Fiction

What Our Superheroes Say About Us

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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.

Bookselling, Publishing

The Worst Business in the World

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“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.

Fiction, Reviews

Suicide Run, by Michael Connelly

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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.

Uncategorized

“Humility in the Wrong Place”

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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).

face-down on the cobbles

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.

Poetry

Irony of Academic Distance

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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.”

Fiction

Chekhov Writes about Nicole Kidman, Eminem, etc.

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Ryan Britt praises Ben Greenman’s efforts in his short story collection, Celebrity Chekhov: Stories by Anton Chekhov (P.S.). Ryan says, “Speculative fiction should not only push the boundaries of what is possible in the various dimensions of existence, but also what is possible within the boundaries of creative expression itself. In this way, Celebrity Chekhov is no laughing matter, but actually quite profound. However, you’ll probably laugh out loud anyway.”

Fiction, Reviews

The Shakespeare Manuscript, by Stewart Buettner

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This disappointing novel is another book I can bury in my “not very good, but at least I got the e-book free” file.

I was drawn to Stewart Buettner’s The Shakespeare Manuscript because of the remarkable (though surely coincidental) parallels between it and my own novel, Blood and Judgment.

Both books deal with the discovery of a lost Hamlet manuscript—in my story an original draft, in this one an original of a lost prequel, “Hamlet Part I”.

Both involve the relationships and frictions involved in the production of a play—in my case an amateur company, in this case a professional one.

My book, however, was a fantasy. This book is… I’m not sure. It seems to be a sort of mystery, but the stakes are never raised high enough to build much tension, and the only death that occurs turns out to be natural.

And that’s the problem with The Shakespeare Manuscript. A lot of people run about doing things and irritating each other, but there’s no real dramatic arc.

The book starts with a New York rare books dealer, Miles Oliphant, on a trip to England, being mugged. While he’s unconscious in hospital and still unidentified by the police, a box of manuscripts he sent home is opened by his daughter, April. She finds a manuscript among the papers which, she soon realizes, looks very like a lost play of Shakespeare’s, in his own hand. Continue reading The Shakespeare Manuscript, by Stewart Buettner →

Religion

Our Self-swindling Hearts

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Burk Parsons on whether trials are meant to make us stronger:

When we as a human race fell into sin, our affections changed, and we who once had the ability not to sin became a people who could not help but sin and even found pleasure in sin, albeit fleeting pleasure. Sin ravaged our hearts and minds, and, like Tolkien’s Gollum, we began to wallow in the mire of sin-dependent idolatry all the while maintaining our autonomy from God and our supreme, though perceived, control over any and all our precious little idols, each of which possessed an uncanny resemblance to ourselves. . . .

Both the enemy within us and the enemies outside us exist as a natural result of the Fall, and in their natural course of existence they fight daily to gain our affection, allegiance, and dependence. Like Gollum’s precious little idol that seemed to want to be found, our self-swindling hearts seem to want us to find our immediate and ultimate fulfillment in anything that lures our dependence away from God. Meanwhile, our Enemy is content simply to draw our affections to anything but the one true God, and thus to make us less dependent on God and increasingly dependent on ourselves and on our hearts’ precious idols, which will come alive and do our bidding.

Authors, Non-fiction

Multiple Falsehood Disorder

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Back when I was in college, there was a TV miniseries (I never actually saw it myself) called “Sybil,” starring Sally Field. It told the story of a woman who suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder, induced by horrendous childhood abuse. It was based on a “fact-based” book, with names and locations disguised.
Still, the word got around as to what the (supposed) facts were. The real Sybil was a woman named Shirley Mason, and she’d grown up in the little town of Dodge Center, Minnesota. Dodge Center is a neighboring town to my own home town, Kenyon. I remember riding through Dodge Center around that time, thinking, “It all happened here.”
Only it didn’t. Continue reading Multiple Falsehood Disorder →