Probably my most eminent friend (though I only know him online) is Gene Edward Veith. Veith is possibly the most prominent Lutheran among today’s well-known evangelicals. He may be best known for his book, Postmodern Times.
We live in a post-Christian world. Contemporary thought―claiming to be “progressive” and “liberating”―attempts to place human beings in God’s role as creator, lawgiver, and savior. But these post-Christian ways of thinking and living are running into dead ends and fatal contradictions.
This timely book demonstrates how the Christian worldview stands firm in a world dedicated to constructing its own knowledge, morality, and truth. Gene Edward Veith Jr. points out the problems with how today’s culture views humanity, God, and even reality itself. He offers hope-filled, practical ways believers can live out their faith in a secularist society as a way to recover reality, rebuild culture, and revive faith.
This was a good day. I did not expect to be able to say that. More on that later.
Yesterday I gave up on a book I was reading. I used to do that more than I do now, but I’m trying to save money on book buying, so I cut books more slack now. But I’d gotten this one free through an Amazon promotion, so no loss.
It’s sad. You read a book that’s clearly well meant, by an
author with something to say. All indications are that the story might well turn
out interesting.
But it’s written so badly. The author, aside from the (now
expected) misspellings and grammar errors, just doesn’t know how to manipulate
the tool he possesses in the English language. The writing is flaccid.
Sentences and paragraphs could easily have been cut. Lines that might have been
dramatic lose all their punch through redundancies and poor word choices. I had
to give up on it.
But today I had a good experience, expecting little.
Some members of my high school graduation class who live in
this general area have adopted a custom of late. Every time there are 5 weeks
in a month (about 3 times a year) they gather on the fifth Wednesday at a bar
& grill in a town near our home town. This time, no doubt made desperate by
the attrition in our ranks, they invited me. And I agreed to go.
My inclination was to give it a miss. I’ve become convinced
over the years that my appearance at any social event is about as welcome as
the Grim Reaper’s. I am miserable, and the cause of misery in others.
But I missed our 50-year reunion, in a recent year I will
not specify. So I felt I owed it to them make an appearance now.
It turned into a long drive, because Google Maps sent me around the north side of the Twin Cities to get to a destination southeast-ward. One assumes traffic was backed up on the rational routes, as is generally the case nowadays. But I was an hour early anyway. Because the guy who invited me told me noon when it was actually 1:00. If I’d gotten there alone, I’d have probably waited a while and then slunk home, feeling persecuted. But another fellow had been similarly misinformed, and we able to enjoy a mini-reunion of our own before the main contingent arrived.
And it went pretty well. I sat at one end of the long table, so I didn’t have to divide my attention left and right (that’s helpful when you’re on the autistic spectrum, as I suspect I am). I conversed pleasantly with my neighbors, none of whom had been particular friends when I was young. The woman next to me told me (to my surprise) that she belongs to a congregation of my church body. The guy across from me spoke quietly about being born again.
What do you know.
Two people in my immediate vicinity told how they’d lost adult children. That’s an experience – a world, really – of which I have no conception. The courage of ordinary folks is a wonder to me, something I can only admire.
We were young once. Now we are old. Once we were cool kids and dorks. Jocks and eggheads. Popular and pariahs. Bullies and bullied. Now, like Civil War veterans, blue and gray, we find comfort in one another, in having seen what we’ve all seen and been what we’ve all been, in a world that no longer exists.
Wow. I enjoyed a social event. I must find a way to suppress
this memory, so it won’t upset my working world-view.
The Peters family is more dysfunctional in sum than any of its individual member knows.
Carley Bleak Peters, the central character in Bleak Harbor, is a descendant of the man who founded the upscale town of Bleak Harbor, Michigan. She is estranged, however, from her widowed mother, and has been cut out of her will. She was working in Chicago before her husband moved them back to Bleak Harbor, and she does not like commuting. It limits her time with her beloved son Danny, born of a fling with a drug dealer 15 years ago. But she has a plan. She will use documents she’s stolen to blackmail her boss, who pressured her into sex. This will allow her to flee Bleak Harbor with Danny.
Her husband, Danny’s stepfather, Pete Peters, is a nice guy,
but not one of life’s winners. Formerly a successful commodities trader in
Chicago, his career languished when he had to switch to online trading. Fired
from his job, he moved to Bleak Harbor to open a medical marijuana shop – a sure-fire
goldmine, he thought. Only he’s found that the only way to compete wtih the
illicit market is to buy his stock from very bad people.
Fifteen-year-old Danny Peters is “on the autism scale.” He is handsome and intelligent, but does not relate well to people. His passions are dragonflies, perch (the fish), and one particular poem by Wallace Stevens. Neither of his parents is sure how much he understands about their situation.
When Danny is kidnapped, and cryptic text messages come to
his parents demanding an odd ransom amount, Carley and Pete each believe it has
to do with their own sins coming home to roost. They will be pushed to their
personal limits, sometimes cooperating with the police and sometimes going
behind their backs, to satisfy the demands of a bizarre kidnapper who seems
determined to bring some of the Bleak family’s old skeletons to light.
Bleak Harbor was a departure for me, a different kind of thriller. I think it will be surprising to a lot of readers. The plot seems to me (I may just be uninformed) a pretty original one. I did guess the kidnapper’s identity a little ahead of schedule, but it was pretty surprising, and the surprise was well set up.
I’m not entirely sure what the theme of Bleak Harbor was, to be honest, but it kept my interest and kept me turning pages. Recommended, with minor cautions for language.
People know America’s great inventor Thomas Edison went through multitudes of material to find a good filament for his little light bulb hobby. He tested everything he could get his hands on and thought could work. Some even claim he made a large bulb in order to test the illumination of a charged cat.*
The Edison Museum states his team tested over 6,000 plant materials, many of them carbonized. The Franklin Institute makes the same claim, possibly taking it from the same source though that source isn’t clearly cited.
Rutgers’ Edison Papers says no one, not even the inventor himself, kept count of how many times they tried this or that. They quote an 1890 interview in which Edison says they tried 3,000 different theories in working out a functional and affordable light bulb, and many more experiments were conducted after they had a patent and a production factory. Edison was awarded that patent on January 27, 1880.
The number of filament experiment may be lost to history, as well as whether he actually said one of his famous quotations:
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.
– Thomas Edison or Harper’s Monthly?
Ralph Keyes, in his book The Quote Verifier, notes this quote and its variations can be attributed to Edison, but the earliest version of this can be found in an 1898 Ladies Home Journal. (Check to see if you still have this edition on your TBR pile.) The magazine claims Edison offered two percent inspiration and ninety-eight percent perspiration as a formula for genius. In the years that followed, it seemed magazine writers, not the inventor, were repeating this line in different ways, but by 1932 Edison claimed it as his own.
Update: The 1932 Harper’s Monthly interview referred to above may have been a contemporary interview, an obituary, or a tribute, because the inventor died in 1931. Harper’s doesn’t make it’s archives available online for free, but I have found a citation of it saying it was the September issue of Harper’s and that Edison was thought to have said this in 1903.
West Uist, the fictional Hebrides island that provides the setting for Keith Moray’s Torquil McKinnon mysteries, suffers from Midsommer Syndrome. It’s a remote and bucolic place, filled with a population divided among the inoffensive and the eccentric, and yet it keeps throwing up murders. The latest involves the age-old tradition of illegal whisky distillation on the island.
As Deadly Still begins, Police Sergeant Morag Driscoll is off for a morning jog when she discovers a local teenager wandering blind in the heather. She and two friends had been celebrating completing their final tests with peatreek (the Scottish equivalent of moonshine) in an abandoned World War II bunker. Now she can’t see, one of her friends is unresponsive, and the other has disappeared entirely.
At about the same time, a local businessman is found dead.
It looks like the result of a drunken fall, but laboratory analysis will show
that he’s been imbibing the bad peatreek as well.
Except that the level of methyl alcohol in this stuff is way
higher than is probable in ordinary home distilling. Someone has a grudge and an
agenda, and Inspector Torquil McKinnon (who already had his hands full with his
wedding plans) will need to stop that person before anyone else dies. And what
happened to the missing girl?
I always come back to the Torquil McKinnon books with pleasure. I like the setting, I like the characters. I don’t rank Deadly Still as the best in the series – I had trouble keeping the characters straight in this one, but maybe that’s just because I’m getting old.
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote essays and myths for years before the publication of The Hobbit in 1937. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is also published this year. The Lord of the Rings is published in three volumes during 1954-55. And through all of this time, the author may have been thinking he should possibly find time to write something deep on Chaucer.
His research student V.A. Kolve said, “He confessed to me once that some were disappointed by how little he had done in the academic way, but that he had chosen instead to explore his own vision of things.”
Tolkien himself said, “I have always been incapable of doing the job at hand.”
[Tolkien] confided to his publisher in 1937 that Oxford would merely add The Hobbit to his “long list of never-never procrastinations” (Letters, 18). Fiction-writing simply did not count in terms of academic production, especially after Tolkien had idled away his two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship. “The authorities of the university,” he would lament when The Lord of the Rings was in press, “might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances” (Letters, 219). He explained to his American publisher this widespread view of his failings: “Most of my philological colleagues are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is: ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years’” (Letters, 238).
In 1965, an English/American film called TheHeroes of Telemark was released. It starred Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris as Norwegian saboteurs attacking the German “heavy water” (deuterium oxide) production facility at Rjukan in Telemark during World War II. Heavy water was a necessary buffering agent in the German program to split the atom, presumably to produce an atomic bomb.
The film took a highly cinematic approach to the story, compressing all the action into a couple weeks and replacing the actual participants with fictionalized and combined characters. It found a mixed response in Norway, where people who’d been through the war complained that it took Kirk Douglas two weeks to do by himself what it took a whole team two years to accomplish in real life.
I kept thinking of that film as I read The Saboteur, Andrew Gross’s similarly (though not so thoroughly) fictionalized account of the same clandestine operations.
Kurt Nordstrum is a Norwegian engineer who leaves his career to join the Resistance – with tragic consequences in his personal life. When an engineer at the Norsk Hydro facility in Rjukan tells him and a comrade that they need to get some microfilm to the English immediately, they hijack a coastal steamer and – just barely – manage to escape to Scotland. Then he and his friend join Company Linge, the Norwegian commando unit, and are eventually airdropped back in Norway. Their mission, from which they do not expect to return alive, is to destroy the Heavy Water production facility. Kurt’s father used to tell him, “A true man goes on until he can go no further… and then he goes twice as far.” And that’s precisely what he and his team will be called on to do before it’s over.
Honestly, I found this a hard book to read, but I’m not sure it’s the book’s fault. I knew this story pretty well already, and so was preparing myself emotionally for the unpleasant parts. Author Gross anticipates those expectations to an extent by making small changes in the story. Kurt Nordstrum (who is essentially standing in for real saboteur Knut Haukelid but has a very different back story), is enabled by his imaginary status to do stuff, and get into dilemmas, that Haukelid never did. I found some of those stuff and dilemmas somewhat implausible, but I can’t deny I was moved by the entirely imaginary heroics at the end.
I was bothered all through by the fictional changes, especially the handling of the characters. Several of the saboteurs here are real people, others are fictional (including an entirely imaginary Norwegian-American). I understand the narrative freedom that gave the author (as mentioned above), but it kind of nagged at me.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much about the spelling
of Norwegian names and places. It’s pretty hit and miss, but I probably should
be thankful for the effort.
What it comes down to, I guess, is that I can recommend The Saboteur to those who aren’t already familiar with the Heavy Water mission. But after you read it, you’ll want to read Neal Bascomb’s The Winter Fortress or something like that to get the actual facts.
Several hours ago on Twitter, a young writer rejoiced over getting a ghostwriting gig, calling it an important step in her freelance career. For a writer wanting to work (and get this, receive money for that work as if he were a plumber or politician), an offer to write a book under someone else’s name can sound par for the course. It’s similar to other ways someone with a fistful of dollars can shove it toward a writer to ask for words in return: blogs, speeches, marketing, and corporate copy.
A friend of Orwell’s said, “There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter.” But the freelance writer hopes to forge another path.
In the current issue of World magazine, Jenny Rough quotes differing opinions on ghostwriting. Some writers would say they couldn’t compose their books alone; they needed to work with a subject expert. Some athletes, actors, and speakers recognize they don’t have the skills to tell their story on paper, so they need a writer to communicate for them; readers will likely buy a book by that actor they love before they buy one about him. Perhaps it feels more personal.
Is it a problem for readers to believe the celebrity whose name is on the cover actually wrote the words on the page, scribbled notes to himself during dull meetings, pounded his own keyboard, cried over an editor’s red ink, and procrastinated until being overtaken by the threat of an existential deadline?
In most cases, it is.
Jared Wilson has written many times on pastors who desire to write. Being known for their words in the pulpit, pastors will be expected to write their own books. If they don’t, they’ll be expected to acknowledge who did.
Author Angela Hunt told World she “realized it wouldn’t cost authors anything to reveal they had help. ‘It doesn’t belittle them to admit they’re not professional writers. Many secular writers refuse to ghostwrite for the same reason we Christian writers do—it’s not honest, and it disparages the work of the writer who has worked hard to learn the craft.'”
I still haven’t finished reading the book I’ll review next. It is a mark of my desperation for material that I’m going to post a music video that represents an utter betrayal of my younger self.
What you see here is a clip from the old Lawrence Welk TV series. It features the popular singers, The Lennon Sisters, doing “Mockin’bird Hill,” a song popular in the 1950s. Patti Page had a big hit with it. I remember that my mother and her sisters were fond of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK99-mLWkjA
What nobody told me at the time was that it’s a Scandinavian song – arguably Norwegian. It was first recorded by a Swedish accordionist named Carl “Calle” Jularbo in 1915, but it sounds suspiciously similar to a Norwegian folk tune, “Norska Bondvals” (Norwegian Farmer’s Waltz). In the clip, the accordionist introducing the song is Myron Floren, a Norwegian-American who was a regular on the Welk show. He was the single major star at Norsk Høstfest in Minot for many years until his death, which was years before I ever attended.
I like the song, but still hate myself for posting it in
this incarnation, because of my childhood. My parents loved Lawrence Welk, and
my brothers and I despised him (and all his works and all his ways, as we
Lutherans say). We had a conspiracy to blind our parents to the program’s
existence. It was broadcast on Saturday evenings in our area, but there was
another channel that showed Tarzan movies at the same time. My brothers and I
loved Tarzan. So when the folks fired up the Remote Control (which consisted of
having one of us change the channel for them), we would zip past the channel
showing Welk, hoping they wouldn’t notice.
Sometimes it worked.
Now that I’m old, I rightly ought to be learning to appreciate Lawrence Welk’s oeuvre. Sometimes they run his programs on the public television station. I’ve long been a confirmed fuddy-duddy. I ought to appreciate them now.
But honestly, I can’t. I’ll admit that some of the girls are
pretty. But that “Champagne Sound” (Welk’s personal trademark) just leaves me
cold. Too processed. Too polka-based. And those obligatory, rictus-like smiles
on all the performers, who were known to be paid minimum union scale regardless
of their popularity with the audience.
Too much ancient bitterness there. Too much blood shed, to wax hyperbolic.
I remember a dream I had last night, which is a rarity for me. I remember it because it disturbed me enough to wake me up.
I was in an airport. A ticket agent (or somebody) had just
directed me toward the gate I needed, and I had to hurry. So I rushed along the
walkway, toward a descending stairway ahead of me.
But as I approached the stairway, I had the sudden
conviction that this wasn’t a stairway. It was an edge. Beyond that edge there
was just open space.
I suddenly dropped on my face, and peered over the edge.
Sure enough, I was at the end of a sort of mezzanine floor without a guard rail
– a dangerous arrangement no real-life airport would contemplate.
But as I looked down, I suddenly heard someone (a young
person, male or female, I’m not sure) running up behind me. They were going
very fast, and I had no time to warn them before they shot over the edge and
plunged to the floor below. Not necessarily a fatal fall, but surely injurious.
Then I woke up.
I have theories about what that dream meant, but I’ll let
you speculate.
I applied for a job today. I won’t tell you what it is, except that it involves editing. But it seemed (in some ways) ideal for my skills and personality, so I took a chance.
I was half way through the application when I saw that they
wanted me to link to a Google Doc of some of my editing work. And I thought, “Forget
this. I don’t have Google Docs.”
And my brain replied, “Wait, haven’t you used Google Docs before? You have an account. Check it out.”
I checked, and behold, I do have a Google Docs account. I created
the link.
I’m rather proud of myself for not chickening out (for
once). But boy, I make this hard for myself.
