November 2025 in Review

Posted on November 30, 2025 by smellincoffee
I have driven by this church for 20+ years (Hwy 139, Alabama) and have often waned to take a photo of it. The afternoon light was just right one Saturday. Photo by me; powerlines removed by a friend.

Welcome to Advent! While today is only the last day of November, it does close the liturgical year’s longest season — Pentecost, or “Ordinary Time” — and begin the story of good news again. This morning, my Adult Formation class discussed the difference between Advent and Christmas, and how the latter has completely overwhelmed the former. Granted, Christmas has taken over November, too, and it would probably take over October were it not for costumes and people’s interest in the macabre. I thought it interesting that most of the people in the room disliked the weight of Commercial Christmas — the mandatory gifting, the constant parties and consumption, &c — and yet no one appeared willing to fight it. Personally, if it weren’t for family & social pressure, I’d happily be done with the gift-giving aspects of Christmas myself: while I love giving thoughtful, spontaneous gifts (ooh, they would love this! I’ll get it for them!), I despise the emotional blackmail of Christmas, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, St Valentine’s Day, etc. Consume or endure resentment, ugh. So here’s to Advent, a season of fasting, penitence, and soberness while all around us everyone is doing the complete opposite.

O come, Thou Wisdom from on high
And order all things, far and nigh
To us the path of knowledge show
And cause us in her ways to go

While it is possible I will finish Heinlein today, it is not likely considering the deep history mood I am in at the moment. November’s reading was intended to be a careful balance between Science Fiction November and science or history, the latter goals aimed at finishing the science survey and ensuring that nonfiction did not get bested by fiction like it did last year. Instead, it started off as science fiction and then…drifted into the American Civil War, because why not? That actually brought back some fond memories: I remember spending all of one Thanksgiving break immersed in either Sid Meier’s Antietam or Sid Meier’s Gettysburg. The Civil War binge was predicated on — I think — my finding that a lecturer on southern folk music had his own Youtube channel, which I plumbed the depths of one weekend. (The linked video is his recollection of visiting New Orleans for a historical conference and deciding that sitting in a ballroom listening to people talk while there’s a historic city out there to explore is just silly.) Funny thing: when I first heard his lecture on southern music, I thought to myself that he sounded just like a Pentecostal preacher. I learned from my binge that he was in fact raised Pentecostal (but is now Catholic) and did hold a preaching license from a Pentecostal organization for a few year before deciding it was not his calling. Anyhoo, he put me in a mood for southern history and soon tramp, tramp, tramp, the ACW books were marching. I do hope we get to meet one day, because he and have similar backgrounds and stories. I even have a used smoking pipe I bought some years ago: I dare not try to smoke it because of my family history with lung cancer, but I enjoy smelling the fruits of past bowls from time to time. Also, I was volunteered to do a class on the real St. Nicholas, so time for research.

Bonus picture!

I was dogsitting at a house in deep woods and was able to get some NICE stargazing in. NO light pollution.

Annual Challenges Look-In

Things are grim on this front, I am afraid. I am not especially afraid for the Science Survey, because it’s two books and the only thing I lack in reading them is attention. (And who has issues paying attention to things in December? It’s not as if other things are going on.) The Grand Tour, however, got mugged in a dark alley somewhere in Lisbon or Madrid and has not been seen since. This is still an avenue I want to pursue, but 2026 will be marked by America @ 250 reading, which I will say more about later. (I.e. in a month’s time.) The Classics Club….um, we’re going to call this year a mulligan and pretend my last year starts in January. I literally didn’t read anything on my list for an entire year. Yes, I still have a month, and if we want to pretend that I am capable of reading 10+ classics in one month, we can also pretend that the next election will produce legislators who care about righting the budget and reducing foreign obligations, &c.

The Unreviewed

The Politically Incorrect Guide to The South. It’s funny that this went unreviewed, given that it inspired the back half of my month’s reading. The book is an interesting one, with some provocative Civil War history bookended by fluff, more or less. The first fluff bookend is on how very interesting the South is, and the latter part looked at southerners in US history. Evidently Dixie ran rampant in World War 2, though the author does call some people like Patton honorary southerners because their granddaddies fought for the Confederacy. It’s the middle bit that I suspect everyone comes for, and it made all kinds of claims like “Grant expelled the Jews” to “Lincoln denied emancipation attempts before 1863”. In researching some of these claims, I have found some of them basically true, but exaggerated, or true but misunderstood or misleadingly framed. Grant did expel Jews from Tennessee, but later apologized for it; and while it’s quite true that Lincoln did not free slaves in the Union (including those in DC, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee), given that he ran on an 1864 promise to push for the 13th amendment, I wonder if he actually could. This was the 1860s, after all: the Presidency had not yet been perverted by the Roosevelts, Wilson, and others to become an elective monarchy where executive orders have the effect of law. Back then the Constitution still had force, and more importantly limited government still had more adherents than not — north and south. If my current mood holds, I will be reading things like Year of Meteors and Lincoln and the Decision of War. Doesn’t that sound like delightful Christmastide reading?

Coming up in December

History and science! I am currently still working on James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, and after several days have actually gotten to the war itself. My intention is two science books + whatever else floats I am currently a third through Battle Cry of Freedom and similar for Man of Iron, though Grover Cleveland will be easier to finish than five years of war and politics. The more I read Man of Iron, the more I like “Big Steve”: he may join Adams alongside my favorite presidents. It’s also Advent, and I usually do some devotional reading: this year that’s a history of the Book of Common Prayer. (I love the BCP, and odds are you’ve heard its marriage and funeral services even if you’ve never stepped foot in an Episcopal/Anglican church.)

Nonbook Commonplace Quotes:

“One of the problems of our fallen humanity is that we’re easily distracted, and we spread ourselves out too thin. Almost all religious practice involves collecting yourself, being present. One of the great phrases of Scripture is Abraham’s response to God, ‘Here I am.’ Here I am. I think that’s become one of the most difficult things for a modern person to say — to anyone, let alone to God. Here! Right here, I am. Because we might be there physically, but mentally we’re all over the place.” – Martin Guit, interview with Dr. Alan Harrellson at the Pipe Cottage. An hour-long convo on pipes, C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Wendell Berry, and presence

“The Suburban Experiment didn’t just change our geography. It rewired our culture. It trained us to experience isolation as prosperity and consumption as citizenship. By the time the internet arrived, we were already living inside systems too large to understand and too brittle to repair.” – Charles Marohn, “The Gutenberg Moment“.

“I think the old become not just repositories of lived experience, but of the dead, too. (…) I think these absences do something to those of us who remain behind. We are like haunted houses, in a way, and our absences can even transform us so that we feel a quiet but urgent love for those who remain, a tenderness to all of humanity, as well as an earned understanding that our time is finite.” – Nick Cave, quoted in Faith, Hope, and Carnage, quoted on substack. (Said substack is evidently banned in Airstrip One.)

New Acquisitions

Oh, dear. My alma mater, the University of Montevallo, has been doing a booksale that consists of discards and donations (some from my former teachers’ libraries!): they were being sold at the lovely price of $1-2 each, so I went in with $20 and came away with this pile:

I wound up swapping A Conquering Spirit for The Battle Cry of Freedom after I realized we had Spirit in the library I work in. (Fun fact: we also have Battle Cry but I didn’t think to check for it. Eh, go Falcons.) Most of the collection is England-oriented in scope, though I’d hoped to score some books on Southern history. As nearest I came was the first volume of Lee’s Lieutenants, part of a large trilogy. There are also a few American Civil War titles in there. I’d been meaning to read The Life of Billy Yank after enjoying The Life of Johnny Reb so much a few years ago.

When I checked my bookstats on the ol’ excel sheet, I was disgruntled to find that 12% of my reads were new acquisitions; my standing goal is to keep that at 10% or under. Given the state of my nonfiction v fiction battle, obviously all of my reading for December will have to be library nonfiction! Of course, this year’s stats are all kinds of weird because of CJ Box and Joe Pickett: Mystery/Thriller is the current genre leader by 7%!

I also purchased Man of Iron on sale on Amazon; $2 for a highly-recommended biography of Grover Cleveland is not bad at all! Ditto Bell I. Wiley’s Confederate Women, which I picked up used and very cheap. Movie Watch will wait until Monday: as of the time of writing, it’s raining on a Sunday afternoon and my odds of watching a movie tonight are quite good.

Also, a final video to think on. While book bloggers lamenting the decline of fiction and the dumbification of the general reading public are common, Amy Shira Teitel has contributed her own thoughts. This is noteworthy because she’s not in the book-blogging scene: her focus is on human spaceflight history, and I’ve read several of her books. She’s currently at work on a third, which I will of course scoop up immediately.

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The Muses speak not to spiritless silicon

Posted on November 29, 2025 by smellincoffee

Dear Leon and Charlie,

In the story of the creation, God makes the world, and everything in it, in six days. On the seventh day he rests. The day of rest is significant because it suggests that the creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place. This struggle is the validating impulse that gives God’s world its intrinsic meaning. The world becomes more than just an object full of other objects, rather it is imbued with the vital spirit, the pneuma, of its creator.

ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.

ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.  That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should ******* desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.

ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation  and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it ‘faster and easier?’

When the God of the Bible looked upon what He had created, He did so with a sense of accomplishment and saw that ‘it was good‘. ‘It was good ‘because it required something of His own self, and His struggle imbued creation with a moral imperative, in short love. Charlie, even though the creative act requires considerable effort, in the end you will be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence. There are all sorts of temptations in this world that will eat away at your creative spirit, but none more fiendish than that boundless machine of artistic demoralisation, ChatGPT.

As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.

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The Plain People of the Confederacy

Posted on November 28, 2025 by smellincoffee

The Plain People of the Confederacy takes a look at three often overlooked demographics of the South: poor whites, whom everyone forgets exist; women; and blacks. As it happens, Wiley has written volumes on each of these categories (poor whites being enveloped by but not defining Johnny Reb’s War), but this is more a condensed version, weighing in at scarcely more than 100 pages. It’s technically divided into four sections, poor white folk being considered at both the front and at home, but parts are not evenly divided: a section on “colored folks” is a third of the book, for instance. The result is a quick and illustrative read, if grim.

War’s hell is not only experienced by the men at the front marching in rags and trying to feed on hardtack infested by weevils and meat so spoiled it sticks to surfaces. Women and children suffered at home because their husbands and sons were at the front fighting, overwhelming women and younger children with the amount of work to be done — and that was before Yankee armies rode through and burned homes or stole stock and supplies out of malice. Wiley writes that the Confederate government’s failure to exempt nonslaveholding men who were the sole means of production in their household was a fundamental mistake. Many men deserted over the course of the war because pleas from their wives about the family plight overrode their sense of duty to ’cause and comrade’. Society as a whole was generally disrupted: if a piece of equipment broke down, it might not be possible to fix because the local blacksmith was off at the war, or if he were present he had no access to needed supplies. Common household supplies were in want, both because of the lack of men and material: there were vanishingly few tanners who could continue creating leather, for instance. Even cotton, the prewar South’s signature crop, was unusable for cloth production without steel cards produced by Northern factories. Wiley includes many letters from home from women who plead with their government to send aide, or at least return their husbands to them: they sound like grist in the mill, crying as they are ground up. The section on women is entirely about the deprivations caused by the homefront.

The closing section, “colored folks”, illustrates David C. William’s claim that slavery was done from the moment the South seceded: not only were there fewer men to maintain ‘order’, but the proximity of Yankee armies invited more and more slaves to make themselves “contraband“. There were, however, many ‘colored servants’ who remained affectionate and loyal to the households they’d served — even help hiding valuables from the marauding bluebellies. Wiley notes that this loyalty came from privileged house slaves, however, and not field hands. Slaves who accompanied their masters to the front sometimes threw themselves eagerly into the fight against the hosts of the North. If that is baffling to the modern reader, Wiley also notes that Yankees did not necessarily treat freedmen or ‘contrabands’ well: when escaped blacks joined the Union army, they were assigned the worst details at inferior pay, and Union troops often refused to march with the ‘colored’ battalions.

This was an interesting little book, though once I read Confederate Women and Southern Negroes (1860 – 1865), I may find it’s merely a collection of excerpts from those, just as Wiley borrows liberally from Johnny Reb’s War for the section on soldiers. We shall see, though! I purchased a used copy of one and sent for an ILL copy of the other, so I may end the year on an unexpected Civil War binge. I began James McPherson’s legendary Battle Cry of Freedom on the eve of Thanksgiving, and it’s a proper tome that I’ll be feeding on for at least a week, I think.

Related:

The Life of Johnny Reb Bell I. Wiley
The Confederate Reader: The War as the South Saw It, Richard B. Harwell
Johnny Reb’s War: Battlefield and Homefront, David C. Williams
A People’s History of the Civil War, David C. Williams

Quotations

Malaria, typhoid, smallpox, pneumonia, scurvy, and pulmonary tuberculosis each took a considerable toll from Rebel ranks. One private remarked in 1862 that “Big Battles is not as Bad as the fever.’ And a prominent Confederate doctor who made a careful study of medical records after the war estimated that for every soldier who died as a result of battle there were three who perished from disease.

And even in defeat the spirit of some remained indomitable. A few years ago when this writer visited relatives near Pulaski, Tennessee, he was escorted to New Zion churchyard to see the grave of a Confederate veteran named Tom Doss. The grave lies north and south with the headstone at the south. This unorthodox arrangement was of Tom’s own planning. Shortly before he died he made his family promise that they would bury him with his feet to the north, so that when Gabriel blew the trumpet on the morn of resurrection he would be in a convenient position to give the Yankees a resounding kick.

Govner Vance, I set down to rite you a few lins and pray to God that you will oblige me. I ame a pore woman with a posel of little children, and I will hav to starv or go neked—me and my little children—if my husban is kep away from home much longer. I beg you to let him come. Tha dont give me but thre dolars a month, and fore of us in the famely. Thay knit forty pare of socks fo the solgers, and it take all I can earn to get bread. If you cud hear the crys of my little children, I think you wod fell for us. I am pore in this world, but I trust rich in heven. I trust in God, and hope he will cos you to have compashion on the pore.

P.S. Apples are good but peaches are better
If you love me, you will write me a letter

Much of the love-making was done at church functions, particularly at summer revivals.

In view of the close association between soldiers and body servants, it is not surprising that the latter became thoroughly imbued with war ardor. So much so, indeed, that in a number of instances the blacks picked up guns during the pitch of battle and indulged themselves in a few pot shots at the Yankees. Several servants boasted of taking Federal prisoners.

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Billy has Gone for a Soldier: the Life of Billy Yank

Posted on November 26, 2025 by smellincoffee

Shortly after Bell Irvin Wiley penned The Life of Johnny Reb, a social history of southern soldiery, he wondered: what about the other fellows? What brought them to the colors, pulled them away from lives of comfort to march thousands of miles over the course of years, risking death by minié ball — or more commonly, disease? The result is The Life of Billy Yank, a social history of Union soldiers, that largely ignores politics to focus on the men and their day-to-day life. Although the author’s sympathies lie more readily with his first subject — Union soldiers are always Yankees, Yanks, or Federals — he does not downplay soldiers’ suffering or humanity here. This was a delightfully deep dive into the camps of those that wore the blue from the man who evidently pioneered social histories of the Civil War: his other works include studies on blacks during the war, as well as Confederate Women. He even addresses the immigrant-soldier experience to some degree: they composed a quarter of the Union army and were mostly German and Irish.

Billy Yank is divided into topics like combat, illness and death, recreation, and morality. Before getting into the lives of soldiers, though, Wiley first visits the motivations of those who volunteered. The overwhelming motive appears to have been simple patriotism — indignation that the Stars and Stripes had been fired upon at Fort Sumter, and determination to squash those who had done it. There were those who expressed a hatred of slavery and a desire to end it, including one soldier who vowed he didn’t care about the Union so long as slavery was destroyed. These appear to be a distinct minority in the early years of the war, though, just as McPherson’s study indicated. Many Yankees evinced outright loathing of the Southerners and the South, viewing the unindustrialized land as primitive and its residents as barbarians. The majority of the book addresses aspects of a soldier’s life: the boredom and terror of campaign life, resentment towards officers, camp conditions and recreation, cooking, and matters of morality. (Bored soldiers often found recourse in liquor and gambling when they were not doing more wholesome things like singing and playing baseball.)

Because the ranks of the Army swelled so quickly, both officers and enlisted men were typically amateur. Officers attended classes in camp at night after the day’s drilling was done, and some studied handbooks on tactics and drill in their free time. Medical reviews of recruits being mustered in were so cursory that numerous women who passed for boys made it into the ranks: some were found out when they were shot, but one lived as a man until 1911 when an auto accident exposed her. The Union army was fairly tolerant of this, even granting pensions to some women who served despite shifting them from infantry to support positions like nursing.The amateur status of the citizen-soldiery also led to massive insubordination issues, since the men were not soldiers by disposition, nor by training. Not only did they not know the many regulations they were breaking in those first few months of service, they didn’t care — and if they had access to liquor, they were violently expressive about communicating their disdain for jumped-up sergeant and officers. Wiley quotes liberally from soldiers’ letters, enough to give an idea for the period’s chaotic spelling. I especially enjoyed the chapter on the music soldiers played and invented to pass the time. I was surprised to read in the chapter on camp food and cooking that the Union army distributed “dessicated vegetables” — or as the soldiers who tried to eat them preferred, “desecrated vegetables”. They were only edible if used in a stew and boiled so long their nutritional value disappeared. Some officers who were courteous mind find themselves invited to eat in southern homes; many enlisted who were not courteous simply stole geese, chickens, and pigs and claimed with straight faces that said livestock had evinced rebel sympathies by hissing at the Union army or the Grand Old Flag.

This was quite an engaging and fun read: while I consider myself fairly versed in this subject there were still a lot of surprises, and Wiley is a talented and thorough writer. This is excellent stuff.

Related:
The Life of Johnny Reb, Bell I. Wiley
For Cause and Comrade, James McPherson

Another Yank of five weeks’ service featured by long marches complained: “If there is anything particularly attractive in marching from 10 to 20 miles a day under a scorching sun with a good mule load, and sinking up to one’s knees in the ‘Sacred Soil’ at each Step, my mind is not of a sufficiently poetic nature to appreciate it.”

“The surgeon insisted on Sending me to the hospital for treatment. I insisted on takeing the field and prevailed — thinking that I had better die by rebel bullets than Union Quackery.”

In the Federal forces four persons died of sickness for every one killed in battle, and deaths from disease were twice those resulting from other known causes.It is a sad fact of Civil War history that more men died of loosening of the bowels than fell on the field of combat.

Of a Virginia belle a New York soldier wrote “She might have been a smart girl but, but she has never done anything but read novels.”

The officer approached a wounded man with the expectation of rceiving a last message for a loved one, but instead was asked, “Colonel, is the day ours?” “Yes”, responded the officer. “Then I am willing to die,” was the soldier’s reply.

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WWW Wednesday & Long and Short Prompt

Posted on November 26, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? “Shadowlands“, a play about CS Lewis, Joy Davidman, and suffering. I’m also fairly close to finishing The Horse and His Boy, I think. I say “I think” because I am listening to the audiobook, and it’s been so long since I last read Horse that I’ve forgotten the story — but Shasta has escaped and met Aslan and I’m fairly certain Rabadash’s hopes for stealing Susan and forcing her to be his wife, as well as conquering Narnia, are about to be dashed. I’m really enjoying the narrator, but I’ve forgotten his name and Audible’s entry doesn’t list the narrators by association with their book, only as a lump. After youtubing the narrators, though, I think Alex Jennings is the Horse narrator. I’d wondered why he sounded so familiar yet not quite known, and it’s because I first heard Jennings in The Lady in the Van where he does a very different vocal affect. He sounds a bit like Hagrid when he’s doing a dwarf voice here. “Yer a Narnian, Shasta!“

WHAT are you reading now? Well, I’m 70% through The Life of Billy Yank, a social history of Union soldiery; I’m a quarter through Man of Iron, a biography of Grover Cleveland; I’m halfway through Double Star by Robert Heinlein; and then I’ve nibbled bits from Tarkin, From a Certain Point of View, and Firewall, the last three being Star Wars and Star Trek novels. I’ve also started a history of the Book of Common Prayer. Since I schedule these posts beforehand, I may have finished Billy by the time it goes live.

WHAT are you reading next? See above entry, unless I get distracted by something else.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is A Genre We Wish Were More Popular. I will say….near-future SF. It’s probably my favorite kind of SF to read, and its best writers that I know of Daniel Suarez and Blake Crouch. I like near future SF because I often learn about tech that’s already at work now, but in experimental or limited ways: in these stories, we see what effects it’s having on society after exploding in use. Exploding is the right word, too: I am amazed by how tech has changed in my lifetime. When unmanned aerial vehicles started being used in the mideast wars, I scoffed when people referred to them as drones. Drones were those things in Star Trek Insurrection that moved around on their own, following and shooting people. UAVs were nothing like that! Now drone warfare is commonplace.

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Teaser Tuesday

Posted on November 25, 2025 by smellincoffee

As we approach the end of November, I’m afraid it doesn’t look terribly good for my SciFi month goals. I have a Heinlein novel I’m almost done with, but I keep pecking at several Star Trek and Star Wars novels and not getting sucked into any of them yet. History is also launching an assault, bound and determined to right the scales and restore itself and its nonfiction compatriots to glory. Presently it still trails fiction by three points, but I have faith it will prevail. It doesn’t help that I’ve been writing more this weekend than reading — not for NaNoWriMo, which is evidently extinct from scandal, but just for the pleasure of it. I’ve been playing with two short stories and began reading one of my successful Nanowrimo runs from back in 2018. (It’s fantasy, if you can believe that, based on a Heroes of Might and Magic II scenario I designed in high school.) Anyhoo, today’s TTT is about being thankful, sooo I’ll just link to my Long and Short Review post from last week and let people who click on it blindly be slightly confused. But here is a Teaser Tuesday!

Another Yank of five weeks’ service featured by long marches complained: “If there is anything particularly attractive in marching from 10 to 20 miles a day under a scorching sun with a good mule load, and sinking up to one’s knees in the ‘Sacred Soil’ at each Step, my mind is not of a sufficiently poetic nature to appreciate it.” (THE LIFE OF BILLY YANK)

“When enemies had at him they quickly found that his weight was the least of their difficulties; what really sent them sprawling was the fact that his whole huge carcass seemed to be made of iron. There was no give in him, no bounce, no softness. He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.” (H.L. Mencken on Grover Cleveland, as quoted in A MAN OF IRON.)

This next one is less of a tease and more of a whole chonka text, but I love the Book of Common Prayer and enjoyed reading this passage. (Yes, I’m nibbling at three nonfiction books and three SF books simultaneously. I am insane. I do get a four day weekend, though.)


Yet for all its modesty and derivativeness, Cranmer’s 1544 Litany was the beginning of something very big indeed. That single rite would be the first installment of a book, the Book of Common Prayer, that would transform the religious lives of countless English men, women, and children; that would mark the lives of millions as they moved through the stages of life from birth and baptism through marriage and on to illness and death and burial; that would accompany the British Empire as it expanded throughout the world. When Cranmer was still alive a version of that book was the first book printed in Ireland; a quarter-century after his death prayers from it were read in what we now call California by the chaplain of Sir Francis Drake; and versions of it are used today in Christian churches all over the world, as far from England as South Africa, Singapore, and New Zealand. That book’s rite of marriage has become for many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, the means by which two people are joined: I participated many years ago in a Unitarian wedding in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that began with the minister’s intoning of the familiar words: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony.” Whatever Cranmer was thinking when he sat among his books in Croydon Palace, in “an obscure and darke place” surrounded by trees, whatever he thought might come of his little exercise in vernacular rite-making, he was imagining nothing even remotely like what would come to pass. (THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, Alan Jacobs)

I especially enjoyed this passage because I remember going through the Book of Common Prayer in one of my first Episcopal services as a visitor, I found the service of marriage and marveled at how influential it was.

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Shadowlands: A Play

Posted on November 22, 2025 by smellincoffee
I have been given the choice twice in my life. The boy chose
safety. The man chooses suffering.

C.S. Lewis died on 11/22/63, a week before his 65th birthday. Over the years, I have taken up the habit of spending “a week with Jack” — reading something of his in that space, to spend time with an author whose letters and essays delight me like no other’s. While looking for a quote of Lewis’ to share on Christmas (specifically, his harrumping at the vulgar commercialization of it), I stumbled upon “Shadowlands: A Play” and was immediately intrigued. A few years ago I watched a movie about the relationship of Lewis and his American friend, and later wife, Joy Gresham — and it shared the same name. While “Shadowlands” is largely about the growth of Jack and Joy’s relationship, the scenes are more confined. Much of the play happens at the Kilns, where Jack and some male friends debate and argue and joke — and where Jack and Joy have more serious conversations. “Shadowlands” is not entirely about their relationship, though. It also draws heavily on The Problem of Pain, in that Lewis and his interlocuators frequently discuss suffering and theodicy. This is not abstract filler, either, as during the course of the play Joy learns that she’s been divorced and must now face the world alone. She doesn’t, of course, as anyone familiar with Jack and Joy’s story knows, but their union will bring its suffering as well as its bliss — as we see later in A Grief Observed. I loved this: the writer had a fairly good handle on Lewis’ voice, I think, even when Lewis isn’t being quoted, and the dialogue is often funny and insightful. As the play develops, it becomes quite serious — with Lewis arguing with himself, finding words written about suffering sound rather different when one is deep in the valley of the shadow of death. Definitely recommended to Lewis fans.

Here I’m going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. I think that God doesn’t necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don’t start off being all that lovable, if we’re honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn’t it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.

God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in the world, and that mechanism is called suffering. To put it in another way, pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can’t He wake us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be awakened is the dream that all is well.

“We’re like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. The suffering in the world is not the failure of God’s love for us; it is that love in action. “

I could argue that art has quite the opposite effect. Great art breaks through that separateness, and lets us touch the very heart of reality.

Riley: What I resent about Christmas is the general presumption of good will. I feel no good will towards my fellow men. I feel ill will.
Lewis: It’s got nothing to do with how you feel, Christopher. Feelings are far too unreliable.

Lewis: You sound like me, Joy. You’re supposed to be dragging me kicking into the twentieth century.

Joy: Professor Riley, as you know, I’m an American, and different cultures have different modes of discourse. I need a little guidance here. Are you being offensive, or merely stupid?

Joy: Don’t you sometimes burst to share the joke?
Lewis: What joke?
Joy: Well. Here’s the neighbors thinking we’re unmarried and up to all sorts of wickedness, while all along we’re married and up to nothing at all.

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Fresh Air with Terry Grosz

Posted on November 21, 2025 by smellincoffee
The only law out there is God, and He is in short supply in that neck of the woods.

When it’s time for me to do my annual writeup in a month or so, I will have to mention the Black Swan event that was game warden-oriented books suddenly exploding onto the scene, bursting out of nowhere like a covey of quail. It’s largely been an absurd number of novels, but I can now included two game-warden memoirs in the list. Wildlife Wars is the memoir of Terry Grosz, who appears to have begun service in 1966, where he was part of the new wave of ‘professional’ wardens who had formal educations. This did not endear him to the old guard, who regarded themselves as lawmen rather than scientists, but Grosz’ skiful reading of the land, creativity, and sometimes sheer brazenness combined to make him an effective warden, eventually moving him from California to overseeing a massive district in the upper west. The stories cover quite the range, as he recollects everything from being a boarding agent on the coast (hopping onto boats to inspect permits & hauls) to sneaking through mountain forests to get the drop on antelope poachers. I found all of them enjoyable, and they are action heavy, even the undercover case he was involved in as a newbie.

Grosz proves himself someone who makes clever and studious use of his environment, though I imagine that’s a practice all wardens have to develop. His submersion in a rice field to monitor duck hunters must have been as uncomfortable as Bob Lee hiding in a woodpile for hours on end to ambush some fish poachers. There is danger aplenty here, both from the animals Grosz is protecting and from those hunting them: at one point, he was shot in the back end multiple times with a shotgun—thankfully loaded with birdshot. The sheriff provided the first and only aid, as the lawmen didn’t want area poachers knowing the warden was injured or suspecting he might be off the job for a few days. A few months later, a quarrelsome hunter cheekily informed Grosz that he understood the warden had had “his ass sprayed”—and Grosz instantly knew the man was his assailant, as only three men knew of the incident, and two of them (Grosz and the sheriff) hadn’t said a thing, not even to Grosz’s wife. Another time, Grosz recounts, he was in the rifle sights of a man he’d busted for poaching, and only the wife — who remembered Grosz’s kindness by supplying them with seized meat — stopped the man from taking the shot.

The most memorable story, though, is the rookie undercover assignment he was given right out of the gate by a captain who despised wardens with university degrees. Because Grosz was unknown to the area’s hunters, he was able to walk into a tackle shop and purchase equipment for “snagging” sturgeon—and thereby earn the trust of the shopkeeper, who just happened to be connected to a group of poachers illegally snagging fish and smuggling them to Native American communities to be smoked and sold at a tidy profit. Grosz was almost immediately invited into the conspiracy after they learned he had a pickup truck that could transport the goods—and the end of this story is even more incredible. Grosz is a memorable warden: physically imposing, clever as a fox, and a stickler for principle: in one story he arrests a couple of deputies who are poaching fish, and then stands up to a judge who reprimands him for arresting his nephew and threatens him with throwing the warden’s future cases out until he learns the importance of “professional courtesy”. (Grosz leaked the story to the press, according to his narrative, and the judge backed down.)

This was a fun surprise, especially considering how often Grosz was operating on his own: this not only heightens the stakes, but forces him to get creative. Fortunately for him, his height and preference for surprises worked to his advantage. Interestingly, Grosz has written some fiction, which I may check out last year.

Not Terry Grosz

Related:
Backwoods Lawman, a game warden memoir set in Florida

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For Cause and Comrade

Posted on November 20, 2025 by smellincoffee

The moment I saw this book at a university booksale I knew I wanted it, because in the second story of that same library I’d researched my senior seminar paper to earn my BA in history.  For Cause and Comrades dives into the letters of  Union and Confederate combatants to explore what led them to fight and what kept them fighting after things grew miserable. (I’d done the same with Civil War songbooks to explore how they expressed motives and the experience of war.)   James McPherson is best known for his Battle Cry of Freedom, a  Pulitzer prizewinning history of the Civil War, and is generally regarded as the most preeminent of ACW scholars.  Between the topic and the author, I knew to brace for a good read and was not disappointed.

McPherson writes at the beginning that he chose to focus on letters, not memoirs, because memoirs were often written decades after the events themselves, where  memories could become pliable and made to fit feel-good narratives. While letters could also be performative – as men tried to reassure themselves and their wives and family at home that their boy was OK on the front –  McPherson found them to be surprisingly raw and honest much of the time.  

 It’s worth noting, as McPherson does, that men of the 19th century lived in a much different culture than we did:  it was more idealistic and romantic,  and ideas like duty, valour, and honor had meaning that our cynical modern age frequent dismiss as sentiment.  This is important to keep in mind, especially as it informs how Union and Confederate soldiers were fighting for “Cause”.  The Union in 1861 was not even a century old;  soldiers who fought for its preservation, or to help establish their own Confederacy, could have had grandparents who remembered a time before its existence.    This made it especially precious to soldiers who believed the American experiment was still quite young and in need of protection –  but at the same time, less important to Confederate soldiers for whom it was a political abstraction and not their “country”, proper.   Many of the soldiers’ letters here testify to not believing in secession, but nonetheless defending it because Lincoln was invading their home.  (General Robert E. Lee also fell into this camp, and it’s expressed in the film The Blue and the Gray when a Southern journalist who despises slavery and secession both winds up taking up arms at the end when the Yankee army is burning their way through his home county.) 

McPherson’s shared letters and comments do not shy away from the fact that “cause” for both Union and Confederate soldiers was complex.  Most Union soldiers were not fighting to exterminate slavery: at the beginning of the war,  only 3-10% of letters (varying on region) expressed that thought, and  in early 1863 many Union soldiers expressed bitterness that Lincoln was trying to turn it into a war to free blacks – though they used less polite terms. One of the more disturbing things I learned from David Williams’  A People’s History of the Civil War is that racism was not only pervasive across the entire United States, but even present with some abolitionists – and that’s evinced here.   As the war progressed, though, and as Union soldiers waded further into the South and saw how slavery stagnated the economy and dehumanized both whites and blacks — and as they realized every runaway slave meant sapping the Confederate war effort – the number of Union soldiers writing against slavery increased. 

On the Southern side,   there were soldiers fighting for the institution of slavery,  although far less than a modern reader would expect. This owes in large part to the fact that most southerners were not slave-holders, though many non-slaveholders did fight to defend slavery purely for the disruption widespread emancipation would cause. These letters concern both the practical economic effects, as well as social fears, particularly being “lowered” to the level of a slave. A poor tenant farmer or struggling freeholder might not ever have any status in society,  but at least he wasn’t a “Negro”.  Far more pervasive was the conviction that Southerners were fighting for “Their country” –  be that Virginia or Texas, or the South in general.  The fervor that Southerners had for their states was sometimes a cause for desertion: after Arkansas fell to Yankee armies, Arkansans fighting in Tennessee wondered why they were still in this thing for. (Nevermind Franklin’s adage about hanging together or hanging separately.)   

On that note, McPherson notes that soldiers in units formed tight bonds with one another that often sustained them even when they’d stopped believing in causes.  Part of this may be tied to the culture of the era, in  which honor was taken far more seriously than now, but I don’t think it’s all of the story.   Soldiers in the Civil War refused promotions to different units and continued fighting after their first term was up for the same reason soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq continued to “re-up” even if they hated  the wars and the land and the people they were fighting in and for – because their brothers were there, and they would not desert them.  Considering that volunteer regiments tended to be highly localized,  this makes sense – but men also formed strong bonds with strangers.    When regiments were shattered by massive battles, though, a soldier who found all of his friends dead might be so overwhelmed he didn’t see any purpose in holding on.

Despite its size, this is a book rich with insight.  It doesn’t skew toward anyone’s preferred narrative of the war, because the variety of quoted letters is enough to give any tidy stories   pause for thought.   McPherson is present as an editor and narrator, but if his thumb was heavier in some aspects or another I didn’t notice.  A book like this – and other works like The Life of Billy Yank, or the Life of Johnny Reb – are valuable because they allow us to break through the staid paintings of narrative and see the subjects come alive and speak for themselves. 

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WWW Wednesday, SciFi Month Prompt 19, and Books that Shaped Me

Posted on November 19, 2025 by smellincoffee

WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South, which was fairly mixed. Some interesting Civil War content that I’m still fact-checking, bookended by fluff.

WHAT are you reading now? Double Star, Bob Heinlein. It’s a quickie so I will probably be done before this post is scheduled, actually. Also 33% through For Cause and Comrades, on what can be gleaned from Civil War combatants’ letters.

WHAT are you reading next? Will continue with For Cause and Comrades, and then more SF.

SciFi Prompt 19: Lost in Translation

If everybody’s answer for this isn’t Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, they’re wrong. I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s just the way it is.

Also on the subject of SF, I watched Source Code last night and really enjoyed it. I can’t say much for fear of spoilers, but let’s say that Jake Gyllenhaal keeps reliving the same eight minutes on a doomed commuter train over and over, and in each attempt is trying to figure out where a bomb is, how to disrupt it, and who planted it. I also watched the 2002 version of The Time Machine, which is so loose an adaptation that all we can say is “There was a guy and he met some people who called themselves Eloi and Morlocks, but Jeremy Irons is the villain so it was ok.” The music was quite nice, though.

Long and Short Reviews Prompt: Books That Shaped Me

This is a subject I have written about before, in a post on authors who have shaped me. Nearly ten years on I suppose it’s nearly time for a considered update, but this prompt is about specific books. Most of these will be familiar if you’ve been around RF for a while, but I’m going to try to throw in less intense/less serious options, too.

  1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. This book, which I literally announced an annual theme for just to prompt me to re-read it, had completely altered my thinking about everything before I was even a third of the way through. I should note that it will not have that effect on other readers: I’d been reading and thinking about things that this book had a catalytic effect on, making me think about emergent order and the morality of intervention. For most people, this is merely a fascinating book about how cities develop and function.
  2. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, Frances and Joseph Gies. This book overturned the snobby Victorian dismissal of the medieval era that my schoolbooks had given me by looking at how technological and intellectual arts flourished in that oft-libeled epoch.
  3. Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, Neil Postman. I found this book in my local library while looking for books on the Enlightenment, and portions of it led me to Postman’s other works, Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death, which explored the effects of technology on society and people ourselves. I had never thought about this before, beyond reading Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason, and found Postman fascinating. I later read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, and these two men are why I didn’t buy a smartphone until 2018 and why I’m constantly analyzing my engagement with social media, the internet, etc. I keep my open tabs to four or under, when I’m reading an ebook I actively restrain myself from checking email or checking the facebook feed, and so on.
  4. The Airman’s War, Albert Marrin. I had an interest in WW2 history in high school, but after Marrin made the war come ALIVE in this book and his other WW2 titles (Operation Overlord and Victory in the Pacific), I was obsessive. Marrin made me especially nuts about WW2 aviation, leading to my writing multiple papers in college on WW1 and WW2 aerial warfare, and many museum visits. I am not a car guy, but I’m pretty darn OK at spotting WW2 fighters.
  5. The Geography of Nowhere by Jim Kunstler was a complete sea change for me, giving me vocabulary to think about issues that had troubled me in a murky way for years. Kunstler’s history of American urbanism — and its death by sprawl in the postwar period — made me start thinking about the importance of the built environment on human flourishing.
  6. Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam. It’s hard to articulate this book’s effect on me, but I read it during a transitional year and I think it’s an important part of the mix.
  7. small is beautiful, E.F. Schumacher. Ditto.
  8. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis. The book that made me a Lewis fan. I read it, or at least read from it, every Advent.
  9. The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. I found this book during a hard moment of life, nearly twenty years ago now, and Stoicism is a vital part of my philosophical & religious biography.
  10. The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton. I believe a search for Seneca led me to this, and ever since then de Botton has remained one of my favorite authors.

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