Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

Things Napoleon Said and Award Censorship

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May I share some quotes and marginalia from my old quotation book with you today?

Cervantes said in Don Quixote, “There are no proverbial sayings which are not true.”

To say, “a man has an axe to grind,” first appeared in print in “Essays from The Desk of Poor Robert the Scribe” by Charles Miner, published in 1811 in the Wilkesbarre Gleaner, a Pennsylvania newspaper.

Another phrase, that sounds out of fashion to me, is “to mix with brains.” English portrait painter John Opie was asked what he mixed his colors with. He answered, “I mix them with my brains, sir.”

During a debate, when one of Phocian the Good’s (402-320 BC) statements stirred up applause of the audience, he asked a nearby friend, “Have I inadvertently said some evil thing?”

Napoleon (1769-1821) has these words attributed to him (without sources):

“Imagination rules the world.”
“I made all my generals out of mud.”
“There are two levers for moving men–interest and fear.”
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
“Independence, like honor, is a rocky island without a beach.”

Greek general Aristides (530-468 BC) said, “The Athenians will not sell their liberties for all the gold either above or under ground.”

And, finally, the Stoics had this proverb, according to Plutarch: “The good man only is free; all bad men are slaves.”

Do all of those right true? They aren’t all proverbial, so we could cut them a bit of slack. What else do we have?

Volcanos: Seven years after Vesuvius erupted, a Jesuit priest climbed it to make his observations. “I thought I beheld the habitation of hell.”

Books: Simon Leys asked, “Are books essentially useless?” Well, they aren’t food.

Sci-Fi Award Censorship: The Hugo Awards are being held in China this year and some notable works were declared ineligible without explanation. Authors conjecture the Chinese government is to blame. Two members of the nomination board have resigned in response.

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Religion, Writing

‘If you don’t tell them a story…”

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Unsplash license, in collaboration with Getty Images.

[The following is the text of the sermon I delivered at the chapel at the Free Lutheran Bible College/Seminary this past Thursday,]

And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’” (Luke 8: 9-10, ESV)

Dr. Sebastian Gorka tells a story about when he was writing his book, Defeating Jihad. When he’d finished it, he showed it to his wife and asked her what she thought of it. As a writer myself, I know what he wanted to hear. He wanted her to tell him it was the most wonderful book she’d ever read, and it would certainly be a bestseller and change the world.

But she didn’t say that. What she did was ask, “Is that all there is?”

He said yes. Here were his facts and his arguments. What was there left to say?

She told him, “You need to tell a story. Nobody will listen to you if you don’t tell them a story.”

So he went back to his word processor and he wrote an introduction. In that introduction, he told the story of a young man who’d been in the underground in Communist Hungary, back in the days of the Soviet Union. He was betrayed by the famous English traitor Kim Philby, and arrested by the government. Imprisoned and tortured.

Then, in 1956, the Hungarians staged an uprising. The man was released from prison, but he knew the Communists were coming back. He made plans to escape to the west. When he left, he took a friend’s 17-year-old daughter with him, at that friend’s request. The man wanted his daughter to live in the free world. They made the very dangerous journey across the border, and ended up in England. Later he married the girl, and they were Dr. Gorka’s parents. He says that whenever people talk to him about the book, they never want to talk about the main text. They ask him about that story.

“Nobody will listen to you if you don’t tell them a story.”

If God had asked my advice, back when He was planning how He’d reveal Himself to Mankind through a book, I’d have told Him to give us a book of Systematic Theology. You start out with a chapter on Epistemology – the science of how we know things. Then I’d suggest a chapter on Trinitarian Theology. And a chapter on the Incarnation. A chapter on Soteriology, the theology of salvation. At the end, a chapter on Eschatology, the Last Things. Everything organized, like the books I used to stock up in the bookstore for seminary classes. I’d want it laid out neatly, with headings and subheadings. Charts and bullet points would be nice, too. Think of all the theological arguments we’d be spared!

But for some reason – and theologians marvel at it to this day – God did not consult me on the subject.

Continue reading ‘If you don’t tell them a story…” →
Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 2

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The father and son parted with little love lost between them. Many people wished Grettir a safe journey, but few a safe return.

I have finished reading The Saga of Grettir the Strong, in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I have much to say about it, though I fear a lot of it strays into the deep grass.

My main takeaway from the saga, as I stated yesterday, is that the real-life hero, Grettir Asmundarsson, seems to have been a psychopath, very likely suffering from PTSD. Even in a book written in the 14th Century, his status echoes ancient tribal attitudes. The heroes of ancestral times were not admired for their moral virtue. A remnant of this world view remains, in residual form, even in our English language. Our word “great” has two meanings. The common one (in our time) is that of “important” or “admirable.” But its older meaning was “large.” We still speak of a Great Hall or a greatcoat. In the same way, old heroes like Sigurd the Dragon Slayer could massacre whole villages of innocent people and still be considered heroes and great men. Because greatness was about magnitude, not virtue. Likewise, Grettir is a hero because he does things in a big way, whether it’s killing men or lifting heavy objects.

Reading the saga from a historical perspective, I noted that most of the episodes where Grettir comes off as heroic by our standards – a virtuous hero – are implausible scenes involving either invulnerable berserkers or supernatural creatures like witches or ghosts. Even the scenes of Grettir’s death, which are likely to have some factual base, are embroidered with elements of witch’s curses, which the saga writer found necessary in order to explain his invulnerable hero’s death at the hands of common men. (Though in an odd interpolation, Grettir finds a friend who’s even stronger than himself. No actual magic is attributed to this character, but one gets the feeling he’s not entirely human.)

The only plausible episode where Grettir exhibits mercy is one calculated to advance his own interests. He spares the life of a son of Snorri the Godi [Chieftain] (an important saga character who makes a brief appearance in my novel, West Oversea), who has come out after him as a sort of bounty hunter. Grettir understands that winning Snorri’s friendship through letting his son live could win him a powerful friend, something he badly needs by now.

Indeed, one remarkable thing about Grettir’s saga is the fact that he had all kinds of prominent connections – “Almost all the chieftains in the country were related to Grettir… either by blood or by marriage.” He’s related to the Norwegian royal family too. And yet he can’t seem to catch a break with the law. (For all I’ve written and said about the importance of the Law to the Norse, your father’s status and who you knew counted for a lot. Rich men’s sons could usually find a way to wiggle out of legal scrapes with their skin intact, even as today. The fact that Grettir couldn’t make this old boy network work for him, seems to have convinced his family and friends that he must have been under some unique curse).

There’s a hint of character development in the later chapters, when Grettir, formerly entirely reckless of consequences, now searches for a way to attain a peaceful life. He’s been outlawed, which means he can’t leave the country and is legal prey for killing. In the end, he will hold the record for survival in an outlaw state – 20 years (though there’s some inconsistency about that figure in the text here). He holes up on the natural fortress of Drangey island, where he fights off repeated attacks. It’s at this point that he becomes a more sympathetic character. He’s terrified of the dark and of being alone – though he knows from experience that few men are to be trusted. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what his killers’ real story is – Grettir has been living by robbery, and he never hesitated to use violence. Stealing sheep and other food could have serious consequences in a marginal economy  The charge that his killers employed witchcraft is not impossible (at least technically – I don’t believe their magic actually worked), but it seems to me more likely the witchcraft stuff was added by the author (who was possibly related to Grettir) in order to make his hero more sympathetic. No small task, with this guy’s record.

An element in the saga which I’d never noticed before (perhaps it was bowdlerized in previous translations I’ve read, or maybe I just forgot) is a couple sexual situations. In one scene, which would have played better in the 14th Century than it does today, a serving woman makes fun of Grettir’s physical endowment, so he rapes her to teach her a lesson. In another, he spends some time sharing a house with a woman whose husband is away, saving her from a monstrous troll woman who’s been ravaging the farm. He leaves a souvenir behind:

Towards the end of that summer, Steinvor from Sandhaugar gave birth to a boy named Skeggi. At first he was said to be the son of Kjartan…. Skeggi was distinguished from all his brothers and sisters by his strength and build. By the age of fifteen he was the strongest person in north Iceland, and then his paternity was attributed to Grettir. Everyone thought he would grow into an outstanding man, but he died at the age of sixteen and there are no stories about him.

In sum, the Saga of Grettir the Strong is a powerful and memorable tale, and an amateur psychologist like me can spend unlimited time picking out clues concerning its underlying facts. That game can go on forever, because there’s no way to prove them wrong.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 1

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This is a partial review. The book I’ve been reading is one of the longer sagas in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, and (as I’ve said before) my reading time has been limited lately. But I’m about half way through with this one, so I thought I’d do what I’ve done with some other longer works in the past. This is an incremental review, my thoughts on what I’ve read so far. The saga under consideration is The Saga of Grettir the Strong, one of the great classics.

I’ve read Grettir’s Saga at least three times before, so the material is familiar. But my response this time is a little different from previous ones. Perhaps it’s this translation, which is more literal than most. I’m not generally a booster of literal translating, but possibly it’s conveying some nuances I’ve missed in the past. In any case, I find I have less sympathy for the hero this time around.

The Icelandic sagas are classic stories of violence on the frontier, stories that anticipate the American Western. One of the standard themes of the Westerns is, “What do we do with violent men, who are valuable but expensive?” We want the gunfighter to come in and clean up the town, but then we’d prefer him to ride off into the sunset and bother somebody else.

Grettir Asmundarsson is often referred to in the saga as “an accomplished man.” But the only accomplishments of his (aside from composing poetry) that we observe are fighting and lifting heavy objects. His family and friends support him (cautiously) because of his value in a brawl, but his impulse control seems poor, and he shows little indication of ever being domesticated, or wanting to be.

In fact, he shows all the signs of PTSD. He’s quick to react violently, he’s suspicious and socializes poorly, and he suffers night terrors. In the saga, this weakness is explained by a nightmarish fight with a revenant, what I called a “walker-again” in my novels – the Scandinavian ghost that’s kind of like a vampire or zombie. Grettir’s nightmarish fight with Glam, the ghost, is portrayed as an experience of such overwhelming horror that even our bold hero can’t undergo it without emotional scars (though he does, needless to say, “kill” the ghost.) What happened to the real-life Grettir we’ll never know, but fighting monsters is a pretty good metaphor for a traumatic experience in combat.

And that’s about all I can really say in Grettir’s defense. The rare occasions in the saga where he appears sympathetically are the most fantastic and implausible – like the ghost-fight, or his rescuing of a houseful of defenseless women from rapist berserkers. These are saga set pieces, the kind of episodes that show up again and again in sagas to keep things lively. I doubt they actually happened in the man’s life.

What I do believe is the stories of his murders, which generally seem to be acts of impulse and overkill.

More on Grettir tomorrow.

Music

‘Les Bicyclettes de Belsize’

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Yet another reviewless night. My reading has been sharply curtailed, and it looks to be thus for a while, due to a pile of work (some of which I’m even getting paid for. So I’ve got that going for me). Today was also my annual appointment with my thoughtful Tax Professional, always an ordeal. People as poor as I am shouldn’t have such complicated taxes (multiple tiny income streams are to blame). I’m pretty sure I’d vote for a flat tax.

So I post music again. The song above, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, is outside my usual, Norwegian-oriented repertoire. It’s just a song I’ve loved ever since it came out, during my college days. I did not know, and have only recently learned, that it’s the theme for a short film. I watched the film on YouTube, but I’m not going to link to it here, because I suspect it’s copyrighted and will soon be pulled. Furthermore, I found it kind of disappointing. It’s a short musical with but one memorable song.

I must have been misled by my own mood when I first heard the song; I always assumed the film would be bittersweet. It’s not. It’s dumb and cheerful, a rather banal story about young people dressed in what we used to call “mod” clothes. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy and girl are separated. Boy and girl find each other again. That’s about it.

In spite of the French title, it’s an English movie and an English song. If you’d like to hear the English-language version, Engelbert Humperdinck had a pretty big hit with it. It’s easily located.

The singer here is Mireille Mathieu, a French artist I’m amazed I never heard of. Incredible voice. According to Wikipedia, she’s a devout Roman Catholic and stands fully 5 feet tall.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bishop Murder Case,’ by S. S. Van Dine

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Tonight, another mystery classic. I was familiar with the name of the author, S. S. Van Dine, but I knew his Philo Vance character only through old movies (William Powell was the first to play him). Raymond Chandler called Philo Vance “the most asinine character in detective fiction,” and now that I’ve read The Bishop Murder Case, I can’t argue with him (though that was before Lawrence Sanders invented Archy McNally).

Philo Vance, New York City esthete and amateur detective, is called upon by the district attorney (who has apparently decided, after a couple of cases, that he can’t operate without the young twit’s help) to visit the home of the mathematician Prof. Dillard. In an archery range next to the house, a young friend of the family has been found killed by an arrow. Suspicion immediately falls on another young male friend, a rival for the affections of the professor’s daughter. But when a cryptic note is delivered to a newspaper, associating the killing with the nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, they all realize that this was part of a cold-blooded plan. When other murders, all with Mother Goose themes, follow, it comes down to breaking alibis and analyzing personalities – just the sort of thing at which Philo Vance excels.

What did I dislike about The Bishop Murder Case? First of all, the prose was stilted, over-long, and unnatural. The dialogue doesn’t sound like anything real people (even dilettantes) would say, and the narrative includes such lines as “’Sit down, Pyne,’ said Vance, with peremptory kindness.” (What does “peremptory kindness” mean?) There are some similarities to Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but Lord Peter was always self-aware, and he played his eccentricities for laughs. Vance is singularly humorless.

Secondly, Vance relies heavily on very simplistic Freudian psychology, which has not aged well. The author goes so far as to affirm that extreme (even cruel) cynicism is a sign of mental health, because it eases repressions(!).

By this time in history, we’re used to seeing amateur sleuths in fiction working in cooperation with the official police, but the kind of slavish devotion the police in this book show to Philo Vance – to the extent that he actually takes the lead in their interrogations – is hard to swallow. They even let him bully them into breaking into a house without a warrant (in a very good cause, I’ll admit, but it was still implausible). The bulk of the district attorney’s business, it appears, is conducted at the stylish Stuyvesant Club, where Vance is also a member.  Also, a man is held in jail on suspicion long after events have pretty clearly demonstrated his innocence. Apparently habeus corpus doesn’t exist in Philo Vance’s world.

There’s a Norwegian character here, and I have to say I hated him cordially (among his other sins, he’s an Ibsen fan).

The author, S. S. Van Dine, is an interesting – and perhaps revealing – case study. His real name was Willard Huntington Wright, and he was a prominent art critic in the early 20th century. He was also a cocaine addict and a German sympathizer during World War I. When his career foundered, he took up writing mysteries, despite the fact that he despised the genre. In an exquisite irony of fate, his books proved popular, and he came to depend on them for a living. Applying a little Freudian psychology of my own, I wonder how much his self-hatred contributed to the generally acknowledged deterioration of his work over time. (And it wasn’t great at its best, if The Bishop Murder Case is any indication.)

In short, I did not enjoy The Bishop Murder Case. It dragged on and on, annoying me increasingly as I read. Recommended only if you want to fill a hole in your education in Golden Age mystery stories.

Music

Sunday Singing: Stand Up, My Soul; Shake Off Your Fears

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Today’s hymn is another from the great Isaac Watts. “Stand Up, My Soul; Shake Off Your Fears” was written in 1707 and paired in some hymnals with the traditional German tune “Mendon.”

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Gal 5:1 ESV)

1 Stand up, my soul; shake off your fears,
and gird the gospel armor on;
march to the gates of endless joy,
where your great Captain Savior’s gone.

2 Hell and your sins resist your course;
but hell and sin are vanquished foes:
your Jesus nailed them to the cross,
and sang the triumph when he rose.

3 Then let my soul march boldly on,
press forward to the heav’nly gate;
there peace and joy eternal reign,
and glitt’ring robes for conqu’rors wait.

4 There shall I wear a starry crown,
and triumph in almighty grace;
while all the armies of the skies
join in my glorious Leader’s praise.

Uncategorized

American Sports and Were All Balls Made from Pigskins

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It’s been a while since we posted something on sports, despite the clamoring of our many readers. When I meet people on the street, in the diner, on the subway, or in a hansom cab, they often recognize me from the blog, and after soliciting my investment in their creative livelihood or some sure deal they’ve hit upon, they ask me when Lars or I will compose another fun feature about the fascinating world of sports.

Eager readers, today’s your day. On this very screen, I intend to answer your burning queries on the topic of Amercian sports. Who’s Connor Bedard, you ask? What’s jazz got to do with Utah? Is Ty Cobb really the most hated man in baseball? Please. Let’s take up the serious questions, shall we?

What’s the oldest organized sport made in America? That would be Lacrosse, which Iroquois were seen playing by French missionaries in the 1600s. Players would pass a deer-skinned ball with sticks, some of which had deer-gut for netting. This game may be almost a thousand years old. It was organized as a sport in the 17th century.

Asking for the oldest organized sport puts certain parameters on the question. If we backed off the idea of organization and asked what the oldest sport made in America is, that would be surfing. Though Captain James Cook first brought the idea of wave riding to the English-speaking world in 1778 when he saw Tahitian surfers, Polynesians had been surfing for centuries then. With Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 and statehood in 1959, Hawaii’s history is grafted into America’s history, making surfing a old American sport. (Is that a stretch? I don’t know. Let’s move on.)

Football has roots in the Roman Empire, which should be enough of an explanation for why men would be thinking about it daily, but what we call football in the States was refined in England and civilized by American patriots. Football has been a word to describe kicking around a bloated pig’s bladder since the 14th century. The first college football game was between Princeton and Rutgers in November 1869. They first played on Rutgers’s field in New Brunswick, New Jersey and the game was a lot like soccer. A few days later, they played at Princeton by Princeton’s rules. That set a trend until 1876 when Walter Camp, a Yale man, would begin to revise the game into one we would recognize today.

The word pigskin was used to name leather made from a pig’s hide by 1855, according to records, and was slang for “a saddle.” By 1894, it became slang for “a football” too.

To close out, let me point you to Ted Kluck’s article on Sports Illustrated closing its doors for good.

It’s been years since I’ve received Sports Illustrated, and I kind of put it away, emotionally, when I started writing for its competitor, ESPN the Magazine, in the early 2000s. Both magazines really haven’t been any good for a decade, with most of SI’s online “stories” reading like long tweets. 

Photo by Rob Worsnop/Flickr

Goofing, Uncategorized

Blood won’t tell

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Yet another reviewless night. I am currently reading a book that’s turned out to be just plain sclerotic. But it’s sort of a classic, so I’ll finish it and give it a review – though not one the author would care for, were he still alive. So you’ve got that to look forward to. As for tonight… free association blogging, I guess.

Looking to the right of my keyboard, I behold an object that’s been with me since my father died, in 2000. It’s a souvenir shop item, a porcelain coaster emblazoned with the Walker family crest.

Which is a joke.

In looking around the net for an illustration, I found a lot of sources happy to sell me family coat of arms merchandise. But they’re not all in agreement as to what the Walker coat of arms looks like. This doesn’t mean they’re making it up as they go. It’s because there are in fact several Walker families in Britain, not necessarily related to each other, and they have different crests. I found the one pictured above on Amazon, and it looks relatively – though not exactly – like the one on my coaster.

All these diverse Walker crests have one salient feature in common – they’ve got nothing whatever to do with my family.

My family, as I’ve told you more than is probably excusable, is Scandinavian on all sides, and my paternal great-grandfather (whose name you wouldn’t be able to pronounce) joined his brother, who’d emigrated before him, in commandeering the name Walker.

A name they couldn’t even pronounce, as Norwegians have trouble with the letter “W.”

So having any object with a Walker coat of arms on it is only excusable as an act of whimsy. I’d be ashamed to think anyone thought I took it seriously.

My real family heritage is, like all family heritages, mixed. In the genealogical research I’ve done, I’ve found long lines of people who thought they’d had a good year if they made it through the winter without any children dying. Farmers and fishermen, and the occasional sailor, scraping out an existence on the northern fringe of Europe. Lots of cold winters in my heritage.

The most socially prominent ancestor I’ve documented was a lensmann (bailiff), a little like a local sheriff. There’s some mention of descent from some rich guy, but I’ve never followed that line back. And (as I’ve mentioned before) a couple of my ancestors earned a footnote in the history of Haugean Pietism in Norway.

I know people who can trace their ancestry back to Charlemagne. That’s less impressive, though, when we note that historians say pretty much every European alive is descended from that virile monarch. We Scandinavians may not share in that entirely, being on the periphery of the gene pool and somewhat isolated, but I figure I can confidently assume descent from King Harald Fairhair, who is said to have had (at least) a dozen sons.

The historical practical joke that really bids pomp take physic (Shakespeare reference) is that genealogy is a game of converging cones. You’ve got the cone of your ancestors, who double in number with each generation as you go back in time – two parents, four grandparents, etc. Meanwhile you’ve got the demographic population cone, which goes exactly the opposite way – the population of the world (or Europe, in this case) decreases with every generation going back. At some point in the past, you’ve got more ancestors than there are people in the gene pool. How is that possible? Well, many of them do double, or triple or quadruple, duty. You’re descended from them in multiple lines.

It’s at that point that one’s proud genetic heritage gets absorbed, as in some pantheist afterlife, into a great, undifferentiated mass. Any talk of “the best  blood” is nonsense. We’ve all got the same blood. Go far enough back, and that uniformity encompasses all continents and racial groups.

If we seek distinction, blood is a pretty poor path to follow. Character is better. Truth and faith are best of all.

Music, Religion

A theology of Broadway

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I’m fairly sure I’m losing my mind. You read about it often in artists’ biographies – at the end of their lives they descend into some kind of mania, growing obsessed with astrology or spiritualism or organic food or bitcoin or something. “He was always a little oversensitive, a little unstable,” friends will report. “But at the end he seemed to lose all touch with reality.”

Of course, in the cases of many of those artists, that fatal condition had something to do with syphilis or alcoholism or drugs. And last time I checked, I don’t have a problem with any of those. No, my descent into unreason can only be blamed on my home-grown neuroses and manifold phobias.

All the verbiage above constitutes my quaint method of introducing an idea I’ve conceived, one that’s just silly enough to embarrass me. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

What if the Kingdom of God is a musical comedy?

You may recall my recent theological speculations. In one line of thinking, I posited the theory that the created universe is a Story.

In another, I suggested the universe is Music.

And I asked myself, “Is there any way to fuse those two ideas into a single, Grand Unified Theory?

And then it hit me. What if the universe is a Musical Comedy? That would be perfect! (The argument works for ballet and opera too, I suppose, but I’m a little lowbrow for those metaphors.)

I’m not a major fan of the musical stage – though I once played Mordred in an amateur production of Camelot, and was, it goes without saying, brilliant. But I’ve seen a fair number of the older, classic productions – The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, etc. They can be pretty enjoyable.

But one thing that always troubled me was the moment – so common in musicals – when people are conversing in a normal way, and then somebody suddenly bursts into song, and a few moments later the whole crowd is singing and dancing in intricate choreography. (I embedded a clip of that sort above, a scene from the Marx Brothers’ film, “A Night at the Opera,” featuring Allan Jones with Harpo and Chico.)

I always had trouble with that moment. There are points – occasionally – in real life when people do burst spontaneously into song. Back when I was in a musical group, my friends and I sometimes even did it in harmony. But nobody ever started a chorus line.

But what if the problem isn’t with the musicals, but with the fallen world?

How often have you experienced a sublime moment in life, when your feelings surpassed mere words? When only song and dance would really have been sufficient to adequately celebrate what was going on?

Maybe that was what the world was meant to be like. Maybe Adam and Eve were doing taps and high kicks in the Garden of Eden (perhaps with animals backing them up, as in an old Disney film). Maybe that’s one of the things we lost at the Fall, and we enjoy musicals now because we’re longing for our unfallen state?

It’s just a theory, of course. But let me add this kicker, which I consider weighty indeed –

The American musical comedy was invented, in part, by P. G. Wodehouse. That would make Wodehouse a kind of prophet.

And that wouldn’t surprise me one bit.