Religion, Uncategorized

Routine disrupted. Will I survive?

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Photo credit: Daiga Ellaby. Unsplash+ license.

Free associating tonight. I’m reading a new Michael Koryta book, which I’m enjoying a lot, but it will take a day or two to finish it. I could look for some music to post, but perceive no cranial lightbulbs in that area.

I can’t imagine why anyone would care to know about this, but I’ve been breaking up my schedule a little lately. My custom from time immemorial has been to post at 6:00 p.m., my time, a while after I’d had supper. But tonight I have an appointment at that hour to talk on the phone, with somebody who’s supposed to be able to help me navigate the turbid waters of Medicare supplement plans. I’ve been working with the same company ever since I went onto Mandatory Old Folks’ Medical Welfare. (It does no good explaining to Leftists that the whole thing could probably be done more cheaply in a private system. Numbers are purely theoretical to the Left. They care not for mere numbers. They care about parading their compassion before men, through the vicarious machinery of government.) But that company has decided not to insure people in Minnesota anymore (one wonders why anyone at all would insure people in Minnesota under any circumstances), and I must find a new carrier.

So I’m posting early tonight.

On Mondays I’ll henceforth be posting early as a (new) rule, because I’ve gotten involved in a men’s Bible Study group at my church.

If you’re a normal, healthy person, you’ll have no idea how big a deal that is in my life.

I’ve been a shy guy ever since certain awful stuff (I’ll spare you the details) happened to me when I was about nine, transforming me from an outgoing, talkative child to a diffident, timid wallflower. I made a group of very close friends in college, and did musical ministry with them for several years. After we broke up as a group we grew apart, and I’ve been disappointed by the way almost all of them have changed their views. This has made me reluctant to make new Christian friends – I’ve conceived an irrational fear that I’m a bad influence (Despair.com used to have a poster that said, “The only consistent element in all your disappointing relationships is you”).

But I found that I fit in with this group of guys from the first evening. They’re not a solemn bunch, though solemn things get discussed. We tell, and appreciate, dumb jokes. They’ve given me space to participate in the meetings as I feel comfortable, and to hold back where I don’t.

I had not expected this. I’ve grown paranoid in my old age, and the two years of Covid quarantine helped to cement that. It’s one of my misfortunes (or sins) that I handle solitude pretty well. I feel lonely from time to time, of course, but I always reflect that I’d rather be lonely than threatened and bullied, and threatening and bullying is what I expect from my fellow man. Better to be safe than sorry. I’ve been attending this church for a good decade now, I think, but I’ve always just attended Sunday services and scooted for the door. Better to remain a stranger, I figured, than to subject my Christian brethren to my baleful acquaintance. I’d likely offend them, or look like a fool. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that they won’t like me.

The men’s Bible study has neatly punctured this defensive presumption. What the long-term consequences may be remain to be seen. I will certainly not be rushing into anything.

Still, it’s nice to have some nearby friends again.

I seem to recall something in the Bible about not neglecting gathering together.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Bad Man,’ by Stanley Elkin

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“If the question is can I take it, the answer is no. Regularity is what I know best. I have contributed to the world’s gloom, I acknowledge that. But I have always picked on victims. Victims are used to it. Irregularity is what they know best. They don’t even feel it. I feel it. It gives me the creeps.”

I picked up Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man by mistake, thinking I was getting a book by some other author. But, having bought it, I gave it a chance. It wasn’t exactly my kind of book, and Elkin isn’t my kind of author, but I can’t deny the book was unexpectedly entertaining.

Think of Kafka’s “The Trial.” Think of Catch-22. Think (a little) of the Book of Job. That’s what A Bad Man is like, sort of.

Leo Feldman is a self-made man. He built his peddler father’s pushcart business up into a large department store – chiefly through black market dealing during World War II. He did not serve himself, due to a congenital health problem – the fetus of a vestigial twin, lodged in his chest next to his heart. If it ever moves, it could kill him.

In the basement of his store, he ran an off-the-books business – not retail, but trading favors, providing referrals to illegal services – abortions, or drugs, or prostitutes. So he was not greatly surprised when the police came for him one day.

He ends up in a penitentiary without a real-world analogue – a modern, high-security complex located in a large tract of no-man’s land. He discovers that the prisoners’ lives are governed by strict rules laid down by the god-like Warden – strict but fluid rules, constantly changing, sometimes mutually contradictory. Whenever Feldman thinks he’s found a way to get by, the Warden stymies him, and once again he finds himself alone, an outcast among outlaws.

What makes the book fascinating is its dark comedy. None of the major characters is really sympathetic. Feldman is, as the Warden terms him, “a bad man.” He has lived a life of greed and petty cruelties. The Warden is god-like, but he’s a petty god – loveless and cruel in his own way. Thus all Feldman’s misfortunes and sufferings are deserved, and often poetic. But the system itself is just as cruel.

Stanley Elkins’ style does a lot to make A Bad Man a fun read. He delights in puns and plays on words – “Little children suffered him.” When the Warden speaks of a small grove of trees he has provided for the inmates’ recreation, he says, “This is your copse, you robbers…!”

What is this book about? It may be a cosmic complaint about the world – the Warden may, indeed, be meant to represent God. It may be a satire on America, from a Jewish perspective. It may be a liberal satire on capitalism.

Whatever it is, I found A Bad Man surprisingly entertaining, far more than I would have expected if I’d known what I was buying. Recommended, for literate grownups.

Fiction, Reviews

‘After That, the Dark,’ by Andrew Klavan

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He was thinking about this when the waiter brought the check to him. Gwendolyn made a motion toward her purse.

“Now, now,” he said, “don’t try any of that twenty-first-century stuff with me.”

“You’re right, she said. “It’s a rotten century. I only stay for the antibiotics.”

It has become a tradition for me to purchase and savor each new Cameron Winter book by Andrew Klavan as soon as it comes out, and to tell the world what a pleasure that annual event has become in my life. After That, the Dark is the fifth in the series, and I enjoyed it, though (I must admit) a little less than I expected. That is for reasons which author Klavan has no doubt anticipated and discounted in his own mind. I’ll get to that.

Cameron Winter, our continuing hero, is a former assassin for a super-secret government division which no longer exists. After its dissolution, he reinvented himself as an English professor, He now teaches at a small college somewhere in the Midwest.

A thread that ties the books together is his conversations with his psychologist Margaret, who is helping him work through his old traumas and sins. Recently she has been particularly interested in his relationship (or reluctance to initiate a relationship) with Gwendolyn Lord, a widow he met a couple books ago, with whom he struck immediate sparks.

In After That, the Dark, Cameron finally asks her out, only to be blindsided by how well it goes. The two are not simply compatible – they click together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And in this story, the investigation is sparked, not as usual by Cameron’s sixth sense for hidden mysteries in crimes in the news, but by a puzzle posed by Gwendolyn herself. She tells him about a friend who works in a prison, where a “locked room” murder occurred. A prisoner, who had been strip-searched, is found shot to death with a nail gun in a padded, locked cell.

Cameron goes to the prison town to look into the matter. He is not aware that he’s at the center of a conspiracy, among the moves and countermoves of highly placed, faceless, ruthless chess players. Cameron is a gifted operative, and he’ll need all his gifts to survive this one.

Was After That, the Dark fun to read? Sure was. Was it as good as its predecessors? Maybe not quite – I’m not sure.

My main problem was moral. Gwendolyn, Cameron’s new love interest, is an open and devoted Christian. Yet (minor spoiler alert) she falls straight into bed with him at the first opportunity. I could have understood that plot point if it were treated as a mistake, but in the aftermath she justifies it, saying that they were clearly made for each other by God, so it must be okay.

Andrew Klavan is a wise and perceptive writer. Surely he’s aware that everybody who’s ever fallen in love feels exactly the same way.

It should be noted that Klavan is a convert to Christianity, and comes to the topic from a different angle than “cradle Christians” like me. Also that these books are not intended as “Christian fiction” in the same way that the average CBA book is.

Nevertheless, that rationalization for premarital sex is, in my opinion, too predictable and conventional for a writer of Andrew Klavan’s considerable wisdom.

Otherwise, highly recommended.

Music

Sunday Singing: A Glory Gilds the Sacred Page

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Today’s hymn is another one of English poet William Cowper’s verses. It has been published in only a few hymnals, according to hymnary.org. May your Sunday be brighter for the light of the Scripture.

1 A glory gilds the sacred page,
Majestic like the sun;
It gives a light to every age;
It gives, but borrows none.

2 The Hand that gave it still supplies
The gracious light and heat;
His truths upon the nations rise;
They rise, but never set.

3 Let everlasting thanks be Thine
For such a bright display,
As makes a world of darkness shine
With beams of heavenly day.

4 My soul rejoices to pursue
The steps of Him I love,
Till glory break upon my view
In brighter worlds above.

Goofing, Religion

Lutheran Satire: Reformation rap

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Today, the eve of All Souls’ Day, is Reformation Day, anniversary of the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, sparking the Protestant Reformation.

The Diet of Worms (pronounced Vurms) is not about a radical weight loss plan, as Gene Edward Veith explains in this blog post today.

The video above, produced by Hans Fiene and Lutheran Satire, is an entirely factual and unbiased account of events that followed.

Happy Halloween.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Gun Man Jackson Swagger,’ by Stephen Hunter

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“That’s the problem with battle,” said Jack. “You must kill the people who most impress you.”

When Stephen Hunter sets his hand to writing a Western, he does not skimp. The Gun Man Jackson Swagger would make an epic movie, like “High Plains Drifter,” but on steroids and with CGI. Sam Eliot should star.

When the man who calls himself Jack rides onto the Crazy R ranch in Arizona, on a summer day in a year of drought, he’s just a starved old man on a starved horse. But he offers superior horsemanship skills, and so they take him on.

The Crazy R manages to survive as a business, in these hard times, through purchasing stolen Mexican army supplies, a portion of which they sell in the camp called Railhead No. 4. Railhead No. 4 is like other railroad Hells on Wheels, except more corrupt and cruel.

Jack has business with the Crazy R outfit. He also has business with Railhead No. 4, and with a bizarre army of revolutionaries led by a fanatic Frenchman, training in the desert. What is one man against so many? Quite a lot, when the man is Jackson Swagger.

As with any of Stephen Hunter’s novels about the Swagger family, a fair amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary here. But those willing to so suspend will be rewarded by a gripping and moving tale, a genuine epic.

I had some quibbles. Jack “slap-fires” his Colt pistol, which I take to mean what’s usually called “fanning,” and am reliably informed never happened in a Wild West gunfight – the author admits in his Afterword that he saw a modern shooter do a trick with it and had to put it in a book.

There’s also a scene where a villain rapes a respectable white woman – something I also understand never happened in the West, in those days. One assumes the author is catering to modern audience expectations.

Those nitpicks aside, I devoured The Gun Man Jackson Swagger, and recommend it highly, with cautions for some pretty raw action.

Uncategorized

A drive to my old stomping grounds

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Kenyon, Minnesota, 2010. Photo credit: Jon Platek. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Yesterday, we contemplated Erling Skjalgsson’s home area; today the topic is mine.

Members of my high school graduation class get together every few months to have lunch and renew our acquaintance. Today was the day. I was reluctant to go, to be honest. I have important things on my to-do list, and an old man’s limited energy. But I just got a “new” car, and I hadn’t taken her on the road yet. After considerable soul-searching, I decided I should probably get out of town. I’m glad I did.

It was almost a perfect fall day – sunny with cool temperatures. The trees had lost a lot of their leaves, but enough remained to supply a fair palette of color. Gudrid the Far-Traveled, my 2009 Toyota Rav-4, performed smoothly. I was fascinated to observe that the mileage per gallon (this is the first car I’ve ever owned that had one of those computers on the dash to tell you how efficiently you’re running) ran up above 26 – way better than my old Subaru Forester turbo – and on regular gas, rather than the Forester’s high-falutin’ premium.

It’s a nice drive, one of the prettier ones in Minnesota, I think. I only learned in the last few years that we’re located in the region called “the Driftless,” an area in southeastern Minnesota, southwestern Wisconsin, and northeastern Iowa that the glaciers overlooked for some reason. The result is a variegated landscape, un-bulldozed by nature. Small, rugged hills and valleys, even some low mesas. I think Kenyon, my home town, must be on the very edge, because when you get southwest of the metropolis, where our family farm was located, it grows pretty Great Plains-ish.

One is always tempted to say that one’s home town never changes, but it has changed, and pretty drastically. We never thought of our downtown as vibrant back in the day – and it wasn’t, compared to any city of any size. But it had all the necessary businesses, and people going about theirs. Nowadays there’s lots of empty storefronts, there are gaps in the blocks like missing teeth on a Fentanyl user, and the streets are pretty quiet.

Our turnout for lunch wasn’t stellar, but in some ways the smaller size was a benefit. Most of us could hear what the people were saying at the other end of the table.

One of my classmates had just gotten back from her first trip to Norway, and was over the moon about it. A large percentage had stories to tell about recent surgeries – a subject that never fails for people our age. Some had sad stories about their children.

There was one fellow there who’s been a puzzle to me the last couple times I’ve seen him. He insisted on buying my lunch both times (you never have to twist my arm with an offer like that, I’ll admit it openly). We were never particular friends in school, but he hints that he’s grateful to me for some reason – though I don’t recall ever doing him a favor. He’s a good guy, whatever’s on his mind. Probably has me confused with somebody else. I have one of those faces.

I was impressed with a story from one woman, a retired high school English teacher. She told us about a boy who was assigned to her class who clearly had a learning disability (though this was before we knew much about such things). “I went to the shop teacher,” she said, “and told him, ‘XXXXX just sits in my room during study hall, and he doesn’t do anything. Do you have anything for him to do?’

“And the shop teacher said, ‘Send him to me. I’ll give him something to do.’ And he brought in stuff for him to fix. And he fixed it all – wonderfully. I was happy, he was happy, everybody was happy.”

I said, loudly enough for the whole café to hear, “God bless you for that!”

One can do worse than to be on good terms with people you grew up with. My car gave no trouble on the road, I got a free meal (pretty good, too), and had some pleasant social intercourse with decent human beings. It’s the sort of thing I should do more often.

Uncategorized

A walk through Erling’s stomping grounds

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I just found the video above, recently posted. It shows you the area of Erling Skjalgsson’s home. This is apparently part of a series, in which the modest videographer says nothing at all himself, relying on a few captions and some short narration (possibly by an AI voice). It’s rather leisurely in pace.

I’ve talked about Sola Ruin Church here before. I’ve been there, I think, three times, the last time in 2022, and it always gives me a thrill to be that close to Erling. The stone church was built after Erling’s time, but quite plausibly may stand on the site of an earlier wooden church – which is how I portray it in my novels. I like to think Erling was buried near the altar, though we have no positive information on that.

The church was demolished by the Germans during World War II, to prevent its use as a landmark by English bomber pilots. However, the Germans were thoughtful enough to number all the stones, making it possible to rebuild it pretty much exactly as it had been, after the unpleasantness had passed. It’s used as an event site today.

The “Domsteinene” are also known as “Erling Skjalgsson’s Thingstead,” though they go much further back in time than that. I seem to recall I used them as the site for some unspeakable heathen rite, in one of my novels.

Bear in mind that the area was much less wooded in Erling’s time. Even so, it’s more rugged than I describe it – I generally wrote from memory, and I guess my memory has a tendency to flatten out terrain.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Down These Streets,’ by James Scott Bell

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He was my height—six feet—but if I curled up I could have fit into his chest.

I’m not a big fan of short story collections. Short stories are fine in their natural habitat, taken one at a time. But in bunches I find them bumpy reading – I get invested in a couple characters, and then they find their destinies and I have to jump into somebody else’s life.

Still, I do enjoy James Scott Bell’s writing. So I figured I’d pick up Down These Streets, his big (and I mean big – north of 700 pages) short story collection. (The title is inspired by a famous line from Raymond Chandler’s essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.”) He pretty much throws in everything, from hard-boiled tales to “twist” stories in the O. Henry tradition, to a series of light action stories about a hard-luck boxer named Irish Jim Gallagher (inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan), to flash fiction, including a few that are just re-tellings of old jokes.

I liked the hard-boiled stuff. The Irish Jim stories were fun, particularly one long in which the world, the devil, and the majesty of the law seem to have conspired to prevent his keeping an important date with his girl (this story, amazingly, features cameo appearances by both Marilyn Monroe and Dr. J. Vernon McGee – and how many stories can make that claim?).

Many of the shorter stories seemed to me rather slapdash, but they didn’t take long to read.

I didn’t love Down These Streets, but it kept me entertained for several days, and you may enjoy short stories more than I do.

Recommended. No profanity.

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Trailer: ‘The Pendragon Cycle’

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In spite of the cosmic injustice that has made Stephen R. Lawhead more famous and successful than me, I figure I’ll showcase my generosity of spirit by posting the trailer above, for the Daily Wire’s coming production of The Pendragon Cycle.

You can’t always tell from trailers, but it looks to me as if it might possibly not be awful. One doesn’t look for great historical authenticity, of course (as if I know enough about the ancient Britons to be able to judge), but I’d probably watch it if I had a Daily Wire subscription. Doubtless it will become available through some other venue, down the line.

It’s an odd thing – back in my day, money spent on making a movie generally provided some clue to quality of production. A production that looked cheap usually skimped on talent as well.

But today, most of the technical bells and whistles are available to any amateur working in his/her basement, with only a moderate investment. And the big studios dump sufficient money to fill small lakes into one bloated, CGI-laden project after another, and produce consistent dreck.

So I wish the Daily Wire people, and Stephen Lawhead too, all the best in this.

One of these days (probably shortly after my death), my Erling books will get their turn. I choose to believe that, because that’s the game I chose to play in my life, and it’s too late now to sign onto a tramp steamer.