Over at National Review, Jay Nordlinger has a delightful report on traveling in Norway. I’ve been on the tour he recommends, “Norway In a Nutshell” twice myself, and it’s all he says (the picture above was taken at a stop en route). (Tip: Mark Belanger)
And at I Saw Lightning Fall, Loren Eaton reviews The Windup Girl.
It’s a very good review.
With apologies to Dashiell Hammett fans (after all, I am one myself), I think the archetypal hard-boiled private eye will always be Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Every hard-boiled shamus to this day—and likely far into the future—has to touch his cap, one way or another, to that tall Californian in the trench coat. Even if “he” is a she, even if the writer updates the concept by giving him computer skilz, endowing him with a regular girlfriend, or moving his office to an airplane cockpit. Even if he doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink, has adopted Buddhism, and treats his body like a temple.
Loren D. Estleman bucks that trend. He flatters, sincerely, by imitation. His Detroit P.I., Amos Walker, could be Marlowe’s love child, or maybe Marlowe was cryogenically frozen. Amos Walker wears a hat (or did in the early books of the series, though he admits here that he doesn’t own a trench coat). He smokes and refuses to worry about it, and drinks with enthusiasm. His office, in a seedy building downtown, is exactly like Marlowe’s as far as I can tell, except for the view.
The result makes for a very comfortable read for the hard-boiled fan. Why mess with a formula that works? Continue reading Retro, by Loren D. Estleman
Last night I attended a cookout for our seminarians and seminary staff, at the dean’s home. The food was very good, and of course I ran away as soon as the eating was over and the time for fellowship was to begin, because a) that’s the way I am, and b) it was getting chilly and I’d forgotten to bring a jacket (despite the fact that the invitation expressly said to bring one).
Anyway, before the food was served I got into a conversation with one of the students. I asked him what he was doing for the summer. He told me he was working at home, helping to administrate a web project called Door 43.
You can examine it yourself here, but as I understand it, the idea is to provide an open-source, creative commons deposit of ministry and discipleship literature for Christians in the Third World.
His brother, a missionary, got the idea, he said, because he’d noticed that people in the remotest parts of Africa (and other places in the world) may not have running water, or regular internet access, but they have cell phones. He dreamed of providing Christian literature in these people’s languages, which they can read on their phones.
He approached various Bible and Christian publishers and found himself stymied by copyright laws. Various individuals told him they hailed his effort, and wished him well, but they were obligated to protect the copyrights on the literary property in their care.
So they decided to create a wiki (in two stages, so that it can’t be casually altered like Wikipedia). People who join the process will be able to help build up a library of creative commons material which can be accessed at no cost. They’re even working on Bible translations.
I got the impression that if you’re interested in this project, and have needed skills (language skills especially), they’d be happy to hear from you. I don’t know how far afield from Lutheranism they mean to go. You’d have to inquire about that.
I agree that public libraries should have a line item in every city and state budget. Small towns particularly need libraries or cultural centers to draw their folks out of a small town mindset into the larger world, and even though this may be accomplished with private ownership, I’d think public funding or tax leniency would be needed to run a library suitable for a whole town or area of a city.
I get the impression that Charles Simic, writing in the blog for the New York Review of Books, is not reading off the page to which my book is open. He writes, “‘The greatest nation on earth,’ as we still call ourselves, no longer has the political will to arrest its visible and precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the workings of our democracy depend.”
It’s more correct to say there isn’t the political will to arrest the negligent spending in other areas–areas where new civil rights have been declared–that are squeezing out the funds for good, but unglamorous, services like libraries. Of course, there are competing voices Continue reading Maybe Apathy Isn't Closing Public Libraries
Some beautiful poetry by Kay Ryan, our current national poet laureate. Cicadas, loquat leaves, breeze, renewal. I love it.
I have something going on tonight, and so will not be able to do a regular blog post.
Except for this. So savor it. Make it last.
Despite my tremendous and unfeigned admiration for, and enjoyment of, the writings of G. K. Chesterton, I’ve raised some people’s ire in the past by giving my opinion that, on the basis of my own reading of his work, I consider him an antisemite within a reasonable definition of the term. Perhaps I need to clarify that I don’t mean—as many people would—to suggest that he was a Nazi, or sympathetic to Nazism. His antisemitism was of an older and arguably more benign sort—the antisemitism of the Christian peasant who truly believes that the Jews are hoarding all the gold in the realm, and using it to manipulate the rulers.
That Chesterton was not by any stretch of the imagination a Nazi can be demonstrated by a single reading of Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
In Chesterton’s time, those pre-World War II years that seem comparatively gracious to us today, Eugenics was a massively popular movement. Some of the most eminent social reformers in the world, people of unquestioned philanthropy and integrity, thought it self-evident that the government ought to be given the power to “improve” the race through selective breeding and the sterilization of “inferiors.”
To all of this Chesterton, out of his “medieval” mindset, cried “Infamy!” To deny a basic right like marriage and procreation to any human soul, simply because someone in authority judges him unfit, was to him a denial of basic human dignity—dignity which, he believed, sprang from the image of God, not from some biologist’s checklist of desirable traits.
Further, Chesterton was deeply concerned that such a program would place in the hands of the state a power that would destroy liberty—power that no human being deserves or is capable of exercising innocently.
The first half of the book contains a wealth of quotations just as apt for our own time as for Chesterton’s:
Say to them “The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same.
The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.
A remarkable element of this book is that Chesterton warns in particular that Germany is likely to be the source of great Eugenic evil.
I liked the second half of the book less than the first, because I’m a reactionary capitalist and less poetic-minded than Chesterton. Chesterton hated Socialism, but he hated Capitalism (I think) more, and in the second section he traces all the evils of Eugenics back to the Capitalists and their presumed plan to organize society in such a way as to produce a more efficient source of labor. I don’t know if that’s true. It certainly is no longer the case, for today’s great Eugenists (Chesterton’s name for them) are overwhelmingly Socialists and Leftists.
But the first half made it all worthwhile. I highly recommend Eugenics and Other Evils.
Author Joseph Finder talks about what he does to keep distraction at bay. He’s got a new book coming too, so the YouTube page has a soft sell on that, but it’s not in this video.
Professor Erin O’Connor writes, “I’m a huge believer in reading out loud–and in having students read literature out loud, together, in real time. It creates a kind of shared, immediate experience that makes for remarkable class discussion–and it also helps hone reading skills and oral presentation skills in students who, almost universally, badly need them.”
Love it.
The Gem Collector (also published as The Intrusion of Jimmy and A Gentleman of Leisure) holds particular interest for the fan of its author, P. G. Wodehouse. Originally published as a magazine story in 1909, it captures almost the precise moment in “Plum’s” career when he began to discover the formula that would soon make him the most successful author of light fiction in the world. He hasn’t quite put the pieces together yet, but the elements are all here, in unfinished form.
The story is of Jimmy Pitt, London millionaire. In his earlier years, being a privately educated young man of high birth but low income, he made his living as a jewel thief in New York City. But now he’s inherited his uncle’s title and fortune, and he’s a reformed character. At least he’s pretty sure he is. In the opening scene, he earns the reader’s sympathy by observing a young man in visible discomfort across a restaurant dining room, divining that the idiot has taken his two female companions out without enough money in his pockets to pay the bill, and surreptitiously sending along five pounds of the needful, by way of a waiter. This earns him the everlasting gratitude and friendship of Spencer “Spennie” Blunt.
On the same evening, by one of those ridiculous coincidences which the author will learn to depend on not less, but more, in his later career, Jimmy encounters a vagrant on the street. And who does he turn out to be but Spike Mullins, a New York criminal (with a ridiculous accent) with whom Jimmy used to work in the old days? Jimmy, kind soul that he is, does not hesitate to take him home and put him up in his own house.
Soon afterward, Jimmy gets invited by Spennie to a house party at his stepfather’s country house. The stepfather turns out to be none other than Pat McEachern, formerly an extremely corrupt New York policeman. McEachern has cashed in on his graft and purchased an English estate. With him has come his daughter Molly, who used to be a friend of Jimmy’s until her father forbade her to see him again.
You can predict the general lines of what follows. I need only add that one of the other guests is wearing a remarkable pearl necklace, which sorely tempts Spike, and has even Jimmy working hard to suppress his old sporting instincts.
The later Wodehouse, of course, would learn to exert less effort to keep his stories realistic. He would learn that, although you can make a reformed jewel thief sympathetic if you try, it’s much easier (and funnier) to find a blockheaded young man of the upper classes and force him, through the blackmail of a ruthless aunt or the pleas of a desperate friend, to burgle the necklace—or cow creamer, or pig. And instead of having your character cool and in control of things, like Jimmy, make him pretty generally feckless, have him caught dead to rights, and watch him squirm. Then deliver him by a deus ex machina, perhaps a brainy valet.
Still, The Gem Collector clearly shows the elements coming together in Wodehouse’s imagination. It’s also an amusing story in its own right, written in the inimitable Wodehouse style, and a very enjoyable read. Suitable for all ages, if they’re literate.