Love me, love Minot

September 20, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

Folk costumes from Telemark, Norway. These people are professionals. Do not try this at home.

Just to give you fair warning, so you may steel yourself for the ordeal, I’ll tell you now I’m going to be out of town and posting only as possible next week. Once again I’m off to Norsk Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota. This year, you may be relieved to learn, I’m not going to drive out on my own in Mrs. Hermanson (who’s been kind of a drama queen lately), but riding along with another Viking in his big van. We both travel alone, so we might as well keep each other company on that long, long trek into the sunset. And back, one hopes.

I’d invite you to stop in if you’re in the neighborhood (that’s a joke. Nothing’s in Minot’s neighborhood), but Høstfest is not an event to visit on a whim. You need to book your room at least a year in advance if you want to spend the night, and you pretty much need to spend the night. It will be interesting to see what the turnout is this year. It was down last year, not because of the recession (there is no recession in North Dakota), but because of the previous spring’s flooding, which wiped out a lot of hotel rooms and private homes. One assumes that situation will be better this year.

Headliners on the main stage this year include Jeff Foxworthy, Olivia Newton-John, and Vince Gill. I don’t imagine any of them will drop in on our camp. One of our members (the guy I’ll be riding out with, as a matter of fact) loves to tell of the day he was holding down the fort all alone, making chain mail, when Victor Borge dropped in and asked him what he was doing. He explained the process and Borge joined in for a while.

But that was long ago, and the big talent seems to have grown more distant. I’m not all that keen on meeting any of these people anyway, I guess. Jeff Foxworthy, maybe. I’d love to meet Olivia Newton-John… forty years ago.

And, as before, here’s fair warning to burglars—my renter will be resident in my house during my absence, training his new pet wolverine.

Writing

Writing on the Job

September 20, 2012 philwade Leave a comment

Your day job can be a means to an end by putting food on your table while you write, but it could be an end to your means by sucking the life out of you. This Writer’s Digest blog takes the first approach, describing the benefits of interacting with people and learning non-writing job skills. How else are you going to learn the sound of man’s last breath after he has been stabbed? You learn that kind of thing on the job.

Elsewhere on the web, Joss Whedon didn’t need a vacation after shooting The Avengers; he needed a working vacation on a radically different movie. So his wife insisted he take up an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.

“I’m a huge proponent of the no budget movie,” Whedon says. “I love working on location. It makes you a better filmmaker. You don’t have everything conveniently placed for you. People are using the environment and it spices things up. I think of myself as a classical storyteller, which is why the digital era excites me. Classical storytelling is about getting a story told. It started with cave people around a campfire saying, that wooly mammoth was enormous, you should have been there! For me, that’s all that matters. It’s why I love writing comic books and I love writing prose. I love all mediums.”

Fiction

A snippet for the Day

September 19, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

For Talk Like a Pirate Day, once again a little Long John Silver from Treasure Island, one of the greatest adventure stories every written and (in my opinion) the very best adventure story ever written for boys. One of its great pleasures for me was always just hearing—in my head—the dialogue of the rogue Silver:

Silver took a whiff or two of his pipe with great composure and then ran on again.

“Now, you see, Jim, so be as you ARE here,” says he, “I’ll give you a piece of my mind. I’ve always liked you, I have, for a lad of spirit, and the picter of my own self when I was young and handsome. I always wanted you to jine and take your share, and die a gentleman, and now, my cock, you’ve got to. Cap’n Smollett’s a fine seaman, as I’ll own up to any day, but stiff on discipline. ‘Dooty is dooty,’ says he, and right he is. Just you keep clear of the cap’n. The doctor himself is dead again you—‘ungrateful scamp’ was what he said; and the short and the long of the whole story is about here: you can’t go back to your own lot, for they won’t have you; and without you start a third ship’s company all by yourself, which might be lonely, you’ll have to jine with Cap’n Silver.”

So far, so good. My friends, then, were still alive, and though I partly believed the truth of Silver’s statement, that the cabin party were incensed at me for my desertion, I was more relieved than distressed by what I heard.

“I don’t say nothing as to your being in our hands,” continued Silver, “though there you are, and you may lay to it. I’m all for argyment; I never seen good come out o’ threatening. If you like the service, well, you’ll jine; and if you don’t, Jim, why, you’re free to answer no—free and welcome, shipmate; and if fairer can be said by mortal seaman, shiver my sides!”

“Am I to answer, then?” I asked with a very tremulous voice. Through all this sneering talk, I was made to feel the threat of death that overhung me, and my cheeks burned and my heart beat painfully in my breast.

“Lad,” said Silver, “no one’s a-pressing of you. Take your bearings. None of us won’t hurry you, mate; time goes so pleasant in your company, you see.”

Poetry

Deep Longing for Home, Hiraeth

September 18, 2012 philwade Leave a comment

Pamela Petro talks about longing for a home that is not her’s–Wales.

I’m American, but I have a hiraeth on me for Wales. I went there first as a grad student in the 1980s. I learned to drink whiskey and do sheep impressions (I can differentiate between lambs and ewes). I learned what coal smoke smells like (nocturnal and oily). And I fell in love with the earth. It happened one late afternoon when I went for a walk in the Brecon Beacons. (The dictionary defines beacons as “conspicuous hills,” which is about as apt as you can get.) When I set off from sea level the air was already growing damp as the sun faded. Ahead of me the Beacons’ bald, grey-brown flanks were furrowed like elephant skin in ashes-of-roses light. It soon became chilly but the ground held onto its warmth, so that the hills began to smoke with eddying bands of mist. That dusk was unspeakably beautiful and not a little illicit. It seemed, for a millisecond, as if I were witnessing the earth drop its guard and exhale its love for the sky, for the pungent cattle, the rabbits whose bones lay underfoot, and for me, too. I felt as if my bodily fluids, my wet, physiological self, were being summoned to high tide. The hills tugged on my blood and it responded with a storm surge that made me ache—a simple sensation more urgent and less complicated than thought, like the love of one animal for another. Or the love of an animal for its home.

Fiction, Reviews

Ratcatcher, by Tim Stevens

September 18, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

“Fast-paced,” “action-packed,” and “breathlessly exciting” are adjectival terms you expect to use when describing a good spy thriller. They all apply to Tim Stevens’ debut novel, Ratcatcher. I discover, however, that it’s possible to take those virtues too far.

The term “Ratcatchers,” we are told, is what English spies call a top-secret, independent group that works to apprehend and eliminate secret agents who’ve gone bad. The hero of the book, John Purkiss, was an English agent until the murder of his beloved fiancée, a fellow agent named Claire. Claire was killed by yet another agent named Fallon, who was convicted of her murder. Then Purkiss left the service and was recruited as a Ratcatcher.

As the story opens Purkiss learns that Fallon has been given early release from prison, and has now been reported in Estonia. Purkiss is sent there to investigate, and soon discovers evidence of a conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism during an upcoming visit by the Russian president.

I can’t deny that Ratcatcher is an exciting book. My problem with it is that it reads more like a Sylvester Stallone movie than a novel. Because of the very nature of cinema, an audience will swallow a lot of improbabilities that the more contemplative environment of reading makes it harder to accept. Just as in a movie, the principal characters here suffer severe, repeated physical trauma without much loss of effective physical function. They mostly get shot at by bad shots. And their own guns never seem to run out of bullets.

I must admit, though, that there were a couple very neat plot twists at the end. And the prose itself, both dialogue and exposition, was professional.

Ratcatcher is worth reading, purely for entertainment. Cautions for language and violence. The sexual content was fairly mild.

Fiction, Reviews

Murder at Thumb Butte, by James D. Best

September 17, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

The Western mystery story is not as rare a phenomenon as you might think. The conventions of the mystery transfer pretty well to the Wild West, and many famous mystery writers cranked out westerns as well, back in the days when you could make a living writing for the pulps.

Contemporary author James D. Best carries on this tradition with his Steve Dancy stories. Steve is a former gun shop owner from New York City, transferred to the west where, although his primary concern is business, he has made a reputation as a gunman. I thought this approach added freshness to the whole enterprise. We often forget that cowboys shared a country and a time with men like Thomas Edison and Cornelius Vanderbilt, but Steve Dancy straddles both worlds.

Murder at Thumb Butte starts in Carson City, Nevada, where Steve and his friend Jeff Sharp are arguing about where to go next. Steve wants badly to go to Prescott, Arizona. There’s a man in Prescott who has some stock certificates, worthless in themselves, which could cause difficulty for Steve in a project he’s contemplating—using Tom Edison’s electric light to illuminate mines. Unfortunately, Jeff already knows this man, who once slandered him in the vilest way possible. When they get to Prescott, Jeff loses little time in punching his old enemy and telling him he’ll kill him next time he sees him. When the man is found murdered the next morning out near Thumb Butte, with Jeff’s own rifle lying next to the body, he’s arrested for the murder by Constable Virgil Earp, and Steve has to set his mind to clearing his friend. With the help of another friend, Pinkerton agent Joseph McAllen, who comes to town with his daughter Maggie and a married couple who are also operatives, he sets about that project. Continue reading Murder at Thumb Butte, by James D. Best →

Fiction, Reviews

Themes, Observations on Bertrand’s ‘Back on Murder’

September 16, 2012 philwade Leave a comment

When I review novels here, I fight with myself over wanting to write something deep with observations on the rich parts of the book vs. saying too much and spoiling it for new readers. Since it’s easier to go light, I usually do, so I doubt you expect to read great, thoughtful posts from me. No, no. It’s my fault. I’ve already given you a positive, light-handed review of J. Mark Bertrand’s Back on Murder (A Roland March Mystery), but some readers have complained that they found little Christianity in the Roland March series. I’ve only read the first one, but here are some observations I made on the Christian themes of Back on Murder. Do I need to warn you against possible spoilers? Continue reading Themes, Observations on Bertrand’s ‘Back on Murder’ →

Uncategorized

Body of Richard III possibly found under parking lot. Gambinos deny any knowledge of it.

September 13, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

Since he’s most famous for being a Shakespearean villain, this story on the dig for Richard III’s bones would seem to be appropriate in this blog.

A dig under a council car park in Leicester has found remains with spinal abnormalities and a “cleaved-in skull” that suggest it could be Richard III.

The University of Leicester will now test the bones for DNA against descendants of Richard’s family.

Professor Lin Foxhall, head of the university’s School of Archaeology, said: “Archaeology almost never finds named individuals – this is absolutely extraordinary.

“Although we are far from certain yet, it is already astonishing.”

If it is Dick, this will solve at least one of the questions that has made him such a contentious figure in historical circles. As I understand it, the Ricardians (defenders of Richard III) have long insisted that the story that he was a “hunchback” was mostly Tudor propaganda. But if this skeleton shows signs of serious scoliosis, that will… well, it won’t settle anything. But it will be interesting.

Tip: Archaeology in Europe.

Brandywine Books

Love me, love Minot

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Writing on the Job

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A snippet for the Day

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Deep Longing for Home, Hiraeth

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Ratcatcher, by Tim Stevens

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Murder at Thumb Butte, by James D. Best

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Themes, Observations on Bertrand’s ‘Back on Murder’

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Body of Richard III possibly found under parking lot. Gambinos deny any knowledge of it.

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