Since I’ve written on political topics lately, let me link to this post on Giuliani’s article in City Journal. Harrison Scott Key argues that Giuliani has been the most forward-speaking candidate on the platform, telling us what we will or should do when problems come. “Government should harness the inherent strength of the American people and the private sector,” Giuliani writes, “in order to build a society that may bend-but not break-if catastrophe does strike. The American people are ready, willing, and able to take a more active role in our civil defense.”
Happy New Year
I spent today in bed, in a dim room. This would make sense if I’d been celebrating last night, lapping up champagne and jitterbugging past the Magic Hour and on to morning, like a character from Wodehouse. But I did none of those things. I stayed up till midnight, reading a book, and then went to bed. I just don’t feel very well today, and chose to rest up so I’ll be ready to go back to work tomorrow. That’s my life—all the discomfort of a hangover without having any fun.
I’ll make a few bold predictions for 2008:
Liberal political candidates who support gay marriage, abortion on demand, surrender in Iraq, gun confiscation and higher taxes will promise to “bring us all together.”
Liberals will continue to insist that they’ve been muzzled, since “the media are dominated by the conservatives.” When challenged on this contention they will cite the mere existence of Rush Limbaugh.
Hollywood will make more movies attacking America, or Christianity, or both. When asked why, they’ll say that this is what the public wants.
Whatever the weather in 2008 is like, it will be used as evidence of… well, you know.
The rich will get richer. The poor will get a little richer, but not enough to stop them envying the rich.
The Left will continue to insist that Christian fundamentalists are not different in any way from Muslim terrorists.
There will be a new Third Party. If it’s not called “The Conspiracy Theory Party,” it should be.
The Year of the Surrender
Just so you won’t have to enter the new year sick with worry over how the Walker Christmas gathering went, I’ll note here that it went just fine. The weather was utterly perfect, in accordance with the demands of the genre. You know how Christmas looks in those Hallmark Theater TV specials? All the deep, snow-covered scenery, with big, fat flakes falling? It was just like that on Saturday. But the snow wasn’t heavy enough to interfere with travel. (I probably shouldn’t have described it to the Youngest Niece, when she called from China. I think she was homesick enough without having to listen to a description of Postcard Christmas Weather.)
The great advantage of having the family gather at my place for holidays (aside from the motivation it gives me to dust once a year) is that I’m more or less centrally located, so that the brother in Iowa doesn’t have to drive up to the North Woods, and the brother from the North Woods… well, you follow the logic. The drawback is that once we’re all in the house there isn’t actually any room to move around, so we all have to stand in one place for the entire length of the visit, employing an elaborate choreography to allow us to visit the bathroom in rotation. However, we overcame that difficulty, even making room for the Oldest Nephew’s girlfriend, by sucking our stomachs in. I can only assume it’s serious, if he was willing to put her through such an ordeal.
We took the cowards’ way out with food, and ate Kentucky Fried Chicken, with heavy side orders of chocolates and pies and cookies.
I’ll tell you about my favorite Christmas gift in a later post. I want to share pictures, and I have other plans for just now.
Some people think of the New Year’s season as a time to look forward and make resolutions. I prefer to make it a time for looking back, for evaluating the events of the past twelve months and beating myself over the head about every mistake, real or imagined.
2007 was a big year in my history. I will always remember it, I suspect, as the Year of the Surrender. This was the year I admitted defeat. I haven’t talked about this, at least directly, in this space before, but I’ll do it now, because it seems time.
I’ve had a strategy for my life from the time I was a boy. It was a fairly simple strategy—one that made sense to me, considering the circumstances of who I am and what I wanted to do.
This first step was to get published and be a famous novelist. This, I assumed, would provide me the validation I needed to get some woman to marry me.
I’m not what you’d call a fighter. Faced with human opposition, I generally fold my hand and walk away. But in matters of living, where it’s just me against Life, I’m pretty stubborn. I take my lumps and continue doing what I was doing before. It’s actually a lot like that classic definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. So it’s taken me 57 years to realize that my Grand Strategy isn’t a winner.
Losing my publisher didn’t convince me. Even my agent going out of business didn’t quite do it. (It’s often said among writers that everybody wants to be an author, but nobody wants to actually write. The irony of my position is that I’m perfectly willing to write. It’s the being an author thing—the business and relationships and self-promotion—that kill me.)
Anyway, there’s serious talk at the seminary where I’m librarian. The Board is going to ask me to get my Master’s in Library Science, online. This will be very useful for their institutional plans, and also ought to make me better able to competently do my job, which any honest employee wants to do.
But it also means I can’t go to an agent and promise him that I’ll be turning out fiction in a steady manner. There just won’t be time for that.
So for now, I officially declare myself a former novelist.
This may change. It should only take two or three years to get the degree, and then I’ll have time to write books again. And maybe God will open the door.
But right now, it’s the time in my life (it comes to everyone, I think) when I have to bow to God, and lay down my own plans, and embrace His.
I guess that’s my New Year’s Resolution.
Have a blessed new year.
Thompson, A Citizen Candidate
Fred Thompson has a blog post on Redstate which responds to an article claiming he doesn’t care much about running for president. Thompson writes:
It is clear that there are those in the media who will exact a high price for candor and from those whom they consider to be insufficiently ambitious. But it is with increasing amazement that we see that those who are willing to slant or leave out important parts of a story to make their point.
If a candidate succumbs to this he will be reduced to nothing more than a sound bite machine.
He reproduces a transcript, that I first saw over here, which states his desire to serve as president and his belief that he has the experience to do so. He paints himself as a citizen candidate, not ambitious for political power, but willing to serve the country. This is the man who declined to run for the senate again because he had agreed to the principle of term limits, meaning he would serve only two terms. He says:
I’m saying that I have the background, the capability and concern to do this and do it for the right reasons. I’m not particularly interested in running for president, but I think I’d make a good president.
Nowadays, the process has become much more important than it used to be.
I don’t know that they ever asked George Washington a question like this. I don’t know that they ever asked Dwight D. Eisenhower a question like this. But nowadays, it’s all about fire in the belly.
Kristol To Write for NY Times
Editor of The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, will write op-ed columns for the NY Times.
Some Would Like Him as President Too
“The critics said it couldn’t be done, but the vision and determination of General David Petraeus have brought greater security and cause for optimism to the people of Iraq. He is The Sunday Telegraph’s Person of the Year.” This British newspaper has better perspective, at least on this subject, than some stateside magazines.
Wodehouse a Favorite in Russia
P G Wodehouse’s Russian translations were banned by Stalin in 1929, but back in 1990 that ban was lifted and now Russian readers love his books.
“Russians need freedom and laughter very much,” she said. “They had none for so long. Wodehouse encapsulates this spirit of freedom.
“He also saves souls. His books are all about innocence and joy and purity.
“The reader is lifted into an English paradise, which many Russians believe is the best paradise of all.”
(belated referral notice for Books, Inq.)
Shorter Classics
Frank Wilson writes about a publishing company who have abridged some of the great works of the past. He begins:
The last commandment in Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing (Morrow, $14.95) declares that an author should “try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” The people at Phoenix Press think a number of classic authors were negligent in observing this rule. Anna Karenina, for instance, weighs in at a whopping 800-plus pages. Who can possibly hope to read that and still have time to watch Dancing With the Stars? . . . And there’s the rub, as Hamlet might not say, if a Phoenix editor thought better of it. There is nothing inherently wrong with what Somerset Maugham called “the useful art of skipping.” Maugham himself in fact helped produce a series of abridged classics in 1948 called “Great Novelists and Their Novels.”
How much skipping do you do in your reading? I have a hard time with it, but I have done it. I remember skipping chapter 13 of The Silmarillion.
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel DeFoe
My plecostomus died today. Or last night. (In case you joined us since my last fish update, we have a fish tank in the library where I work. The plecostomus is an ugly, brown fish which eats scum, and I’ve kept a series of them in the tank, with greater and lesser success). This specimen had lasted a fair amount of time, but he’d gotten fussy lately, liking neither his native algae nor the commercial wafers they sell you to vary his diet. This morning I found him on the floor next to the tank, dried up and stiff like a plastic novelty fish. So the algae will accumulate over the New Year’s break, and I’ll have to buy a replacement soon.
I just finished reading Robinson Crusoe. I ran out of reading material over Christmas, when all the stores and libraries were closed. I’d been watching three versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as is my Christmas tradition, and there’s a scene in the original book (and in the George C. Scott TV movie) where Ebenezer recalls the books he enjoyed as a boy, and one of them is Robinson Crusoe. I had a copy on my bookshelf (a paperback left behind by a long-ago roommate, stamped as property of “English Resource Center, Bemidji High School”), so I figured I’d go ahead and add it to my reading achievements.
I think it was fairly rare for a bookish boy of my generation to miss reading R.C. I seem to recall trying it once, but it failed to grab me. I have more patience now.
Novels were written differently in the 18th Century (which isn’t surprising. Robinson Crusoe is considered by many the first English novel, so DeFoe was making it up as he went along). Today they teach writers to start with an action scene, to get the reader engaged immediately. Back-story can be added later. DeFoe began in the natural, logical manner that modern writers have to un-learn, by starting at the beginning. Robinson Crusoe tells us more than we really want to know about his birth, education and early life. We’re told from the beginning the chief lesson DeFoe has in mind to teach us—stay at home. Don’t have adventures. Crusoe bewails his youthful folly in insisting on going to sea instead of remaining in York, to be set up in business by his father.
We all know the bulk of the story—the shipwreck, the salvaging of the ship’s supplies by Crusoe, the sole survivor. His years of solitude until he sees a footprint in the sand, and finds a friend in the native he calls Friday, whom he rescues from cannibals. I had been unaware of the shorter exploits before and after the island episode—Crusoe’s early adventures at sea, including slavery in North Africa, and afterwards a harrowing winter journey through Europe on his way home to England. Any competent editor today would have advised the author to leave that stuff out. Or save it for the sequels.
The prose was pretty vivid and engaging in the early 1700s. Today it’s a little tougher to follow, though that’s mostly the fault of our inferior educations. Even so, the story remains compelling, and once I was into it, I turned the pages eagerly.
If you only know the story from a cartoon or a children’s book version, you may not be aware how religious it is. Robinson Crusoe sees himself as living proof of God’s providence in the world, and his story as a series of lessons in faith and trust in God’s plan.
The chief problem with the story, for the modern reader, is its primitive, unself-conscious racism. Although Crusoe bewails the wickedness of his early life, before the shipwreck brought him to repentance, the fact that he was on a slave-hunting expedition at the time of the disaster does not seem to count in his mind as one his sins. Although he has the highest praise for Friday’s courage and character (in one place he judges him a better Christian than he himself is), his assumption seems to be that dark-skinned people (like dogs) are happiest when they are owned by kindly white people.
Which means, sadly, that this book will probably not be read by anybody except scholars for a while. Perhaps the day will come when we’ll have gotten past the race thing sufficiently to be able to evaluate a book like this in the context of its own culture and time. Because it’s an important classic, and a very good story with a large “footprint” in English-speaking culture.
Mountaintop shopping
Since the Walkers are doing Christmas this Saturday, I haven’t actually gotten much in the way of presents yet (special thanks, though, are due to Cousin Trygve in Norway, who sent a chocolate Santa from the inimitable Freya Company). One gift I have gotten was a fifty dollar grocery store card from the dominant local chain.
Since I have to get ready for Saturday, I figured I’d use the card to get what I needed, and do some stocking up, too. I mean, fifty bucks! I’ve never spent fifty bucks at the grocery store in my life. The very idea of spending that much seemed to me an all but impossible task. Do they make grocery carts that big, I wondered.
So when I went through the check-out line with my laden cart, imagine my surprise when the total came to more than a hundred dollars.
I was able to pay the balance. That’s not a problem. And I wasn’t throwing away money on non-essentials, by and large. Mainly I was stocking up on my usual staples.
And I realize that, when I deduct the value of the card, I got a really good deal.
It’s just that I’m not used to spending money at the grocery store the same way you folks with families do. I’m not used to shopping at that… altitude.
The oxygen’s a little thin up there, isn’t it?