All posts by Lars Walker

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Notes from a cold climate

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The timing was spot on. In my mental calendar, November is a cool month that’s all about Thanksgiving. December is a white, snowy month that’s all about Christmas. So on the selfsame day that I turned the calendar page, the Frost Giants dropped four inches of heavenly sugar on us, like theater techies lowering the “Winter Scene” backdrop from the flyspace over the year’s stage, right on cue.

But four inches was all it was. No mighty blizzard. Commerce did not cease. Schools wouldn’t have closed if it had been a weekday (probably some would have been delayed, but they wouldn’t have closed).

It did keep me from doing any Christmas shopping. The roads were kind of slick, and as you know, one of my secret shames is that Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker, does not actually have operative four wheel drive.

I did go out, though, to my regular Chinese buffet. The Guangzhou Restaurant in Robbinsdale has become my steady Saturday lunch venue. Their buffet is not extensive, but it’s good food, and not expensive. And now they know me, and pretty much expect me. I’ve achieved the status of “regular.” They don’t actually know my name, but I have a regular booth.

It’s not hard to have a regular booth on Saturdays at the Guangzhou. I think they do a pretty fair weekday business, but on Saturdays I’m sometimes the only one around. If I don’t show up, I think of all that food going to waste, and I feel guilty. (Not that most of it doesn’t go to waste even if I do show up. Even I don’t eat that much.)

But I didn’t drive there. That is silly on the face of it, I know. All summer, when the walking was easy, I drove to the restaurant. Saturday, when the arctic wind was blowing and snow was piling up, I trudged through the drifts. This was because, aside from the minimal danger of dying of exposure, my feet were more dependable than my slightly bald tires would have been on the streets that day.

I think I’ll walk to the restaurant more often in the future.

Starting next spring.

Via Mirabilis: You know that Gospel of Judas that National Geographic made a big production of last year? The one that suggested that Judas was actually following Jesus’ instructions in betraying him, and was a great saint in Heaven?

Never mind.

Turns out it was just a bad translation.

Could happen to anybody, right? Who among us has not promoted a major TV special and sponsored a national promotional campaign on the basis of a quick-and-dirty, slanted translation?

You don’t imagine there was any agenda here, do you? Is it possible that some people at NG jumped the gun on publication and fact-checking because they had an ax to grind against Christianity?

No, no. Forget I suggested it.

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Report on an amusing evening

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I went to my Viking Age Club & Society meeting tonight (the snow isn’t expected till sometime in the morning–maybe not even till the afternoon).

Anyway, I took the exit from Hiawatha Ave. onto Lake Street in Minneapolis. And there, on a corner in the underpass, stood a guy with one of those hand-lettered cardboard signs. It said:

NEEDED:

1. WHISKEY

2. STRIPPER

3. CHEAP HOTEL ROOM

Full marks for honesty to that fellow. (No, I didn’t give him anything.)

At the meeting, members of the club gave me a Christmas gift, which was entirely unexpected. It was a copy of the new Sissel Christmas CD, in concert with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I have it on the stereo at this moment, and it’s lovely.

It’s also autographed.

Just when I think I’ve got the world figured out, somebody’s nice to me. Sheesh.

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The end of Evel

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Evel Knievel has died, if you hadn’t heard. I was never a follower of his career, but I thought I’d mention it since he professed faith in Christ a while back. His connection with Robert Schuller gives me pause, personally, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he made The Really Big Jump successfully.

I was once in a fellowship group in Florida where three of the guys had first been drawn to Christ through watching Schuller on TV. By the time I met them, all of them had left Schuller’s brand of pop-salvationism behind for more nourishing spiritual fare.



Here’s a rhetorical question:

When you’ve got crowds of thousands who’ve turned out to demand the execution of a middle-aged schoolteacher because she allowed the little girls in her class to name a teddy bear “Muhammad,” are you allowed to point out the self-evident fact that those people (in particular, making no assumptions about their fellow countrymen or co-religionists) are scumferrets?

No, probably not.



Another rhetorical question: Do you think some of these people’s anger might possibly arise, not from her perceived blasphemy, but from the fact that she comes from another country and has a different skin color?

No, no. Impossible. That could only happen in America.

We’re expecting a snow storm tomorrow. I was planning to do some Christmas shopping, but I may be snowbound. If you don’t hear from me again, notify my next of kin—whatsername, that hot chick from House.

Authors

Jack’s birthday

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Somebody mentioned it today, and I looked it up, and it’s true—it’s C.S. Lewis’ birthday. He was born November 29, 1898. I’m not an anti-smoking zealot, but I wish he hadn’t been a puffer. We might have had him around into the ’70s or ’80s.

Not that this helps you. You read this blog tomorrow, don’t you? I’m a day late. I should have told you about it Wednesday.

That’s me. Always on the receding slope of the bell curve. Yesterday I looked at my desk calendar to see when I needed to send out memos to instructors, so they could get their book orders to me.

Turns out I should have done it last week.

Today as I was leaving work, I thought about stopping at the grocery store. Then a voice in my head said, “No, you have something else to do tonight.”



“What could it be?” I wondered. I consulted my pocket calendar.

I had an appointment to give blood.

Two nights ago.

Ack. I’ve become one of those embarrassing old bachelors who misses all his appointments, dribbles food on his vest and is the last to know when he has holes in his clothes.

I need a keeper.

Reading

Not a book review

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In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Not just long, long ago, though. I think of Christina Rossetti’s poem every time Christmas approaches and the temperature tumbles. I even used to think of it when I lived in Florida, when Christmas approached and the temperature plunged to something we’d call “brisk” up here. The snow hasn’t fallen, snow on snow, yet, but the spike has been driven down into the bone.

The liturgical question for times like these is, “Cold enough for ya?” to which the liturgical response is… puzzlement. There’s no good answer to “Cold enough for ya?” If you say “Yes,” it’s lame, and if you say “No,” you’re obviously insane. Most of us twist our mouths up (which hurts, because our lips are paralyzed) and try to figure out some kind of clever response. But there is none. Nobody has ever gotten off a good answer to that question. The guy who asked the question has swept all the points. He may be spouting clichés, but at least he hasn’t been struck dumb like you, you poor sap.

Thus do we torment one another on the frozen steppes.



What follows is not a book review. I am not qualified to review this book.

I re-read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer out of desperation. It was early Sunday evening, and I’d just finished Koontz’ Brother Odd, and had no new books in the house. So I went to the shelf and pulled out The Moviegoer. I’m not a Percy fanatic, for reasons that shall be made clear, but I approve of him in principle, and I very much enjoyed The Thanatos Syndrome, his last novel, in which he condescended to write a thriller for common folk like me, and did a bang-up job.



The Moviegoer is the kind of book that makes me feel like Bertie Wooster, when he assumed that Jeeves’ pocket Spinoza was a murder mystery. The book exists on a level far above my poor powers of comprehension. I think I understand it a little better now than I did the first time I read it, but that’s not saying a whole lot.

The story, set around 1960, concerns Binx Bolling, the narrator, who is a scion of an old Louisiana family. He makes his living selling stocks and bonds, and everyone agrees he was designed for better things. Binx isn’t sure of that, and a career isn’t really his primary concern. What he worries about is what he calls the “malaise” which dogs him. He’s a veteran of the Korean War, and the only time he can remember when he felt really alive was the time just after he was wounded. He goes to movies regularly, not because he wants life to be a movie or can’t tell the difference between the two, but because they distract him from the malaise.

Love seems to be his best hope, but he’s gone through several girlfriends (all of them his secretaries; they were more tolerant of that sort of thing in those days), and although they excite him we can tell he’s not genuinely engaged with them. More serious are his feelings for his distant cousin, Kate, who’s more messed up than Binx is. She takes pills and is suicidal. Eventually Binx runs off with her to Chicago, which sets off a crisis that finally decides how he will live out the rest of his life.

How we’re supposed to feel about that ending, I haven’t a clue.

But people I admire say it’s a great book, and I trust them.

Reviews

Book Review: Brother Odd, by Dean Koontz

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Our commenter Aitchmark recommended Dean Koontz’ Odd Thomas books to me. I dragged my feet, because I’d read one Koontz and wasn’t terribly impressed. I didn’t think he used language very skillfully.

But I picked up Brother Odd last week, and frankly it turned my world upside down and gave it a good shake.

I still don’t think Koontz is a very good wordsmith. Time and again it seemed to me he was aiming for effects he wasn’t achieving.

But in Odd Thomas he has created a character who won my heart, and I’ll bet he’ll win yours too. You should not pick up this one first, though, but go back to the earlier books in the series to get the tragedies in sequence, because it does make a difference.

Odd Thomas (Odd is his first name. He explains it as a typo on his birth certificate, where it was supposed to say, “Todd.” Koontz doesn’t seem to be aware that Odd is an uncommon but not unknown Norwegian name, a variant of “Odin”) is a young man who makes his living as a fry cook. He is totally unremarkable (disregarding the pain he has suffered in his life) except for his unusual gift. Like the kid in The Sixth Sense and that girl on the TV show, he sees dead people.

But it’s harder for him than it is for them, because the dead don’t speak to him. The ghosts who linger in this world, in these stories, are mute. They are usually the victims of murder, and it’s Odd’s task to figure out their unspoken secrets and give them rest.

This all sounds very New Age, but it’s anything but that. Odd is a devout, practicing Roman Catholic.

In Brother Odd, in fact, he has left his California home and entered a Colorado monastery, overwhelmed by the personal losses he experienced in earlier adventures. It’s fairly quiet there for him—the only resident ghost is a monk who hanged himself in the bell tower and appears only occasionally.

But it doesn’t stay quiet. Besides ghosts, Odd is able to see spirits he calls “bodachs,” dark, shadowy figures that always gather in advance of acts of massive death and violence.

At the beginning of the story, Odd sees three of them. And they head straight for the monastery’s associated school, where the nuns care for retarded and handicapped children.

In his efforts to prevent whatever unknown horror is threatening the children, Odd must uncover the secrets of the monastery residents.

But these aren’t the kind of secrets you expect in a contemporary thriller. The monks and nuns are not practicing secret sexual rituals, or abusing the children, or plotting the overthrow of democracy. They are, by and large, sweet souls, the kind of people you can believe have given their lives in service to God and their fellow man. (I have to give Koontz tremendous props for these characterizations. As C.S. Lewis noted [I think] in The Four Loves, good characters are “the very devil” for an author.)

No, the secrets are deeper than that, and the evil resides in a place Dan Brown would have never imagined.

Koontz got completely past my reservations about his style, and grabbed me with the characters and the story. I don’t often cry over a book, but Brother Odd got to me.

Highly recommended. I’ve got to read the earlier installments, Odd Thomas and Forever Odd.

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A couple neat links

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I think these are nifty. Both come via Mirabilis.

This one’s a virtual whale. You set the inset on a spot on the whale’s body, then watch him swim by, life-sized.

This is a story that needs to become a novel. See, there’s this important antique clock in Paris, and the authorities were just letting it rust away. So a group of “guerilla” restorers broke into the museum, set up a workshop, and worked for a year to restore the thing. Only then did they alert the government to their act of reverse sabotage.

It seems to me there’s a parable there.

Goofing

Thanksgiving vignette

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This happened at the Walker Thanksgiving:

My brother Moloch and his wife brought the Korean exchange student they recently acquired. His name is Han. (Or Hon. I never asked him to spell it.)

When he was introduced to one of my nephews, this bit of dialog occurred:

Moloch: “Han, meet Luke.”

Me: “I think I saw this scene in a movie once.”

Reviews

Book review: Web of Evil, by J. A. Jance

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I’d read one J. A. Jance novel before, I think, and hadn’t been terribly impressed (I thought I’d reviewed it, but can’t find it in the archives, so I guess I didn’t). If I remember correctly, it had a male protagonist and, like so many female authors (in my opinion) she didn’t write a guy very well. No doubt we male writers have the same trouble with female characters.

But Web of Evil is one of Jance’s Ali Reynolds books, stories about a woman amateur detective, and I found it a lot of fun.

Ali Reynolds is a former Los Angeles news anchor. Today she lives in a double-wide mobile home (though a nice one) in Sedona, Arizona, where her parents run a diner. She’s in the midst of a bitter divorce from her husband, Paul, a network executive, and also an unfair dismissal suit against her old TV station (the two facts are not unrelated).

One day she gets in her car to drive to L.A., where she’s going to sign her final divorce papers. But there will be no signing. Her husband turns up dead, locked in the trunk of a car which was then left on the railroad tracks to wait for the next train.

As it happened, the murder occurred near the highway Ali was driving, just about the time that, by her own account, she was passing through the area. Suddenly the police are looking very closely at her movements and personal affairs.

This mystery was one of the most tech-savvy I’ve read. Ali is a blogger, and her blog, as well as her cell phone, are important parts of the plot.

I especially liked Ali’s parents, who bear the fine Scandinavian name of Larson. They are decent, caring people and unabashedly conservative (how often do you see that in a novel these days?).

Ali herself is a classic female detective. She’s smart, beautiful and spunky. Like all amateur detectives, she goes where the police say she shouldn’t go, and does what the police say she shouldn’t do, and yet doesn’t get locked up long enough to keep her out of the action. When you sit down to analyze the plot, the whole thing is a little far-fetched, and Ali’s close involvement with the investigation improbable, but Jance keeps the story moving so skillfully that you don’t notice. She kept me turning the pages, and I found it a very entertaining read.

Not great literature, but a lot of fun. Worth the price.

Reviews

Short movie review: No Country For Old Men

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Thanksgiving went just fine. My turkey was once again a success, and nobody got food poisoning (or if they did, they’re thoughtfully keeping the fact from me).

At the end of the day my brother Baal and I found ourselves alone here, and we decided to see a movie. So we went to see “No Country For Old Men.”

Brilliant writing, brilliant dialog, brilliant acting. And an ending designed to make ordinary people want their money back, while critics at Cannes applaud their manicures loose.

My one-line review goes like this: “No Country For Old Men” is an elegant, three-hour shaggy dog story.

And do you think Tommy Lee Jones will ever get tired of being the Texan Steppin Fetchitt? I’m sure there’s a lot of money in being the go-to guy whenever Hollywood wants to show how bigoted, hateful or irrelevant (irrelevant in this case) white Texan males are (Billy Green Bush made a good living in the same gig back in the 70s. Maybe you’re required to have three names to get the job), but do you think he ever feels a little embarrassed about it?