I look like this, according to legend, when I lecture.
From time to time, events in what’s laughingly known as my working life mean I have to alter my habits on this blog.
Or, to put it less pompously, I’ve got work (some of it even for money) that may – occasionally – keep me from posting here, without notice, for a while.
This Thursday, at 7:00 p.m., for instance, I’ll be speaking on Viking Legacy to Sagatun Lodge of the Sons of Norway, Brainerd, Minnesota. I think they meet at Trinity Lutheran Church, though such information is surprisingly difficult to learn from online sources. (The reason I don’t have the address myself is because someone’s generously taking me to dinner beforehand, and we’ll drive from there. But I think it’s Trinity Lutheran.)
I expect that if you’re in the area you’ll be welcome, even if you’re not a member of the lodge. Or Norwegian. Or all that good-looking.
What else am I doing? Oh yes, I have an agreement to write an article on the new Norwegian Nobel Laureate for Literature, Jon Fosse. It’s for a periodical which I will not name at this point, in case they don’t want to be publicly associated with me. But I have to read Fosse’s Septology, which is a very long book. I have no idea what I’ll blog about while I’m working my way through that unusual (but fascinating) work. We’ll see.
Also, I have to learn how to use Adobe Live Desk so I can produce a newsletter for the Valdres Samband’s (an organization of descendants of immigrants from the Norwegian region of Valdres) newsletter. Also a paying job.
And I have some translation to do for the Georg Sverdrup Society. They don’t pay money, but I think I go to Hell if I don’t deliver.
I’ve been loafing all summer, trying to drum up work, and now the stuff is falling on my head in the manner of Burt Bacharach’s raindrops. I just translated 11 pages of Norwegian for an author on a two-day deadline, and I got paid for that too.
And someday, like King Arthur, the script translation work may return from Avalon.
Me with two of the Five Foolish Virgins bauta stones in Haugesund, Norway, a year ago. This is one of the photos I used in my lecture.
Sorry about not posting last night. I got back from Moorhead pretty late, having burned both gasoline and élan vital.
My “new” car ran just fine – wait a minute, I don’t think I’ve written about the new car here. It’s a 2005 Subaru Forester XT. Burgundy in color. Been wanting a red car for a long time, and the word on the street is these are pretty reliable. Which will make for a nice change. Also lots of room for Viking impedimenta. Anyway, she ran fine. I call her Sigrid the Haughty.
Fargo-Moorhead is about a four-hour drive from here. Although my speaking engagement was in Moorhead, Minnesota (which we like to call the Soviet Zone), I’d made a motel reservation in Fargo, North Dakota (the American Zone), just across the state border. Because I just sleep better knowing the taxes are lower. I had no complaints about the motel room until 2:00 a.m., which my phone rang. The clerk said my neighbors were complaining about the noise. This confused me, as I was asleep, and alone. It only occurred to me later that they might have been talking about my snoring. Naw, what are the chances of that?
The bygdelags are a Norwegian-American institution. Originally, as I understand it, they were organizations allowing people who came from particular regions of the old country to maintain contact over here. Nowadays they concentrate more on genealogy and keeping traditions alive. They meet for annual gatherings known as stevnes. I’d lectured to the Tre (Three) Lag Stevne twice in the past. This year a couple more lags had joined in, so it became the Flere (Several) Lag Stevne, and we were meeting in Moorhead.
I arrived in plenty of time for my 10:45 time slot, and set up my book table. When the room cleared after the previous speaker, I hurried in to set up, only to encounter something I’d never experienced before when lecturing –
Everything worked. The first time.
I plugged my laptop into the projector line and there was my image on the screen. No problem. You have to understand, I always bring my own projector in case of technical emergencies – because in my experience, something always goes wrong with projection systems. Belt and suspenders is my motto.
But they’d been running the stevne for two days already, and they had everything taped down, ready to plug and play. It was too good to be true, I thought. Surely I was being set up by fate for disaster.
But no, there was no disaster. My lecture went great. The room was nearly full. The audience was attentive, and they laughed in the right places. My talk was basically a condensed version of the account of my trip to Norway I posted here a little more than a year ago. I was worried it might be self-indulgent, too much like a neighbor’s home movies.
But you can tell when your audience is with you, and I had this bunch, apparently, at God dag. The only thing that bothered me was a distinguished-looking gentleman in the front row who seemed to be dozing off. But he came to me afterwards, when I was selling books, and told me he’d attended both my previous lectures and was a big fan. Said he enjoyed my talk very much. We discussed Haugeanism.
I figure he probably just dozed off because somebody kept him awake with their snoring in the next room the night before.
Another audience member told me that what made my lecture enjoyable was that I supplemented my photographs with stories and history. Stories make all the difference. That makes sense to me.
Anyway, it was a good day, and I sold a reasonable number of books. I’m very grateful to the Flere Lag Stevne.
Ah, the high adventure of the author/translator/lecturer’s life! I’m back from my travels, none the worse for wear in spite of age, infirmities, and my well-attested general incompetence.
I set out on Sunday morning, which was clear and cold. It’s about 3 and a half hours to Bemidji, a world-famous northern Minnesota center for winter sports and summer fishing. I arrived in plenty of time to get lunch at a restaurant – something I’ve done rarely of late, due to tight money. But I had prospects of income, and I counted my chickens before they hatched, eating some of them in the form of a turkey dinner. Even went crazy and had pie for desert, which is probably imprudent when you’re about to speak publicly. Living dangerously, however, has always been my style.
Trudy and me and Brad. Do I look like a statue in a wax museum to you? The thought crossed my mind…
I arrived at the church where the Sons of Norway meeting would be held, and met Brad and Trudy, my hosts, who’d thoughtfully dressed as Vikings to help me feel at home. (Actually, they’ve decided to push Viking themes in an effort to stir up interest in their lodge after the setbacks of the Covid lockdowns). They were very helpful and competent, and – to my amazement – my laptop hooked up seamlessly with the projector. I’ve learned to be highly pessimistic about such hookups based on my recent experiences, but this went like clockwork. Which filled me with a different foreboding. This foreboding, fortunately, proved unfounded.
At the appointed time I delivered my tried and true lecture on the book Viking Legacy (which, in case I haven’t mentioned it in the last few minutes, I translated). There were a couple glitches in my PowerPoint presentation, but those were due to human error (mine). By and large the lecture went extremely well. The Sons of Norway people had promoted the event extensively, and they were pleased with the turnout. I was pleased with the audience response, and (especially) by book sales.
After everything was over and we’d swept and garnished the room, Dan and Trudy took me to their home, where we’d agreed I’d spent the night. They gave me a lovely supper, and we talked till after 9:00 p.m., which was staying up pretty late for me that particular night (Brad is himself the author of a book, A Conversaunt Existence, on the existence of God). We were concerned about weather forecasts predicting dangerous driving conditions in the morning.
In the morning there was in fact a light mist falling, which froze on all surfaces. But when Brad left for a meeting, he called back to say the roads seemed all right. So I set out for home, driving a little under the speed limit until I got to the four-lane highway, where everything seemed clean and dry. I arrived at my destination safely, and my GPS will vouch for it.
Now I’m in pretty good spirits, but bone-weary in that way that only an introvert feels when he’s been through an explosion of socialization. I have, nonetheless, the satisfaction of coming home with a lighter load than I took out, as cash weighs a whole lot less than books.
The only way I can imagine in which the expedition could have gone better would have been if I’d found true love.
But I expect true love is heavier than either cash or books.
Anoka, Minnesota. Creative Commons license, Tim Kiser.
If you are (or were) a fan of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, you’re familiar with the town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.
Lake Wobegon is (we are reliably informed) a cover identity for Anoka, Minnesota. Anoka is a northern suburb of Minneapolis today, but it was a quiet rural community when Keillor was growing up. (It also boasts of being the Halloween Capitol of the US, for some reason I haven’t discovered).
Anyway, you may recall Keillor talking about the Sons of Knut lodge in Lake Wobegon. The Sons of Knut are obviously based on the Sons of Norway. And there is indeed a Sons of Norway lodge in Anoka. It’s called, not the Sons of Knut, but “Vennekretsen,” which is Norwegian for “circle of friends.”
I told you all this to sidle around to the fact that I spoke to Vennekretsen Lodge last night. It went great. The people were very kind and hospitable, and receptive to my presentation. They also bought a fair number of books. And they served a great big cake, because it was the 100th birthday of one of the lodge members. Haven’t seen a cake like that in a long time.
Anyway, what I mainly wanted to write about tonight was the adventure of preparing for that event. Because it wasn’t any walk in the park (except in the sense that parks nowadays tend to be places where you’ll get mugged).
When I do a presentation, I generally prepare by rehearsing several times, and also by pulling out things I think I’ll need to take along, and piling them somewhere so I won’t forget them on the date.
What I didn’t expect was that I’d trip on a laptop cord and yank the thing down onto the floor on Sunday. The screen was ruined. I’ve always found it difficult to use a computer without a working screen.
So – although it’s my general policy not to do commercial transactions on a Sunday, but this was an emergency – I ran to Micro Center, the best computer store in these parts, and quickly found several inexpensive laptops there. I had to wait around a while to get sales help, because Sunday’s a big shopping day for people less spiritually-minded than myself. When I finally got hold of a salesman, he actually recommended the least expensive machine on the shelf. “Does everything the others do, and it’s cheaper!” he said. Sounded great to me.
What I hadn’t noticed – and it would have meant nothing to me if it had, because I’m ignorant – was that what I was buying was a Chromebook. I didn’t know (then) that Chromebooks are the Trabants of the computer world, minimalist machines that only do a few things. Perfectly fine for their target market, but I’m not that market.
I even asked the salesman if it would run Microsoft 365, and he said yes. This is technically true, but it will only run it through the Chrome browser. IT IS USELESS FOR TAKING AWAY FROM HOME AND GIVING A POWERPOINT PRESENTATION.
I even mentioned to him that I needed a laptop for a PowerPoint presentation. At that point he was (understandably) eager to get rid of me, and he said nothing. I hold him morally culpable for this.
Anyway, I took the thing home and tried to get it set up, growing increasingly frustrated. A couple posts on Facebook got me the information I needed – Chromebook was wrong for me.
On Monday I took the thing back to Micro Center, returned it, and got an HP, which turned out to be pretty much identical to the one I broke.
But I got it set up at last. And I was able to head out on schedule for Lake Wobegon in the evening.
One last insult remained, however. When I got to the church where the lodge met, we found that my new machine would not communicate with the digital projector on site. I ended up having to borrow somebody else’s laptop and run the presentation from a file on a thumb drive (I always bring a backup copy on a thumb drive, because experience has taught me that something always goes wrong). The upshot was that this laptop, which I’d gone to such pains to acquire and prepare, was redundant, and my beautiful, carefully selected title fonts, not loaded on the borrowed machine, did not appear.
Now I’m worrying about projector compatibility in the future.
Tonight I’m giving one of my lectures, and it’s turning into an adventure (and not in a good way). So this post is scheduled ahead of time, and I’ll tell you all about my travails tomorrow.
Above, a short clip of an interview with Jonathan Kellerman, whose Unnatural History I praised the other day. Enjoy.
We know from the Bible that a prophet is never honored in his own country. By that standard, I definitely don’t qualify as a prophet. Because my talk last night in my home town (Kenyon, Minnesota, in case you missed it) went extremely well and was warmly received.
I gave a PowerPoint travelogue on my trip to Norway this summer, with a concentration on historical sights. Personally I think I went a little long, and some later alterations to the script came in ragged. But everybody seemed pleased and entertained, and my book sales were gratifying.
So, many thanks to the Kenyon Vikings Sons of Norway lodge.
I was looking for a video about the Battle of Hafrsfjord for tonight’s post, but everything I found was longer than I wanted. But the film above is interesting. It’s not about Hafrsfjord, but about the Battle of Nesjar (1016), which I described in my novel, The Elder King. Erling Skjalgsson gets a mention.
The theme of my life just now seems to be homecoming. I went back to the first college I attended last weekend. And tonight I’m going to my home town, Kenyon, Minnesota, to speak to the Sons of Norway lodge (and hopefully sell some books).
I’m not lecturing in Viking costume this time. I’ll be giving a presentation on my trip to Norway this summer, emphasizing the historical sites I visited. I’ll concentrate especially on the battle of Hafrsfjord.
On the unlikely chance that you can be there (I should have announced this yesterday or earlier) the meeting will be held at First Lutheran Church in Kenyon at 5:30 p.m.
Last night’s lecture, to the Synnøve-Nordkapp Lodge of Sons of Norway in St. Paul, was memorable enough that I might as well report some of the highlights to you.
I had a quiet day to prepare myself and pack my impedimenta. I have been known to forget to bring important things (such as the books I was planning to sell), so I always worry. I’m happy to say I brought everything I needed.
And that was about the last thing that went right, from a technical perspective.
Synnøve-Nordkapp Lodge had not met for a regular meeting in two years, due to circumstances you’ll easily guess. I arrived at the church where they gather to find some people setting up the meeting space, a large hall (it appeared to be a multi-purpose space used sometimes – perhaps every Sunday – for worship). When I asked about setting up for my PowerPoint presentation I was directed to a gentleman in back, sitting in front of an array of screens and multimedia gear.
I talked to him about my needs, and he explained that the church had changed the setup since the last time he’d used it. He couldn’t figure out a way to get the images on his screens projected onto the big screen in front. He made a call to somebody who was supposed to know, and spent the next hour-and-a-half or so talking to them, with no success.
The meeting began at last, and I grew fairly certain I wouldn’t get the use of the standing equipment. When the president announced me, I asked if I could get a table and some time to set up my own projector (which I’d brought along, being a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy). They happily accommodated me, and I spent a few hectic minutes setting my projector up and connecting it to my laptop.
Nothing. I couldn’t project an image either.
This was beginning to resemble a witch’s curse.
Finally I admitted defeat and delivered my lecture without visual aids. I gave it my all, summoning my considerable reserves of eloquence (or, as the skalds would say, opening my word-hoard). Taken as such, the lecture went very well. The audience was attentive and even laughed in the right places. And I sold a good quantity of books afterward. Got lots of compliments. So it was a good experience in itself. But ah, I regretted the lovely images I hadn’t been able to use.
I decided as I drove home (through hail part of the way; a nasty weather front passed through just then. It was suitable to the general theme of the evening) that my problem had been not trying the projector out with my new laptop ahead of time. I became convinced my new Windows 11 system couldn’t communicate with the old projector. Today I determined to run out to the computer store and buy a new, up-to-date projector.
But I didn’t go for some reason. And after lunch I had an attack of prudence and tried the projector with the laptop again. I discovered I’d used the wrong socket for the connector.
Now that I know the fault was mine, everything makes sense again. All’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
I suppose I should have mentioned yesterday (or before) that I’ll be speaking to the Synnøve-Nordkapp Lodge of the Sons of Norway at Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church in St. Paul, this evening at 7:00 p.m. But I doubt very much that it would have made a difference. On the other hand, I’m posting early tonight, so who knows?
Above is an officially released clip of the new Viking movie, “The Northman,” starring Alexander Skarsgård. These guys are supposed to berserkers, who famously went into battle unarmored, so they should not be viewed as representative of how the average Viking went to war.
I’ve read a review, and it sounded promising. This may just be the “good” Viking movie we’ve been waiting for forever.
I have the opportunity to attend a preview one week from tonight, and I plan to attend with some other friends in Viking costume. I’ll let you know what I think.
My prediction: My review will be, essentially: Good flick. Not for kids.
Got up, dim and early, to be in place to deliver my PowerPoint lectures on the 793 AD Viking raid on Lindisfarne, and on the conversion of Norway. I spoke to a small class of seminary students. They did not break into uproarious laughter at my jokes, nor did they weep at the profundity of my wisdom. But they didn’t laugh me out of the room, either. Which is something, in the greater scheme of things.
A nice thing that happened was that, as I was lecturing, I suddenly discovered connections between the two lectures I’d never noticed before. These talks were conceived separately, but I found previously unnoticed ways they fit together.
I love it when ideas fit together.
Of course, that’s also to be expected when you’re a monomaniac.
Just before I left for the seminary, I got an email telling me I’d gotten the translation job from the filmmaker to whom I’d been referred recently. The referral came from someone to whom I’d previously been referred. So now I’ve got referrals at two removes. I think that qualifies as word of mouth. Some measure of business success.
The job isn’t huge, but it has a more imminent deadline than I’d expected. I’ve still got plenty of time to finish it, but this adds an element of dramatic tension to my days. And I suppose that’s not a bad thing, for a phlegmatic guy.
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