I’ll say at the outset that I do not love the Roper-Hooley detective series, set in London. I don’t hate the books; I just have no problem putting them down. But I bought a set of four (got them for free, actually), they are readable, and times are tough, so I’m reading them.
In The Case of the Dirty Bomb, brilliant autistic detective Jonathan Roper is back at headquarters, having completed his time with a national security agency. But his partner Brian Hooley is concerned about him. He seems to have lost his way; he’s having trouble analyzing information and is worried he’s “losing it.”
With Hooley’s help, he changes his approach and soon realizes the reason he’s been having trouble. They’re facing an unprecedented problem. Someone is gathering fissionable nuclear material cached in secret locations across Europe and smuggling it into England to set up the extortion scheme to end all extortion schemes.
There’s nothing all that wrong with these books; they simply don’t ring my bells very loudly. The autistic character, Jonathan Roper, is really the most interesting one here. I guess that’s not surprising; he is the “exotic.” But the others could have been made more colorful, in my view. I didn’t find myself caring about them a lot.
Toward the end, the author takes an opportunity to make a dig at anti-Communists, but the political side wasn’t really intrusive. One Russian character’s name was inconsistently spelled. The book was okay, though, though I thought the plot a little far-fetched. Maybe you’ll like it better than I did.
Many people today believe we are not being told the whole truth about current or historical events. Some say our history is whitewashed (using a broad definition for that word), and a recent survey found half of Americans believe the national news media is actually lying to us.
At the same time, the Ronald Dahl estate wants to edit their popular novels to avoid repelling new readers with details like these from an AV Club article on Saturday:
But it hasn’t stopped fans of Dahl’s books from passing around excerpts today of new versions of his work in which Matilda is no longer a fan of Joseph Conrad or Rudyard Kipling, or a version of The Witches that goes to pains to remind you that there are lots of good reasons for a woman to wear a wig that have nothing to do with her being a monster with an insatiable desire to murder children.
As one commenter on that article said, this kind of rewriting will encourage further sanitizing of history. I wonder if this means complaints about the age inappropriateness of some content is no longer book banning. That reminds me I want to buy some good editions of Longfellow before they get erased.
“Let Us Love and Sing and Wonder,” sung by the congregation of Metropolitan Tabernacle, London
The great John Newton (1725-1807) wrote “Let us love, and sing, and wonder” in 1774 with six verses. It doesn’t appear to be a very popular hymn, but it struck a chord with me when I heard a modern arrangement of it several years ago. It’s a marvelous praise song that doesn’t focus on our devotion or what I’m doing to worship the Lord. It focuses on the awesome work of Christ.
1 Let us love and sing and wonder, let us praise the Savior’s name! He has hushed the law’s loud thunder, he has quenched Mount Sinai’s flame: he has washed us with his blood, he has brought us nigh to God.
2 Let us love the Lord who bought us, pitied us when enemies, called us by his grace and taught us, gave us ears and gave us eyes: he has washed us with his blood, he presents our souls to God.
3 Let us sing, though fierce temptation threaten hard to bear us down! For the Lord, our strong salvation, holds in view the conqu’ror’s crown: he who washed us with his blood soon will bring us home to God.
4 Let us wonder; grace and justice join and point to mercy’s store; when thro’ grace in Christ our trust is, justice smiles and asks no more: he who washed us with his blood has secured our way to God.
5 Let us praise, and join the chorus of the saints enthroned on high; here they trusted him before us, now their praises fill the sky: “You have washed us with your blood; you are worthy, Lamb of God!”
6. Hark! the name of Jesus, sounded Loud, from golden harps above! Lord, we blush, and are confounded, Faint our praises, cold our love! Wash our souls and songs with blood, For by Thee we come to God.
It’s been cold this week. We even had a bit of wintery precipitation, which we call snow around here, but you probably have real snow in your area and would laugh at us for using the same word to refer to whatever that was in the air a minute ago. It’s winter here. With current events as they are, it feels like winter everywhere.
He recalled the city he’d escaped from,
the scorched terrain he searched by hand.
He recalled a weeping man
saved by the squad.
Life will be quiet, not terrifying.
He should have returned a while ago.
What could happen to him, exactly?
What could happen?
The patrol will let him through,
and god will forgive.
God’s got other things to do.
Winter can feel like that. Quiet enough to allow you to push back both real and imagined terrors, worries that the world is leaning into the curse, that God has other things to do. But such feelings belie the hope we have in Christ. As Christina Rossetti wrote in “A Better Resurrection“:
My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.
What else to we have today?
Bookstores: Focusing on a new store in Concord, N.C., called Goldberry Books, World magazine reports on the return of small booksellers. “In the last decade, the American Booksellers Association (ABA), a trade organization for independent bookstores, has actually seen steady growth. In 2022, its members operated more than 2,500 locations—up more than 50 percent since 2009.”
Fathers: Ted Kluck talks about his friends’ fathers, who are coming to the end of their lives. “They taught us how to goof off and bust chops and work hard and be generous and stay married. . . . Do they make dads like these anymore?”
Remembering: Joseph Conrad wrote, “The dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.” Patrick Kurp reflects on this as well as Thelonious Monk’s love of the hymn “Abide with Me.”
“This man, he sounds like a force to be reckoned with. And it seems … it seems he got his first taste of wisdom. It can be intoxicating. There’s so much to see that you were blind to before. The problem? He thinks he has it. Wisdom. But no one has it. We just wear it from time to time when we’re lucky.”
I wonder if other people enjoy Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels as much as I do. For this reader, these books are more than well-written. They possess a solidity. A punch. No energy is wasted, just as the hero wastes no energy when he fights: “People think of a superpower as going fast when everyone else moves slow. But that’s not as useful as going slow when everyone else is moving fast.” It could be that I respond viscerally to the character’s OCD, his feelings of alienation, of being separated from the rest of humanity. Or maybe the powerful prose works the same for everybody. The books certainly sell well enough.
The Last Orphan, the latest entry in the series, begins with our hero, Evan Smoak, in Iceland, where he has traveled for no other reason than to sample a local vodka in a bar on a glacier. Vodka is one of Evan’s few, small indulgences – taken in strictly controlled quantities, and only the best. Iceland recurs as a reference point again and again in The Last Orphan, indicating something pure, refined, cold and remote. Evan Smoak’s personal, unachievable ideal for life.
But life is messy, and even Evan Smoak, the Nowhere Man, the freelance hero no one can find, can’t keep himself out of its mess. In The Last Orphan, a very carefully planned and executed government operation manages (just barely) to capture him. Confined in restraints, he is offered an assignment by the president of the United States herself (she’s a woman in this alternate universe). She wants him to take out an international wheeler dealer named Luke Devine. Luke Devine has pulled political strings to stall an environmental bill the president wants passed. But he also controls dangerous agents suspected of very bad acts. If Evan can eliminate him, she’ll give him a full pardon.
Evan couldn’t care less about the president’s bill, but he soon learns that Devine’s personal security men have been doing some horrific stuff, and seem to be guilty of at least two unsolved murders. Once Evan (with the help of his teenaged hacker ward, a girl named Joey) understands the kind of surveillance power Devine wields, he’ll have to figure out how to keep an innocent family safe as a side job.
There are echoes of The Great Gatsby in the descriptions of the wild parties (actually orgies) Devine holds at his Long Island estate. We get to see how several of the regular series cast members are doing now, which is gratifying. And Evan Smoak, against his will but with a sense of moral obligation, is forced to move a little further out of his protective shell as he attempts to outthink and outmaneuver the most intelligent – and dangerous – adversary he’s ever faced.
The Last Orphan is a wonderful book, expertly written. Author Hurwitz even includes one of my favorite author’s tricks – one that should only be attempted rarely, and by a master – a one-line chapter.
Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series has often been recommended to me, but I’ve resisted. Not sure why. After reading Crooked Man, I still haven’t made up my mind how I feel about it, but I liked the book better at the end than in the early stages.
Tubby Dubonnet, for those of you who (as I was) are unaware of him, is a divorced criminal lawyer in New Orleans. That in itself suggests he’s no moral paragon, but he does maintain two rules of ethics in his practice – never screw a client, and never lie to a judge. By the standards of the place, that makes him pretty upright.
He has a colorful cast of clients. Right now he’s negotiating a malpractice settlement for a transvestite stripper who got a bad skin-darkening treatment from a doctor, and trying to coax payment for divorce work from a buxom blonde who may be available for a different kind of transaction. But when Darryl Alvarez, a nightclub manager, asks him to keep a locked sports bag in his safe for a couple days (he swears there’s nothing illegal in it), Tubby goes against his own better judgment and accepts it. This soon puts him in an awkward ethical position, not to mention a dangerous one. Tubby is a clever man, and he’ll need all his cleverness to stay alive.
I prefer my heroes a little more principled than Tubby Dubonnet, but by the end of Crooked Man – which was a lighter concoction than I expected – I was enjoying the story. I bought a whole set of the novels, so I’ll be reviewing more.
Professor Joseph McRae Mellichamp of the University of Alabama, speaking at conference at Yale University to an audience that contained the Novel Price winner Sir John Eccles, famous for his discovery of the synapse, together with a number of the pioneers of AI, said: “It seems to me that lot of needless debate could be avoided if AI researchers would admit that there are fundamental differences between machine intelligence and human intelligence — differences that cannot be overcome by any amount of research.” In other words, to cite the succinct title of Mellichamp’s talks, “‘the artificial’ in artificial intelligence is real.”
What was the last thing you heard about artificial intelligence? Maybe it was about ChatGPT, an open AI web app that invites people to ask the computer to write anything they can think of.
Chris Hutchinson on Twitter asked it to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in the style of the psychedelic funk band Sly and the Family Stone. The AI said it would be disrespectful to rewrite such a historic speech in this style. Then he asked for a rewrite of the speech as a haiku, and the AI complied. Later, another user was able to get the speech in the style of Sly and the Family Stone by wording the request differently (and possibly by his preceding requests). Maybe ChatGPT had a change of heart after refusing the first request.
Educators have been worried that this program (and others produced in its wake) will allow students to task their computers with writing papers for them with minimal chance of detection, but educators are prove to worrying and are probably assuming too much AI language proficiency at this point. Writers worry this program threatens their jobs, and those who work for any of the click-bait sites on pop culture, movies, and games should worry. The garbage prose ChatGPT spits out is totally on par with their daily posts.
You won’t find this in Lennox’s book, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. It was published in 2020. Developments in this field will be fast and fierce (no, frenetic. Wait, it’s fast and feverish, right? Fulminous?) Lennox couldn’t deal with the very latest news, but he does deal with the ideas and claims many in the field of artificial intelligence are making.
Current advances in AI have sparked hopes and fears similar to George Orwell’s 1984, but instead of INGSOC controlling our society, it would be supercomputers that had developed themselves beyond their creators’ imagination. If it came to reality by 2084, supporters ask, wouldn’t it be poetic?
Lennox explains some of the benefits of current machine learning and some of the changes we see coming as robots take over select jobs. For example, the freight industry could be transformed by trucks that drove themselves. (How would they refuel? Could criminals take advantage of them?) He also explains some of the dangers we can already see in AI’s current uses. China’s surveillance state already looks resembles an episode of Black Mirror in which approved behavior and social media influence controls a society of people constantly monitored by unseeing eyes. Facial recognition programs may violate privacy by design and are only as good as they are accurate. False matches have already gotten a few people in trouble.
I get the feeling, as I read David Crosby’s Will Harper series, that the author wants to pay homage to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee – Will, after all, lives on a boat in a marina in Florida. Instead of “taking his retirement in installments,” he lives the good life on an inheritance. Frankly, except for the sentiment of the thing, I almost wish he wouldn’t. Will Harper is a very different character from McGee.
In the previous installment, journalist Will saved his neighbors from being fleeced by land developers exploiting eminent domain. His girlfriend Sandy, about whom he was getting serious, rewarded him by sailing away to a new life in the Caribbean.
So as Guilty Money begins, he’s rebuilding his life (along with his boat, which got shot up in the action). He’s also acquired a new girlfriend, a girl who wants no commitment and likes to hang around the boat naked (a curiously 1970s plot element in a 21st Century book). But then a friend asks his help in getting someone out of the jail in nearby (fictional) Grove County. There the sheriff’s department, under financial pressure and tempted by plain greed, is milking the jail system for cash – particularly through failing to notify defendants of court dates, then pocketing the forfeited bail. Also they skimp on prisoners’ food, and brutalize them on top of it. There are one or two deaths, which get covered up.
With the help of a friendly (and attractive) ACLU attorney (she brags about how the ACLU defends people of all political beliefs, another dated element in the story), he plans a campaign to expose the corruption. It will get ugly – and fortunately a new ally appears, a young man who knows how to fight. A much needed addition to this cast.
At least in these early books in the series, author Crosby hasn’t yet mastered his instrument, in my opinion. His prose could use some pruning. And the politics lean left (as you no doubt guessed from this review). The theme of the story is the over-incarceration of criminals — something I’m pretty sure isn’t a problem anymore.
But there’s only one more book in the collection of three that I got for free, so I imagine I’ll read it. Guilty Money wasn’t bad.
Anoka, Minnesota. Creative Commons license, Tim Kiser.
If you are (or were) a fan of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, you’re familiar with the town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.
Lake Wobegon is (we are reliably informed) a cover identity for Anoka, Minnesota. Anoka is a northern suburb of Minneapolis today, but it was a quiet rural community when Keillor was growing up. (It also boasts of being the Halloween Capitol of the US, for some reason I haven’t discovered).
Anyway, you may recall Keillor talking about the Sons of Knut lodge in Lake Wobegon. The Sons of Knut are obviously based on the Sons of Norway. And there is indeed a Sons of Norway lodge in Anoka. It’s called, not the Sons of Knut, but “Vennekretsen,” which is Norwegian for “circle of friends.”
I told you all this to sidle around to the fact that I spoke to Vennekretsen Lodge last night. It went great. The people were very kind and hospitable, and receptive to my presentation. They also bought a fair number of books. And they served a great big cake, because it was the 100th birthday of one of the lodge members. Haven’t seen a cake like that in a long time.
Anyway, what I mainly wanted to write about tonight was the adventure of preparing for that event. Because it wasn’t any walk in the park (except in the sense that parks nowadays tend to be places where you’ll get mugged).
When I do a presentation, I generally prepare by rehearsing several times, and also by pulling out things I think I’ll need to take along, and piling them somewhere so I won’t forget them on the date.
What I didn’t expect was that I’d trip on a laptop cord and yank the thing down onto the floor on Sunday. The screen was ruined. I’ve always found it difficult to use a computer without a working screen.
So – although it’s my general policy not to do commercial transactions on a Sunday, but this was an emergency – I ran to Micro Center, the best computer store in these parts, and quickly found several inexpensive laptops there. I had to wait around a while to get sales help, because Sunday’s a big shopping day for people less spiritually-minded than myself. When I finally got hold of a salesman, he actually recommended the least expensive machine on the shelf. “Does everything the others do, and it’s cheaper!” he said. Sounded great to me.
What I hadn’t noticed – and it would have meant nothing to me if it had, because I’m ignorant – was that what I was buying was a Chromebook. I didn’t know (then) that Chromebooks are the Trabants of the computer world, minimalist machines that only do a few things. Perfectly fine for their target market, but I’m not that market.
I even asked the salesman if it would run Microsoft 365, and he said yes. This is technically true, but it will only run it through the Chrome browser. IT IS USELESS FOR TAKING AWAY FROM HOME AND GIVING A POWERPOINT PRESENTATION.
I even mentioned to him that I needed a laptop for a PowerPoint presentation. At that point he was (understandably) eager to get rid of me, and he said nothing. I hold him morally culpable for this.
Anyway, I took the thing home and tried to get it set up, growing increasingly frustrated. A couple posts on Facebook got me the information I needed – Chromebook was wrong for me.
On Monday I took the thing back to Micro Center, returned it, and got an HP, which turned out to be pretty much identical to the one I broke.
But I got it set up at last. And I was able to head out on schedule for Lake Wobegon in the evening.
One last insult remained, however. When I got to the church where the lodge met, we found that my new machine would not communicate with the digital projector on site. I ended up having to borrow somebody else’s laptop and run the presentation from a file on a thumb drive (I always bring a backup copy on a thumb drive, because experience has taught me that something always goes wrong). The upshot was that this laptop, which I’d gone to such pains to acquire and prepare, was redundant, and my beautiful, carefully selected title fonts, not loaded on the borrowed machine, did not appear.
Now I’m worrying about projector compatibility in the future.
Tonight I’m giving one of my lectures, and it’s turning into an adventure (and not in a good way). So this post is scheduled ahead of time, and I’ll tell you all about my travails tomorrow.
Above, a short clip of an interview with Jonathan Kellerman, whose Unnatural History I praised the other day. Enjoy.
