Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

What of Our Deeds Will Matter for Long, Statesmen, and Blogroll

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“Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
                           Nothing but bones,
      The sad effect of sadder groans:
Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.”
from “Death” by George Herbert

A handful of life paths — intellectual and artistic work in particular — are about trying to create, as Horace wrote, “a monument more lasting than bronze.” They are a calculated gamble that a life dedicated to the difficult and narrow path will continue after our death, however unrewarding it might have been to experience.

But that we even have Horace’s poetry to read is as much a caprice of fate as a function of his poetic virtue. Some manuscripts survive the collapse of civilization, others do not; it seems unlikely that these survivals and disappearances precisely track merit. We have Horace and we are missing most of Sappho.

It’s Very Unlikely Anyone Will Read This in 200 Years (via Prufrock)

Statesmen: A review of The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation by Daniel J. Mahoney. “The best politician employs the intellectual and moral virtues and ‘all the powers of the soul,’ with proper humility and deference to divine and moral law, to better the community.” Has anyone in this generation or last done this? Have we lost this type of man for a while?

Racism: Albert Camus has something to teach us about anti-racism in his book The Fall. “The Fall operates as a reverse confessional with the priest as the penitent who, rather than seeking absolution, wants only to implicate us in his guilt. With this inverted symbol Camus recognizes that power often wears a priestly frock.”

Abolition of Man: Do you think you understand Lewis’s Abolition of Man? Here’s some help. “Through Ward’s page-by-page, sometimes line-by-line, and occasionally word-by-word exegesis of Abolition, we discover the wide plethora of sources upon which Lewis drew to critique his opponents as well as to appeal to Western and non-Western thinkers who have maintained confidence in reason’s capacity to know moral truth.”

Evil: A review of Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel: “The moral of this tragic story is that people are often too trusting of criminals professing their innocence, and ignore the reality of human nature: Evil exists. Heinous crimes don’t commit themselves.”

Christian Living: What do believers need today? We need power.

Photo: Brooklyn Hotel, closed. Brooklyn, Iowa. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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The Norwegian word for ‘overthinking’ is ‘overtenkning’

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No book review tonight. No music either, but I posted the short video above about Stavanger. Because I’m going there this summer, God willing. When I think about actually going, I’m terrified. I’m fairly certain I’ll make enemies wherever I go, not because I mean to, but because I’m socially clueless. So I’m concentrating on the mechanics of planning, and trying not to think about the experience itself.

If that makes any sense.

Part of these mechanics is my ongoing effort to improve my listening comprehension of the language. I’m doing that, as you may recall, through listening to Norwegian radio. And I think I’m making progress, unless I’m deluding myself (there’s some precedent for that). When I listen to the news on the NRK (state radio) channel now, I can sometimes understand about 50% of what’s being said. This is substantial progress, considering the fact that at the beginning I only caught a word or two here or there.

I notice a strange development as I listen. If I listen intently, trying to understand, I tend to lose the thread. If I listen lightly, with half a brain, as you might say, I seem to catch it better. The effort itself seems to be an impediment. Sort of a zen thing, I suppose. Or Jedi. “Do or do not; there is no try.”

I’m trying to remember that.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Nine Tailors,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“You’ve got too much imagination, Nobby,” said Parker.

“You wait, Charles,” said Lord Peter. “You wait till you get stuck on a ladder in a belfry in the dark. Bells are like cats and mirrors—they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them. Go on, Cranton.”

Dorothy L. Sayers achieved some remarkable things in her classic Lord Peter Wimsey series of mysteries. One of their impressive elements is the way she varies settings, both socially and geographically. I suspect that The Nine Tailors is one of her most beloved books, despite the fact that it spends a lot of time on the arcane English pastime of “change ringing,” in which church bells are rung in varying strings of ever-changing notes. The Nine Tailors combines a kind of epic sweep with profound human tragedy.

It’s Christmas Eve when Lord Peter and his man Bunter, speeding over the East Anglian fen country in his big Daimler car, go into a ditch, bending the axle. They are taken in by the kindly vicar of Fenchurch, a small community nearby. When the vicar announces sadly that they’re going to have to cancel their attempt to set a record ringing “Kent Treble Bob Majors” that night, because one of his ringers has fallen ill, noblesse oblige leaves Lord Peter no choice but to volunteer himself, as he has some experience as a change ringer. This involves nine hours of labor in the church tower when he could use some sleep, but everyone is very grateful. The next day Lord Peter drives away in his repaired car, assuming he’ll never return.

But some months later, the vicar calls and asks his help again. A strange thing has happened. While the sexton was opening a grave to bury a man with his recently deceased wife, a strange body was found in the grave. The face had been bashed in with a shovel and the hands removed, so it’s impossible to identify the man. Lord Peter, always keen for a mystery, quickly shows up and starts investigatin’.

It all seems to have something to do with a scandalous theft that occurred long ago, on the eve of the Great War. A guest at the local nobleman’s wedding had a valuable emerald necklace stolen. It has never been recovered. One of the house servants and an outside accomplice were arrested and sent to prison, shaming his wife, who still lives in the town, remarried after her husband escaped and died in an accident. The accomplice was still alive, though, having recently been released. The body may be his. But if so, who killed him, how did they kill him (there is no visible premortem wound), and why is he wearing French underwear?

Author Sayers turns the pealing of the bells into a kind of chorus that accompanies the drama up to its epic climax in a massive flood on the fens. The Nine Tailors is gripping and haunting. A masterpiece of the genre. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘If I Scream,’ by W. H. Clark

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I was wandering through some of the old reviews on this site, and I found a review of An End to a Silence, by W. H. Clark. I liked the book quite a lot and noted that I wished the sequel were available (it’s intended as a trilogy). I checked again now, and found that the second book, If I Scream, is out, so I bought it. It has most of the virtues of the first book, and engaged me deeply. Except for one thing…

A young woman, pale and emaciated, appears along a Montana highway. A kindly man stops to help her, and seeing her condition and hearing her say something about being held a prisoner, he heads for the police station. But on the way she distracts him, and he smashes into a car in an intersection. They are both rushed to a hospital, where the young woman quickly dies.

This is a case for Ward, the mysterious, taciturn former Texas Ranger, now a Montana policeman. Kidnapping and the abuse of children are things he obsesses about. But his bosses won’t devote a lot of resources to the case, because a serial killer has started working in the area. The murderer kills in various ways, and it’s hard to see what connects the men he’s murdering. So Ward is left to work the case as he can, with the help of a cop named Mallory, a victim of child abuse himself and a pariah on the force because of the things he once did at the bidding of his abuser.

Stories about child abuse chill and fascinate me, and If I Scream did the same. It’s very well-written and bears the marks of deep compassion.

My main complaint is how dark the book is. When you’re writing about as grim and tragic a subject as this, I think it’s a good idea to offer the reader a little hope. There isn’t much hope in If I Scream. It troubles me to think what a serious abuse victim might conclude from reading this story.

I do look forward to the next volume, if there is one (this book came out in 2017). If the final volume appears, I hope it has a more uplifting ending.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trouble Is My Beat,’ by James Scott Bell

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I’ve become a big fan of James Scott Bell, an excellent mystery-and-thriller writer who also happens to be a Christian. So when I saw he’d published a collection of novellas in hard-boiled style called Trouble Is My Beat, I snapped it up. It was excellent value for money.

Bill “Wild Bill” Armbrewster is a World War I veteran and a successful pulp mystery writer. But it’s hard to make a living doing that, even back in the late 1940s. So he works as a “fixer” for a Hollywood studio. That involves getting stars out of dangerous or illegal situations, avoiding scandal, and sometimes putting the scare on them to keep them on the straight and narrow. It might bring him up against rival studios, or gangsters, or dangerous dames, or the cops. He won’t let himself be intimidated, and he’s a hard man to fool. And at heart he’s a decent guy.

Bill Armbrewster is the kind of simple, old-fashioned hero you don’t run into much anymore, on the page or on the screen. Author Bell does a good job of writing in the hard-boiled voice, though his similes and metaphors aren’t up to Chandler and Hammett’s standards. No effort is made to shock the reader into a raised consciousness. The language is generally mild, and one story involving a Christian evangelist treats him with respect.

There was pretty much nothing I disliked about Trouble Is My Beat. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cloud Castles,’ by Dave Freer

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If the name Augustus Thistlewood strikes you as something out of P. G. Wodehouse, you and I have that in common. And we’re both right. There are echoes of Wodehouse at the beginning of Dave Freer’s science fiction novel, Cloud Castles, though the book gradually evolves into something quite different.

Augustus is a son of a wealthy, but low-profile, family of industrialists. He went to university to become an engineer, but he’s so brilliant he needed more of a challenge. So he took a degree in Sociology too, and that’s where the trouble began.  Convinced of “modern” views of society and economics, he decided he needed to spend time with the less fortunate, “uplifting” the poor.

That mission took him to Sybil III, a floating city in the “habitable region” of a gas-dwarf star. The city floats on antigravity engines and shares the skies with “floating castles” belonging to two alien races who are war with each other but “neutral” (though hostile) to humans. The skies also feature clumps of floating vegetation that nobody cares about much.

Augustus arrives in the floating city as the perfect innocent. The place is the most debased and claustrophobic of slums, but he, having no experience of real life, trusts everyone. He’s immediately spotted by an urchin called Briz (a girl, though he assumes she’s a boy), who “takes him under her wing” with the intention of robbing him blind. Only Augustus proves strangely resilient – the stupid moves he makes tend to work out all right for him (kind of like an old Mr. Magoo cartoon), and his engineering skills prove useful and even lifesaving. And Briz, against her will, finds herself drawn to this gormless do-gooder, developing a genuine sense of obligation.

Then they end up on one of the floating “skydrift paddocks,” vegetation clumps, and discover a thriving, if marginal, civilization – a place mirroring Australian Outback culture, but in the air. And gradually Augustus becomes “Gus,” their strong, inventive, and decisive leader. In this capacity he’ll face war, slavery, and worse from the aliens, on whose domains he can’t help encroaching.

Cloud Castles was a lot of fun – creative, original world-building, and a cast of colorful, well-developed characters. Dave Freer has been a Facebook friend for some time, but I hadn’t tried his science fiction before. This is an extremely good space opera, and I recommend it highly.

Authors

MacArthur Accused of Overlooking Abuse

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Last week, Julie Roys published a report of evidence and testimony from wounded people in the ministry orbit of Grace Bible Church. It’s not something I want to repeat here, maybe because I don’t have an axe to grind with MacArthur. He’s one of the big voices on my side of the church–that would be the big tent side (small ‘r’ reformed or Calvinist), not my specific side (PCA). But like the accusations against Zacharias, this seems important and relevant enough to post.

There are many details, and I don’t understand how there wasn’t an accountability structure in place to take accusations seriously without preferring the victim or the perpetrator. It’s an application of the doctrine of original sin, that being anyone is capable of sin, even pastors, and the perpetrators of heinous sins are going to work on appearing to be above such things. On the other hand, accusers can lie, therefore accusations should be given some amount of due diligence to uncover the truth.

I’m worried that this story is an example of the corrupting nature of power. I’m worried this shows MacArthur and his people chose mega ministry over responsible shepherding. But even as I type that, it sounds false, because I know the pastor of a fifty-member church, the owner of the greasy spoon down the street, and the head flight attendant on a single aircraft can all be tyrants of their domains. Power doesn’t need size to corrupt; it just fertilizes the seed already planted.

The gist of this account is read in these paragraphs toward the end. Wendy, the primary victim, wanted to put everything behind her, but she read the report last month of Grace Baptist excommunicating a woman for not returning to her abusive husband.

Wendy said that similar to how she naïvely assumed her father had not sexually molested anyone else, she also assumed MacArthur had not covered for other pedophiles like her father. Wendy said she now believes covering for abusers is a pattern with MacArthur that needs to be confronted.

“It’s not okay to believe the perpetrator,” Wendy said. “I just don’t want other people to be damaged by Grace Church or other churches not handling things in an appropriate manner.”

Music

Sunday Singing: Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior

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“Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” performed by Nathan Drake

This long-favored hymn was written by Methodist Episcopal Fanny Crosby in 1868 to a tune by industrialist William H. Doane, who “wrote over twenty-two hundred hymn and gospel song tunes, and he edited over forty songbooks.”

Savior, Savior,
Hear my humble cry,
While on others Thou art calling,
Do not pass me by.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Big Publishers, Writer’s Complaints, and Blogroll

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Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, who took up writing as a career after losing his respect and position at Dabney Oil in 1932, read a laudatory profile on Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker and said, “I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life.”

Well, someone should have told Chandler he had his own genius as well as his own version of the good life, which needed amending.

Mark Twain vented his spleen on the writing skill of James Fennimore Cooper with many accurate complaints like this one:

For several years, Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so — and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some “females” — as he always calls women — in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon-blast, and a cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn’t strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain in the dense fog and find the fort. Isn’t it a daisy?

Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 1895

What are other people saying about books?

Big Publishers: There are five powerhouses in U.S. publishing today: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. If judges approve a currently contested merger, Penguin Random House would be allowed to buy Simon & Schuster, reducing the big publishers to four. This would make German media group Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House and is already the world’s largest trade book publisher, in an Amazon-sized company. (via ArtsJournal)

Today is St. George’s Day in England, a day celebrated on par with Christmas at one time.

We fairly hope … that this day
Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.
To cry “Amen” to that, thus we appear.
You English princes all, I do salute you.

Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 5

Birthday: It is also Shakespeare’s birthday. He was born April 23, 1564, which is a date deduced by the record of his baptism in the Parish Register at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday 26 April 1564. 

Block Party: Thoughts of Shakespeare naturally turn one’s mind to Brooklyn and “a timeless block party that could be 400 years old,” notes the NY Daily News.

Word Game: And when you think about block parties, you think about the word guessing games that are all the rage amongst the hip kids. The Folger Shakespeare Library has their own version called Prattle. This one is new to me. I’ve been playing Wordle and Quordle for several weeks now.

Photo: Bus Depot, angle view, Bond Street, Bend, Oregon 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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Happy Cuckoo Month

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Naught to review tonight. It’s been a quiet day. No translation work. I started an article for the American Spectator; haven’t worked out the conclusion yet.

Kind of a nasty day, weather-wise. It started clear but cool, and now clouds and rain have set in. Still, it’s above freezing, and the precipitation isn’t snow.

Call it Norwegian weather. Vestland weather, anyway.

Speaking of Norwegian weather, my Norwegian almanac says that today is St. Gaius’ Day. Known in old times as the beginning of Gjøkmåned – Cuckoo Month. The Scandinavian calendar in old times began and ended its months in the middle of our months. The first day of Cuckoo Month was considered a good day to plant peas, I am reliably informed.

I’ve shown you a video of a past Viking festival at Bukkøy, Avaldsnes, Norway, where I’ll be going this summer. But that’s the first weekend. The following weekend, God willing, I’ll be at the Viking Market at Hafrsfjord in Stavanger. Above is video from the 2018 market.

I note that in their combat they allow guys to fight without helmets. Different rules, I guess. Neither my group nor any group I’ve run into in this country allow that, for safety reasons. Though it’s doubtless more historically authentic.

I have no plans to fight in Norway. I shall bring the power of my wisdom instead.

I hear they’re expecting ten Viking ships for the festival. Not bad at all.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture