It’s going to snow. I can feel it in the air pressure. In the humidity level. I see it in the grayness of the sky. I smell it in the atmosphere. I sense it in my arthritic old bones.
But mostly I heard it on the radio.
As you plan your Thanksgiving meal, make sure to check out the following “fool-proof” recipe from Joseph’s Machines.
Yesterday, November 16, was, as Stephen Bullivant puts it, “the actual feast day of the actual Blessed Lucy of Narnia.” He notes that Lucy was the one who observed in The Last Battle, “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”
So, if you want to visit the ancient, hillside city that gave Lewis’s magical country its name, you’ll have to go to Italy’s Umbria region and find the place presently called Narni.
Eleven years: Peck would give everything to have had those eleven years back. For one thing, he wouldn’t have messed around with those women in Indianapolis. If he’d gotten a regular doctor job, he’d be driving the big bucks now, fixing everything from Aarskog syndrome to Zika virus.
I’m fond of cop humor. Cop humor is black humor, often profane humor, the humor of people who’ve seen the worst things life can dish up, and have found ways of coping. John Sandford’s novels about Minnesota cops are full of cop humor, which is one of their charms. In comparison to his Prey novels, starring Lucas Davenport, his Virgil Flowers novels tend to lean more heavily toward slapstick. Escape Clause is perhaps the most comic of his novels to date, though there are several murders along the way.
In Escape Clause, we begin with the theft (kidnapping?) of two rare tigers from the Minnesota Zoo. There’s no mystery in this story – it’s a thriller. We know who the bad guys are (an eastern medicines doctor and a few thugs), and the suspense is in how fast the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, in the person of Virgil Flowers (the only guy they can spare because of security demands at the Minnesota State Fair during visits by presidential candidates) can figure out what’s going on and stop it.
Virgil is a good cop, though not a very good shot, and generally reluctant to even carry a gun. He also tends to take a lot of pratfalls in this outing. Simultaneous with this job, he gets involved with stopping some thugs, hired by a sweatshop owner to beat up his girlfriend’s sister, who’s doing sociology research on the illegal alien workers.
It’s all a lot of fun, and it’s mostly dirtbags who get killed. The climax is obvious a mile away, but no less enjoyable for that, on a visceral level.
An interesting new element in this story is the character of “Father Bill,” a Catholic priest who leads an odd life. He works as a supply pastor for the Minneapolis-St. Paul diocese nine months of the year, and is celibate then. During the summers he works at a resort and has a girlfriend. This is kind of jaw-dropping, but I suppose it’s not unthinkable in today’s church. Virgil, whose father is a Lutheran pastor, makes some small effort to talk him over to the Protestant side.
Anyway, I had a good time with Escape Clause. Cautions for lots of bad language and adult situations, also the death of an animal (almost always more traumatic than human death in a novel).
The esteemed Dr. Bruce Charlton at Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers re-posts a review of That Hideous Strength. This post, from the Toast blog, is by a woman named Felix Kent. I found it delightful, for two reasons. First, I’ve come to assume that all modern women will hate THS (which remains one of my favorite novels). Secondly, Ms. Kent gets it precisely right.
“Don’t read That Hideous Strength,” my mother said. My mother is a great C.S. Lewis fan, also a believer, in the religious sense. One of my best sources for what to read. And a woman who grew up in the Fifties and became an academic. Became, like Ransom, the trilogy’s main character, a philologist.
“Why not?” I said.
I don’t think my mother used the word “yucky” in her reply, but that was more or less what she meant. I went ahead and read the book anyway.
It was a morning of ethereal splendor – such a morning as Noah knew as he gazed from his pitchy bulwarks over limitless, sunlit waters while the dove circled and mounted and became lost in the shining heavens; such a morning as only the angels saw on the first day of that rash cosmic experiment that had resulted, at the moment, in landing Corker and Pigge here in the mud, stiff and unshaven and disconsolate.
I mentioned Evelyn Waugh on Facebook, and in the ensuing discussion was forced to admit the shameful fact that I hadn’t actually ever read any of his novels. Someone suggested Scoop, his treatment of foreign newspaper correspondence. Thus this review.
William Boot is a member of a large but declining “country” family in England. He writes a column on rural nature for a London paper, The Daily Beast. Due to a series of misunderstandings on the part of Lord Copper, owner of the paper, and his editors and sub-editors, William finds himself dispatched, much against his inclination, to report on a civil war in Ishmaelia, an African republic.
Along the way he gets acquainted with members of the real foreign press corps, all serious drinkers and savage exploiters of expense accounts, who vie with one another (mostly within the confines of the hotel bar) to discover the merest hint of news of the war (which does not exist; it was all a misunderstanding from the start) and then build those hints into fanciful news stories which they all crib from one another and send back to London by radiogram. He has to deal with the cheerfully venal family that runs the country, he rubs shoulders with foreign agents, and he gets romantically involved with a semi-German gold-digger.
The whole story is a ridiculous construction of misinformation, misperception, prejudice, lazy thinking, and cutthroat but genial competition. It could have been called “Much Ado About Nothing.” There are some elements reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse here (there’s even passing mention of a fellow named Bertie Wodehouse-Bonner), but the humor is more acerbic than “Plum’s.” It might be judged closer to Saki’s humor – but I think Saki would have taken the opportunity of a story like this to kill off a lot of people.
Scoop is a highly amusing novel that will give you a whole new (and lower) view of journalism. No problems with language or subject matter here, except for dated racial slurs. There are contemporary 1930s references that will confuse a lot of modern readers (including me sometimes).
For rent, one planet that’s lost its way in the race for development, that showed up at the stadium after all the medals had been handed out, when all that was left was the consolation prize of survival.
For rent, one planet that learned to play the economics game according to one set of rules but discovered once it started playing that the rules had been changed.
That planet in Yoss’ novel A Planet for Rent is a stand-in for 1990s Cuba. Emily A. Maguire describes the story of an unmanageable Earth. “In the interests of ‘saving Earth from itself,’ [aliens] have turned the planet, now a ‘Galactic Protectorate,’ into a vacation destination: Earth and its inhabitants exist solely to satisfy the desires of its alien visitors.” (via Prufrock News)
“When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.”
Why do we occasionally see Moby Dick with a hyphen? Because that’s how the original title ran. Erin Blakemore of the Smithsonian calls it a Victorian convention, but that doesn’t satisfy many readers.
“Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale” was published in the United States on this day in 1851, having been previously released in the United Kingdom. It didn’t sell well compared to his other books, and critics took a dim view:
The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.
The Handmaid’s Tale has become a significant artifact of North American postmodern culture. It’s hard to imagine, for example, the myriad of shelves dedicated to young-adult fiction at your local Barnes and Noble without the influence—however indirect or incorrect—of The Handmaid’s Tale. After all, in our age of intellectual stagnation, who better to destroy patriarchal oppression than a noble and brave teenage girl, a postmodern Joan of Arc?
But this is a most superficial reading of the novel. In reality, the story is as complicated as anything Huxley or Orwell wrote.
Bradley J. Birzer of Hillsdale College writes about the virtues of Margaret Atwood’s most-loved novel. (via Prufrock News)
The Only Poem by Leonard Cohen pic.twitter.com/IPtQgnrDP5
— Poetry Is–@VVanGone (@PoetryIsPoetry) November 11, 2016
“Literature,” writes Caleb Griego, an editor for The Heights, the student newspaper of Boston College, “seems to soothe the discontents of the mind. Reading allows for us to come away from our own loneliness and relish in the solidarity of it with another. Our alienation is both the cause of anguish and the remedy to it.”
The winner says he had to test the non-viking weapon he’d made, so it appears here in this typically Viking-oriented skirmish. His long double-handed sword is a Thracian Romphaia, apparently a terrifying weapon in its day.