Dean Koontz’s Uneven Odds

Dean Koontz, prolific writer of popular supernatural thrillers, is also a craftsman who cares about the quality of his writing.  Here, for example, is the first sentence of Odd Apocalypse:

Near sunset of my second full day as guest in Roseland, crossing the immense lawn between the main house and the eucalyptus grove, I halted and pivoted, warned by instinct.

With six phrases and two precise verbs Koontz has laid out the landscape, characterized the narrator as a guest with “instinct” given to exploring alone, and added tension to the atmosphere.  The easy flow of the sentence halts with the narrator.  We don’t have to wait even one more sentence for the supernatural mystery to begin:  A woman on a black stallion gallops silently through the narrator.  This writing is effective and efficient. 

Koontz’s affable narrator Odd Thomas allows the writer to keep a “buoyant” tone (Odd’s word for his own outlook) through a ghastly tale.  “In addition to being a pretty good short-order cook, I have an occasional prophetic dream,” Thomas explains, mixing normal with paranormal as if it’s no big deal.  The more we read, the more we like this unassuming guy.  He empathizes with others, and his disarming modesty often does disarm aggressors, (though not massive mutant pig people in Odd Apocalypse).  Unlike a cool Bourne or  Bond, this guy is reluctant to hurt anyone, and liable to muck things up.  Even hiding from flesh-eating beasts, Odd has to fight the urge to sneeze.    While he sees the world as “a war zone” where we will all lose everything we love and life itself, “Yet,” he concludes, “everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy” (16).  Reluctant to experience pain but unafraid of death, Odd repeats a prayer that his grandmother taught him, “Spare me that I may serve” (OA 14), and boldly goes forward.  For the future readers of his "memoir," he politely bleeps out cuss words.   

Writing in the character of Odd, Koontz sometimes crosses a line where the reader stops believing in the story and wonders instead at the judgement of the story writer.  Would a 22 year-old dropout itinerant short-order cook draw analogies to the “welcome wagon” and office politics?   Would he quote Shakespeare, citing act and scene numbers?  Would he know Eliot, James, Twain, classic Hitchcock movies, 1920 architect Addison Mizner, Silence of the Lambs and The Love Bug?  These sound more like references that would come to the mind of a Baby Boomer who has had years to sample literature and pop culture, not a young man who has had a lot more on his mind.

Update:  Before I get to some things about the novels that have detracted from their effect, I want to report on what happened when I completed reading Deeply Odd a few hours after I posted this article.  The story drew me on, page by page.  As I finished, a storm was agitating trees outside my window more with each clap of thunder.  Then two cockroaches flew across my room and met on the wall above my bed.  Carrying around Koontz's world in my imagination, I went after those roaches as if they were life-threatening entities. Hero of my own narrative, Odd-like I sought an unlikely weapon-- a dirty dress shirt -- to snap at the creatures.   Destroyed one; hunted the other.  My heart rate elevated for the next hour, watching the storm, waiting up for roach number two.  All of which is to say, Koontz's imagination had pulled me in all the way.  That's great!

Koontz is not above introducing plot devices disguised as characters.  Most annoying is a pregnant teenager named Annamaria.    The pretext for Odd Apocalypse is Annamaria’s decree that she and Odd Thomas need to visit this resort “Roseland.”  How do homeless teens afford it?  We learn that she has some kind of charisma that convinces Roseland’s reluctant owner to accept her and Odd as guests.  Once she has brought Odd to this place, she sits in her room for the rest of the novel.  She serves Koontz both by knowing enough to direct Odd Thomas, and by her exasperating habit of speaking in coy oracles.  In Deeply Odd, she does even less, but does appear in a Salvation Army store just when Odd needs some salvation.  She vanishes, evidently able to project her presence from dozens of miles away. That’s a talent that might help Odd (and Koontz) out of a dead-end in the plot.

Annamaria is just one example of how Koontz plants many a deus with a useful machina to give Koontz options when he needs to rescue Odd from tight corners, and putting Odd in tight corners every couple of chapters is the rhythm that Koontz keeps up in his stories.  This creates some inconsistencies.  An egregious example is the ghostly woman on the stallion who warns Odd to flee monsters approaching over the hill.  That’s fine.  But then, why doesn’t she appear next time he’s in the same situation? 

Because I’ve started reading the series with the latest two installments, I wonder if I’ve caught Odd Thomas at just the point where a good series gets out of hand?   It happened to Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta series, which started with a cast of characters who grew closer as they investigated murders in Richmond.  By the time I gave up on the series, the characters were so burdened with regrets and resentments that they just weren't fun anymore, and the plots were bloated with international conspiracies and robots. 

I understand that earlier Odd Thomas books put Odd in the role of a sort of ESP detective with dead clients.  That’s manageable and interesting.   Deeply Odd seems to be preparing ground for some kind of US civil war, as a rich old lady on the road with Odd introduces him to more quirky characters than Dorothy meets in The Wizard of Oz, all connected to an underground militia.  There’s a lot of talk about what the Government is doing, how even the Social Security Administration is arming. Yet Odd also disparages paranoid conspiracy theorists on TV and radio.

In Odd Thomas, Koontz is keeping balance between humor and horror.  Here’s hoping that he doesn’t lose that balance!

(Reflections on Odd Apocalypse and Deeply Odd, latest in a series by Dean Koontz.  Bantam Books.)
My reflection on the first book in the series:  "Odd Hours: Dean Koontz Keeps Reader Up Late."

Film of Odd Thomas Captures Voice, Spirit of Novel

That the film Odd Thomas went straight to DVD is no reflection on its qualities, which are those of the title character.  Created by novelist Dean Koontz, embodied and voiced by young actor Anton Yelchin, "Odd" is modest, funny, guardedly cheerful, interested in the people around him -- living and dead. Like the film, which got caught in a netherworld between lawsuits and distribution, "Odd" inhabits this world but can see into the world beyond. (Read my response to the novel.)


As in Raymond Chandler's classic "Marlowe" novels, the narrator's voice is more important to our enjoyment of the story than the story itself.   Critics who fault director Stephen Sommers for voice-over narration evidently miss Odd's charm -- except for the critic who thought it was too charming.  For me, the time reading and watching the story is like spending time with a kind and exuberant friend, whose patter doesn't cloy.  That said, Sommers keeps explanations to a minimum with flashbacks that really go by in a flash, and instant replay that refocuses us on significant clues that Odd has noticed. 


Aside from gory spirits, a foray into hell, and translucent demons that swarm like roaches, this really is a simple detective story.  Odd opens and closes a murder case in the first moments of the movie, when the mute young victim points to her killer.  The main investigation begins with Odd's premonition that a massacre is planned for Odd's sunny little town.  For clues to the who, what, where, and how, he searches a home, looks through files, stakes out a bowling alley, and examines a corpse at different stages of nausea-inspiring decay.  Mute spirits sometimes help him to find clues, and sometimes get in his way, but it's really a human-sized story for our humane lead character.  


Too bad for the critics who complain that it's small-scale and that it doesn't live up to their expectations of  apocalypse.   I, for one, stopped going to movies regularly when I got tired of seeing the entire planet threatened in every movie, and in the previews, too.  I've longed for a movie scaled to human proportions. 


Exciting series; delightful movie.  Spoiler alert:  I also start crying about five minutes before the hero does. 

Reflection on the film Odd Thomas, directed by Stephen Sommers, based on the novel of the same name by Dean Koontz. Anton Yelchin plays the title role; Addison Timlin plays "Stormy," and William Dafoe plays the police chief. Read my reflections on the Odd Thomas series here.

Saint Odd: "As it was in the Beginning..."

"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." - Gloria Patri

 In Saint Odd, the affable young man named Odd Thomas returns to his small home town of Pico Mundo; and author Dean Koontz returns to human-scaled action, unencumbered by conspiracy theories and apocalyptic visions that encroached on the later novels of his series.  The story is simple: Odd searches for clues to thwart a cult's scheme for mass murder while the cult's assassins pursue him. 

Being Odd, he can also ask the spirit world for a hint.  He sees (though he cannot hear) dead people; he has a sixth sense to guide him to any goal that he can picture; and he is haunted by prophetic dreams that give him a vague idea of the cult's plan.  He also has a premonition of his own death.  No spoiler alert:  Odd, our narrator, is up front about the end of his story. "I came home to die and live in death." 

More than a plot device, Odd's sense of worlds beyond this one gives substance to the story.  Otherwise, it could be just a video game, our protagonist picking his way through unfamiliar terrain -- a canyon, a derelict shopping mall, an almond orchard, a farmhouse -- trying to shoot bad guys before they shoot him.  But digital avatars don't climb down into the canyon "in Good Samaritan mode" to check on the faceless driver who just ran off the cliff trying to kill him (12): "I couldn't let him bleed or burn to death just because of his idiocy behind the wheel of the SUV."  On the brink of surprising the bad guys, in the grip of "cold, controlled fury," Odd considers that he is now two Odds:

...the fry cook who had written poetry for the girl he loved and wept at movies like Terms of Endearment, but also the ruthless killer who could shoot men in the back.  The darker Odd Thomas thought his violence must be righteous... .But the other Odd wondered if the claim of righteous purpose, exerted so often in the past two years, was always true -- or might be overused. (262)

In pain, expecting to fail, Odd lunges forward, believing that his efforts matter: "In this world, Evil works through countless surrogates.  Its name is Legion.  But Good works through surrogates, as well, and they are legion, too" (325).  

In an interview at Beliefnet.com, Koontz tells how Roman Catholic theology gives the world "shape and form and function and meaning" (Beliefnet interview, p. 1).  Odd's girl friend Stormy, lost in the first novel of the series, but ever-present in Odd's thoughts, is quoted often speculating that the universe has a structure.  This world is like a "boot camp," for a battle that continues in another world that she imagines will "out-Tolkien Tolkien" before arrival at final peace.  There's no need for a reader of the series to get hung up on the doctrine of Purgatory, just to share in Koontz's vision of good as eternal, creative, long-suffering, but destined to win over those who, cultists or not, are motivated by the thought, "Can't be me made a mess of my life, must be your fault, so you're gonna pay" (196).  The entire series has been a fleshing-out of that vision.

Asked if he weaves his faith into his novels consciously, or if it's second-nature, Koontz says it's both: 
"I would say it happens because of what your world view is. And it's going to happen automatically without your straining to do it. The way I sometimes begin a story is with a premise, just an odd little thing."  (Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/Entertainment/Books/2008/10/Dean-Koontz-interview.aspx?p=4#UwUx5dfJOPqrud1E.99)  

For all the mayhem and dark ruminations, Odd's own humor and appreciation of beauty keep the reading light and uplifting.  "I have a tendency to hope always for the best," he tells us on page one, "even when I'm being strangled ...by an angry, three-hundred-pound Samoan wrestler" (3).   Kind and brave people leaven the story, and, late in the game, one dog that lays a benediction on him:

Muggs scrambled off the backseat.  Standing with his hind feet on the floor, he pawed forward between the front seats and came face-to-face with me.  I would have been fine with a dog kiss, as long as it was on the cheek; but Muggs had something else in mind. His eyes met mine, and he grew very still, his gaze penetrating, his demeanor solemn.  ...I thought, This is A Moment, stay with it.  ...Then the dog shook his head, flapping his floppy ears, and terminated our moment with a sneeze.  (302-3)

That little scene resonates with one early in Koontz's memoir of his dog Trixie.  In Koontz's world, inside and outside of book covers, angels are everywhere, in friends, strangers, and dogs.

Dean Koontz.  Saint Odd. (New York: Bantam Books, 2015).  
For an index of my reflections on other books in the Odd Thomas series, see the section on Dean Koontz on my Crime Fiction page at this blog.  

Odd Hours: Dean Koontz Keeps Reader Up Late

Reflection on Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas.  Bantam Books, Kindle Edition. First published 2003.

Note: I just learned of a movie adaptation of Odd Thomas .   Other news on the web explains that this film may never be seen. Other sites say that it's scheduled to open in Finland in August.  Dean Koontz is "whacked flat happy" about it.  Here's  a link to the trailer:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL94mkU1On8

Skipping from the latest book of Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas series backwards to the first one, I’m officially hooked.   Near midnight, I wasn’t willing to sleep on the last gruesome image or anticipated danger, and I read straight to the end.  Is that a silly response to a book about ghosts and demons and premonitions? 

 
Odd World
A grown-up can pooh-pooh the paranormal and still leave room for it in the imagination.  Early in this novel, Odd passes through an ordinary door into a dark and chilly world.  It didn’t have to be a wardrobe for me to see that this series is like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia for a more contemporary, more grown-up audience, placing our ordinary planet at ground zero in a cosmic battle of good v. evil.

Through Odd, Koontz explicitly ties paranormal fantasy with something compatible to orthodox Christian faith:

Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous... (Kindle edition: location 2179)

He’s got that right.  When I’m reading the Bible or a work of fiction, my mind inhabits two worlds simultaneously.  Why should it be hard to accept that a spiritual world intersects ours?   More to the point:  I want to believe that there’s a larger world framing this one. 

Besides, reality itself is pretty hard to believe.  Koontz grounds his novels in a fact that’s hard to accept:  While we can perceive beauty, affection, humor, and courage around us,  we must also confront the presence of sordid, malignant humans among us, and dark feelings in ourselves. 

Odd Pleasures

It’s not the supernatural element that makes me want to read.  I enjoy spending time with this character named Odd. 

The author presents these books as chapters in a memoir by a 20-ish-year-old young man whose gifts are frying foods and seeing spirits.  The love of his life is a girl named Bronwen “Stormy” Llewellyn, and their two characters are encapsulated in a brief argument.  He, with a premonition of danger, warns her to stay home.  She says she will, if he’ll stay with her.  He replies…

“We’ve been through this.  I can’t let people die if there’s a way to spare them.”

“And I’m not going to live even one day in a cage just because there’s a loose tiger….”

Feeling obligated to help where he can, Odd opens doors to uncertain danger and rushes through the fleeing mob towards the gunman.    Stormy’s attitude is another version of the same courage:  she won’t let caution paralyze her.  Their brands of courage are endearing and, I have to admit, motivational. 

Odd’s gratitude for Stormy’s loving him is a sweet core for a story haunted by Timothy McVeigh, Charles Manson, and Mohammed Atta.   Unlike other mass murderers in the bad guy’s files, none of these three killed alone.  They had “family” or “brotherhood.”  Their evil communities contrast to the surrogate family that grows up around Odd and envelops him in its arms at the memorable end of the novel.   Koontz has made Odd a virtual orphan, unloved by parents each wrapped up in delusions.  The father devotes himself to maintaining his ideas of youth and studliness.   The mother is a couple turns screwier than Blanche DuBois,  cordial to her son until he asks for help: she decrees that her home must be a problem-free zone.  But other characters love Odd: the 400-pound writing mentor, the fatherly police chief, and the motherly owner of the diner where Odd works.  Even the spirit of Elvis takes Odd’s hand in both of his own and expresses heartfelt sympathy silently (for spooks don’t speak, we’re told). 

Odd’s background makes him sensitive to others who feel unloved and unlovable.   Past midnight, Odd has traveled to a deserted brothel outside of town to dispose of a bad guy’s body, when he encounters the spirit of a young prostitute murdered on that spot some years before.   In Odd’s world, spirits hang around if they have unfinished business, or if they fear what awaits them in the next world.   He intuits her whole life:  unloved, homeless, seeking any kind of affection, she is ashamed of herself, afraid of punishment.  He assures her that she will find love in the next life.   She listens intently, and waits while he drives away, “coyotes resting on the ground at her feet, as if she were the goddess Diana between one hunt and another, mistress of the moon and all its creatures.”

It’s a scene of little consequence to the unfolding of the story, a lovely image and one of many incidental pleasures I’ve found now at both ends of Koontz’s series.  It’s time to dig into the volumes in the middle.

Dean Koontz & Walter Mosley: One Plot, Two Thrillers

Reflections on ODD HOURS by Dean Koontz on Kindle, and LITTLE GREEN by Walter Mosley (New York: Doubleday, 2013).

I've recently enjoyed two best-sellers, supernatural thriller Odd Hours by Dean Koontz, and mystery Little Green by Walter Mosley. Different as these novels are, they have the same plot:

Conspirators, abetted by corrupt police, pursue an innocent person whom they believe to be messing up their plans to make big money.  As our hero tries to protect that innocent person, the bad guys are soon after our hero, too.   He  stumbles from one encounter to the next, meeting friends (sometimes familiar, sometimes new), evading enemies.  When cornered, he escapes by wit more often than by force, though he gets assistance from powerful allies at crucial moments.

But for a master gardener, it's not the plot, but what expert hands work into it that makes it bloom.  In both novels, the first-person narrators barely have time to rest, but they do take time to reflect while they ricochet around the streets and back alleys of their respective California cities.  It's in these reflective passages that the novels bloom.

Koontz's affable Odd Thomas keeps up a steady banter with us.  "As you know," he tells us, "I make it up as I go along, heart in my throat and bowels quivering near a state of collapse," an approach that works well, "Except when it doesn't" (location 3150).    He expresses cautious optimism. He speculates about the "vertical order" of the universe, meaning this life and the next, and the living forces that define that order.  He recalls his past mostly with gratitude, tinged with regret over his failure to save his fiancée's life. He takes pleasure in finding just the right way to describe what he sees, always attuned to analogs from literature and pop culture.  For example, there are echoes of famous poems by friendly old Carl Sandburg and sour old T.S.Eliot in his description of the fog that pervades the book:

[F]og crept along the alleyway behind Hutch's house, rubbing its furry flanks against the garages on both sides, slipping through fence pickets, climbing walls, licking into every niche and corner. (location 1013)

Odd also makes some wry comments about modern society, showing distaste for consumerism and materialism on one hand, and for government intrusion on the other.   A fruitless search for a pay phone sets Odd off on this rant:

Someday the telephone will be a small voice-activated chip embedded just behind the jawbone and under the ear.... Those commentators who explain our world to us and who tell us how we should feel about it will call the embedded phone "progress."  And when someone from the government wishes to speak with you, they will always know where to reach you and, because of your implant's transponder signature, where to find you.

This will go a long way toward encouraging the New Civility and toward discouraging the endless quarreling and tiresome debate that characterize our current society.... [Pundits will ensure that], in the end, you will like your new world and feel that it is a paradise on earth, so just shut up already. (location 4025 ff)

In a novel overlaid by fog, Frank Sinatra's blue eyes add welcome color.  Ghosts are Odd Thomas's clients, needing some assistance to resolve issues left over from their lives on earth.  Mute (as ghosts are supposed to be in Koontz's universe) but eager to entertain, Sinatra has latched onto Odd.  My strongest impression from the story is the vividly described mayhem unleashed when the Chairman of the Board loses his famous temper, preceded by witty dialogue that primes the tantrum.

All these pleasures come to us on the way to the plot's climax, when Odd Thomas stows away on the bad guys' ship.  I wore out the "forward" button on my Kindle.  The suspense doesn't end there, as Koontz tops that scene with a cat-and-mouse chase in a church. (Coyotes are involved.) 

Of the two series, Mosley's Easy Rawlins books are the more densely textured, woven of history, deep cultural issues, Easy's own past, and allusions to other literature (this time to Chester Himes and Ralph Ellison).  But of all the Rawlins books, Little Green is most buoyant - a word that Odd Thomas uses for his own attitude. 

Little Green, set in springtime, is about rebirth.  In the beginning, narrator Easy Rawlins wakes "dead and dreaming" from a coma, months after the suicidal car crash that ended the previous book in the series.  Characters familiar from earlier installments are here, taking loving care of Easy:  Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, Easy's adopted children Jesus "Juice" and Feather, who've grown up over the course of the series, and Jo, a healer.  With the help of Jo's voodoo medicine, Easy is soon up on his feet on a mission from Mouse, to find "Little Green," a young black man who disappeared days before in a hippie enclave.  When a white girl, confused by the way Easy defies stereotypes, says, "It's kind of like you're coming from four different directions at once," Easy comments to us,

I laughed heartily in reply.  This humor rose from the anticipation of the minor resurrection Jo's medicine would have on my body, and the recognition of the actual definition of a black man's life from that white girl's lips.  (112)

But it's not only Easy who has resurrected.  The accident happened at the end of 1966;  now it's 1967, and the world has been reborn. New music, new casualness about sex and money, new intermingling of races at hippy hangouts.  Rawlins often comments on how black men in America must be on their guard at all times, as in this powerful statement:

Black people in America at that time, and all the way back to our first conveyance, the slave ship, had received common traits.  For the so-called white man these attributes were merely hair texture, skin color, and other physical characteristics.  But our true inheritance was the fear of being noticed, and worry about everything from rain collapsing the walls around us to a casual glance that might lead to lynching.  We ... inherited anxieties like others received red hair or blue eyes.  (163)

So Easy is prepared to fight at a diner when a white guy objects to Easy's sitting with a white girl; but Easy's not prepared to have the guy's friends remove the racist, with apologies to the black man (114).

Easy's manhunt takes him to a hippy brothel, a rich kid's crash pad, a pot farm "commune," a luxury hotel suite, and a dozen other places, each with its own cast of characters, all summoned to our imaginations by apt descriptions. 

Some whimsical descriptions stand out. Easy, recovering from his coma, is so shocked by morning sunlight that he has to sit and breathe slowly.  He writes that "breath was like a playful carp swimming in and out of my body, strengthening me with each visit, bringing the light in small parcels that my living carcass could absorb"(148).  At a quiet moment, adopted daughter Feather asks Easy about her mother, and Easy tells us, "My other worries, seemingly of their own volition, climbed quietly over into the backseat of my headlong life" (237). 

I've read other mysteries that were padded with the detectives' personal problems, and I've turned pages through those parts, impatient to move forward with the story;  in the Easy Rawlins series, it's the crime plot that takes the backseat.

Note: I've blogged about Mosley in two other articles.  "Black, White and Noir" compares the worlds of black detective Easy Rawlins in 1967 to that of Ross MacDonald's white "noir" detective Lew Archer in a novel from the same time period.  "Guilty Pleasures in Crime Fiction" mentions Mosley's novels on a spectrum that includes work by Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Cornwell.  About Dean Koontz, I've posted articles throughout June and July 2013, making my way through most of the Odd Thomas series. 

Wit and Wisdom from Brother Odd

Reflections on Brother Odd, third in the series of novels by Dean Koontz.  Kindle edition.

Third in Dean Koontz's series, fourth that I've read,  Brother Odd takes place in a monastery where monks work and worship.  A few hundred yards away stands an abbey where nuns care for severely handicapped children.  Rather than review the novel, which others have done so well, I'll list prose gems, interesting for their phrasing, their insights, or both.

Looking out the window from his unlit guestroom, Odd does not have the interference of his own reflection in the glass, and he observes that a monastery gives you "fewer opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it"  (Kindle location 82-87).  

Odd Thomas on insomnia:  "Some nights, it seems my brain is someone else's TV, and they won't stop channel surfing" (location 703).

The winds of a blizzard shift direction, and Odd's description is fun, while foreshadowing danger in the storm: "Such schizophrenic wind threw spun-whipped flakes in stinging sheets, in funnels, in icy lashes, a spectacle some poet once called 'the frolic architecture of snow,' but in this instance, there was a lot less frolic than fusillade, wind booming as loud as mortar fire and the snow like shrapnel" (location 1579-84).

When Mother Superior tells Odd of a rescue plan that would involve some big-wheeled vehicles, his go-to metaphor relates.  He tells us, "I regretted having to let the air out of her plan after she'd evidently spent some time inflating it" (location 1925).   That's playful writing, a pleasure to read.

Jacob, a taciturn young man with deformities and disabilities, obsessively draws pictures of his mother.  Odd watches:  "With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes.  ...Jacob created her from memory, as he made real on paper what was in his mind and what was evidently lost to him except by the grace of his art" (2096).

Odd sees dead people, but also one ghost dog Boo. Koontz interrupts a tense chapter with Boo's rolling over to expose his belly, paws in the air.  Odd reflects: 

Receiving such an invitation, only the hard-hearted and the uselessly busy can refuse.  All that is wanted is affection, while what is offered is everything, symbolized in the defenseless posture of the exposed tummy.

Dogs invite us not only to share their joy but also to live in the moment, where we are neither proceeding from nor moving toward, where the enchantment of the past and future cannot distract us, where a freedom from practical desire and a cessation of our usual ceaseless action allow us to recognize the truth of our existence, the reality of our world and purpose -- if we dare" (2865-70).

Finally, a first:  I've enjoyed these stories, which keep pretty evenly balanced between enchanting me and grossing me out.   But a simple gesture by the retarded boy Jacob brought tears:

"Sorry about your girl."
"Thank you, Jake."
"I know what you don't know," he said.
"What is that?"
"I know what she saw in you," he said, and he leaned his head on my shoulder. 
(4363)

Good stories go better with vivid description, better still with interesting characters, and best of all with insight.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day Aug-Sept-Oct 2024

Every morning I read the scripture assigned by the Episcopal Book of Common prayer, then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights. See my responses going back to 2013.

I must confess what I have left undone: I didn't start reviewing my notes from August until Christmas Eve. I'll just hit what I remember, the highest of highlights.

August 2024: Chrys Meador
A retired lawyer who now works with food ministries, Meador knows something about scarcity -- of food, of resources, of time. She refers to the numerous Scripture passages where we hear Be not afraid and reminds us to make time to be attentive to [the prophets] as to a lamp shining in a dark place (2 Pet 1.19). She seems to have been in the same Vestry meetings that I have, as she imagines the apostles brainstorming how to feed the 5000 -- it's too costly... there are too many... there's not enough.... She writes, "Remember the possibility of unimaginable solutions."

When the Apostles are stymied by a "hard saying" about eating the flesh of Jesus, Meador sympathizes. Haven't you ever heard something explained so clearly that you can't wait to tell others, but later, you can't make any sense of it? Yes! (I take notes to remember remarkable insights in sermons by our interim rector Mother Pat Miller but recall only unremarkable snippets.)

Responding to Job, she wonders why God would even care about our lives and our sins? Then she thinks of her infant son. "The love I have for my children cannot be explained, and yet it explains everything. And so it is with God." Amen.

September 2024: Colleen Thomas
A leader of workshops on centering prayer, Thomas identifies the phrase "I got this" as a source of great anxiety in our culture. Better, like Jesus, to accept I can do nothing on my own (John 5.20). Writing on Psalm 49 for the reading on September 11th, she ties it to other readings for the day: Job's lament that his generosity to the poor hasn't kept him from suffering, and Paul's return to the city where they stoned him (Acts 14.22), and the death of Lazarus. The dead man did not participate in his own renewal. "Sometimes we need God to be our light when there's none in us."

Thomas points out something I'd never thought about in the story in Acts 16 of the servant girl who has the gift of prophecy. Paul removes her power because she's so annoying, following him around and proclaiming her visions. Thomas doesn't deny the annoyance, but she observes that the serving girl is being exploited by her owners. "Paul's holy annoyance ends an injustice."

Thomas admits to being uncomfortable with Psalms, so "prone to exaggerated emotions." But their anger can be a comfort for us when we feel anger out of proportion to the cause. Recognition of that disproportion can bring healing to us. She relays an acronym for times when we are most at risk for Satan's temptations: HALT when you're Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired.

October 2024: Joseph Yoo
Another confession: this youngish vicar of a "plant" church in Texas, formerly a Methodist minister, connected with me right away. I wrote three times the usual number of notes, visited his web site, and bought his memoir. I'll respond to that book later. For now, a list of his insights as concise as I can make them:

• The sick whom Jesus healed got sick again, those he raised from the dead died; but touching and asking questions of those like the leper and the "unclean" woman and the demoniac, he gives these people their dignity. That lasts! Maya Angelou: "People will forget what you said, and people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
• Yoo says the best ability is availability. Illustrated by the call of Levi, the tax collector.
• Pharisees fuss over the sabbath. Yoo observes that the Sabbath reminds us that our worth isn't based on what we produce; we are free.
• "Following Jesus is simple, but it's not easy." His radical plan to eliminate enemies is to love them. (Cf. Thurman, MLK Jr) BTW God loves those who reject him and disobey him in the day's reading from Hosea 11.9
• "Suffer the little children" reminds Yoo of very young siblings who sang "Jesus Loves Me" during communion, then "Baby Shark." Yoo writes that you might be horrified if you think of communion as a performance, but for a communal celebration, the tots' offering was joyous. He asks, "What changes could you make to honor and celebrate the gifts of everyone in your congregation?"
• "Names will never hurt me" is a lie, Yoo writes, recalling hurtful words hurled at him decades ago. But Jesus heals two people in Luke 7 by words alone. Words have power to hurt and to heal.
• Jesus tells John's disciples, "Go tell John what you have seen and what you have heard." Yoo says, "Jesus invites us not only to tell a good story, but to live a good story."
• A woman crashes a high society dinner party and anoints Jesus's feet, scandalizing the host and others. Jesus asks them, "Can you see this woman?" (Luke 7.44). Odd question: of course they see her. Yoo thinks Jesus was asking, "Can you see beyond stereotypes and status to her?" Following Jesus means changing how we see.
• In the parable of the sower, the God-figure doesn't assess the worthiness of the ground. He is indiscriminate.
• "Let us go to the other side of the lake." Yoo sees this line as significant because that's the Gentile side of the lake. He relates this to the dove, adored as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, despised and called a "pigeon" when it gets up in our spaces at sidewalk cafes and park benches, ignoring our boundaries. Jesus and the Spirit do the same.
• "We don't know what the future holds, but we know who holds it." The rich young man focuses on what he must give up, not on what he could gain with Jesus.
• Farmers don't give names to animals that won't be around much longer. By the same logic, Yoo writes, perhaps we prefer for some people in our vicinity and in our world to remain nameless so that we can continue to hate or mistrust them. Jesus asked the demoniac his name (cf. dignity in the first item of this list).
• Compassion v. Justice is the difference between serving at a soup kitchen v. asking why so many people need this help. Jesus didn't just stop a woman's hemorrhage, but called the woman "daughter" and responded without disgust to her touching him. Yoo writes, "Jesus brings her from the margins and places her right in the middle of the community." (cf. dignity in the first item of this list.)
• Re: God's sparing of Nineveh in the story of Jonah. "God isn't fair, but generous. What great news for everyone!"
• Ha! Moses seems surprised to see God, yet he's on Mt. Horeb, "the mountain of God." Yoo asks if we expect to encounter God at church -- or anywhere?
• Ha. The son of man has no place to rest his head prompts Yoo to point out that many of us will drive past homeless people on our ways to church to hear the words of an itinerant teacher.
• Luke 10.42 (re: Martha and Mary), There is only one thing needed. Yoo quotes someone, "If Satan can't make you bad, then he makes you busy doing things that don't matter." He quotes Richard Rohr: "Thy Kingdom come means my kingdom go."
• Jesus asks the blind man what he wants. Seems insensitive? But Jesus is pushing us to ask ourselves, Yoo believes. [Our interim rector Mother Pat picked up on the same question, and paused for an uncomfortably long time for us to ask ourselves, What do I want?]

Yoo's last word to us regards God's close attention to sparrows: Jesus says, You have more worth than sparrows. Yoo says, our worth does not depend on what we bring to the table.

Eating Holy Words

(I wrote this preface for the Lenten devotion book written by parishioners of St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta GA in 2015)

"What is your tongue?" That's not an odd question for the working mothers learning English at St. James. In Spanish, la lengua means both tongue and language. In English, tongue still commonly meant language when Thomas Cranmer admonished us to "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" Scripture in his collect for the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.

Like bread and wine, language and nourishment have always gone well together. In Psalm 19 we read, "These are the words of my mouth / these are what I chew on and pray." Hungry, Jesus would not "live on bread alone" but also on the words of the Law and the Prophets.

We hope that you will chew on the words of this book each weekday, even while you may be giving up some other food.

Besides getting your fill of Scripture, you'll get a taste of St. James from parishioners of different backgrounds and different places in their life journeys. A trio of working mothers writes in their adopted tongue. Others who write come from experiences in Adult Christian Education, Bell Choir, Choir, Congregational Care, Episcopal Church Women (ECW), Education for Ministry (EfM), Family Promise, Reach Out Mental Health, Ushers, Vestry, Wonderful Days Preschool, Book Club, and parish worship services.

The Pilgrimage at St. James has sponsored these in-house devotional booklets for many years, among other offerings of spiritual nourishment to the parish. Thanks to our stalwart contributors. I've heard that some of you enjoy tracing growth in your faith as you review your words from past issues.

Special thanks to our new contributors, and please join us again! -Scott Smoot

Stephen and Steve: Sondheim Appreciates Reich

Onstage at Lincoln Center for a concert - with - conversation earlier this year, Steve Reich and Stephen Sondheim fairly bubbled with shared enthusiasms and mutual admiration. (watch: Reich and Sondheim: In Conversation and Performance.) One composes music that repeats with only minute changes over long stretches of time, while the other compresses vast stretches of story in song with dramatic music and incisive lyrics. But the connections are clear to longtime fans of Sondheim.

First, as Sondheim himself says during the discussion, "we both are interested in harmony." Both vary the harmony under repeated phrases.  Both men agreed that there's been little harmonic variety in popular songs for the last fifty years or so, which have depended on beat and production values for interest. Sondheim said that rock music did Broadway composers a favor by freeing them from the pressure to write popular songs; he and his colleagues were free to write for the drama.  But both men found interest in the rock group Radiohead.  Reich explained how his latest piece is based on an odd harmonic pivot under the phrase "everything's changed" in a Radiohead song. 

Second, in Sondheim's words, both like "vamps."  In Tin Pan Alley-speak, that's a bit of accompaniment that introduces a song and repeats under the melody:  Think the rolling chords under Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" or the intro to Kander and Ebb's "New York, New York."  At the end of the Lincoln Center show, we hear a single vamp repeated with little variation during a performance Sondheim's "Someone in a Tree" from the musical Pacific Overtures.  Sondheim adds elements to fill in gaps of the vamp as it repeats, while each singer adds a different perspective on a slice of Japanese history.  The description may sound dry; the song feels joyful.  This, Sondheim tells us, was composed under the influence of his first exposure to Reich's music.

Steve Reich - A Personal Music Journey

When John Simon commented in a review of Sunday in the Park with George that the music -- "if that's what that is" -- was a "superficial" imitation of the "modish minimalism" of Steve Reich, I took it as a challenge:  I'd better get to know the music of Steve Reich.  I started with The Desert Music, Reich's setting of poetry by William Carlos Williams in which block chords sung by voice and brass float in stately succession over waves of pulsing percussion.  Conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas likened it to directing ice bergs.  I was hooked.

I soon added to my collection Reich's exhilarating Tehillim ("Psalms"), Variations for Orchestra, Eight Lines, and Violin Phase.  I branched out to composers who, different as they were, shared with Reich the label "minimalist":  John Adams, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Michael Nyman.  When Reich in album liner notes mentioned 12th-century composer Perotin and jazz great John Coltrane, he opened up other musical vistas for me.

In those pre-internet days, I sat in the public library to read cover-to-cover a pamphlet Reich published around 1970 to explain that listening to his "process music" was like watching the patterns that shift in sand between our feet as waves recede. Over time, changes accrue to create something quite different from what we saw at the start.  His early music for tape loops, clapping hands, or blocks of wood best fits that description, culminating in the pulsing, shimmering Music for 18 Musicians.

Reich's later music, such as his "counterpoint" series, interweaves ten or so lines pre-recorded by the soloist to make a kind of trampoline from which the live performer can spring into improvisation. Vermont Counterpoint for flute, New York Counterpoint for clarinet, and Electric Counterpoint for guitar, all sharing musical material and structure, each has its own character, thanks to the colors of the instruments.

Still later, Reich used sampling technology to make music from the notes of spoken phrases, adding up to a kind of dramatic collage, as in his marvelous, emotionally touching Different Trains.  Adding video to the mix, with his wife Beryl Korot, he created The Cave, a kind of musical documentary.  They co-wrote Three Tales, a video documentary with live chorus.  This, he said, was as close as he would ever come to writing musical theatre -- although I found a lot of theatrical pleasures in a live performance of Drumming, an austere piece of absolute music (see my appreciation of Drumming in live performance.)

Mutual Appreciation

For a public presentation in 2012,  Sondheim wrote, "Stealing ideas from [Steve] is one of the more satisfying pleasures that I’ve had." He concluded that Reich's music is ...

...a constant delight, by turns dramatic and joyful, its energy infectious, its surprises exhilarating. It is not a coincidence, but astonishing nonetheless, that he comes from a show business family.  Show business may not produce much art but, on occasion, it can produce a first-rate artist, even if indirectly, as this award attests. -  Recorded for the May 16, 2012 award ceremony where STEVE REICH received the Gold Medal for Music. Mr Sondheim was in China.

Reich returned the compliment by contributing to pianist Anthony De Mare's massive project Liaisons, a program of composers' piano pieces inspired by Sondheim's music.  (See my reflection on Liaisons.)  Naturally, Reich chose "Finishing the Hat" from Sunday, with its lyric about the creative process, and Sondheim's accompaniment composed of repetitive small cells of music, Sondheim's version of Reich's music being a good analog to painter George Seurat's pointillism.  First the song, then Reich's response to it, opened the Lincoln Center concert.

For me, the pleasures of the evening were many.  The performers, including singer-actors Alexander Gemignani (whose father is longtime Sondheim conductor Paul Gemignani), Kate Baldwin, and Michael Cerveris sang in character(s), note-perfectly.  The two composers were jovial and eager to tell how they wrote what they wrote.

If there's a negative, here, it's that all their talk is about stuff they did years ago. To quote "Dot" in Sunday, I send out this plea to both Steves: "Give us more to see." 

Bells Resonate in The Nine Tailors

The cause of death in Dorothy L. Sayers's detective novel The Nine Tailors (1934), not revealed until late in the novel, is so horrible to contemplate, that it exerts gravity over the whole story.

Until then, it's a cheerful fish-out-of-water comedy.  Car trouble strands urbane Lord Peter Wimsey among rustic folk of Fenchurch St. Paul on New Year's Eve, where he has no choice but to enjoy the hospitality of affable, addled rector Venables, and to participate in a festive ringing of the church's nine bells.  When a body turns up, Sayers gives the investigation a light touch. The inquest is presented comically, as we infer answers from ellipses between the officious examiner's questions (80).  Locals complain how "eddication" has made everything "mysterious" with "fillin' up forms" (98). A chamber pot, referred to with delicate obliqueness as a "bedroom utensil," concealed the necklace that inspired the original sin in this plot (115).

Levi Stahl, in the blog "Ivebeenreadinglately" acknowledges that the detection part of the story could have been handled in thirty pages, but, "Wimsey likes these people and their odd rural interests--and so do we, so neither of us is in a hurry to be shed of them. His having a mystery to solve gives us both an excuse to stick around for a while."


Sayers makes a game of integrating the action with the uniquely English tradition of "ringing changes" on church bells. Change ringers follow intricate patterns to ensure that no sequence of tones will repeat until all permutations have been sounded.  Sayers uses those patterns to create a secret message. She uses ringers' jargon for her chapters' titles, with amusing double-entendres, such as "Mr. Gotobed Is Called Wrong with a Double," and "Emily Turns Bunter from Behind."   A line from ancient ringer's manuals or Scripture often seems to have inspired the action of a chapter.  For example, the epigraph to the chapter "Lord Peter Dodges with Mr. Blundell and Passes Him" explains how "retrograde motion" is involved in "the hunt," which describes both a ringing pattern and a witness's filling in the back story to the crime.  Another epigraph quoting from I Kings about the space between cherubim and "costly stones" above (219), hints to us where Lord Peter will find an important clue.

(I wonder if Sayers's titles make sense as sequential moves in an actual peal?  If so, this would be a meta-fictional coup akin to the actual chess game that Lewis Carroll plays chapter by chapter in Alice Through the Looking-Glass.)

For all the humor and playfulness, The Nine Tailors also expresses what's dear in the Anglican Church to Sayers, a rector's daughter, who also published essays on the faith.  The rector Venables, forgetful, chatty, and fussy about the aesthetics of the church (48), nonetheless shows genuine concern for the soul of the unidentified victim. He drops what he's doing to administer last rites to one of the church's benefactors, but also to the dying infant of a poor mother.  Sayers goes into considerable detail to show Venables pulling the community together when a major flood is imminent.

Through Lord Peter's internal monolog, Sayers also comments upon the "genius" of the burial liturgy and upon the faith that motivated anonymous artisans who built the church and carved its cherubs (102).  She lavishes vivid description on the beauty of the countryside in spring (55) before she goes on rather too long to describe the flower guild's work at the altar (57).


Not just a plot device, the bells mean something for Sayers.  In her preface, she compares the "uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band" unfavorably to church bells, "the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God."  She waxes poetic describing the bells "rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower, wide mouths rising and falling, brazen tongues clamouring, huge wheels turning to the dance of the leaping ropes" (29).  She demonstrates how the bells have served their community broadcasting important messages.  For instance, the "tailor" bells ring nine times to signify the death of a man in the parish - "Nine tailors make a man" (60) - followed by the ringing of his age, informing folks for miles around which parishioner has passed; and the bells alert surrounding towns to floodwaters' approach.

In a memorable passage, when Lord Peter visits the belfry alone, Sayers gives us strong, unironic prose to give us a sense that the bells, even in stillness, resonate as if alive and waiting.

There he stood for a moment, gazing up into [the bells'] mouths.... Presently their hooded silence oppressed him.  A vague vertigo seized him.  He felt as though they were slowly collapsing together and coming down upon him.  Spell-bound, he spoke their names:  Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul.  A soft and whispering echo seemed to start from the walls and die stealthily among the beams.  Suddenly he shouted in a great voice: "Tailor Paul!" and he must somehow have hit upon a harmonic of the scale, for a faint brazen note answered him, remote and menacing, from overhead.  (200)

He, and we, are spooked. But, when justice is served, and atonement made, we sense in this place a Holy Ghost.

Sources

Page references come from the Harbrace Paperbound Edition, 1962, that I first read in 1979 [pictured]

Before writing this post, I read other bloggers' comments about The Nine Tailors.  Both were perceptive and helpful:
http://ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com/2008/03/nine-notes-on-dorothy-l-sayers-and-nine.html
and
https://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/the-nine-tailors-by-dorothy-l-sayers/