Hal Colebatch at the American Spectator published a tribute to Jim Baen, my former publisher, today. I never knew most of this stuff. Wish I had.
Our commenter Hunter Baker mentioned me in connection with Baen on the AmSpec blog here. Thanks, Hunter.
My own tribute to Jim can be read here.
I got mittens for Christmas!
I finished my combat mitten project on Sunday. This is what they look like.
Actually, I thought they were done when I took the picture, but then I decided to tighten up the stitching. All the stitching that looks like dotted lines in the picture is now solid lines. Tight seams! Redundancy! Those are my watchwords. I may end up a quivering, broken casualty, but I want the paramedics to say as they wheel me away, “Hey, this guy’s mittens are really put together!”
A lot of live steel guys use gloves instead of mittens, and I think gloves do actually look better. But mittens allow you to have your fingers unseparated as you grasp your weapon grip, and that’s not a trivial advantage. This past year I used welder’s gloves, which looked great with their gauntlet cuffs, but separated my fingers. So my new mittens are equipped with gauntlet cuffs (added by me), which also help to protect my wrists (wrist injuries are one of the most common in our sport).
The original moose hide mittens were a Christmas gift from my brother Baal.
Some guys use mittens covered with mail for live steel, but I’ve heard that that’s actually not the best system. The little rings sometimes drive themselves into the glove and break your fingers. I prefer heavy leather myself, and it’s lighter.
We have no record, literary or archaeological, of the Vikings using combat gloves of any kind, although we know the Normans were using mailed mittens not too long after. It’s hard to imagine doing this kind of fighting with no hand protection, though. Judging from the experience of live steel fighters today, you’d have to expect all the experienced Vikings to be missing a finger or two, if they fought without protection. And you can only sacrifice so many of those suckers before you’ve (literally) lost your grip.
Defocused Text
I love photos like this one on BarunSingh.com. I love fonts and the look of words on paper and sometimes words on stuff. Not bumperstickers. Other stuff.
Damnation Street by Andrew Klavan
Had the opportunity to meet faithful commenter “Michael” today. He’s a pastor in my church body, and was here for a missions conference. He probably won’t see this for a few days, but nice to meet you, Michael.
One-line review of Andrew Klavan’s Damnation Street: “Woo-hoo!”
I got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for Christmas, and Damnation Street was one of the books I chose to get with it. I don’t generally buy hardbacks, but I felt this was a special case.
It was, in fact, a more special case than I knew. Because it appears that Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop books (the previous ones are Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley) are not going to be an ongoing series, but a trilogy (unless I read the ending wrong).
I’ve told you about these books before. Klavan, author of such blockbusters as True Crime and Don’t Say a Word, made an abrupt shift from big thrillers to smaller mysteries, and the Weiss and Bishop series is the result.
The main characters are Scott Weiss, private detective, and Jim Bishop, his operative. Weiss is a large, sad-faced, fat man, an ex-cop who longs for goodness and justice and true love. Bishop is a wild man with sociopathic tendencies. He’s a special forces veteran who rides motorcycles and flies planes, parties hard, uses women and throws them away. But Weiss saw some decency in him long ago, and gave him a second chance.
Now he seems to have thrown that chance away. In Shotgun Alley he came close to selling Weiss out for the sake of a seductive girl who was using him just as he’d used so many other women. He’s left the firm, and is seriously considering a career in organized crime.
Which is why, as the story begins, Weiss is searching for Julie Wyant alone. We know Julie from Shotgun Alley. She’s a prostitute and one-time porn actress of rare beauty, and Weiss fell hopelessly in love with her without ever meeting her. But Weiss isn’t her only admirer. She is also the obsession of the Shadow Man, a mysterious contract killer. He’s a sadist and a natural chameleon. Five minutes after talking to him, people can’t remember what he looked like. He used Julie once in the past, and he decided she was the woman he intended to love—to death. She managed to escape him, and fled in terror at the things he’d done to her.
Shotgun Alley ended in a sort of stand-off between Weiss and the Shadowman. Weiss knew that if he found her (and finding people is what he does best) the Shadowman would be close behind. So he made the decision to leave her alone. (Sorry for the spoiler. I can’t see how to avoid it.)
Now Weiss has changed his mind. He’s decided that if he leaves Julie alone, the Shadowman will find her eventually anyway. The only way he can ensure her safety is to find her, use her to flush the Shadowman out, and eliminate him (by whatever means necessary).
Weiss is an old cop. A smart old cop; an intuitive old cop. But he’s not a killing machine like the Shadowman. He could use a back-up man, someone like Bishop. But Bishop’s not around anymore.
So Weiss goes on his own, tracing Julie Wyant’s path across the American southwest, learning her story, bit by bit. Watching his back, knowing the Shadowman is there somewhere, watching. Waiting.
The tension of the story is relieved by a seriocomic subplot involving the unnamed narrator, a young man working as a sort of intern in the agency. This plot thread is a romance, and—wonder of wonders—it has a Christian element. Hopeful Christian authors should read this book just to see how a real storyteller handles spiritual matters.
I loved this book. I can’t praise it highly enough. As I read it I couldn’t avoid the feeling that I was reading a novel that could be a turning point in the history of the detective story, just as the works of Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers and Raymond Chandler were. (That’s not saying it will have such an effect. That will only happen if the book gets the readership it deserves.) In my view, Klavan has taken the detective story to a whole new level of character depiction and spiritual exploration. This is more than a story about crime. It’s about love and hate and loneliness and longing. It’s about the deepest needs of the human soul—good and bad.
Not for children. Cautions are in order for language, violence and disturbing subject matter.
Just like real life.
I Want to Look Fabulous; Then I May Love My Neighbor
On Blogwatch, I noticed this link to what girls write in their diaries:
The author [of The Body Project] examined young girls’ diaries from the 1800’s to the 1900’s and found that “In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, girls’ diaries focused on ‘good works’ and perfecting the character. In the 1900’s, the diaries are fixated on ‘good looks,’ on perfecting the body.”
You Can Only Find What You Are Looking For
Previous Martian probe may have found alien life and killed it. Not that life could evolve on Mars, but this report on a theory on Martian life is too funny and true to avoid a blog link.
T.S. Eliot’s Passions
I heartily agree with the ideas in this post on T.S. Eliot, creativity, and art. The Lord God is the author and sustainer of life. When he created all things, declaring them good, he made them such that they work best by directly or indirectly honoring him. If the animists could truly listen to the spirits of everything around them, they would hear a profound chorus singing glory to God in the highest and calling for redemption from the curse mankind inflicted on them.
I suggest the reason certain philosophies glory in ugly art, destructive behavior, and personal freedom from the normal consequences of our actions is those philosophies are anti-life by virtue of being anti-God.
T.S. Eliot's Passions
I heartily agree with the ideas in this post on T.S. Eliot, creativity, and art. The Lord God is the author and sustainer of life. When he created all things, declaring them good, he made them such that they work best by directly or indirectly honoring him. If the animists could truly listen to the spirits of everything around them, they would hear a profound chorus singing glory to God in the highest and calling for redemption from the curse mankind inflicted on them.
I suggest the reason certain philosophies glory in ugly art, destructive behavior, and personal freedom from the normal consequences of our actions is those philosophies are anti-life by virtue of being anti-God.
Stumbled Upon
I just stumbled upon this site dedicated to All Quiet On the Western Front. That’s one of those books on my Meaning to Get to Soon list for a long time. I hope it’s still at the library when I go to look for it.
Also, this site with a long list of books about coffee.
Hans Christian Andersen: Unsuitable for children?
I was chatting with a friend online last night, and the subject of favorite fairy tales came up. For some reason I forgot to mention “The Ugly Duckling” by Hans Christian Andersen. Somebody (I forget who) wrote a book a long time ago, saying that our favorite fairy tales reveal a lot about our basic desires and strategies for life. Girls who like “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, seem to always own a red coat, and have a tendency to get into relationships with big bad wolves.
“The Ugly Duckling” is actually a pretty uncharacteristic story for Andersen. It has a happy ending, and he didn’t write those often. Sorry to drop a spoiler on you here, but if you only know “The Little Mermaid” from the Disney movie, the original version doesn’t end the same way at all. Not at all
An excerpt (not the conclusion of the story):
The little mermaid could not help thinking of her first rising out of the sea… and she joined in the dance, poised herself in the air as a swallow when he pursues his prey, and all present cheered her with wonder. She had never danced so elegantly before. Her tender feet felt as if cut with sharp knives, but she cared not for it; a sharper pang had pierced through her heart. She knew this was the last evening she should ever see the prince, for whom she had forsaken her kindred and her home; she had given up her beautiful voice, and suffered unheard-of pain daily for him, while he knew nothing of it. This was the last evening that she would breathe the same air with him, or gaze on the starry sky and the deep sea; an eternal night, without a thought or dream, awaited her; she had no soul and now she could never win one….
Andersen was a writer of tragedy. He wrote tragedies for children, which seems perverse to us. But Andersen was a lonely, shy man who had little experience of happy endings. He’d grown up in poverty and been rejected by every woman he ever fell in love with (he was not, despite what the activists will try to tell you, a homosexual). He was only comfortable with children; remained a child himself in many ways. But the message he had for children was not the one we like to give them—“Hold on, keep hopeful, and everything will turn out all right.” His message, forged out of his own experience in a world where lots and lots of children never grew up, was, “You may fail. You may die. But death doesn’t have to be the end, and the way you die can make your life beautiful.”
I wrote about something like this the other day, in regard to the story about the widow in the smoky house. Our ancestors lived in a harder world than ours, and they had wisdom we can’t begin to comprehend, wisdom that allowed them to endure suffering we can’t imagine and retain their sanity. Afraid to look closely at such holy things, we, the descendents, malign them and label them “morbid.”