I am (once again) reading a very long book, and so will be a while getting to my next review. As I pondered what to post tonight, it occurred to me to check whether there was any video about the Viking House that formed the centerpiece for the Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay – from which I returned on Sunday.
And behold, there is one. This seems to be a promotional video, produced before the house was relocated to Green Bay, touting the idea of making it part of the campus.
The house is in a form called a “grind house,” after the “grind” (rhymes with “wind,” I think) which is a section of the house comprising its length between the sets of internal pillars. The buildings are constructed in an almost modular fashion, as I understand it.
The video features my new friend Owen Christianson and his wife Elspeth. Owen is – as I mentioned yesterday – a physicist. He also has a black belt in karate (I kid you not).
The Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay is, once again, history (in two senses). I made the four-hour-plus drive to and from without incident, and had an excellent time.
I shared a motel room with the experimental archaeologist who oversaw the construction of the Viking House, on the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay campus, that is the centerpiece of the encampment. His name is Owen Christianson and he is a physicist (I really didn’t understand his descriptions of his work, but it has something to do with electromagnetics) by day. He’s also a recognized folk artist, and I once took his class in making wooden stave vessels. He was by himself this year because his wife was unable to come along. I was somewhat daunted by his credentials at first, but we actually found a lot to talk about, and parted good friends.
The festival itself runs Friday and Saturday. Friday is a day for school groups; it went okay, but was rather quiet. I feared we were losing public enthusiasm. But Saturday, as it was last year, was a madhouse, and people bought up nearly my whole stock of Viking Legacy (I’d brought extra this year) along with a fair quantity of my novels. I was in no wise disappointed.
As is more and more the case these days, the hard part for me was setting up, tearing down, and packing the car. I’m getting too old for this stuff, I fear, but I expect to keep at it for a while. I’m too proud to hang it up, I imagine, until I actually hurt myself. (Much thanks to Andy and Missy, especially, for helping me tote that barge and lift that bale.)
We got handsome coverage from a local TV station, and I was fortunate enough to get a lot of the air time. I’m the devilishly handsome man in the blue tunic, in case you were wondering.
Today’s hymn comes from the great George Herbert (1593-1633). He wrote many poems, which were well received at first, but as hymns few found popular acceptance despite the encouragement of John and Charles Wesley in 1739. Above is an arrangement of “Let All the World in Every Corner Sing” by the great Ralph Vaughan Williams, not really congregational singing but it fits the grandeur of the piece.
“Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!” (Ps 96:3 ESV)
1 Let all the world in every corner sing, “My God and King!” The heav’ns are not too high, God’s praise may thither fly; the earth is not too low, God’s praises there may grow. Let all the world in every corner sing, “My God and King!”
2 Let all the world in every corner sing, “My God and King!” The church with psalms must shout: no door can keep them out. But, more than all, the heart must bear the longest part. Let all the world in every corner sing, “My God and King!”
Quotations: Here’s a great example of how asking the simple question, “Who said that?” or “Who was the first to say that?” can lead to nowhere interesting. Consider the origin of this statement: “Thinking is the hardest work many people ever have to do, and they don’t like to do any more of it than they can help.”
Quote Investigator also points out that AI programs can miss what doesn’t seem possible to miss, as in a line in an Edgar Allen Poe story.
Pranking Academic Journals: I remember the journal article Boghossian refers to as the one that busted them (the dog park article) and I thought I blogged about it at the time, but perhaps I didn’t. I tend to shy away from topics even loosely related to sex. In this video from Dad Saves America, Boghossian discusses his attempt to expose peer-reviewed journals that are willing to publish any nonsense that falls within accepted dogma. It’s incredible.
I am, of course, keenly aware of the irony of holding a Viking festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of the Packers. Yet so it is. Life does not always make sense, as I think Nietzsche observed.
In any case, I plan (by God’s travel mercies) to be at the Midwest Viking Festival this Friday and Saturday, selling my books in the ancient Norse manner. I guess I’ll also be doing some kind of presentation. Come and see if you’re in the area.
I can’t say I was any too pleased. I felt the old beak furtively. It was a bit on the prominent side, perhaps, but, dash it, not in the Cyrano class. It began to look as if the next thing this girl would do would be to compare me to Schnozzie Durante.
I suppose there must be a time when it would be a mistake to read a P. G. Wodehouse novel, but I can’t think of one offhand. And for this reader, the Jeeves and Wooster stories are supreme. It’s Bertie Wooster’s narration that makes all the difference.
Opinions differ, naturally, on what is the best J&W novel, but I think Right Ho, Jeeves must be in anybody’s top two or three. John Le Carre called it one of his all-time favorite novels. An internet poll in 2009 voted it the best comic novel ever penned by an English writer. Published in 1934, RH,J was Wodehouse’s second full-length Jeeves novel. Critics have noted that these first two books share the common theme of Bertie attempting to assert himself in the face of Jeeves’ intelligence and personality; that element was reduced in later stories. But it can’t have been because it was ineffective as a plot element – it’s irresistible.
When we join our heroes, Bertie has just returned from a holiday in Cannes. He soon clashes with his valet Jeeves over his new dinner jacket – a “white mess jacket with brass buttons” that was all the rage on the Riviera that summer. Bertie insists that he will wear the garment, creating a coldness between master and servant.
So when Bertie gets word that his cousin Angela Travers has broken her engagement to his old friend Tuppy Glossop, he refuses to appeal to Jeeves to solve the problem, but comes up with a plan of his own. Similarly, when his old school chum Gussie Fink-Nottle tells him he can’t work up the nerve to propose to Madeline Bassett (a girl Bertie considers too goopy to live, but just right for the feckless Gussie) he hands him a scheme of his own (based on “the psychology of the individual”).
Needless to say, all Bertie’s plans lead to disaster, and in the end only Jeeves’ fantastic brain can bring about a resolution – a resolution that will involve a considerable amount of discomfort for Bertie himself. One notes a certain refined vindictiveness in Jeeves here, but it’s the affectionate vindictiveness of a parent who wants to teach an errant child a lesson they won’t forget.
No review of Right Ho, Jeeves would be complete without a mention of the classic scene when Gussie, drunk as a lord for the first time in his life, distributes prizes to students at Market Snodsbury grammar school. Here is farce raised to Olympian heights.
What a treat. If you haven’t read Right Ho, Jeeves, do yourself a favor.
He owns four billion dollars’ worth of abstract expressionist paintings so meaningless and ugly that, displayed in one gallery, they would render connoisseurs of such art suicidal with delight.
Dean Koontz’ colossal success as a novelist, combined with his quirky Catholic faith, have made it possible for him to take risks most writers wouldn’t. The Forest of Lost Souls is clearly experimental in nature. Although I enjoyed it, I’m not entirely sure how successful the experiment is.
Vida, the heroine of the book, is a young woman of rare beauty and even rarer gifts. Orphaned young and raised by a kindly uncle in his mountain cabin in Colorado, she makes her living mining and polishing precious stones for sale. She has a strange gift for finding gems, but that’s only one of her talents. She sees hidden beauty everywhere, and lives in harmony with nature and its animals, who do not fear her.
She recently lost the love of her life, a local schoolteacher and activist who was trying to stop a development plan for a mountain meadow near her home. Supposedly he died in a freak accident, but it was murder. Anyone who gets in the way of the plan will be targeted for similar murder.
Author Koontz performs a very neat maneuver in this story – he enlists all the reader’s sympathies for nature under threat from ruthless capitalists, but then turns that sympathy against the progressive policies that actually drive much of that threat (wind power in this case). He introduces us to close-to-the-soil, spiritually sensitive Native Americans, and then uses them in a way we hadn’t looked for.
And he does not neglect to include a couple of heartwarming love stories.
But I wasn’t sure it all worked in the end. This is a story about Heaven taking a hand in human affairs, providing rescue through supernatural powers. If that’s what it’s gonna take to save us, I’m not sure we’re likely to be so favored.
Also, I found the love stories (both of them) too good to be true (here speaks the bitter old bachelor).
But The Forest of Lost Souls is certainly an enjoyable book. I do recommend it.
This is me with a Norwegian Forest Cat. I’m the bigger one, but only slightly bigger.
I think I can do my promised post on Høstfest tonight, before time and senescence wipe all recollection from my mind. I’m gradually recovering from the rigors of travel, and expect to be fit for duty on Thursday, when I have to drive four hours to Green Bay, for the Midwest Viking Festival on Friday and Saturday.
How was Høstfest 2024? From my point of view (and I think I speak for all the Vikings), it was a smash. Among the highlights were these:
First of all, we were in a new location. Over the years (and a lot of years it’s been in my case) the festival has shoehorned the Viking encampment into any space they could find after the really important exhibitors had been accommodated. But now at last they placed us next to the Log Cabin (used, I understand, for Fur Trapper rendezvouses), right across from the main entrance to the exhibition/entertainment building.
This meant, first of all, that people could find us. The chief complaint we’ve gotten from Viking afficionados over the years is that nobody ever seemed to know where we were. This year we were front and center – and the visitor numbers were correspondingly gratifying.
It also meant that we were in the fresh air, where – strictly speaking – Vikings belong. An American log cabin isn’t so different from a Scandinavian one after all (Swedish immigrants invented them), and the weather was pleasant (sometimes, in fact, pretty darn warm).
Now if you know me at all, you know that I’m not numbered among the Great Outdoorsmen of this world. But even a couch tuber like me could feel the difference, spending four days in God’s sunshine and fresh air, as opposed to four days on concrete under fluorescent lights (often breathing the dust of a horse barn). I was tired at the end, but I didn’t feel as if I’d spent the time confined to a jail cell, as in the past.
I also sold a good number of books. And the local hosts who gave me a bed for four nights were extremely pleasant and congenial.
Each day, at 2:45 p.m., I went to an inside stage to sit on a stool next to a very beautiful woman who interviewed me about my writing and translating, as well as Viking history. I could tell she was in awe of me, but retained my dignity.
I even found a vendor who sold me some Norwegian Kvikk Lunsj candy bars, which are like Kit Kat except really, really good.
I drove home weary in body but quite fizzy in spirit, as Bertie Wooster might have put it. And as usual I stopped for lunch on the way with my friend (and commenter on this blog) Dale Nelson, which is always a pleasure.
I suppose Høstfest 2024 could have gone better for me, but offhand I can’t think how.
