Blogs, Socials, Religion, Uncategorized

R.I.P., Charlie Kirk

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Credit: Adam S. Keck. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.

Charlie Kirk is dead at 31, the victim of a cowardly assassin.

I was not a follower of Charlie Kirk’s. Nothing against him; I guess it was mostly an old fart’s reflexive resentment of up-and-comers. He took over Dennis Prager’s spot on Salem Radio, and though Dennis’s accident could hardly be blamed on Charlie, I suppose I was annoyed by the change. As old men are wont to be.

I resented a video clip I saw, in which Charlie stated that “no heterosexual man” ever re-plays old conversations in his head, pondering what he should have said. Since I do that all the time (and a number of my friends, whom I firmly believe to be heterosexual as well, say they do it too), I took some offense.

Until I discovered that Dennis Prager said it first.

But I think what annoyed me (subconsciously) most of all about Charlie Kirk was that he did – extremely well – a thing I always wanted to do. He faced people who disagreed with him in public, and argued with them, never (that I know of) descending into anger or name-calling, no matter how much anger and name-calling he took from the other side. I’ve never been able to do that, to my great shame.

My strongest impression of Charlie Kirk actually comes from video clips I’ve caught on Facebook, in which he appeared on a podcast called “Whatever.”

I watch “Whatever” clips now and then, as low entertainment. It’s a podcast about men and women and their relationships, and the format (as far as I can tell) is for young women, often heavily tattooed and pierced, to appear on one side of the table in the studio, to describe how wonderful their lives are as “sugar babies,” OnlyFans influencers, or porn stars. The host and his friends sit on the other side, arguing for something (usually) a little more responsible. The guest who seems to show up most frequently is a guy about whom I know nothing at all, other than that he claims to be an Eastern Orthodox Christian, but is not shy about using profanity. His strategy seems to be to shame these women into repenting and becoming celibate (he does not recommend they marry, as he considers them morally spoiled).

But Charlie Kirk was a guest at least once. And the clips of him at the table are something entirely different. He was polite, courteous, and sympathetic with the women, even as he condemned their sins. He listened, and spoke kindly. I feel that Jesus, when he dealt with prostitutes, must have been very much like that.

And I thought I saw (though Heaven knows I know nothing about reading women’s faces) that there was something in those women’s eyes as they looked at Charlie Kirk. A look that seemed to say, “Why couldn’t I have found a guy like this?”

Well, there’s one fewer guy like that in the world today.

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk. Enter into the glory of your Master. May your blood be the seed of the church for which you fought so bravely.

Uncategorized

With malice toward some

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“The Surrender at Appomattox” – Mosaic Mural by Allyn Cox, 1965 at the General Grant National Memorial

Recently, the popular intellectual Malcolm Gladwell came out with an apology for supporting the idea of men playing in women’s sports.

At first blush, this filled me with Glad(well)ness.

But I had another, delayed response. One I’m now reconsidering.

That has to do with being a gracious winner.

When I saw conservative commenters castigating Gladwell, because he should have had the courage to tell the truth from the start, I thought at first they were being unnecessarily vindictive. My tendency is to say, “Let’s just let bygones be bygones. We need to live with one another, after all.”

It looks as if (God willing), we may be winning this gender battle. Both the unisex sports thing, and the transexual thing. This is a splendid development. Much of the transgender madness was fueled by a conviction (a delusion, but often sincere) that catering to sexual dysphoria would prevent suicide. (It increasingly appears that it not only does not do that, but rather contributes to suicide and murder.)

Not to mention ruined lives and reproductive sterility, just at the moment when we’re facing a demographic cliff.

My hero has always been Abraham Lincoln, who, as the end of the Civil War approached, proposed a gracious reconciliation – “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” His plan was not fully realized, but we did, in time, work out an accommodation – the north allowed southerners to believe (not entirely without reason) that the war had been about more than slavery. That there was an important constitutional issue involved. They called it the “Lost Cause.”

It allowed them to keep their pride.

So my inclination is to say, “Let’s let the people who were wrong about transgenderism keep some dignity. Let’s let them construct some kind of myth to justify their cruel (often cowardly) error.”

But then I thought about it some more.

The fact is, the world has changed since 1865. If (as I hope), we’ve won this battle in the gender wars, we’re not in the position of the north at the end of the Civil War. Our enemy’s cities do not lie in ruins (except as a consequence of their own policing policies). Our opponents still occupy the highest, most prestigious positions in many of our most honored institutions.

We don’t have to create a new myth of a “lost cause” for the transgender advocates. They will, you can be sure, construct it for themselves. The media will (first) drop the whole business down the memory hole, as much as they can; and (second), to whatever extent the memory lingers, find a way to blame it on conservatives and Christians.

So I think the leaders of the transgender movement need to be made to pay in some way. They must suffer some kind of public disgrace.

I don’t know what to suggest, though.

I think President Trump should put somebody to work on it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Cypress House,’ by Michael Koryta

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She was that kind of beautiful. The crippling kind.

Probably later than any other fan, I’ve figured out that most (maybe all, for all I know) of Michael Koryta’s supernatural thrillers involve the same family. Arlen Wagner, hero of The Cypress House, seems to be the grandfather of Mark Novak, hero of the two books I previously reviewed.

Arlen grew up in West Virginia, and still carries the shame of having a crazy father who thought he could converse with the dead. Now he’s a veteran of World War I, and working for the Civilian Conservation Corps. He’s on a train with a group of other CCC men, headed to Florida to help construct a bridge to the Keys.

That’s when he has a vision of all his fellow passengers turning into skeletons. Arlen has had this experience before, during the war, and he knows it means they’ll die soon. He tries to persuade the men to leave the train, but they laugh at him. The only one who gets off with him is a young man named Paul Brickhill, a mechanical genius for whom Paul has conceived paternal sentiments. Left at loose ends, the two men get a ride to the Gulf Coast, so Paul can look at the ocean. There they find the Cypress House, a lonely boarding house near a dying town, overseen by a beautiful woman. They don’t plan on staying long, but a hurricane blows in (fulfilling, down in the Keys, Arlen’s grim prophecy about the CCC workers), and by the time it’s blown over, Paul has fallen in love with the landlady. Also, Arlen has noticed that something shady is going on at the Cypress House. He stays on to protect the boy.

A lot of protection will be called for, and Arlen will have to make peace with his father’s legacy before he can save the lives of the people he cares about.

The Cypress House is a compelling thriller. The tension ratchets up steadily, and the final showdown is as exciting and surprising as you’d expect from Koryta. In the tradition of Dean Koontz, Koryta’s story dabbles in the supernatural, but not in a way to greatly bother Christians.

My only quibble was that the Florida nights in this story seemed to be remarkably mosquito-free (though the mosquitoes finally showed up when they were needed to contribute to the dramatic tension).

The Cypress House was a superior thriller, verging on the epic. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Rise the Dark,’ by Michael Koryta

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The Billings airport was built on a plateau above the city, and while the mountains were far off in the hazy distance, the big sky was right there on top of you. The Montana sky felt older than time and endless as space itself.

It was a humbling sky.

Pushing on through the second book in Michael Koryta’s Mark Novak series. I was a little disappointed in the previous book, Last Words. Rise the Dark made up for that, and more. The claustrophobia of the first book contrasted with the open heights of the second (Rise the Dark is about mountains and power line towers), lending epic scope to the narrative as a whole.

Markus Novak now knows the name of the man who murdered his wife Lauren. His investigation takes him to the one place he needs to see, but always feared to visit – Cassadaga, Florida, a community founded on spiritualism. Raised by a fraudulent psychic mother, Marcus has always had a horror of psychic claims. But when he goes there, and nearly gets murdered in a burning house, he comes away with the last notation in Lauren’s notebook – the words, “rise the dark,” as well as  a clue as to where the murderer is headed – to a town in Montana where he lived a while as a boy, with his mother and his two outlaw uncles. On the way, he joins forces with a beautiful private detective.

Meanwhile, in Montana, a young wife is kidnapped by the leader of a doomsday cult. Her husband, a power line worker, is informed that if he wants his wife to live, he’ll have to help the cult carry out a major act of sabotage. What no one knows is that he’s lost his nerve. If he is to do this thing he does not want to do, he’ll have to go far beyond his personal limits.

Rise the Dark was an epic story, full of Michael Koryta’s trademark plot twists and surprises. It strays further into the occult than I like, but there’s an ambivalence about the topic that comforted me. It looks like more books are coming, and I look forward to reading them.

I found Rise the Dark highly compelling. Recommended, with the usual cautions.

Poetry, Religion

I read ‘In No Strange Land,’ by Francis Thompson

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My intention yesterday was not to post the Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen video. I was thinking that I had put up a reading of Francis Thompson’s ‘The Hound of Heaven’ not long ago, and I ought to do ‘In No Strange Land’ too. Because it’s a lovely poem of faith, possibly even better than the ‘Hound,’ but that’s an apples and oranges thing. (It also inspired the title of a hit movie and song of the 1950s.)

And there were several readings to choose from on YouTube. I sampled them, but they failed to please me. I have strong views on how this poem (which I memorized long ago and can still reel out) ought to be read.

Well, as they say, if you want something done right, you’ll have to do it yourself. And I have the technology.

Above, my reading of ‘In No Strange Land.’ Feel free to share it, if you like.

Uncategorized

Bull-Hansen on the Birka warrior woman

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No book to review tonight. A friend pointed the video above out to me recently, and I watched it with interest. It’s by Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, a Scandinavian living historian and video blogger. I’ve watched several of his videos before and found him very sensible – that is to say, he often agrees with me.

Except on religion. He’s a strong heathen, so I imagine we probably couldn’t be great friends. Which speaks well for both of us (I think) when we agree in spite of that.

This video is about the famous “woman warrior” grave at Birka in Sweden. As Bull-Hansen explains, early excavators assumed the excavated skeleton to be male, because of the rich finds of weapons and armor buried with it. But more recently, DNA analysis has shown that the occupant was in fact a woman.

This, of course, set off fireworks and celebrations among feminist historians and Lagertha groupies. It also had the effect of muting (somewhat) my own position, where I insist that there might be other reasons for armor in a grave than identifying the occupant as a warrior. Inheritance law is one possibility that comes to mind. Family graves had legal importance in regard to property rights – a man who died at sea or abroad might require a surrogate in a grave as a sort of proxy. (I don’t know that to be true – I’m purely speculating.)

Bull-Hansen answers one question I’d wondered about – there are no signs of any healed wounds on the skeleton. That seems to me significant.

Anyway, I find this an excellent discussion of the matter, and thank Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen for it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Houseboat Detective,’ by Jay Allan Storey

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I am, as you’ve doubtless noticed, a sucker for mysteries about detectives who live on boats. This is due to a (fruitless) yearning for some second coming of Travis McGee. The Houseboat Detective by Jay Allan Storey was available for free, so I gave it a shot.

It wasn’t bad, but it was (perhaps intentionally) about the polar opposite of a Travis McGee story.

Jake Sommers does not live on a luxurious seagoing barge yacht like McGee, but on a quaint little houseboat, never intended to sail anywhere. And it’s docked more than a nation away from Fort Lauderdale – in Victoria, British Columbia. Jake inherited the boat from his hippie aunt. He ekes out a marginal living playing piano in a bar (he’s a talented musician, but lacks ambition), and he’s working on a serious drinking problem.

One of his neighbors, just to send him a wake-up call, puts up an online ad, advertising Jake’s services as a private investigator. (Jake has a little intelligence training, from the military, but has neither experience nor interest in the work.) But when Evangeline, a beautiful young woman, shows up at his houseboat, offering him money to locate her missing sister, he can’t resist. The woman tells him she never knew she had a sister, and the woman’s profile has now been pulled from the DNA testing site where she found it. Purely by trial and error, Jake begins to turn up leads, though the sister has left suspiciously few traces behind. Meanwhile, the mercurial Evangeline is fascinating him more and more. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that she’s been lying to him from the start.

I get the impression that author Storey is still learning his craft, but he shows some promise. Jake Sommers is an intriguing, wry character (though his bravery when the action starts is a bit surprising to the reader), but he could have been more effective if he’d been written in the first person (there was no plot reason not to). The prose could have used some cutting. It’s not awful, but meanders.

Still, not bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Last Words,’ by Michael Koryta

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…He had called on every resource for survival and found that your resources didn’t matter much when you were lost in the dark. You needed help from outside the blackness then. That had been the most unsettling realization of his life. I cannot save myself.

A while back I picked up a novella by Michael Koryta, my latest author enthusiasm. It was called The Last Honest Horse Thief, and told a story about Marcus Novak, a young boy living an itinerant life in the American mountain west. His mother, whom he loved but was ashamed of, was a fraudulent psychic and con woman. The story told how he got a chance at a different life, but chose to go back to her, honoring what he felt to be his responsibility. Like all Koryta stories, it didn’t go where I expected it to, but was satisfying in its own way.

On picking up Last Words, the first book in a series, I discovered that the novella had been a prequel, and that Marcus Novak is the hero here. He’s grown up now, having happily fled the mountains that carried so many bad memories. Now he lives the good life in Florida, as an investigator for a nonprofit foundation that investigates wrongful death penalty convictions. Or rather, it was the good life, until his wife was murdered. Since then he’s been obsessed with discovering her killer – so that he’s close to losing his job.

To get him out of the board of directors’ sight, Marcus’ boss sends him to Indiana, to investigate a case that doesn’t even match their organizational criteria. Ten years ago, a teenaged girl was lost in a cave. An eccentric local spelunker brought her dead body out, claiming he’d lost any memory of finding her. Public opinion agrees that this man must have murdered her, but there’s no evidence, and he’s never been charged or convicted. He is, in fact, the one who asked the foundation to send an investigator, to settle the truth once and for all.

Marcus has no interest in going to Indiana, and doesn’t care about the case. The secret lies in the cave, and he doesn’t like caves. The secret also involves a hypnotist, and he doesn’t trust hypnotists. Still, he will get drawn into it, and dark truths will be revealed.

I’m afraid I was a little disappointed in Last Words. The writing, as always with Koryta, was good. But I found the hero kind of passive. He got drawn into things against his will, and although he was tested in a major way, I wasn’t sure what he learned from it. But the big thing was that I wasn’t greatly surprised by the solution. I expect more surprises from Michael Koryta.

Also, there’s a lot of hypnotism in the story. I’m skeptical of hypnotism myself (someone tried to put me under once, but I’m a bad subject), and I thought the claims here were implausible.

But I’ll stay with the series. Last Words was all right, just not the author’s best work. In my opinion.

Blogs, Socials, Uncategorized

Are we all Ned Ludd now?

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When you do a web search for “Ned Ludd,” this is the only picture our computer overlords have to offer.

On Wednesday, my Close Personal Friend®, Gene Edward Veith, posted an article describing a recent report out of Microsoft Corporation, predicting which jobs are most threatened by Artificial Intelligence. Ed’s post is subscription only, but the report itself can be found here, if you care to read it. It includes the following list of endangered jobs, in order of endangerment:

  1. Interpreters and Translators
  2. Historians
  3. Passenger Attendants
  4. Sales Representatives of Services
  5. Writers and Authors
  6. Customer Service Representatives
  7. CNC Tool Programmers
  8. Telephone Operators
  9. Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks
  10. Broadcast Announcers and Radio DJs
  11. Brokerage Clerks
  12. Photographers
  13. Technical Writers
  14. Tour Guides
  15. Copy Editors and Proofreaders
  16. Librarians
  17. Museum Technicians
  18. Archivists
  19. Event Planners
  20. Public Relations Specialists
  21. Marketing Coordinators
  22. Social Media Managers
  23. Conference Coordinators
  24. Advertising Sales Agents
  25. Travel Agents
  26. Court Reporters
  27. Paralegals
  28. Insurance Underwriters
  29. Claims Adjusters
  30. Survey Researchers
  31. Market Research Analysts
  32. Fundraisers
  33. Grant Writers
  34. Instructional Coordinators
  35. Human Resources Specialists
  36. Compensation and Benefits Analysts
  37. Training and Development Specialists
  38. Executive Assistants
  39. Office Managers
  40. Data Entry Keyers

This will be, of course, a troubling list for many people. For me, it’s already kind of old news, as I, in my old gig, translation, (Number One on the list), have already been “made redundant,” as the English say.

Nowadays I find myself in sympathy with the legendary Ned Ludd, an English weaver who supposedly broke up a “knitting frame” because the technology threatened his traditional job. (In fact, his legend seems to be older, going back to a boy who was disciplined for sloppy work and smashed the machinery in a fit of pique. Later on, when mechanization arrived, the people opposed to innovation were labeled “Luddites.”)

A better hero for us enemies of progress would probably be John Henry, the hero of the folk ballad, who raced a job-threatening steam drill and beat it, but worked himself to death in the effort. I remember that even as a boy I viewed John Henry as emblematic of something that was going on in the world – little did I guess how high the stakes would get in my own lifetime.

(Continued on page 2)

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Goofing, Music

‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’

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I have no real excuse for posting something fun and trivial tonight, except…

  • First of all, I don’t have a book finished for review;
  • Secondly, everything’s so sad today, and this clip amused me.

Above, a show-stopping number from the musical, “Kiss Me Kate.” The production, in its various manifestations, is a meta-narrative – a musical about a musical. It deals with a fictional musical production of a version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming Of the Shrew.” The producer and star is Fred Graham, played here by Howard Keel. The female lead is Lilli Vanessi, played by Kathryn Grayson. They are divorced, but still cherish suppressed feelings for one another, though each is now involved with someone else. Lilli’s guy is another actor in the play, who owes a large sum of money to a gangster, and has deviously signed Frank’s name to his IOU. The gangster sends two minions to collect from Frank; here they’re played by two of the great character actors of the 20th Century – Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore. Who knew they could dance like that?

(By the way, I have never seen “Kiss Me Kate” in any of its forms, and I get this information from the Wikipedia article. But I’ve long been familiar with the song.)

The lyrics are by Cole Porter, better than which you do not get.

The movie altered the plot somewhat from the stage version, so I don’t entirely understand what excuse they made for having the two goons encourage Frank with this number in the back alley. In the original play, they find themselves onstage alone before the audience, and improvise it.

Does quoting Shakespeare to women actually make a man interesting to them?

Not in my experience.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture