Our friend, Hunter Baker, points to an interesting interview with Raquel Welch, which ends on how our sex-saturated culture is ruining sex for most of us. “I just imagine them sitting in front of their computers, completely annihilated.” It’s curious that the interviewer says she may come across like a prude, as if that’s one of the worst positions one could be in.
In the Spirit of Freedom, You Should Be Ashamed
James Taranto describes how the public discourse over Rush Limbaugh’s characterization of Sandra Fluke’s argument before Congress has spawned a “meta-kerfuffle” among professors. One prof praises Limbaugh’s argument, while detracting from the two words he apologized for, and his university’s president scolded him, both in print.
“I am outraged that any professor would demean a student in this fashion,” Seligman writes. “To openly ridicule, mock, or jeer a student in this way is about the most offensive thing a professor can do.”
The implication is that by treating Fluke with disrespect, Landsburg has behaved unethically. That’s bunk… Seligman’s shot at Landsburg is the equivalent of saying it is unethical for any physician to criticize Fluke’s political activism because she is a “patient.”
The effect of President Seligam’s argument may be to squash the freedom of thought and speech of students and profs without tenure. It’s happened before, he says, over just this type of argument.
Troll Valley gets noticed
Our friend Frank Luke was kind enough to review Troll Valley for the men’s magazine of the Assemblies of God Church. You can read the review online here.
From what he says, it seems like a remarkable book. I’m not sure I recognize it, though.
Also, Joe Carter included Troll Valley in his occasional list of cheap Christian e-books, over at Touchstone Magazine’s Mere Comments blog.
Have a good weekend!
“The Explicit Gospel”
He didn’t know God cared about him as a person; he just seemed to care whether he was a good person or a bad person. Kinda like Santa.
Voskamp’s Unknown Bestseller
“For 30 weeks Ann Voskamp’s book has earned a place on the New York Times bestseller list – and her neighbors don’t have a clue. People at her church found out only because the pastor shared his congratulations.”
This is a warm story about a wonderful lady (from what I can tell at this distance) who has written a stirring book on living under the mighty hand of God. It’s One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
What People Read 100 Years Ago
John Plotz describes what’s in a database called What Middletown Read, “the borrowing records of the Muncie Public Library between 1891 and 1902.”
The Original Sam McCain Mysteries, by Ed Gorman
I like to think I gave Ed Gorman a fair shake. He’s honest enough to admit his political leanings (liberal), but he makes a genuine effort to humanize his characters, even those awful Republicans. I have to give him credit for that. He tries. But I didn’t like this second book (actually two books; it’s a double volume) of his that I’ve read, and I don’t think I’ll read any more. The Original Sam McCain Mysteries
First of all the main character. As the title suggests, he’s a guy named Sam McCain. Gorman gives what seems to be his inspiration for the character in a passage where McCain meditates on his favorite mystery writer, the pre-Travis McGee John D. MacDonald:
There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero. He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be.
If Gorman’s goal was to create a character who isn’t heroic, he’s succeeded. Sam McCain is a short young man, a poor lawyer in a small Iowa town in the mid-1950s, forced by penury to do jobs for the local judge, an elitist woman who delights in humiliating him in small ways. He talks a lot about his love for the town beauty, who is herself in love with a rich guy. Meanwhile another girl, apparently just as pretty and with more personal substance, loves Sam and he doesn’t reciprocate. In this he’s clearly an idiot.
He’s also a punching bag. People beat him up a lot in these stories, and he just endures it. When he finally overcomes the murderers, he ought to be grateful to the God he claims not to believe in, because without a deus ex machina or two he’d be long dead. I think he won one fight in the second book. Continue reading The Original Sam McCain Mysteries, by Ed Gorman
Back to the workbench
Gave blood at work today. It went pretty easily for me, as it generally does. I told the technician that bleeding well is one of my gifts.
But one of the students, across the aisle in the Bloodmobile, apparently had a harder time. From what I could gather, they failed to get a good puncture, tried more than once, and eventually gave up rather than turn his inner arm into hamburger. I heard his technician tell mine, after the student had left, that it was the second one he’d messed up that day.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
Last night, I went back to my fiction writing. I’ve been busy getting my taxes ready recently, plus the desultory promotion I’ve been doing for Troll Valley. But I have the feeling Troll Valley‘s surge (such as it was) has passed. Haven’t seen reviews from several of the bloggers who got free copies, but I have to assume they’re doing what I do when I get a freebie that disappoints me—exercising merciful silence.
So I’ve taken up revising the next manuscript I’ll send to Ori for e-publication. This one’s called Hailstone Mountain. It’s another Erling Skjalgsson book, but this time in the H. Rider Haggard vein, with a lost world and horrible eldritch mysteries. I think it’ll be a fun story, though it has tragic elements. Continue reading Back to the workbench
Look Around You. What Do You See?
Tom Davis was in a cafe in Moldova and saw things he didn’t want to see. “One of the girls you will meet was trafficked from this restaurant.”
Blood Moon, by Ed Gorman
I feel a little guilty about not liking Ed Gorman better as a writer. It’s very obvious that he’s a liberal, but he works so darn hard to be fair to people he disagrees with—like Republicans and evangelical Christians—that I feel I ought to reciprocate in some way. But Blood Moon
This is the first book for a series character, Robert Payne, a former FBI profiler who now works as an investigative consultant from his home in Iowa. He’s approached by a woman who tells him she believes there’s a serial rapist and killer hunting little girls. Her own daughter, she says, was killed by this man, but the police and her family don’t believe the cases are connected. Payne agrees to look into it, and soon discovers that each of the murdered girls had visited the small town of New Hope, Iowa before her death. Payne goes to New Hope and begins making inquiries. He also meets the very attractive local (female) sheriff. Continue reading Blood Moon, by Ed Gorman