Goofing

Handy Guide or Opposition Research?

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The ever helpful and occasionally funny Babylon Bee has published a guide to being woke in a world eager to know what that and other new labels mean. Mark Marshall has been equally eager and reviewed the book for his blog.

We can all think of excellent humor writers and comedians who excelled in short formats but flopped in books or movies. Maintaining humor beyond a few pages or a few minutes is no easy task.

In the case of The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness, my skepticism was unfounded. Just about every page had me laughing . . . hard. In fact, I alerted friends I was in danger of dying laughing just in case I had a joyous demise.

One example he provides comes from the chapter on making your life as woke as Jesus’s was. He raised Lazarus from the dead to vote for Democrats, and the DNC has followed that example from their beginning.

If this looks like your thing, then I’m sure the Bee’s Guide to Wokeness can be found wherever Babylon Bee merch is sold.

Religion, Reviews, The Press

D. Keith Mano’s ‘Topless,’ reviewed by National Review

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Our friend Dave Lull recently sent me a link to a National Review article reviewing the late D. Keith Mano’s novel, Topless, which was released 30 years ago and is (like most of his work) out of print.

I hope it won’t be offensive to our readers to link to this review by Michael Washburn: Topless, a Noir Tragicomedy that Anticipated the Scandals of the Present.

Topless is the first-person account, in the form of diary entries, of a Nebraska-based Episcopal priest, Mike Wilson, who comes to New York after the death of a young woman named Rita and the disappearance of a man involved with her, who happened to run the Smoking Car, a strip joint in Queens. The man is Tony Wilson, Mike’s brother. How pitifully unprepared poor Mike is for the world — of exhibitionism, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs — in which his brother thrived….

If the concept sounds salacious, it is, but the book looks at all the sleaze with a Christian (if often distracted) eye. Tony Wilson knows from the beginning that he’s playing with fire, getting involved in his brother’s world. But he is full of rationalizations. In the end, what he discovers is as much about himself and his limitations as about the solution to the mystery. And there’s a biblical twist at the conclusion that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind.

As reading matter for Christians, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the book (if you can find a copy). Author Mano, to the extent I understand him, struggled most of his life to find a Christian response to the sexual revolution, which seemed so overwhelming and permanent back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. (Little remains of it now, I’d say, thanks to Feminism and Wokeness, except for its contempt for marriage and its reverence for abortion.) I don’t think Mano ever really succeeded in his effort, even to his own satisfaction. The book does anticipate our own times in a way, as Washburn says, but in other ways it’s hopelessly stuck in a cultural moment now dead and buried.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Scarecrow,’ by Eaton K. Goldthwaite

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It’s possible to appreciate a novel without enjoying it much. That’s my reaction to Scarecrow, the first novel in the Lieutenant Dickerson series, first published in 1945.

Lieutenant Joe Dickerson is a Boston detective with a reputation for case-solving. His superior assigns him to go to the small town of Sudwich, Connecticut as a consultant, to help with the first murder the town has seen in many years. Sudwich has one industry, run by Old Man Kendall. But the old man has withdrawn from the world since his son Cotton was lost in combat in the Pacific.

One day, a strange, misshapen figure turns up in the town square, saluting the flag. Soon after, the town Lothario is found shot to death in his car, and a local beauty is stabbed in her apartment. That’s when they call in Lt. Dickerson. Dickerson sets about painstakingly analyzing crime scenes, interviewing witnesses, and picking his way through a tangle of relationships, hatreds and other motives to finally identify the murderer (whose identity did surprise me).

What I appreciated about Scarecrow was the (relatively) realistic portrayal of professional police work. Dickerson doesn’t rely on flashes of intuition, or on his flashing fists, but on science and reason. I suspect (I don’t know) that this book may have been an advance in the police procedural sub-genre. (Dickerson does, in a rudimentary way, the same sort of thing they used to do on the CSI shows.)

What I didn’t like was that the book was boring. It took forever for the plot to get going. The dialogue was stilted, all the characters speaking in the same formal, unnatural way. Also, this was clearly the work of an Englishman, though the setting and characters are American – there were Britishisms everywhere, “petrol” for gasoline, and “torch” for flashlight, for instance.

So I can’t recommend Scarecrow very highly. Though you may appreciate the utter absence of profanity.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion, Writing

Writing by Hand, Beastly Boy band, Blogroll, and Fear

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Paul Auster has written a biography on Stephen Crane and several other works without a word processor. He drafts by hand and types a paragraph with a typewriter (via Literary Saloon).

I have shelves of encyclopedias, foreign dictionaries, and all the reference books I use. And I must have five or six English dictionaries of various sizes and editions. I even have slang dictionaries. When I’m really stuck I look at a thesaurus, but it never helps me. I know all those words, but I always think, “Well, there’s one word I’m not remembering that would be better than the one I’m stuck on.”

City of Fear, by Alafair Burke, “a tight, pacy police procedural, in which three Indiana college girls hit New York for their spring break.” One of them doesn’t come back.

The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory, “deliberately and imaginatively breaks every one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rules of Detective Fiction.'” It’s a crazy premise, a genetically engineered boy band who find their producer dead in his hotel room, that apparently works.

Martin Luther: How Luther helped my depression. “I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton.”

Why should we fear the Lord when perfect love casts out fear?

Halloween meditation: Jesus defines hell as the place when everyone is “salted by fire.”

No matter what you call your church or church movement, I think you’ll go astray if you claim your side is the one breathing life into dead orthodoxy. The message of the Reformation is still needed.

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saint to the Rescue,’ by Leslie Charteris

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I recently reviewed The Saint on the Spanish Main, and found Leslie Charteris’ famous hero, Simon Templar, a little different, and more intriguing, than I had guessed based on the TV shows.

The Saint to the Rescue is an earlier series of stories, first published in 1959. In these six neatly constructed little tales, set either in California or the American South, I learned yet more about Simon Templar, and I was a little shocked. In a fun way (in real life it might be different).

Several of the stories involve people being blackmailed. The Saint considers blackmailers lower than murderers, and has no objection to a private death penalty for them. That’s not something I’m accustomed to in fiction, but it provided this reader a genuine frisson of guilty pleasure.

Modern readers, if they are liberal, will appreciate the Saint’s contempt for Florida land developers who ravage the environment. Conservative readers will appreciate his condemnation of foreign aid and his spirited defense of the British Empire (remember that author Charteris himself was a non-white child of the Empire, son of a Chinese father and an English mother).

And those of us, young or old, who are weary of Gender Feminism will appreciate the complete absence of Evolved “masculinity.”

Shocking. Fun. Easy to read. I recommend The Saint to the Rescue, unless you’re Woke.

Music

Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

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The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.

Seraphic Fire performs “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” by Elizabeth Poston

This traditional Christmas carol would fit well during apple season, in September or October when many of us look for cider at a farmers market or visit orchards to pick or buy Jonagolds, Mitzus, and Arkansas Blacks off the trees around us.

Eric Hollas has a beautiful story of the apple trees his father tended in the inhospitable climate of Oklahoma City.

So it was that each autumn we ate apples until we grew tired of them.  And when it was clear that we’d eat no more, he turned to pies.  Late into the night, night after night, he peeled apples relentlessly, while my bemused mother baked on and on.  Our kitchen became a pie factory, and by the end of the season there could be eighty or a hundred pies in the freezer.

“Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” has been found in print from 1761 and possibly a bit earlier, attributed to Rev. Richard Hutchins, a clergyman of Northamptonshire, England.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Unauthorised,’ by Ed Church

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…The guy looked like he’d been chiselled from granite then dipped in a vat of nicotine.

The latest installment in Ed Church’s Brook Deelman series, Unauthorised, seems to take the books in a new direction. I’m not sure I’m entirely happy about that, but the book is worth reading.

Brook is called up, to his own surprise, to join a special task force of the London police. He isn’t there long before he figures out he wasn’t recruited for his investigative skills. His friend Kev is part of the team. Kev has finally reached his career ambition of being on the Homicide Squad. Unfortunately, he has apparently reached his Peter Principle level of incompetence. His superior is easing him into a less demanding job at the police academy, and Brook is just there to babysit him during the transition.

But Brook is fascinated by the crimes they’re investigating, partly for personal reasons. Two police officers have recently been found dead, apparent suicides, surrounded by evidence (likely planted) of deep moral depravity and corruption. But the weird thing is that both had the same name – Jonathan Davies. And that is also the real name of Brook’s best friend, whom he calls Jonboy. And who’s been away in Croatia and is supposed to be back soon, but Brook hasn’t been able to reach him.

Meanwhile, in New York, a UN functionary tries to recruit an agent to help him with a plot to “save the world.” And that plot involves interfering in the London serial murder investigation.

Also, Brook meets a new woman and starts a tentative relationship.

The book was well-written and gripping, though the premise was kind of far-fetched. The UN thread moves us into the realm of Illuminati-style Conspiracy Theory, which I don’t care much for. There’s a character who seems to be a Christian believer, but I’m not sure what to think about him.

All in all, Unauthorized was not my favorite book in the series, but I’ll keep reading to see where the author takes it. Cautions for language and disturbing themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Missing and the Dead,’ by Jack Lynch

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In spite of the unwelcome appearance of pot-smoking in the previous volume of this collection, I enjoyed the first book in Jack Lynch’s Pete Bragg series enough to continue with the second book, The Missing and the Dead.

Here we find our San Francisco private eye retained by a local celebrity, an over-expressive female TV personality, to look for her brother, Jimmy Lind. Jimmy is an insurance investigator, and he’d been sure he was on the trail of a much-sought, missing artist when he vanished. Oddly, a cop disappeared around the same time in the same area, a sort of artist’s colony.

As is characteristic of the series (so far as I can tell so far), our hero works at solving the puzzles he encounters, but the malevolent genius in the background is such as he could never have imagined. Once again, he’ll survive by luck as much as by strategy, and he won’t really know what he’s facing until the Big Reveal, when it’s almost too late.

But one doesn’t read Hard-boiled for the puzzle solving. The Missing and the Dead was fun to read, a page-turner with lots of fighting and (implied) sex. Plus some surprisingly sensitive characterization. And most satisfactorily, it’s pre-Woke. When a drunk persists in harassing the woman Pete is romancing, he decks the guy, and she doesn’t lecture him on how she doesn’t a man’s protection, but rather appreciates his gallantry.

And the pot-smoking, though mentioned, is restricted to off-stage.

I recommend The Missing and the Dead as popcorn reading.

Authors, Bookselling

Jack Lewis’s ‘Heimskringla’

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Photo from auctions.tennants.co.uk

Via the Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, Sept.-Oct., 2021:

News from finebooksmagazine.com website dated June 9, 2021:

Leyburn, North Yorkshire, England — A highly important collection of C.S. Lewis titles from the library of the author’s lifelong friend Cecil Harwood (1898-1975) is to be offered in Tennants Auctioneers’ Books, Maps & Manuscripts sale on 28 July 2021. […]

Leading the collection is C. S. Lewis’s personal annotated copy of Snorri Sturlason’s Heimskringla (Cambridge, 1932), a hugely evocative literary artefact shedding light on his mature engagement with the Norse sagas which had first stimulated his ‘imaginative Renaissance’ as a young schoolboy (estimate: £700-1,000 plus buyer’s premium).

I can’t find any information as to who got the book.
Fiction, Reviews

‘The Unpleasantess at the Bellona Club,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“Considering the obliging care we take in criminal prosecutions to inform the public at large that two or three grains of arsenic will successfully account for an unpopular individual, however tough, it’s surprising how wasteful people are with their drugs. You can’t teach ‘em. An office-boy who was as incompetent as the average murderer would be sacked with a kick in the bottom….”

Old General Fentiman, a veteran of the Crimean War, was pretty much a fixture at the Bellona Club, a stodgy gentlemen’s club for veterans in London. On Veterans’ Day, he becomes more a fixture than ever, being found dead in his accustomed wing-chair. Certain peculiarities about the condition of the body make it difficult to determine the exact time of his death.

And that becomes an issue, since, as it turns out, the old man had reconciled with his long-estranged sister that same day, and she had also died, after changing her will. The division of her large estate will now depend on which of them passed away first. Lord Peter Wimsey, himself a member of the club, is asked to investigate – as discreetly as possible. Lord Peter grows increasingly interested as he asks questions, and then (as he so often does) begins to dread what he’ll learn. He hopes very much the murderer wasn’t his friend George Fentiman, the old man’s grandson, who is very poor and suffers from shell-shock and the occasional fit of uncontrolled rage.

That’s the premise of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, fourth novel in the Lord Peter Wimsey series. At this point (in my opinion), author Dorothy L. Sayers is coming into her full powers as a detective novelist. Her writing is sharp and amusing, her characters vivid, and the puzzle is a neat one. Also on display are acid social commentary (especially concerning attitudes toward women) and problems of morality.

I like The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club very much, and recommend it highly.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture