Terry Teachout says the reason we all know Art Carney for his role as The Honeymooners‘s Ed Norton and not also for his performance as Felix Ungar in The Odd Couple is one of the saddest stories he knows.
“Carney, who started out as a comedian, discovered almost accidentally as a byproduct of the popularity of The Honeymooners that he had the stuff great character actors are made of.” But when filming The Odd Couple came around, Hollywood could not see that stuff for understandable reasons.
The Great War ended with the official Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, but arms were laid down on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. This Sunday is the hundredth anniversary of what we had hoped to be the end of all wars.
President Wilson proclaimed the following year: “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations.”
Collin Hansen asked Baylor Historian Philip Jenkins about WWI’s influence on Christian peoples. Did the war or the end of it change the global church in significant ways?
The war destroyed ancient centers of Christianity in the Middle East, especially among the Armenians and Assyrians. At the same time, the suspension of missionary enterprises shifted the balance in Africa and Asia to native forms of faith. That movement was massively enhanced in 1918 by the influenza epidemic, which killed between 50 million and 100 million worldwide. That event showed the utter inability of Western missionaries and medics, and drove many ordinary people to seek help from healing churches, and from individual prophets and charismatic leaders. The great age of the African Independent Churches dates from this time.
As to the West, I can hardly begin! Contrary to myth, the war did not destroy the faith of ordinary people, but it did drive thought and writing by theologians, above all by Karl Barth. Barth published the first edition of his commentary on Romans in 1919, but it was the second edition, published in 1922, that according to one Catholic observer, “burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians.” The book was a frontal attack on the liberal conventions that had shaped mainstream theology since the Enlightenment.
And that does not begin to talk about the great Catholic thinkers like Henri de Lubac, whose war experiences shaped their lives, and we see their lasting influence transforming the church in the Vatican Council of the 1960s.
Dare I say that the Christian world we know today is the product of 1918?
Surprise! I don’t have a book review today. I binge-watched Daredevil yesterday, to take my mind off… things.
One-paragraph review: Worthy of the first two seasons, superior in some ways to Season Two. I thought the climax a little contrived, but it was good. Odd to have a superhero season without the hero getting into his suit once.
I shall tell you how I live my current life. This schedule may change; in fact it’s likely to change.
My life kind of centers on free-lance assignments coming in from Meteoritt, my Norwegian employer. The business day in Oslo starts while we’re asleep in Minnesota, so one of the first things I do when I wake up (which is pretty much whenever I want to) is check my email for a notice. It’s always in the form of a request – sometimes a personal request, sometimes a general appeal to the group. Sometimes I miss out on those, though, since the local Norwegians have a time advantage. But the boss often offers me exclusives, because she likes my work. I have no complaints.
If I get an assignment, there’s generally a deadline. And I’ll already be a few hours behind. So my day is generally devoted to that work. I do take frequent breaks though (which accounts for the amount I’ve been reading lately). I can’t do translation steadily for several hours – it just wears me out and my body rebels. As the day goes on, though, I find I can usually work longer sessions, and the translation – for some reason – seems to get easier in the evening. And into the night.
If there’s no assignment for the day, I can work on my translation for the Georg Sverdrup Society. I’m translating quite a long piece for the next Journal. And, of course, I can work on The Elder King, the coming Erling book, though right now I’m pausing (which one needs to do sometimes when writing fiction anyway) to wait for feedback from my First Readers. I’m not sure if we’ll get the book out before Christmas, but we’re trying.
And how was your day?
“She’s a good person.”
“How can you tell?”
Nina tapped the center of her chest.
“The heart never lies,” she said.
“Of course it does. That’s what’s wrong with it.”
Coincidence is a very bad story element, if you resort to it to solve a plot problem within a story.
Coincidence can work just fine, though, if you make it the jumping-off point for a story, and build the conflict on top of it. Because coincidences do happen in life; just not generally when it’s convenient.
It’s a coincidence that criminals trying to kill a woman by throwing her out of the back of a pickup truck to be hit by a car, should toss her into the path of a private eye with a Don Quixote complex. But that’s how David Housewright starts Unknown Woman #15, the next book in the McKenzie series. The accident happens, by the way, on Highway I-94 where it passes from Minneapolis to St. Paul, a spot I know pretty well.
The pretty victim is injured, but not killed, thanks to “Mac” McKenzie’s quick thinking. But she suffers (or claims to suffer) amnesia from the trauma. She ends up staying in Mac’s condo, with him and his girlfriend Nina, after her release from the hospital. They both like her tremendously, but Mac can’t suppress his suspicions, which only increase when she suddenly vanishes, and people start getting killed. Following up a few clues she dropped, he begins to unravel her true identity – and the disturbing reasons why somebody wants her dead.
Unknown Woman #15 actually follows a classic Noir template (I won’t say which one). I found it riveting, though the story was fairly downbeat, like any Noir. Author Housewright once again takes a shot at Minnesota’s concealed carry laws (and again paradoxically carries a gun past a “guns forbidden” sign), which annoyed me. But all in all I liked Unknown Woman #15 quite a lot.
Cautions for the usual.
The receptionist at the Lake Minnetonka Community Bank had green eyes that glowed like the numbers on an ancient calculator, the kind you used to be able to buy at Radio Shack.
A continuing character in David Housewright’s series of McKenzie mysteries is old Mr. Walter Meulenhaus, sometime ally, sometime enemy, sometime client of our hero, millionaire detective Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie. Mr. Meulenhaus, we are informed, is the eminence gris of Minnesota politics, the string-puller behind the scenes who makes everything happen in our state. Which has to be a joke, because we’re told he’s a Republican and there hasn’t been a Republican in a state office for some time now.
Anyway, in The Devil May Care, Mac is approached, not by the old man, but by his granddaughter, Riley Bodin. She has fallen in love – against her family’s wishes – with the son of a prominent Spanish family, Juan Carlos Navarre. Partly because he likes Riley, and partly just to twist Mr. Meulenhaus’s shorts, Mac agrees to help her.
And before long there’s murder and arson, and gang war, and federal investigators, and Riley herself in mortal danger. Turns out Juan Carlos was not who he said he was, and not who he’d claimed to be before that, either.
The Devil May Care is enjoyable and well-written, like all the other books in the series. I think author Householder can lay off the lesbian characters for a while now, though. He must have filled his quota to satisfy whatever PC regulation he’s trying fulfill.
Cautions for minor grown-up stuff.
Rejoice. Michael Connelly has brought out a new Harry Bosch novel. Except Harry’s getting long in the tooth (apparently he’s grown his mustache back too. I’m pretty sure he shaved it off a few years back), and is not technically an LAPD detective at all anymore. So in Dark Sacred Night he teams up with Connelly’s new detective character – surfer chick-detective Renee Ballard, heroine of The Late Show.
Renee is the victim of sexism in the department, and has been exiled to the “the late show,” the night shift. Surprisingly, she’s found she kind of likes that shift. She’s surprised when she sees an older cop rummaging in a filing cabinet one night. She learns that it’s Harry Bosch, who’s investigating a cold case – the murder of an underage prostitute, Daisy Clayton. Harry knows Daisy’s mother, who is a drug addict and recently cleaned herself up. She’s living with Harry right now, and he promised her he’d try to find the killer. When Renee learns about it, she wants in, and Harry and she find they work pretty well together. They’ll need that synergy when the case gets dangerous, and the brass interfere.
Not the best of a long series, Dark Sacred Night is a satisfying but somewhat downbeat visit with an old friend, professionally delivered. Recommended with the usual cautions.
The Amazon-owned used book website AbeBooks announced their disconnecting from select rare and antique booksellers around the world sparking a backlash from over 250 booksellers in 24 countries. The New York Times reports:
The stores are calling their action Banned Booksellers Week. The protest got its start after AbeBooks sent emails last month to booksellers in countries including South Korea, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Russia to say that it would no longer “support” them. “We apologize for this inconvenience,” the company said.
The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association Book Fair is also dropping AbeBooks from their 2019 sponsors, and one business owner says he will never list his books on the site again.
AbeBooks says their third party payment service is shutting down, so they cannot continue to process sales from certain countries. The way this report reads, if the website had at least made the pretense of finding a way to work with the affected booksellers before announcing it could not, other booksellers may not being protesting now. (via ShelfAwareness)
I think I can explain everything that’s wrong with western politics today. All intelligent people (that is, everyone who already agrees with me) will understand immediately.
I think the problem rises from the fact that westerners – even those who expressly reject Christianity – base their ethic on the teachings of Christ.
Only they misunderstand it.
They start with Christ’s Golden Rule: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do yet also unto them.” And that’s good. It’s the best of ethical rules, and well worth following.
But they assume a corollary. They assume the next stage is, “And then they will do the same unto you in return.” Be nice to others, and no one will hurt you. A thousand Sunday School papers and children’s books make the tacit promise that that’s true.
But the passage doesn’t actually say that.
There’s no promise that anyone will return your kindness. In fact, Jesus often warns His disciples that people will hate and persecute them.
Most sophisticated westerners assume that if you’re peaceful and act peaceful, and if you’re kind, that will protect you from evildoers. Your kindness will make them kind, too.
There is no such promise.
That’s why the Apostle Paul tells us that the emperor bears the sword. Because somebody has to protect the vulnerable.
It isn’t the government’s job to practice the Golden Rule, unless you want everybody to die.
Here endeth the lesson.
And now, just to prove to you how old and white I am, another instrumental piece from my youth for a Friday – “The Syncopated Clock,” by Leroy Anderson (1908-1975). He was Swedish-American, by the way, and is probably best remembered for the Christmas favorite, “Sleigh Ride.”
Yet it was her eyes that I found most remarkable. They were warm and wide open and so honest that meeting them made a fellow regret his long-forgotten sins.
I had a weird moment while reading The Last Kind Word, another in David Housewright’s McKenzie mystery series. It occurred to me that this was kind of like a P. G. Wodehouse novel.
Your classic Wodehouse confection involves a group of English aristocrats gathered in a country house. Their house party is intruded on by an Impostor – a guy who’s come to steal a silver cow creamer, or a manuscript, or a prize pig, or something. Humor rises through the impostor’s attempts (facile or clumsy) to put off the very reasonable suspicions of the (few) intelligent people (always women) in residence.
The Last Kind Word alters that scenario a bit – substitute a northern Minnesota fishing cabin for the stately country house. Substitute a group of lower-middle-class Minnesotans for the English gentry. And substitute our hero, Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie for the Wodehouseian impostor.
Aside from that, there are many similarities.
Federal agents have convinced Mac to help them locate some Mexicans who are selling automatic weapons connected with the Fast and Furious scandal (you may not remember it; the press sent it down the memory hole). Mac poses as a dangerous prisoner and is permitted to escape from custody, taking with him another prisoner, who has connections to the only known lead to the gun runners. Continue reading ‘The Last Kind Word,’ by David Housewright
Her smile reminded me of the promise on a package of lightbulbs I had recently purchased – “Lasts up to 10 times longer while using 75% less energy.”
Author David Housewright got on my wrong side near the beginning of Curse of the Jade Lily. He explained how to tell Norwegians from Swedes based on how they spell “son” in the names (and got it wrong), and then went on to discourse on racism, for no pertinent reason. But I persevered, and all in all the book was OK.
Housewright may be messing with us, though. Sometimes, for instance, he gets his directions diametrically wrong. In this book, for instance, he has Mac go east from Minneapolis to get to Theodore Wirth Park. It ought to be west. Maybe it’s a gag.
As you probably recall, Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie retired from the St. Paul Police Department a few years ago, when he accepted a multi-million-dollar finder’s fee from an insurance company. That good fortune comes back to bite him in Curse of the Jade Lily. A rare Chinese sculpture (the eponymous lily) has been stolen from a small Minneapolis art museum. The thieves have offered to sell it back, but they have one condition – Mac has to deliver the money. Because the insurance company asks him for the favor, and because of a certain amount of pressure from various levels of government, he agrees. Then the suspected thief is found murdered, and someone else is murdered during the ransom delivery, and the whole thing turns into a complex mystery, with elements of international intrigue.
It’s complicated, and Mac gets hurt multiple times, but he figures it out in the end. Author Housewright put my back up a little with his Norwegian crack, but not enough to put me off the series. Recommended with cautions for language, mature themes, and anti-Norwegian bias.