Thanks to Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard for alerting us to the fact that Madeleine L’Engle, the influential fantasist, has passed away.
I’ve never read any of Ms. L’Engle’s books, since I missed them as a kid, and as an adult I made the mistake of finding out about her theology, which made me chary of them. But she is much beloved of many readers, including many Christian readers. So R.I.P.
Uff da, as we Norwegians say. I got home from work tonight, parked my car in the garage, lowered the garage door, and—snap!—the thing suddenly gave way and dropped like my spirits will, once I see the bill I’m going to get tomorrow. Can’t get the door open again, needless to say, and there is no side door. So I called a 24-hour garage door service place, and they’ll send a guy out tomorrow morning.
Hopefully my car will be free in time for me to drive up to Montevideo (we have a town called Montevideo in Minnesota, believe it or not) for the wedding I’m supposed to attend tomorrow.
Of course if they can’t get it out in time, that will give me an excuse not to attend. Which, all in all, I’d prefer. Hate weddings. But my aunt from California will be there, and her health is failing, and it may be the last chance I get to see her, so I promised I’d be there.
If I have a car I can get to.
That’s all the original material I’ve got tonight. I borrowed the following meme from Grim’s Hall:
1. Name a movie you’ve seen more than 10 times.
The Outlaw Josie Wales, as I mentioned a few days ago. Probably The Three Musketeers (the Richard Lester version). I don’t think I’ve seen any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy ten times yet, but it must be getting close.
2. Name a movie you’ve seen multiple times in the theater.
Same answer.
3. Name an actor who would make you more inclined to see a movie.
Sam Elliot. Can’t think of anyone else. Robert Duvall, maybe. There was a time when Clint Eastwood would have been at the top of the list, but that time is long past.
4. Name an actor who would make you less likely to see a movie.
Sean Penn. George Clooney. Angelina Jolie. Dabney Coleman. (And if you think there’s a political subtext to most of those choices, you’re perceptive.)
5. Name a movie that you can and do quote from.
The Outlaw Josie Wales. Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
6. Name a movie musical, to which you know all the lyrics to all of the songs.
Camelot, because I was in it once (played Mordred, if you insist on knowing).
7. Name a movie with which you’ve been known to sing along.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
8. Name a movie you would recommend everyone see.
Local Hero (though I can’t guarantee everyone will like it).
9. Name a movie you own.
You mean the DVD? Not a lot. Josie Wales. Once Upon a Time in the West. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Lord of the Rings, extended edition. The Vikings with K. Douglas and T. Curtis…
10. Name an actor that launched his/her entertainment career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops.
Can’t think of one.
11. Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in? If so, what?
Several. I’m old enough. The first movie I ever saw was in a drive-in—Around the World in 80 Days with David Niven. My family saw it on a visit to my uncle and his family in Poughkeepsie, New York.
12. Ever made out in a movie?
What is this “making out” of which you speak?
13. Name a movie that you keep meaning to see but just haven’t yet gotten around to it.
Amazing Grace.
14. Ever walked out of a movie?
Not that I recall.
15. Name a movie that made you cry in the theater.
I must have teared up at some point in The Return of the King. Not sure, though.
16. Popcorn?
With butter.
17. How often do you go to the movies (as opposed to renting them or watching them at home)?
Almost never anymore.
18. What’s the last movie you saw in the theater?
I think it was Stranger Than Fiction, which is pathetic (my movie attendance, not the movie).
19. What’s your favorite/preferred genre of movie?
Action, I guess. I like a good fantasy, but there are so few.
20. What’s the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?
The Ten Commandments. My parents warned us not to tell our grandmother, who didn’t approve of movies.
21. What movie do you wish you had never seen?
Beowulf and Grendel.
22. What is the weirdest movie you enjoyed?
Magnolia, maybe.
23. What is the scariest movie you’ve seen?
I guess it was the original Alien.
24. What is the funniest movie you’ve seen?
The movie I remember laughing at most was The Return of the Pink Panther.
Movies fascinate me. I’m interested in what’s playing, what’s being made, who’s making them, who’s in them, and what they’re about.
I just can’t be bothered to go out and see them anymore.
Michael Medved says 3:10 to Yuma is a great traditional western, though. Maybe I’ll see that. Depends on how much the garage door people soak me for.
Wait. IMDB doesn’t list Sam Elliot as a cast member.
Isn’t there a law against that?
First of all, a Philistine update. I think we can all agree that it’s a sad commentary on our times that so little attention gets paid to the Philistines anymore.
This item from Mirabilis reinforces, I think, my contention that the Samson story in the Book of Judges was not intended to provide a role model for us all (see my previous post about him here, which generated some controversy in Comments). Archaeologists have learned, according to this article, that the Philistines were regular consumers of pork and dog meat.
We already know that Samson broke his Nazirite vows by touching the carcass of a lion. It now appears probable that during all those Philistine banquets he intended, he ate pork and dog meat.
Like a knife in his mother’s heart, I’ll bet.
My view of Samson is that he’s an example of a guy who was given great gifts by God, but wasted them on his own passions and pleasures. A cautionary tale, a typological picture of Israel, but not a story for emulation.
Speaking of misusing your gifts, I found a very weird story from Poland by way of the New Zealand Herald. Ever wonder whether the people who come up with those grisly scenarios in the crime thrillers might not be a little twisted themselves, a little corrupted in their souls?
Apparently, at least one of them was. (Hat tip: World Views.)
So think twice before you attend your next book signing.
I know for a fact that every time a pagan deity materializes or the space-time continuum is violated in my neighborhood, the police put me under surveillance.
Does it really count as a book review when you explain why you tossed the book aside less than half way through? Because that’s what I did with Jeffery Deaver’s The Vanished Man.
I was not disappointed with the author’s skill. He writes a good story, creates a tight plot. His characters are well realized.
No, I just didn’t like the points he was trying to make, and I didn’t want to waste any more time on them.
The Vanished Man is a well-crafted thriller with a clever premise. What if a master magician became a serial killer? What if he felt compelled to re-create the feats of famous escape artists like Houdini, except that he stages them with innocent victims, leaving them no avenue of escape? And what if he were skilled in quick changes, illusion and lock-picking, so that even when the police have him surrounded, he can slip away from them?
That’s the promising scenario of The Vanished Man.
But Deaver lost me as a reader. I doubt if he cares. He clearly despises people like me, and wouldn’t want us for readers.
For instance, I’m a sexist pig. I don’t believe women (in general) make as good policemen as men. I believe men have both an obligation and a psychological need to protect women, and that putting women in harm’s way debases both them and the men.
In Deaver’s world, about half the cops are women, and any suggestion that a guy thinks even for a moment that women don’t make equally effective cops proves that he’s a Neanderthal.
There’s a conservative Protestant pastor in the novel, and at the beginning he seems to be portrayed pretty sympathetically. This immediately made me suspicious, and I was right to be. A little further in, we learn that the pastor is a child molester, and that he’s in New York City to perform a political assassination on behalf of a right-wing militia group.
That was when I lost interest.
Nobody pays me to read these books, and I don’t have unlimited time left in my life. I’m not going to spend that time reading fiction that insults me.
No doubt some people feel the same about my books.
Fair enough.
Today I gave my classic Orientation-time PowerPoint on library procedures to the students at the Bible school. As usual it was a hit, and it ought to earn me some tolerance from the students, right up until they actually have to deal with me in person.
I learned yesterday morning, as I lay in bed luxuriating in the Labor Day holiday, that I was supposed to be at school, delivering the thing. The implication was that I’d been informed about this. I have no memory of that (as unindicted co-conspirators like to say). So it was arranged for me to do it today, but I went in and put in a few hours work yesterday anyway. Had to update the PowerPoint, for one thing. New rules on fines, in general more forgiving ones. Naturally, as a Christian conservative, I hate that. All the money we spent on the new pillory and refurbishing the ducking stool, down the drain. There’s just no standards anymore.
I am strongly conflicted about Randy Wayne White’s Shark River. I liked it and disliked it, in about equal proportions. No, I guess I liked it a little more than I disliked it. I shall elucidate.
White’s Doc Ford character is widely considered an heir to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, and I have to say I haven’t read anything in the field that meets the qualifications better. Like McGee, Ford lives a laid-back life on the water in Florida (though Ford lives on the other coast, and works pretty hard as a marine biologist, while McGee purposely lived as a beach bum between cases). They are both actively involved in the social scenes in their marinas, though Ford’s neighbors are more important to the plot than McGee’s usually were.
But Ford has a dark past. He was formerly a member of an ultra-secret government assassination squad. He came to Sanibel Island, his present home, with the intention of killing a man named Tomlinson, who had been involved in a fatal anti-war bombing plot back in the Vietnam years. For reasons of his own, Ford decided to let Tomlinson live, became his best friend, and hung up his spurs, so to speak.
Shark River begins with the attempt of a Colombian drug lord to kidnap the daughter of an influential American bureaucrat. Ford, in the right place at the right time, prevents it. In the fight he paralyzes a man who turns out to be the drug lord’s son, making himself a target. At the same time he meets Ransom Ebanks, a Bahamian woman who claims to be his long-lost half-sister, but is in fact the daughter of his reprobate uncle, whom Ford never liked much. She has a letter from her father and a sort of treasure map promising to lead to her “inheritance,” and she is relentless in trying to get Ford to help her. But of course the Colombians are waiting over the horizon, planning to strike back at the man who crippled one of their own.
In his casual courage and human tolerance, Doc Ford pleases me in the same way Travis McGee used to. But there are elements in the story that please me less. I can’t help it, but I’m just intolerant of drug use. Ford doesn’t use marijuana, but his friend Tomlinson and his “sister” Ransom are both users.
Tomlinson is presented as a burnt-out case, a little flaky (he is a Buddhist and a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, which also doesn’t win any points with me), but I have trouble with his history as an anti-war radical, as well as his religion. I think his friendship with Doc Ford is meant to be a metaphor for American reconciliation, and that’s nice, but I’m still pretty bitter about the whole thing, so I found Tomlinson kind of hard to take. Especially when he was smoking pot.
The attitude toward sexual morality all around in the book was pretty heedless too, in my opinion. (Yes, even more heedless than Travis McGee’s.)
But I liked Shark River enough that I expect I’ll give White another read.
So I had a choice this weekend.
I could stay home by myself, which is always my inclination. On top of that, it was my team’s turn to do set-up at church (we meet in a gymnasium) and I’ve finked out on the team twice this summer already.
Or I could go up to my brother Baal’s, where brother Moloch and his family were going. This would be a gesture to my family, which I’ve been (frankly) neglecting.
I decided the obligation to help with set-up took priority, so I stayed home.
This is how it worked out:
My pocket calendar said the set-up team would meet at 10:00 p.m. on Saturday. That’s late, but it’s not unprecedented. Sometimes they have events in the gymnasium, and we’re only able to get in when it’s clear. I was certain the message on my answering machine had said “10:00 p.m.”
So I showed up at 10:00 p.m. sharp. As I drove in and noticed that no other cars were there, the thought crossed my mind for the very first time that I’d gotten the meridian wrong. It had been 10:00 antemeridian, not postmeridian.
I waited ten minutes, then went home depressed, knowing I’d let the team down once again.
I was able to help tear down on Sunday morning, and as it turned out the floor mats had already been rolled out for them at set-up, so their Saturday morning job had been lighter than usual. But I still felt humiliated.
So I spent Sunday thinking dark thoughts, meditating on my many personal failings, studying my forehead in the mirror for the mark of Cain.
It seems to me this weekend is a sort of metaphor for life as an Avoidant. I remember a feature Edward Gorey did once for the National Lampoon years ago, called something like, “A Child’s Rainy Day Activity Book.”
Among the items in the “Book” were a number of cut-out figures, printed on the front and back of a single page. The instructions said, as I remember them, “You will note that several of these figures are printed front-to-back with figures on the previous page, so that if you cut out one, you will destroy the one on the other side. There are several ways to deal with this problem, all of them unsatisfactory.”
That seems to me a good motto for my life. “There are several ways to deal with my problems, all of them unsatisfactory.”
If I keep to myself and avoid my fellow man, I escape many unpleasant experiences, but at the same time make my whole life generally unpleasant and lonely, and I get depressed.
If I try to break out of my shell, I either have good experiences (which don’t happen that often, and I generally discount them if they do) or I have bad experiences, which validate my low self-esteem. This also leads to depression.
The choice seems to be between easily won depression and strenuously won depression.
What to choose, what to choose?
In any case my renter came home safe and sound this afternoon, so I don’t have to worry about losing my meal ticket just now.
I’ll have to put my mind to figuring out a reason to be depressed about that.
Oh man, I’m useless tonight. I’m kind of worried, because I didn’t see my renter at all yesterday, and today there’s a message on the answering machine, asking why he didn’t show up for work.
You might pray that he’s OK. His name is John.
Talking of early television, that’s a subject I can discuss with some authority, being one of the first kids to grow up with the thing. And I’m not going to tell you how it blighted my mind. Television and my grandmother were about the only good things in my life when I was a kid. TV was the only friend I had that didn’t beat me up. Television got me interested in history and in Shakespeare.
For those of you old enough to appreciate it, or just curious, here’s a YouTube clip of the opening of the old Howdy Doody Show, one of the delights of my early life. Buffalo Bob Smith (the guy, unaccountably, in a pith helmet in this clip) was one of the great pitch men of the medium. He pushed Hostess Cakes and Wonder Bread and Tootsy Rolls, and a whole mess of other products, to gullible kids like me, and our parents hated it, but on the other hand the show kept us quiet for a while.
All those great kids shows died when the government “for the sake of the children” passed legislation forbidding characters on children’s programs from endorsing products. Almost immediately there were no more national or local children’s shows, and the programming space was filled with loud, violent, badly animated cartoons.
Thanks a lot.
Buffalo Bob’s real name was Schmidt, by the way, and most of his life he was a Lutheran, though he seems to have ended up a Presbyterian, for some unaccountable reason.
Note to anyone from WWTC Radio in the Twin Cities who happens to be reading this: The background jingle on that carpet commercial you’re running just now is a vile earworm, and probably toxic and dangerous to the general public. If it runs much longer I may have to take unilateral action. And nobody wants that, do they?
Here I am, a bona fide professional writer, and I’m stuck for words to describe the loveliness of today’s weather. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art less humid and more temperate….” I should have taken the day off and gone to the state fair and fired questions about Bohemian Grove at Michael Medved. But, as Yogi Berra once sagely remarked, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
If you think you know about the Father Dowling mystery books because you used to watch Tom Bosley in the ridiculous TV version some years back, be assured that you don’t. Father Dowling is a priest named Father Dowling, and he does live in the Midwest and he does have a nosey housekeeper, but that’s about the extent of the similarity.
The original, authorized Father Dowling is a sort of clerical Sherlock Holmes (he’s tall and thin and smokes a pipe), but kinder and more inclined to suffer fools (and sinners). He was once a rising young star in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but job pressures led to alcoholism, and the church sent him to Fox River, Illinois, a transitional suburb of Chicago, as a sort of second chance-cum-penance. But he discovered that parish ministry is his real calling, and he loves taking care of his little flock. Except for the remarkable number of unsolved murders that seem to crop up. (Also it should be noted that there are no roller-skating nuns to be seen anywhere.)
The drama in Last Things centers on the conflicts and dysfunctions of the Bernardo family, whose patriarch is Fulvio Bernardo, owner of a string of local greenhouses. Fulvio has only been moderately honest in his business dealings, and has been serially unfaithful to his pious wife, Margaret. But now his health is failing, and his children are gathering for the end.
The children include Raymond, who was once a promising young priest, but he ran away with a nun, with whom he now lives out of wedlock in California. Andrew is the underachieving middle brother who teaches English at a local college and has a live-in as well. Jessica is a successful novelist, much envied by Andrew, and remains a believer. She’s planning to write a novel based on her family’s story, and there’s an aunt who is much alarmed at that prospect, going so far as to ask Father Dowling to persuade Jessica to drop the project.
But it’s Andrew who gets into big trouble, when an insufferable colleague blames him for holding back his career, and starts a campaign of harassment against not only Andrew but his whole family. And when the colleague is found murdered in the street, well, who do you think comes under suspicion?
Father Dowling works it all out, of course, relying on his profound understanding of human motivations and sins. Along the way he also helps Raymond come to terms with the guilt he’s been carrying (and denying) ever since his defection.
All things taken together, I think I prefer Father Dowling stories to Father Brown stories. That’s heresy, I know, but although I’m crazy about G.K. Chesterton about 80% of the time, I always found the FB mysteries a little facile, a little too neat. They seem to me analogous to an archer shooting his arrows first and then painting targets around them. The Father Dowling stories are richer and more humane, less didactic (which isn’t to say there aren’t moral and theological lessons).
As a Protestant, of course, I find points in the stories where I disagree with some of the detective’s basic assumptions about Christianity. But it doesn’t interfere much for me, and the quiet, peaceful presence that Father Dowling imparts to these stories make reading them a comfort and a delight.
Roy over at Writing, Clear and Simple identifies a word commonly misused, especially by journalists, in our day.
It seemed to me a matter of some importance.
A crisis, as a matter of fact.
What do I have to write about tonight? Can’t think of much. Did the usual thing at work. Came home and mowed the lawn.
The weeks of rainy weather we’ve had have turned my lawn around in a way that amazes me. Very few bald spots now, and the grass is thick—thick, I say! Like hair on an Airedale. OK, granted it’s not all the kind of grass you want, in an ideal world. When I reseeded some bare spots last year, it appears I’d bought an entirely different species of grass, one which now sits ghettoed in minority patches, agitating for equal rights and reparations. And I’ve got some crab grass, and some Creeping Charlie (I actually kind of like Creeping Charlie. And since concrete walls separate my yard from both my neighbors’, so I can’t infect their lawns, I see no reason not to indulge it).
But it’s thick! It covers the ground. Back when I lived in Florida, I used to think back on a lawn almost precisely like this (my aunt’s in St. Paul, which I’d often mowed). For all its departures from canonical orthodox lawndom, folks in Florida would have paid big money to have this kind of thick, green grass. And often did.
What I wrote above is deeply disturbing to me. All my life I’ve been a guy who’s “not into lawns.” I used to say, “Show me a guy who keeps a perfect lawn, and I’ll show you a guy with a lousy marriage.” My dislike for golf springs mostly from my distaste for broad expanses of mown grass. My original intention in buying a house was to get a townhouse, so somebody else would do the lawn.
And here I am now, taking an interest in my lawn.
I must be evolving into a better, finer soul.
I hate it when that happens.
If I ever start talking about aerating and water features, somebody do an intervention.