Poetry

Be Thou My Vision

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“Be Thou My Vision” is one of my favorite hymns. It’s one I wish I could speak as a confession instead of an aspiration. Here are two of the less familiar verses:

Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight;

Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight;

Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower:

Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,

Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:

Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,

High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

Reviews

Everglades, by Randy Wayne White

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I’m going to write a piece one of these days about The Static Problem of the Series Hero. The problem is this—the heart of any story is to produce some change in the main character. In its classic form, a story is a drama in which a character employs a series of strategems to overcome a problem, failing time after time until he succeeds at last. The reason he has to go through so many failures and disappointments is because a good story needs to tell how that character learns something and grows. And the solution that involves learning and growing is usually the solution each of us leaves for last.

But series characters make that method difficult or impossible. How many life-changing, existential choices can one character believably make, in one book after another?

The mystery format helps solve (or at least cover over) that problem. Mysteries are generally not stories about transformation through personal change. They’re stories about solving puzzles external to the main character’s personal life. So Sherlock Holmes, for instance, can go on for story after story (long after his author is tired of him), changing little if at all. The faithful reader looks on the detective as a dear old friend. He doesn’t even want him to change. If someone needs to learn something in the story, let it be a secondary character. (Conan Doyle had Dr. Watson fall in love and marry in “The Sign of the Four.” But Watson’s marriage became such a nuisance from a storytelling point of view that Doyle killed her off, in so negligent and confusing a manner that fans argue to this day about how many wives the doctor actually had.)

But there are authors who resist this time-honored mystery formula. One of them (as I’ve said before) is Robert Crais, whose adult adolescent detective Elvis Cole has been growing up before our eyes.

Another is Randy Wayne White, author of the Doc Ford series. As I’ve said before, White manages better than anyone else (anyone I’ve read, at least) to revive the spirit of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee.

But Doc Ford is not McGee. Ford has a darker history, a past career as a top-secret commando and assassin. In the early books, this past served to give the character a textured, somewhat guilty background, and to add credibility to his fighting ability when violence became necessary.

But Everglades appears to have been a pivotal entry in the series (I haven’t read them all). White made the decision in this book to force Ford to change his entire attitude to himself and his past, and to handle his present challenges in a different way.

The story begins when Ford comes home to his stilt house at Dinkin’s Bay Marina, Florida, to find Sally Carmel, a former lover, waiting for him outside. She’s worried and scared. She’s been married to a real estate developer, and he’s disappeared. Supposedly he fell off a boat in the night and was lost at sea, but she suspects it was stage-managed. And she believes someone has been breaking into her house, going through her things. She’s certain someone is following her.

Before his death, her husband had gotten involved with a New Age/Hindu cult leader called Bhagwan Shiva. Shiva’s religion has become extremely successful and profitable, and he’s been investing heavily in Florida real estate, with an eye to partnering with a Seminole tribe to build a casino. Shiva’s religion is extremely “advanced” in its sexual practices, and Sally found that part of it highly traumatic. She separated from her husband, and is now active in a Pentecostal church.

She doesn’t know it, but she’s become a pawn in a very big power game, a game planned by a brilliant man with grandiose plans and no conscience.

The issue of religion looms large in Everglades. As always, Doc’s friend Tomlinson is on hand, often high on pot or booze, spouting New Age “wisdom.” Doc, the narrator, is clear in telling us that he believes in none of it, and yet manages to convey the suggestion that Tomlinson and his psychic friends are actually in touch with legitimate spiritual forces.

This is troubling for the Christian reader.

On the other hand, Sally’s Christianity is treated with respect (although her theology appears a little weak). And a Christian character treated respectfully is something to be thankful for in any popular novel nowadays.

The center of the book, though, is Doc’s personal decision about his life. He starts the story in a bad condition. He’s sleeping badly. He’s drinking too much. He forgets appointments. He’s gotten fat.

His problem, he discovers, is that he’s been fighting his essential nature. Trying to live a quiet life as a marine biologist, working and partying and staying out of trouble, he has been denying his true gifts. If it’s not blasphemous to speak of it in Gene Edward Veith’s terms, he’s been neglecting his Vocation.

But a terrible turn of events shows him that he has a job to do in this world, and that he’ll never be satisfied—and others will suffer—if he neglects it.

The book was published in 2003. Which suggests it was written in 2002.

I wonder if the events of September 11, 2001 didn’t have something to do with Doc Ford’s epiphany.

I found the book very satisfying (with reservations for theological issues and some uncomfortable sexual scenes).

Recommended, as long as you heed the warnings.

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The road to rune

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I don’t think I can avoid it. Lileks noted this morning, on The Buzz, that today is the anniversary of the discovery of the Kensington Runestone in 1898. If anything comes within the parameters of my “beat,” I guess it would be the Runestone.

But I don’t really want to. It’s a subject that can make me no friends.

If you don’t know anything about the stone (which means you’ve never read my novel Wolf Time, and shame on you), it’s a piece of blackish stone, about a yard high (I’ve seen it in Alexandria, Minnesota, several times, and I also drove out to the discovery site once), carved with runes, an alphabet that began among the Germanic peoples in antiquity, flourished in the Viking Age, and actually survived in remote parts of Scandinavia into the 18th Century (if I remember correctly).

It tells the story of a Gothic (Swedish) and Norwegian expedition to America in the 14th Century, and notes that some of the men went out fishing, and came back to camp to find ten of their company “red with blood and dead.”

The stone was found by a Swedish immigrant farmer named Olof Ohman. He exhibited it at the local bank, and it attracted attention from a few American scholars, who rejected it as a fraud. At that point, it seems that Ohman dropped the subject (as well as the stone), turning it over on its face to serve as a step into his cattle barn. In 1907 he sold it for ten bucks to a Norwegian-American student named Hjalmar Holand, and then things started happening.

Holand became a prominent ethnic historian and a major booster of Scandinavian culture in America. For a man like Holand, the runestone constituted proof positive that Scandinavians were not Johnny-come-latelies in this country, but the original discoverers (it was much the same impulse that made Columbus so important to Italian immigrants around the same time). Holand wrote several books about the stone, and was a tireless advocate for its authenticity for the rest of his life.

Scandinavian runologists have pretty consistently rejected the stone as a hoax, and I don’t believe that opinion has changed with time. The argument about the “idiosyncratic” runes included in the inscription goes on to this day, and it goes on at a level far above my head.

A new wrinkle in the argument involves a geological analysis of the stone published in 2000. The author, Scott F. Wolter, is a highly regarded forensic geologist, who has testified as an expert in a number of legal cases. He believes that the inscribed stone was buried in the ground no less than fifty years, which would mean it had to have been carved well before Ohman’s time, and probably before there was white settlement in the neighborhood. Like every other opinion about the stone, Wolter’s has been challenged.

What do I think about the Kensington Runestone? I’ve learned to be cautious when expressing my opinion. I once told a group I spoke to in Moorhead, Minnesota that I didn’t believe in it, and the chairman, who had been very nice to me, replied with some disappointment that his grandfather had been a friend of Ohman’s.

I think Ohman (probably with the help of a friend; there was a deathbed confession by a neighbor who said he was part of the prank) carved the stone with the help of a history book he owned. I don’t think he intended to perpetrate a hoax. I think he was just interested in seeing how people would react (it has been noted by more than one scholar that Ohman never made any serious effort to make money off the thing). Then when it didn’t draw much attention, he set it aside. I think he was surprised by the notoriety that came from Holand’s books, and was afraid at that point to admit he had carved it, concerned he’d be called a liar and a hoaxter. I think the whole thing got out of hand for him, and he didn’t know what to do.

On the other hand, I’ve never seen a strong refutation of the geological analysis.

So my vote is no, but I reserve the right to change my mind.

Next question.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

We Talked Over Coffee

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1. Chicago, Tampa, Miami, Phoenix, and Atlanta have the highest percentages of caffeine consumers. That includes cokes and chocolate, not just coffee. Atlanta, by the way, is the HQ of Coca-Cola. Philadelphia and Baltimore were among the “least caffeinated cities.” Perhaps picking up the coffee drinking would help you in your war over E.A. Poe, Philadelphia.

2. Chicago readers who drink coffee (or Coffee-drinking Chicagans who read) may be interested in this round-up of local coffee shops.

Continue reading We Talked Over Coffee →

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The sandwich that swims upstream, and more

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I can’t believe it. My side won in the school tax referendum. It seems like a very long time since I voted on the winning side in anything (although it’s not really that long. On the other hand, this is Minnesota, sometimes known as California Northeast).

Now comes the really ugly part—the part where the educational establishment takes its revenge. We know what they’ll do. They’ll do what all hostage-takers do. They’ll say, “We told you not to call the cops, but you had to go and call the cops. Now we’ll have to cut one of the kid’s ears off. We don’t want to cut his ear off. It breaks our hearts, frankly. But you’ve made the choice. It’s out of our hands. You forced us to do this.”

I’m not feeling terribly well tonight. I think I may have a cold. Or perhaps I’m coming down with the flu. I never get flu shots. I prefer the thrill of danger. And let’s face it, even the worst case consequence isn’t that bad. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not really very well gifted for this living business. I’d probably employ my time better in some other form of activity.



News From Norway: According to the November issue of Viking Magazine, the publication of the Sons of Norway, McDonald’s of Norway added a new menu item last August. It’s called the McSalmon, and is a fish filet wrap available “in honey and wasabi” (what the heck is “wasabi?”). At the present time it’s only available in God’s Country, but it may go global if it’s a success.



Here’s an idea I came up with today for a bumper sticker. I give it to you at no charge:



“IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE PROBABLY MINDING YOUR OWN BUSINESS. THANKS FOR THAT.”

Authors, Fiction

The Books are Dark, but the Movie May Not Be

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File this under Waiting to See. I gather that several people have seen the Snopes article on the upcoming movie, The Golden Compass. The outcry is that the movie will be as atheistic and anti-church as the books are, but I don’t know that to be true yet.

Months ago when we first talked about this, I remember reading the spiritual themes of the movies would not be like the books. That belief is backed up by this EW article, in which Catholic actress Nicole Kidman says, “The Catholic Church is part of my essence. I wouldn’t be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.” The article reports, “Conspicuously absent, for instance, is any reference to Catholicism; instead, the malevolent organization that snatches children to surgically remove their souls is referred to in the movie only as the Magisterium.”

So the movie may not be the atheist tract some are thinking it is, regardless what the author says about the books. It is the movie coming out in December, not the books, which have been around for several years, so (perhaps this is a point too technical) Pullman did not write the movie just as Tolkien did not write the adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Scriptwriters adapted both works for the big screen, which means there will be differences.

So will the movie be a hateful diatribe? I don’t know. The books are another matter. Note this summary from a 2001 story in Crisis Magazine:

That is because Lyra is, as Mrs. Coulter learns from a witch she has tortured to death, Mother Eve reincarnate, destined to bring about a redemption from original sin.

Pullman’s treatment of the Catholic Church in his fantasy-Oxford world is at times imaginative (he names one of the popes John Calvin the First). But it is also unflattering. Mary Malone, a physicist introduced late in The Subtle Knife, says, “I used to be a nun you see. I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.” What is a seven-year-old to make of that?

Note also the blasphemous quotation at the beginning this article. For a lengthy consideration of Pullman’s writing, see this Touchstone article by Leonie Caldecott, in which she calls Pullman “anti-Inkling.” She sums up the books (not the movie) this way:

Pullman may be a spellbinding magician painting an awe-inspiring scenario of hugely ambitious scope, but I suspect that in His Dark Materials he is trying to remodel the universe to his own taste. It is a kind of Luciferian enterprise to try to do in his story what Sauron tries to do in The Lord of the Rings. Or indeed to believe one can co-opt this power for good, as those whom the Ring has tempted, like Boromir, or even Frodo at the end of his quest, try to do.

Reviews

The Forgotten Man, by Robert Crais

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Today I voted. In my little corner of the republic, we were faced with only two decisions, both of them education related. One was the election of school board members. I voted for none of them, since their bios in the local giveaway newspaper made them all look indistinguishable to me. Margaret Sanger crossed with John Dewey.

The big question was whether we wanted to approve a property tax increase for education. According to our lords and masters, our school district will soon be reduced to teaching the kids in one-room schoolhouses with dirt floors and wooden benches.

Come to think of it, that might not be bad. The kids who went to those one-room schools generally learned to read and do their sums. Our present system can’t make the same boast.

Of course my true reason for voting “No” is my selfishness and bigotry. As a bloated member of the plutocracy, my true fear is that the brilliant plans of the National Educational Association will be brought to fruition. If that should happen, all our children will become geniuses and paragons of postmodern virtue. In short order they will end poverty, cure all diseases, stop global warming, abolish war, and prove scientifically that there is no God. This threatens my vested interests and entrenched power, so I’m fighting a vicious, yet futile, rear guard action against the tide of history.

The Forgotten Man is another Robert Crais novel. It really isn’t my intention to review a string of Crais novels all in a row. If I were following my inclinations alone, I’d be reviewing a string of Stephen Hunter novels all in a row, but just at this point in my life I’m cutting back on book buying. So I’m only reading stuff I can check out of the library or find at Half Price Books. My library carries no Hunter, and I’ve bought everything HPB has by him at this point. So I picked up some Crais, and that’s no form of suffering at all. The more Crais I read, the better I like him.

Once again in this book, detective Elvis Cole is forced to deal with the shadows of his dysfunctional childhood. His mother, who was loving but psychotically delusional, always told him that his father (whose name he’s never known) was a human cannonball in a circus. In flashbacks we see how the young Cole ran away from home time after time, searching carnivals for the right daredevil, without any success.

But now, a possible father has come to him (sort of). An unidentified older man, bizarrely tattooed all over his body with religious pictures, has been murdered in an alley. The policewoman who heard his last words says he told her that he was Elvis Cole’s father, come to Los Angeles to find his son.

Cole has been elevated to public hero status by his last case, in which he rescued the kidnapped son of the woman he loves. But in the aftermath she moved away, deciding (and Cole knows she’s right) that being with him is too dangerous a life for a mother who has a child to protect. Since then Cole has been in a funk. He hasn’t even visited his office.

The one thing that could draw him out, though, is the chance to at last learn the identity of his father. He gets permission from the police to assist in the case. But the man is a ghost. He seems to have no name, no past. All Cole learns at first is that the man made several outcalls to prostitutes.

Not to sleep with them. To pray with them. To pray for forgiveness for sins he wouldn’t name.

The story also offers healthy helpings of familiar supporting characters like Joe Pike, Cole’s Psycho Killer Friend™, and Detective Carol Stark, the heroine of Demolition Angel (Crais fixed her up with an FBI agent at the end of that book, but apparently decided he could make better use of her if he had her shamelessly throwing herself at Cole, so he unattached her again).

I’ve been impressed, as I’ve read the Elvis Cole books, by the way in which Crais has deepened and enriched what started out as a fairly shallow, perpetually adolescent character, the kind of detective who wears Hawaiian shirts and decorates his office with Disney collectibles. But maybe I failed to recognize that this was Crais’ intention from the start. The clock on Cole’s wall is a Pinocchio clock, and the figurine on his desk is Jiminy Cricket. And what is Pinocchio but the puppet who needs to learn moral lessons in order to become a real boy?

Religion

Curable Romantics

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The weather has turned on us, like a girlfriend (I’ve read about such people) who suddenly won’t talk to you, and you ask her what’s wrong and she says, “If you don’t know, there’s no point in me saying anything.”

What I mean is, the weather turned to the winter side today. Oh, it’s not freezing (not quite). And it’s not snowing (although Lileks says a few flakes fell this morning). But the winter attitude is there. We’ve got a wind, sharpened with a carborundum stone. It wants to blow my hat away. It wants to give me a cold, or the flu if I let my guard down. And in combination with sunset coming an hour earlier now, we all know it’s time to stop lying to ourselves and to admit that summer was an aberration, a parole. This is the real world. This is Life, unpainted and raw.

Once again we have offended God with our ingratitude. That’s why we schedule a day at the end of the month for giving thanks, as a student gives the teacher an apple or a box of chocolates toward the end of term, in hopes that his previous slacking will be forgotten.



Iowahawk has posted scans of a book by Munro Leaf, most famous for the pacifist classic, Ferdinand the Bull. In 1942, Leaf sang a much more martial tune.

Dinesh D’Souza offers a spirited rebuttal today to the argument that “Hitler was a Christian,” noting quite properly that Hitler hated Christianity but adored Darwin.

In my novel Wolf Time, I noted that Nazism was compounded of Darwinism and Romanticism. I’m a big fan (as was C. S. Lewis) of much of the stuff that went on in the Romantic period in art and literature. That was the age when the Icelandic sagas gained thousands of readers, when the Grimms collected peasant fairy tales and Edvard Grieg worked Norwegian folk music into haunting orchestral works. Various European ethnic groups rediscovered their cultural histories, and—and this was very important—began to look at the common person, the peasant, as something more than a beast of burden. This helped to advance education and democracy.

But there was a downside. The celebration of the ethnic too easily overflowed into plain racism and xenophobia. The Norwegian, reading an Icelandic saga and saying, “We are as great as the Romans,” often went on to say, “…and we’re much better than the Poles.” The Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest provided a scientific veneer for theories of racial superiority, and Nazism was born.

I’ve read that there are strong elements of neo-Nazism among some (not all) groups of Asatru (Thor and Odin worshippers) today. I’ve known several Asatru. We used to have them in our Viking Age Society, before our Great Schism. Some of them were people I liked, and some I didn’t like so much. I never heard any of them express racist views, but I never discussed the issue with any of them, either. So I can’t accuse them in this matter.

But I will say this. There is, within the Christian scriptures, ample authority for rejecting any view of human superiority on the basis of race. I see no such authority within the traditional documents of Norse mythology. I think that the Asatru (and all moderns who reject Christianity) are depending on the basic goodness of themselves and their friends to protect them from racism.

I don’t believe in the basic goodness of myself or my friends. I believe in the restraint provided by the authority of the Word of God.

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Maybe Treebeard Should Speak Up for Sherwood

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Sherwood Forest is now 450 acres, down from 100,000, and come Britons are concerned, saying the forest is one of England’s essential features. Only 450 ancient oaks are still alive. I wonder what that ancient shepherd of trees, Treebeard, would say about this.