impressions – Page 2 – Everything is Oll Korrect!

Snap Back to Reality

Posted on 17 April 2021 by Richard Carroll

A couple years ago I did something rather dangerous and reviewed a novel written by an e-friend, Neovictorian’s Sanity. Fortunately, the novel was in fact enjoyable and genuinely interesting. Shortly after publishing Sanity, Neovictorian announced that he was working on a sequel, Reality, and I was, for the first time since high school, looking forward to a new novel by a living author. Amazing! Being swamped by schoolwork and wedding planning kept me from starting and finishing the book until recently, well after its January 2020 release date, but so it goes.

Was it worth the wait? Mostly, yes. The short version of this review is that if you enjoyed Sanity (and yes, you need to read that first), then you’ll also enjoy Reality. If you didn’t, you won’t.

Like Sanity, Reality starts off with a bang:

Sometimes it helps if you don’t have too much imagination.

I’m starting to put pressure on the seatbelt buckle, to snap it into its slot, looking down to find the right angle when in my peripheral vision the reflection off the car hood changes, the orb of the sun cut into by a shadow that shouldn’t be coming from that direction and I let go the buckle and begin to drop right, across the seat and there’s a burst of light and sound over my head and a shower of glass across my back and legs but I ignore it and get down, down, flatten the right side of my face into the leather bench seat.

It still has that new car smell.

I reach with my left hand and pull the passenger door handle toward me, give the door a shove and launch out behind it, pulling on the edge of the seat with my right hand and using knees and chest muscles and everything and anything to get some velocity out the door. There’s another big sound, different because the windshield is already shattered and a gentle rain of safety glass pebbles falls on the back of my head but I don’t care. I make it mostly out, elbows on the asphalt and the rebounding door hits my legs but I just keep pulling and twisting toward the front of the car to get a visual, my legs finally clear and hit the ground. Between the front tires I see a pair of black boots and dark pants 12 or 15 yards away and I squirm to get some clearance for my right hip, get a good grip on the butt of the .45 and another shot comes, the deep throaty boom of a 12-gauge. I smoothly draw, I’ve practiced from this position and every position get a two-hand grip a flash sight picture on the left boot and send one, the sound is enormous in the confined space under the car, a wave of dust and heat bounces off the pavement rushing away from me and when it dissipates a second later I see the legs of the shooter collapsing, a dark figure tumbling toward me and the shotgun clatters and bounces, sliding along the asphalt and the figure’s chest hits the ground right into my sight picture and I send the second one smoothly, pressing the trigger so gently I can feel the perfect location of it, just ahead of the first knuckle.…

Consecration to St. Joseph

Posted on 31 January 2021 by Richard Carroll

Many Catholics are well familiar with consecration to Mary, especially St. Louis de Montfort’s thirty-three day programme of preparation for consecration. It’s a popular devotion with centuries of history behind it. Much more recent, though, is the concept of consecration to St. Joseph. I only became aware of it when my wife bought me a copy of Fr. Donald Calloway’s book Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father, published just in 2019, for my birthday last year.

Now, to be clear, this is intended to be a complementary devotion to the consecration to Mary. Fr. Calloway assumes that if you are reading his book you are already familiar with and have likely already done the Marian consecration. In the introduction, he points out that God intends all families to have a mother and a father. Mary is our spiritual mother, and her spouse thus becomes our spiritual father in a similar way. Just as Christ entrusted Himself to Mary and Joseph’s care as a child, we may also entrust ourselves to their paternal care in our spiritual lives. Fr. Calloway states in the book that no saint can have loved Christ as much as His earthly parents, and both are eager to help us on our way to knowing and loving Our Lord.

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Tales of Mystery and Imagination (the Other One)

Posted on 17 October 2020 by Richard Carroll

It’s October and Halloween is just around the corner, so now’s a perfect time to bring out Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Not the compilation of Edgar Allan Poe stories, though that’s good, too, but the Alan Parsons Project album based on various Poe stories and poems, though most aren’t from that specific collection – only “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

This album was something of a lucky find for me. About seven years ago or so I was browsing the vinyl section at a Half Price Books and stumbled across Tales. I wasn’t very familiar with APP outside a couple hit and that Parsons was involved with Pink Floyd, but those were enough to pique my interest. Also, I liked the idea of a concept album based on Poe’s stories and besides, used vinyl was very cheap aside from collectible stuff. I wouldn’t call it a great album, but it’s right up my alley and is quite good.…

That Other Return of the King Movie

Posted on 8 June 2020 by Richard Carroll

We’ve talked about Rankin and Bass’s version of The Hobbit, and you can’t talk about The Hobbit without also talking about The Lord of the Rings. Yeah, I know, it’s been three years since that earlier post, but I don’t like to be rushed. So, today we’re going to talk about about Rankin/Bass’s follow-up, The Return of the King.

“Now hold on,” you may be thinking. “That’s the third Lord of the Rings volume. What happened to The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers?” Well, I assume there were some rights issues involved, or perhaps they just didn’t want to retread the ground already covered by Ralph Bakshi’s unfortunate foray into Middle Earth, which was an animated and rotoscoped adaptation of Fellowship and about half of Two Towers and which had come out just two years earlier. To give you the timeline, R/B’s Hobbit was 1977, Bakshi’s LotR was 1978, and R/B’s LotR was 1980. I won’t go in to why things worked out that way; I don’t know and ultimately what matters is the film as we have it.

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