Our theme this month has been spiritual warfare, and today’s song departs from that. It’s a traditional spiritual with a straight gospel message. Run to the city of refuge while you have the chance.
“And Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’ Then he bowed with all his strength, and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people who were in it. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he had killed during his life.” (Judges 16:30 ESV)
From “The Interrogation” in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. (alt link – Internet Archive)
My interrogator had used no methods on me other than sleeplessness, lies, and threats — all completely legal. Therefore, in the course of the “206” procedure, he didn’t have to shove at me — as did interrogators who had made a mess of things and wanted to play safe — a document on nondisclosure for me to sign: that I, the undersigned, under pain of criminal penalty, swore never to tell anyone about the methods used in conducting my interrogation. (No one knows, incidentally, what article of the Code this comes under.)
In several of the provincial administrations of the NKVD this measure was carried out in sequence: the typed statement on nondisclosure was shoved at a prisoner along with the verdict of the OSO. And later a similar document was shoved at prisoners being released from camp, whereby they guaranteed never to disclose to anyone the state of affairs in camp.
And so? Our habit of obedience, our bent (or broken) backbone, did not suffer us either to reject this gangster method of burying loose ends or even to be enraged by it.
We have lost the measure of freedom. We have no means of determining where it begins and where it ends. We are an Asiatic people. On and on and on they go, taking from us those endless pledges of nondisclosure — everyone not too lazy to ask for them.
By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives.
I worry we’re getting to this point of silencing ourselves without Soviet interrogation.
The Press: CBS has reportedly “confiscated the records of” Catherine Herridge after firing her last month. Many suspect she wasn’t toeing the narrative line (or kissing the ring of the Right Side of History).
Ukraine: The aggressive invasion of Ukraine began two years ago this week. “. . . you have to gather all your strength and keep living — it’s easy to go mad from the onslaught of emotions and experiences. Sometimes I feel like we’ve all collectively gone mad.”
Real Men: Praise for the male lead in Helprin’s The Oceans and the Stars as the type of man we need everywhere. “As a leader, for instance, Rensselaer maintains the perfect distance from his crew. Though they know they can approach him for help and advice, he does not pretend to be their buddy. Nor is he aloof or self-absorbed. Rensselaer is all about the mission at hand, preserving the lives of those under his command, and winning in battle.”
ICYMI, Lars review The Oceans and the Stars last October.
Darwin’s Sequel: Robert Shedinger has a new book about the sequel to Origin of Species, which “promised evidence for natural selection” that was not included in the original. He says Darwin just kept promising his supporters, because he would never have the material to finish the book.
Western Canon: A college attempts to replace the Great Books with those aligned with a proper ideology. “‘Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment’s alternative to the Canon,’ Bloom groaned, ‘I reflect that these aspirants must believe . . . that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.'” This isn’t post-modern, the writer notes. It’s as old as the iconoclasts of history.
Photo: Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash
Music tonight, as is so often the case with me on Fridays. Way back in the 1970s, I acquired an album by the late Roger Whittaker, entitled “Folk Songs of Our Time,” sadly no longer available as such. It was a loose collection, featuring some numbers that weren’t strictly folk songs at all. “Folk,” of course, is a nebulous category. It can mean a song genuinely passed down mouth to mouth through generations, or merely a song written last week in the folk style.
Anyway, I grew quite fond of the album, and the song, “The Ash Grove,” was one of my favorites. Mr. Whittaker sings it above, though I’m not sure it’s the same arrangement.
The song evokes the unmistakable air of antiquity. According to Wikipedia, it was originally a Welsh song, and was first published by the harpist Edward Jones in 1802. But a similar tune is found in John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” (1728), and that tune has in turn been traced back to a Morris song called “Constant Billy,” published in 1665.
In my own imagination, I suspected it was a heathen song. The ash tree has deep folkloric significance – I have a little book about British tree superstitions down in my basement somewhere. In my novel, The Year of the Warrior, I give Father Ailill a mad, homicidal heathen slave who likes to sing “a song about an ash grove.” The original lyrics as we have them were by Jones in Welsh, of course, and they’re actually about a man mourning his lost love.
A good folk tune never escapes the hymn writers. “The Ash Grove” is well-known in churches as the tune to “Let All Things Now Living,” and “Sent Forth With God’s Blessing,” as well as a few others less familiar.
“You think I’m in the wrong line of work?”
“I think running a bar can be more fun than most jobs, including mine. It can also be a lot of work.”
“People deserve a cold one after a long day.”
“People enjoy a cold one. I’m not sure what any of us deserve.”
I knew nothing of Indy Perro, author of the novella Welcome to the Party, before I picked it up on a free offer. But I was happy with what I got.
It’s 1973 (this is, I think, a prequel story). Vincent Bayonne is a rookie cop in (the fictional) Central City. He’s recently back from Vietnam. He misses the action, and became a cop for the danger, and maybe to make a difference. But so far, the work has been pretty routine. He and his veteran partner are assigned to what’s considered a plum day’s assignment – providing security for a mayoral candidate who’ll be making a speech at a VFW post.
The candidate, it turns out, is both a lush and a lech. The crowd will turn out a little more rambunctious than expected. And Vincent will get the opportunity to save a life.
Welcome to the Party is a simple story. The writing is spare and clean, the characters believable and sympathetic. I was impressed. I’ve purchased the next book in the series, and look forward to seeing where this is going.
Time travel books form an interesting sub-genre of science fiction. Some writers like to play with the inherent paradoxes of the time-line – what happens if the hero kills his own grandfather? What happens if he meets himself? Suppose you killed Hitler as a baby – would fate provide a second-string substitute and history go on pretty much the same?
Other time travel stories are more about memory and regret. That’s the case with Jon Spoelstra’s Do-Overs, a book tailor-made to appeal to people of a certain age, who have life regrets. As a man who meets both criteria, I liked it.
Roy Hobbs (same name as the hero of The Natural) used to be a Chicago news reporter. Then his ex-wife, whom he still cared for, fell victim to a vicious serial killer. Roy wrote a bestselling book about the murders. But he lost all the money he earned.
Now he’s gotten an invitation from a reclusive billionaire, one of the old Silicon Valley computer moguls. He and a group of his fellow billionaires have pooled their resources on something like a privately funded Manhattan Project. Their purpose was to prove the existence of parallel universes. This, he says, they have accomplished. There are multitudes of parallel universes, mostly differing from one another only in minor details. By traveling between these universes, it’s possible to move about in time – though never in our own universe; only in the others.
What he wants from Roy, he says, is a book. A book only he himself will read. He wants the book to describe Roy’s own subjective experiences in parallel universes, not the science. The payment will be princely. Roy sees no reason to refuse.
Naturally, he travels to his own past. There, he observes himself meeting his wife for the first time. He is astonished at the sensation of seeing her, and falling in love again. But on another trip, as he’s following her around, she notices him and makes an excuse to meet him. She feels, she tells him, a strange attraction to him (in spite of their near-thirty-year age difference). Apparently, Roy comes to believe, there’s such a thing as a “cosmic connection,” which binds souls (or something) together, even across universes.
Enthused by this renewed passion, Roy makes up his mind to travel to many universes and stop the killer early in his career, saving his wife and as many women as possible. What he doesn’t realize is that this cosmic connection connects more than love – he may have given the murderer the key to a longer, even bloodier career in countless iterations.
Do-Overs was adequately written. The prose wasn’t memorable, and there were occasional grammatical slips, as in when we’re told a character “had drank” wine. The narrator also speaks of an “uncompromising position” when he means a “compromising position.”
But the storytelling was adequate, it kept my interest, and I cared about the characters. We’ve all imagined going back and fixing our lives’ mistakes. It was pleasant to follow a character doing just that.
There was a little more sex than I thought necessary in this book, and it was just a tad more explicit than it had to be. Is it immoral to go to bed with a woman you just met, when she’s been your wife already in another universe? Intriguing question.
However that is, I found Do-Overs quite a lot of fun. Recommended.
Three items for you tonight. The video above, in case you care to view it, is my sermon last Thursday in the chapel of the Free Lutheran Bible College and Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. I note that it times out at 17 minutes, 57 seconds. The time frame they allotted me was 18 minutes. I did no padding or cutting on the sermon – it was the right length pretty much out of the chute. This is something I seem to have been born able to do, writing to a set time. I find it wholly inexplicable. Anybody know a politician who needs a speech writer? I work cheap. Preferably a conservative; I hate being a greater hypocrite than I already am.
Secondly, our friend Dave Lull, ever on the watch for references to the late author D. Keith Mano, for whom I cherish a fondness, sent me the link to this piece from National Review. An excerpt:
Keith was soon established within our senior ranks and was included in the periodic “off-sites,” where vexed NR policies were (endlessly) debated and (occasionally) resolved. He and I would sit together, two high-school sophomores in the back row of an algebra class, with D. Keith providing sotto voce commentary on the otherwise tedious proceedings. On one occasion I lost it and laughed out loud. NR publisher William Rusher, who on solemn occasions made himself available for hall-monitor duty, barked at us from across the room, “Perhaps Freeman and Mano would care to share that witticism with the rest of the group.” (We did not care to share it. It was about Rusher.)
Thirdly: Report from the writing front: I’m in the process of doing a paper revision on The Baldur Game. It’s well known that I’ve been almost entirely assimilated by the digital Borg; I read and write mostly electronically. Yet I retain a semi-superstitious conviction that I ought to do at least one revision per book in red pen on printed sheets. That’s what I’m doing right now.
And you know what? It does seem to be different on paper. I almost feel as if I’ve re-written the book by hand, in red ink. (Some of it’s even almost legible.)
I had thought the polishing stage was almost complete on this thing. I was surprised find so much substandard writing all of a sudden, like shining ultraviolet light on a crime scene. I’ve never noticed any difference in the reading experience between paper books and my Kindle. Yet revision, somehow, seems to be different.
Clouds boiled up over the opposing ridge, backlit and tumultuous. A scorched violet sangria sky breathed its last breaths. Nighttime had dusk in its teeth already, choking it out. There was electricity in the air, and the sky was vast and dangerous, and somewhere far to the west over the Malibu hills, the tide thrashed against the coast. Alone for a moment on this spot, Evan had the feeling of standing on the planet itself.
At this point in my reading life, there are two annual events I look forward to like Christmas. One is Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels. The other is Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels. A new Orphan X is just out. It’s called Lone Wolf, and I think it may be the best so far.
Evan Smoak, our hero, lives his life according to his operational Ten Commandments (essentially based on Twelve Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson, who is a friend of the author). This keeps his existence tight and controlled, as he carries out his vocation of helping the helpless, when summoned by a call to his private phone number.
So it’s out of character for him to lose himself for days on an alcoholic binge. But that’s just what he’s doing at the beginning of Lone Wolf. To be fair, he’s been having a rough time lately. His goth foster daughter Joey, who just started college, has decided she wants to pledge a sorority, and is suffering all kinds of female angst. The neighbors at his condo are trying to involve him in a HOA president takeover scheme. But the real problem is that he just met – at last – his birth father, and the meeting was nothing at all like he’d anticipated.
But he has another family member, also recently discovered – a loser, alcoholic brother. And that brother has a daughter – Evan’s niece. When she calls in desperation, asking Evan to help her find her missing dog (the ugliest dog Evan ever saw), he tries to explain that this isn’t the kind of thing he does. But her tears move him irrationally. Okay, he’ll do what he can.
Little does he know that the search will lead him to a murder – the murder of a brilliant scientist in the Artificial Intelligence field. When he realizes that this murder is just one in a string of assassinations, all carried out against people with connections to cutting-edge computing, he has to go hunting for the assassin, who turns out to be an incredibly dangerous – and ruthless – young woman.
Gregg Hurwitz turns out excellent prose (though I did catch one grammatic error). But where he really excels is as a plotter. Lone Wolf is packed with breakneck action, and the breathing intervals feature hilarious farce, as Evan and Joey, each in their own ways, find themselves operating in worlds way outside their comfort zones.
There’s also a disturbing preview of a possible dystopian future. And in the end, another personal kick in the stomach for Evan.
Lone Wolf is a really, really good novel, in spite of some “girl boss” moments. Cautions for language and violence.
Today’s hymn was written by Rev. George Matheson of Glasgow, Scotland (1842-1906). He published several works of prose and poetry while serving as a parish minister. His most popular hymn is “O Love, That Wilt Not Let Me Go.” “Make Me a Captive, Lord” was published in 1890. The tune was written in 1862 by George William Martin of London.
“Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.” (Psalm 146:3–4 ESV)
1 Make me a captive, Lord,
and then I shall be free;
force me to render up my sword,
and I shall conqueror be.
I sink in life’s alarms
when by myself I stand;
imprison me within Your arms,
and strong shall be my hand.
2 My heart is weak and poor
until it master find;
it has no spring of action sure —
it varies with the wind.
It cannot freely move,
till You have forged its chain;
enslave it with Your matchless love,
and deathless it shall reign.
3 My power is faint and low
till I have learned to serve;
it lacks the needed fire to glow,
it lacks the breeze to nerve;
it cannot drive the world,
until itself be driven;
its flag can only be unfurled
when You shall breathe from heaven.
4 My will is not my own
until to You it’s given;
it must its earthly crown resign
if it would reach to heaven;
it only stands unbent,
amid the clashing strife,
when on Your bosom it has leant,
and found in You its life.
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.
[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…”
