Dispatch from the sickbed

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aGDZc9bdUZM

I am not well.

This goes without saying when it comes to my emotional health, but the malaise has spread to my mortal coil.

I’m at an age when digestive complaints are more the rule than the exception. But when my latest discomfort turned out to be the equal and opposite problem from my usual torments, I grew concerned. Once I’d dosed myself and, shall we say, eliminated the problem, I was left utterly enervated. No energy. Even more alarmingly, I had little appetite.

I did a web search for DELTA VARIANT SYMPTOMS, of course. But whatever I’ve got doesn’t sound like that. I’m hoping things will be better tomorrow. I had a reasonable supper tonight, and enjoyed it, but found in my heart no desire for further snacks. That’s not normal. I’m running out of groceries and need to go to the store, but I lack motivation.

It would be nice if the indifference to food lingered on, became my new normal. As long as the stomach cramps don’t come back.

I’ve shared the clip above before. It’s Motown group The Toys, singing A Lover’s Concerto, from 1965. I just like it. Driving around in my loaner car, which has no working radio, I’ve been reduced to singing to myself for entertainment. Last Sunday on the trip to Kenyon, I was working on this one. I’ve always been good at remembering song lyrics and poems, but if I neglect them for a while, bits of the lines slough off. But I went over them enough times to reconstruct them, pretty close. It gave me something to do besides pondering my mortality.

‘MindWar,’ by Andrew Klavan

I’m probably too much of a snob to properly appreciate young adult novels, even ones by the great Andrew Klavan. But to the extent that I can imagine what a book like MindWar (and its two sequels – they’re a trilogy) would mean to its audience (young gamer males, I imagine) I would say the book is excellent value for money.

Rick Dial used to be a high school football hero. But then came a terrible year, when his father left him, his mother, and his brother behind to run off with his old girlfriend, and Rick himself was crippled in a car accident. Now he spends his time alone in his room, playing video games. He’s living without hope, but he’s become very good at the games.

And that gets noticed. Suddenly he’s abducted by government agents, who tell him a maniacal scientist has constructed a digital world called the Realm. Using the power of the Realm, this man has the ability to begin a campaign to undermine and destroy the one entity he hates most in the world – the United States.

They have the technology to inject Rick into the Realm – a place where his body is whole and strong again. They need him to use his gaming skills to destroy the Realm and save America.

Nothing here we haven’t seen before, in books like Ender’s Game and Ready Player One. But Andrew Klavan applies his seasoned storytelling skills to ramp the stakes up and raise the tension to almost excruciating levels. The main lesson, as with all Klavan’s young adult books, is to persevere, to never despair.

And that’s a pretty good lesson.

Recommended, mostly for members of the Gamer demographic.

‘Lincoln’s Melancholy,’ by Joshua Wolf Shenk

The hope is not that suffering will go away, for with Lincoln it did not ever go away. The hope is that suffering, plainly acknowledged and endured, can fit us for the surprising challenges that await.

I grew up on a farm, as I may have mentioned before. And I often got into trouble because I preferred reading books to doing my chores. When I read about a great president who grew up on a farm and also got into trouble for reading when he should have been working, I felt an immediately bond. That president, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.

Later I learned that Lincoln suffered from “melancholy” (the 19th Century term for chronic depression) all his life. This also led me to feel close to him.

I’ve learned more recently that a collateral ancestor of mine, my great-great grandfather’s half-brother, a Norwegian pioneer in Illinois, knew Lincoln through Republican Party activities. This ancestor does not appear in the book, Lincoln’s Melancholy, by Joshua Wolf Shenk (I didn’t expect him to), but I enjoyed imagining him as one of the extras in the background.

Lincoln’s Melancholy is a fascinating book for the history buff and the Lincoln fan. There are plenty of Lincoln haters out there too, and I imagine they can find fuel for their position here too, but for this reader the story was one I can empathize with. And it had a surprisingly faith-friendly conclusion.

It’s common for chronic depression to run in families, and author Shenk documents how the limited information we have on this fairly obscure clan indicates that not only depression, but plain insanity was common among the Lincolns. Young Abraham suffered the traumatic loss of his mother at a young age, but seems to have been a fairly cheerful person until his 30s, when he had two suicidal “breakdowns” in a row in 1840 and 1841. (One of these may or may not have been related to the death of the fabled Ann Rutledge.) After that he withdrew into himself; his closest friends – and certainly his wife – never felt that he entirely opened up to them. But they all agreed that he suffered from long spells of melancholy. Then he would shake himself, so to speak, and start telling jokes. Or go to work. He had found a way to manage his depression; to use it as a spur to achievement. Having given up on personal happiness, he aimed for significance. He came to believe that God had destined him for some great purpose; his challenge in life was to make himself worthy of that purpose.

Which brings us to his religious beliefs. I’ve heard more than one atheist quote Lincoln triumphantly, as a patron saint of their un-faith. But as Shenk documents, it’s more complicated than that. Raised in a fire-and-brimstone sect (unusually condemnatory even among Calvinists), Lincoln abandoned Christianity as he understood it. But years later, after his breakdowns, he went to Louisville to visit the family of his friend Joshua Speed. There Speed’s mother (a Unitarian) placed a Bible in his hands and told him gently that he’d find comfort there if he read it correctly. And by all accounts he did just that. He became a regular reader of the Bible, and it seemed to help him with his depression, though It’s impossible to know exactly what his theological beliefs were:

The Lincolns later rented a pew at Smith’s First Presbyterian Church—which reserved them space for services but did not bind them to accept the church’s creed, as membership would. This arrangement, which Lincoln repeated in Washington, nicely represented his relationship with traditional religion in his mature years. He visited, but he didn’t move in.

I found Lincoln’s Melancholy fascinating, moving, and helpful in my personal situation. I recommend it highly.

Memoir of a watershed weekend

As I’m sure you know from news reports, I had another birthday this weekend. I keep waiting for someone to yell “Walker is in his 70s! This is ridiculous! Aren’t we going to do something about this?”

But no one ever does. It’s almost as if the world doesn’t care.

But aside from that, it was a pretty good weekend. The best birthday I can remember in a long time.

Got a free meal from a family member, who drove a considerable distance to be with me. That’s appreciated.

Also took advantage of a couple freebies in restaurants I frequent, over the week.

I heard that translation work may be coming this week. And even that my car part might come in (!).

Also a couple other items I don’t feel free to share publicly. One of them was that a big mistake I thought I’d made turned out to not be nearly as big as I thought. Made my crowded interior life a touch roomier than it’s been.

Then on Sunday, I drove down to Kenyon for our every-other-year (I can never remember whether the word is “biennial” or “semi-annual”) family reunion. A bittersweet one.

We held it in Depot Park, next to the municipal swimming pool and across the road from the bare spot where the old Root Beer stand used to be. The weather was beautiful, unusually so for the beginning of August in Minnesota.

Attendance was down. Scheduling conflicts, Covid fears. I don’t know what all. Perhaps the main reason is that the old mainstays, “the Cousins,” grandchildren of our immigrant patriarch John Walker, have mostly died off now. It’s become a reunion of second and third cousins. And second and third cousins tend to be less invested in one another than their “cousin” parents.

And, of course, all the families are smaller nowadays.

The word around the picnic tables was that this was likely to be the last Walker reunion ever.

There was a small crisis to handle. Cousin Doris, widow of Cousin Jim, had some family history items she needed to pass on, since she’s moving to an apartment. Among them were a lot of family letters – significance unknown. And my great-grandmother’s wedding dress from 1890. And Great-Aunt Charlotte’s porcelain doll (possibly valuable). Plus four very large photographic portraits, of my great-grandparents and of their individual parents, in couple shots, dating back to the mid-19th Century.

I took it all, except for the doll (fear not; it found a home). I have no place to display the photos, but I’m the family historian, so they go to me. In my basement for now.

I find it poignant and sort of metaphorical that our family heirlooms, such as they are, should end up in the home of a childless man. After me, who knows what will become of them?

I need to put labels on them.

Van Morrison, Zuby: New Protest Songs

Being a protestant, maybe I live a general lifestyle of protest. Maybe I’m so protestant I don’t see the protest. Heh. I don’t know about that. Are “Come, Thou Fount” or “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks” protest songs? Maybe they are.

The incredibly well-versed Arsenio Orteza writes music reviews for World News Group. In “Not so pop(ular) music,” he describes two new protest albums, Van Morrison’s Latest Record Project Volume 1 and Zuby’s Word of Zuby.

Is Van Morrison too big to fail or does he publisher think he’s now in the old man ranting on the porch category? Orteza writes, “The many songs with ‘the media’ in their crosshairs cohere into one big pushback against the contemporary groupthink that Morrison says plagues his industry after lockdowns halted live performances.”

Zuby is young and independent. His current album was crowd sourced. He represents a generation of Christian rappers who see the world from well-grounded, biblical lens and say things that are truly counter-cultural. Listen to the song above to hear how Big Tech doesn’t understand him so much that he can’t have a normal conversation.

Delayed Olaf greetings

I should have noted the Feast of Saint Olaf (Olav) of Norway yesterday. Or even better, the day before, so you’d be prepared to attend mass, as I’m sure you would have wished. Yesterday was Olaf’s feast day in the church calendar, July 29. However (as I mentioned in a book review a while back) I’ve been won over to the revisionist figure of August 31 for the actual date of Olaf’s death. So today will do.

Besides, I’m not all that fond of Olaf. Or of Olav, either.

The short video above invites you to visit the site of the battle, Stiklestad, near Trondheim (I had ancestors from nearby). However, just now you can’t go to Norway unless you’re willing to submit to a couple weeks’ quarantine. So I don’t really recommend it. The video suffers from the presence of short-haired Vikings, a current plague in the reenactment world. Also, I don’t think the scene of the battle was wooded. (You can’t actually stand where the battle occurred anymore, due to slippage of terrain a long time ago.) But the production values aren’t bad.

Tomorrow is my birthday (won’t tell you which one). And Sunday is a family reunion.

I’ll post on Monday, if I survive and avoid arrest.

Suffer the little children

“The Last Judgment,” from The Small Passion, by Albrecht Durer, ca. 1510. Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

I had a theological idea the other day. It gave me great enjoyment when it occurred to me, but it also worried me. In 2,000 years of church history, I can’t be the first person to think about this, but I’ve never heard it discussed in these terms. Probably because the idea is fraught with danger. And I do care about orthodoxy.

One of the things that troubles me, in my long sleepless nights, is the thought of all the “wasted” people who’ve ever lived. Not wasted in the modern sense of being destroyed by alcohol or drugs. Wasted in the older sense – people simply thrown away. Discarded. The Gospel teaches us that there is nothing more precious than a human soul (think of the parable of the Lost Sheep). But uncounted millions of people have been born into slavery or peonage, worked without respite all their short lives, and then left to die… or killed. Like animals. Also, so many have died young, with no chance to live. Not to mention those aborted.

“What will the Lord do with such people at the Last Judgment?” I’ve often wondered.

And then I remembered an important Christian doctrine. It’s even in our creeds. The Resurrection of the Body. When I was a kid I thought that meant Christ’s resurrection, but it doesn’t. It refers to the resurrection of our bodies, the bodies of every human being who’s ever lived.

At the Last Judgment, every human who ever lived will get their bodies back.

And a picture came into my mind, of a great throng of those “wasted” children, crowded around the throne of Christ, who will do the judging according to Scripture.

I remembered that in the Old Testament, judgment doesn’t always mean condemnation. It also means the place where the poor can get justice against their oppressors.

And then the picture of Jesus surrounded by little children gave me a strong sense of peace.

I can’t make a doctrine out of it. It would be wrong to do that. Universalism must be resisted at all points.

But I feel good about this.

‘Runaway,’ by Peter May

But there was something else in her gaze, something that I have never been able to identify, which left me unsettled then, and still to this day. A look that has haunted my worst nightmares and darkest hours. Almost as if God himself had peered through a crack in the brittle shell of my mortality to pass his judgment upon me ahead of the grave.

It’s not often I encounter a book that’s not only different from what I expected it to be, but wonderfully different. I expected Peter May’s Runaway to be yet another Baby Boomer paeon to the “glories” of the Swinging 60s. It is no such thing. Far from it.

Jack Mackay is a resident of Edinburgh, a man dwindling into old age. He has been edged out of his house by his daughter’s family and installed in a nursing home. He’s consumed with regrets over an unsuccessful life, over sins committed, dreams unfulfilled, and opportunities thrown away.

Then he’s summoned by an old friend, Maurice Cohen, who was lead singer of the band they were in together in their teens. In 1965, aged 17, they “ran away” to London, to be rock stars like the Beatles. Instead they experienced violence, victimization, and a peripheral connection with a famous celebrity murder.

Maurie is in the terminal stages of cancer now; not much time left. He shows Jack a newspaper story, telling how the man accused of the celebrity murder, who disappeared at the time, has now been found murdered. Maurie says the man was not guilty. He himself knows who did it, and they have an obligation to go to London and set things right.

It sounds insane, but Maurie doesn’t have much time left, and Jack feels a personal debt. They collect Dave, one of the other surviving band members, and dragoon Jack’s couch potato grandson, Ricky, into driving them. They set off on a ridiculous, ill-planned pilgrimage, retracing the route of their ridiculous, ill-planned “escape” 50 years before. Along the way we follow two parallel accounts – Jack’s own first-person memoir of the original trip, and a third-person account of their present 2015 journey. We will learn the source of Jack’s guilt, and the secret Maurie has been hoarding all these years, leading up to an explosive conclusion.

 I have no idea what Peter May believes. I suspect that, like most sensible modern people, he probably wouldn’t care much for my beliefs. But I have to say that I have rarely encountered a better description of sin and guilt – from the human point of view – than I found in Runaway. It amazed and moved me.

This is no CBA novel. Cautions for very adult themes. But I highly recommend Runaway to adult readers.

‘The Emperor’s Sword,’ by Andrew Klavan

I could tell just by looking at their faces that they were awed by the genius of my writing. At least, I could tell they were pretending to be awed by the genius of my writing – and really, this was Hollywood, so what was the difference? In this town, to be admired and to be in a position where people had to pretend to admire you were pretty much the same thing. In fact, the latter might’ve been a little tastier than the former, when you came right down to it.

I’d been waiting for the third and final volume of Andrew Klavan’s Another World fantasy series, but somehow I missed its release. I have remedied that omission now.

The Emperor’s Sword opens on a world in some ways far weirder than the fantasy world to and from which its hero has been shuttling. That weird world is Hollywood. Austin Lively has made it to the big time. He’s sold a screenplay to a major studio, he goes to the best parties, and he’s being hailed as an “important new talent.” He has an expensive car, an expensive home, and his pick of eager starlets to share his bed. However, like Hamlet, he has dreams, dreams that remind him of places and adventures he just can’t remember and doesn’t want to believe in.

But when his neglected girlfriend Jane is framed for murder, the memories come back in a storm. He has an unfinished job to do in the Other Kingdom, and he can’t save Jane unless he completes that job. He returns to the Other Kingdom, only to find it’s too late. The Emperor to whom he was to bring a message is dead. And Austin now needs to fight a duel he can’t win to save innocent people from death.

Fortunately, in the Other Kingdom, death sometimes works differently than it does here.

Nobody, but nobody, knows how to build plot tension like Andrew Klavan. The Emperor’s Sword puts you on a roller coaster like those old movie serials tried to, but failed. The roller coaster works here. The reader accompanies the hero from the depths of despair to the peaks of triumph and back, with barely a moment to catch his breath.

There’s also a lot of (no doubt semi-autobiographical) realism about Hollywood, and how truly evil and soul-destroying the industry and its culture can be. I do not recommend this book for younger readers, because there’s some very sordid stuff going on here. It pleases me, on the other hand, that top-grade fantasy is being written for an adult audience.

I’m a harsh critic of fantasy – I compare everything to a) Tolkien, or b) the things I imagine my own work to be. In terms of fantastic imagination, I wouldn’t say this book climbs the heights. Some of it seems kind of boiler-plate medieval to me. But in terms of storytelling and plotting – mixed in an uplifting way with brutal spiritual honesty – it would be hard to do better. Highly recommended for adults.

The Vikings of Hastings

Big weekend. I saw new (old) things, did my Viking shtick, sold books, and exerted myself more than I’m used to these days. Probably good for me, but it made me thoughtful too.

I’m embarrassed, as a native of southeastern Minnesota, to have had to learn this, but there’s a pretty neat museum in the town of Hastings that I’d never heard of before. It’s called the Little Log House Pioneer Village, and one assumes it started modestly and just grew. It features a large collection of historical buildings, from pioneer cabins to hotels and post offices and gas stations. Some of the stuff goes back only to my childhood, but that’s a long time, after all.

The picture above shows you where we were camped (and by our camp, I mean my tent and awning). Looking up the street you can see just a little of the collection of buildings at the museum. The white building dominating the left-hand side is the town hall from Nininger, Minnesota, a storied place in Minnesota history. It was a utopian community, which Ignatius Donnelly (a radical Republican who eventually become a Populist) promoted as a model community of the future. The crash of 1857 doomed it, leaving Donnelly bankrupt.

Donnelly, a Philadelphia native, was Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota from 1860-1863, and also a congressman and a state representative. He ran for Vice President on the People’s Party ticket in 1900. His greatest fame, though, was as a writer, a forerunner to today’s pseudoscience cranks. This was a man born for the cable channels. His book on Atlantis: The Antidiluvian World is still being reprinted, and continues to be studied by ancient mystery geeks. He also wrote a book about the Great Flood, and championed Francis Bacon as the author of Shakespeare’s plays. In addition, he was a pioneer of Science Fiction, writing a future dystopia novel called Caesar’s Column that was a big success in its time.

The Little Log House Museum hosts an Antique Power Show (steam engines, tractors and classic vehicles) every year. I’m told the place is generally packed for the event. They skipped it last year, of course. And the public seems to still be cautious – our crowds this year were only fair. Still, I sold a moderate quantity of books, and had some pleasant interactions with my species in fairly pleasant weather. It was hot, but I enjoyed fair shade under my awning (better the second day, when we moved my tent onto the east-west tree line). This was not my usual group of Vikings, but a couple of the younger members plus a group of very young new recruits. This made me, perforce, the village elder, and occasional dispenser of dad jokes. I let them have the combat shows all to themselves, but lent some of them arms and armor.

These days I feel my age more every time I do one of these events, but in fact I felt less tired the second day than I expected, and I feel less wiped out today than I also expected. My main concern right now is carrying stuff up and down my basement steps, because there’s no room to store my Viking things on the main floor of my house – and let me tell you, Viking things are heavy (as are books). I need to think about cutting back – not on the events I attend, but on the impedimenta I bring along. I expect I’m going to have to downsize my operation to a plain book table in time.

I was happy, through the good efforts of my printer, Elroy Vesta of EJ Enterprises, Fergus Falls, MN, to have the new paper edition of The Year of the Warrior available to hand sell. I meant to get my picture taken with it in costume this weekend, but it slipped my mind. Here’s a more modest picture.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture