Through the miracle of YouTube, I have now watched all of the three film adaptations of Russell Thorndike’s Doctor Syn novels, while through the magic of Kindle I’ve read all the novels except for The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn, which isn’t yet available in a digital edition. What follows is a guide, from one viewer/reader to another, to this interesting, sometimes exciting, sometimes aggravating adventure series about a vicar in a small town on the Kentish coast who is secretly a former pirate captain, and who runs an efficient – often ruthless – smuggling operation, riding by night in the costume of a ghostly scarecrow.
The author, Russell Thorndike, was an accomplished actor (Dame Sybil Thorndike was his sister, and you can still see him in small parts in several of Laurence Olivier’s Shakespearean movies) but his great love was writing. He authored a one-off novel about smugglers called Doctor Syn: A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh in 1915, and was surprised to find its central character become far more popular than he’d ever anticipated.
The first film version of any of the books was a 1937 English production starring the actor George Arliss in his final role. This one was called Doctor Syn and was based on Thorndike’s novel of the same name. Arliss was about 70 when he played this role, which is too old for the part, and he functions more as a mastermind than an adventurer here. Continue reading A disquisition on Syn
On Writing in Books
Joel Miller is encouraging his readers to write in their books, especially the nonfiction. It will help their memory. It will be personally revelatory. It will lead to original verbages. And stuff.
I agree, and I’d like to thank my college English professor, Richard Cornelius, for encouraging me to go easy on these markings. A simple star, check, or v-mark in the margin is better than underlining a few lines. Using a notebook is probably better than writing comments in the margins too, but I don’t usually argue with writers in the margins of their books.
What marks do you make in your books?
A story in the perspective of time
Today I was reminded of an incident back when I was attending a Lutheran college in the Midwest (go ahead and guess which one; I went to three). I was in an English Literature class. The teacher was a very pleasant woman. She was openly liberal, and liked to season her lectures with provocative ideas to challenge her students’ beliefs, but she wasn’t a hostile person.
I remember her describing a story she’d read that was “controversial.” But it was a very good story (she said) one that raised important questions. I don’t recall the title or the author. I don’t recall whether it was a short story, a novel, or even a play.
She said the dominant character in this story was a remarkably difficult woman. Other characters tried various methods for coexisting with her, and she frustrated every one of them. “In the end,” my instructor said (and I’m quoting her exact words here) “there was nothing you could do about this woman except rape her.”
I sat there listening to this, and I immediately rejected it. I felt very provincial and callow in doing so, of course, because I knew I lacked my instructor’s sophistication. But I couldn’t think of any circumstance in which rape would be appropriate. I’d just have to accept, as I had many times before, that I was an unsophisticated hick from the farm.
Years have passed, more than 40 of them, and if that instructor is still alive, I suspect she’s changed her opinion of that story. Sophisticated people no longer consider rape an edgy, taboo subject to be explored. Rape is evil, the foul fruit of male social domination.
My point is that I didn’t have to wait for fashionable opinions to change in order to see rape as categorically wrong. My liberal instructor did.
I was following the North Star. She was listening to voices in the dark.
Freedom and equality: enemies
Photo credit: Serguey
Just a little more about the American system, from a certified non-expert.
There are many expressions that we hear all our lives, beginning in our childhood (this is very noticeable in the church), expressions which we tend to skate over without considering their specific meanings.
“Freedom” and “equality” are two of those. I suspect a lot of Americans think they mean the same thing. And they most emphatically do not.
Here’s the thing our Founders understood, which neither the later French revolutionaries or most moderns comprehend. Freedom and equality are in fact mortal enemies.
If you have total freedom, equality is impossible, because some people will be more successful at what they do, and at life itself, than others. The weaker and the less intelligent may even be crushed under the feet of the stronger and the more clever.
If you want total equality, you’re going to have to clamp down on everybody, and ruthlessly cut off every head that pokes above the level of the average.
The American answer to that problem was to set up a system meant to achieve a balance. “Equality of opportunity” means everybody gets as equal a chance in the game as possible. But equality was never enshrined as an American motto, as it was for the French – “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” For Americans it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As for the losers in life’s game, their care was left to the family and the church. And they were encouraged to try again. America’s bankruptcy system was designed to permit people to start over, something European systems discouraged.
When people used to talk about the American way, that’s what they meant.
The Unused Score for 2001
Perhaps Alex North’s musical score for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t right for the movie, but that doesn’t change the fact that North put everything he had into that score, working with the belief that it would be used. But Kubrick never intended to use it. He wanted the public domain music he selected himself for the temp track.
North’s daughter-in-law, Abby North, writes, “As all composers know, directors fall in love with temp tracks. It is often next to impossible for even the most talented and skilled composer to replace the temp tracks with new music cues that elicit the same feelings initially felt with the temp tracks. Unfortunately for Alex, Stanley Kubrick loved the grandeur of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and the “poetry of motion” of Johan Strauss’s The Blue Danube in the context of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”
For a bit of context, see this piece on Kubrick’s use of European music in The Shining. “[A]lmost the entire score is made up of music by the best European composers of Kubrick’s time,” writes Hope Lies, Béla Bartók’s music in particular.
Of civil society
As our great national holiday approaches, I’m about to (fair warning) write about theoretical politics. I do so with a great deal of shame, because I should have understood this before. My thoughts were sparked by an article (to which I was directed by Ori Pomerantz) at First Thoughts, “Crushing Civil Society,” by Peter Leithart, an article which isn’t even about America but about eastern Europe under communism. Still it sparked a gap in the gap-rich environment of my brain, and helped me crystallize some pre-existing thoughts. In a way I should have done long ago.
The realization I came to while reading, although it involved no fresh ideas, provided me a new, systematic way to think about government. We – or at least I – tend to use the terms “civil society” and “government” almost interchangeably. But in fact they are very distinct things.
Civil society means the associations people naturally form, of their own volition. A church (at least in America) is a civil institution, because it wasn’t ordained by the government, but by a private group. Marriage is a civil matter – indeed, the union of man and woman as the kernel of the family forms the essential center of the civil order, which is why so many of us consider government redefinition of the institution a grave danger. Through most of history, people have gotten their “social welfare” from civil society – from their families and their churches (I’m speaking of the West. Other institutions dominated elsewhere in the world, though the family is pretty much universal).
But in order to get along with others in a civil society, that society must establish what we call “laws.” Our English word “law” (as I’ve mentioned here before) comes from an Old Norse word – “lagu” – which originally meant “layers.” It conveyed the idea of something that lies evenly on everyone – the rules by which we agree to work when we’re cooperating, whether on a Viking raid or in running our petty kingdom. Continue reading Of civil society
Are Evangelicals Too Political?
Some are saying evangelical Christians should realize they have been defeated in recent political skirmishes and shut up. They’ve been too political for too long, they say. But Out of Ur says his experience hasn’t been dominated by politics.
“Given the lack of politics in my evangelical church experience, why do 75% of young non-Christians say evangelicals are ‘too political’? … Either my church engagement is wildly outside the norm, or perhaps evangelicals aren’t as devoted to political social engineering as the outside culture seems to believe we are.”
Even NPR’s Ira Glass thinks “what Christians really are is not being documented by the press.” But perception is deemed reality by most, if not all, of us, so how do we counter a politicized perception of who we are? (via Trevin Wax)
First in war
Original drum from the First Minnesota. Photo credit: Minnesota Historical Society.
Before the day is entirely over, I’d like to take the opportunity to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the charge of the First Minnesota Regiment at the battle of Gettysburg. Though the action was almost ignored in Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, and entirely ignored in Ralph Peters’ Cain at Gettysburg, the battle would certainly have been lost if those few farm boys from a new western state hadn’t counterattacked an overwhelming force in a hot wheat field.
Mitch Berg of Shot in the Dark can tell you all about it.
The charge drove back a force five times the size of the First. It bought the time needed for Hancock to get the reinforcements into the line and consolidate Cemetary Ridge.
The Good Lawyer, by Thomas Benigno
It’s a pleasure to read a first novel and enjoy it. Doesn’t happen as often as one would wish. I can’t claim Thomas Benigno’s The Good Lawyer as any kind of personal discovery, though. It’s already an Amazon bestseller.
The book shows some of the distinctive marks of a first novel. Author Benigno is sometimes a tad awkward in terms of style, but I’ve seen far, far worse in recent years. Generally the editing’s pretty good. The plot doesn’t really offer a lot of surprises, and contains a fair number of common tropes. But then tropes exist for a reason. A novel entirely without tropes would lack credibility.
The hero and narrator is Nick Mannino, a young Legal Aid lawyer (a job the author knows from experience) doing defense work in the Bronx. For a change, he finds himself with two defendants he thinks might actually be innocent, one a teacher accused of molesting little boys, the other an accused serial rapist. But if he thinks that’s surprising, he has no idea what very nasty shocks are coming his way.
The best thing about this book is the characters. Nick is very likeable, and the friends, family, co-workers, and enemies who show up in the story are easy to believe in. His devout, loving mother, his wealthy girlfriend, and his sympathetic mobster uncle (a little too much Godfather here, but he’s still a good character) draw the reader in. And the villain is so vile and contemptible that we’re all on Nick’s side when, having earlier declared his opposition to capital punishment, he sets out to essentially perform an execution himself.
The politics of the story are hard to discern. Nick seems to be a decent liberal, but the story (it appears to me) has conservative implications, at least in terms of the justice system. I suppose that’s how bestselling authors square the circle and please a large audience. I need to try that.
Christianity comes out pretty well in this story, and I’m happy to report that the author avoided one trope in particular – the pedophile priest. (I don’t think he’s ever been inside a Baptist church, though, judging by his descriptions.)
All in all, pretty good. I enjoyed it. Recommended, with cautions for strong language and mature subject matter.
Communists: Free Association Must End
Peter Leithart points out a book on Soviet history, noting that the communists opposed free association more than free markets. They wanted to crush individual will power, stop curiosity, and if possible, outlaw independent thinking.
“It was not enough that an individual be open to the new regime or hostile to the old. The person who did not make an outright, preemptive demonstration of his servility might cause you trouble later on,” Leithart quotes from a review of the book.
The People must be greater than the sum of its persons.