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.
This post will probably be drivel. Because I’m going to try to talk about things I can’t express. (Doesn’t stop me trying to express them, of course).
To open the proceedings, I’ll talk about my visit to the dentist today. I had a checkup recently, and mentioned to the dentist that I was having trouble with teeth-grinding. He scheduled me for an appointment to get my mouth scanned for an “appliance.”
The appointment was today. I thought it was at 2:00. I got home from the grocery store and realized the time was precisely 2:00. I had missed the appointment. I called to apologize. “We have you down for 3:50,” the receptionist said.
Oh. OK.
So I went in at the hour appointed, and they turned me over to a very pretty young technician. At least she had very pretty eyes. The rest was under a Covid mask. She had me sit in a chair, and then wrestled some kind of scanning wand (about the size of a loaf of bread, or so it felt) into my mouth to scan my bite. It went very slowly. They were having trouble with the scanner today, she explained. At length she called in a slightly senior technician (who also appeared young and pretty), who manhandled the thing for a while, finally pinning it to the mat.
As I sat there having my teeth re-created in digital space, I gave some thought to the wonders of modern science. The amazing things we can do that weren’t even imagined for most of my adult life. And all based on the basic question of logic, “Yes or no? One or not-one?”
I love that thought because it’s utterly consistent with Christian theology. Christian truth is, as Francis Schaefer taught me long ago, “propositional.” A choice is offered. You choose yes or no. Truth and untruth are two different things. Everything else flows from this understanding.
People keep trying to propose some kind of spiritual truth that bypasses binary choices. But they end up saying nothing. Pondering tautologies, imagining them profound. Has anyone ever tried to work out a computing language that manages without the binary? Is such a thing even possible?
I don’t know. I do know that we’re performing miracles with good old true/false.
And this brought to mind a spiritual experience I had this Sunday in church. At communion, which is a good time for spiritual experiences.
As I knelt for communion, I suddenly had – what shall I call it? Not a vision. Nothing as dramatic as that. It was a sort of a thought, except that I couldn’t verbalize it. Still can’t – and I’m considered pretty good at verbalizing stuff.
It was compelling, for just a moment, but afterward, as I walked back to my seat, I tried to put it into words and I realized I couldn’t. It was as if I’d physically touched a truth with my mind, but my mind couldn’t grasp it, and came away with no more than the impression (you might call it a feeling) that I’d encountered a Truth.
It had something to do with eternity. With how it is in eternity with God. That all things are accomplished, that what today we consider incomplete is in fact complete and perfect in God.
That’s not quite it either. But it’s the best I can do.
It gave me a sense of peace and trust. But I can’t explain why.
What I brought home with me was a statement I posted promptly on Facebook:
“There are truths that are beyond reason, not because there’s anything wrong with reason, but because reason’s suspension isn’t tough enough for the terrain up there. For those truths, God has given us wonder.”
Which doesn’t at all explain my “vision” during communion. It just describes how I had to deal with it.
Let me just say at the outset that this may have been one of the best days of my life. I can’t give you details because that would be betraying a confidence, but a development happened in my life that ought to improve my happiness about 50%.
This development happened, I should tell you, soon after I determined for the first time to pray about it daily. Just sayin’.
I’ve been listening to Norwegian Christian radio on my cell phone, as I’ve told you. And because of that, today I thought I’d post a performance of Carolina Sandell’s famous hymn known in English as “Children of the Heavenly Father.” Very familiar to all us Scandinavians, but I believe it’s known to more benighted groups as well. The rendition above was done by the choir of Bethel College — but it doesn’t tell me whether it’s the Bethel College in Newton, Kansas of our own Bethel College (now University) here in Minneapolis.
I hesitate to mention it, but just as I sat down to post this, my Norwegian station played it. Gave me the shivers.
I don’t spend a lot of time in urban fantasy, as you may have noticed. But you may have also noticed that I’ve grown fond of Dan Willis’ Arcane Casebook series, set in the 1930s New York in an alternate universe where the world runs on magic rather than oil and coal, and where it’s possible both to be a magician and a practicing Catholic.
Alex Lockerby is a runewright, who makes his living doing magic through drawing, then burning, complex mystical designs on paper. He started humbly but has now risen in the world, being in business with the richest sorcerer in America, and in a romantic relationship with Sorsha Kincaid, the most powerful sorceress in the country.
But as Hostile Takeover begins, Sorsha is in trouble. Someone has drawn an incredibly complex rune that’s draining her life-force away. What they’re using the energy for is a mystery, but it’s gradually killing Sorsha. If Alex and his mentor Iggy (who is actually Arthur Conan Doyle incognito) can’t unlock the rune and break it, Sorsha will die.
But that’s not all that’s going on. Alex has been approached by a young couple who are being bullied by thugs who want them to sell a historic property they own. Alex promises to figure out what’s going on and stop it. Also, a runewright who held proprietary rights to a rune that gave a technical edge to a radio manufacturing company has died mysteriously. The insurance company suspects he was murdered, but can’t prove it. That’s Alex’s job.
I like these books. I like the characters. The writing’s pretty good, and the world-building fun. I recommend Hostile Takeover, along with the rest of the series. No very objectionable material, not even bad language.
Nothing to review tonight. I have a sudden break in translation work (it only began this afternoon, and if recent history is any guide it won’t last long. As I fervently hope it won’t).
The video clip above (in Norwegian, but much of it is without dialogue) is from a 1939 Norwegian movie called “Gjest Baardsen.” For some reason it occurred to me to write a little about this character tonight. I am by no means an expert on the man, but I’ve read a little.
Gjest Baardsen (1791-1849) is sometimes called the Robin Hood of Norway. But in fact Jesse James would be a closer historical parallel (though his legend admittedly has a more Robin Hood-ish flavor).
Gjest already had a long rap sheet in 1827 when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Akershus Fortress in Oslo (a major tourist attraction today for many reasons. I’ve been there, but not as long as Gjest stayed). During this imprisonment he did something visionary and memorable – he wrote his autobiography. In this book he portrayed himself as a clever rogue and a defender of the common folk, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor (as you can see in the clip above). A historian named Erling T. Gjelsvik published a serious biography in 2000. His conclusion was that in real life, Gjest stole from pretty much anybody who didn’t lock up their possessions well.
Not a real surprise.
He was pardoned in 1845, and supported himself until his death in 1849 by selling his books.
As a phenomenon of the 19th Century, however, Gjest is interesting. He was contemporary with my great hero, Hans Nielsen Hauge the lay preacher. Although it would be hard to imagine two characters more different from one another, there are similarities in their cultural impact. Both were common men who became famous through taking advantage of their literacy and the expanding publishing industry. A burgeoning, literate public was hungry for reading matter aimed at them. Those whose hearts were set on higher things read Hauge. The more carnal turned to Gjest Baardsen. And many, no doubt, read both.
Eventually, books like Gjest’s would be parents and grandparents to innumerable paperback novels, tabloid newspapers, blogs, and reality TV. But Gjest was, in one country, a sort of a grubby pioneer.
Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the founders of the British “Detection Club,” a group of mystery writers. They enforced certain rules on their membership, including one against allowing their detectives to solve crimes through “jiggery-pokery.” Jiggery-pokery included spirits, magic, and psychic powers.
The rules of detective writing have changed since then (like all the rules), so that now and then we do encounter a mystery book where psychic powers play a part. However, it doesn’t work in practice to make those powers too effective. That ruins the whole point of a mystery. When a “real” psychic appears in a mystery, their gift is generally obscure, constituting a puzzle in itself.
That’s the case with Jack Lynch’s Die for Me, another in his Pete Bragg series. San Francisco PI Bragg, who flourished back around the ‘80s, gets a call from Maribeth Robbins, a woman he’s only encountered once before – over the phone. On the very last day of his newspaper career, then-reporter Bragg took a call from a profoundly depressed Maribeth. He realized he was talking to someone suicidal, and stayed on the line with her until she’d calmed down. Then he referred her to counselors. That call, she tells him now, saved her life. Today she’s a psychic, but a low-key one. She avoids publicity and the media.
She’s learned that Bragg has become a private eye, and she wants to talk to him about a vision she’s been having. She sees a rural location where – she is certain – several bodies are buried. These people were recently murdered and one of them, she thinks, is a child.
It’s pretty vague evidence to go on, if it can be called evidence at all. But Bragg teases some further details out of her, and then gets a pilot friend to fly him and a friendly medical examiner to a particular area along the California coast. In Jack London State Park they find a spot that matches the description. And the M.E. notes that the vivid green color of the grass could well be a sign of burials.
They land and examine the place, and immediately call the county sheriff. This is indeed a burial site. Just as Maribeth feared.
The story that follows mixes Bragg’s involvement with the case with his struggles in his relationship with his girlfriend, who’s increasingly distant. In the end he’ll face a showdown with a hostage-taking killer, in the ruins of Jack London’s house.
I don’t believe in ESP. If it exists, I consider it probably demonic. But suspending my disbelief on that point, I very much enjoyed Die for Me. It was an engaging and engrossing story that kept me turning the pages.
One thing that dated it, I thought (and being dated is no drawback in a book for this reader), was the treatment of feminism. Bragg encounters a female police detective back when such creatures were a rarity. He demonstrates his openmindedness in his conversations with her, but those conversations are cringe-inducing by the standards of the 21st Century. I think that’s because back then we thought feminism was really about fairness, not just about finding ways for men always to be in the wrong.
Anyway, Die for Me was a pretty good, old-school mystery, and I enjoyed it. Recommended unless ESP is a deal-breaker for you.
As for the flat itself, whatever had gone on here, it was highly unlikely that the weapon used was a cat, as there was nowhere near enough room to swing one.
Caimh McDonnell’s series of comic mysteries featuring bibulous police detective Bunny McGarry can well be called ground-breaking, if only for its extension of the category “trilogy” to include a series that’s up to six books now (not to mention the “Bunny in America” side-series). The latest is Firewater Blues, and it’s as inventive and hilarious as all the others.
Nevertheless, I’m done with them. Reasons at the end of this review.
Firewater Blues is a sort of prequel, occurring before A Man With One of Those Faces, the first in the series. Bunny is still with the police force at this point, though on a “sabbatical.” He’s grown disillusioned with the force, and is considering a change.
Then he encounters Rosie Flint, a young woman he once helped out. Rosie is a computer genius and very obviously somewhere on the Autistic scale. Which means she absolutely refuses to have anything to do with the regular police, due to the way they treated her the last time around. But she trusts Bunny… sort of. She has a boyfriend now, and he’s disappeared. On top of that, she’s convinced somebody has been following her. Already agoraphic, she’s terrified of a world of dangers.
Bunny agrees to help, and begins uncovering disturbing clues. Something very big is going on, and poor Rosie is in the middle of it. Bunny will approach the case with his usual blunt object methodology, and many heads will get knocked together before – with the help of a pack of renegade nuns and a twelve-year-old truant – he finds the answers. Not all of them comforting.
Author McDonnell is a genius, and Firewater Blues combines slapstick, crude jokes, and clever wordsmithing with moments of genuine poignancy. This is an excellent, funny book, if you can handle the language.
However (at least for this reader) this is where the author finally came out so plainly with his politics that that element overcame the entertainment. There’s never been any question where Caimh McDonnell stood on the political spectrum, but (it seemed to me) he came out swinging this time. He even went so far as to trot out the old chestnut that “political correctness is just another name for politeness.” (Yeah, pull the other one. What could be more polite than calling everybody you disagree with Hitler?) I’m sure author McDonnell doesn’t want my conservative, fascist money anyway.
In any case, it’s stopped being fun and I’m done with it. But you may be more tolerant than I am. I can recommend it as a really funny, well-written book.
This is a book I mistook for a promising novel by a Christian writer. Having finished it, I still consider it a promising novel (the author has gone on to write several and seems to be doing well). I’m not so sure about the Christianity. Though Preacher Finds a Corpse (awful title) is not exactly anti-Christian either.
Evan Wycliff grew up in Apple Center, Missouri, and then went away to Harvard to study theology. Then he studied astrophysics. Then, after a personal tragedy, he went home again, where he now works as a bill collector for a car dealer and now and then preaches in local congregations. Hence his nickname, “Preacher.”
His return allowed him to reconnect with his boyhood best friend Bob, though they haven’t actually spent much time together. Nevertheless, Evan is shocked when, one morning when he’s on his way to join some buddies on a turkey hunt, he finds Bob’s dead body waiting on the path. Bob has apparently shot himself to death with a pistol.
Evan is not a serious suspect in the case. In fact, the sheriff quickly closes the case, but confides to Evan in private that he wouldn’t mind having someone look a little closer at it. Bob’s financial affairs had been in disarray. A farm he’d been renting to a friend was about to be taken over by the government, and Bob had told the friend not to worry – he’d prevent that from happening. Only now he can’t. And Bob’s beautiful wife, who’s set to inherit all his property, seems less than devastated. And what is it with the property, anyway? Why is there no clear title? Why is an area there fenced off by the military?
Evan will poke around in his low-key way, digging up some history, and some people will feel threatened. Physical attack and involuntary commitment to an institution are just some of the challenges Evan will face. But in the end the truth will out.
I found Preacher Finds a Corpse a promising book in terms of narrative. Evan is a layered character, and the other characters are complex too. I thought the prose a little weak – the author needed to move the story along faster. He’s probably figured out how to do that by now.
The plotting was weak, I thought, in the sense that everything turns out to be less than the reader expects. The conclusion was kind of flat. Another problem was that one surreal plot element – Evan having conversations with the imagined spirit of his dead fiancée – doesn’t start happening until half-way through the book. If you’re going to add that kind of mystical element, you need to establish it earlier in the story.
But my main problem was theological. Evan is supposed to be a popular supply preacher in the small-town churches around Apple City. But, judging by the topics he preaches on, he’s only marginally orthodox (or not orthodox at all). He tells the people in the pews that “God is all there is” (pantheism). He questions whether human souls in Heaven possess personality. I have trouble believing small town preachers would put up with that sort of thing. However, I suspect the author means well. I think he wants us to like these people because they’re open to “original” ideas.
Preacher Finds a Corpse wasn’t awful. But I didn’t like it enough to go on to the sequels.
Kenyon, Minnesota back in the 1930s or so. Before my time, but this is pretty much how I remember it.
Yesterday was a good day. There’s been a sudden hiatus – for some reason – in my translating. I got a sudden reminder on Facebook that some of my high school classmates were meeting down in Kenyon (our home town) for one of our occasional get-togethers. (When there are five Wednesdays in a month, we try to meet at some restaurant for lunch on the fifth one. The lockdowns, of course, played hob with this admirable plan, but we’re back at it again).
We met at a new restaurant in town. I might as well mention it, as I liked the food and the service. Kenyon has not been a lucky place for restaurants since I was a boy. This place, Lacey’s, occupies a space where two restaurants have died over the last few years. But one of my friends, who’s stayed in town and knows everybody, said they have a good business plan and are doing a brisk trade. God bless them.
I genuinely enjoy these little reunions. I don’t know any of these people well anymore, and we have vast differences in beliefs, education, and politics. But we have two inexhaustible topics for conversation – our shared school experiences, and the multiple indignities of growing old. There’s a bond there. I suppose military veterans feel much the same. And our casualty list is, I expect, comparable. Members of my class started dying off fast after graduation, and they kept it up at a rapid pace through the years that followed. Somebody noted that we haven’t actually lost any for a few years now. It would appear that we few, we happy few, we survivors are a hardy lot.
A wiser man might have stayed home due to the driving conditions (it’s a tip of over an hour). The temperature lingered just around freezing all day, and what the meteorologists call a “wintry mix” kept falling. But in practice I found the road surfaces fine, and made it there and back without any scares.
An update on my great plumbing crisis – the way things have shaken out, it all proves to be not only a case of God’s provision, but of my own obliviousness. The Bible says, “Before they ask, I will answer them,” or words to that effect. (Actually I’m not sure it does. I’ve heard it quoted many times, but Bible Hub doesn’t produce a reference.)
I have a Home Service Warranty, and have had it since I bought this place. It had honestly never occurred to me that it might cover plumbing. I had what I assumed to be an adequate understanding of what warranties cover – not structural stuff, but appliances. And in my mind, plumbing was a lot more like a roof than like a clothes dryer.
But lo, I was wrong. My old pipes are covered, thereby saving me piles of money. I am gratified by this, but embarrassed to have almost missed it.
Elisiv of Kyiv, probably drawn from life. The earliest portrait of any member of a Norwegian royal family.
I am savvy enough about the current climate of opinion to be aware that it can be a dangerous thing to criticize Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky (for the record, I have no doubt that Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine is both illegal and unjustified).
Nevertheless, I have to correct Pres. Zelensky today.
Something you probably haven’t heard about, but I have, is that Pres. Zelensky addressed the Norwegian Parliament (Storting) today, by remote video. I know this because I was listening to the Norwegian NRK radio network at the time, and heard it live. And I understood it perfectly because (for some unexplained reason) they broadcast it with simultaneous English translation – not Norwegian.
Pres. Zelensky appeals, among other things, to the historical ties between Norway and Ukraine. He says this in particular:
Today, Russian bombs are flying at our land and our people. At the land where the Ukrainian Princess Elisiv of Kyiv was born and grew up. Wife of King Harald III of Norway, mother of King Olaf the Peaceful, grandmother of Magnus III, great-grandmother of Eystein I and Sigurd the Crusader.
This statement is in error – though the fault is probably that of the president’s speech writers.
Princess Elisiv (Elizabeth) of Kyiv (portrait above, taken from a church wall in Kyiv) was indeed the wife of Harald III, better known as Harald Hardrada, the freebooting Viking and mercenary who became king of Norway in 1046 and died in England in 1066. And she did bear him a child, a girl named Maria who was later declared a saint.
The mother of King Olaf the Peaceful, however, was not Elisiv, but Harald’s mistress, Thora Thorbergsdatter, daughter of Thorberg Arnesson of Giske.
What makes this fact of particular interest to us is that Thora’s mother was Ragnhild Erlingsdatter, daughter of Erling Skjalgsson of Sola, hero of my Viking novels.
The marriage of Ragnhild to Thorberg actually constitutes a plot element in my work in progress, King of Rogaland, currently nearing completion but delayed by heavy translation work.
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