouchable blonde Hitchcock heroine, but she also had big blue eyes and dimples. I never watch “Hang ‘Em High” (because the gallows scenes are too harrowing for me) but when I watch “Five Card Stud,” it ain’t for Dean Martin.

4. I used to be able to recite Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” from memory. I still remember most of it, but there are gaps.

5. I’ve never met anyone famous, that I’m aware of. I’ve had contact with a few people of some note by e-mail.

6. I was co-winner of the New York C. S. Lewis Society’s Screwtape competition back around 1975. The challenge was to write a new Screwtape letter. I shared the prize (which consisted of publication in the newsletter, nothing more) with Jennifer Swift, who is, I believe, like me a minor Fantasy writer now. My letter was better than hers.

As is my wont, I shall not tag anyone else with this meme. If you want to carry it on on your own blog, be my guest.

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Liveblogging my flu, Day 2

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I felt considerably better last evening, and thought maybe it would all be done by this morning. But I woke up to find myself weak and coughing. Haven’t even had the energy to read much today.

On the upside, I’ve completely lost my appetite.

Uncategorized

Posting sick

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Sorry, this is all you get from me today. I have the flu. It appears to be the famous “24 hour bug,” because I started feeling lousy last night about this time, and I’m coming back now. But not enough to produce a decent post. I’ll be back tomorrow, I trust.

Reading

If I’m too tired to spring forward, can I just crawl?

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Not a bad weekend, in spite of the fact that it was the debut of a new, absurdly early date for the start of Daylight Saving Time, which, according to the link in this earlier post of mine, doesn’t necessarily save any energy at all. Back when I was a lad, (in the time of Henry VI, Part 1), you had some consolation for losing an hour of sleep in the knowledge that spring was coming soon, and it was getting warmer). Now we’re making the change in the dead of winter (though today got up to about freezing, and the rest of the week looks good. But spring it ain’t).

I got together will my old buddy Chip on Saturday, and we went out to lunch at a marvelous place called The Fifties Grill. I’d heard about it but had never tried it. As you’d expect, the ambience is Ron Howard/Henry Winkler, and the waitresses wear poodle skirts. But the hamburger I enjoyed was better than anything I remember getting in a grill during the Eisenhower administration. If you live in the Twin Cities, you can find the place in Brooklyn Park, hard by Brookdale Mall. (Of course if you live in the Twin Cities, you probably knew it long before I got the hint.)

Then we went to a bargain theater to see “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.”

My evaluation: Fun, but dumb. But you knew that.

It’s nice to see a movie where they actually manage to talk about America without irony. But I’m too obsessive to just take the thing at face value. I had a couple problems with it.

One is, I just don’t like Nicholas Cage. From the first time I saw clips from “Raising Arizona” (which I’ve never watched), I haven’t liked his flat, dull eyes. I would not buy a used car from this man. He’s probably a great guy for all I know, but when you’re an actor, your eyes are a big deal.

Secondly, I’m too much of a writer to entirely enjoy a movie that plays that fast and loose with logic. I’ve talked about “movie logic” before. Movie logic is when somebody leaps a car over a river in a film. It all happens so fast—vroom, they’re gone—that you don’t have time to stop and think, “Would a vehicle with a heavy front end and a light back end actually stay horizontal through a jump like that, or would the front end dip?” Movie logic is when something explodes in a building, and the hero runs out and beats the fireball to the exit. It doesn’t make sense in the real world, but you just saw it happen right there on the screen, so you buy it.

In the National Treasure movies, they come up with these obscure clues (traveling all over the U.S. and Europe to follow them up), and once they’ve read them, Nicholas Cage says, “This has to mean X.” So they run off to check out X, and of course he’s right.

In real life, a clue that esoteric could probably mean a hundred things. But the process of actual and trial and error would slow down the movie, and the task of producing clues that actually make sense would tax the creativity of the writers. So they fall back on movie logic.

And it works, in terms of entertainment.

But it’s lazy, and I don’t like it.

I also finished reading The Face by Dean Koontz. I’ve done enough Koontz reviews in this space, but I just want to say that, although it doesn’t bear close examination theologically, this is an intensely, though subtly, Christian book. The payoff was very elegantly done, and I wish I’d written it.