All posts by Lars Walker

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Not affected, but burned out anyway

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The further we get into this bridge collapse story, the more far-fetched my insistence on terrorism appears. Witness the expert articles here and here, from Popular Mechanics (courtesy of James Lileks at www.buzz.mn). Right now we’re all just blue sky speculating. Perhaps we’re dealing with some kind of perfect architectural storm here (to overburden an already stressed metaphorical bridge).

I went through a time, when I was a kid, when I was afraid of bridges. I’ve never entirely gotten over it, though it’s pretty well suppressed. I suppose the suppression will be less effective for a while now.

My own complaints seem (and seem because they are) trivial today. A little after the tragedy last night, a thunderstorm hit here (it was a mercy of God that it only grazed the neighborhood of the bridge failure), and a lightning strike close by messed up a couple things in the house. The monitor I’m working on now lost some brightness (the degaussing utility fixed that) and my TV got all messed up, with arcs of primary color adorning the top and bottom, and green faces on all the people. According to what I read on the internet, my set ought to degauss itself, in a gradual fashion, a little bit each time I turn it on.

Also the Ground Fault Protection outlet in my bathroom went poof and stopped working. It’s the kind that doesn’t have a re-set button, so I guess I’ll have to call an electrician for that.

Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost re-posted this essay today. I consider it well worth your attention.

I find that I just don’t have the stomach for those old arguments anymore. I’m still willing to discuss doctrinal differences. But now I’m less sure that I’m standing on the right side of scripture. Is the view heretical or likely to lead someone away from salvation? Then I’ll fight it tooth-and-nail. If not, then I’ll probably just sit this one out. I no longer have an interest in being what Anthony Bradley calls a “wife beater”:

And I’ll leave you with that tonight.

Uncategorized

In which I say nothing helpful about the disaster

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It’s almost obligatory for anybody in this community to say, “I just drove over that bridge yesterday.” Or “last week.” Or “I drive it all the time.”

I think I must be the only person in Minneapolis who almost never goes that way. I’ve been trying to conjure up a memory of that particular stretch of 35W, and for the life of me I can’t. I live in the northwest suburbs, so I always angle off before downtown, and if I’m going north I angle off northeast. So I’m much less spooked than your average Twin Cities blogger today.

I’m very sad though.

And I still can’t get terrorism out of my mind. The whole thing just doesn’t add up. Somebody’s holding something back, I suspect, to prevent panic.

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I’m all right

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In case you were worried, I wasn’t anywhere near the 35W bridge when it collapsed tonight. It’s a terrible thing, and aside from the suffering (one confirmed dead at this time) it will cripple local commerce and transportation for a long time. This was the major artery of our community.

They say there’s no reason to suspect terrorism. I’ll go out on a limb and say that, personally, I do suspect it.

Reading

Beowulf, suffering servant

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“Thus Beowulf showed himself brave, a man known in battles, of good deeds, bore himself according to discretion. Drunk, he slew no hearth-companions.”

I re-read Beowulf over the weekend, in response to our discussion about the movie trailer for the upcoming film.

My conclusion is that I enjoyed it, and I’m reasonably certain that no movie based on the poem (I believe yet another is in the works after this one) will get to the heart of the thing.

Beowulf is often described as a heathen tale overlaid with a thin veneer of Christianity (it’s a Dark Age story, probably based on events that happened [if they happened] in Denmark and Sweden sometime around 500 AD. But the poem as we have it was clearly re-worked by Christian scribes, based on an oral original). And that’s essentially true.

Nevertheless, I think I may understand why monks would have considered it worth preserving. Because they understood the poem in a way that moviemakers today never will. They understood that Beowulf’s actions are not based only on personal pride, on showing off, on “macho.” They are based, at bottom, on sacrifice.

It has often been noted how boastful Beowulf is, and how there is no hint of humility or reserve in his account of his great deeds at Hrothgar’s feast.

But the editor of the edition I read (an adaptation of F. Klaeber’s translation, in Vol. 1 of The Norton Anthology of English Literature) notes, “…his boast becomes a vow; the hero has put himself in a position from which he cannot withdraw.”

When you’re living in terror, when you’re afraid that not only your prosperity but your very life and the lives of your children will soon be lost, there’s nothing you want more than somebody big and strong and competent who’ll swagger in and say, “Trolls? I eat trolls for breakfast! I’ll moider da bum.”

You can sense Hrothgar’s blood pressure dropping as he listens to Beowulf’s self-promotion.

For all his braggadocio, there really isn’t much in the whole business for Beowulf personally. He risks his life with Grendel, then has to repeat the performance with Grendel’s mother. He receives honor and gifts, which are nice, but he almost always fights alone. His is essentially a lonely fate.

There’s an elegiac quality to the poem, too. If Beowulf ever married or had children, we aren’t told of it. After he becomes the king of his own people, the Geats, he rules successfully, but essentially leaves nothing behind, not even an heir. It’s hinted plainly that his people will be conquered and driven from their homes after his death. This, I suspect, is why the poem ended up in England. It probably crossed the sea with the refugees.

So Beowulf is essentially the story of a warrior who gives up his own life for his people, and for his allies. His is the story of every soldier, even in our own time, to a lesser or greater degree. In return for the sense of duty fulfilled, and fleeting glory, they give up their very lives. They become servants, and their pay is never enough.

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I ketchup on the weekend

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Today is my birthday. I’m ** years old.

Thanks to Uncle Orv and Aunt Rachel, along with our reader Omie, who sent cards (Omie also sent a gift. I approve of this. Gifts to bloggers are always in order. Especially on their birthdays. Especially when they’re crotchety old bachelors).

I took myself out to Baker’s Square for supper tonight, to celebrate. I don’t go there often, not because I don’t like the food (I think it’s been getting better over the years) but because at my age, and following the reflux surgery I had, I have a hard time consuming a meal and a having a piece of French Silk pie on top of it. And skipping the French Silk is not to be thought of. Better to skip the meal.

I ordered from the Light Menu, but I’m still pretty stuffed. Nevertheless, I will not have it said that I did nothing to celebrate. Almost nothing, yes, but not nothing.

I’m still pretty beat from a weekend of almost constant social interaction (oh, the humanity!). We gathered at Brother Moloch’s home in Iowa for a double celebration (or observation. Or something). There was the baptism of their former exchange student, a young woman from Germany who is back temporarily for some medical training. “What?” you ask. “An adult baptism in a Lutheran church?” Yes, we do do them, in certain circumstances. This young woman was born in East Germany under Communism and has never been baptized. She’s been making up her mind on the matter for several years, under the influence of Moloch and his family. Now she’s decided that she wants to enter the church. Her parents and maternal grandparents came over for the event too. Her parents speak English but the grandparents don’t, but we all got along excellently. We spent most of our time sitting outdoors, which the Germans seemed to prefer. Fortunately the weather was mild, and it’s been a dry year so there weren’t many mosquitoes. We made conversation (or sat pretty much silent in my case) and watched the fireflies and listened to the cicadas.

There was also a commissioning for my Youngest Niece, whom we put on a plane for China about 6:30 a.m. Monday. She’ll be teaching English there for two years, under the same program her sister attempted a couple years back, but had to abandon due to ill health. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, but we’re all proud of her.

We also spent some time fooling around with an ultralight plane Brother Moloch bought and hopes to re-sell. He never got it off the ground, and didn’t really try to. He just wanted to figure out how the controls responded. My personal impression is that the thing was designed by Terry Gilliam and Dr. Kevorkian, but those who tooled it around like a go-cart had a good time, and they only tore up a small portion of the cornfields that surround the air strip.

For my birthday, my brothers took me out for a hamburger. The symbolism suffered, however, in that the local diner did not have Heinz ketchup for my Heinz birthday. But I choose to believe that they’re boycotting Heinz in disgust at Teresa Heinz Kerry, and I can get behind that.

It’s my birthday. Humor me.

Reading

Davy Crockett and the corruption of children

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The mawn is lone. I mean, the lawn is mown (Sorry. It just came out like that). The clothes are in the washer. I am on schedule to be packed up and out of here tomorrow morning. I’ll be going down to Iowa for family stuff over the weekend, and I won’t be back till Monday night, so I probably won’t post again till Tuesday evening.

Be strong. I know you can endure that long.

Got my Davy Crockett book in the mail today. It’s the same one as this one, except that close examination reveals it to be the Australian edition. I kind of wondered about that when I noticed the seller was from there (or New Zealand. I forget). But as far as I can tell it’s essentially the same. A quick perusal doesn’t even reveal any Britishisms like “colour.”

It was somewhat startling to page through it for the first time in decades. I thought I remembered the book clearly, but although every page is immediately familiar, I’d completely forgotten most of them, as far as being able to summon them up from memory on my own was concerned.

I puzzle over memory a lot. I’m convinced (and experience confirms it) that most of what we call “memory” is a construct, a movie we’ve produced for ourselves. The first time we remember an event, we remember the thing itself. The next time, we remember the event plus our experience of remembering it. That little addition compounds over the years, so that eventually there isn’t much of the original memory left.

That doesn’t mean memory is worthless. But it’s unfocused and palimpsested. It’s not entirely to be relied on.

Which is good and bad, I think.

Another thing that came to mind as I examined the book was the prominence of guns in the thing. No publisher would get away with so much shooting in a kids’ book nowadays, I’m pretty sure. Like all Baby Boomers, I grew up surrounded by the images of heroes (Crockett, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, etc.) who carried and used guns.

Yet—amazingly—we confounded the grownups who worried about the effects of all this “violence on TV.” We grew up to be the most pacifist, anti-gun generation this country had ever seen.

This gives me hope.

Because if it’s a principle that kids will grow up to reject the heroic images they were raised with, we can look forward to the next generation being the pickup-drivingest, huntingest, jingoistest, moral absolutistest generation that ever waged a war of aggression.

Authors

Another stab at Beowulf

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It’s raining this afternoon. This is a good thing, though they tell us we might get some severe weather later tonight. But that’s OK. I don’t mind a little storm damage. As long as it happens to somebody else.

Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard got a link from Hugh Hewitt at Towhall.com today.

I hate you, Gaius. Curse you, and your little animal uprising too!

Dale sent me this link to a trailer for the upcoming Robert Zemeckis Beowulf movie. Looks like they’re going the 300 route, which isn’t necessarily bad. It can’t be worse than the recent Icelandic effort with Gerard Butler, which I reviewed a while back. But it doesn’t look like much effort has been made to get the costumes authentic (which the Gerard Butler incarnation at least got right, pretty much the only thing it got right).

We Viking reenactors don’t ask for much. We’d like to see a Viking movie (Beowulf isn’t technically a Viking, but close enough to get on our radar) with historical authenticity and a good story.

So far, the best Viking movie ever made is still The Vikings with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. And that movie isn’t really very good (though it’s a lot of fun). The Thirteenth Warrior had its points, but it went so far off the reservation with armor and weapons that it kind of hurts to watch. (Unless you’ve just watched the Gerard Butler Beowulf, in which case it’s like a drink of cold water on a hot day.)

So I’ll see this one. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I don’t think anyone has ever imagined Grendel’s mother (the part Angelina Jolie plays) as a siren before. I suppose it could work.

Just as long as I’m not supposed to like her. I like Robin Wright-Penn all right, even though she has lousy taste in husbands.

Hollywood! Don’t you realize the world is screaming for a film version of The Year of the Warrior?

Religion

The melting house

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Tonight, a Christian Fundamentalist joke to start with:

Q: What do you call a Pre-Trib eschatologist with a drug problem?

A: Hal Lindsey Lohan



(Ba-rump-bump)

It was a good day. I not only got a start on a project I’ve been struggling with, but I caught our former IT guy, recently departed from the staff, on a visit to the school. I begged him to help with a bar code project I’d asked him about just before he left. He’d told me clearly where to find the Microsoft Access file I needed, but I’d been able to locate nothing there. So he came up and looked on my computer, and on the network, and behold, I was right (someone write that down. It doesn’t happen that often). The file had disappeared, like an 80s TV star. So he spent more time than he’d planned on, creating a couple new reports for me. Now I’m back in business. Thanks, Brian, in case you happen to read this.

Earlier I spoke to Dennis Ingolfsland of The Recliner Commentaries. He’s the librarian at a Christian college in our general area, and I’d been asked to call around and find out how those schools figure overdue fines, since we’re considering revising our policies. Nice to speak to Dennis, whose blog I enjoy very much.

Here’s something that occurred to me today:

I was thinking about how, through the centuries, so many of God’s best servants have had very short life-spans. Thinking about Oswald Chambers brought it to mind, but there are many examples. In the great days of the Missions Movement, young people from all over Europe and America trooped onto ships that sailed to Africa or India or Southeast Asia, and the casualty toll was horrendous. Some were lost in storms at sea, hundreds succumbed to disease, and a few were killed by natives. Living in a time when passion for the gospel has narrowed to a trickle in our civilization, that seems like an awful waste.

But you know, God doesn’t build as man does. His Church is the solidest of edifices, as C. S. Lewis says in The Screwtape Letters: “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.” In terms of this temporal world, though, God builds like a contractor putting up a house made of ice in Saudi Arabia (or in Minnesota, today). His construction material is forever dwindling away under His hand, and one piece after another has to be replaced.

But this is not a bad thing. He chose that form of architecture, and it may be that the constant replacement prevents problems of petrifaction or rot that He particularly wants to avoid.

Or so it seems to me.

Writing

Inter Session

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Today, when I left work, it was raining. Big, fat drops. It wasn’t supposed to do that.

When I got home, it was not raining here. So apparently we hit the lottery back at the school (rain is much needed up here). The skies are cloudy; we could still get some. But since the rain at work was undocumented rain, rain not authorized by the weather forecasters, I think it will probably remain in the shadows.

Where rain generally falls, come to think of it.

Today I shall rail against a great evil in our society. Oddly enough, a quick web search seems to indicate that nobody has written about it before. Since such a thing is unthinkable, I can only blame a world-wide conspiracy, orchestrated, perhaps, by the Bilderbergers or the Tri-Lateral Commission. If this post mysteriously disappears and you never hear from me again, you’ll know why.

I want to talk about the difference between “intervene” and “intercede.”

The error usually involves someone using “intercede” when he wants to say “intervene.”

I shall explain.

“Intervene” means to come between. The UN intervenes, for instance, in civil wars in the Third World (those little girls aren’t going to prostitute themselves, after all). Federal officials intervene in labor disputes. Bad weather intervenes to stop a ball game.

One form of intervention is called “intercession.”

(This is the problem, you see. All intercessions are interventions, but not all interventions are intercessions.)

To “intercede” is to plead with someone on someone else’s behalf. If someone is suing you, and you hire a lawyer to make them an offer to settle out of court, the lawyer is interceding. In the Christian faith, we intercede for others when we pray for their needs, and we ask others to intercede for us. Christ intercedes for us with the Father.

“Intercession” means pleading someone’s case. Asking for a break for them. Nature never intercedes. Fate never intercedes. Armies never intercede, since they use force, not negotiation or pleading.

There’s someone at the door. I’ll just answer it, and then I’ll be—

Reviews

Weekend reading

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The word from Our Beloved Supervisors in the Twin Cities today is, “Stay inside. Do not attempt any strenuous work out of doors. The temperature is too high; the ozone level up in the Oh! Zone.”

I defied that advice, rebel that I am. In the first place the temperature was lower than expected, only a little over 80. Also my walking schedule has finally gotten me to the level where my body (like a dog) actually expects and wants its daily walk, and is disappointed if it misses it.

The humidity level was in Jacques Cousteau territory. I thought breathing was a little difficult too, but that was likely psychosomatic. Is ozone really dangerous to breathe, like cigarette smoke or something? Am I going to die now? Maybe I should just take up tobacco.

It says much about my psychological disorder(s) that, although I’m essentially very lazy, I judge a good or bad weekend by what I’ve accomplished. By that standard, it was a pretty good weekend. I mowed the lawn. I mopped the bathroom. I waxed Mrs. Hermanson, my car. And that was all on Saturday. On Sunday I did precisely nothing, as is my preference, except for church and reading. I shall now tell you about my reading.

No full reviews on these, just observations.

I finished Michael Connelly’s Echo Park. It’s another Harry Bosch novel, and a strong book in a dynasty of strong books. Harry is back with the L.A. police department now, working the Cold Case unit. A serial killer is arrested with human body parts in his van, and he confesses to a series of murders, including one that Harry worked on back in 1993, when it was new, and has been revisiting from time to time ever since. The problem is that Harry has been certain from the first that somebody else murdered that particular victim. And Harry is told that he missed a vital clue back in ’93, one that could have saved a number of lives if he’d followed it up. There’s an escape, cops are murdered, and Harry works two puzzles at once.

There’s nothing cheerful in a Harry Bosch book. Harry lives in a dark, confused world, where doing right (and Harry always tries to do right—that’s part of his problem) isn’t always the same thing as following the rules. Harry gets the job done, but there’s always a cost.

I also read an oldie, Robert Crais’ Lullaby Town. I like Crais better with each book of his I read. In this story, L.A. private eye Elvis Cole is hired by Peter Alan Nelson, a powerful Hollywood producer (whose characterization is deftly kept just this side of parody) to locate his ex-wife and son, who left him years before and simply dropped out of sight.

Elvis has to travel far from home to find the two, and when he does he discovers a desperate situation that calls for swift and forceful action. Needless to say, he brings in his dangerous partner, Joe Pike, but the real delight of Lullaby Town is the character arc traced by Nelson, the movie producer, as his family’s danger gradually forces him into a strange new territory known as The Real World, and how he begins to grow up as a man.

I think we lose a lot in contemporary storytelling through the abandonment of belief in objective truth. When you believe that there is an actual “thing” out there called Truth (or Goodness), then you can believe that everyone has an obligation to it, and you can root for them as they approach it, or sorrow for them as they move away from it.

When you believe that everybody makes his own truth, your rooting for a character is only a function of your personal taste (and his). It’s a game without a fixed goal. It’s pointless.

I don’t know if Crais had that kind of lesson in mind, but that’s what I drew from Lullaby Town, and it was very satisfactory to me.