Fire, Burn, by John Carr, 1957.

A neat little locked-room mystery novel transposed to the late Georgian era, combined with a tragic romance, combined with a mystical time travel element.

Quite engaging.  It held me to the end.

I have two criticisms.  The explanation of the mystery seemed a little contrived, and I never got the full sensation of being submersed in a different era.  It came close, but  never quite moved beyond being a contemporary story with historic trappings.

P.S.  If you don’t like these little reviews, let me know.

What you reading?

An adult comic book.

Eww, like superhero sexy time?

Ick, no.  It has adult superpowers.  The hero’s superpower is when he makes decisions he ignores sunk costs.

What?  What’s his weakness?

When he makes decisions he ignores sunk costs.

. . . Fascinating.

The villain’s superpower is he has a big network and lots of social influence.

Update

One of the boyos–his superhero name is DeaconBoy!–said that having a social media influencer villain would actually be pretty cool.  But the hero should be RealLifeMan!  Their epic showdown would take place in augmented reality.

I think its really hard for moderns to grasp how  much the Book of Mormon is concerned with corporate salvation as a group, not individual salvation.  Though this changes throughout the book, and may be one reason the Lord told them up front that corporately their effort was going to fail.  Even so, the famous promises in the Book of Mormon about keeping  the commandments and prospering are corporate commandments and corporate promises.  Lehi’s original dream was about part of his family not willing to be led by him to the tree.

Weird thought of the day:  because we do not have an ancient world view, do we mistake the extent to which the Book of Mormon is a satisfying read as a revenge plot?  We tend to see the narrative arc as “eventually the Nephites are all destroyed.”  If we extend it a little bit, we end on a hopeful note, “eventually the Nephites are all destroyed, but their record comes forth and creates the modern church.”  But the actual arc as portrayed by the Book of Mormon prophets ends with, “and then the Great and Spacious Building is thrust into the pit it dug for the Saints.”

The people of the 1940s were apparently stark mad.  We just watched a movie from then called the Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.  The first half is slow and trying to be comic about something that doesn’t really seem comic: the distaff-half of a pair of quasi-sweethearts from a small town gets in trouble (pregnant) and is also probably married to a soldier but she doesn’t know who and has no proof.  T here is an obvious romcom direction for the plot to go but it doesn’t, hoo boy, it doesn’t, and the second half of the movie just rips the top off and goes wild, one insanity piling on top of insanity until the  big insane denouement.  You end up laughing a ton mostly because it is pretty funny but also partly from hysteria.

With my fatherly hat on,   I Do Not Approve of the film for what its worth.  Golly, what a thing.

Via Bruce Charlton, a real find: FadedPage.com, which has a number of excellent digital downloads of 50-year old works.

Unfortunately, only available for our Canadian or unscrupulous reader contingents.   We love our Canadian and unscrupulous readers, don’t we, folks?

That is a phrase that came into my head and won’t leave.  I don’t have an answer to it yet.

We all know what the iron rod is.

But what is your iron rod.

Here’s a simple but unique approach to understanding the atonement and law and justice that I believe is at root the same point that Lehi is making in 2 Nephi 2.

Be warned: our friends have not been very excited about this insight in the past, probably because its a bit horrifying.

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Benjamin West

The church’s newsroom reports that date nights were sponsored in the last couple weeks at the church’s colleges and 15 of the larger institutes. (link) One obstacle to addressing a problem is that recognizing the problem can be embarrassing, and that was my first reaction: Is our current crop of 20-year-olds so undeveloped that they need their college presidents to coax them into pairing off for an evening? Well, yes, they are, so let’s face up to it instead of pretending all is fine or just grousing that those young people aren’t doing what they ought to on their own. The world they live in isn’t all of their own making, their cluelessness in pursuing romance is not just a personal problem, and improving the climate within our communities to one more conducive to their success is a job for all.

“While Elder Gilbert [church commissioner of education] said he realizes a one-night event won’t be ‘a silver bullet,’ the hope is that it will be a catalyst to help re-instill a culture of dating.”

• There’s the chapters in 1 Nephi that are pretty clearly talking about Columbus and early European colonials.  Who had their faults.  Modern education is sometimes selective in presenting facts about the people it wishes to blacken, but doesn’t always invent stuff.  A lot of the dubious things they were up are dubious.  The Book of Mormon, though, presents them as blessed and to some degree on the Lord’s errand, even though later in the same chapter it says they err a lot because of their incomplete scripture.    With Columbus, one thing to keep in mind is that greatness is an aspect of righteousness.  A great man (visionary, energetic, and so on) who does wicked stuff is only partially righteous.  So is a commandment-keeper who is mediocre.  For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  For the settlers, another thing to keep in mind is that they are described as “humbling” themselves.    Righteousness isn’t really a matter of intellectual assent to a set of propositions, nor in this life is it a freeze frame of what kind of person you are holistically right now.  “Humility” isn’t abasement.  Humility is a recognition that something is lacking about you and a desire to fix that lack.  In other words, humility is directional.  Reading the BoM through the lens of Lehi’s Dream, humility is grasping the rod to move to the tree.

• the end of the world — should we interpret that as the end of the World?   Not the end of everything, but the end of this worldly system.

• There has to be some connection between Laman and Lemuel standing by the ‘chasm’ and the river of filthy water in Lehi’s dream, and his earlier comparison of them to a valley and a river respectively when they first left Jerusalem.

Someone smarter than me can tell me if this is a poem or what.

Proverbs 18:2

The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliver;

My God, my strength, in whom I will trust;

My buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.

The horn of my salvation.

The horn of rescue.

The horn of the infantry are here.

The bugle of the cavalry coming over the hill.

Roland winding his horn and hearing, o blessedly near! the answering clarion.

The bell of the boxer’s round is done.

The church bell, the evening bell, the day is over.

The last trump.

Your surprised laugh when you find it all worked out in the end.

Your home greeting–Daddy!–at the end of the day.

Mr. Elon Musk has in mind an “Everything App” for social media, but I have in mind to do him one better.

I have in mind an app that’s Urbit for personal transportation, Door Dash for food including even  in-home catering, but also includes laundry, life coach, house cleaning, first responder, friendship matching, and tutoring.  I call it Momm-E.

Best if used with our partner app, Dadd-E.

It occurs to me that one of the great things about vacations is that you have small defined problems that  you can then solve.  Getting to the airport, unpacking your stuff, finding a replacement for the charger that didn’t get packed.   No one consciously wants this and too much of it can spoil the vacation but in moderation it gives you a sense of order and accomplishment and rest.  Most adult problems are either not containable into a tidy little task or keep getting repeated and repeated and repeated.

Which means that there are probably discrete little tasks that people set themselves just for the joy of doing a discrete, intelligible, doable job–and now that I think of it, yes there are.  They are called hobbies.

Let’s make a gospel point out of it.  Mostly we think of callings as an extra burden.  One more thing.  Most of us accept them dutifully, even cheerfully, but even so we feel that we have one more task to do.

Perhaps we can see callings differently.  Start from the standpoint that we are aspiring angels, sons and daughters of God that He has called to grow up, and in principle the tasks and goals we face are limitless.  This is a point C.S. Lewis makes; this a point the temple also makes; we owe all of our time and talents and effort to the work of the Lord.  What a relief then to be able to take a little vacation, where your only difficulties are this nursery, or this ward, or even this Church, and this family and neighborhood of yours.

Vocation, vacation.

Don’t ask my why, it just is.

And sometimes standing around talking about why a hole was dug is also fun.

Inspiration works in curious ways. I don’t feel like I get inspiration. Whenever I ask about some serious real world decision I invariably get an answer that is something like, “Yep, you are right that there are pros and cons and risks. What do you want to do?” So it wasn’t with much expectation that I prayed for some guidance on what approach to take to the Book of Mormon this year. I didn’t get any answers other than that maybe I should ask. I asked some friends, got a few ideas, and then a day or so later got a clear out the blue bona fide inspiration. Its funny and typical that the inspiration had nothing to do with anyone’s suggestion but didn’t come until I got the suggestions.

Anyhow, the inspiration came, I don’t know why, since I have all of 5 readers here, but those are the only sorts of inspiration I seem to get sometimes, gospel insights that no one cares about, the Saints seem to prefer either pablum or scholarship or official sources and good for them, none of which I am.

Oh well. The Lord knows what He’s doing I suppose.

Anyhow, the inspiration was to look at the entire Book of Mormon through the lens of Lehi’s Dream. That’s what I am going to be trying to do this year.

Here’s the first fruits of that effort.

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