Speaking of Britain, there’s a story of a little girl born in the last few days with an unusual name. I’m glad I can copy-n-paste this. Her name is Autumn Sullivan Corbett Fitzsimmons Jeffries Hart Burns Johnson Willard Dempsey Tunney Schmeling Sharkey Carnera Baer Braddock Louis Charles Walcott Marciano Patterson Johansson Liston Clay Frazier Foreman Brown. For real.
But not as for real as the proposed name of a New Zealand baby. His parents want to name him “4Real.”
Someone save us.
Have you seen this video of Britain’s Got Talent winner Paul Potts? A Bristol, England, native walks on stage, feeling nervous, and does not impress the judges by claiming a desire to sing opera. Oh, but when he sings! He went to the semi-finals to sing “A Time To Say Goodbye,” and returned to his first song in the finals, “Nessun Dorma.” Now he has a £1m record deal with Simon Cowell’s label and plans to sing with Katherine Jenkins at a Wales event.
Bravo!!
A strenuous weekend (by my effete standards), but a pretty good one, all in all.
In Moorhead, Minnesota there is a museum dedicated to the Hjemkomst (Homecoming), a replica Viking ship that sailed to Norway in 1984. Each year they hold a Scandinavian festival there, and sometimes they invite the Viking Age Club & Society. This was one of our years.
We were blessed with pretty good weather in our encampment. It got warm, but we had a breeze most of the time, and that makes all the difference if you’ve got some shade. I sold a few books. We did two combat shows on Friday and three on Saturday (Roy Jacobsen of Writing, Clear and Simple posted this link to a Fargo Forum newspaper photo in the comments below, but I give you the link again, so you can be suitably impressed. Much as it may surprise you, that’s not a screen capture from ‘300.’ It’s yours truly, terrible in his wrath, defending himself heroically against a base attack by those scoundrels, the Andersons.
The photographer must have had a camera with a fast shutter, because this battle lasted about 3/8 of a second.
You’ll note, if you look closely, that there are holes in my shield. Here’s a picture of the shield today:
It’s on its way out, but I think I’ll use it a while longer. Those holes can actually be an advantage, if you’re fast (which, unfortunately, I’m not). You can catch your enemy’s weapon in them, give the shield a twist, and disarm him.
I packed up Saturday afternoon and drove home. Sunday morning I drove down to Kenyon, my home town, for the annual historical service at my home congregation’s Old Stone Church, pictured here:
I wasn’t aware (or hadn’t paid attention) but this was a special service of dedication at the end of a major refurbishing project. They had tuck-pointed the stonework and completely re-done the interior, replacing the crumbling plaster walls with concrete colored to look like the originals. Some private grant money and a lot of volunteer work went into the job.
Here’s a close-up of the old altar.
It’s a very Haugean altar (the Haugeans are the pietistic Lutheran group which formed my religious outlook). On either side are the tables of the Law. Haugeans are always aware of the Law. We’re not the kind of people who think the Law is of no further interest to those who are in Christ.
But the Cross is in the center, lifted high above the Law. The Cross puts the Law in perspective. The Cross rules over the Law.
And under the Cross is a painting of the Lord’s Supper, a central means by which the grace of the Cross is mediated to the worshipers kneeling at the altar.
The verse on the plaque is John 3:16.
I came in costume (not Viking but 19th Century), since it’s my belief that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I’d been asked to give a historical talk. I suppose they had in mind a synopsis of the story of the congregation and the building. Being me, I did it my own way.
I didn’t want to do just names and dates. I wanted to tell a story, to convey the romance (and it was a romance) of Norwegian immigration and evangelism in the new world. I figured there’d be children there (there were) and I wanted to tell them things they might remember.
So I told the stories of two men—Elling Eielsen, the Norwegian evangelist who planted Haugeanism in America, and Østen Hanson, Eielsen’s disciple who broke with him and became the president of the Hauge Synod, pastor of our church (and its sister congregation) for 37 years.
I’ll post the text of my talk tomorrow, because I promised some people I would. The rest of you might find it interesting too, as a case study if nothing else.
Perhaps by doing the work of Truth and Goodness, which too many people reject out of hand.
The Thinklings have a good, long interview with the author of The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game and The Devil Is a Gentleman. In the second book, Hallman says he toured the religions of the world with William James as a type of guide. “It’s kind of a revisitation of the basic thinking of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience,” he says. Is chess a religion? Find out in this interview.
Marvin Olasky has listed his favorite 100 books from the past seven years. I wonder if he read “The Charge of the Light Brigade” during those years.
The splash made two summers ago by The Traveler from John Twelve Hawks (JXIIH) is about to return with his next book, The Dark River. From the publicity poster anonymously pasted on a brick wall outside Brandywine Books International Headquarters and Yogurt Emporium:
In a post-9/11 world, The Traveler struck home with its disturbing yet familiar themes of state-sponsored paranoia, the dismantling of individual privacy and the ever-increasing number of personal liberties a society is willing to relinquish in return for a sense of security. Picking up where The Traveler left off, The Dark River follows the Harlequin warrior Maya and her charge, Gabriel Corrigan – one of the fabled and endangered mystics known as Travelers – from New York’s Chinatown to a thousand year old Irish monastery, from the catacombs in Rome to the ruins of WWII bunkers in Berlin, as they race to stop the Tabula from unleashing a powerful weapon of surveillance that will change the balance of power across the globe.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer recommends reading The Traveler before diving in to The Dark River, which I don’t plan to do in order to give this book a chance to stand on its own. Maybe that’s a bad idea.
“Who hath a book
Hath friends at hand . . .” quoth Sherry about a mysterious league of 600.
“Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred. . . .
When can their glory fade?”
Writer Agnieszka Tennant, a self-described feminist, doesn’t like the Eldredge book on women, Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul. She says it’s simplistic. The gist of the book, she believes, is the stuff of little girl dreams: “Every woman longs for three things: to be swept up into a romance, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, and to be the Beauty of the story.” Ms. Tennant writes:
But there’s so much more. Beauty draws blood to the heart and speeds up the pulse; sometimes it evokes repentance. I wish more Christians were comfortable with its pull. Too often, beauty raptures us so forcibly that we fear it will lead to temptation. So we avert our eyes. What if we turned our ecstasy into worship?
I don’t get it. Yes, beauty can be enrapturing, and since we’re talking about feminine beauty, not the gorgeous melodies of Dvorak’s New World Symphony or the rich landscapes of Albert Bierstadt, I will say that my wife is simply enchanting. Captivating, even. For more common ground on profound female beauty, I remember feeling quite moved by a scene with Grace Kelly in the middle of Rear Window, and I remember thinking I might jump through the screen to rescue a vulnerable Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Call me impressionable, but I was captivated by them for a time.
But I don’t think I get the point of Ms. Tennant assertion about worship or about a deeper beauty than advocated in Captivating. What do you think?
I’ll be taking a blog break till Monday, probably, unless I get a wireless connection in Moorhead and find the time. I’m going up with the Vikings for the Hjemkomst festival. Drop by if you’re in the area, but I won’t be there Sunday.
On Sunday I shoot back south, overshoot my home, and come to rest in Kenyon, Minnesota, my original home town. I’ve been asked to give a short historical talk for a special service. My home church (Hauge Lutheran) has an old stone church, the congregation’s original building (it was built in 1875 and is on the National Register of Historic Places). A service is held there once a year (it used to be in Norwegian, but that’s kind of pointless nowadays). Anyway, I’ll be helping out with that Sunday morning.
I always look forward to Robert K. Tanenbaum’s Karp/Ciampi books, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy Counterplay. But I see problems in this old, dependable franchise.
Our friend Aitchmark reviewed it here. He thinks Tanenbaum has succumbed to the temptation to try to make every book “bigger” than the last. I see that, and I agree to an extent. But I think I discern a deeper problem.
First, a synopsis: The last couple books have featured Butch Karp’s great nemesis—former New York City District Attorney Andrew Kane, a rich and corrupt man who nearly became mayor of New York. We thought Kane was beaten at the end of the previous book, when his plot to destroy the Catholic Church was unmasked and foiled.
But Kane has escaped from the police, and has made it clear that he is going to a) kill everyone Karp (now District Attorney himself) cares about, and b) perform a major act of terrorism. Security people believe he’s planning to target Russian president Yeltsin on an upcoming visit to the U.S.
You get your money’s worth in entertainment with any Tanenbaum book. He rolls out the beloved stock company of funny, eccentric, well-developed regulars we’ve come to love. The most interesting part of the story for me, actually, was a sub-plot—the cold-case against a millionaire for the murder of his wife, prosecuted by good ol’ Ray Guma, on the basis of a memory recovered by the couple’s son under hypnosis.
But there really is a problem, and I think Tanenbaum needs to do something about it. I think he’s fallen into the Superman Dilemma.
The Superman Dilemma is simple. Once you’ve created a hero who is faster than a speeding bullet, bulletproof himself, inhumanly strong and incredibly smart, what do you do to give him a challenge? Yeah, you’ve got kryptonite, but you can only use that stuff so often before people get bored.
The answer is the Super-Villain. You’ve got to come up with an adversary worthy of his steel skin. Someone who matches him in at least one category, and who is as bad as he is good.
Tanenbaum, over the course of this long series, has gradually loaded the Karp family with a pantheon of super friends. Tran, the former Viet Cong, was the first, I think. He’s a leader of the Asian mob, and will do anything to protect Butch’s wife Marlene, on whom he’s been nursing a crush for years. Then there’s John Jojola, the Taos Indian/Special Forces veteran, who walks unseen and has strange mystical powers. And there’s David Grale, the psychotic who leads and army of the homeless, fighting evil in the city sewers. And there’s daughter Lucy’s new boyfriend, the cowboy Ned, who is (of course) a crack shot and a quick-draw artist. Lucy herself is a language prodigy, which helps in a lot of situations. And Marlene is the Top Gun in Manhattan. She also trains huge attack dogs.
Which means that in real life, a family like the Karps would be safer than the president in the presidential bunker, just giving folks a tour. Thus, for a challenge, we need a super-villain capable of working past all these layers of security.
Andrew Kane has been the super-villain in the last few books, and is again here. And frankly it’s getting to the point where he’s straining credibility. The man is so insane—so filled with hate and yet so omnicompetent, that it’s hard to take him seriously.
Tanenbaum has produced a comic book. A superior comic book, one well worth reading, but a comic book nevertheless.
He needs to drop the end-of-the-world scenarios, kill off some of the family’s protectors, and get back to writing stories about people we recognize. There’s plenty of ordinary evil in the world for a big-city D.A. to fight.
Even Superman shouldn’t fly out of sight.
