I’ve seen many critical comments about “purity culture” this year from strangers on the Internet. I didn’t know exactly what they were referring to, but that’s normal when you come into the middle of someone’s conversation, which is what social media allows you to do all day, every day. And you can’t bring a pot of coffee with you. Last week such conversations couldn’t be avoided as everyone on my side of the Internet cafe took up talking about the announced divorce and apostasy of the author of a 1990s bestselling book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye.
The criticism has been as open-ended as the label. I think much of what I saw was from people who were pushing back appropriately on a shame-based rationale they were taught, but many critics seemed to be attacking biblical sexual ethics as a whole. The latter is ridiculous, but I’d like to write about the former for a minute.
Moving along through Mark Greaney’s implausible but enjoyable The Gray Man series, we come to Dead Eye. I have to say that, though the temptation to fall into tropes is probably strong, author Greaney manages to keep the concept fresh.
The concept, in case you missed previous reviews, is this:
Court Gentry is the world’s greatest assassin. Former military, former CIA, he
was suddenly targeted for death by his former employers, he doesn’t know why.
Now he lives as a professional hit man, but he only kills people he considers
genuinely evil. He is totally isolated, with no family, no living friends, no
fixed address.
Like all action heroes, Court is effectively infallible, always one step ahead of his enemies, capable of sustaining injuries that would stop a lesser man. But as Dead Eye begins, he makes a mistake. He’d be dead because of it except for the intervention of an unexpected ally – a member of the hit squad sent to kill him, who suddenly changes sides. Court is grateful but skeptical. The guy seems a little off.
His savior, Russell Whitlock (code name Dead Eye) is almost Court’s
clone. He moves like him, thinks like him, even resembles him physically. And
he’s been a student of Court’s career. He wants to team up. Together, he says,
they’ll be unstoppable.
But that’s not what Whitlock really wants. His true plan is devious and ruthless. Court rushes through northern Europe to catch and stop him, forming an uneasy alliance with a female Mossad analyst, until the Gray Man and Dead Eye meet in one final showdown.
Dead Eye was, like all the Gray Man books, completely preposterous. But highly readable (in spite of some slips in diction). I highly recommend Dead Eye, if you don’t mind some bad language and lots of violence.
You could probably tell that my birthday yesterday left me a little melancholy. I pursued music on YouTube to soothe my savage breast, and came on a version of “Les Bicyclettes de Belsize” sung in 1969 by the French singer Mireille Matheiu. I’ve always loved the song, which first appeared in my college years, but I’d never heard this singer before. She’s sort of a successor to Edith Piaf, and her performance kind of blew me away.
According to Wikipedia, Miss Mathieu is a major star in France. She is a devout Roman Catholic (though famously superstitious) and politically conservative. She has, regrettably, ties to Vladimir Putin in recent years.
The song comes from a 1968 short film directed by Douglas Hickox. In spite of the name, it’s an English film, not French. Nor does London’s Belsize Park appear anywhere in it.
In case you missed the parades and fireworks, today is my birthday. I won’t tell you how old I am, for online security reasons. Let’s just say I don’t think I can get away with calling myself middle-aged anymore.
It’s a challenge to write about one’s birthday without sounding self-pitying — probably because I am pitying myself to a degree. Birthdays, especially when one is alone, are mostly opportunities for ruthless self-examination. And those are seldom occasions for merriment.
My brother and his wife bought me lunch the other day. I took myself out for lunch today. I thought about buying a little cake, but I’d already sabotaged my diet pretty ruthlessly. And events beyond my control are coming up that promise to subvert it even more.
What are we to do? Longevity is its own punishment.
And then I exchange emails with a friend who happens to have the very same birthday. And he tells me he highlighted his day by scheduling a biopsy.
Perspective. Ah, well. Thanks to everyone who sent greetings on Facebook. I do appreciate them.
If you’re looking for realism, Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man series is probably not for you. If you’re looking for pulse-pounding action entertainment, you could hardly do better.
Years ago, Eddie Gamboa went far beyond the second mile in
Southeast Asia, to save the life of CIA operative Court Gentry. Later on, Eddie
returned to his native Mexico, where he became a drug enforcement officer, one
of the few honest ones trying to stop the cartels. Not surprisingly, that got
him killed, along with most of his team.
As Ballistic begins, Court, now “The Gray Man,” international assassin without a country, is passing through Mexico, on the run after a pretty hairy mission. He stops by Eddie’s grave to pay his respects, and accidentally meets his widow. She insists he must come with her and the family to a memorial service in Puerto Vallarta the next day. But the service turns into a bloodbath when cartel gunmen start firing on the crowd. Court is able to save most of the family and get them away, but now he has two big problems – he has innocent people to protect with limited resources – and his picture was taken and published, meaning his many enemies around the world know where to find him.
The situation looks impossible, but impossible is what Court
is good at.
I was about three-quarters of the way through Ballistic when I realized what it was. It’s A Fistful of Dollars.
Which is Yojimbo. Which is Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.
The plot is a hardy perennial – and as far as I’m concerned, Ballistic is as effective a retelling as any.
This book has an interesting and somewhat strange subplot
involving religion. Court is puzzled but attracted by the Catholic faith of his
charges, especially that of Eddie’s beautiful sister. A very odd scene involves
her explaining her faith to him in a very winsome way – but that testimony
leads into to a sex scene, which was a little weird.
Nevertheless, I thought Ballistic worked very well. Cautions for language, violence, and mild sex.
Quite a weekend. A real Viking weekend, in the sense that a real Viking weekend consists of unloading a heavy boat, dragging it and carrying all its cargo over a Russian portage, and then loading it all up again. I’ll stipulate that the real Vikings were stronger than me and worked harder, but it was a pretty grueling time for an old man who lives by the keyboard.
The Viking Age Club and Society was invited to set up an encampment at the Isanti County Fair in Cambridge, Minnesota (not to be confused with Cambridge, England, which had its own Viking problems a thousand years ago). The local Sons of Norway lodge, known as Rumelva (Rum River) Lodge, invited us to come, bring our Viking boat, and set up for the public. They paid good money for our presence, and provided generous help in getting us set up and torn down.
They also wanted Viking fights. As it turned out, only one of the young fighters was available that weekend. Which meant that, as it takes two to tango, an old fighter had to step into the gap. And that old fighter was me.
Photo credit: Ann Bergum Saterbak
I can’t complain about the results. I won most of my matches, against a young man recently out of the military. Of course it helped that I was wearing full armor for the first set – helmet, gambeson, mail shirt, and fighting gloves. (Omitted the mail the second time around.) And he had only helmet and gloves.
But it was hot. And humid. Adrenaline took me through the
fights, but afterward I was fairly well drained – literally. I’d brought a good
supply of water, and I drank it all up. Added some salt too. Even begged some
potato chips off the nice ladies at the food stand. And I took a little nap in
the Viking bed we had in one of the tents in between bouts.
I’m too old and fat for that kind of nonsense.
On the other hand, if I’d died on the field of honor, I’d be
revered by every reenactor in the world. So there’s that. No downside, really.
I sold a fair number of books. Not great, but it could have been worse. Traffic was kind of disappointing – the lodge people said they’d been promised advertising that never happened. More than one person happened by and was surprised to learn there were Vikings there at all.
Still, it was a stimulating weekend, one I won’t soon
forget. I hope the Rumelva Lodge people don’t regret their investment in us. I’ll
do it again next year if we’re invited.
In case you’re in the vicinity of Cambridge, Minnesota, I’ll be playing Viking at the Isanti County Fair there tomorrow. The event goes on until Midnight, I guess, but I don’t think I’ll be there that long. I’ll have books to sell and sign.
Unless my car breaks down. Or I have a heart attack. Or fall down a well, or something. You never know.
For your Friday treat, here’s something delightful I think I haven’t posted here before — though what do I know? It’s Sissel singing “Sukiyaki.” A bizarre fusion of cultures here — a Norwegian girl in a folk costume singing a Japanese song in Norwegian. But you can’t deny it works. She was born to sing this song.
I suppose this counts as cultural appropriation, and is therefore evil. But if she sang it in Japanese, that would be cultural appropriation too. In fact, how can you avoid the conclusion that learning any foreign language at all is cultural appropriation? Hey you, liberal, trying to be multicultural by learning Spanish! Who gave you permission to plunder somebody else’s language?
Jean-Jacques Megel-Nuber’s first drawing of his imagined bookstore on wheels had little in common with its final design. “It looked like the cabins in a Christmas market,” says Megel-Nuber, who is from the Alsace region of eastern France, known for its festive seasonal markets. He had originally thought about opening a brick-and-mortar bookshop but decided he wanted one that could travel to French country towns whose bookstores have often closed. He also wanted a space where he could live during his travels.
So he commissioned a young design firm to construct a cute, little store on a trailer that travels through rural France with 3,000 books, typically stopping at festivals. He’s dubbed his shop Au Vrai Chic Littérère (The Truly Elegant Literary).
British author Sofka Zinovieff, 58, has written a book set in the 70s about a relationship between a child and an adult who is twenty-five years older. It has been called “a Lolita for the era of #MeToo.” In The Guardian this month, she writes about how her daughter’s generation think they have this morality thing all figured out.
When I asked my 23-year-old daughter whether there was sometimes too much emphasis on consent, she retorted: “You can’t debate the importance of consent when rape is still such a big issue. It’s confusing priorities.”
I tried again with my 26-year-old daughter. “It must sometimes be hard these days for sensitive, intelligent, young men,” I said. “They have to be so careful about what they can say and do.”
“It’s only about not being an ****##$*,” she replied curtly. “That’s not so difficult. It’s just speaking and behaving with respect.”
Zinovieff doesn’t spell out exactly what she’s defending. Perhaps we’d have to read her book to get a better idea. But I wonder if both she and her daughters are saying the same thing: whatever happens in a physical relationship, if everyone continues to say he or she approves of it, then it’s good or at least difficult to oppose; only when someone says he or she has been hurt does the relationship become a problem.
