Authors, Bookselling, Poetry, Publishing

Moral Sanctity, Authors Banned Left and Right, and a Speaking Tree

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I heard a podcast this week that raised the idea of moral sanctity, meaning there is value, nobility, and even peace in the fact that you have never done particular things (and further, that you’ve never even thought that particular things could be done). This contrasts with transactional morality, meaning that we consider some actions wrong and forbidden only because we perceive they have unwelcome consequences.

Perhaps you’ve heard of mock moral dilemmas as intellectual challenges. Someone asks, “Would you do this evil or that one, if you had to choose one of the two?” How do you rationalize the consequences of one action against the other? More transactionally, if you were in a room where no one could see you or know you were there, would you do this nasty thing for a dollar amount of your choice? If all moral choices are transactional, then we determine what is right and wrong after a bit of cost-benefit analysis. Plagiarism is good, if you don’t get caught, and even if you do, it may still be good enough to have attempted it. It’s up to you.

With the backing of moral sanctity, you can say no to both of the questions above. You don’t have to choose one evil over the other. Instead, you would attempt neither. You don’t have to name a dollar amount to outweigh the nastiness of doing some vice where no one can see you. You can choose instead the value of being able to say to yourself, if no one else, that you’ve never done such a thing.

And that touches on a truth secular society has ruled out. We are never alone. What we confess in private, we confess in God’s hearing. What we choose, we choose under God’s watch, and the consequences we earn from his hand cannot be sidestepped.

I’m probably out of my depth here, so I’ll move on.

More Rewriting: Not only is the Roald Dahl estate allowing the publisher to edit his books to avoid offending sensitive readers, the Ian Fleming estate is following suit. But R. L. Stine claims his publisher has gone behind his back to change his books. “Altering published works to conform to ever-shifting standards is more Orwellian than just banning them,” he said.

More Banning: Joel Miller talks about this subject in “What Else Can We Censor While We’re Here?” “When novelist Jane Smiley recently discovered a school district in Idaho banned her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, she was thrilled. ‘Most authors know that banning books can increase sales, so here’s hoping,’ she said.”

Comic Books: Word on the street is that Marvel and DC are struggling to keep their readers and have or will reduce the number of printed comic books they produce. Some might say this is a case of Go Woke and Go Broke. Andrew Klavan had a short discussion about this with comic book author Mike Baron, who notes several writers that have been pushed out of the comic space for not toeing the current party line.

Poetry: Dream of the Rood

Wondrous was the victory-tree, and I was stained by sins,
wounded with guilt; I saw the tree of glory
honored in garments, shining with joys,
bedecked with gold; gems had
covered worthily the Creator’s tree.
And yet beneath that gold I began to see
an ancient wretched struggle, when it first began
to bleed on the right side.

Eleanor Parker writes about this ancient poem for Plough. “The story it tells is shaped to resonate with an Anglo-Saxon audience. By imagining Christ as a warrior and the Cross as his loyal follower, it echoes the relationship found in poems like Beowulf, where the bond between a warrior and his men is invested with the most intense emotions of love and grief.”

Photo by Maxim Lugina on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Republican Party Reptile,’ by P. J. O’Rourke

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Is that any way to have fun? How would your mother feel if she knew you were doing this? She’d cry. She really would. And that’s how you know it’s fun. Anything that makes your mother cry is fun. Sigmund Freud wrote all about this. It’s a well-known fact.

I am feeling a little grim about the world these days, so I thought I’d read something funny. Were I a better man I’d probably have read some Wodehouse, but I listened to the little guy on my left shoulder and bought the cheapest P. J. O’Rourke I could find.

Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the reviewer, this blog, or of real persons, living or dead.

When you read the late P. J. O’Rourke, you are guaranteed two things – hilarity, and offense. Republican Party Reptile is probably one of the extreme cases in his oeuvre, because this is National Lampoon-era O’Rourke, young and iconoclastic and frequently stoned on something. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is immune to a joke, including lots of things we (rightly) no longer consider funny. This is how it was in the ‘80s. Deal with it.

In this series of essays, written for various publications, O’Rourke writes about a wide variety of subjects. A condensed history of the world. A user report on the drug Ecstasy. A cruise through Soviet Russia with an earnest group of American lefties. A hostage situation in Beirut. A trans-continental road trip in a Ferrari. Sex acts in moving cars (this one deserves a special content warning). Men’s hats (I particularly liked that one). And finally, an epic history of the author’s own life, recast as a medieval war chronicle. For some reason.

Some of these essays have aged better than others. Some are frankly offensive and could never be published today. (Evangelical Christians come in for a single insult. I believe O’Rourke softened his views later in life.) One detects the subtle influence of various chemical stimulants, legal and illegal, from time to time.

But it was funny. Republican Party Reptile made me laugh. Most of the subjects of ridicule had it coming. Lots of cautions are in order for language and subject matter.

Drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don’t get any presents you didn’t bring.

Fiction, Reviews

‘City of Beads,’ by Tony Dunbar

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Tubby went into his own bedroom and checked the drawer in the little table by the bed to see if his own pistol was still there. It was, and he picked it up. It was an old and heavy gun, a Smith & Wesson .38. When you ordered shells for it at the gun store it was like ordering a double bourbon at a bar. People gave you respect because you were old.

The second Tubby DuBonnet book in Tony Dunbar’s well-known series is City of Beads. The city, of course, is Tubby’s New Orleans home, where he practices law in a fairly desultory manner.

Tubby is settling into the routine of practicing law on his own, after his partner betrayed him in the last book. He’s upset to learn that an old friend, a man who made money exporting peanut oil for foreign aid programs, has been found dead in the hold of one of his own barges. But he didn’t drown in the oil – it was murder. It’s hard to figure out why anyone would kill the man, and Tubby promises the widow he’ll poke around.

At the same time, he’s been retained by a local casino. The money’s excellent, though they don’t seem to have much real work for him to do. But he’s enjoying the company of the beautiful blonde they appointed as his liaison.

There’s another woman too, though – an attractive black woman who just happens to have committed a revenge killing.

In addition, one of Tubby’s adult daughters is involved with an environmentalist group, investigating river pollution. Some people don’t like the questions she and her friends are raising, and Tubby agrees to help out just to keep an eye on her.

I’m still not sure what to make of the Tubby DuBonnet books. At the end of the last one I decided I should approach them as dark comedy, but I didn’t find City of Beads all that funny. And the hero, though he’s supposed to be pretty street smart, seems to me to survive as much on luck as on intelligence.

I wonder if I’d appreciate the books better if I’d ever been to New Orleans….

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Purple Place for Dying,’ by John D. MacDonald

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He looked at me in a way which made me glad I would never have the job of quieting him down—twenty years ago—or now. He had the look of the long hard bones, the meat tight against them, laid on in the long flat webs of hard muscle, ancient meat of the western rider, sunbaked, fibrous and durable. He had made trouble in a lot of far places and settled it his way, or he wouldn’t have lasted.

I’d almost forgotten about A Purple Place for Dying, another in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Even though it contains one of the great set pieces in the saga.

Travis is far from his Fort Lauderdale home in this one. He’s out west, where Mona Yeoman, the big, young, beautiful wife of a very rich man, has summoned him to a secret meeting in a lonely mountain cabin. She’s fallen in love with a man her own age, she says, and wants to get free of her husband. She wants Travis to help her work that out.

Travis isn’t much interested, until Mona is suddenly dead, pierced by a high-powered rifle bullet fired from a distance. And when he makes his way down the mountain to report the murder, nobody believes him. By the time the sheriff’s men get to the site, her body is gone. For all anyone can tell, Mona succeeded in running off with her lover, and McGee is just covering for them. Which means he’ll have to figure out what’s really going on.

He’ll meet Mona’s husband, a hard man but not a bad man; a man Travis respects. He’ll meet Mona’s lover’s sister, a lonely, damaged woman who’ll probably be alone forever unless she finds some real man with a gentle touch to heal her spirit (and you can guess where that will lead).

All in all, I don’t think Travis McGee is at his best too far from his house boat, especially when he leaves his economist friend Meyer behind. On the other hand, A Purple Place for Dying features one of his most imaginative fights – the defense, without a gun, of a desert mesa against two armed men. That was pretty cool.

Not the best McGee, but still better than most of the stuff you’ll see nowadays. Extra points awarded for patriarchal sexism.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Clockmaker’s Secret,’ by Jack Benton

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In theory, this was almost an ideal book for me. It’s fairly low on violence (how did I become the kind of reader who relishes a lack of violence in a book?), but it’s too dark to be called a Cozy. The Clockmaker’s Secret by Jack Benton is very British, I dare say, in the sense that eccentricity is often considered a British trait.

This is the second book in a series, and having finished it I see that I reviewed its prequel, The Man by the Sea. I did not like that book at all. I found the characters improbable and the action implausible. I liked The Clockmaker’s Secret a little better, but not enough to endorse it with a full heart.

Our hero is Slim Hardy, a former British commando and current recovering alcoholic, who has decided to become a private eye (without great success) and is spending a holiday in Cornwall to clear his mind.

One day while hiking on Bodmin Moor, he stumbles over an object wrapped in plastic, protruding from the heather. He digs it up and discovers that it’s an unfinished cuckoo clock. He takes it back to the guest house where he’s staying and asks around. It turns out to be the work of Amos Birch, a renowned local craftsman who disappeared more than 20 years ago, leaving behind a crippled wife and a bereaved daughter.

For his own reasons, Slim becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Amos’ disappearance. He encounters the mulish secrecy of suspicious locals, and meets Amos’ attractive daughter, who seems to know more than she’s saying.

But in the end all Slim’s suppositions will be proved wrong. And he’ll fall off the wagon too.

The Clockmaker’s Secret was one of those books (for this reader) that ends with no clear sense of accomplishment. Some secrets were dug up, but nothing really changed. The characters acted a little more sensibly here than they did in the previous book, but I wasn’t really caught up in the thing. And I don’t like Slim a whole lot.

I don’t generally award stars, but if I did, I guess I’d give The Clockmaker’s Secret three out of five.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Lavender Look,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Making someone dead is a game for the unimaginative, for someone who cannot ever really believe they, too, can die. The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse.

It was around 45 years ago, in Missouri, that I picked up my first Travis McGee novel, The Long Lavender Look, from a rack in a grocery store or a drug store or something. The story proved to be quite a sordid tale of theft and prostitution and murder in a small town. It was the way it was told that grabbed me.

Travis McGee, freelance “salvage specialist,” is barreling south one night on a rural Florida road in Miss Agnes, his blue Rolls Royce pickup conversion, his friend, the economist Meyer, beside him. They’re headed home from a wedding celebration. Suddenly a near-naked girl runs across the  road in front of them, close enough to make McGee hit the brakes, putting Miss Agnes in a skid that lands them in a canal. Meyer pulls Travis from the water, saving his life, but a few minutes later Travis returns the favor when a passing motorist stops and shoots at them, shouting a message that makes no sense to them.

Finally they reach a small town by foot, but they’re soon arrested by sheriff’s deputies. Apparently the guy who shot at them was tortured to death that same night, and Travis and Meyer look like the most likely suspects. Under questioning, one of the deputies brutalizes Meyer, giving him injuries requiring hospitalization. Travis contacts a lawyer who gets them released, but not before warning the sheriff that he’s going to ruin him.

But that’s just the beginning. It gets a lot more complicated than that. As it turns out, the sheriff is a decent cop – though not without blind spots. Travis will stay around to get his own questions answered, and the death count will not be small.

The Long Lavender Look is a tough story, with a lot of collateral damage involved. But the author’s humane and poignant narration makes it all touching and memorable in the end. This is one of my favorite McGee books, and not just because it was my first.

Not politically correct (though there’s plenty of environmental concern), but that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned.

Music

Sunday Singing: From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee

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“From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee” sung by Kayla and Naomi of Trinity Reformed Church of Martinsburg, WV

For the next four weeks preceding Palm Sunday and Easter, I want to feature hymns related to salvation. “From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee” is an English translation by Richard Massie of Martin Luther’s German hymn based on Psalm 130. Massie’s first translation was published in Martin Luther’s Spiritual Songs in 1854. I believe the text was altered last century, as hymn publishers will do, but the tune sung above is Luther’s 1524 original.

1 From depths of woe I raise to thee
the voice of lamentation;
Lord, turn a gracious ear to me
and hear my supplication:
if thou iniquities dost mark,
our secret sins and misdeeds dark,
O who shall stand before thee?

2 To wash away the crimson stain,
grace, grace alone, availeth;
our works, alas! are all in vain;
in much the best life faileth:
no man can glory in thy sight,
all must alike confess thy might,
and live alone by mercy.

3 Therefore my trust is in the Lord,
and not in mine own merit;
on him my soul shall rest, his Word
upholds my fainting spirit:
his promised mercy is my fort,
my comfort, and my sweet support;
I wait for it with patience.

4 What though I wait the live-long night,
and ’til the dawn appeareth,
my heart still trusteth in his might;
it doubteth not nor feareth:
do thus, O ye of Israel’s seed,
ye of the Spirit born indeed;
and wait ’til God appeareth.

5 Though great our sins and sore our woes,
his grace much more aboundeth;
his helping love no limit knows,
our utmost need it soundeth.
Our Shepherd good and true is he,
who will at last his Israel free
from all their sin and sorrow.

As a bonus, let me share Michael O’Brien’s arrangement with you as well.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Life Builds Its Own Fences, and Fond Memories of Louis Armstrong

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A few months ago, I watched August Wilson’s Fences on Amazon. The play was first produced in 1985 and won a Pulitzer and a Tony in 1987. When the play returned in 2010, it won another Tony along with awards for the main actors. I watched the 2016 movie adaptation, directed by and starring Denzel Washington along with Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson. They were compelling and marvelous.

It’s a moving drama about a man, Troy, who was something of a star in baseball’s negro leagues and now works in Pittsburgh as a garbage man. His wife, Rose, asks him to put up a fence around their back lot, and he is a common-sense man who will do a job right, if he doesn’t talk it to death first. The story spans a couple decades, I think, and the fence is incomplete for the majority. It’s a metaphor for the boundaries Rose wants to protect their family and the boundaries Troy wants to exceed as a man who has done something with his life.

I don’t know what viewers of the trailer think of these lines, but coming as they do with the full weight of the story, they had me bawling.

Troy: It’s not easy for me to admit that I’ve been standing in the same place for eighteen years!

Rose: Well, I’ve been standing with you! I gave eighteen years of my life to stand in the same spot as you!

Troy had chosen his ego over his wife. He framed his choices as his ambition struggling against life and society. She framed them as betrayal. Many men take the same stand while making the different choices. That’s what mid-life crises are about. It’s a story that resonates.

Banned Books: It doesn’t resonate with everyone equally, though. In 2020, a mother had good reasons for complaining about her 14-year-old-son being required to read Fences in class as the only black student in eighth grade. She got a little too upset about it, but I think school officials proved to be the thin-skinned ones. They expelled him.

Thriller Writing: Here’s a cool discussion from 1958 between authors Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler to honor the latter’s 70th birthday. Near the beginning, Fleming notes that he writes thrillers and Chandler does not.

Fleming: I don’t call yours thrillers. Yours are novels.
Chandler: A lot of people call them thrillers.
Fleming: I know. I think it’s wrong.

Memories: What brought life back to tired guitarist Doc Watson? The memory of a tube radio and listening to Louis Armstrong.

New from Bill Watterson: In case you missed the news two weeks ago, the beloved cartoonist Bill Watterson is releasing a new book — The Mysteries, a vibrantly illustrated “fable for grown-ups.”

“From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.”

Photo: Paul’s Market, Franklin, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Secret Weapon,’ by Bradley Wright

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Maybe it started with Jason Bourne – I mean the movie Jason Bourne, not the one in the novel, which is much more cerebral than the film(s). There’s the can’t-miss formula – create a bigger-than-life main character, give him near superhuman fighting skills, put him in impossible situations, and keep the car chases, gun fights, and explosions coming. If the plot’s tissue thin, never mind. The audience didn’t come for plot anyway.

Alexander King, the hero of The Secret Weapon, first book in a series, is a former CIA agent. His status now is equivocal. Officially, he’s dead. Only the CIA director and couple of his trusted friends know he’s still alive. Currently he’s living secretly in London.

One day he looks out his apartment window and observes the attempted murder of a young woman. King rushes to her rescue, and soon finds himself on the run with her. Then he learns that she is being hunted by a family of terrorists headquartered in Greece. King does his best to get her safe, but when she disappears, that’s only the first of many surprises.

I didn’t hate The Secret Weapon. It delivered everything the blurb promised – the plot is fast and full of twists, and the characters have something approaching personalities. Plausibility is far back in the rear-view window, but nobody came for that.

My main complaint was the writing, as in the use of words. I’d guess the first draft of the book was dictated; it has that feel. The author doesn’t know when to use “as” instead of “like.” As in, “…especially when such a high-value target like Husaam Hammoud was taken out….” There are lots of awkward line constructions like, “The fire was on its last legs.” Or, “He stared at the stubble on his iron jaw.” (An iron jaw refers to resistance to impact, not appearance).

Also, the hero’s relationship with his best friend, a beautiful, butt-kicking female agent older than he is, seemed odd to me. It’s described as brother-sister, but didn’t feel right.

However, if popcorn reading is what you’re after, The Secret Weapon isn’t bad. Patriotism is treated positively here, which isn’t always the case these days.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

The conservative resistance to Hitler

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My friend Gene Edward Veith has a review up at the Acton Institute. He reports on the book, White Knights in the Black Orchestra, by Tom Dunkel. Although the book is not primarily an examination of conservatives in wartime Germany, it does make it plain that the conservative conspiracy to kill Hitler was much bigger than Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his circle, and that German conservatives constituted a major, and serious, challenge to the Third Reich. He writes.

My impression had always been that Bonhoeffer was caught up in a quixotic and poorly planned attempt by a small group of German aristocrats and military officers at the very end of the war, and that his role was minimal, basically that of a courier. But Dunkel shows that the Black Orchestra conspiracy began in the earliest days of Hitler’s regime, that it penetrated to the highest levels of the German war machine, and that it carried out many anti-Nazi missions, some of which had an impact on the outcome of the war…..

Meanwhile, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was battling the so-called German Christians, who wished to Nazify the Protestant state church by turning Christianity into a cultural religion (as liberal theologians were already doing) and expunging its “Jewish elements” to the point of removing the Old Testament from the Bible altogether. (This, too, was made feasible by piggybacking on the work of generations of liberal Bible scholars who had succeeded in undermining biblical authority within the state church.)….

That National Socialism is thought of today as an extreme kind of conservatism is one of the biggest victories of Marxist propaganda. This book shows that Hitler and his followers were radical revolutionaries, who sought to liquidate—not conserve—the traditional Western values of faith, morality, and freedom.

Dunkel does not play up the conservative and Christian angle as such, beyond saying that the conspirators “tended to be politically conservative to the bone” and describing the key figures as devout Christians.

Read the whole thing here.