My latest article for The American Spectator can be found here. It’s about the old Robin Hood television series we Baby Boomers enjoyed in the 1950s.
I note that Michelle Malkin wrote about Robin Hood today too.
Great minds, and all that.
DVD review: "Buck"
Full disclosure: This should probably be called a Netflix review rather than a DVD review, but I can’t link to Netflix on Amazon.
Full disclosure number two: I’m not a horseman. I’ve ridden some, and generally managed not to fall off, and my brothers and I had a pony when we were kids. But I know I’m a tenderfoot. I qualify in no way to evaluate the horse training methods discussed in this excellent documentary.
It sure makes a good story, though.
Buck Brannaman, the subject of Buck, is one of the most famous proponents of what might be called the “new school” of horse training, an approach that concentrates on understanding the horse’s fears, calming those fears, earning the animal’s trust, and then becoming its thoughtful master. Buck seems to be able to take all but the most damaged animals, and fairly quickly to gentle them and get them doing what he wants them to do.
He was one of the inspirations for the book The Horse Whisperer, and served as technical consultant and stand-in for Robert Redford’s movie adaptation. Nowadays he travels the country nine months out of the year, conducting four day seminars on horse training.
The most remarkable and moving aspect of this film is its treatment of the abuse Buck and his brother suffered at the hands of their father, after their mother’s death. Fortunately they were removed from his care and placed in a loving foster family where they gradually learned to trust grownups again. Buck explicitly links this experience to his approach to horse training, feeling that he understands the horses’ fears (they’re essentially afraid that we’re predators trying to eat them) on a profound level.
With all I’ve heard of “Horse Whisperers,” I was half prepared for a lot of new-agey, PETA-style sentimentality and romanticism in the the film’s treatment of horses. I’m happy to report that there’s none of that here. Buck still considers himself a cowboy, and an important part of his technique is getting the horse (and its owner) to understand who’s supposed to be the boss. A dangerous horse must be put down, for the sake of humans.
This is a fine, moving documentary. I recommend it. I think there’s a little rough language, but I don’t have a strong recollection of it.
In Response to Having His Book Pulled from a Library
Author Charles Bukowski
“The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth,” he says. “Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them.”
Thanks for this link to Frank Wilson, who observes the letter “pretty much says it all. But it won’t stop the censors of all stripes.”
Burn: Never Extinguish
This is a commercial posing as a short film on creative desire. I suppose the bottom line for a commercial is the sale of drinks, specially the energy drink, Burn. But this bit of video is calling us to create out of our own image and don’t let hardship, like a tornado, get in the way.
Perhaps the video I embedded here last night changed (because I think I double-checked its availability). Here’s another link to the video.
Link sausage, Oct. 21, 2011
Tonight, as we approach the weekend, a couple links. Both will lead you to delicious compendiums of obscure information, with which you may amaze your friends and win bar bets (not that any of our readers ever go to bars).
First, from Listverse: Twenty Great Archaic Words. Words that we’ve somehow allowed to slip out of common use. Yet a few of them seem (to me) to be very useful. My favorite:
17. Apricity – The feeling of the warmth of the sun in winter. This word sparked this list when I used it in conversation and no one knew what it was. Nothing particularly funny, just a great word and a great sensation.
One of my favorite sensations, and a word I need to work into conversation from now on. I suspect I’ll get the chance before many months have passed.
(Caution: The last archaic word is one you might want to shield small children from.)
Also, from The Scotsman, Vikings and Scotland: Ten Lesser-Known Facts:
Clan names are a visible relic; MacIvors were originally the sons of Ivar, MacSween, the sons of Swein, Macaulay, the sons of Olaf, MacAskill, the sons of Asgeir and so on.
I didn’t know about those names. I did know about MacLeod, the sons of Ljot (some people say Ljot means “Light,” and others say it means “Ugly.” I’m not qualified to judge, but I’d bet on “Light.” Just a hunch.
Have a great weekend.
What Our Superheroes Say About Us
Steven Greydanus discusses this summer’s superhero movies.
Perhaps Captain America offers the best depiction of what makes for a good hero: being a good person in the first place. … Like others of his generation, Steve’s character was tempered in the forge of the Great Depression as well as the shadow of world war. Next year’s Avengers movie will throw this Greatest Generation warrior into the mix with the Tony Stark generation. What will that show us about ourselves and the world we live in? I’m almost afraid to find out.
The Worst Business in the World
“As early as 1896, Publisher’s Weekly wondered whether the book business was ‘A Doomed Calling’—a question that, by the late nineteenth century, had already become a cliché.”
Ben Tarnoff says people in the book business have been complaining about it’s final curtain drop for over a century. Back in Mark Twain’s day, they worried the subscription model would ruin everything. Today, it’s e-books. Tomorrow, it will be holographic gaming galleries.
Suicide Run, by Michael Connelly
Harry Bosch is not my favorite among Michael Connelly’s continuing characters. That honor goes to Terry McCaleb, whom Connelly killed off a few books back (McCaleb makes a welcome appearance in one of the stories in this book). But I appreciate Harry more than Connelly’s replacement for McCaleb, Micky Haller, the “Lincoln Lawyer.” Not that there’s anything much wrong with Haller. He’s just newer and (to all appearances) less damaged by life than the others. It’s the scars and calluses on the older characters that make them interesting to me.
Suicide Run is a collection of three short stories starring Harry (Hieronymus) Bosch, Los Angeles police detective. Warning: It’s a short collection. Much of the bulk of the book is taken up by a preview of Connelly’s next novel, The Drop. Since I never read such previews (they only frustrate me), I was a little disappointed in that.
But I enjoyed the stories nonetheless. In “Suicide Run,” Bosch investigates the murder of a beautiful Hollywood starlet, disguised as a suicide. In “Cielo Azul,” he goes to visit a killer on death row, in an attempt to persuade him to reveal the burial site of one of his victims. In “One Dollar Jackpot,” he tackles the murder of a famous female poker player, shot to death in her automobile.
The genius of the Harry Bosch stories, in my view (and in all Connelly’s work), is the compassion at their heart. Harry, like a character in a painting by the artist he was named after, lives in a world filled with horrors and apparent irrationality. Yet his personal vocation is to speak for the dead, to do them the last possible service through seeing that their killers pay the price.
For me, the outstanding story here was “Cielo Azul,” a bittersweet tale in which Harry goes on a seemingly hopeless quest to learn one truth before it’s too late. I don’t know what author Connelly believes about God or the afterlife, but he asks the right questions here, and that’s something.
Recommended for adults.
“Humility in the Wrong Place”
Mark Tubbs invokes Screwtape to say Christians entirely misunderstand equality. “[T]hey consider it bad form at best, and supreme, ‘sinful’ arrogance at worst, to evangelize others or even to encourage one another because it suggests they may be possessors of a superior spiritual experience!” he says. As long as we are more concerned with our reputations than the truth, we will avoid talking to others, even believers, about real life (meaning spiritual truths).
The post refers to Chesterton’s thoughts on humility. Here is part of the man said about that:
… what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
Irony of Academic Distance
Mindy Withrow talks about Poet Billy Collins:
He delights in paradoxes. In “Table Talk,” a dinner companion “asked if anyone had ever considered / applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the maryrdom of St. Sebastian.” All during the meal, pondering Zeno’s theory that no moment ever really arrives but only draws closer by half, Collins “kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing / the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian, / a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances / to his body, tied to a post with rope, / even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.” But then he wryly observes that “my fork continued to arrive at my mouth / delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish.”