Norman Mailer died last week at age 84. Terry Teachout reminds us why this isn’t that big a deal. “[He was] to literature what the Kennedys are to politics, a living, breathing relic of the vanished era of high hopes.”
Stardust, Book and Film
Pig Wot Flies tells us why Neil Gamon’s Stardust is so much better as a book than a movie. “In Gaiman’s Faerie, no-one is safe. People die, sometimes bloodily and it’s a shock when they do.” That’s one of the book’s good parts which doesn’t come through in the movie.
From Blog to Book
Editor and writer Anna Broadway has blogged herself into a book with Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity. I don’t think the blog is the book, but maybe it is.
The essays on Makoto Fujimura’s blog are to become a book as well. That should be good.
Myers and Jacobs on Pullman
Ken Myers and Alan Jacobs talk about Philip Pullman’s books, which sound worse the more I hear about them. Beautifully imagined, but unfulfilling and not so much fantasy as argument for religious anarchy. Whether The Golden Compass is toned down or spun out enough to be acceptable to most audiences, it sounds as if the two sequels will have to depart from the books a great deal, especially the third.
Be Thou My Vision
“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.
In Translation
Speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat? . . . which we strike? Where’s that thesaurus? CAAF plays a little game with Bovary’s line.
Everglades, by Randy Wayne White
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.
The road to rune
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.
We Talked Over Coffee
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.
The sandwich that swims upstream, and more
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.”