Author Archives: wjduquette

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About wjduquette

Author, software engineer, and Lay Dominican.

This and That

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So yesterday I arrived home at 10 PM from my business trip; that was two hours later than usual, as my plane out of Washington-Dulles was late because at the scheduled boarding time the pilots were still in Chicago. When I arrived home, I discovered that the power was out, had been out since about 6 PM, and they weren’t sure when it would come back on.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to have a low-carb supper when you’re trying not to open the refrigerator at all in hopes that the food won’t spoil before the power comes back on?

Be that as it may; the power came on around noon today (18 hours without power), and the stuff in the freezer is largely history. On top of that, it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit at our house–well, 100 degrees outside, since the power’s back on–and we are all trying to avoid doing much of anything at all, really. Later we’ll probably try to find a pool to swim in.

In other news, I’m a bit worried about Ian of Banana Oil. I’ve sent him a couple of e-mail messages since June 30th, and haven’t heard anything from him. Moreover, his blog hasn’t been updated since July 12th; if I’m not mistaken, all of the posts in July have been quotations from some book or other (the kind of post, in other words, which he preschedules when he knows he’s going to be too busy to blog); and as of today the blog is showing nothing but a WordPress database error. He’s a yankee in Shanghai; I hope nothing has happened to him.

The Wayfarer Redemption, by Sara Douglass

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This is the first book in what’s evidently a popular series; the fifth or sixth book has just come out, and Tor has issued a special low-priced printing of this book in the hopes of selling the whole set to a new crop of readers. Evidently they think well of it, and on the strength of that I bought a copy while we were on vacation. Unfortunately, I wasn’t terribly impressed.

But before I go into that, here are a few words about the book. It is set in yet another shadow of the archetypal Western European Feudal Swords & Sorcery Milieu. The country of Achar was founded a thousand years ago following the Wars of the Axe, in which the followers of the god Artor drove the People of the Wind and the People of the Horn–now collectively known as “The Forbidden”–into desolate regions to the north of Achar. After the wars, the Acharites, in keeping with Artor’s Way of Axe and Plough, cut down the forests, tilled the land, were fruitful and multiplied. As our story begins they are ruled by King Priam, and Artor is served by a church hierarchy known as the “Seneschal” (huh?). The Seneschal has a military arm, the Axe Wielders, who are led by one Axis Rivkahson, the BattleAxe of the Axe Wielders. Axis is the bastard son of Priam’s sister, Princess Rivkah, who died at this birth. Rivkah was married to Duke Searlas of Ichtar, and gave him a legitimate son, Bornehold, who is now the Duke; Axis and Bornehold hate each other passionately. Both love a noble woman named Faraday who is betrothed to Bornehold by her parents but nevertheless has given her heart to Axis. Already we have enough hatred to drive a moderately sized plot; but there is worse to come.

In accordance with the legendary Prophecy, of which none of the Acharites has heard, Axis’ unknown father has two sons: Axis, and the evil, fiendish, and uncanny Gorgrael, the Destroyer. Soon Gorgrael’s wraiths of ice and snow will begin to attack Achar from the north; the entire land will be made waste unless the Acharites can band together with the remnants of the Forbidden. Only united by Axis, the StarMan, and Faraday, the TreeFriend, can the three races defeat Gorgrael–otherwise, they will die.

On the face of it, this is a reasonably typical premise for an epic fantasy. So why didn’t I like it? First, the writing’s lousy. The prose is especially clunky for the first hundred or so pages, though it improves a bit after that. Douglass has no ear for names, some of which are laughable, and she moves her characters around like puppets. Sometimes they’ll have a fit of angst over something she wants them to do, but then they obediently do whatever the plot–that is, the Prophecy–wants them to do.

On top of that, there’s something about the book, beyond just the quality of the writing, that I found repellent.

Given all this, why is the series so popular? It’s possible that the writing improves; but why would readers have moved on to the second novel after reading the first? I think I know why, and it has to do with why I found the book so repellent. It’s all about the world view.

In N.T. Wright’s academic lingo, a “world view” is defined, in part, by two kinds of stories told by those who share the world view: stories they tell to bolster and strengthen their own world view, and stories they tell to subvert the world views of others. Some stories can work in both modes. The fantasy of C.S. Lewis, for example, is a prime example of work written from a Christian world view, which strengthens that world view among Christian readers, and which may well subvert non-Christian world views among other readers. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is an excellent example of fiction written specifically to subvert the Christian world view. (If you don’t believe me, Google some of Pullman’s recent interviews. Lewis makes him so mad he can hardly contain himself.)

Douglass tells a story in which the dominant civilization, which looks markedly Western European with its monarchy and church, is based on lies. The church is the guardian of those lies. The heroes, Axis and Faraday, must abandoned the lies of their childhood and embrace the Old Ways of the People of the Horn and the People of the Wind. The People of the Horn live in the remnants of the Great Forest of Avarinheim; they are strictly non-violent and live in harmony with nature. That is, they always apologize to the animals they kill for food or for blood sacrifice (!) to the Mother, a goddess who personifies Nature. If they attempt to retain their old beliefs, all of Achar will be laid waste.

Did I mention that none of the brothers of the Seneschal are shown in a good light? The leaders are narrow-minded, intolerant, and violent at best, and usually hypocritical liars to boot; and the one parish “priest” that we meet is a child molester.

What we have here is a story which attempts to subvert the institutions of our Western and Christian heritage in favor of (I’m guessing) a liberal, literary, (and most likely purely metaphorical) paganism. As such it’s a story which I’d naturally find repellent, and one which I figure will resonate with a certain class of reader, and sufficiently to overcome the weakness of the writing and the character development.

Anyway, I’m giving the rest of the series a miss–I’ll just have to find something else to read on the plane during next week’s business trip.

Woo-Hoo!

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Not only has the ‘net connection been working reliably since my last post, but I picked my laptop up from the shop this afternoon. It’s got a shiny new keyboard, a new optical drive, and it appears to be working just fine.

For the last week I’ve been using the kids’ eMac (that’s one step down from an iMac), using my external backup drive as the boot disk. That works, but in order to preserve my backup I’ve been avoiding saving anything to disk as much as possible. That, fortunately, is no longer an issue…which means that, at long last, I am able to download the pictures I took during our vacation. Approximately 400 of them, which will probably be winnowed down to 150 or so. I’ve been eager to get to it, but haven’t been able. It also means that I should be able to write a book review or too, so expect a burst of activity this weekend (it’s certainly going to be too hot to do much of anything else!).

Now That’s Fame

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Prompted by a blog post I read, I typed my full name into the Google search box, just to see what would come up. (Yeah, sure I’ve done it before; but it’s been quite a while.) I’m not used to the keyboard I’m using, though, and my fingers stumbled, and what I actually entered was

William H. Duquett

I left the “e” off of the end of my name. And so help me, Google responded with this:

Did you mean William H. Duquette?

Is that cool or what?

Hmmmm.

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I spent some time on the phone with Earthlink this afternoon, and did enough troubleshooting to prove to them that my connection problems were not in my house–that it was, in fact, AT&T’s fault. The nice lady with an Indian accent wrote up a trouble ticket…and, astonishingly, my connection was back up just a few minutes after I got off of the phone. It’s been up ever since. This is remarkable, as it’s been down most of the time for the past week, and has usually only been up during the early morning.

Not that I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth, mind you, but I’m quite curious to know whether there’s any causal relationship, here, or whether it just happens to be up this evening.

In other news, I still don’t have my laptop back from the shop; it seems they are Waiting For A Part. Ugh.

Update: when I tried to post this, the connection went down. It came back after I power-cycled the DSL modem, which is a nice change.

Connection Troubles

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Howdy! I’ve been quiet for the last few days partly because my laptop is still in the shop, but mostly because our DSL connection has been really flaky recently–off more often than it’s on. I’m starting to look into that with the tech support folks, but posting is likely to continue to be minimal until it’s resolved. Just FYI.

I’m Back

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Jane and I and our kids have just gotten home from a week’s vacation during which we had a wonderful time and no Internet access. I’m still catching up, and my laptop won’t be repaired until next week, so there won’t be any Ex Libris for a while; in fact I might skip July altogether.

I’ll probably have more to say later about our vacation; for now, suffice it to say that we went to the beach, we took lots of walks, we swam in the ocean, we went on a ferris wheel, and did all sorts of other delightful things, and it was very restful and tiring at the same time. ‘Twas wonderful.

Spilled Milk

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So this morning, through no fault of her own, Jane spilled a full glass of milk across the kitchen table…and onto my laptop, on which I was reading the morning’s news. I turned it off, and dried it off, and let it air dry during the day, and it appears to be working now. Except for two things: the CapsLock key doesn’t work (why? The milk didn’t land on that end of the keyboard), and I can only get a capital “I” using the shift key on the righthand side of the keyboard. The shift key on the lefthand side of the keyboard works fine for every key…but “I”.

Wait a minute….the “I” is working again….but the CapsLock still doesn’t work.

Now if only I could understand why “LeftShift-i” wasn’t giving me “I” to begin with. I can’t think of any reasons that make sense. I can think of reasons why the “i” key might fail altogether, and I can think of reasons why the LeftShift key might fail altogether, but I can’t think of any reason why that combination, and only that combination, would fail.

And how come my web browser says “Display a Menu” on the status line when I press the CapsLock key?

I’m confused.

Update: Now my “Down Arrow” key doesn’t work, and the guy at the computer store said, “By all means bring it in–it needs to get cleaned out as soon as possible. In the meantime, leave it turned off.” So I’ve hooked up my external backup drive to my kids’ eMac (and ain’t it slow, though!) and I’m presently copying all of my user files from my external backup drive to my other external drive so that I can run off of my external backup drive without feeling like I’ve got no backup. It looks like it’s got about two more hours to go. Then I can begin to think about paying the bills.

Note to readers: if you don’t have a good backup of your computer, make one. This can happen to you.

Back to Virtue, by Peter Kreeft

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Some while back I reviewed C.S. Lewis‘ The Abolition of Man, an outstanding book on the decay of a common sense of morality in our culture and the effect it was likely to have on society. Peter Kreeft’s Back to Virtue reads like a companion to Lewis’ work–except that by the time Kreeft wrote it in the late 1980’s, the problems Lewis foresaw were already here. And they are still with us today. I was fascinated to read the following passage:

We have lost objective moral law for the first time in history. The philosophies of moral positivism (that morality is posited or made by man), moral relativism, and subjectivism have become for the first time not a heresy for rebels but the reigning orthodoxy of the intellectual establishment. University faculty and media personnel overwhelmingly reject belief in the notion of any universal and objective morality.

Yet our civilization, especially the two groups just mentioned, talks a good game of ethics. Ethical discussion has grown into the gap left by a dying ethical vision. It is the kind of discussion Saint Paul described as “ever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth.” (Perhaps he had a prophetic vision of our modern TV talk shows!) It is intellectual ping-pong, “sharing views” rather than seeking truth. For how can we seek something we do not believe in? The notions that there is objective truth in the realm of morality and that an open mind is therefore not an end in itself but a means to the end of finding truth are labeled “simplistic” by the intellectual establishment when, in fact, they are simple sanity and common sense.

As I read this, written twenty years ago, I had a vision of virtually all of the progressive Episcopalian rhetoric I’ve read over the last three or four years. Kreeft nailed it; he absolutely nailed it. I could quote more; I was constantly reading bits of it to Jane as I went through it.

As the father of four children, I want my kids to grow up knowing right from wrong; and I want them to be able to articulate their knowledge. This book is going to help me do that, because it’s going to help me do it for myself. I’ve read it once, and I think I’m going to re-reading it fairly often for a while; there’s a wealth of information and practical advice that I can definitely use. If you’re concerned about where society’s going–and what you personally can do about it–you should read this book. I recommend it highly.

Bystander: A History of Street Photography, by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz

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Some while back I reviewed Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography. While reading that book I was particularly taken with his description of various street photographers, notably Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Atget. And given that I take most of my pictures while out-and-about, walking hither-and-yon, I was curious to learn what other photographers had done in similar circumstances.

I asked around, and was pointed at this book. I had to order it on-line, and at $50 it was rather expensive to be buying sight-unseen; but it came recommended, and I was still in the early days of my passion for photography–I find that when I take up a new hobby, I almost go out looking for reasons to spend money, not a good habit but a common one, I suppose–and I went ahead and ordered it. My chief concern was that it would be too lightweight, that I’d read through it in a couple of hours and wonder what I’d spent my money on.

That was a number of months ago; and as I just finished it this evening I suppose I can’t call it lightweight. In fact, it’s quite a detailed exposition of street photography, from its earliest origins in the 19th century up through the final decades of the 20th. If I have a complaint it’s that there aren’t enough pictures–but then, there are seldom enough pictures in a book like this–and that the pictures aren’t well integrated with the text. This was done on purpose, I guess, to let the pictures stand alone, but it would have made it simpler if the pictures were closer to where they were discussed. Also, the tone of the text is rather more hifalutin’ than in Newhall’s book–so that instead of devouring it in a couple of days, as I did Newhall’s book, I spread it out in small segments over several months.

On the whole, though, I have to pronounce myself satisfied. I’ve now been exposed to the work of a great many skilled street photographers, and learned a great deal about their motivations. I’ve also taken a great deal more photographs, many of them in the street, since I acquired the book. And I’ve learned a few things.

First, it’s difficult to do real street photography walking around a quite suburban neighborhood. Street photography delights in odd juxtapositions of people, and you simply don’t get enought people on the streets. And then, if I go downtown there are more people on the streets…but I find taking pictures of folks I don’t know rather daunting, especially since I don’t really want to call attention to myself. Consequently, my forays into real street photography have been extremely limited to date. But as I intend to continue walking, and I intend to continue taking pictures (I’ve made–and kept–over a thousand exposures since January) I rather expect I’ll take a few more that qualify.