Fiction, Reviews

‘Common Tragedy,’ by Alan Lee

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I never hesitate about buying one of Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August books (though apparently I’ve missed a couple in the series. I’ll have to remedy that). Common Tragedy is 15th in sequence. Mack August stands in the hardboiled tradition, but he’s taken Robert B. Parker’s sunnier approach and turned the dial up to “cheery.” If Raymond Chandler is “Noir,” Alan Lee has to be described as “Blanc.” Mack August is a big, strong, happy man who loves his life, loves his wife and kid, and enjoys company so much that he lives in a house with his father, his father’s girlfriend (the sheriff), his US Marshal friend Mannie Rodriguez and Mannie’s girlfriend Noelle, his own wife, and his dog, and they take an “it takes a village” approach to raising the kid.

They live in a house in a nice neighborhood, complete with a Home Owner’s Association. One evening, the HOA president hosts a meeting/picnic for the board in his yard, next door to Vickie Plemmons, the past president, a woman with a drinking problem and a rebellious, drug addict daughter. When Vickie disappears inside her house and doesn’t return, a neighbor woman goes inside to check on her. She finds Vickie and her daughter both dead of drug overdose.

It looks like a double suicide. The police want it to be a double suicide. But Mack is dubious. For one thing, it’s unclear how the drugs were administered. Working without a client, just out of a sense of community obligation, Mack starts asking questions. And it’s clear that a lot of his neighbors have things to hide.

Mack’s work is both hindered and helped by another neighbor, a crime podcaster, who has been secretly filming and recording his neighbors for some time, and soon starts racking up followers for his viral podcast.

On top of that, it turns out that Mannie’s girlfriend Noelle is pregnant, and she’s reluctant to tell Manny about it.

Common Tragedy is a fast-moving, amusing, and tragic story with a deeper message. I think the author may be a Christian, though his characters don’t always act like it. Highly recommended, with cautions, mostly for language.

Reading

In praise of Phonics

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Photo credit: Michał Parzuchowski. Unsplash license.

My favorite teacher in junior high school was Mr. B_______ . He was a tall, lean, austere-looking man who served in many ways as my role model. He was also head of the English department, and I’m pretty sure he made a major mistake in that role.

I remember him saying to the class one day, “People ask me why we don’t teach Phonics in our schools. My answer to that is that English is not a phonic language.”

Which turned out to be partly true but short-sighted. If he were still alive, I hope he’d have admitted that.

I was reading the latest issue of Thinking Minnesota, the magazine of the Center of the American Experiment, a local think tank. It featured an article about teaching literacy in schools, and sketched the history of the Phonics/Whole Language controversy. “Whole Language” was a theory that began to gain influence in the 1950s. It involved students recognizing words on sight, using flash cards, rather than through the words’ spelling. I was not taught to read under the Whole Language model, but I know a guy who attended the same schools, five years younger than me, who did. When he reads anything, he tells me, and comes to a word he doesn’t know, he just guesses its meaning and skips over it. He has no other tools. That’s what he was taught in school under Whole Language theory.

For my own part, I remember being taught to “sound out” words in my classes. That was Phonics training. They taught it in school, but I remember the day I actually “got” it, and that was at home.

It was summer vacation. Somebody (my grandfather, I think) had given me, as a Christmas present, a subscription to the summer edition of The Weekly Reader. The Weekly Reader was a thin magazine (it no longer exists) published for school children as an aid to reading education. I had just gotten my first copy, and had sat down to read it. But I hit a word I didn’t know, and went to Mom.

“You can sound it out yourself,” she told me. “Look at the letters. The first letter is ‘b.’ What sound does ‘b’ make?”

I said, “buh.”

“Right,” she said. “Now the next letter is ‘e.’ What sound does ‘e’ make?”

And she walked me through the word (it only had four letters), and when I had them all, I sounded it out “BE-AR.” Not exactly phonetic, of course; she had to explain that you sometimes have to search around a little, but by means of context and running through familiar words, you could generally work it out.

And soon I was tackling one word after another. I was genuinely thrilled. I’d found the key to literature! From then on, I lived more and more inside books.

I suppose a large percentage of our readers are younger than me, and therefore Whole Language-trained.

If you can’t “sound out” words, I promise you it’s not a complex art. I learned it before my brain was fully developed. I bet you could work it out in an afternoon. Simply vocalize your way through the letters.

Just a suggestion.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mildred Pierced’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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By now I’ve read and reviewed the majority of the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s amusing Toby Peters novels. Mildred Pierced is the second to last in the series, and I’m pretty sure I’ve covered the final one already. But I don’t read them in order. I read them based on how much I like (or am interested in) the celebrity client involved in each mystery. Mildred Pierced must – as any old film afficionado will guess – involve Joan Crawford, an actress who has never appealed to me in any way. Hence my delay in reading it (though she nosed in ahead of that Commie, Charlie Chaplin).

Mildred Minck is the unfaithful, abusive wife of Sheldon Minck, LA’s worst dentist, who shares an office with PI Toby Peters. Somebody killed her in a park with a crossbow bolt, and it is Sheldon’s great misfortune to have been seen standing near the body, holding a crossbow. Sheldon swears to Toby that he didn’t do it (and it’s hard to imagine a putz like Sheldon successfully murdering anybody) and asks Toby to prove his innocence. Therefore, Toby must question the witness, who just happens to be movie star Joan Crawford. To his surprise, she wants to hire him too – to keep her name out of the papers.

Now Toby has to investigate the people who put a crossbow into Sheldon’s hands – a crackpot group of proto-survivalists. Meanwhile, Toby’s sister-in-law is dying of cancer, and his cop brother Phil is contemplating retiring from the force.

Snappy, fast-moving, full of oddball characters, Mildred Pierced keeps faith with the template of the Toby Peters novels. I liked it a lot, even if I don’t like Joan Crawford much. Recommended. No serious content warnings are called for.

Music, Religion

‘O Gladsome Light’

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I often post old hymns here, especially on Fridays. But I’ve never posted one this old — it’s “O Gladsome Light” (Phos Hylarion) a hymn still used in Orthodox churches, and first known from a manuscript around 300 AD. But it could be older.

I should mention that others promote a hymn called the Oxyrhynchus Hymn. You can decide for yourself.

Have a good weekend.

Uncategorized

The Uber of 2 evils

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Photo credit: Jon Tyson (jontyson). Unsplash license.

“How’s it going?” a hypothetical interlocutor asks me.

Well, stuff is happening. My life is not dull. On a positive note, I just got an opportunity (not a lead-pipe cinch, but a possibility) to get involved in a writing project. I’m not going to tell you what it is right now. If I make the cut, I’ll let you know. If not, I’ll plausibly deny any and all knowledge of the whole matter, an eternally believable dodge in my case.

I have, I think I’ve mentioned before, two separate editing jobs with deadlines coming up soon. One pays money, the other (I can only hope) treasures in Heaven.

Have I done any more driving for Uber Eats? Not this week. I’ve been busy with the editing stuff, and – can I be frank with you? – I’m still a little scared. I’ve learned a lot in my first few runs, and one thing I’ve learned is that my Android phone is way underpowered. The many glitches I’ve experienced in the Uber Eats app are (I now suspect) due to my phone just running out of memory. I’d already decided to restart the thing after each delivery. Now I plan to refuse all “stacked” deliveries – deliveries where you pick up from two vendors located close to each other, and then deliver both in a single run. Every time I try that, the app refuses to give me directions, and I have to switch to Google Maps. I’ll see if doing only singles makes it better.

But not tonight. More editing has come in. I figure I need to prioritize the editing, even though shirking Uber Eats embarrasses me.

A friend suggested I get a new phone. I told him that if I could afford a new phone, I probably wouldn’t be driving for Uber Eats.

Life, said the wise man, is a choice of the lesser of two embarrassments.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mission 37,’ by Michael Berk

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In England after World War II, Jack Monroe is a doctor in the US Army Air Corps. To his surprise, he’s ordered to go to Germany and observe a top-secret autopsy along with an international group of physicians. The subject of the procedure is supposed to be an obscure German named Martin Bormann. Jack considers the autopsy perfunctory and unprofessional, as if somebody is covering tracks. Afterward he can’t resist going see the English doctor who was also present, only to learn that the man has been run down by a car.

Inquiring further, he gets into contact with Simon and Dionne, a couple of young people who turn out to be agents for a shadowy organization of Holocaust survivors. And that leads to all the intrigue and adventure that follow in Michael Berk’s Mission 37, first volume in a series.

The book wasn’t bad, all in all. It was more like a mystery than the usual thriller nowadays, as the main focus is on the puzzle of Martin Bormann’s fate rather than on action and violence. There is action and violence, but our hero is more often rescued than active in the fights. (The solution to the mystery, I ought to mention, did surprise me.)

There is romance and sex in this book, but the sex happens offstage.

The writing was passable, better than a lot that I see these days. My main complaint was typesetting – there are whole sections where the quotation marks disappear for no apparent reason, making the dialogue hard to understand. I suspect the fault is in A.I. proofreading.

I did appreciate the book’s pro-Israel slant, which is not only rare but brave nowadays.

I recommend Mission 37 moderately.

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized

Surprised by A.I.

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I found this video on YouTube. It seems to me both wonderful and troubling.

First of all, Jack Lewis is using “my” microphone. It’s a Blue Yeti, and I have one exactly like it, even unto the color. (Or “colour,” as he would have spelled it.)

Secondly, it’s pretty well done, except for a couple glitches. The voice appears to be cloned from Lewis’ well-known The Four Loves recordings. (On the downside, I’ve read a statement from one of Lewis’s friends, who says that that was not his normal speaking style.)

The troubling aspect is – of course – just that this is A.I. I’m almost obligated to hate A.I., which took a much-needed job away from me.

The very idea of resurrecting actual humans through A.I. is just disturbing to many of us, whether it’s affected our bottom lines or not. It seems creepy, like necromancy. However, I’m not sure that creepy feeling is to be trusted. When radio was a new technology, there was a fair number of sincere Christians who denounced it as demonic – voices coming through the air; that has to come from the domain of the Prince of the Powers of the Air! (For our young readers, that’s a biblical reference to the devil (Ephesians 2:2 in the King James Version).

But the bottom line, for me, is that I found it kind of fun.

I’d like to see more of this sort of stuff, and no doubt I will. Maybe somebody can recreate Moody preaching, or Jonathan Edwards declaiming “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (contemporaries reported that he read it from a manuscript, in a very rote voice).

The best thing about A.I. might be that it could kill Hollywood. We can bring back the great actors of the past and cast them in new movies, bypassing Wokeness. I’d love to see a young Clint Eastwood playing Travis McGee, for instance. Authors could have total control of film adaptations. Who wants to do an A.I. production of The Year of the Warrior for 50 bucks? I might be able to spring for half of that.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Medusa Protocol,’ by Rob Hart

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A friend of mine, a Vietnam veteran, used to talk about a war buddy of his. “He loved the war,” my friend said. “He was addicted to the action. He never wanted to go home – and he never did.”

If violence can be an addiction, can it be treated like other addictions, with a 12-step program? That’s the original conception behind Rob Hart’s The Medusa Protocol, book 2 in his Assassins Anonymous thriller series.

Astrid is a new member of Assassins Anonymous, which is like Alcoholics Anonymous but way more secretive, because all the members have mortal enemies looking for them. She’s on her way to a meeting one night when she’s abducted, ending up in a remote prison on a South American island.

She’d been brought into the group by Mark, her sponsor. Using the CIA resources he still maintains, he manages to figure out where Astrid has been taken. He and another group member pack up their kits to go after her. Only one thing is unusual for men like them – they’ve made a commitment not to kill anyone along the way.

In some ways, I found The Medusa Protocol a very satisfactory adventure story. The characters were interesting and the theme – personal redemption – was appealing and sometimes inspiring, occasionally skirting close to Christianity.

My big problem with the book, though, was plausibility. The willing suspension of disbelief. We’re supposed to believe that it’s possible to renounce killing and go into firefights relying on paintball guns, tasers, and martial arts skills, and hope to prevail. I’m only a (former) playacting fighter in the medieval sword fight field, but I’m pretty confident that when you enter “kinetic” situations like that, people tend to get killed whatever you do. The idealists first, of course, but where bullets fly, “friendly fire” tends to happen.

I’m also expected (yet again) to believe in a small woman who somehow awes much larger and stronger men possessing equal training, on the basis of her amazing Girl Power, or something. Also she employs one life-and-death trick that seemed pretty darn iffy to me.

Still, if you’re looking for a thriller on a higher moral level, The Medusa Protocol is pretty entertaining. (I might note that the author employs the annoying [to me] present tense for most of the story.)

Religion, Uncategorized

The quest for the saint

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Medieval altar to Saint Olaf preserved in Nidaros Cathedral.

Someone on Basefook brought this project to my attention. The idea is to locate the lost bones of St. Olaf (best remembered as a character in my Erling novels) for scientific and cultural purposes.

For a saint as problematic as he was in life, St. Olaf swung disproportionate weight in the religious life of the European Middle Ages. His shrine in Nidaros Cathedral was a rich and elaborate one, making the city of Trondheim a very popular pilgrimage destination (perhaps people calculated that the hard trip over Norwegian terrain would earn them extra penance points). Pilgrims streamed in from all over Europe, lifting up prayers, looking for miracles, and spending money. Sigrid Undset describes such pilgrimages in several of her novels.

During the Reformation, Olaf’s shrine was demolished and broken up, the proceeds going to the king. Yet it seems that the bones themselves were not destroyed. Instead, they seem to have been re-buried covertly. Anyone who knew the secret of their location did not pass it on. But now there’s this project to rediscover them using modern scientific techniques.

My Basefook friends have expressed mixed views on the project. Many of them are – reasonably – concerned that if the bones are recovered, they will once again become the object of pilgrimages and devotion. We Protestants don’t hold with that stuff, and I agree.

Yet, all things considered, I’m for it. I believe in freedom of religion, so let the Roman Catholics do what they like. If it serves as a counterweight to the advance of Islam in Europe, it’s the lesser of two evils, it seems to me. What I’d like is for Lutheran Norway to be preserved, but I’ll take a Catholic Norway over a Muslim one.

Also, I’ll be interested in what analysis of the bones will reveal.

I signed the petition. I’ll be watching the project’s progress with interest.

Fiction, Non-fiction

New Culture Commentary from Klavans

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There’s a new show on movies, games, books, and other cultural artifacts, and it’s hosted by Andrew and Spencer Klavan. Episode two Klavans on the Culture dropped yesterday on a subtle horror movie based on a small, popular game, Exit 8.

The movie doesn’t have much to talk about. Like the game, it’s more of a feeling than a story. The hosts spend half of this episode talking about ghost stories and recommending a couples recent books.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture