Jeffrey Polet reviews Emory professor Mark Bauerlein’s second book on the “Dumbest Generation,” Millennials, whose poor education has underserved them. He says, they don’t have the “moral imagination” to speak to the real world. If only they’d read good books.
Multiculturalism didn’t multiply heritages and enhance each one; it left the students with no heritage at all, no relationship to past greatness.” As witness to this claim Bauerlein offers Malcolm X, who, he avers, would have scoffed at the denuding of such a wealthy heritage. Instead, Malcolm X transformed his life when his prison cell became a refuge from the world, allowing him to read day and night, thus awakening “the long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” It was by placing himself in the horizon provided by the great works of the past that Malcolm X was able to turn his life around and give it purpose.
This is not a review, but a promotion. I have a story in the recently released anthology, Renegade Swords III. I was approached by the compiler, who paid me a small fee for rights to the story. It was originally published long, long ago in Weird Tales (I was delighted to get into Weird Tales, once upon a time the home of Robert E. Howard’s Conan).
The story is called “Magic’s Price.” It’s about a wizard, berserkers, and a bereaved husband. I know nothing about the other stories, or the authors. But my story alone makes the book worth having. It goes without saying.
Had a melancholy reading experience today. I picked up a bargain e-book, and it started out really well. The prose was excellent, and I liked the characters. I was interested in them. The story drew me in.
Then I came up against the Agenda (or, as you may prefer to put it, my bigotry). The central problem of the story involved a homosexual being blackmailed, back in the early 1950s.
I always cringe when they bring in “gay” themes. Aside from my beliefs on sexual morality, male homosexuality gives me the willies. I think that’s true for all “straight” (what we used to call normal) men, if they haven’t been brainwashed. But I could put up with it as a realistic plot element.
However, that wasn’t enough for the author. He had to make it an issue. Had to preach repeatedly on the importance of normalizing homosexuality, of bringing it into the mainstream.
So, sadly, I put the book aside unfinished.
But it was good enough that I think I ought to at least mention it here: Murder by the Book, by Eric Brown. As I mentioned, the writing was very good. You might enjoy it, if you’re more enlightened than I am.
Busy with translation today, but I was finished in the afternoon. I think there might have been more work available if I’d asked, but I’m busy with meetings tomorrow (volunteer stuff, of course), so I couldn’t commit. This is the first project I’ve done involving a certain new technology. I don’t think I’ll tell you what that technology is, because you have no Need To Know. Enough to say it might someday put me out of work entirely. For that reason I, for one, welcome our new android overlords. Me good human; not make trouble.
Seems odd not to have anything to write about Fridtjof Nansen today. But come to think of it, I do. Leftover thoughts, musings, and pharisaisms out of a long read.
I find it odd how the world judged Nansen vs. Roald Amundsen in terms of their dogs. Nansen and his companion Johansen, as I mentioned in the review, killed their sled dogs on their trek home, feeding them to the other dogs. Amundsen and his men, on his South Pole expedition, ate their dogs themselves (it was an emergency). But Nansen was hailed as a hero, with little mention of the dogs, while Amundsen came in for a lot of criticism for his canophagia (probably not a real word, but a quick web search didn’t produce a scientific term, so I improvised). I can only assume it was the eating, not the killing, that people objected to. In those days, killing dogs in itself wasn’t much of an issue in the public mind.
On a related issue, something I read once had given me the impression that Nansen’s distant treatment of Johansen after their return may have contributed to Johansen’s eventual depression and suicide. However, on further reading, I find that Nansen was a prince to the guy compared to Amundsen, who kicked him off the South Pole expedition and expunged his name from all reports.
It should also be noted that Johansen had a drinking problem, which probably didn’t help.
Nansen’s ship “Fram,” frozen into the polar ice, 1893. Photo from the Fram Museum, Oslo.
It was a nice quiet weekend, just the way I like it. I continue reading Fridtjof Nansen’s interminable book on his Fram expedition. It’s not boring – I’d have dumped it if it was. But it’s suitable to its subject – grim and dark and uncomfortable. It correlates well to the weather we’re experiencing. I can’t resist tailoring tonight’s post to the pattern of his daily journal entries:
January 10, 2022: The day dawned bright and cold. I made my way to the gym again, after skipping most of last week due to my temporary attack of an unspecified ailment. I don’t believe it was Covid; the symptoms seemed wrong. But if it was, all the better; in that case I’m over it now. The temperature was -6 Fahrenheit as I drove; it reached a high of 3 above during the afternoon. Tomorrow looks to be warmer. When shall spring come? Will I live so long? Ah, for the warm zephyrs and green grass of June! It seems so far away in these dark days.
It appears most of the people at the gym are wearing masks again now. For some time they’d become rare. I’m still going barefaced. I believe the vaccine has some benefits, but I think I’ve become a mask skeptic.
At lunchtime I tried to get into Arby’s again, and again the dining room was closed, in spite of a big sign saying the room is open as a general principle. I hold no grudge; no doubt they’re doing their best to recruit workers. But once again, as has happened so often of late, I ended up at Perkins, which is nearby and where I can count on a table to sit at in comfort. The manager actually mentioned, as I paid my bill, that he’d been seeing me a lot lately. I had to confess I hadn’t set out with his restaurant in mind. Perhaps I should have let him believe he’d won a devoted fan, but that would just have left him with an illusion sure to be shattered. My meal was jumbo shrimp, which Perkins does pretty well, though I noticed the shrimp aren’t as jumbo as they used to be. Restaurant management is a tough business just now – I don’t begrudge them a few economies. The place is warm, the food is good, and the help is friendly.
This afternoon I girded up my loins and addressed a job I’d been putting off – filing and paying my Minnesota sales tax for books I unloaded during my summer adventures. I’ve never had any serious problem with the process, and yet I always approach it with fear and trembling. Great was my relief when I got the job done (online) and printed out my receipts (duplicates, because you can never be too careful). My only regret was that the money I transferred doubtless works out to sunk costs.
Yeah, that’s about the right town. Winter in Minnesota / dead reckoning trekking on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. Essentially the same thing.
Yes, you’re in the right place. This is where you get my occasional book reviews, but more often you get excuses for why it’s been several days since the last review. Not that you’d expect me to read a book every day. I know you pretty well by now, Gentle Reader, and you’re not unreasonable. As a matter of fact, I think you’re pretty gosh-darn patient.
It was a weekend full of translation work for me. Which is good. I approve, and am grateful. Only Christmas’ wingéd chariot keeps drawing near, and I haven’t started my cards yet. No, that’s not quite true. I gave the address labels a start yesterday. And then got confused and lost all my work. I shall resume, Sisyphus-like, tonight. If I can work up the energy. (My cold is better, but I’m still a little tired.)
The book I’m reading at the moment is Dorothy Sayers’ classic Five Red Herrings, which is considered a masterpiece of the railroad timetable school (which was very popular at the time). But I feel I’m not doing it justice, because I’m not making spreadsheets of all the data. Thus, my progress is slow.
But I share the little video above, which is the original titles for the BBC production of Clouds of Witness, back in the 1970s. Broadcast in the US on Masterpiece Theater. I always liked that music.
By the way, have I mentioned I did translation work on a production that was broadcast on Masterpiece Theater last spring? I’ll tell you about it if you insist…
Benjamin Moser talks about finding a somewhat old library of English books and how he began to change his opinion of translating world authors into English.
In recent years we have seen writers outside English become global phenomena: Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami. But such a literary life, the popularity owed to translation, began to seem a little fake to me. And when I read Mizumura I found myself agreeing that, strictly speaking, literary universality does not exist. The books I loved were, after all, about something, not everything. But even in practical and commercial terms, the prominence of English created more losers than winners, favoring, like so many other forms of globalization, a handful of instantly recognizable and inoffensive brands.
…
Translation — not the thing but the unquestioned emphasis on its virtue — started to feel to me like another philistinism masquerading as worldliness.
By worldliness, Moser means people travel the world–or read from around the world–and they start to think they own the place.
Micah Mattix discusses the essay in the latest Prufrock email, saying maybe readers or literary opinion makers should lighten up a bit. “A healthy curiosity is a virtue, of course, but there is nothing wrong with enjoying a work on its own.”
Today, of course, I worked at translation. Made good progress, too, and I’ll put some more time in tonight. I’ve got personal business to handle as well, but everything’s in hand.
Started reading a book by an unfamiliar author the other day. A bargain book for Kindle. According to the description it’s a Christian book, and it has a lot of good reviews.
Alas, so often the descriptor “Christian” indicates poor craftsmanship. So it was here.
I won’t tell you the author’s name or the book’s title. They might be favorites of yours. Many people better than me in almost every respect enjoy – or even write – books that don’t please me. It’s not for me to look down my nose at them. I know I’m turning into a literary snob in my dotage.
The author just hadn’t mastered the craft. The story may have been good – I tried to hang with it, to see if the plot grabbed me when the prose didn’t – but in the end I couldn’t hack it. I was opening it out of duty rather than anticipation.
So much in writing depends (as in jazz) on the notes you don’t play. There are lots of things you don’t need to tell the reader, if you can suggest them – through word choice, rhythm, juxtaposition. When the reader expects you to say something and you don’t, that makes him guess at your reasons. Such things make the reading experience a collaborative one, a kind of dance. It draws the reader in.
This author knew nothing of these things. He may learn the craft in time. You’ve got to start somewhere. I wish him well.
Above, a video of The Dragon Harald Fairhair, the largest Viking ship replica ever built. She was constructed in Haugesund, Norway, and I hoped to see her back in 2016, when she was supposed to come to Duluth. But that was prevented by maritime regulations. She’s been sitting in Mystic Harbor, CT for a couple years now, and I wonder what her future will be.
Anyway, this is a cool video, mixing comments by crew members with epic sailing footage. I believe I haven’t seen it before, which means somebody probably sent me the link once, and I was too busy to look at it.
No translation work today. But no book review either. Maybe tomorrow. Today I’ve been preparing a couple lectures I’ll be delivering to a class at our seminary on Thursday. I’ll talk about the Viking raid at Lindisfarne and the conversion of Norway. I have Things to Say on both subjects, springing from my ever-ready stock of opinions, based on life-long study and my association with a certain independent-minded scholar.
I always try to make it clear that the theories I talk about are theories only. “Don’t look at me! I’m just the errand boy!”
The book I’m reading right now is Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison. It’s a landmark volume in the series, because it’s here that Lord Peter Wimsey first meets the novelist Harriet Vane. She’s on trial for murder, and he makes up his mind to save her, largely because he’s fallen in love with her and can’t conceive of the woman he loves being a murderess.
It was adapted for TV back in 1987, with Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane, and Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter. I quite liked Miss Walter in her role. Petherbridge I found less successful. He looked more like the character than Ian Carmichael in his classic performance (though too tall), but I didn’t like his portrayal. It had a strong basis – the author’s own statements that Lord Peter was basically depressed due to being shell-shocked in the Great War and disappointed in love. His Wodehouseian persona was an act. But Petherbridge played him as a sort of mope who cracked jokes. I think Lord Peter carried the thing off rather more elegantly than that.
Anyway, Strong Poison includes one of my favorite Sayers characters – “Blindfold Bill” Rumm, the reformed safecracker. Bill is a man of no great intelligence or sophistication, but is an absolute master at the art of lock-picking. He turned from that life after Lord Peter caught him breaking into his own safe one night, and pumped him for knowledge rather than turning him in. Soon after he was converted to Evangelicalism (there’s a suggestion that it might have been through Chief Inspector Parker, who’s an evangelical), and now he pastors a house church. However, when Lord Peter needs his help in training someone to crack a lock, Blindfold Bill happily assists. He believes (erroneously) that Lord Peter is also a believer, and (correctly) that all he does is in the service of good.
Dorothy Sayers was a well-known Church of England believer (not an evangelical), who wrote brilliant apologetics. Yet she wrote her mystery stories for the publisher Victor Gollancz, who was an influential Communist. The idea of writing a story in the C.S. Lewis vein, with an evangelical lesson, would have repelled her. And by her own account, she took offense when people suggested she’d make Lord Peter a believer eventually (“Keep your hands off my character!”). I find that perfectly understandable as a novelist, and rather sad as a Christian.
But Blindfold Bill shows how she did include Christian themes in her work, consistent with her views of art. Bill is no Christian Mary Sue, no fantasy-fulfillment character for the Christian reader. He’s remarkable only for two things – his skill (however illicit) as a craftsman, and his unashamed (even awkward) gospel witness. His testimony isn’t intellectually compelling or very appealing. But it’s sincere, and one feels his heart is good.
In short, Blindfold Bill is a realistic Christian character. We’re allowed to laugh at him a little, but he leaves a strong positive impression. I think that’s a subtle kind of apologetics.
Work has descended on me today, like a squall off Cape Horn. It had been a long-ish calm, and I was getting nervous about it. But today, first of all, I got a referral from a satisfied customer, recommending me to another possible client. That’s gratifying in the extreme. Don’t know if it’ll come to anything, but approval is approval, and I suffer from a constitutional deficiency. Then a substantial script came in for translation, which means a decent pay day coming up over the horizon. Which, as it happens, I can use.
I’ve been reading a book (I’ll review it whenever I get it finished) about the last days of the great sailing ships. I read this stuff with a special fascination, knowing that some of my ancestors were involved in merchant sailing (one of them is supposed to have sailed to China). The author is doing an excellent job describing the hellish conditions under which those old sailors worked, even late in the 19th Century – insanely dangerous duties up in the rigging, miserable food, brutal discipline, dreary drudgery and heart-in-your-throat peril from the elements. For little pay. (That explains the shanty performance I embedded at the top of this post.)
When I think about the fact that I can eke out a living working at a keyboard under my own supervision, in a warm, dry house with enough food to keep me fat, I realize that I certainly belong to the 1% of humanity, from a historical perspective. And so, probably, do you, unless you’re a Chinese or Muslim slave, just because you were born into a lucky century.
Russian Bill. Photo from americancowboychronicles.com
I reviewed John Boessenecker’sRide the Devil’s Herd the other day. The book is an impressive account of the deadly conflict between the Earp brothers, Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan (note how I list Virgil first – he was the oldest of the three, and I’m an oldest too. We oldests have to stick together) and the rustler gang known as the Cowboys.
The book includes many interesting anecdotes, some of them surprising, some of them shocking, some disillusioning. One story amazed me. It’s one of the weirdest western yarns I’ve ever read, and I’m amazed I’d never heard of it before.
There was a member of the Cowboys known as “Russian Bill” Tattenbaum. He was an educated man of about 30, older than most of the other cowboys. He spoke French, Russian, Spanish, and English. He dressed expensively, with gold pieces on his buckskins, a silver hat band, and silver-plated, ivory-handled six-shooters. He had a reputation as a blowhard – he bragged about his crimes and depredations, but was considered all hat and very little cattle. One of his brags was that he was a European nobleman. Nobody believed that any more than his other tall tales.
He was finally arrested by a deputy and jailed in Shakespeare, New Mexico, in an adobe hotel, along with another Cowboy named Sandy King. According to newspaper accounts, they were “loud and demonstrative in their threats against the citizens, declaring that the people of the town would have an opportunity to dance to their music inside of twenty-four hours.”
At 2:00 a.m. the next morning, a group of local citizens, faces masked, overpowered the guard, took the pair to the bar room, and hanged them from a ceiling joist. Sandy King, according to witnesses, went to his death with dignity, but Russian Bill “begged for his life,” claiming he hadn’t committed any crimes at all, and was really a Russian nobleman who’d fled his native land because of a love affair. The vigilantes, neither convinced nor impressed, let Russian Bill swing.
A coroner’s jury the next day declared their deaths “suicide.”
Here’s the payoff:
…Five months later, in April 1882…, Sheriff Harvey Whitehill received a letter from the U.S. consul in St. Petersburg, Russia. The consulate had been contacted by a Russian countess whose son was in New Mexico and had not written to her since the previous May. The consul wrote… that the missing man’s name was “Waldemar Tethenborn” and provided his photograph. It was Russian Bill. Sheriff Whitehill replied to the consul and, to spare the mother’s feelings, reported that her son had committed suicide.
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