I see TV ads for some new fall TV comedy called “The Big Bang Theory,” about brainy geeks and their sexy female neighbor.
These are my questions:
Do non-geeks want to watch a show about geeks?
Do geeks want to watch a show about geeks?
Also the acting looks lousy.
I share because I care.
Well, as it turns out I’ll have a little time I didn’t expect tonight, after all. Let’s see if I can get this review composed and posted (composted?) before time’s winged chariot o’ertakes me, leaving tread marks on my back.
I think you’ll either love or hate Stephen Hunter’s Dirty White Boys. I almost put it down a few pages in, because the story promised the murders of a whole lot of innocent bystanders before it was done, and I don’t have much stomach for that sort of thing anymore.
But Hunter surprised me. The story wasn’t what I expected, and I found it both compelling and complex.
A lot of people in our culture, I think, misunderstand what moral ambiguity in fiction means.
Sam Spade, for instance, in The Maltese Falcon, is a morally ambiguous character. He has major moral failings, especially in that he’s having an affair with his partner’s wife. But when that partner is killed, Sam knows his duty. He has to find the killer and turn them over to the police—even though it turns out to be someone he cares about. He’s not perfect, but he knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and he does his best to choose right.
That’s moral ambiguity.
Or there are situations where everything is so convoluted that one good has to be balanced against another good, or one evil against another. Sophie’s horrible Choice in that novel is an example of such a tragic moral ambiguity.
That’s another kind.
But modern writers aren’t usually willing to wrestle with moral ambiguity that way. They take the easy way out, flippantly declaring that there is no right and wrong, and that everyone’s choices are right for them. For all the theatrics of their characters, nobody really thinks anything important is at stake.
That’s not moral ambiguity. That’s moral nihilism.
Stephen Hunter presents here a classic exercise in real moral ambiguity. It’s a tour de force, in my opinion, with echoes of Greek tragedy.
Oklahoma Highway Trooper Bud Pewtie is Hunter’s tragic hero, the good man with the fatal flaw. He’s a little like Sam Spade, but he has more guilt. A family man with two teenage sons, he wants to be a good father and a good example. But he’s betraying his family, carrying on an affair with a younger woman. In yet another betrayal, the younger woman is the wife of his partner. Bud inhabits that moral no-man’s-land we all know so well, where you can’t make up your mind to end the thing, but can’t make up your mind to make a break the other way either. So you take the path of least resistance and hope things will work out somehow.
The antagonist in the book is Lamar Pye, a sort of mythic figure—the baddest white man in McAlester State Penitentiary. He is big and strong and fearless and smart, and when he breaks out of prison along with two other prisoners (murdering two innocent people along the way) he looks forward to blazing a path of robbery and death across the state.
And yet… in his own way, Lamar is a better man than Bud Pewtie. Because, as someone mentions, he knows how to be “true to his own kind.” “His own kind” being the people close to him, the ones he considers his family.
First of all there’s his cousin Odell. Odell is a huge, powerful man with a cleft palate and the mind of a small child. Essentially sweet by nature, he’d never have hurt anyone if he hadn’t been abused by his father (Lamar killed the father) and then become attached to a criminal.
Then there’s Richard, the other escaped prisoner. Richard is an artist, a soft and sensitive type who would have been easy meat for any rapist in the prison if he hadn’t drawn a picture of a lion that Lamar liked. Lamar became his protector then, leaving him no choice but to escape when Lamar escaped.
Later on there’s Ruta Beth, a not-quite-sane farm girl with a dark secret who hides the gang and becomes Lamar’s lover. She calls them all “the family” (Odell is “the baby”).
And Lamar surprises us. After the first two needless murders, he spares the lives of a couple people whom it would be safer for him to kill. We see him caring for his perverse little family in self-sacrificial ways, and we realize that under different circumstances he could have been a great man.
But he keeps running afoul of Bud Pewtie, and somehow he can’t manage to kill Bud. Bud becomes his obsession, his target, and that leads to a final showdown between two extremely complex, morally ambiguous men.
But for all the ambiguity, Hunter never forgets which side is the right side.
Aristotle said (if I remember correctly) that tragedy should rouse “pity and terror.”
There’s plenty of that in Dirty White Boys.
Cautions for offensive language, sex and violence. Not for the fainthearted. But an outstanding moral narrative, for my money.
Sorry, nothing much tonight either. I gotta run around and do stuff, and give somebody a ride too. But here’s a link from Redstate, which amuses me. (Warning: it’s political.)
I promise I’ll try to post something tomorrow.
I don’t have much for you tonight. I had internet connection problems, which threw me behind schedule. But I’ve got a YouTube link here. This was done by a youth group at a Pentecostal church called Livets Tabernakel (Tabernacle of Life) in Oslo, Norway. It’s not as great as it thinks it is, but blast it, there’s little enough good coming out of Norway. I want to encourage them.
James Lileks says he doesn’t like the weather today. I ought to agree with him, since in general my rule is “the warmer the better,” but I have to say I like days like today. Cool and bright.
I remember coming back to Minnesota for a vacation back when I was living in Florida. I went to a movie with my brother Moloch, and we were walking back to the car. (This was actually in Iowa, now I think of it.) It was fall, a cool day, almost chilly, but the sun shone on us. And I thought, “This never happens in Florida. In Florida, if the sun is shining, it’s hot. If it’s cold (a rare thing, but it happens), it pretty much has to be overcast.” I thought, “This is nice weather, and I’ll almost never see anything like it as long as I live in Florida.” And for some reason that seemed to me very sad.
So now I’m here again, and I’m enjoying my early fall day. My afternoon constitutionals call for a sweatshirt, and that’s really the best way to do a walk, I think we can all agree.
I think I’ll handle the looming prospect of approaching winter with denial this year. I’ll try to convince myself that, what with all this global warming and stuff, it’ll just be like a beautiful autumn day all the time until April.
I note from looking at our blog stats that most of our casual visitors come looking for the pictures I post from time to time. So I’ll post a picture tonight. But, to keep the riff-raff out, it’ll be the kind of picture that brings in the fewest Googlers: one of my family photo scans.
This is a picture of my great-grandfather, Hans (seated), and some of his numerous children. It was probably taken in the early 1950s.
The tall fellow at the upper right is my grandfather, Jack. The fellow on the left end is (if I remember correctly) his brother Peter. The others, I’m pretty sure, are some of the sisters, but I couldn’t put names on them for you. It’s been too long, and I never knew them well.
I actually knew old Hans, slightly, when I was very small. He died in 1957. He was born in 1862. It sometimes amazes me that I knew an ancestor who went that far back in history. He was born in Denmark and immigrated in the 1880s. According to what my mother told me, he left his wife and two kids in Denmark, promising to send for them when he’d saved the money, but never “got around to it.” So eventually she came over on money lent by her brother, who’d already come to America, and just showed up on Hans’ doorstep. One can imagine his delight.
I wonder if she came to regret it herself in time. Hans was (I suppose it’s a sin to speak thus of an ancestor) a man of whom nobody I ever met had a single good thing to say (except that he mellowed when he got old, and too weak to bully anyone). He drank heavily and brutalized his children. Grandpa told me, “I got a whipping every day when I was a boy. My father said that if he didn’t know of anything to whip me for, there was bound to be something he didn’t know about that deserved a whipping.” By all accounts my grandfather was Hans’ least favorite child, and he got the worst of a situation that was pretty much a snake pit to begin with.
I trace my own dysfunction back to Hans. He started (or passed on) a sequence of abuse that dominoed down to me in time.
When I get around to upgrading some of my ancestors, Hans is one of the first I’ll trade in.
Stand by for a Deathless Quotation from Lars Walker.
The chief achievement of Britney Spears in the last couple years has been to make us all appreciate the depth and substance of Jessica Simpson.
This has been a Deathless Quotation from Lars Walker.
It may have been “Dirty Harry” on Libertas blog, or it may have been someone else talking about the movies somewhere. But I’ve never forgotten the insight. Whoever it was pointed out that the great moviemakers did not transcend their genres by trying to turn them into other genres. They transcended them by doing the same old thing better—with better stories, more interesting characters, superior artistic techniques.
This, it seems to me, is a problem with many mystery writers today. Everybody (including some authors I like very much) tries to turn the mystery into a thriller. Big explosions. Big conspiracies. Big gunfights. Big, thick, heavy books.
Old pro Stuart M. Kaminsky resists this trend, and like the great movie directors, simply works the old routine, but he does it a little better.
In many ways Terror Town is a small book. It’s short compared to most of the novels you’ll buy these days. The characters are ordinary cops and ordinary citizens, living believable lives and caring for—or damaging—one another in the usual ways.
But there’s more beneath the surface.
Terror Town is one of Kaminsky’s Abe Lieberman novels. Abe Lieberman is a Chicago detective, getting old. He’s not a romantic figure. He looks like a shoe salesman, we’re informed, and he has to watch his cholesterol. He’s been married many years, and he and his wife are now raising the children of their daughter, who ran away to California and carries an unexplained grudge against her father.
His partner is Bill Hanrahan (they call each other “Rabbi” and “Father Murphy”). Hanrahan is a widower who has recently remarried, and his wife is expecting a baby.
The first of three strands of mystery in the book concerns the murder of Anita Mills, a pretty, black single mother who is on the way to building a good life when she is robbed and shot outside a bank. Abe knew her and is assigned to her case, which comes to involve a prominent politician with a very unusual secret.
Then there’s the problem of Carl Zwick, a former Chicago Cubs baseball player who’s trying to stage a comeback in the majors when he’s attacked for no apparent reason by a crazy man who knocks him out with a Coke bottle. What’s worse, the same crazy man seems to want to kill Bill Hanrahan and his wife.
And then there’s Richard Allen Smith, a religious con man who’s practicing extortion to finance (so he claims) a crusade to liberate Jerusalem. (Normally characters like this in books drive me away, but I thought Kaminsky handled it well.)
Meanwhile, Abe’s brother Maish suffers a heart attack. Maish is angry at God. He doesn’t deny God’s existence, he just doesn’t like him much. This plot element, combined with that of Abe’s rebellious daughter, adds an exquisite Job-like subtext to the whole business. In fact the theme of parents, children, and their complaints against one another recurs throughout.
It’s on the low side for sex, violence and bad language (by genre standards). I recommend Terror Town, and all Kaminsky’s books (well, I don’t much care for the Porfiry Rostnikov mysteries, but that’s just me).
Via World Views, this fascinating article by the English writer and physician Theodore Dalrymple, on the question of whether religious people are, or are not, actually nicer people than the secular kind.
You won’t agree with everything, but it’s a fascinating snapshot.
Somebody sent me an e-mail a little while back, urging everyone to fly their flags today.
Mine’s out there.
Do what you think is right today.
But don’t forget. Don’t forget.
It came out OK with the garage door. Sort of. I guess.
The repair guy showed up on time on Saturday a.m., and he knew what he was doing. Instead of employing arcane, specialized tools to get the door open, as I expected, he used a lever and brute force. Then he informed me that nothing was actually broken. The bolt on a pulley had worked loose, and everything had flown apart. He put it all together, added a locking nut, oiled the rollers, and tightened the bolts. It now hangs much higher when it’s opened (meaning I can put the antenna on Mrs. Hermanson up a little higher, enabling me to hear AM 1280 The Patriot for maybe five minutes longer when I’m driving out of town), and everything runs more smoothly. It cost me on the low side of what I feared it might cost.
He also warned me that it’s an old door, and when (not if) something does break someday, they may not be able to find replacement parts.
I feel like that most days, myself.
So I was able to head out to Montevideo (no, I’m not kidding you. There really is a town called Montevideo in Minnesota. It’s over on the west side. We pronounce the name wrong, though) shortly after lunch. My recently purchased car compass proved its value when I missed an exit and realized, at length, that I was on the wrong road. I knew, however, that I was going in the right direction, so it was no big deal.
If you don’t live in the American Midwest, you may not be aware that our roads are mostly laid out on a grid—north/south roads intersecting with east/west ones. So all I had to do was turn north (it involved a detour, but everything does in Minnesota this time of year) to get back to my original course.
It was a small town journey, traveling what William Not-So-Hot Moon calls “blue highways,” under a cloudy sky that spit on me occasionally. I was in a mood to drive the speed limit, since I’d seen a highway patrolman ticketing a driver early in the journey. This led, as is so often the case, to a number of cars piling up behind me. I solved that problem by turning into a lot in one of the towns, waiting for the parade to pass me, and then pulling in again at their rear.
I arrived just in time for the wedding, said hello to some of the relations, and got seated with them. I made it through the ceremony without making a spectacle of myself, which I like to think was a pretty good achievement.
It was, I think, the biggest wedding I’d ever seen. There were eight (8) bridesmaids and eight (8) groomsmen. Two (2) flower girls, and two (2) ring bearers. I was half expecting Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell to conduct the ceremony.
Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell appeared in musicals during the Depression, which provides an elegant transition to a description of my mood that day. Weddings are like a perfect depression cocktail for me—you’ve got your happy couple enjoying the long-awaited day that I’ve been awaiting a heck of a lot longer and have given up on now. You’ve got your attractive young women, who were unreachable for me even when I was young, and haven’t come any closer with the years. You’ve got your crowd of people with whom I am expected to interact pleasantly, when I just want to run away.
I do my best. I honestly do. If people knew the things I want to say, and the faces I want to pull, they’d know that my sullen, mumbled conversation and my stone-faced, eye-contact-avoiding aspect are actually the results of considerable effort, and a genuine act of brotherly kindness.
Not that that buys me anything.
But the relatives know there’s something wrong with me, so they put up with it. My uncle and aunt (grandparents of the groom) talked to me for a while in their nearby house, and sent me off loaded down with caramel rolls and Special K Bars, when I opted to skip the reception dinner.
What was really embarrassing was that the aunt from California, whom I came to see, wasn’t there, and hadn’t even planned to be there. I’d entirely misunderstood the information I’d been given.
Still, any social event attended by me which doesn’t end with the deployment of SWAT teams and hostage negotiators can’t be called a complete disaster.