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Alcuin of York

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Tonight, a tribute to a man to whom every book lover owes an incalculable debt. But do you ever think about Alcuin of York? No, I’ll bet you don’t. You only think about yourself.

The simple video above pretty decently describes that great Englishman’s achievements in the intellectual sphere. Did you know he was the one who popularized putting spaces between words in a text? He didn’t invent the idea — I believe he got it from the Irish. But he took it with him to Charlemagne’s Cathedral School and made it the standard for western Christendom. Also punctuation marks and capitalized first letters of sentences.

The video doesn’t mention the matter Alcuin himself would have considered most important in his life — his work to spread the gospel. His master Charlemagne was essentially a jumped-up Germanic barbarian, and not above letting his sword do the talking for him. In 782 he baptized 4,500 (the number is probably exaggerated) Saxon chiefs who had reneged on an agreement, and then beheaded them on the spot. Alcuin was not pleased about that.

He lived at the very beginning of the Viking Age, and his lament over the sacking of Lindisfarne in 793 is often quoted.

When I was with you, your loving friendship gave me great joy. Now that I am away your tragic sufferings daily bring me sorrow, since the pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street.

What assurance can the churches of Britain have, if Saint Cuthbert and so great a company of saints do not defend their own? Is this the beginning of the great suffering, or the outcome of the sins of those who live there? It has not happened by chance, but is the sign of some great guilt. You who survive, stand like men, fight bravely and defend the camp of God. 

(Alcuin, letter to Bishop Higbald)

Poetry, Uncategorized

‘Linger a while, thou art so fair!’

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Once again, I’m reading quite a long book, and so am forced to actually think in order to come up with blogging fodder. Consider that your warning.

A while back I did some semi-coherent posts about Art. I was trying to work out – more or less in real time – what beauty is and why it matters to Christians. I got into the similarities (only similarities – they’re not the same thing) between aesthetic experience and religious experience. It all had to do with C.S. Lewis’s Joy and mythopoeia.

But there’s a further point which is – it seems to me – the actual point, and I didn’t quite extract it then. But here it is now:

Art is the effort to eternalize a moment of beauty.

One of the most frustrating things about the pursuit of beauty is that it’s fleeting. Describing Joy, Lewis emphasized the fact that it’s temporary by nature. It comes and goes. Try to maintain it, and it slips through your fingers like a handful of water. Try to recreate it, and it’s shyer than a doe in the forest. (Try to mix your metaphors, and you produce something less than art.)

Nevertheless, the artist’s job is to attempt to recreate the moment of Joy.

He can’t dispense Joy from a container. He can’t cook it up in a pot.

But he can produce a work – it may be a sculpture or a painting or a play or a ballet, or some other example of an artistic medium – that provides an opportunity for Joy to creep in on its own. Sort of like putting seed out to attract a bird.

In Goethe’s play, “Faust,” the magician makes a bargain with Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles promises to serve him as long as he lives. But, as Faust says:

“When I say to the Moment flying; 
'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!' 
Then bind me in thy bonds undying, 
And my final ruin I will bear!”

In other words, Faust will lose the bargain and be damned the moment he experiences something so wonderful that he longs for time to stop.

That’s the artist’s challenge – to generate beauty that “tempts” the audience to desire to prolong the moment.

That puts the artist in Mephistopheles’ place, which is awkward, but we just have to live with that. Artists will never be quite respectable.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bad Blood,’ by Blake Banner

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Over the years I’ve picked up Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer books from time to time. I neither love nor hate them, but they are entertaining. So, I purchased Bad Blood. It filled the time.

Harry Bauer is one of many highly similar heroes starring in action series these days. Think of Mark Greaney’s Gray Man books. Harry, though an American, used to be part of the British SAS, and is now associated by (yet another) secretive, extra-governmental antiterrorist unit.

As the story begins, he has decided to follow his superiors’ advice and take some down time. He decides to go to Victoria Island, off Mauritania in North Africa. He’s been told it’s a peaceful earthly paradise.

So of course, his first evening there, he witnesses a gang shooting in which a young girl is caught in the crossfire and killed. Holding her hand as she bleeds to death, he swears vengeance. It turns out that the closure of the US border has caused drug cartels to change their supply routes, and now they’re running drugs and women through Victoria Island.

Harry then acquires some weaponry and gets to work setting one gang against the other, in the tradition of “A Fistful of Dollars” or “Yojimbo” (he acknowledges the resemblance). Having wiped out the gangsters on the island, he then proceeds to Mauritania in the style of James Bond, to destroy the secret headquarters of the criminal mastermind.

The book is full of action and entertaining. I was annoyed that the only professed Christian in the story was a major idiot, and another more positive character promoted Buddhism. I suppose I should object more to the violence than to that, but this is an action thriller. I knew what I was signing up for.

Bad Blood was pretty much like every other book in its genre. My verdict is… so-so.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Scarlet Ruse,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She said, “It’s funny. You know? They’ve all said so many things so many ways, there’s nothing left for people to really say to each other. I mean I can say things, but behind it I can hear Cher saying it to Sonny.”

I first read John D. MacDonald’s The Scarlet Ruse back in the 1970s, when it was new. Back in those days you could look forward to a new McGee every year, and everything has gone downhill since that ended, as far as I’m concerned.

In The Scarlet Ruse, McGee, lanky, houseboat-dwelling Fort Lauderdale salvage expert, agrees to help a stamp dealer, as a favor to his economist friend, Meyer. Hersh Fedderman is an honest man with a small but lucrative business, selling stamps to collectors. But not all of his clients are necessarily honest. One in particular he suspects of being a gangster. For this man he has assembled a very valuable collection of rarities, steadily appreciating in value. He keeps the collection in a bank safe deposit box, which can only be accessed by both of them together. Yet somehow, he has discovered, the stamps have been switched out, low-value items substituted. It’s one of those impossible, locked room mysteries. Clearly someone stole the stamps, but the only people with access are the client, Hirsh himself, and his assistant Mary Alice, a long-time employee he trusts implicitly.

It’s a head-scratcher. As he ponders the problem, Trav gets close to Mary Alice, who is exactly the kind of woman he likes – big, beautiful, healthy, and cheerful. Trav is in love – but what about the crime? How was it performed?

Finding the answer to that question will nearly get him killed.

It goes without saying that I enjoyed The Scarlet Ruse. It hasn’t aged well in some ways – particularly in McGee’s musings, which are always engaging but heavily influenced here by his friend Meyer, who seems to be pretty Malthusian in his economics. (Meyer calls his houseboat the John Maynard Keynes, for heaven’s sake.) Also, Travis talks about being won over to the anti-handgun cause – even as he prepares a pistol or two of his own, which he’ll need pretty desperately before he’s done.

But you take McGee as a package, and mostly it’s a top quality package. Recommended, with cautions for violence and mature scenes and themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Washington Trail,’ by Lou Aguilar

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Lou Aguilar, like me, writes for the American Spectator (he does it at a rather higher level, though). When he mentioned in an article that he wrote detective thrillers, I thought I’d try one. (Turns out there’s only one thriller so far.) The Washington Trail was a lot of fun. Proust it ain’t, but fun it decidedly is.

Our heroes are Mark Tristan, a former Army Ranger, and Neil Cork, a former FBI analyst, now Washington DC private investigators. Cork is a family man, but Tristan is a bachelor with a pretty flippant attitude to life. He has a car, but he likes to zip around town on a bicycle. He’s a passionate fan of old Western movies, and quotes them constantly.

A beautiful young woman comes to their office and asks them to follow her artist boyfriend and find out why he dumped her. They try to put her off, but she’s insistent. When Tristan starts shadowing the young man, he quickly discovers his secret life, which will not delight their client. But hardly has he delivered the bad news than the young man gets involved in a shooting incident, and suddenly Tristan and Cork are plunged into a three-way conflict involving secretive groups they call (of course) “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

The prose in The Washington Trail is passable, but not memorable. The plot and action are, frankly, highly implausible. It’s the characters that lift this book above the level of the herd. Tristan, in particular, is brash and funny and brave, but also relatable (he’s a male fantasy figure, as so many great characters are).

There’s a twist at the end that I saw coming, but it was only one of several.

Author Aguilar is brave, but perhaps foolhardy in making The Washington Trail blatantly political. His conservatism is quite open here – though Trump and Biden are never named as such, references to “the last president” and “the current president” are made in contexts that render it impossible not to figure it out. Most authors would try to be a little more oblique, simply for the sake of potential sales. But Aguilar flies his colors proudly.

So if you’re a liberal, you probably won’t care much for The Washington Trail. But if you’re a conservative looking for a really fun action story, you’ll probably get as big a hoot out of it as I did.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Enemies Among Us,’ by Jeffrey S. Stephens

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A while back I read a novel by Jeffrey S. Stephens which I found entertaining and well-written. Since then I’ve read two more of Stephens’ books to see how they’d be. Enemies Among Us is part of a series starring a continuing hero named Nick Reagan.

Nick Reagan is a high-level CIA operative. One of his old enemies is an Islamist terrorist mastermind called the Handler. In Enemies Among Us, Reagan gets a chance to capture the Handler, but is ordered by his superiors to stand down. Reagan ignores those orders and manages to catch him anyway, then delivers him up in a neat package. But the Handler himself has warned him that there are traitors in the US government, and they’ll both kill him and Reagan to keep their secrets covered. For the rest of the book, Reagan fights and strategizes to stay alive, to protect his friends, and to save the country.

Was Enemies Among Us any good? I didn’t think so.

I found the prose ponderous, and the story moved (for me) very slowly. I often complain about thrillers that never give you a chance to breathe, where the protagonist shrugs off more physical damage than real humans could survive. But in this story, I felt that the action scenes were separated by endless stretches of clumsy writing. The author told us too much, and not very artfully. (He also has a tendency to misplace modifiers.)

I’m sorry to say all that, because Enemies Among Us is very explicitly conservative and pro-American. I appreciated the intention, but I was bored.

Religion

The Kingdom and the zebras

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Photo credit: sutirta budimansutirtab. Unsplash license.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:1-4, ESV)

I’m still reading the next book I’ll be reviewing (it’s a little slow, but I also have other business demanding my time just now). Last night I filled the void with talk about my work. Tonight I sink even lower – I’m going to write down my thoughts, such as they are.

Jordan Peterson’s most famous animal anecdote concerns lobsters. But he also talks about zebras, and what he says of them intrigues me.

He tells of some biologists in Africa, observing herds of zebras. They found it impossible to track any single animal. The moment you blink or glance away, you lose the individual. It disappears into the herd.

So the researchers tried marking them with paint.

The marked zebras were immediately chased down and killed by lions.

Because the zebra’s safety is found in the anonymity of the herd.

People, Peterson notes, used to wonder why zebras have stripes. Evolutionists suggested the stripes helped them blend into the tall grass. But that doesn’t work. Zebras stick out like hi-viz vests against the backdrop of tall grass.

No, what zebras blend into is not the grass, but the herd. Each individual gets lost to sight among all that chaos of stripes. It’s the individuals who stand out – either due to deformity or weakness or age (old or young) who get eaten. Individuals are lost, but the herd goes on and remains strong.

Which leads me to think about The World.

Growing up in a pietist church, I had clear ideas about what the World is. Drunkenness, and gambling, and questionable entertainment. The singleminded pursuit of money. Compromising one’s values to gain power and status.

But it occurs to me that, in a real sense, the World is the Herd.

Continue reading The Kingdom and the zebras →
Uncategorized

Into the shallow end of the talent pool

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Photo credit, Getty Images. Unsplash license.

I’m not in a position to review a book for you tonight. Instead, I am reduced to talking about what I’ve been doing. I used to do this all the time, but personal blogging doesn’t seem to be “a thing” anymore. (And with good reason, no doubt, considering the world we live in. I’ll try to avoid specifics.)

I can announce to you that I was accepted, last Thursday (as I recall) as a book narrator on Amazon ACX. ACX is a sort of hub, where authors and narrators can find one another, make deals, and launch projects. I read a book on how to get involved with ACX, and I watched hours of videos on how to work with it. Then I jumped through some procedural hoops to finally qualify for my space in the system.

I had already poked around in ACX from the author side, looking idly to see if I could find a genuine Irishman to narrate my Erling books. One of the options for payment is percentage of royalties, and I figured if I could find one who’d take that, it might be worth doing.

That didn’t work out. Turns out (as I should have guessed) that you actually need prospects of earning some kind of decent royalties before you can ask anybody to spend hours in a sound booth in hopes of a piece of the action.

But now I’m in as a narrator. The skills I learned narrating Troll Valley can now (I hope) start paying off. (TV has, I’ll admit, certain flaws. I think I’ve learned something from my mistakes.)

There’s a database in which you can search for projects where Rights Holders (RH’s, as we professionals call them) have posted openings for auditions. You download a short printed excerpt, record your best performance of it, and upload the file for review.

I have posted 4 auditions so far. One a day, more or less. I intend to continue that strategy until somebody bites or I have a stroke.

My subtle strategy is to start at the bottom. Low paying, short books, so I can get my feet wet. Dull topics that nobody else wants. My concern at this point is not to get rich, but to get started, and to supplement my retirement income. I don’t need a lot. I didn’t make a lot doing translations, but it made all the difference in my income.

(Political note: The state of Minnesota is now extracting a larger deduction from my miniscule [well south of $500] monthly IRA distribution. Way to go, stickin’ it to the rich, Governor Tim!)

Most of the projects I’ve auditioned for have been sitting open for weeks or months. I suspect most of the RH’s have lost interest altogether, and I’m shouting into the wind. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

And that’s where I am.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Fairytale,’ by Alan Lee

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Beaches feel lonely when it’s cold. The ocean is too icy to enjoy, and the breeze makes the loveliness of nature remote and hard. Beautiful but sad, like missing someone you loved.

You probably know by now that I’m in the tank for Alan Lee. His Mackenzie August and Manny Ramirez books are great fun, and what I’ve called Christian-adjacent.

Dark Fairytale, book 16 of the Mackenzie August series, springs from an earlier installment, in which Mack,  a private eye in Roanoke, Virginia, was coerced into participating in a secret, to-the-death mixed martial arts tournament in Italy (he won, of course, because he’s still alive). In the course of that adventure, his fiancée Veronica (“Ronnie”) killed a very evil woman, in Mack’s defense. Still, she’s not a killer type. It still bothers her, years later. She asks Mack to locate that woman’s family and see if there’s some way she can make amends by helping them.

Mack is happy to do it, of course, but it proves a difficult job. The woman and her husband led secretive lives and have left few traces behind. When Mack starts asking questions, he gets pushback and a gang of furries (I kid you not) try to kill him and Manny. That doesn’t stop him, of course. When he and Ronnie finally go on the road to find the family, the trail takes them to Amish country in Ohio, and on to northern Virginia. They encounter a desperately dysfunctional family, and are faced with a Solomonic choice as to whether they should help them, and how. I thought I figured out the trick author Lee had up his sleeve, but I was delighted to find that a couple deeper tricks were concealed inside it.

The prose and dialogue in the Mack August books are excellent, but I think it’s the characterization that’s best. You’ll really love this cast of characters. Mack and Manny are a hoot to spend time with, as they motivate each other through mock-macho cross-talk. There’s real (fictional) love here, and real community and real eternal values.

Dark Fairytale is highly recommended. Cautions for adult situations and rough language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lady in the Lake,’ by Raymond Chandler

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The Gillerlain Company’s reception room looked even emptier than the day before. The same fluffy little blonde was tucked in behind the PBX in the corner. She gave me a quick smile and I gave her the gunman’s salute, a stiff forefinger pointing at her, the three lower fingers tucked back under it, and the thumb wiggling up and down like a western gun fighter fanning his hammer. She laughed heartily, without making a sound. This was more fun than she had had in a week.

I think most mystery fans wish Raymond Chandler had written more Philip Marlowe books. He burned hot, like the alcohol that consumed him, but pretty briefly as an artist. The Lady in the Lake is considered neither his best nor his worst novel. It also suffers from the movie they made out of it, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery (Elizabeth’s father). Montgomery chose to go all artsy with it, shooting the whole thing from Marlowe’s point of view, so that we only saw his face occasionally in a mirror. It’s awkward, and it doesn’t work very well. The novel deserves better than that.

Marlowe is hired by a businessman who wants him to find his wife, who has disappeared. She apparently went to their mountain lake cabin, and then traveled with a lover to Mexico, then back to Los Angeles. Then nothing. He knows she doesn’t want to be married to him anymore, but he’s concerned about her anyway.

Marlowe travels up to the mountain cabin, where he happens to witness the recovery of the body of another woman, the wife of a local, who drowned in the lake. Then the missing woman’s lover is murdered. And Marlowe realizes somebody has been lying to him.

The Lady in the Lake’s plot is a little complex (though not as confusing as some of Chandler’s other scenarios), and I thought it ended somewhat abruptly. But the prose is classic Chandler:

This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.

The book also features one of my favorite Marlowe side characters, the laconic Constable Jim Patton.

The Lady in the Lake is not the best Chandler, but definitely entertaining.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture