What did I order, if the waitress repeats it by saying, “Drag one through Georgia?” Amy points out an interesting site on diner slang.
Don’t Read That Fantasy
Here are twenty reasons you may want to put down that fantasy novel before you are disappointed by a lame story (according to the writer). One reason: “characters repeatedly ‘respond,’ ‘demand,’ ‘deny’ or ‘wonder’ their dialogue. You get ONE of these per chapter, and even that’s pushing it, buddy. They can ‘say’ things. They can occasionally ‘ask.’ And, since I’m an Anne of Green Gables fan, they can ‘ejaculate’ if they must. But THAT’S IT.” [by way of The View]
Serious noms de plume
It was a rainy weekend, and today was rainy too. Almost constant, soaking rain. This is good (except for the folks in the southeastern part of the state who suffered flooding). Up to this weekend, we had below average rainfall. Now suddenly we’re above it. I hope it’s not too late to help with the crops.
It did put a damper on our Viking Age Society’s annual Viking Youth Day event, held at the Danebo Hall in Minneapolis, under the sponsorship of the Sons of Norway. We had both indoor and outdoor activities planned, but it ended up being only indoor. Some kids came (with their parents, of course), but they all went home after lunch, and we left ourselves shortly thereafter.
Discovered something fairly disturbing today. James Lileks at buzz.mn mentioned that great impersonator, “Iron Eyes Cody,” (the “crying Indian” in the famous environmental ad), who turned out, on closer examination, to have been a second-generation Italian-American. The Snopes article he linked to contained a further link to this piece about “Forrest Carter,” author of Gone To Texas, the novel that was the basis for one of my favorite movies, The Outlaw Josie Wales. Turns out that Forrest Carter was in fact Amos Carter, an active white supremacist well known to the FBI.
I never read The Education of Little Tree (Carter’s putative autobiography), but I read Gone To Texas, and I’m not sure I perceived all the subliminal racism the author of that article seems to find in it. I did note one wrong note in the book, though. Lone Watie, the character played so well by Chief Dan George in the movie, describes himself as a “Cherokee. Full-blooded, I reckon,” in the book.
I knew this was misleading, because historically the full-blooded Cherokees sided with the Union (Lone Watie fights with the Confederacy). It was the mixed bloods who, by and large, owned slaves and supported the South. I’m not sure what point was served by that misdirection, but it struck me as odd at the time. Perhaps Carter had a message of racial separation in mind.
Carter was far from the only author to obscure his real identity. A famous example was B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. To this day, nobody’s sure who the heck he was.
Maybe that’s what I ought to do. I’ve pretty much sputtered to a halt as Lars Walker. Maybe I should re-invent myself as Luisa Wahlid, a Mexican-Pakistani lesbian living in this country illegally, forced to live in hiding (in a carbon-neutral compound in Oregon) because the CIA is trying to assassinate her for knowing too much about Bush’s lies in Iraq.
Nah, I expect it’s already been done.
D. A. Carson on False Alternatives
So which shall we choose? Experience or truth? The left wing of an airplane, or the right? Love or integrity? Study or service? Evangelism or discipleship? The front wheels of a car, or the rear? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience?
Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ. The truth is that Jesus Christ is Lord of all—of the truth and of our experience. The Bible insists that we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. (D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, p. 234) (found here)
A Tribute to Poe from Whom?
Have you heard that for years someone has been putting roses and cognac on the alleged grave of Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore? A man stepped forward to claim responsibility for the tributes, but he lacks the credibility to put the mystery to rest. Apparently, the man “has a long history of making things up for the sake of publicity, which in this case is rather ironic as it is itself a publicity stunt about claiming to have started something else as a publicity stunt.”
Too Real: US Senator in Next Batman Movie
Sen. Patrick Leahy has a speaking role in next Batman movie. I wonder if the ratings description will note “actual politician” among “violence,” “frightening sequences,” and whatever elements make up the movie’s rating.
3 School Girls
THREE school-girls pass this way each day:
Two of them go in the fluttery way
Of girls, with all that girlhood buys;
But one goes with a dream in her eyes . . . (from a poem by Hazel Hall)
Lately, I worry about nurturing the dreams in my little girls. I seem so naturally harsh and distant. I don’t want to be, but it’s like swimming against the current to change.
What I meant to say
I missed a step yesterday. As I re-read my post, I thought, the transitions here, from Elvis to Rock ‘n Roll to my personal navel-gazing to fear, aren’t flowing properly. But I had other things I wanted to do, so I let it stand.
But now I remember I’d wanted to say something about fear. Something positive, difficult as that may be to believe.
First of all, I was going to say that, in case you were wondering about my problems with book orders in the bookstore due to the internet being down, that it all got worked out. The IT guy came up and burrowed under my desk a while, and then went down to the server and discovered that the problem was there all the time. So I got my service, and all the orders were placed on Thursday (except for the orders of that one instructor who never gets his orders in until just before classes start. I figure if he can live with it, I can live with it).
I employ a mixed media approach in ordering books from publishers. I use the internet to research the books, learn the publishers and ISBN numbers, and after I’ve transcribed all that information on a spread sheet, I call the publishers’ 800 numbers to actually make the orders. It seems to work best for me that way.
And that’s remarkable, under the circumstances. Because I hate calling people on the phone. When I first took this job, the phone calling was one of the duties I dreaded most. It’s related to my Avoidant problem, as you’ve probably guessed.
But I got past it. After I’d done it a couple times, I learned that if I was prepared, making the calls with my orders wasn’t all that difficult.
I need to highlight this in my mind, which is why I highlighted it above. Within my personal scenario, the warped lens through which I look at my life, there is no place for improvement. I see my life as a place where everything is going downhill. Nothing ever gets better. Instead, the inevitable slide takes me, eventually, to the place where I lose my job, my home, all my friends and family, and end up wandering the streets yelling at imaginary enemies.
But this got better. I actually improved at something. I overcame a fear.
I’d better stop now. If I write any more, I’ll find a way to sabotage it.
Have a good weekend.
The race and the not-so-swift
I have another column up at The American Spectator Online today. It’s about mainline Lutherans and diversity.
Elvis, Hauge and fear
Everyone’s talking about Elvis today, the 30th anniversary of his death.
I have nothing particular against Elvis, except that his stuff never did much for me.
I never got Rock ‘n Roll. Rock ‘n Roll is for adolescents, and I never really was one. I was a kid forced to act like a grownup before he was ready. I didn’t actually become a grownup, I just got stuck at the “kid playing adult” stage for the rest of my life, which is how it works when you do that. So I think I lacked some emotional components necessary to appreciate the genre.
Also, of course, R&R is about sex. Teenagers are excited about maturing, and their music expresses that. Me, I was terrified of what was going on in my body. I was pretty certain that I’d never get a lawful outlet for it (I was right), and I tried to deny the whole thing as long as I could.
I liked soaring, symphonic music that raised my spirit to eternal things, and causes worth dying for. “The Theme from Exodus” was my favorite song.
I think Mel Brooks is overrated, but I appreciated one running gag in his “2,000 Year Old Man” act. Carl Reiner would ask him where something—pretty much anything—got started, and Brooks would say, “Fear!”
Fear controls us more than we like to admit (even I, who admit it all the time). Writing a story? Want to know how to motivate your characters?
Ask two questions—“What does he want?” and “What is he afraid of?”
The answer to the first question will tell you what the character will do. The answer to the second question will tell you how he will do it.
Another thing that impressed me in my reading of Hans Nielsen Hauge’s autobiography (see yesterday’s post) was the fearless way he went about his ministry, doing stuff that nobody in his country had ever dared to do before.
It’s a measure of the depth of his Christian conversion that he became a man almost without fear—or at least a man whose faith conquered his fear.
Hauge was the first man in Norwegian history—one of the first in Europe—to decide that he wasn’t obligated to obey his rulers all the time. The principle that “we must obey God rather than men” is a biblical one, but it was taken for granted in those days that the king ruled by God’s authority, and so there could be no conflict. The law (a very sensible one in many ways) said that all religious preaching and instruction had to come from an authorized representative of the state church. Otherwise, you’ll get nuts running around preaching heresy and nature worship and reincarnation and witchcraft and a lot of other nonsense. Which did, in fact, happen in the end, so you can’t say their concern was unreasonable.
Hauge harkened back to a principle of Luther’s—that a plowboy with his Bible had more authority than all the popes and councils that ever met. Convinced of this authority, Hauge went out to do whatever good he could—spiritual or material—for his neighbors.
He was warned. He was arrested. He was beaten. He was thrown out of towns. But the conviction of his heart and his study of the Bible weighed more in his eyes than any intimidation or violence.
There was a Danish/Norwegian author named Axel Sandemo who invented what he called “janteloven,” the Law of Jante (which is a fictional city, based on his Danish birthplace, in his stories). It’s a series of rules that would be familiar to many people, Scandinavian or not. It’s sort of a Lake Woebegone thing. Some of the janteloven rules are:
You shall not think you are anybody.
You shall not think you are as good as we.
You shall not do anything to give the impression that you are better than we.
You shall not think you are worth anything.
You shall not think you can teach us anything.
Hauge fell to the janteloven in the end. They put him in a cell, where it was dark and cold, and they gave him nothing to do, and nothing to read (except the works of Voltaire), and they kept him from his friends. Year after year. Finally they let him go, sick and old before his time, but not before they’d gotten him to confess that he’d gone too far. He’d taken things to extremes. He’d been a bad Lutheran and a bad citizen.
He never recanted his faith (they didn’t want him to), but he recanted a part of his vocation. He wanted to walk under the sun again, to see things growing in the soil, to talk with fellow believers.
But the thing that really broke his heart, according to what I’ve read, was that they convinced him (it was hard, but they did it at last) that the king was against him.
It’s hard for us to understand today what the king meant to the peasants through most of European history. The king was not an oppressor. The king was their friend. The common people loved the king. Every man who suffered injustice knew in his heart, “If I could just get to the king’s ear, I’d get justice.”
“If the king thinks I was wrong, then I must be wrong,” Hauge thought.
And yet he won in the end. That bent, white-haired, toothless old man of fifty was nevertheless the future of the country.
Kind of like Elvis, I guess.