Music

Sunday Singing: God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand

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“God of Our Fathers” sung by the congregation of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church of New York City

Today’s hymn, “God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand,” was written by New York Episcopalian Daniel C. Roberts (1841-1907) to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. It was accepted by an Episcopal hymnal committee and given a fresh tune by organist George W. Warren for the commemoration of the United States Constitution.

1 God of our fathers, Whose almighty hand
Leads forth in beauty all the starry band
Of shining worlds in splendor thro’ the skies,
Our grateful songs before Thy throne arise.

2 Thy love divine hath led us in the past;
In this free land by Thee our lot is cast;
Be Thou our ruler, guardian, guide and stay,
Thy word our law, Thy paths our chosen way.

3 From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence,
Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defence;
Thy true religion in our hearts increase,
Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.

4 Refresh Thy people on their toilsome way,
Lead us from night to never-ending day;
Fill all our lives with love and grace divine,
And glory, laud and praise be ever Thine.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

No Fear of Sleep, the Internet Gone to Pot, and Hollywood Noir

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Lee Yong-ju’s 2021 film Seo Bok is a standard sci-fi thriller about a cloned man with telekinesis. It opens with an ex-secret service agent, Min Gi Heon, being offered an outside job, one that’s dangerous enough to require deniability if it goes wrong. He’s asked to deliver an asset, and when he arrives at the lab to pick it up, he learns the asset is a young man, Seo Bok, whom the scientists introduce as undying. He is a lab-created human being who will not die if properly cared for. They say his cells are the key to healing many, if not every, human disease. Not only that, his brain waves are off the charts, enabling him to push and guide material around him. But, what could go wrong with that, eh?

I could tell you more of the plot, but I bring up this movie because of a couple minutes that appear right before the final act.

At one point, Seo Bok reveals he doesn’t need to sleep. Later, when exploring part of his backstory, he and Gi Heon go to a Christian mausoleum. With several crosses on the walls and light shining through stained glass, Seo Bok asks, “Do you believe dying is really like sleep?”

“Maybe,” Gi Heon replies.

“Then how come people aren’t afraid of falling asleep? It’s like dying a little while.”

“Because they’ll wake up the next day.”

“How do they know that?”

“They just believe it. They believe they will wake up in the morning.”

In the context of the story, that dialogue had me wondering if this was the seed for the whole. The scientists think they’ve created a cure for disease and even natural death in one man, and in the mausoleum another man suggests we can wake up after death if we put our faith in the cross. It’s subtle but stands out as the moral of the film.

Let’s move on.

Internet: 30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse. Here are the first two.

  1. “Create a society that rewards influencers more than truth-tellers—and turn every digital platform, large or small, into a boosting pad for these influencers.
  2. “Make plagiarism, cheating, and deception totally acceptable, so nobody gets fired from a media job, even for the most egregious violations of journalistic ethics.”

Also from the signs above, over 33% of people hired to train AI for better, more truthful output are using AI software to do the training faster, folding in errors that will be baked in if they aren’t removed soon enough.

Democracy: “This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the paperback release of Francis Fukuyama’s controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man.” How has his argument that democracy had and would continue to win over world civilizations panned out?

Hollywood: Brian Patrick Eha recommends the work of Alfred Hayes. “Money promises to give substance, in Hayes’s novels, to those without it; for those with it, though, material wealth proves unsatisfying, even oddly insubstantial. The vast sums that flow from the movie business have a ‘phantasmal quality.’ . . . Laboring for America’s dream machine, his men and women are made to bear, in the end, too much reality.”

(Photo by Hammad Siddiqui on Unsplash)

Music, Uncategorized

‘The Sons of Liberty’

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Not being in the work force anymore, I’m not current on work schedules. Is this considered a long weekend? The Fourth isn’t till Tuesday, and this is one holiday we still celebrate on the proper date (don’t we?). Anyway, I’m going to do my patriotic music post today, and we’ll see what happens on the holiday itself.

The clip above comes from the miniseries “Johnny Tremain,” which Disney produced way back in the ’50s. A few minor differences may be noted between Disney’s consumer product back then and what they’re doing now. Disney back then produced stuff like this, which reinforced patriotism, social cohesion, and traditional values. All this is deplorable to today’s Disney.

I don’t think I look at the ’50s through rose-colored glasses. The worst period in my life began in that decade, and I developed a deep personal cynicism that makes me fit in pretty well with much of contemporary culture. I know enough history, too, to be aware that the American revolution had its dark side. (I’ll still put it up against the French one any day, though.)

But I learned to be a subversive (at least in secret) in those days too. And today I exercise my subversion by flouting the cherished values of the present establishment. By posting patriotic songs and calling on people to come together around the old verities. Warts and all.

Have a blessed Independence Day.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing, The Press

The Dead White Male and the Sea

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Hemingway writing at the Dorchester Hotel in London, 1944. Photographer unknown, public domain. By way of Wikimedia Commons.

Via Instapundit, this story from PJ Media: “The Woke Bell Tolls for Ernest Hemingway.”

The UK’s Telegraph revealed Saturday that Penguin Random House, which publishes Hemingway’s novels and stories, has slapped them with “a trigger warning” due to “concerns about his ‘language’ and ‘attitudes.’” Hapless new Hemingway readers are also “alerted to the novelist’s ‘cultural representations.’”

I can imagine what Ernest Hemingway himself would say to all this, but I wouldn’t be able to publish it. The arrogant, self-infatuated, blinkered, miseducated woke dopes at Penguin Random House don’t seem to understand that the whole idea of reading Hemingway, or any other great writer, is to encounter “language,” “attitudes” and “cultural representations” that are not one’s own, and are not the same as the language, attitudes, and cultural representations of contemporary culture.

As you may recall if you’re a regular reader here, I don’t like Hemingway much. Though his writing style was undeniably influential, I’ve never cared for his stories, and never worked up the interest to read any of his books. I don’t like his politics, and all I know about his personality repels me.

But you know how you can tell I’m not on the Left? You can tell because I think his books ought to be published straight. Adults should be trusted to have the maturity to handle ideas, words and imagery that might trouble or offend them.

Somebody made a comment on Twitter the other day to the effect that our times aren’t much fun. I replied, “Shoot, Prohibition was more fun than this.”

I think we ought to declare a new Roaring 20s. Let’s have speakeasies, places where you can speak easily. Say anything you bloody want. Leave your electronic devices in a Faraday Cage at the door, so nobody can listen in, and engage in old-fashioned forbidden conversation. All ideas permitted. No punching allowed, though.

Which would admittedly cramp Hemingway’s style.

Reviews

Of brownstones and starships

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Lately I’ve been “doing” Nero Wolfe on YouTube. First the 1981 series starring William (“Cannon”) Conrad and Lee Horsely, and currently the 2001 series with Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton. But in the course of my fumbling about on the site I stumbled on the little-known video above. It’s a 1959 pilot for a half-hour NW series starring Kurt Kasznar and none other than a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. But more about that below.

I sought out the Conrad-Horsely series for sentimental reasons. The series was one of my favorites back when it came out. Critics complained that it violated some of the basic protocols of the ordered household author Rex Stout created. Though I’m fond of the original Wolfe books, I’m not as punctilious about them as I am about, say, Sherlock Holmes or Travis McGee. I thought Bill Conrad was just splendid as Nero Wolfe, and he had excellent chemistry with Horsely’s Archie. The set designers worked meticulously (and at considerable cost) to recreate Wolfe’s office. I particularly liked the big chair. Stout often mentions in the stories that Wolfe’s upholstered desk chair was specially built to support his great weight.

The only problem with that handsome chair was that it was physically too large for Bill Conrad, who kind of got lost in it. I suspect it was designed with Orson Welles, who was originally meant to play the role, in mind.

But after I’d watched that series’ one season of episodes, I moved on to the 2001 series. It’s very well done and very faithful to the original stories. Also extremely stylish and shot in period. Maury Chaykin as Wolfe is growing on me, though I still prefer Conrad. I’ve always seen Wolfe as a dark-haired man. Timothy Hutton seems a little lightly constructed for Archie, but the attitude is spot on.

But now, back to the 1959 pilot. I was surprised how good it was. Bill Shatner may be the best Archie Goodwin of them all. The role plays exactly to his strengths. And Kurt Kasznar (whom I believe I saw in person once, as Moriarty in a road production of William Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes” play, but I may have him confused with someone else), has a good look for Wolfe and brings the additional value of an Austrian accent. Stout’s Wolfe was Montenegran by birth, but I think this is the only time anyone ever portrayed him with an accent (except for Sidney Greenstreet’s English tones). The plot is stripped-down, as is necessary for the half-hour format (not ideal for the material), and the office set lacks the rich detail of the later productions. But all in all it’s a commendable effort and pretty entertaining.

(It also features the actor Alexander Scourby [whose Bible narration you may have heard], whom I also saw in person once, in college, doing a reading of Walt Whitman. I had a chance to meet him but missed out, as is my custom in life.)

One wonders why it wasn’t accepted by the network. However, if that had happened, Bill Shatner might have still been busy when Gene Roddenberry went looking for an actor to play Captain Kirk a few years later. And the world would have missed out on a rich font of camp, parody, and Facebook memes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Fells,’ by Bruce Beckham

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Her face is big-boned like a Herdwick sheep and in the greenish-blue eyes rests an innate kindliness.

I’m not sure I’d have ever read the Inspector Skelgill novels if they’d been described to me first. An eccentric police detective whose main expertise is as a hunter and fisherman, who detects mostly by instinct and intuition rather than by reasoning, doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. And yet I find these books by Bruce Beckham fascinating, and they seem to get better and better as they go. They are set in the English county of Cumbria, up by the Scottish border.

In Murder in the Fells, a shepherd discovers a lost wallet in a fox’s “earth.” It contains an American woman’s passport. Probability indicates it belongs to a woman whose body was found near a waterfall in the fells, who has not been identified so far. Inquiries are begun to find out more about the woman.

Meanwhile, in a separate plot thread, we follow a woman named Dorothy T. Baum, another American who has traveled to Cumbria to meet a man, a professor of history, whom she met online and with whom she plans to move in. The reader soon realizes she’s the victim of a “catfishing” scheme, that she’s been lured to England to be fleeced of her money, then murdered. One suspects at first that this is the story of the dead woman – but it’s contemporaneous with Skelgill’s team’s investigation, and the dead woman’s name wasn’t Dorothy.

Tension builds as Dorothy survives a couple “accidents,” and Skelgill’s team becomes aware of her and begin trying to locate her in the tangle of mountain and valley paths that crisscross Cumbria.

And in the end, a big surprise. Very well done.

I liked Murder in the Fells very much. Enjoyed every page. It’s become a cliché for publicists to advertise every English mystery as “gripping.” But in this case it’s true.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Air,’ by David Pearson

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The Galway Homicides is an Irish police procedural series I’m not familiar with. But in the usual way of such things I got the offer of a free book, and so I read it. I had the impression from the description that it starred a man/woman police detective team, but if that was true of the earlier volumes, it is so no more. The hero of Murder in the Air is Detective Inspector Maureen Lyons. Her former partner (and current “life partner” in the dreary contemporary parlance) is Inspector Mick Hays, who has been kicked upstairs to the administrative office of Superintendent and plays only a peripheral role in this story.

A Galway property developer named Gerald Fortune crashes his small plane in a West Ireland bog and is killed along with his 17-year-old daughter and a business associate. When it’s discovered that the engine was tampered with, the accident investigation becomes a murder case. Fortune was known as a ruthless competitor who profited from others’ failures, so there is no shortage of possible suspects. But the investigation turns in a surprising direction, and the real killer has an unexpected motive and turns out to have no scruples about hurting anyone – even the investigators’ own families.

The writing in Murder in the Air was fine – author David Pearson writes in a competent, professional manner. He has, however, the annoying habit (which seems to be increasingly common these days) of describing as few of his characters and possible – and when he does, it may be half way through the book. I presume he has reasons for this discourtesy to his readers, but I can’t imagine what they might be.

Being who I am, I was of course conscious of the sexual politics involved in the storytelling. This story takes place in one of those now-common fictional police stations where the personnel are evenly divided between men and women. Maybe that’s how it is in Ireland. Maybe affirmative action has forced those proportions on the famous Gardai. But it was at least good to see that Superintendent Mick Hays was on hand to take care of the rough stuff when called upon. We men are still good for lifting things and opening jar lids, it would appear, even in the age of Trans.

Anyway, Murder in the Air was okay. But I didn’t love it and feel no great impulse to read another in the series.

Music

Sunday Singing: Ancient of Days

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Today’s hymn was written by American William Croswell Doane (1832-1913), the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Albany, New York. He wrote this hymn for the bicentenary of the City of Albany, 1886.

1 Ancient of Days, who sittest throned in glory;
To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray;
Thy love hath blest the wide world’s wondrous story
With light and life since Eden’s dawning day.

2 O Holy Father, who hast led Thy children
In all the ages, with the fire and cloud,
Through seas dry-shod, through weary wastes bewildering;
To Thee, in reverent love, our hearts are bowed.

3 O Holy Jesus, Prince of Peace, and Savior,
To Thee we owe the peace that still prevails,
Stilling the rude wills of men’s wild behavior,
And calming passion’s wild and stormy gales.

4 O Holy Ghost, the Lord and the Life-giver,
Thine is the quickening power that gives increase;
From Thee have flowed, as from a pleasant river,
Our plenty, wealth, prosperity, and peace.

5 O Triune God, with heart and voice adoring,
Praise we the goodness that doth crown our days;
Pray we, that Thou wilt hear us, still imploring
Thy love and favor, kept to us always.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

The Heroes of Your Imagination

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People ask on social media to share gifs of the superhero they imagine themselves to be (when they aren’t fetching coffee for the office team or replying to emails from people who hadn’t read the original email). I don’t join the sharing, because I don’t daydream in previously defined types like this.

Sometimes I imagine catching a falling meteor and it setting my body ablaze, and maybe that’s the signal flare from an extraterrestrial being needing my help. Or I imagine I’m the one who can talk to either large, invisible beasts or poltergeist-like forces nearby, telling them no to tear up the door I’m walking through.

Lately, I’ve taken a different tack. I’ve imagined confronting the bad guys with their full names, telling them they’re on my list, and saying no one would die here except them. If they run, because maybe they shoot at me to no effect, I follow them, like the stalking killer of a horror movie. I’m not so much a superhero in this line of thought as a force of nature, literally an agent or ambassador for the office of Death. No power to use or abuse; only select authority dispassionately exercised.

That sounds like a boring character or a side character at best. But thinking on those lines got me thinking of the flipside, of someone who can heal anything. I’ve imagined putting a hand on the back of someone’s neck and getting an expanding, somewhat undefined sense of their nerves, tissues, and organs, recognizing broken parts or dead cells, and restoring them to life. Sometimes it hurts the healer, sometimes the patient. Sometimes emotional pain rushes out causing both to weep.

There may be a story with a character like that, but more likely it’s fruitless imagination.

Batman: Tim Burton’s Batman was released June 23, 1989. Michael Keaton donned the cowl in that film and again in the sequel, Batman Returns. He and Burton would have returned for a third film, but the studio didn’t like the results of the second well enough to allow it. Now that Keaton is Batman again in the recently released The Flash, Jesse Schedeen tells us what Burton had intended to do in a third film and what the DC Comics series Batman ’89 does to fill in the story.

BTW, it was Keaton who gave us the line, “I’m Batman,” when he was scripted to say, “I am the night,” according to All the Right Movies on Twitter.

Super Movies: What are the best superhero movies, in your opinion? ScreenRant has the original Superman with Christopher Reeve and Blade with Wesley Snipe at the top of their list.

Novels: Superhero novels aren’t big sellers, from what I can tell. I’ve heard writers say the boom in movie sales hasn’t translated into book sales. I heard another writer recommend against any new writer attempting to sell a superhero novel. FWIW, here’s a list of superhero novels that aren’t graphic novels.

Americans: Nabokov on “The Simplicity and Kindness of Americans” and insightful barbers.

Favorite Books: No doubt, you were asking yourself just the other day what would be Umberto Eco’s favorite books. His son, Stephano, provides few titles, including “one of the most beautiful in the world,” Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Writing

Adventures in saga writing

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Snorri Sturlusson dictates to an amanuensis, in a woodcut for “Heimskringla” by Christian Krogh.

You may find this hard to believe, admiring me as you do, but I’ve gotten lazy. I watched a video about sleep problems on YouTube recently, and it occurred to me that instead of lying in bed as I am wont to do in the morning, trying to get back to sleep (and generally failing), I should just get up and work on my novel. Maybe I would a) get to sleep more easily at night, and b) actually make progress on this Erling book. My work so far has been mostly thinking about it and plotting.

And what do you know? It worked. I’m sleeping better and I’m actually getting text written. I’ve made progress every day this week. Yesterday I wrote a big scene that even kind of gave me chills. One of the worst things about indolence is that you forget the rewards inherent in the labor.

It’s also a little embarrassing, like one of those times when you’re a kid when you’re trying to do something the way you think it should be done, and your parent says, “I think you should try it this way.” And you say no, because you know how you want to do it. And finally, in desperation, you try it their way, and it turns out they knew more than you did. Proving you’re not as grownup as you thought you were.

Even when you’re over 70 and your folks are dead.

Anyhow, I like how the book’s coming at this point. I was looking for a fantasy element to interweave in the plot, because historical fantasy is what I do, after all, and I think I found just the thing. It comes from northern folklore and feeds into a theme I wanted to explore in the book anyway. Creepy, and with just a touch of contemporary commentary.

In short, I feel like a writer again.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture