Peter Suderman blogs, “The difficulty with reading these days is not that there is too little being written, or that no one is doing it, or even that no one is doing it well. It’s that there’s too much to read, too much to process. We are not short for words. We are drowning in them.”
Weekend reading report
We got more snow today. I’m not sure how much. Three inches, maybe. It looks likely to be one of those ol’ fashun winters, like we used to have when I was a kid, back in the Later Pleistocene. One of my earliest memories is of going out of the house with Mom and my brother Moloch, through snow about waist high (considering that I was about three feet tall at the time), to my Dad’s old, World War II-era car. Might have been a Studebaker. He had one at some point along there.
The only thing is, that isn’t a real memory. Or rather, it’s a memory, not of the actual event, but of the film of it that Dad was taking with his Brownie movie camera that day. I’ve seen the movie enough times that, in my mind, I think I actually remember being there. But it’s all a construct.
Memory fascinates me. Especially my early memories. I have this idea (probably picked up from that quack, Freud) that if I could just pull the right memory up into God’s light, I’d solve all my problems.
Well, not the problem of making it through another winter, but other problems.
This weekend I read two books which follow up other books I recently reviewed, so what follows isn’t really meant to be a couple of reviews, just reader’s impressions.
Odd Thomas is the first of the three Odd Thomas books by Dean Koontz published to date. It was a hard read in a way, because I already knew (from Brother Odd) how it was going to end.
Nevertheless, Koontz completely blindsided me with the climax. And thinking back, I realize he telegraphed it from the beginning.
Well done!
Dragons From the Sea is a sequel to Judson Roberts’ Viking Warrior. Both are extremely well-written Young Adults about a young man in 9th Century Denmark who rises from slavery to become a warrior, and gets drawn into a grim drama of murder and revenge.
I enjoyed this volume almost as much as the first one. My only reservation is that in this episode Halfdan, the hero, joins a major Viking attack on France. Although the leaders justify the action as a necessary preemptive strike (I don’t think Roberts has a contemporary political message in mind here; he’s following history pretty closely), the realities of the thing are pretty brutal, and Halfdan does things it’s hard to root for.
(I pretty much dodged this problem in my Erling books. I sent Erling on one raid, but had it happen off-stage. Generally I kept him busy with politics and magical enemies.)
I still recommend Dragons From the Sea. It might not be for the more sensitive of the younger readers, though. (The violence isn’t gratuitous, and there’s no sex.) Good book.
Short Stories or Novels?
“Is writing short stories first a good way to start ‘breaking into’ writing novels?” Author S.L. Farrell tries to answer this one with many commenters joining in. Farrell says short stories and novels are different. “You don’t learn to play piano by learning to play guitar,” he says. (via Jason Sanford, who is blogging on sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery now)
Mysterious Map of America to Be Displayed
The 1507 Waldseemuller map will go on display in the Library of Congress this month, but historians don’t understand it fully. The map was designed only thirteen years after Columbus landed on this side of the ocean, and modern scholars don’t know how the mapmakers knew enough to draw the land and oceans as accurately as they did.
TINFOIL HAT: So, why don’t we know how they could have designed this map? Could it be that someone doesn’t want us to know? Martians, or perhaps more likely, Brazilians?!?
Christmas Trees by Robert Frost
“He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.”
Notes from a cold climate
The timing was spot on. In my mental calendar, November is a cool month that’s all about Thanksgiving. December is a white, snowy month that’s all about Christmas. So on the selfsame day that I turned the calendar page, the Frost Giants dropped four inches of heavenly sugar on us, like theater techies lowering the “Winter Scene” backdrop from the flyspace over the year’s stage, right on cue.
But four inches was all it was. No mighty blizzard. Commerce did not cease. Schools wouldn’t have closed if it had been a weekday (probably some would have been delayed, but they wouldn’t have closed).
It did keep me from doing any Christmas shopping. The roads were kind of slick, and as you know, one of my secret shames is that Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker, does not actually have operative four wheel drive.
I did go out, though, to my regular Chinese buffet. The Guangzhou Restaurant in Robbinsdale has become my steady Saturday lunch venue. Their buffet is not extensive, but it’s good food, and not expensive. And now they know me, and pretty much expect me. I’ve achieved the status of “regular.” They don’t actually know my name, but I have a regular booth.
It’s not hard to have a regular booth on Saturdays at the Guangzhou. I think they do a pretty fair weekday business, but on Saturdays I’m sometimes the only one around. If I don’t show up, I think of all that food going to waste, and I feel guilty. (Not that most of it doesn’t go to waste even if I do show up. Even I don’t eat that much.)
But I didn’t drive there. That is silly on the face of it, I know. All summer, when the walking was easy, I drove to the restaurant. Saturday, when the arctic wind was blowing and snow was piling up, I trudged through the drifts. This was because, aside from the minimal danger of dying of exposure, my feet were more dependable than my slightly bald tires would have been on the streets that day.
I think I’ll walk to the restaurant more often in the future.
Starting next spring.
Via Mirabilis: You know that Gospel of Judas that National Geographic made a big production of last year? The one that suggested that Judas was actually following Jesus’ instructions in betraying him, and was a great saint in Heaven?
Never mind.
Turns out it was just a bad translation.
Could happen to anybody, right? Who among us has not promoted a major TV special and sponsored a national promotional campaign on the basis of a quick-and-dirty, slanted translation?
You don’t imagine there was any agenda here, do you? Is it possible that some people at NG jumped the gun on publication and fact-checking because they had an ax to grind against Christianity?
No, no. Forget I suggested it.
Reading Theology
Joe Holland blogs about why he “Can’t Stop Reading Thomas Boston,” a Scottish minister who wrote on covenant and reformed theology.
He ministers to my soul by consistently taking me to the only One who can satisfy my soul. This is why so much of the modern, cross-centered movement has latched onto Puritans like Boston. They and I have found in him a kindred spirit, a teacher, a pastor, a theologian, a man thoroughly captivated by Jesus Christ.
For my part, I heard a couple sermons from Kelly Kapic who has worked on books by John Owen, particularly Overcoming Sin and Temptation. The modern church needs to be revived with the teaching of these men for our better health.
Christmas Poetry
Sherry offers a work by D. Gabriel Rossetti:
She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:
At length the long-ungranted shade
Of weary eyelids overweigh’d
The pain nought else might yet relieve. . . .
Also, Frank Wilson offers a piece he wrote last year:
The leaves are fallen, but the sky is clear
(Though winter’s scheduling an arctic flight).
The rumor is a rendezvous draws near. . . .
Words like these put me in the mood for a song. “Oh by golly, have a holly, jolly–” NOT THAT SONG. Something closer to the holiday will be better. Here’s part of one we sang tonight.
As with joyful steps they sped
To that lowly cradle bed,
There to bend the knee before
Him whom heaven and earth adore;
So may we with willing feet
Ever seek thy mercy-seat.…
Holy Jesus, ev’ry day
Keep us in the narrow way;
And, when earthly things are past,
Bring our ransomed souls at last
Where they need no star to guide,
Where no clouds thy glory hide.
Live from the Front of the Writers Strike
Shawn Macomber records the skinny on a writers strike rally in Washington Square Park: big names and faces.
The Writers Guild strike is everywhere because when you go to one of their rallies you get to see Tony Soprano’s wife standing next to Joe Pantoliano on stage while Sopranos creator David Chase and Richard Belzer, holding a small dog to his cheek, look on. It’s because even if Tina Fey looks like she’s not into it, she’ll still pose for a photo with you and the guy who plays Kenneth the Page on 30 Rock. It’s because the ex-intern from The Office will nod at you if you smile at him as he leans nonchalantly against a tree. . . . . The gathered heard a thousand times this day how brilliantly writers are able to express themselves, yet, aside from one Daily Show personality and comedian extraordinaire, Colin Quinn, no one saw fit to let the writers speak for themselves. (“I want this to end so the Writers Guild can go back to doing what they do best,” Quinn ribbed. “Sending three giant envelopes of detailed health plan information out every week.”)
Report on an amusing evening
I went to my Viking Age Club & Society meeting tonight (the snow isn’t expected till sometime in the morning–maybe not even till the afternoon).
Anyway, I took the exit from Hiawatha Ave. onto Lake Street in Minneapolis. And there, on a corner in the underpass, stood a guy with one of those hand-lettered cardboard signs. It said:
NEEDED:
1. WHISKEY
2. STRIPPER
3. CHEAP HOTEL ROOM
Full marks for honesty to that fellow. (No, I didn’t give him anything.)
At the meeting, members of the club gave me a Christmas gift, which was entirely unexpected. It was a copy of the new Sissel Christmas CD, in concert with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I have it on the stereo at this moment, and it’s lovely.
It’s also autographed.
Just when I think I’ve got the world figured out, somebody’s nice to me. Sheesh.