Stop reading newspapers that ask dumb questions, such as “Is the presidential race too long?”
What if we asked, “Should political debates be actual debates?” Maybe that’s kids stuff to the campaign experts of the world.
I’m doing fine
Today the glories of spring returned, after several days of rain. We needed the rain, and now it’s time for some sunshine. This Global Warming thing is working out pretty well so far, if you ask me. I mowed the lawn tonight. I’m definitely convinced it’s just a tad less goshawful than it was this time last year.
I had an interesting encounter at work today. I shall, needless to say, draw a Moral Lesson from it, for the edification of all.
We have a foreign student at the school who was running up a pretty large library fine. He’d kept some books overdue, and one book he’d lost completely. His fines accumulated as they remained unpaid, and I was worried about it getting out of hand.
I spoke to the instructor in his program one day a while back, and said I thought we’d have to come to some kind of settlement, to get him out from under. But the instructor said no. “We have to teach our students responsibility.” At least that’s what I understood him to say. So I stepped back and allowed the totals to mount up.
Last week the student came in, along with an American friend. He offered me some money (not the whole amount). I told him I could take it and reduce the fine, but that he’d still have to pay off the total. At that point his friend became quite upset, and they left. The friend said he’d come back with cash and pay the whole amount himself, and that this was not demonstrating the love of Christ.
After that I went back to the instructor and told him what had happened. The instructor said we probably needed to make some kind of settlement. I said I wanted to, but I wasn’t allowed to.
“Who told you that?” he asked.
“You did,” I said.
He became very apologetic then. Somewhere we had miscommunicated. I’m not sure how it happened, but he hadn’t meant it the way I took it.
Anyway, it got worked out. I accepted the smaller amount the student himself was able to pay, and it’s all settled. Relief reigns among the stacks.
Today the American friend came in and apologized. I told him I understood completely, and that I’d probably have reacted the same way.
It was a very godly act on his part, but when you get down to it, I did handle it wrong. Instead of simply doing what I was told, I should have questioned a decision I considered unreasonable. If I’d done that, the whole thing would have been worked out weeks ago, and much unpleasantness avoided.
It’s one of my besetting sins, this passivity. It’s the Nuremburg Defense: “I was only obeying orders.” God expects more from us. We’re Christians, not Buddhists. Quietude is not an unalloyed virtue in our moral scheme. God expects us to make a fuss now and then.
Gotta work on that.
Where Are the Good Book Reviews?
January asks why book coverage decreases while book publishing increases. “Newspaper owners don’t see book reviews as revenue producers,” he writes, and then he complains about certain bloggers.
Angst and the Anti-angst
Did Lars review of The Last Detective leave you cold? Did you start questioning his loyalties? Could he have been paid off by Crais or Crais’ evil publisher (doesn’t matter who it is b/c all of them are e.v.i.l. money-grubbing capitalists)? If so, perhaps you agree with Lynne Scanlon, who says, The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Book Reviewers. She raises several good angst-ridden points, but I plan to continue taking my life in my hands by reviewing the books I read. I’m sure Lars will too. We’re building trust here at Brandywine Books–trust you can bank on.
Which leads me to wonder if we should set up one of those Amazon Associate accounts or a recommendations page. Tip jar, maybe. Advertising. Hmmm.
The Last Detective, by Robert Crais
Thought, thought (for no particular reason) during a visit to the grocery store:
I do not want to see your toes.
Your mother may have told you they were adorable. Your Significant Other may tell you they’re sexy. You probably feel that traditional shoes are confining, especially in the warmer months.
But I, for one, don’t enjoy looking at other people’s toes.
The only toes I have any interest at all in are my own. And I’d just as soon not look at them much either.
This is a purely personal judgment, and I don’t expect anyone to pay any attention to it.
But I feel better now that I’ve shared.
I read one of Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole novels before, at the urging of Aitchmark, who’s a fan. I think I made a poor choice. It was one (probably Voodoo River) where Cole, a Los Angeles P.I., leaves his natural habitat to do a job in New Orleans. It didn’t work for me and I didn’t have any desire to go back to the franchise.
But I picked up The Last Detective last week and underwent an attitude alteration.
For one thing, the book explains how the hero got the name “Elvis,” an element of his persona that repelled me from the start. I can forgive it now.
At the beginning of the story, Elvis Cole is looking after Ben, the teenaged son of his girlfriend, Lucy Chenier, while she’s out of town. Lucy was a character in the New Orleans novel. She fell in love with Cole and followed him to L.A.
But one afternoon, Ben goes outside to play on the hillside (Cole lives in the Hollywood Hills, not far from Michael Connelly’s detective Harry Bosch, who makes an uncredited cameo appearance) and just disappears. A phone call a short time later confirms his worst fears—the boy has been kidnapped.
Examining the site of the abduction, Cole realizes a frightening fact—this snatch was a professional operation, and the kidnappers are military trained. Better than he is, and he was an Army Ranger.
It all goes back to the military, because the kidnapper claims the boy was taken in revenge for something Cole did in Vietnam, on a day of horror when he lost his best friends, but knows he did nothing wrong.
The quest for answers leads him to stir up buried memories, about his own childhood and his wartime experiences. These flashbacks (honestly) feature some of the most affecting writing I’ve ever encountered in a mystery novel. Deeply moving, and emotionally true as a laser sight.
Cole is assisted, as he usually is, by his Psycho Killer Friend®, Joe Pike. (I’ve commented before on how detectives nowadays tend to have PKF’s. That’s probably an unfair description. Pike isn’t a psycho, just an obsessive, a man who’s stripped his life down to warrior efficiency, his friendship for Cole, and nothing else. The kind of man a Scandinavian Modern chair would be, if it were human.) But Pike isn’t 100% right now, due to a gunshot wound suffered in the previous installment.
I liked The Last Detective very much and intend to read more. Aside from the good, tight writing and the perfect emotional pitch, I particularly liked the way the military was treated. There are bad former soldiers in the book, but there’s no hint of the moral condescension you find in so many stories dealing with veterans (especially Vietnam veterans). Cole doesn’t beat a drum about his service (rather the opposite), but he’s got nothing to be ashamed of and he isn’t ashamed. Even a particular minor character, a shadowy former officer who now brokers mercenary deals, is portrayed as a man of honor.
I highly recommend The Last Detective.
Do They Drive Their Readers Away?
More on the death of the creature popularly called “newspaper.”
One small squawk of defiance
I’m in a rantin’ mood today, buckaroos. There shall be links. There shall be outrage. There shall be metaphors strained like gnats and camels. There shall be depressive, hopeless prognostications about how the world is going by hand to a h*llbasket.
But stay with me. I plan to end on a positive note. If I survive.
First of all, why should I be the only Minnesotan with (or in) a blog who isn’t writing about the decision of the Minneapolis Star & Tribune (better known locally as “the Strib,” or “the Star & Sickle,” or “the Red Star”) to cancel James Lilek’s daily column and move him to a reporting gig.
This is the kind of innovative, forward-looking thinking that’s got the paper buying more barrels of red ink than black these days. At the rate the Stars & Garters is devaluing, I’m saving up my own spare change against the day when I’ll be able to buy it myself.
I can’t cancel my subscription, because I haven’t subscribed in decades. The last time I bought a copy of the paper, shortly after I returned to God’s Country from Florida, I read the following in the newspaper ombudsman’s column (quoted from memory):
Q: Why didn’t you ever refer to the Unabomber as a “left-wing radical,” since you regularly call abortion clinic bombers “right-wing radicals?”
A: It would be inaccurate to call the Unabomber a left-winger. He criticized the Democrats as much as he criticized the Republicans.
Me: And we all know abortion clinic bombers never criticize Republicans.
It’s bad enough reading people who can’t reason any better than that. It’s insufferable to be lectured to by people who can’t reason any better than that.
But Lileks’ll do OK. He’s already bigger than the Strib. He’ll be able to write his own ticket.
And it’ll be a funny one.
So, the pro-American won the election in France. This is a good thing, but I’m cautious.
It seems to me the real solution to France’s problem is the mass deportation of millions of unassimilated immigrants. And that ain’t gonna happen.
My uncle Orvis alerted me to this excellent article from Brussels Journal: The Rape of Europe by Paul Belien.
The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.” Europe is turning Muslim.
As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”
Hal G. P. Colebatch posted a great piece today at The American Spectator, (the best darn conservative journal in the whole durn world, after all), about the lack of seriousness with which our present war is being conducted:
In 1940, during the most desperate part of World War II, amid an avalanche of disasters, a British ship named the Lancastria was bombed and sunk as it was evacuating British troops from the collapse of France. It is thought that more than 3,000 soldiers died aboard this one ship — the equivalent of an entire brigade gone at a stroke.
Newly-appointed Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not knowing how many more disasters Britain could take, at once ordered that the story be suppressed. Nothing was said about it in Britain during the war, and it has remained little known to this day.
Very insightful, as Colebatch’s stuff always is. I’m proud to say that he’s a friend of mine, at least by e-mail. He’s a fellow Baen author as well as a fellow Spectator columnist.
I just worked up the courage to start reading The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. (I think this volume has reached the actual physical size limit for a book that a man can be expected to actually carry around and read on the bus or in a coffee shop. It may be above the maximum for most women. It’s 1,810 pages.) Lewis is a congenial spirit for me, not least because he’s constitutionally pessimistic, always expecting some kind of disaster to knock at the door. One of the first letters in this collection [covering 1950-1963] is to his friend Cecil Harwood, on the news that Harwood’s wife has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. “Still love to both: I wish it were of better quality—I am a hard, cold, black man inside and in my life have not wept enough.” That problem would be remedied.
It’s interesting to note the things Lewis worries about, writing in the early ’50s. He worries about China, in relation to the Korean War. He also worries about Persia, the place we now call Iran, interestingly enough, but he’s worried about the Communists operating there, not radical Muslims.
There’s comfort in this, I think. One obvious lesson is, as Roseanne Rosanadana used to say, “It’s always something.” The halcyon days we look back to, when the world was safe and secure, never really existed.
But there’s another lesson, I think. And that’s that Lewis, for all his obsessive worry, didn’t know what was going to happen. The things he feared never took place. The Russians didn’t roll over Europe. Communism, in fact, was doomed. No one could guess it back then. The challenge we face today is arguably worse, but it’s a different challenge from the ones Lewis and everyone else expected.
We don’t know the future. Unexpected disaster may be on its way, but it’s equally likely that rescue may be coming from a direction we never guessed.
And you know what? If we just mope around (as I tend to do) and say, “It’s over. It’s done. Europe’s lost. America’s going. Prepare for the end,” we’re doing precisely what I’ve criticized the Democrats in Congress for doing—telling the enemy they’ve won.
They’ve only won if we let them. The only war they’re winning is the morale war. The wonderful thing about a morale war is that all you have to do to win is decide to win.
What Does ‘Christian Writing’ Look Like?
Andree Seu met with a small group to talk about Christians writing, I believe, both fiction and non-fiction of any type. She draws a lesson from it which she didn’t anticipate.
Not Writing for the Market
“The interrogator referred to the poem as a ‘document’ and to its writing as a terrorist ‘act.'” Read about the poem which became a sixteen-line death sentence.
I Want to Be a Nobody
I was talking to my good wife about some young ladies in our church who are graduating college and grad school this year, and my eight-year-old overheard me. She asked me what grad school was.
“Some people pursue advanced education after college,” I said. “That’s what you get in grad school. In fact, some jobs require you to have advanced training.”
“Like doctors and lawyers,” said the wife.
“Some people get advanced education that isn’t tied directly to a job,” I continued. “I thought about going to grad school myself, but I didn’t. I guess I could still go, but I haven’t.”
My little girl asked, “You didn’t go to grad school?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you go to grad school? Because you didn’t want to be anybody?”
“No, I decided not to.”
“I don’t want to be anybody either.”
That’s my girl, striving for excellence right out of the nursery.