Today is not only the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is also the birthday of one of our greatest presidents – the only president born on the Fourth – John Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933).
I recently heard a speech by a noted historian – I won’t say who – who took time out of a lecture on an entirely different topic to sneer at Calvin Coolidge. This raised my hackles. Coolidge is one of my favorite presidents. He did exactly what the Constitution requires of a president – as little as possible. He was a model statesman, a modern Cincinnatus (look him up).
He was also famous for being sparing with words, which makes him a model for writers too.
Above, a short and pithy speech from Silent Cal – about freedom and taxation.
And here’s the text of an Independence Day address by Coolidge. I find no fault with it. (Hat tip: Instapundit)
Photo credit HLS 44. Free to use under Unsplash License.
I know you’re aching to know how all my household crises are going. I’m happy to report that I got my new roof yesterday. (They taught me in radio broadcast to pronounce the double-o in roof like “brew,” not “look,” but I always feel a little pretentious doing it. Though I do do it.) It was a bit of a surprise, actually. I had understood the representative who’d last called me to say that they were going to delay it a couple days, but there they were at 7:00 a.m., smack in the middle of my writing time. I’d wanted to warn my neighbors (with whom I share a driveway) about their arrival, but there was no time for that now. And they parked their dumpster trailer for the scraps right in that driveway.
The workers, however, labored rapidly and efficiently, and they cleaned up so well afterward that the yard looks better than before. And my new shingles are what they call “architectural,” which seems to mean they’re thicker. Quite nice looking, really.
My air conditioner, on the other hand, remains a dead soldier. I get a call from the HVAC company every few days, telling me they’re still waiting for the replacement compressor being sent by the home warranty company. That compressor is apparently a rare and precious item, and must be transported over the smoothest roads at a speed of no more than 30 mph.
I did get another thing accomplished, though, on Monday. I went to the Minnesota equivalent of the DMV, sat for an hour or so, and got my driver’s license renewed. Which brings us to the curious incident of the license photo.
By some strange providence, I do not share the common human complaint of taking bad document photos. It’s an irony that a man as unattractive as I am almost always takes a good picture. My old license photo was rather charming (if I do say so myself). I looked a little like Gabby Hayes in mid-chuckle.
But for some odd reason I found myself thinking about how to make the new photo better. I decided I wanted to look forceful. Stare directly into the lens. Be forthright. An alpha male. A Chad.
When I saw the final photo, though, I was a little shocked. The photo at the top of this post suggests its expression (just add 40 years, 50 pounds, and a gray beard).
I had no intention of looking angry. Just determined. But angry is what I got.
And it occurs to me to ask, “Does this contribute to my lifelong problem with making eye contact?”
I’ve long known that direct eye contact makes me uncomfortable. This is common in people on the autistic scale, even low on the scale (as I appear to be).
But if this is how I look when I do make eye contact, maybe I scare other people too. Maybe when I run away, they’re running as well.
Brad Frame and Nick Argostino are the heroes of an ongoing mystery series by Ray Flynt. Inkblot Killer is the 11th of these.
The background is that Brad Frame is a Philadelphia billionaire. Some years back, his mother and sister were abducted and killed, and he inserted himself into the investigation. Once it was solved, he set himself up as a private investigator. He developed a relationship with police detective Nick Argostino, and they came to trust one another. As Inkblot Killer begins, Nick is newly retired from the force, and has joined Brad’s agency. But he finds himself uncomfortable with the new work atmosphere.
A new client comes in. She is a rich woman, the entitled daughter of a reclusive tycoon, and she wants them to prove her husband is cheating on her. But when she interferes with the investigation, Brad severs their association. Then she herself disappears, and her equally repellant father retains the agency to locate her.
Meanwhile, Nick becomes increasingly concerned as several of his old police colleagues are strangled to death by a mysterious killer who leaves behind index cards bearing blots of blood, like the patterns in Rorschach tests. Nick grows increasingly convinced that he is on the killer’s to-do list.
Inkblot Killer was a competent enough mystery in terms of plotting. But the writing was pedestrian and the dialogue clunky. It had the flavor of something knocked off quickly for the market. There’s no harm in it, but I won’t be back for another.
First I’ll tell you what’ s going on in my thrill-packed life. Then I’ll tell you about one of my cosmic revelations. Those are always good for a chuckle.
There’s a shrink-wrapped pile of roofing material sitting in the driveway behind my house. I had hail damage last year and my insurance company authorized a full replacement. But one complication after another has delayed the actual job. First it was supposed to happen today. Then tomorrow. Now it’s all in flux – it may or may not happen tomorrow, like Schroedinger’s Shingles. What makes it annoying is that the contractors are going to be parking a dumpster in front of my garage when finally they get to work, which means I have to park on the street tonight on the possibility that work will start tomorrow.
Even more annoying, my air conditioning is out, and has been for about three weeks now. I have a sort of insurance for that, too – a home warranty. The HVAC tech who autopsied my unit said the compressor had burned out, and it couldn’t be replaced. A new AC unit would have to come in. And that shouldn’t take long.
The warranty company, however, has ideas of its own. They opted to replace the compressor. They have a source for replacements which (apparently) they get at a discount. But that source is not a fast source. So we’re still waiting for the part to be delivered.
Thankfully, we’ve had relatively cool weather recently.
Which is supposed to end tomorrow.
Ah, well. I grew up without air conditioning. And hey, it keeps my electric bills down.
A pack of blessings lie on my head, as the Friar said to Romeo (not long before Romeo killed himself).
And what is my revelation?
It wasn’t a full-fledged revelation, of course. Just one of those moments when two ideas inhabiting separate pigeonholes in my brain suddenly link, and I have an ah ha! moment.
It started out with Jordan Peterson. I’ve grown quite taken with Jordan Peterson videos. He’s not right about everything, but he can see correctly what the problems are. He exhorts me to do things I don’t want to do, which is generally a mark of truth.
Anyway, Peterson was talking about Cain in Genesis 4. Peterson’s interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel is that it represents the Easy Way and the Hard Way in life. Cain sacrificed vegetables, which were (as Peterson sees it) an easy sacrifice. Abel sacrificed animals, which means blood and pain. God was pleased with Abel because he took the Hard Way. The right thing in life almost always means blood and pain.
The spark, the circuit that closed, for me was a comparison to the parable of the talents, of which I think I’ve written here before. There are two versions of the parable. In Matthew 25, the master gives talents (sums of money) to three servants – five to one, two to another, and one to the last. In Luke 19, he calls ten servants and gives them ten talents each. In each case, the servants are told to do business with (invest) the money for him while he’s away. In each case, only one servant fails – the one who, instead of investing the money, hides it safely. He returns the full amount to his master, and his master is furious. He didn’t want security. He expected a profit.
The point in both stories – looking at it this way – is that God expects his servants to stretch their horizons. Do bigger things. Move outside their comfort zones. Break new ground, at least personally.
This isn’t about salvation, of course. Salvation is by grace. This is about our earthly lives – what God expects us to do with the talents He bestowed. We’re not here just to wait passively for Heaven. We’ve been given gifts – for the sake of our families, for our neighbors, and (especially) for the church.
And always God expects the bloody sacrifice, the dying to the self. Taking up the cross.
It all makes me feel tremendously guilty. But even I can recognize the truth of it.
Today’s hymn of faith is another one I hadn’t heard before Indelible Grace wrote new music to it. William T. Sleeper (1819-1904) was a native of New Hampshire and Congregationalist minister in Worcester, Massachusetts, wrote the words in 1887. It’s a moving confession of coming to Christ with nothing. No bargaining, no promises, no attempts to merit the grace he offers.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3 ESV).
1 Out of my bondage, sorrow and night, Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come; Into thy freedom, gladness, and light, Jesus, I come to thee. Out of my sickness into thy health, Out of my want and into thy wealth, Out of my sin and into thyself, Jesus, I come to thee.
2 Out of my shameful failure and loss, Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come; Into the glorious gain of thy cross, Jesus, I come to thee. Out of earth’s sorrows into thy balm, Out of life’s storms and into thy calm, Out of distress to jubilant psalm, Jesus, I come to thee.
3 Out of unrest and arrogant pride, Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come; Into thy blessed will to abide, Jesus, I come to thee. Out of my self to dwell in thy love, Out of despair into raptures above, Upward for aye on wings like a dove, Jesus, I come to thee.
4 Out of the fear and dread of the tomb, Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come; Into the joy and light of thy home, Jesus, I come to thee. Out of the depths of ruin untold, Into the peace of thy sheltering fold, Ever thy glorious face to behold, Jesus, I come to thee.
Reading Passively: “One of the problems of shouldering one’s way through books—worldview machete in hand—is that we become the kind of readers who get from a book only what we bring to it.” Professor Jermey Larson writes about reading for experience and enjoyment and letting active learning take a back seat. He leans on C.S. Lewis’s effort to equip readers of medieval literature to stay with the story instead of looking at commentaries every other page.
And the Gulag Remains: The Gulag Archipelago in English is 50 years old this year. Gary Saul Morson writes, “Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been ‘repressive,’ but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work’s lack of polish: ‘I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!’ ‘The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature.’ Since this persecution is itself one of the work’s themes, its imperfections are strangely appropriate and so, perhaps, not imperfections at all.”
Remembering How We Cooked: Writer Megan Braden-Perry talks about authentic New Orleans gumbo and how strangers change historic recipes. “To me, the composition of gumbo is a topic serious enough to invade my dreams. Recently I had the most awful nightmare, that I made gumbo and forgot all the ingredients and spices. It was just a roux and broth.”
There was a king named Dumb. He ruled over the gulfs that stretch north across Helluland and are now called Dumbshaf after King Dumb. He was descended from giants on his father’s side, a good-looking people and larger than other men; but his mother was descended from the tribe of trolls….
When I made my one visit to Iceland involving more than a stopover in the airport, I took a day trip out to the Snæfellsnes peninsula, to see locations I’d be using in West Oversea, which I was working on at the time. At one point we visited the construction/statue shown on the cover of the book shown above (which is not the one I’m reviewing). Our guide told us this was a guy named Bard, who did things like wading across fjords. I’d never heard of this Bard, and it meant nothing to me at the time.
Years later, Bard came up again in some material I translated for Saga Bok Publishing (not likely, alas, ever to see publication now). Bard, it turned out, was the subject of one of Iceland’s legendary sagas – a late saga full of folkloric elements.
The saga opens with the regrettably named King Dumb mentioned in the quotation above. Dumb and his wife have a son named Bard, the hero of this saga. Bard is, for a time, foster son to the giant Dofri, for whom Dovre Mountain in Norway is named (Dofri features in certain legends concerning the youth of King Harald Fairhair, legendary uniter of Norway, which Snorri Sturlusson quite understandably omitted from Heimskringla), but eventually, unable to get along with that same King Harald, he emigrates to Iceland and settles on the Snæfellsnes. Later, unable to live at peace with lesser men, he retires to dwell in a cave in the mountain, becoming a legendary figure (“the god of Snæfell”) who comes at the nick of time to rescue friends when they are in need. In time he has a son named Gest who is effectively identical to himself and performs the same kinds of feats.
In the end, Gest goes to Norway to meet King Olaf Trygvesson. The king exhorts him to adopt the true faith, but he resists. Later, in a scene reminiscent of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an armored troll (or giant) shows up at Olaf’s court and challenges him to send a hero to claim his (the troll’s) treasure. Gest accepts the challenge, traveling in company with a priest, who eventually baptizes him. But Gest (perhaps because of his other-worldly family roots) cannot survive long as a Christian.
It’s a peculiarity of the Icelandic sagas that the genre did not generally improve with time. Later sagas (and Bard’s Saga is one of the latest ones we have) lack the verisimilitude and psychological insight of the classic sagas. Bard’s Saga is interesting for its legendary elements, and also for the geographical assumptions that seem to be in play (the author appears to think North Norway and Greenland are close to each other).
We tend to think of Norse mythology as a sort of closed canon, as in Christian theology. Stories like Bard’s Saga offer abundant clues to whole branches of pre-Christian belief that are remembered, if at all, only in fragmentary or distorted form.
Rex Dalton is the hero of a series of action thrillers by J. C. Ryan, The Fulcrum being its first volume. Here is another example of that trope I’ve been noticing lately – thrillers about super-secret, completely deniable government assassins who take lethal care of those special cases normal diplomacy, espionage, and warfare can’t handle. It seems to me this trend must express some public hunger for more robust, aggressive action to be taken against a rising tide of terrorism and crime in the world.
Our hero, Rex Dalton, lost his family to a terrorist event years ago. After that he cast off all his human ties, enlisted in the Marines (later Delta Force and then something even more hush-hush), and began turning himself into a living weapon, a sort of warrior monk committed to killing terrorists to the exclusion of all else. At one point he meets a woman he finds attractive, but his focus is elsewhere.
The prose in The Fulcrum wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, and the occasional political comment usually suited my prejudices. But the problem with this book was that it wasn’t really a story. There was no narrative arc. All we had was a sequence of accounts of various actions Rex carries out – invariably with perfect efficiency. He never makes a mistake. He never meets an enemy he can’t overcome. His plans of action always survive contact with the enemy. This author knows nothing about building dramatic tension.
Which is not to say the book was dull. It was interesting to watch our hero at work. But it just wasn’t a story.
I can’t say you shouldn’t read The Fulcrum. There’s entertainment value here. But I can only deplore the absence of narrative craftsmanship.
I am proud (in a suitably humble way) to announce that my first article has appeared in Religion & Liberty Magazine, published by the Acton Institute.
Its topic, a sure crowd-pleaser, is the story of Professor Georg Sverdrup, Augsburg Seminary, and the Lutheran Free Church. Readers of this blog have enjoyed my accounts of the antics of the Free Lutherans for many years (as I’m editor of the Sverdrup Journal), but now the whole wide world can marvel at the story. The passion. The pathos. The pietism.
Getting back to the real world, I’m well aware that the saga of the Free Lutherans is pretty tall grass stuff, even for people generally interested in church history. And we Norwegian Americans do love our schisms, which complicates matters. Hot dishes and schisms, that’s how you can tell Norwegian-American Lutherans.
The obscurity of my topic was brought home to me in a surprising way when I received my copy of the magazine, opened it, and found that it had been illustrated with an image, not of the Georg Sverdrup I wrote about, but of his namesake great-uncle. I can sympathize with the artist – I wrote an article about the Reformation kings of Denmark for the Sverdrup Society newsletter a while back and got my Fredericks and Christians completely mixed up. Had to print a correction in the next issue.
The R&I editor, when I pointed the lapse out to him, was very apologetic, and the artist quickly produced a corrected version, which will be used when the article goes online next month. And I appreciate that.
But these are details. The important thing is that the article serves its higher purpose – the great cause for which I labor with unwearying toil.
The cause of me getting paid.
And, of course, contributing to public knowledge of the history of the Christian faith. That too.
He was one of those guys who look around when you talk about money because they can’t imagine any legal way they might earn it.
I reviewed another of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels the other day. Toby, a low-rent Los Angeles PI in the 1930s and ’40s, tends to be hired – under seriocomic circumstances – by various movie stars and celebrities to clear their names.
Down For the Count begins with Toby looking down at a murdered man on the beach – and up at Joe Louis, heavyweight champion of the world. Louis explains that he saw the man being beaten and ran up to help, but the killers got away before he got there. Toby, who is a fight fan and respects Louis, believes him. He advises the champ to run off before the police get there, and then undertakes to find the real murderer for him, so he won’t be implicated in a scandal.
Toby knows who the dead man is, because his widow (who happens to be Toby’s ex-wife) just hired him to locate the man. Investigation reveals that he had gotten involved in investing in boxers and arranging “cards.” Losses in such enterprises had gotten him involved with some of the nastiest characters in the LA underworld. There is no lack of suspects – or of tough guys (including cops) eager to rearrange Toby’s face, at best.
The Toby Peters books are always amusing. I enjoy the characters and the period flavor of Down For the Count. This one has a darker ending than most in the series. Recommended.
