Frank Wilson says Out Stealing Horses is well-worth it.
A lesser novel would gather up all the dangling threads of narrative – there are plenty more besides those mentioned – and tie them into a nice neat bow of an ending. Not this one. It is, in fact, Petterson’s refusal to do precisely this that makes his novel so lifelike. After all, life boasts far more loose ends than pat endings.
I am a frustrated man. A frustrated, tired man.
Today was the first day of our Summer Institute of Theology at the seminary. I was kept busy, off and on, selling textbooks to the pastors who have come in for continuing education. At 4:30 I went home, leaving the operation in the hands of my assistant, with some qualms. He’s a seminarian from a third-world country, and he has never really mastered the cash register. But the last thing he told me was that he felt he was doing better now.
I drove home and fell into bed. No afternoon walk, no lawn mowing (which is needed). I had a bad case of insomnia last night (my own fault—I stayed up late and missed the brain wave curve), and I just wanted a nap. I’d been nodding off all afternoon, and I never nod off in daytime.
I wasn’t horizontal long before the phone rang. It was my assistant. He said he was having a problem with the cash register.
Then there was a noise on the line. My renter had picked up the phone (he always does this. I suspect he’s a little deaf. He seems to hear the phone ringing, but he never hears me talking on it). When he realized I was talking to someone, he hung up. At the same moment I lost the connection with my assistant.
I waited for him to call back. Nothing happened.
I don’t have the number for the phone at the front desk. It’s not a number I’ve ever needed. I tried my office phone, and even the business office downstairs. No luck.
Maybe my assistant thought I hung up on him, and is afraid to call back.
I should have dressed and driven back to work. But I’m honestly so tired I’m afraid to drive.
And now I can’t sleep.
Oh fudge.
Well, I could have worse problems. Like this lady, for instance.
Dale sent this link to a story about an appalling case of contemporary censorship in England.
Every year American librarians rend their garments and sit in ashes, scraping themselves with potsherds, because of all the horrible “censorship” they endure, when parents try to keep them from making porn available to their children.
I’ll just bet the English librarians don’t say a word about this genuine act of censorship.
(Note: Dale points out, correctly, that this isn’t technically censorship, because it’s not a government act. But in suppressing the publication and distribution of a book, a foreign government has managed to restrict the ongoing discussion of ideas in England. It’s much closer than anything the ALA bellyaches about annually.)
First of all, many thanks to Uncle Orvis for e-mailing me to explain about Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters. (And yes, I do have an Uncle Orvis. And no, he doesn’t publish a catalog.) Turns out the one I was worried about is connected to one in the basement that does have a reset button. Once I’d discovered that, it was for me but the work of a moment to get the bathroom outlet working again. This is important, because my renter uses it for his electric razor.
They’ve reduced the number of missing in the bridge collapse. This feels bizarre, but good. I don’t think anybody, when they first heard about the event, was in any doubt that the death toll would be in the dozens at least.
It appears that many lives were saved by gridlock. If I understand it properly, the fact that the road surface was being worked on meant that traffic had been bottlenecked to two lanes. Cars were crawling.
Because of that, when the bridge went, most of the cars fell straight down. It was shocking and terrifying, and often caused serious injuries, but in most cases it wasn’t fatal.
If traffic had been zipping along freely, the cars would have gone off the end one after another before reflex time kicked in, and would have piled up on top of each other down below, probably to have the bridge then fall on them.
But as it is, it looks like we’ll have a list of dead not much worse than what you might see in a very bad traffic pileup.
It’s tragic and horrible for those who’ve lost loved ones, needless to say. Our hearts and our prayers go out to all of them.
But there are lots of people alive and with their families tonight who might easily have not been. I’m grateful to God for that.
Have a good weekend.
Irish singer/songwriter Tommy Makem, 74, died on Wednesday of lung cancer.
World Magazine founder Joel Belz writes on former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s statements to the press, that they report like pack animals, if you can call it reporting. The modern press, Blair says, are scandal-mongers.
I’m just sitting here mulling over
What to do this dark, overcast day?
It was a night of the radio turned down low,
Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams.
I woke up lovesick and confused.
I thought I heard Estella in the garden singing
And some bird answering her,
But it was the rain. . . .
Taken from “This Morning,” by Charles Simic
We have a new poet laureate. “He’s very hard to describe, and that’s a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears,” James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said of Charles Simic. Not a native of the States, Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He has lived stateside since 1954, and he is an American poet. Today, he won the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”
The New York Times reports:
Mr. Simic said his chief poetic preoccupation has been history. “I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.”
Yet he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. “That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, ‘What is the role of the writer?’ ” he said.
Mr. Simic said he preferred to think of the point of poetry in the way a student at a school in El Paso put it when he visited in 1972: “to remind people of their own humanity.”
The headmistress of St John’s C of E School in Midsomer Norton, Somerset, decided to send away her students with a “seasonal” farewell, as it were. She read them from the close of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, effectively spoiling the end. The Daily Mail reports:
Another mother, who declined to be named, said: “It’s appalling. My son was going to read a book instead of playing on his computer and I was going to have some peace and quiet. Now that’s ruined. What was she thinking of?”
My wife thinks it’s funny.
Anne Hathaway almost quit her starring role as Jane Austen in Becoming Jane over stress, according to Reuters.
“A lot of people put pressure on me. I put a lot of pressure on myself,” Hathaway said. “There was a time when I considered stepping away from the project because I really didn’t want to fail.”
The further we get into this bridge collapse story, the more far-fetched my insistence on terrorism appears. Witness the expert articles here and here, from Popular Mechanics (courtesy of James Lileks at www.buzz.mn). Right now we’re all just blue sky speculating. Perhaps we’re dealing with some kind of perfect architectural storm here (to overburden an already stressed metaphorical bridge).
I went through a time, when I was a kid, when I was afraid of bridges. I’ve never entirely gotten over it, though it’s pretty well suppressed. I suppose the suppression will be less effective for a while now.
My own complaints seem (and seem because they are) trivial today. A little after the tragedy last night, a thunderstorm hit here (it was a mercy of God that it only grazed the neighborhood of the bridge failure), and a lightning strike close by messed up a couple things in the house. The monitor I’m working on now lost some brightness (the degaussing utility fixed that) and my TV got all messed up, with arcs of primary color adorning the top and bottom, and green faces on all the people. According to what I read on the internet, my set ought to degauss itself, in a gradual fashion, a little bit each time I turn it on.
Also the Ground Fault Protection outlet in my bathroom went poof and stopped working. It’s the kind that doesn’t have a re-set button, so I guess I’ll have to call an electrician for that.
Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost re-posted this essay today. I consider it well worth your attention.
I find that I just don’t have the stomach for those old arguments anymore. I’m still willing to discuss doctrinal differences. But now I’m less sure that I’m standing on the right side of scripture. Is the view heretical or likely to lead someone away from salvation? Then I’ll fight it tooth-and-nail. If not, then I’ll probably just sit this one out. I no longer have an interest in being what Anthony Bradley calls a “wife beater”:
And I’ll leave you with that tonight.