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Cold news

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The fate of the Greenlanders has long interested me, in a melancholy sort of way. If you’re not familiar with the story, the place was settled by Erik the Red around 986, and prospered for a time as an exporter of valuable merchandise like walrus hides and narwhal ivory. Eventually, after Norway become a province of Denmark in the 14th Century, interest in the far-off colony waned, and the last ship sent to check on them, after a long period of neglect, found the settlement deserted.

There’ve been many theories over the years about what happened to them, most of them pretty depressing. Some thought they assimilated with the Inuit and lost their identity (unfortunately there’s no evidence for this). Others thought they succumbed to the Black Death or some other disease, or just starved due to the increasingly cold weather. Some historians pointed a finger at Portuguese or English pirates, suggesting they kidnapped all the Icelanders and sold them as slaves. (I particularly hated that theory.)

Now there’s a theory being touted as new (though I’m pretty sure I read something very like it in a book years back). It’s suggests that the Icelanders got sick of having nothing but seal to eat, and went back to Iceland and Norway. They seem to have some evidence. This article doesn’t mention it, but I’ve read elsewhere that they suggest that land was opening up in Iceland and Norway at the time, and the Greenlanders just went back there.

I’m all for this theory. Maybe some of the dozen or so people I’ve met in my life who informed me they were direct descendents of Leif Eriksson were right. Right by accident, but right nevertheless.

Tip: Archaeology in Europe.

In other news about frigid places where nobody wants to live, somebody over at Threedonia mentioned the Minnesota state flag in comments today:

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“For the children”

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You know what bugs me about the president’s public relations event today? (Aside from the fact that I’m a “Nazi” NRA member, and thus an enemy of the people. Plus the fact that the Bill of Rights has somehow become suspicious.) It’s the use of the kids.

He brings out these kids who apparently wrote letters to the White House asking him to do something about gun violence.

Does anybody really believe these kids wrote those letters on their own initiative? That they pondered the options and decided they were morally obligated to bring their concerns to the highest office in the land?

No. You and I both know they were assigned to write these letters in school classes. After a class discussion, carefully orchestrated by the teacher to come to the approved conclusion, they were assigned to write letters, which the teacher then posted for them.

For some reason that sort of moral exploitation really offends me.

It offends me on our side too, by the way. There’s a pro-life organization around here that puts up billboards along the highways. It also runs radio ads. And the ads consist of little kids reciting lines written for them by adults, like, “My mommy says that I could suck my thumb before I was even bo-orn!”

It’s cute, I suppose. And the organization does a good work (the billboards, in my opinion, are less manipulative.) But the point of the radio ads seems to be that these are children speaking simple truth out of their innocent hearts. When it’s nothing of the kind.

Just like the presidential show today.

By the way, a lot of Sunday Schools and parochial schools have sent letters to the president over the years (40 years now), protesting abortion. I’m eagerly awaiting the press event where the president brings those kids out for the cameras.

Fiction, Reviews

Killer in the Wind, by Andrew Klavan

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See, I’d seen that look before. That wrinkled nose, that laughing sparkle in the eyes. In the movies, evil guys laugh out loud. Bwa-ha-ha. Or they chuckle suavely, swirling their drinks in their glasses. But this is the real deal, the real look most monsters have. A sort of cute, dainty, delicate recoil from speaking the thing out loud. The forbidden joke of it.

Are we being naughty now?
I know you’re used to seeing me review Andrew Klavan’s books, and I know you’ve come to expect me to praise each one to the skies. Nevertheless, I want you to believe me when I say that it’s been a long time since I actually stayed up late in bed with a book, unable to put it down except by a strong effort of the will.
Killer in the Wind is one of the most compelling thrillers I’ve ever read.
The hero, Dan Champion, is a former commando, a former New York City police detective, and a certified hero. Now he’s part of the police force in a small town in downstate New York. He’s dating a local waitress, a nice woman whose love he’d like to return. But he can’t commit. He can’t commit for a reason he himself knows is crazy. Three years ago, in the course of an undercover investigation, he had a hallucination under the influence of drugs. In the hallucination he encountered a woman named Samantha, whom he can’t get over. Even though he knows for a fact that she doesn’t exist.
Except that one day Samantha shows up in the flesh. She says one thing to him – “They’re coming after us” – before disappearing again.
Is this a real-world mystery, or a supernatural thriller? The borderline seems vague sometimes, and that’s no accident. Klavan likes to explore those boundaries. Some of the reviews on Amazon suggest that certain readers don’t get this. They take the uncertainty as over-the-top storytelling. But it’s not. It’s the author’s way of exploring the wonder of life itself – that all of us are living in an improbable world, a world impossible to explain by purely rational methods. For good and evil.
My own reaction to Killer in the Wind may not be yours. I’m pretty sure I was emotionally affected by the way it dealt with areas of human evil of which I have some personal experience.
But even if that’s the case, I can still recommend Killer in the Wind without reservation. It’s a tight, tense, deeply moving thriller with characters as real as your own family.
Cautions for rough language, sex, and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

Take No More, by Seb Kirby

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Getting free book offers for my Kindle has expanded my opportunities for writing snarky reviews. Take No More by Seb Kirby is far from being the worst written e-book I’ve read, but I can hardly recommend it.

James Blake, a London radio executive, comes home to his apartment one day and finds his wife dying just inside the door, shot in the head. Not only can he not imagine why anyone would have killed her, but he didn’t even know she was in town. She was supposed to be in Florence, looking for lost art masterpieces.

Naturally he comes under police suspicion, but he manages to flee to Florence where he discovers that his wife has crossed immensely powerful people, and he soon becomes a target himself.

I’d say the problem with Take No More is that the author is an OK storymaker, but an amateur storyteller. He often commits the sin of having his narrator inform us what other people are thinking, something he can’t know for sure. And the prose is… maddeningly pedestrian. There’s plenty of danger and action, but the words don’t serve the story. It occurred to me that the book read like a second-rate translation – all the words are right, but the music is absent. One of the reviewers on Amazon actually said something about it being originally written in another language, but “Kirby” sounds like an English-speaking name to me.

There was one trick employed for losing a tail that did impress me, though.

Cautions for the usual stuff, but nothing radical. If you can get it free like I did, you might care to give it a try if this sort of thing interests you. Otherwise, I’d say pass.

Authors, Poetry

Heaney Talks About O’Driscoll

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The Book Haven writes: “The elder Irish poet said, ‘He devoted years to collaborating with me on a book I needed to write but one that, without Dennis as interviewer, might never have got written.’ He called O’Driscoll ‘my hero.'”

Poet Dennis O’Driscoll, 58, died suddenly last Christmas Eve. Seamus Heaney praises him as his hero.

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Video Vikings

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So here’s the trailer for the upcoming History Channel series, Vikings.

On the basis of this trailer, and what I’ve read, I’m not as sad as I have been that I don’t have cable and won’t be able to watch it. I suppose I’m hypercritical. The first thing reenactors look for is always costumes, and these seem… weird. Instead of dressing people as we’re pretty sure they actually dressed, they’ve allowed their costumers to get “creative,” especially with leather. And what’s with the guy (I think he’s the star, playing the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok) with the sides of his head shaved?

Also they have a woman warrior. You know how I feel about this. I don’t deny that Viking women could fight. But I’ve never seen any account, from sagas or the chronicles of the Vikings’ victims, that mention women being a regular part of armies.

Maybe it’ll be OK. But I won’t order cable to see it. Maybe it’ll show up on Netflix.

Anyway, I think the people who made the trailer borrowed ideas from my book trailer.

Addendum: Re:the filth. One of the things we know for sure about the Vikings is that they were notably fastidious for the times. We have an Anglo-Saxon document complaining that the Vikings were stealing all the English women through their effeminate habit of bathing once a week.

Authors

In which I play philologist. Badly.

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

I’m generally a few months behind in my reading of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, so I only got to the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue yesterday. The front page story is “The Riddle of Gollum: A Speculative Meditation on Tolkien’s Sources,” by Woodrow and Susan Wendling. As the authors examined the origins of both the character and his name, they mentioned a poem Tolkien wrote around 1928. It’s called “Glip,” and comes from a collection called Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay. Here’s Glip’s description:

Glip is his name, as blind as a mole

In his two round eyes

While daylight lasts; but when night falls

With a pale gleam they shine

Like green jelly, and out he crawls

All long and wet with slime….

Glip is a scavenger. He lives near a mermaid who lures sailors onto the rocks with her songs, and scavenges their bones for his meals.

The name “Glip” intrigued me. Tolkien, of course, was a master linguist concentrating on northern European languages. I know that there’s a Norwegian word, “glipp,” which means to blink. However, there’s also a verb phrase, “å gå glipp av,” which means to lose or mislay something. I’m not qualified to say, but that form may be related to the Old Norse word “glepja,” which means to confuse or beguile. (I don’t read Old Norse, but I have access to an online dictionary here. And now so do you. Thanks to Kelsey Patton for the link.)

If Glip was an early version of Gollum, could the original name have suggested to Tolkien the idea of a creature who mislays something important to him? The conjecture’s a little weak, as Tolkien rejected the name Glip and moved on to Gollum. But I thought I’d mention the possible connection. The tangle of associations in an author’s mind can be extremely complex.

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Lucky 13. Or not.

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“Cognitive dissonance” is a useful term, especially in my life. I first learned it – it will surprise none of you to learn – from a counselor, and he wasn’t talking about himself. But during this winter of our discontent, I find myself even more dissonant than is my wont.

On the macro level, I see no hope at all. I can’t conceive a scenario by which conservatives and Christians, and conservative Christians, can possibly come back from the losses we’ve suffered. I fear the future, not only because I see persecution (if relatively light by global standards), but because I love my country. I have this crazy idea that you can’t sow scoundrelism and reap integrity, and that you can’t borrow your way out of debt.

I know that God is in charge. I’ll stipulate to that. He was also in charge during the Diocletian persecution.

So that gets me down.

On the other hand, it’s beginning to look very much as if 2013 may be the year when things turn around for me personally. I’ve got the translation work, and there’s some publishing news coming up, and things look pretty good from here. I’m particularly pleased that it should happen in a year ending in “13,” as I decry all forms of divination, and telling the future by numbers counts as that.

I can imagine Noah having a neighbor who came over his house yelling, “Hey! Good news! My big deal came through! What do you mean boat ride? I haven’t got time for a boat ride –”

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion

Ken Myers Feature in The Weekly Standard

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Andrew Ferguson talks with Mars Hill Audio Journal Host Ken Myers for The Weekly Standard:

“I’ve always thought that beautiful art was a great apologetic resource,” Myers says. Beauty is the chief attribute of God, said Jonathan (not Bob) Edwards. “Beauty points to a Creator.” Yet the church, Myers says, “capitulates more and more to the culture of entertainment.”

“It’s a way of keeping market share. But they’re digging their own grave. There’s a short-term benefit, but in the long term the kinds of cultural resources they need to be faithful to the Gospel won’t be there.”

This recalls the MHA Journal (#114) interview with Gerald McDermott who said Jonathan Edwards has been marginalized by Modernists (if I remember correctly) who successfully made the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Edwards’ signature work. By doing so, they hid their students from the beauty and glory of God which Edwards often discussed.

Fiction, Reviews

A Real Piece of Work, by Chris Orcutt

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It’s always nice to discover a new hard-boiled detective writer (and character) who’s worth reading. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with Chris Orcutt’s first Dakota Stevens mystery, A Real Piece of Work.

Dakota Stevens, the hero and narrator, is a former FBI agent who’s set himself up as a New York P.I. He mentions appreciating the classic detectives Marlowe and Spenser, which is a good sign. He leans more to the Spenser side, I think, being essentially an optimist. And he has plenty to be optimistic about, having for his partner not some dull John Watson but the sexy Svetlana Krüsh, a long-legged Russian-born chess master.

The plot involves the art world (oddly, I’ve been reading a lot of books involving art forgery lately), Middle Eastern terrorists, and Nazis (who make for pretty old villains by now, but I suppose you can wring a few more plots out of them).

The best thing about the story was the writing. Orcutt is an excellent wordsmith. The dialogue is good, the characters generally believable (except for the unusual percentage of gorgeous women in Dakota’s world, almost every one of whom throws herself into his arms. Perhaps this is an homage to the old days of the sexy paperback detective, like Shell Scott). My main complaint is with the plotting. One major plot point in particular was so obvious they might as well have perched a raven over one character’s door.

Cautions for language and adult situation. There’s lots of sex, but thankfully it’s not as explicit as I’ve seen in other novels recently. All in all a pretty good piece of work.