It’s only fair to say that I was under the influence of a lingering sinus
infection when I read this book, and this might have jaundiced my view,
but for once Wodehouse has failed to impress me. The book was published
in 1971, just a few years before Wodehouse’ death, and frankly it feels
tired. Here’s the plot: Bertie goes to visit his Aunt Dahlia, and sits
idly for the rest of the book. While he’s sitting, doing not much, a
variety of complications appear, take their turn on the stage, and then
evaporate. He’s briefly engaged to marry Madeline Bassett; and then
suddenly he’s not. He’s briefly engaged to marry Florence Craye; and
then he’s not. He’s briefly in danger of being arrested for stealing an
article of silver from one of his aunt’s guests (an accusation which, for
once, he is innocent of, even if the article is found in his possession),
and then suddenly he is not. He’s briefly in danger of being seriously
embarassed by publication of the Junior Ganymede club book, and then he
isn’t. In fact, (and this is the crowning glory, if glory is the word
I’m looking for, which it isn’t) at the conclusion Jeeves agrees to
destroy all of the pages in the club book which refer to Bertie–and this
for no particular reason.

Even Jove nods, they say, and I fear this time he nodded right off. The
plot has lots of elements but no complexity; with the exception of Bertie,
Jeeves, and Aunt Dahlia the continuing characters (Madeline, Florence,
Spode) are but shadows of themselves.

I dunno. It’s possible that my mood affected my reading, but I think it
more likely that this one’s just a stinker.

I continue my Chesterton streak with this slim biography of St. Thomas
Aquinas.

St. Thomas was a Dominican priest; and though you may not of heard of him
he was also one of the world’s most influential philosophers; indeed, his
writings still provide the theological foundation for Roman Catholic
doctrine.

A little history. You all remember the Greek philosophers, Plato and
Aristotle. St. Paul, St. Augustine, and many of the other early church
fathers were greatly influenced by what’s called neo-platonism; they
identified Jesus Christ, the Word of God, with the neo-platonic “logos”.
Because of neo-platonism’s emphasis on the ideal, there was a tendency
in the Christian followers of Plato to emphasize the goodness of the
spirit and the wickedness of the flesh, sometimes to the extent of saying
that the flesh and the material world are altogether evil.

Now, this is part of the Manichean heresy, and has never been acceptable
Christian doctrine–after all, God created the world and then said that
it was good. Jesus Christ, so the early church councils decided (and so
we believe today) was fully divine and fully human–and if fully human,
then partially material, ergo, the material world cannot be evil.

As Thomas approached adulthood, the work of Aristotle was becoming known
in Europe once again, mostly through the work of a muslim named Averroes,
and because Averroes had added some decidely problematic ideas of his own,
Aristotle was acquiring a bad name among churchmen. It was Thomas,
reading Aristotle afresh, who “baptized” his work and in so doing slew the
dragon of Manicheanism.

In my Intro to Philosophy class in college we didn’t study either
Aristotle or St. Thomas; we skipped straight from Plato to Descartes, and
then on to David Hume. And looking back on it, I’m
very sorry we did so, for I’m acquiring a taste for Aquinas, mostly
because everybody since has gotten it all wrong. Let’s look at David
Hume to see why.

David Hume was an empiricist. Following Locke and Barclay, he believed
that we can only know what we perceive with our senses–a seemingly
reasonable starting point, but coupled with the notion that Hume wasn’t
sure he could trust his senses it led, in the end, to solipsism–the idea
that we can’t be sure that anything exists but ourselves.

In my view, this is utter nonsense. Reality bites, as they say; I’ve long
thought that any philosophy that doesn’t take the existence of objective
reality as axiomatic is looney-tunes. The difficulty for me, then, is
that the only prominent philosophy I’d been familiar with that takes the
existence of objective reality is axiomatic is materialism, the notion
that natural world alone exists. As a Christian, materialism really isn’t
my cup of tea either.

And then I picked up Chesterton’s book on St. Thomas, and lo and
behold–unlike those who follow him, St. Thomas doesn’t attempt to prove
everything from a miniscule set of first principles. Not for him the foolish game of
pretending to know less than we do. Instead, with common sense
not shown by philosophers as a class, he accepts God’s creation–the
universe we live in–as a given.

Imagine–all this time I’ve been a Thomist, and I didn’t even know it.

Anyway, I liked the book a whole lot. And I’m clearly going to have to
spend some quality time with St. Thomas.

That’s right, we’ve finally signed up for DSL service. It’s supposed to take “3 to 5 days” for the local phone company to do their bit, at which point Earthlink will mail us the installation kit. I’ll keep you all posted.

This sequel to Legacies continues the story of Alucius,
nightsheep herder and horse trooper, as the political situation develops
and he learns more about his world. He’s now married, and (thanks to his
exploits in the previous book) is a captain in the Iron Valley Militia.
All he really wants to do is complete his term of service and return to
his life as a herder. But there are two obstacles to that dream: his
skill, and his Talent. He’s too good a commander to be allowed to leave
the service, and though he’s worked hard to keep his Talent a secret,
he didn’t reckon with the Lord-Protector of Lanachrona.

It seems that in the dim distant past, the entire continent of Corea, of
which the Iron Valleys are a very small part, was ruled by a government
called the Duarchy. It was a golden age, so the legends go, in which
Talent and technology were combined, though it had some
nasty flaws that led in the end to a complete societal collapse all
across the continent. Few of the Duarchy’s artifacts remain in Alucius’
day; the most obvious is a road network of imperishable stone. But the
Lord-Protector of Lanachrona has a wondrous device, the last remaining
Table of the Recorder. A person with sufficient Talent and the proper
training can use the Table of the Recorder to see events anywhere in the
world, at the present moment or any moment in the recent past. The Table
of the Recorder has an interesting blind spot, however–whether
unavoidably or by design, highly Talented individuals are invisible to it.
Their surroundings, however, are not.

The absence of a person in the table where interesting things are going on
is therefore interesting information. The absence of a person in the
table where your spies indicate that a person should be is therefore
interesting information. As the book progresses, the Lord-Protector has
a shrewd notion that Alucius is very talented indeed. And as it has long
been the Lord-Protector’s dream to annex the Iron Valleys, you know that
Alucius isn’t going to have a quiet time between now and retirement.

Meanwhile, in a vault deep in the grass-lands of Illegea, a nomad warchief
is given access to weapons of the Duarchy that have lain in suspended
animation for a thousand years: twenty pteridons and sky lances of the
Myrmidons of the Duarchy. With himself and nineteen of his fighters
awing on pteridon back, and all of the clans of Illegea united under him,
Edyss thinks it’s a fine time to take on the decadent city-dwellers.

On the whole, this is a rather more satisfactory read than its
predecessor; there’s plenty of action, and we actually get some
interesting (and surprising) answers about the history of Alucius’ world.
However, I’m quite curious to see where Modesitt takes this next–the next step
isn’t at all obvious.

I was looking for Google-Whacks (a Google-Whack is a pair of words that yields exactly one page when you Google them), and found the above pair. Here’s the page Google found; if anyone can explain to me why it exists, I’ll be much obliged to them.

Some while ago, Ian Hamet wrote a
lengthy post about one of the great comics of the early days of the
silver screen, Buster
Keaton. And so when I was at Fry’s Electronics the other day, and
found a DVD of Keaton’s The General on sale for the whopping sum
of $4.95 (eat your heart out, Ian) I nabbed it, and tonight we watched it.

In this flick, Keaton is a train engineer with two loves–his girl, and
his locomotive. And then the Civil War breaks out, and honor–and his
girl’s family–demands that he join the army. He can’t, of course,
because he’s more useful to the South as an engineer, but his girl
doesn’t buy it. Snub, snub.

And then some Union soldiers make the mistake of stealing his locomotive,
the “General”. Keaton grabs the next locomotive, and they’re off!

Let me tell you, this is some seriously funny stuff–it’s like a
live-action Warner Bros. cartoon. There are train chases, misfiring
cannons, a damsel in distress, slapstick aplenty, plus lots of dangerous stunts–and
then you realize that Keaton did all his own stunts. So did Daffy Duck,
but somehow it’s more impressive when Keaton does it.

The film quality was pretty good, considering; the low price shows up
mostly in the soundtrack. It’s a silent film, of course, so the folks who
produced the DVD added a soundtrack of classical music standards played
seemingly at random. There’s a battle scene near the end with cannons
and rifles going off, and big bursts of smoke drifting across the valley,
all to the pleasant, peaceful strains of the Blue Danube waltz. For a
moment I thought I was watching Dr. Strangelove.

It’s not the funniest movie I’ve ever seen; the pacing is a little too
slow for that. But it was definitely $4.95 well-spent.

I like this book, and I’m not entirely sure why. I liked it the first
time I read it, and I wasn’t sure why that time either. In fact, I liked
it better this time than that time. It’s a long, slow book, but something
about it grabs me. The longer Anthony Trollope novels grab
some people that way, and I imagine it’s the same kind of effect.

Anyway, this is the story of a farm boy named Alucius. His father went
off to fight a border war when he was a baby and never came back;
consequently, he’s been raised by his grandparents and his mother. I
called him a farm boy; in fact, he’s what’s called a “herder”, and he
helps his grandfather raise and herd nightsheep, large, tolerably fierce
sheep that grow a special kind of wool–properly processed, it becomes a
pressure-sensitive fabric called nightsilk. Nightsilk undergarments, if
properly cut to your body, will stop a bullet.

Of course, tending nightsheep is a lot of work, and it takes a particular
kind of Talent to do it well. The Talent lets you control the nightsheep,
and can also help you detect sandwolves and sanders before they attack.
All herders have a touch of the Talent, some more than others; if they
didn’t, they wouldn’t be herders. Townsfolk with herder forebears
sometimes have it as well.

The early part of Alucius’ life is what you’d expect…working with the
nightsheep, learning how to card the wool and process the nightsilk, a
variety of chores, the occasional trip into town, the occasional daylong
party at someone’s stead. But then he comes of age, and is drafted into
the militia; Alucius’ small country is under attack, and he’s needed to
defend it. Fortunately, thanks to the Talent is that he’s a
first-class shot.

The book follows his career in the militia as a horse-trooper and scout,
his eventual capture, and his subsequent career until his return home.
Along the way he learns a lot more about his Talent and about his
world, as do we, and a variety of interesting things happen.

And when you get to the end of the book, you say, “Well, that was
interesting…I wonder what the point was.”

And yet, for some reason I was happy to read it again. Weird.

So Anne, my two-year-old, and James, my four-year-old, are sitting next to me, and I witness this exchange.

Anne: I’m very pretty.
James: Yes, Anne, you’re very pretty.
Anne: (looking at James) You’re very smart!

Hmmmmm.

On June 3rd and 4th I attended the Plano-West conference in Long Beach,
California; I seem to have been almost the only blogger present, as I’ve
not seen any in-person reports anywhere on the ‘net. For the benefit,
then, of my fellow orthodox Episcopalians here’s a report of what went on.
If you’re one of my regular readers feel free to skip this, as I won’t
be providing a whole lot of context.

Continue reading →

I’m back from my conference, which I hope to say more about later today; first, though, I need to deal with accumulated paperwork and such-like.