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Thousand natural shocks

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Photo credit: Joshua Chehov joshua_chehov. Unsplash license.

What could be less interesting than a health post by a blogger?

Oh! Oh! I can answer that. A health post by an old blogger!

However – spoiler alert – I can promise you that it’s not a depressing story. You will not be required to feel sorry for me.

What happened was, on Friday night I had a Sons of Norway meeting. Then I came home, noodled on the ‘net a while, and then got ready for bed. As I brushed my teeth, I noticed a pain in my chest, on the left-hand side.

Inevitably, I thought about heart attacks.

As I went to bed, reading a chapter of the Bible and “composing my limbs for rest” as the Victorians used to put it, the pain continued. A sort of dull, tight pain like a ball up against my ribs.

One thinks interesting thoughts at such times. Not only, is this a heart attack? But is this a serious heart attack? Suppose I went to the emergency room, and it turned out to be just some kind of indigestion I’ve never felt before. Is it worth the embarrassment? Would that be more embarrassing than finding myself unnecessarily dead?

At last I figured I’d given the pain sufficient time to fade naturally. “I won’t be sleeping tonight anyway,” I thought at last. “I might as well take a book and wait in the emergency room.”

So I did that. I know you’re not supposed to drive yourself to the ER in such circumstances. But I didn’t feel like I was going to lose consciousness, and the hospital is only about a mile away.

I drove into the parking ramp. There were plenty of spots not far from the door. As I wandered through the building, I met a tall man, a security guard, who said, “How you doin’?” I said that remained to be seen. He stopped and took the time to tell me about the importance of having a positive attitude. I thanked him, and said, “God bless you.”

I have to give North Memorial Hospital credit for their triage system. I walked to the desk and told the woman there that I thought I might be having a heart attack. Within five minutes I was in a room with a technician, who was giving me an EKG. Very soon I learned that my heart rhythm was perfectly normal. The rest of the night would be low pressure – but sloooow.

They took some blood and said I’d have to wait for the results. I asked if I could go home. The technician looked at me oddly – as if to say, “Do you actually think we’d let you just come in and go home again? You can’t skip the most important part of the process – vegetating in our waiting room.”

Fortunately, I had come prepared. I’d brought my Kindle – and I mean the Paperwhite, not the Fire. The Paperwhite has a much longer battery life, and I had a suspicion I’d be needing it.

And I did. Surrounded by an ever-changing cast of silent, patient sufferers, I alternately read and dozed until about 5:30 AM. I wondered, often, if they’d forgotten about me. But at last I got called to a room where they told me I was fine and could go home, after signing the necessary papers.

I suppose a man’s first heart attack scare counts as a milestone in his life. Like every other living fossil, I need to remind myself several times a day that I’m actually an old man. Not even middle-aged. Bona fide old. I believe I’ve outlived three of my four grandparents. I’m overdue, in fact, for a heart attack scare. If you’re lucky, it’s a false alarm. I lucked out. It’s all good.

My Saturday was pretty much shot at that point. I got a little sleep. I ate some food. I tried to do some translation work, but my brain was fuzzy and my eyes wouldn’t focus.

I’m better now. But I feel I’ve turned a corner.

Such moments in our lives cause mortals to pause and assess their lives.

What occurs to me offhand is that I’m way behind schedule for my midlife crisis. I’ll have to make it an end-of-life crisis.

But I definitely need a sports car and young girlfriend.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Double Barrel Bluff,’ by Lou Berney

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Why not? he thought.

Understanding, even as he thought it, that asking yourself, Why not? was usually the beginning of a bad decision, the first domino tipping over.

I like Lou Berney’s Shake Bouchon novels very much. The main problem with them is that he brings them out pretty slowly. So it was a pleasure when I saw that there was a new one available – Double Barrel Bluff. It’s an excellent, offbeat, dark comedy thriller.

Charles “Shake” Bouchon, our hero, is a former wheel man for the Armenian mob in Las Vegas. But he’s now married to Gina, a former pickpocket, and they’ve gone straight. Straight to Bloomington, Indiana, where they have square jobs and live a square life. Which they love.

Until one morning Shake finds himself accosted by an old enemy, Dikran Ghazarian, an Armenian thug the size and strength of an ox, with only a little more brains. To Shake’s astonishment, Dikran – who has often promised to murder him – does not want that today. He explains (after catching Shake) that Lexy Ilandryan, the woman leader of the Armenian mob, has disappeared while on vacation in Cambodia. He needs Shake to go to Cambodia with him and find her. Shake feels some obligation to Lexy, and so they fly there, to hunt for Lexy among the slums and ancient temples.

The dark humor of Double Barrel Bluff rises in large part from Shake’s attempts to keep a rein on Dikran, whose idea of investigating is to punch people and break things. Meanwhile we also follow the team of kidnappers, also a “smart” one and a dumb one, oddly parallel to Shake and Dikran. Author Berney excels at characterization – the good guys and bad guys constantly surprise us, but never pass plausibility.

Cautions for language and extreme situations. And some psychic/Buddhist nonsense. But Double Barrel Bluff was a very exciting and amusing light thriller. I enjoyed it a lot.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Side of the Street,’ by Jack Higgins

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There was a time when I was a great fan of the late Jack Higgins’ books. (His real name was Henry Patterson.) In time I began finding him repetitive, and I gave up on him. But I don’t mind picking one up for old times sake, now and then, if I happen to find one I haven’t read before. Such was the case with Dark Side of the Street.

Higgins explains in a foreword that this book was one of his early ones, written with the idea of competing with the James Bond franchise. His character Paul Chavasse is a very Bond-ian British intelligence agent. In this outing, Chavasse is called in on a special assignment to help the police, based on his experience in undercover work. They want him to commit a crime, get caught, and go to prison in order to ingratiate himself with a prisoner.

The background is this: The criminal he’s supposed to befriend, Harry Youngblood, was one of three men convicted of a major theft, and the money has never been recovered. Both his partners have already been sprung from high security prisons and have utterly disappeared. What nobody knows is that these men have not been spirited off to anonymous lives in foreign countries. They were in fact murdered for their loot. When Chavasse befriends Youngblood in prison and joins him in his escape, they will both be walking into a waiting death trap.

Dark Side of the Street benefits from some decent characterization – author Higgins humanizes the ruthless Youngblood, without romanticizing his essentially selfish and brutal nature. There’s also a sad subplot involving an unattractive, lovestruck girl.

The story includes a scene involving a mortuary and the embalmment of a beautiful young woman. It seemed familiar because it was – I’ve encountered the same scene twice in other books by Higgins – one of his weaknesses was a tendency to recycle material.

The layout of the book was marred by a lack of double spacing between chapter sections – meaning the reader frequently finds himself in a new scene with new characters, with no warning. This is the sort of error that happens increasingly in e-books these days, and it’s annoying.

But otherwise, Dark Side of the Street wasn’t bad as light entertainment.

Fiction, Reviews

Phantom Thriller: Review of Phantom Orbit by David Ignatius

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Guest review by Adam H. Douglas

David Ignatius’ new novel, Phantom Orbit (2024), is like a Zen koan asking: When is a thriller not a thriller? 

Let me explain.

Those of you familiar with Mr. Ignatius know he is a renowned reporter for the Washington Post who writes a twice-weekly column there. He is also the author of several works of fiction, mostly thrillers. Personally, I wasn’t familiar with his creative writing until I picked up this new novel. 

As you might expect, his writing skills are very good. The man can craft the textures of a wide variety of global cultures and wield national idioms with a time-honed and deft ability. His professionalism shines through on every page. 

That’s the good part. 

On the flipside, this was a frustrating, meandering read that I would’ve given up on about a quarter of the way through if not for a sense of masochistic curiosity that made me wonder how long it would remain so pointless.

Three Decades of Backstory 

The story of Phantom Orbit follows three characters over three decades, from the mid-90s to the current time. 

Our first hero is Ivan Vladimirovich Volkov, a one-time student of astronomy and astrophysics at Tsinghua University (Beijing), who is feeling the effects of the dissolution of Soviet Russia. As a young man studying hard, he hooks up with a visiting American woman named Edith Ryan—our second heroine. The two have an intense romantic relationship that ends in a tearful separation. 

Ivan greatly regrets the breakup yet wonders if he might’ve dodged a bullet. After all, there were subtle indications that the young woman might’ve been a CIA operative. 

Our third character is Professor Cao Lin, a distinguished researcher and member of the Academy of Sciences who eventually becomes head of a committee on “special projects” that reports to the Central Military Commission. Essentially, he’s there to get China’s spy/intelligence space program working, including attacking the Americans by whatever means they can manage. 

Promises to Keep

Phantom Orbit commits what I consider to be one of the most grievous sins for thriller novels (or indeed any novel genre if you get right down to it): Failing to follow through on its promises. 

The book is marketed as a taut page-turning thriller that is part The Martian, part The Da Vinci Code. The dust jacket teases us with the story of a Russian student (Ivan) stumbling upon an “unsolved puzzle” contained in the writings of the famous 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. Ivan brings this puzzle to a prominent scientist within China’s space program, expressing his determination to find the solution that could have “significant implications for space warfare.”

Sounds intense and dynamic, right? Moreover, the book’s prologue is practically textbook-format for attracting thriller aficionados. Here’s a summary:

Continue reading Phantom Thriller: Review of Phantom Orbit by David Ignatius →
Music

Sunday Singing: My Heart Is Filled with Thankfulness

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Today’s hymn is a new one from the great Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. “My Heart Is Filled with Thankfulness” was completed in 2003. The video above is a 2020 evensong version. The lyric is still copyrighted, but it is displayed in the video.

“I will give to the LORD the thanks due to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the LORD, the Most High” (Ps 7:17 ESV).

The Press

Don’t Worry about the News

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Over the past several days, I’ve looked for peaceful, beautiful images or videos to share on Twitter in an effort to calm people down. No doubt dozens of readers had a momentary sigh because of it. Not a long enough sigh to like the tweets. Of course not. That would be too much like making eye contact on the street.

But I have tried to share peace on Twitter, the primary social media I use, because what Thomas Kidd says about news consumption is true. “News Anxiety Is a Waste of Time.”

He recommends dialing back your daily news calories to almost nothing, giving this detail on contextual reporting. “Newspapers are generally better at telling readers what’s going on – normally with some hours or days of time to digest events – than the insta-reactions of cable tv and social media.” Add to that good magazines and podcasts, like the good people at World News Group.

A 24-hour news cycle should not be the soundtrack of our day. Let’s set it aside and take up good and praise-worthy things instead.

Music, Religion

Mahalia Jackson: ‘Just As I Am’

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I thought of Mahalia Jackson tonight, for some reason. I don’t think she’s much remembered anymore, but in the Ancient Days she was the most acclaimed and respected gospel singer in the world. Here she sings “Just As I Am.”

The hymn is an English one, written by Charlotte Elliott (1789-1871) who spent much of her life as a semi-invalid. The story is that she said to the Swiss evangelist Henri A. Cesar Melan one day that she did not know how to come to Christ. He replied, “Come just as you are!”

Fiction, Publishing, Writing

A work in progress

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Photo credit: James Tarbotton. Unsplash license.

I have no idea where I’m going with tonight’s post. I just have some thoughts provoked by my paperback book project. As I’ve told you before, all my self-published Erling Skjalgsson books (except for The Baldur Game, still waiting in the wings) are now available as paperbacks, thanks to backbreaking effort on my own part.

Currently I’m working on West Oversea. Its previous publisher, Nordskog Publishing, has transferred all rights to me, and I’m currently going through the manuscript, formatting it as an e-book form. Nordskog was kind enough to provide me with the graphic files for all their neat art, and I’m embedding that stuff now. My version won’t look exactly like Nordskog’s, but it will have similarities.

Which gets me thinking about some of the stuff I sort of learned in library school… some of which I sort of remember. I’ll probably get the terms wrong.

First of all, we studied what a work is. I reviewed True Grit last night. True Grit, as conceived and written by Charles Portis, is a work. Print it in hardback, print it in paperback, make it an e-book – it’s still the same work. If you adapt it as a movie, that’s a different work, because substantial changes have been made. A comic book version is also a different work (if I remember correctly).

But the hardback, the paperback, and the ebook, though the same work, are all different editions. And when it went out of print, and then got printed again, that became a new edition.

The individual copy you hold in your hand, on the other hand, pretty much identical to all the other copies of the edition, but distinct in its individual quiddity and whatever notes you might have scribbled in the margins, that’s called an instantiation.

My new e-book of West Oversea, similar to but different in detail from Nordskog’s, will be a new edition.

This is all complicated by the question of editorial changes. As I’ve been working through the manuscript, I’ve made small corrections. Mostly in punctuation. Very rarely, I’ll change a minor word. I don’t want to go crazy – I feel I must let the chips lay where they fell, even if I could do a better polishing job now than I did back in 2009. Mostly for the sake of the people who already bought it and think they’ve read the work.

I think that makes my new edition a different iteration of the work.

But it’s the same work.

Unless I remember it wrong.

Fiction, Reviews

‘True Grit,’ by Charles Portis

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The bandit chieftain made no reply. He brushed snow and dirt from my face and said, “Your life depends on their actions. I have never busted a cap on a woman or anybody much under sixteen years but I will do what I have to do.”

I said, “There is some mix-up here. I am Mattie Ross of near Dardanelle, Arkansas. My family has property and I don’t know why I am being treated like this.”

I was appalled to read, in Donna Tartt’s excellent Afterword to this edition of Charles Portis’ True Grit, that the book was out of print for a while. That was, apparently, due to the fact that its association with a John Wayne movie drove it beyond the pale for the kind of intellectuals who got a drubbing in last night’s election. Fortunately, that injustice was remedied in 2010.

True Grit, which I first read back in the 1970s, is – I almost need not say – a really wonderful book. It’s the kind of work that can be read on several levels – as a sheer, headlong adventure tale, or as a commentary on Victorian American culture, the Western genre, female empowerment, or even Christianity. There’s something for almost everybody here.

The story – for those few who haven’t at least seen one of the movies – involves Mattie Ross, a feisty, precociously hard-nosed 14-year-old Arkansas girl who hires US Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt for Tom Chaney, the man who murdered her father, in the Indian Territories in the 1870s. She insists on going along with him, to make sure she’s getting her money’s worth.

Surprisingly, I find the contrast between the two True Grit movies (John Wayne in 1969 and Jeff Bridges in 2010) illuminating in discussing the book as a literary work. It’s common to assert that the more recent movie is truer to the book. I would say that’s only right in a sense.

As stated above, the book can be taken on many levels. On the surface, it’s almost a perfect John Wayne vehicle, and I was unable to decouple his voice from Rooster’s character as I read. They softened the ending for the 1969 version, but that’s generally how a John Wayne movie works. By and large, it was quite a faithful adaptation.

The 2010 version has many excellent qualities. It has a more authentic look than its predecessor. The use of gospel music is especially evocative, and Mattie’s age is correct.

However, the Coen brothers made some alterations of their own. The sequence where Mattie and Rooster are separated from LaBoeuf, and they cut a hanged man down from a tall tree, does not appear in the book anywhere, and I’m not sure what purpose it serves.

But that version delves deeper into the subtext, into the layers of social commentary and religion. It’s a more profound movie.

They’re each True Grit in their own way, it seems to me.

Whichever approach you prefer, you’ll find it in the book. If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s not long. It’s just perfect.

Highly recommended.

(I might mention, as a footnote, that I believe that True Grit marked a watershed in the writing of Western movie dialogue. The somewhat stilted diction Portis uses in the book, meant to emulate the writing of a middle-aged woman in the early 20th Century, was lifted verbatim for the movie characters. It worked so well in evoking the period that writers have been copying it ever since.)

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Dale Nelson, part 2

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The Fellowship & Fairydust blog has posted the second part of its interview with our friend Dale Nelson. This portion concentrates on his work on Inklings scholarship:

So, much that keeps me interested in the Inklings is not just academic curiosity or opportunism but a concern for the moral imagination incarnated in our lives and homes; and these books are delightful to read. At the moment I’m reading The Lord of the Rings for the 14th time.

Read the whole thing here.