A newly elected school board member of Peoria Unified School District Board in Glendale, Arizona, has been told to stop quoting scripture at the beginning of school board meetings because the district believed it was a violation of the First Amendment. They took this stand in response to letters from organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Off into the Green
In case you’re keeping track, I passed the 60,000 word count on The Baldur Game this morning. Since I anticipate a final length in the neighborhood of 100,000 words, I feel as if I’m making progress. I’ve wrapped up Ailill’s and Erling’s adventures in Caithness, Scotland with Jarl Thorfinn the Mighty (a whole lot more happened there than I expected), and now I’ve got them in the Orkneys, preparing for the crossing to Norway.
If you’re in the Green Bay area, you’ll find me (God willing) at the Midwest Viking Festival on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Friday and Saturday. They have a Viking house there, which will anchor our encampment. I’ve been to this festival before, but only in its former venue in Moorhead, Minnesota – a somewhat shorter drive. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll satisfy the authenticity standards.
I’ll have some books to sell, but get there early. Supplies are limited.
(Note, I know Green Bay is an odd place to hold a festival for Vikings. Another of God’s little jokes, I suppose.)
‘Old Songs,’ by Olga Sedakova
If you know boldness, you know mercy too, because they are like sisters; boldness is lighter than all things on earth, but compassion is lighter than anything.
It’s not my custom to review poetry on this blog; I write it poorly and read it with only middling comprehension. But the description I received of Olga Sedakova’s recently released volume, Old Songs, intrigued me enough to accept the offer of a free review copy. As might be expected, the poems baffled me a little, but they nevertheless left an impression. The translation is done by Martha M. F. Kelly, and seems excellent so far as I am able to judge.
Olga Sedakova is a Christian Russian poet, a survivor of the Underground in Soviet times and today a major critic of her country’s war in Ukraine. Old Songs was published only a few weeks ago, and still awaits its first Amazon review.
Speaking from my limited perspective, these poems seemed resolutely Christian in a realistic way. No easy answers. No assumption that rewards will come to us in this world. The poet knows suffering and placidly expects to suffer more. All temporal hopes are likely to fail; we believe anyway.
I felt like a child trying to follow an adult conversation through most of the poems (it’s not a long book), but certain passages definitely resonated. I particularly liked the one I placed at the head of this review. Here’s a couple other good ones;
Ah, I’ve watched people a long, long time, and strange things have I learned: I know that the soul is an infant, an infant until its final hour, that it believes absolutely everything, and it sleeps in a den of thieves.
The dead don’t need a thing, not houses nor dresses nor hearing. There’s nothing they need from us. Not a thing, save everything on earth.
Those are good lines. Recommended. I was impressed.
‘Madison P.I.’ by Brian Clements
We’re dealing here with a book I got as a free sample (not an uncommon thing). Madison P.I. is the third book in a series by Brian Clements starring Joe Bamberg, a former local news reporter in his home town of Madison, Alabama. Having solved a couple crimes in previous books, he’s now set up as a private eye.
The first client to come to his office is an eighteen-year-old girl named Riley Evans. Riley is concerned about her mother, who’s been missing for three days. Turns out the woman is a degenerate gambler with a drinking problem, and Riley has been more or less mothering her mother. She came to Joe because her mother told her she’d dated him briefly as a young woman. This is true, but it doesn’t make Joe any more comfortable.
Things get puzzling when the local sheriff, instead of cooperating or even giving him the cold shoulder, actually bars Joe from having any contact with the police. Joe will have to intrude on some of the seediest locations in the area in order to find Riley’s mother. And the girl insists on accompanying him most of the time. Surprisingly, she’s actually helpful sometimes.
The writing in Madison P.I. wasn’t bad. The plotting was a little rough, but also not bad. I did have trouble with some moments when Joe seems to act out of character, as when he subdues a professional thug with a few moves learned in a self-defense course.
Still, this wasn’t a bad book. I probably won’t read any more in the series, due to the author’s somewhat sanctimonious liberalism, as when he repeatedly denigrates the Second Amendment, yet has his hero save his life more than once with a concealed carry weapon. Also, I disliked Joe’s opinion that it’s always okay to steal from insurance companies.
Oh yes — it ends in a cliffhanger, which annoys me.
But Madison P.I. isn’t bad at all for a self-published mystery.
‘The Supremacy License,’ by Alan Lee
(Back from Høstfest in Minot. No incidents to report, and my book sales were excellent. Remind me to tell you someday about being a “Høstfest VIP,” which isn’t as good as it sounds.)
I have complained more than once about novels that seem intended to compete with mindless Hollywood thrillers – stories where the hero races from one violent confrontation to another, shrugging off “flesh wounds,” shaking his head and recovering immediately from head trauma, crashing cars and blowing up buildings rapidly enough to prevent the reader from pondering the improbability of the whole frothy concoction.
However, it’s possible for the Hollywood thriller novel to work as light entertainment – if the author has writing skill and a sense of humor. Those qualities won me over almost immediately as I read The Supremacy License.
Our main character is Manny Martinez, code name “Sinatra,” whom I knew previously from author Lee’s Mackenzie August novels (which I also like very much). Manny is an improbable character, a former gang member, drug addict and convict who has cleaned his life up to become the most gung-ho, super-American US Marshal ever. He has devils he wrestles with, but his friendship with Mack, his job, and his love of country keep him on the straight path. He is also, we are reminded, devastatingly attractive to women and a deadly fighter.
As the story opens, Manny is summoned to a meeting with high-level FBI agents. They offer him a job – not full time but sort of on-call – as a special agent for a super-secret domestic black ops group. He would be helping to eliminate criminals so dangerous the government can’t even acknowledge their existence. His partner, oddly, would be Noelle Beck, a demure Mormon data analyst who harbors a secret crush on him.
Manny’s all in from the word go. Anything he can do to serve the USA he’ll do, and the more dangerous the better. His first job is one for which he’s uniquely qualified – to arrest or kill a powerful Honduran terrorist who happens to be his former girlfriend.
Two things made The Supremacy License a lot of fun – Manny’s personality, a blend of tongue-in-cheek arrogance and genuine moral nobility, plus his complete, reckless fearlessness in action. I liked Manny a lot, and I look forward to following his further preposterous adventures. Well done.
Sunday Singing: The Sands of Time Are Sinking
For October, we will take up the theme of the life to come. Today’s hymn is by the Scottish poet Anne Ross Cousin (1824-1906). She wrote it while reflecting on Samuel Rutherford’s notes on Revelation 22.
“No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Rev. 22:3-5 ESV).
1 The sands of time are sinking,
The dawn of heaven breaks,
The summer morn I’ve sighed for,
The fair sweet morn awakes;
Dark, dark hath been the midnight,
But day-spring is at hand,
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Emmanuel’s land.
2 The King there in his beauty
Without a veil is seen;
It were a well-spent journey
Though sev’n deaths lay between:
The Lamb with his fair army
Doth on Mount Zion stand,
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Emmanuel’s land.
3 O Christ, he is the fountain,
The deep sweet well of love!
The streams on earth I’ve tasted
More deep I’ll drink above:
There to an ocean fulness
His mercy doth expand,
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Emmanuel’s land.
4 The bride eyes not her garment,
But her dear bridegroom’s face;
I will not gaze at glory,
But on my King of grace;
Not at the crown he gifteth,
But on his pierced hand:
The Lamb is all the glory
Of Emmanuel’s land.
Toward a More Reasonable Faith and Words Written or Generated
My all-time favorite song is Michael Card’s “God’s Own Fool,” published in 1985 on the Scandalon album. That may have been the first album I bought with my own money. It’s a song about Jesus being misunderstood during his earthly ministry. The last lines are:
So, surrender the hunger to say you must know; Have the courage to say, "I believe." Let the power of paradox open your eyes And blind those who say they can see.
I could understand if someone took lines like this to encourage blind faith, a faith that doesn’t question what we read in Scripture or what our ministers teach, but Christian faith isn’t blind. It’s reasonable and fits the real world He created.
When Jesus tells Peter to check the mouth of a fish for a coin to pay their taxes, Peter believes Him and checks the fish’s mouth. When Jesus tells a couple of His men to go into town, find a donkey and colt tied up, bring them to him, and if anyone asks what they’re doing, say that the Lord needs them, they go into town expecting to find exactly what He has said. That’s a reasonable faith. It’s one that recognizes the limits of our knowledge, not one that denies knowledge altogether.
But what else do we have today?
Art & Literature: David Platzer writes about a Paris exhibit on Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. “Edmund Wilson—who was generally sympathetic to her work and compared it to Yeats, Proust, and Eliot—noted in a 1923 Vanity Fair article that her word-portraits of Matisse and Picasso published in Camera Work made it ‘evident that Gertrude Stein had abandoned the intelligible altogether.'”
Words: If you or someone you know have shown symptoms of being a witcracker, call the number on your screen. You are not alone.
American Words: American pioneers had to make up words for a new world. Rosemarie Ostler writes, “Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap.” “Yankee is also almost certainly a Dutch contribution. Various theories have been suggested for the word’s origin (for instance, that it’s a Native American mispronunciation of English), but the most likely one derives the word from Janke (pronounced ‘yan-kuh’), a diminutive of John that translates as something like ‘little John.'” (via ArtsJournal)
Artificial Intelligence: Tech companies are hiring writers and poets to compose somewhat refined work, particularly in Hindi and Japanese. “It is a sign that AI developers have flagged fluency in poetic forms as a priority, while refining their generative writing products.” To what end? (via ArtsJournal)
Photo: Fairyland Cottages Minnesota, 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
‘Romeo’s Justice,’ by James Scott Bell
This will be a short review – probably shorter than the book deserves. But I’m busy playing Viking in Minot, snatching a few minutes before bedtime, and I’m kind of tired (the festival is going fine; thanks for asking). Anyway, I love all the Mike Romeo books, so what is there new to say about Romeo’s Justice?
Mike Romeo, erudite Los Angeles private eye working for Ira, an ex-Mossad attorney, beats up an obnoxious type at the very start of the book, just to set the tone. The guy deserved it. Then he has a date with his girlfriend Sophie, who is learning to coexist with Mike’s forceful ways.
Ira asks Mike to take on a case from Noel Auden, a mother whose son recently (ostensibly) committed suicide. He had left their Catholic faith to explore spirituality at a school called the Roethke Spiritual Center, out near the Salton Sea. According to his suicide note, he did it because of global climate change, but Noel wants to be sure, in light of the seriousness of suicide in Catholic doctrine.
Mike goes out and starts poking around, asking questions. As you’d expect, there is pushback from some nasty characters, as well as from the police, most of whom are in the pay of a local energy tycoon. But that’s all in a day’s work for Mike Romeo.
Romeo’s Justice was not full of surprises, but it was full of Mike’s personality and Bell’s prose, the things that bring us back. Important issues are addressed. A resolution is found in the end.
Good book. Well worth the price.
Coming Soon in the Cameron Winter Series
We’ve raved about Andrew Klavan’s series … well, we’ve raved about almost everything he’s written and about him personally. We can’t hide our admiration. We’re crazy about him.
A couple years ago, he released the first novel in the Cameron Winter series, When Christmas Comes. Lars said, “If Graham Greene had written A Christmas Carol, it might have turned out something like [this].”
Last year, the second novel was released. A Strange Habit of Mind is a compelling story of justice and love. My fear is that “Poetry boy” is going to get it in the teeth next time around. (If you know, you know.)
And by the end of October, book three will be upon us. Publishers Weekly calls The House of Love and Death “complex,” “gripping,” and “a penetrating mystery with a plot that cuts straight to the dark heart of some of modern America’s most pressing issues.”
I just finished listening to the Highbridge audiobook of A Strange Habit of Mind, and the memory of it is pressing me to pre-order The House of Love and Death. Klavan’s writing is gripping, especially when I compare it to my other recent reading. He doesn’t just communicate efficiently, like I might do sometimes. He draws you in. I can’t quote him precisely, but there’s a moment when an adorable student is praising Prof. Winter’s lecture and she pauses to choose just the right word to describe her impression then uses the same word every other student uses in that situation. I love it.
If you pre-order The House of Love and Death, you’ll help push it on to the NY Times bestseller list which will help sustain the series for many books to come. I’m sure you’re the kind of person who would want to do something like that. The generous sort. A warm-hearted, salt-of-the-earth type, that’s you.
‘The Concrete Ceiling,’ by Peter Rowlands
I’ve written mixed reviews of Peter Rowlands’ Mike Stanhope novels in the past, and my criticisms of his plotting actually attracted the author’s personal attention in our comments. So I’m happy to report that The Concrete Ceiling, the fourth novel in the series, is (in my opinion) far better than the previous offerings.
Mike Stanhope, freelance English journalist in the Logistics field, is troubled on two fronts. First of all, he’s convinced his relationship with his girlfriend Ashley is dead on its feet. Not only do they seem to be avoiding each other lately, but his commute between Wales (where he’s moved to be with her) and London, where his work is centered, is interfering with his ability to support himself. His second concern is with his self-published novel, which resolutely refuses to leap onto the bestseller lists. (I hear that.)
He’s also thinking more and more about Samantha, a girl he met on another of his adventures. But she’s engaged now, to a go-getting young man who seems to be on his way to bigger things.
Mike is contacted by a cousin of Samantha’s, who has also self-published a novel. He’s wondering whether he should hire a web-based service that promises to promote his book. Mike looks into the service, finding that it looks too good to be true. Nevertheless, in a moment of desperation, he signs on with the service himself. Time passes, and nothing seems to happen. But when Mike goes to see the service’s owner in his home, to try to find out what’s happening, he finds the man dead – and the police suspect him.
This is just the beginning of a complex story, in which many threads converge at last. Author Rowlands does a pretty good job of bringing it all together logically, and I’m delighted to report that this plot depends a whole lot less on “dumb luck” to rescue the hapless hero than previous stories did. One plot twist actually made me laugh in pleasure. Also, as always, the prose is very good.
It’s a personal thing, but I always dislike it when a series hero meets the love of his life in the first story, then drops her for another woman. This probably says more about my personal hangups than about the real requirements of a good story. I’m just mentioning it.
All in all, I was pleased with The Concrete Ceiling, and I recommend it. Only minor cautions for rough language.