Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Not alone in my madness

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My friend Gene Edward Veith posted today, on his Cranach blog, concerning a theory about Tom Bombadil, which he found at the GameRant website, by a Melissa C. The conclusion: “Tom Bombadil would be the equivalent of Adam.”

Although Dr. Veith is a self-confessed fan of my novels, it seems he doesn’t follow this blog. I advanced this theory sometime in the dear, dead long-ago, in the earlier version of Brandywine Books that was lost when we changed hosts. But I refer to it in this post from last year.

I hasten to clarify that I do not charge Melissa C. with plagiarism. The theory seems fairly obvious to me, for anyone familiar with the Bible.

I simply reserve the right to do a little gloating dance, in the presence of friends.

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Tribute to a helper: Paul Nash

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It occurred to me today that the tribute I posted on Monday to my friend and former boss Paul Nash, who died Saturday, was missing an important element.

I forgot to talk about his gift for helping. That’s a biblical gift (1 Cor. 12:28), and Paul had it to a greater degree than anyone I’ve ever known.

In the years I worked for him, I can’t recall ever hearing him turn anyone away who came to him for help. If he couldn’t help by himself, he could always think of someone on his extensive contacts list who’d be able to. Most of the time, though, he could help personally, because he was one of those omni-competent people who make lesser men feel inadequate. He was physically strong, and good with his hands, and he’d grown up on a farm and knew how to tinker with things. He knew work-arounds. He knew a trick or two they don’t teach you in school.

And he always had time. Even if the day was full of important phone calls and meetings (they usually were; his schedule was insane), he could take an hour or two to help you out. He could always finish the rest of his work later that night. Maybe he’d only get a few hours of sleep. Or none at all. Sleep was boring, anyway.

I’m not like that. I’m good for about two things in the world – writing (translation is a sub-category thereof), and acting/reading copy. If I try to help you out with any problem outside those areas, I’ll probably drop something or step on it or set something on fire.

I’m not sure whether the world needs a lot of people with my gifts. It never runs out of the need for people like Paul. He’ll be missed, by many, many people.

Reading, Religion

You Must Be Common afore You Be Oncommon

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Ronni Kurtz describes the encouragement he finds (along with Pip) in Great Expectations: Don’t long for a future time after you’ve studied and learned all the thing; be grateful for who you are today.

Well, Pip, be it so, or be it son’t, you must be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommone one, I should hope! The king upon his throne, with his crown upon his ‘ed, can’t sit and write his acts of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet–Ah! And begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Body Keeps the Score,’ by Bessel van der Kolk

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After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety.

Some years back I read about a new psychiatric diagnosis called Complex PTSD. The idea is that symptoms displayed by children who’ve been subject to abuse over long periods of time are very similar to symptoms common to adults who suffer from PTSD due to trauma, as in combat. The difference is that the Complex kind is harder to treat. This is of considerable personal interest to me, for reasons I won’t detail here.

Somebody on Facebook mentioned this book, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, and I was intrigued enough to buy the Kindle version. Turns out Dr. van der Kolk is one of the researchers who came up with the idea of Complex PTSD (which has not to date been accepted for the APA’s book of recognized diagnoses).

The major argument made in this book is that many of our psychological disorders rise from trauma, and that trauma actually makes physical changes in the brain. Current treatment tends to lean toward drug therapy, which (the author argues) only masks the problem. What we need to do is help people to retrain their brains, to reorganize the various areas of the brain to work again in a normal fashion, instead of the abnormal ways they’ve adopted in order to cope with shocks they’ve suffered.

A number of treatments are suggested and evaluated, based on Dr. van der Kolk’s extensive personal experience as a clinician and researcher. These include yoga, biofeedback, and participation in drama.

I found the book largely persuasive (as if I were qualified to judge). I absolutely agree about Complex PTSD. I’m not so sure of the author’s strong defense of Suppressed Memory – he defends it strongly, but completely ignores the numerous cases where it has been used to persecute innocent people, such as day care workers. As a Christian, I’m dubious about yoga.

And the author spoiled it to some degree, for this reader, by his political conclusions. He sees it as self-evident that what will really solve our social problems is national health care and government preschools. I am personally doubtful that bureaucracies are ever going to fill our lives with empathy and caring.

The author is also prone to fall into the refrain of, “The medical establish has never appreciated my genius.” That does raise skepticism in this reader.

But most of the book is convincing, and all of it is worth reading. Recommended, with cautions for disturbing subject matter.

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R.I.P., Pastor Paul Nash

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I’m busy with translation work today, and I’m still reading the long book I’ve been working on. But I do have something to write about.

My friend and former boss, Pastor Paul M. Nash, passed into glory, far too young, on Saturday following hospitalization. I’m not sure of his exact age, but he was younger than me and – to all appearances – in better health.

It was Paul who hired me and brought me back home from Florida in 1995. Through the years I worked as his office assistant in the Home Missions Department of the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, we were sort of a Laurel and Hardy team, each complementing the other in terms of our strengths.

Paul was one of the godliest men I ever knew. He wasn’t just godly in his heart – he worked actively at his holiness. He disciplined himself and kept himself on a leash. I expect I was a disappointment to him in that arena.

Yet, unlike a lot of disciplined types, he was not grim or cheerless. Quite the contrary. Paul was always the life of the party. Things got interesting when Paul showed up. Laughter soon followed.

In many ways he reminds me of descriptions I’ve read of Hans Nielsen Hauge, the founder of our branch of Lutheran Pietism, of whom I’ve written often. Like Hauge, Paul was an A-type who had trouble sitting still, who always had to be doing something useful. He loved airplanes and flew them to facilitate travel for his ministry. He got up early and worked late, and figured there’d be plenty of time to rest after death. Which, sadly, has come.

After his retirement from Home Missions, he started a work called Shamgar Ministries. There’s a brief bio there.

Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Uncategorized

Nobel Prize for Lit, Blogrolls, and Other Reading

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We started this blog in May 2003. I’ve impressed very few people with my posts here. I would have benefitted by having an editor, someone to tell me to press on to a better idea or a better development of the idea I had.

My writing process, in case you’re wondering, is to think about a post for a while, begin to write it down, distract myself with tangents or diversions for far too long, and after a couple paragraphs shoved into the blog engine, to doubt the point of it all. As Descartes once quipped, I doubt therefore I’m not.

Blogs have changed a lot in the last twenty years. Most people chatter into social media apps and discussions board communities. Having a blog is no longer the easiest way to publish your words online, and one part of blogging that has gone the way of yesteryear’s Internet is the blogroll. Most blogs, even those updated infrequently, had lists of websites down one side to other blogs that they presumably admired and even read. One of our readers said he missed our blogroll when we moved to this WordPress platform, and because I’m nowhere near as smart as I used to think I was, I have now concluded I might start linking to other blogs in regular weekly posts. That’s not what a blogroll was, but that’s what I’m going to do.

The photo above is of The Donut Hole in La Puente, California, circa 1991, from the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive. It’s a picture of the quality of another day. Let that inspire you.

The Literary Saloon has been going since Creation. I think it was the second blog to have ever been launched, right after Justin Hall created the first one from a faux-swarthy corner desk at Swarthmore College. They focus on international and translated fiction, so naturally they have the goods on the Nobel Prize for Literature this week. M.A. Orthofer notes, the books of winner Abdulrazak Gurnah haven’t sold much in the U.S. Only three thousand copies of all of the books combined.

“It’s not like his work hasn’t gotten any attention,” Orthofer says, “The New York Times has reviewed six of his novels — but they certainly do not seem to have found readers — no wonder his latest, Afterlives, hasn’t found a US publisher.”

Word, a poem by Andrew Frisardi that reads like spoken word, is in the Fall 2021 issue of Modern Age. (via Books, Inq. – Frank has been old-school blogging since 2005.)

October 9th is Leif Erickson Day, a day that has yet to catch much heat from those who demonize colonization. Erickson and crew stayed at L’Anse aux Meadows for many decades, well before Columbus landed in the south, and they didn’t take over the continent, which makes them more immigrants than colonialists.

Eudora Welty’s first collection of Southern gothic short stories was released in the fall of 1941, 80 years ago this season. I confess I haven’t read any of them yet, but that’s normal for me. I barely read as it is. Gregory McNamee of Kirkus Reviews offers this appreciation.

Music

Sissel sings Grieg

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I’m up against it tonight. A meeting to attend tonight, a meeting to attend tomorrow, and a fairly large translation job to do whenever I can squeeze it in.

Above, the divine Sissel, doing “Solveig’s Song” by Edvard Grieg, from his music for Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.”

She’s wearing the Bergen folk costume.

Goofing

More on humor

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This clip from “A Night At the Opera” includes one of my favorite Groucho lines: “When I invite a woman out to dinner, I expect her to face me… That’s the price she has to pay.”

Reading another long book right now, so I guess I’ll dig myself further into a hole by elaborating on my puerile theory of humor. Basically, my theory is that humor is just telling the truth, but lobbing it in from an unexpected direction.

The truth in question doesn’t have to a big Major Truth. It could be a banal truth – the fact that you put one sock on before the other in the morning, or that the big box store always has about ten check-out stations, though never more than 2 of them are open. Puns, of course, depend on the most pointless of truths – that some words sound the same as others. It’s the surprising angle of approach, not the subject matter, that makes it funny. Groucho employs stream of consciousness in his dialogue – what he says makes sense, but only if you disregard context. Result: constant surprise. A roller coaster of illogic.

Every witty person has his own style. I think that’s what makes wit possible. One learns a particular angle of approach to the truth, and finds ways to apply it in lots of different situations. I once wrote on this blog (whether in this iteration or the original version) that I sometimes think I learned one joke when I was a teenager, and have been repeating it in various forms ever since.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Whip Crack,’ by Alex Smith

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I know you probably regard me as a man of iron, inured to all pain, physical and emotional. But in fact, there are limits to my endurance. It’s possible to write books that drive me away just by being too good, in terms of action and dramatic tension.

I think that’s the situation with Alex Smith’s Whip Crack, fourth in his DCI Robert Kett series. (SPOILER ALERT: If you are reading this series and have not yet finished the third book, Three Little Pigs, you should stop reading here. Parts of my synopsis must necessarily give away some of the ending of that book.)

Robbie Kett has been suspended from the force, due to the extremes he went to, to rescue his children and his wife Billie (who had been kidnapped and held prisoner 5 months). Now they’re back together, but they’re all damaged. Especially in his relationship with Billie, he’s walking on eggshells, never sure what to do to help her readjust to freedom and love.

When four young teenagers disappear in a lonely town on the Norfolk coast, his superior doesn’t order Robbie to go investigate, but pointedly lends him his holiday “caravan” (trailer) near the crime scene. He knows Robbie can’t resist this kind of case.

The four teenagers, all close friends, have been lured away from their homes by recordings on cassette players. Similar players have been left behind with messages for the investigators. With difficulty, the police are able to trace the man who bought the players, a local drug dealer. The only problem is that he’s killed himself. If they’re going to locate the missing kids, they’re going to have to solve the recorded riddles he left behind.

But there’s more to the mystery than even that. Robbie can sense something more is going on – and he’s right. I thought I had figured it out, but it was even weirder than I imagined.

Whip Crack is taut, harrowing, and exciting. The prose is good, too. I can’t fault author Smith on his craftsmanship. Also, he employs some tricks to avoid too much profanity.

But give me a break, guy. Poor Robbie has been through four thrillers now, and in each book he gets injured more – physically and emotionally – and he hasn’t been given time yet to heal up from the first book. My empathy needle is spiking here. I don’t think I can handle the next installment.

Recommended, if you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.

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Jokes: Just Whom Are You Talking About?

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To pick up on Lars’s post about humor using truth to make the joke, I thought I’d note a common subject of humor that seems to have fallen out of favor with some. That’s when the jokes fall into an area of culture or ethnicity.

Stephen He on having his Chinese dad as a substitute teacher

Stephen He hails from China and says in one video he has only been in the States for three years. He makes videos like this one for YouTube and TikTok. Since I assume you haven’t watched the video yet, let me tell you it’s funny. But why is it funny?

It’s funny for multiple reasons:

  • The new guy speaks frankly to grade schoolers.
  • Your dad is your substitute teacher.
  • The experienced or worldly shoots the dreams of the idealists.

But these ideas are rolled generally into the vague stereotype of overachieving Asian adults. In some ways, the particular ethnicity makes it work. Imagine how a skit like this would run if the substitute teacher was Canadian. It wouldn’t. The substitute has to have the air of overachievement or strict standards. The context of a shame culture helps too.

On the other hand, the particular ethnicity doesn’t matter because the comic ideas or widely seen. I’ve heard Asian Americans talk about their parents, laughing about the exact same things Southerners, Cuban Americans, Pakistanis, and Jews say about their parents. All of us are a lot alike.

On the other, other hand, the particular ethnicity matters because specifics are the true things that make a joke funny. For example, what if you replaced your Alexa with your Cuban Abuela? The essence of the joke may be universal, but the comic has to take it somewhere specific to get a laugh.

But it’s become unpopular to joke about people outside your own tribe. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly unpopular to criticize people outside your own tribe. If Stephen looked Irish instead of Chinese (he says he’s Chinese Irish, which naturally accounts for his good looks), would he be able to tell the same jokes? Oversensitivity among other things would shut him down.