Methane found on distant world, “a Jupiter-sized planet known as HD 189733b.”
Insert juvenile humor here.
Weak end
It was a long, low-energy weekend for me. I’m still trying to fully shake loose from the flu, so I mostly sat (or lay) around, getting nothing useful done. I did vacuum the house on Saturday, because my brother Moloch and his wife were coming Sunday evening (as shall be related anon).
On Sunday, as has been my habit, I watched a couple old mystery movies from my renter’s collection. The most interesting was The Stranger, starring Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young.
It’s the story of an escaped Nazi war criminal (played by Welles) who is tracked down, in the New England town where he is living under a false identity, by Robinson, who plays a U.N. war crimes investigator.
I found it an interesting study in Hollywood culture. The movie was released in 1946, when World War II was newly over. The moviemakers were still in full Allied propaganda mode. There’s no question of good and evil here. Nazis are evil, period (which makes the portrayal of the war criminal, even by a genius like Welles, pretty one-dimensional). It occurred to me as I watched it that evil had not, in fact, ended in the world on VE Day. Even as the movie was being filmed, Stalin in Russia was systematically murdering millions of people for whom he had no use. And doubtless many of the people who worked on the movie were huge fans of Stalin. But, you know—Stalin murdered people for progressive and internationalist purposes. So that was different.
Another hangover from World War II was that the film was unabashed, non-ironic, all but Norman Rockwellian in its American boosterism. The town of Harper, Connecticut, where most of the action occurs, is a wonderful, edenic place. Everyone’s friendly. Everyone’s honest. There appear to be no bigots (even a stranger with a plainly foreign accent, coming to town, elicits almost no special notice).
At the center of the community is a church, and—get this—the church is portrayed as a positive institution. Although Orson Welles’ villain attempts to mess with the church (or rather with its antique clock, which he’s repairing) the building itself rejects him, as it were, and finally visits on him his final doom.
If this film were re-made today, I’m confident the church would be made into a haven for fascists, and somebody would point out at the end that the people of the town, in their mob anger over having a Nazi among them, aren’t really all that different from the Nazis themselves.
That evening Moloch and Mrs. Moloch showed up. They spent the night here, so we could get up at 4:00 a.m. and I could drive them to the airport. Even as I write, they are winging their way to China, to visit The Youngest Niece, who’s teaching English there.
I envy them the travel.
I don’t envy them the twenty-hour plane ride.
Can the day be far away when everybody finally agrees that the only sensible way to fly, from the point of view of security (as well as comfort and personal dignity), is to just put us all to sleep and stack us in containers? The after-effects of the sedative can’t be much worse than jet lag.
Rosenberg’s Next Novel is Dead Heat
I just heard about Joel Rosenberg’s latest: Dead Heat.
In his new political thriller DEAD HEAT, New York Times best-selling author and Middle East expert Joel C. Rosenberg depicts a worst case scenario for the United States: a nation that has fallen asleep and allowed terrorists to attack during a campaign season.
Rosenberg writes solid political thrillers about headline events, so you may want to check out this one in the next few months.
Simplistic, Terrible History
Mr. Holtsberry has a lineup of reviewers criticizing a World War II book by Nicholson Baker called, Human Smoke.
- Tom Nagorski says, Mr. Baker leaves the impression — one cannot say that he “believes,” since he is never quite explicit — that Roosevelt’s preparations for war with Japan were as bellicose in character as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and that the Allied failure to help Jews in the early years was as bad as the Nazis’ dispatching them to the gas chambers.
- Adam Kirsch calls the book perverted. “A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take Human Smoke at all seriously. The problem is that people who don’t know enough . . . Already a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times has praised it for ‘demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.'”
- William Grimes writes: “Did the war ‘help anyone who needed help?’ Mr. Baker asks in a plaintive afterword. The prisoners of Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald come to mind, as well as untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles. Nowhere and at no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest, in any serious way, how their liberation might have been effected other than by force of arms.”
Prince Caspian
Who among us has not read Prince Caspian, the second of the Narnia books (unless you are devoted to the new numbering system on some editions)? Well, HarperCollins is talking to other people when they encourage young and old alike to read the book before seeing the movie. The publisher’s webpage has information about the book, book-related games, and a contest for a trip to the movie premiere in New York (opening in less than two months). Facebook users can catch a bit of buzz over here.
The publisher has added something new to The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Movie Tie-in Edition, “an 8-page, fold-out insert based on C. S. Lewis’s own timeline conceived for Narnia.” This is a hard-bound edition of all seven books and a “special full-color timeline, recreated from C. S. Lewis’s original and paired with Pauline Baynes’ classic full-color illustrations for the first time. [It offers] the key to the passage of time in Narnia and Earth by laying the two worlds side by side. Never before has C. S. Lewis’s timeline been included in a complete edition of all seven books of Narnia.”
If that isn’t cool enough, Brandywine Books will have being hosting a Narnia book giveaway someday soon, so tell your friends. I’ll let you know when I can.
Racial Ideas and American Conservatism
The Washington Times has these two reviews:
- A new Randall Kennedy book called, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal
- A history of political publishing by a man who trudge against the current, publisher Alfred Regnery’s book, Upstream: The Ascnedance of American Conservatism. Reviewer Goulden writes:
“Upstream,” in essence, is a Baedeker guide to the men and ideas behind conservatism. The underlying theme for the movement was a strong belief in individual freedom and personal responsibility. The task was tough. As Mr. Regnery astutely notes in his opening pages, in the early 1950s “few people would admit to being conservatives at all, and those who did were thought to have lost their minds.”
Only Up From Here
I have to pass on this metaphor alert from the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web:
“We hit the ground running. We’re at the bottom of the food chain but . . . we have really made a dent up here.”–Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) on his time in the Senate so far, quoted in the Washington Post, March 21
Old News
Frank links to a review of News stories that set gold standard for journalism. It’s a book on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. I wonder if will read like last month’s fish wrap.
A little (extra) good news for Easter
The pope baptizes a prominent Italian Muslim.
Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.
No doubt this will lead to violence somewhere, as does anything that offends “the religion of peace.” But that’s no reason not to celebrate a soul coming home.
Jon Hessler, 1933-2008
Jon Hessler, an author and Minnesotan, died this week. Terry Teachout says Hessler was one of his favorite American authors:
Try thinking of him as a Midwestern John P. Marquand and you’ll get a better idea of what he’s about. ‘Of all the people I know,’ Marquand observed, “only Americans, because of some sort of inferiority complex, keep attempting the impossible and trying to get away from their environment.” Jon Hassler has never made that mistake.