In this life there are goings out and comings in. Today was a going out, for me.
All posts by Lars Walker
Apres moi, le deluge
Counting down the last two days of my librarian career. I am not doing well, thanks for asking. Sleeping badly; fuzzy-headed at work, where I flounder to remember to tell people the things I need to tell them before I surrender my keys. Training my boss in the new library management system, which I haven’t yet had time to master myself. Trying – probably with little success – not to be a grump.
I feel a little like a man on death row – half terrified of the end, half wishing to get the bloody thing over already.
The interior turmoil has exterior manifestations – external to me. Stuff is being torn out. Stuff is being brought in. Half the things I’m teaching my boss may prove to be unnecessary, because they’ll be changing to other technology anyway. But I don’t know these things for sure, so I share my antique wisdom.
I’m still skeptical about the operational plan for the library. I may be less than ideal as a resource person to whom students may appeal to for help, but the new alternative seems to be nobody at all, most of the time. I find it hard to believe an absence is preferable to my presence. There will be assistants around in the afternoons, but that’s not when most of the students will be using the resources.
But, as I keep telling myself, it’s no longer my circus.
Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. The readiness is all.
‘Solveig’s Song’ with Sissel
I am, if you’ll pardon me, a little moody this evening (alert the media!). So I’ll post another song.
I shared a piece from Grieg’s Peer Gynt not long ago. Here’s one more, but it features none other than the Divine Sissel (who is wearing the Bergen bunad — the city folk costume). In the play, Solveig is Peer’s faithful and neglected girlfriend, whom he treats badly, as is his wont. She sings of patiently waiting for him. This is one the standard classic songs in Norway. Amundsen and his men had it on a recording to listen to on their way to the South Pole, I believe.
‘A Private Investigation,’ by Peter Grainger
Bittersweet. The last of a good thing is always bittersweet, and Peter Grainger’s DC Smith books have become one of the small pleasures in my life. This one may be the last in the series (though the ending is ambiguous).
As A Private Investigation begins, Detective Sergeant D.C. Smith is rapidly approaching mandatory retirement, two weeks away (it was a little weird for me to start this book just as I was two weeks away from the end of my own job). Smith is keeping a low profile, tidying up the records on his last case. No one expects him to do any serious investigation; he’s just filling time. His old team has been broken up. His new superiors, one a former subordinate, the other a long-time rival, are keeping their distances.
And then a teenage girl disappears. It strikes Smith as odd that his career should end with the abduction of a young girl; that’s what his first major case was.
But then there’s a shock – a connection is discovered between that old first case and this present one. Which does not impel Smith into action – that would be against regulations. But he pays attention, and gives his friends on the case some useful pointers.
But that won’t be enough. Someone is preparing a final showdown. D.C. Smith’s career will not end quietly.
I very much enjoy this whole series of books. D.C. Smith is a fascinating, engaging character – reserved, ironic, quirky, but beneath it all a man who truly cares about victims and the justice due to them. Also, here and there, author Grainger throws in hints of a conservative world-view.
There may have been some bad language, but I don’t recall any. I really have no cautions for you. I enjoyed A Private Investigation, and recommend you read the whole series.
Who knows? There may even be another book.
Bilingual orientation
I forget what the word “blogging” originally meant. I know it involved a conflation involving the word “logging,” but I can’t remember where the “b” came from. In any case, blogging used to be a pretty big deal, but now only a few of us are left, systematically throwing messages in bottles out into the digital sea, hoping somebody will find one of them washed up on a virtual beach.
The original blogs, as I recall, tended to be rather confessional, like personal web cams, but involving only psychological voyeurism. Not many do that anymore (though James Lileks still excels). But occasionally I still cast up the odd personal log here, and today will be one of those days. Mostly because I’ve been so busy I haven’t had much time to read, so I can’t do a book review. I may finish the book I’m reading now in time to review it tomorrow.
Today was my last Monday at my job – though I’m informed they’ll be wanting to bring me in as a contractor now and then in the next few months, to do the stuff nobody else knows how to do. In my free time, I’ve been surprisingly busy. Odds and ends that demanded attention. The first inchoate stirrings of a job hunt. I haven’t spent much time on the couch watching TV, though it’s what I really feel like doing.
Friday I got a message from the woman at Meteoritt, the media translation company in Oslo, asking me if I wanted to translate an 18-page document, due Wednesday. I said sure. No problem. I’ve begun to get a handle on how long it takes to translate a script, and 18 pages is no big deal. Script pages, as you probably know, are mostly white space.
But it turned out it wasn’t a script. It was what I believe is called a “treatment” in the industry. A treatment (unless I’m mistaken) is a narrative of the story organized in paragraphs. One paragraph per scene, I think. Which means that a treatment is a pretty dense document. 18 pages of a treatment is a chunk of verbiage. Continue reading Bilingual orientation
‘Victor’s Song’
Yeah, I’m dry today. So I’m going to post another song from “Local Hero.” I’m gonna make you like this movie whether you want to or not.
“Victor” is a Russian trawler fisherman who drops in on the Scottish fishing village from time to time. He is an unabashed capitalist (this is before the Cold War ended). When he comes to a ceilidh, he always does this song, a favorite with his Scottish friends.
So we’ve got a Russian singing a country-western song to Scots. Fits right in with the whole film.
‘Mist Covered Mountains’
Today James Lileks, blogging from England, posted a musical piece from the 1983 movie “Local Hero.” Which happens to be one of my favorites.
So I’ll just post a “Local Hero” selection of my own. The movie, a light treatment of cultural miscommunication between an American oil man and the population of a Scottish fishing village, is full of magic. But the most magical part (for me) is the ceilidh, the musical party and dance held in the village hall. I could have posted the wonderful country-western song sung by a Russian fisherman, but the real peak of the night is this waltz, “Mist Covered Mountains.”
You may notice a brief appearance by Peter Capaldi, who would go on to become a Time Lord, but not before Time had had its way with him, good and hard.
‘Random Revenge,’ by William Michaels
I’d classify this book as one that ultimately worked, but it had some weaknesses.
My main problem was that Random Revenge by William Michaels doesn’t roll out in optimal fashion. It’s sort of a Columbo story, where in the first half you see the crime committed, and in the second half you watch the detective solving the crime.
The problem here was that we spent that first half mostly with the criminal and victim, who were both unpleasant enough to make the going tedious. One of them (I won’t say whether they’re murderer or victim) is Melanie Upton, a ruthless, aspiring actress with very few sympathetic qualities. The other is Lenny Gruse, a ruthless, aspiring paparazzo with no sympathetic qualities at all. I got a few glimpses of our hero, Detective Robert Winter, within that section, and his appeal was all that kept me with the book. The second half, where he takes center stage, is much better.
Winter, a detective in a small Massachusetts town where a movie is being filmed, is another in a long list of fictional “loose cannon” cops, but he’s original enough to make him interesting. He’s impatient of regulations and protocol, but he has a very high clearance record. And he’s not above doling out a little street justice. His method is to follow his instincts, but also to think a lot. He has a genius for playing out a multitude of possible scenarios in his head, making connections other cops wouldn’t make. He’s not like Columbo in the genius department – Columbo usually knew who was guilty from square one. Winter tries out and rejects a thousand theories before finding one that works. It’s the genuine scientific method.
The ending of the book was surprising, but not out of the blue, in light of what we’ve learned about Winter. His idea of closing a case isn’t always precisely the same as what the law prescribes.
Random Revenge started slow, but worked well once it got going. Cautions for adult themes and language, and some moral ambiguity. There were moments of sloppy writing. But I’d like to read the next book in the series (I trust one is coming), because I think Detective Robert Winter might have a big future.
Reading report: ‘Rogalendinger i den Amerikanske Borgerkrigen’
Col. Hans Christian Heg
The Norwegian soldiers had a reputation for never retreating in battle, and their courage resulted in their regiment being among those regiments suffering the greatest losses in the American Civil War. (Translation mine.)
When I’m manning a bookselling table for hours on end at a Sons of Norway convention, my greatest concern is generally to have sufficient reading material. Although I do almost all my reading on my Kindle Fire nowadays, one has to consider battery life. Also, I have a few “dead tree” books I’ve been accumulating. The convention seemed a good opportunity to read one of those. And if it’s in Norwegian, it has the advantage of allowing me to show off, and who knows, maybe somebody will walk past looking for a translator.
So I chose a book called Rogalendinger i den Amerikanske Borgerkrigen (Rogalanders in the American Civil War. Rogaland is a county in Norway, from which my dad’s father’s family came). It was written by Arne Halvorsen and Mari Anne Næsheim Hall. Mari Anne is a friend of mine – she was the person who first put me in touch with Prof. Titlestad, author of Viking Legacy. She sent me a copy, and I was keen to read it.
The most renowned “Norwegian” regiment during the Civil War was the 15th Wisconsin, commanded by Col. Hans C. Heg, who was killed at Chickamauga. Wisconsin was more or less the center of Norwegian-American settlement at that point in time, but a number of other soldiers came from Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and (in lesser numbers) from other places, serving in various units. The reasons for signing up varied – many simply needed the enlistment bonuses. But many also felt honor-bound to demonstrate their loyalty to their new country – a loyalty sometimes doubted by their neighbors. And Norwegians in general were sincerely appalled by the institution of slavery (though there were some Norwegians on the other side – especially from the Norwegian settlements in Texas). Continue reading Reading report: ‘Rogalendinger i den Amerikanske Borgerkrigen’
Dr. Norvald Yri, 1944-2018
I learned today of the death (on Sunday) of a man I’d worked with and respected greatly. Dr. Norvald Yri was a Norwegian missionary and Bible scholar. Born in 1944, he served on the mission field for many years, both in Ethiopia and in Tanzania, and served as secretary for an international mission organization. He took his doctorate from Fuller Theological Seminary in 1975, and was the author of several books. One of them, Guds Ja, was a commentary on Romans 1 through 8. I translated it for him, but we never found an English publisher.
In recent years he had been a teacher at the Fjellhaug Bible School near Oslo. He also participated in a Bible translation project. He and several others were unhappy with the Norwegian Bible Society’s most recent translation, so they produced an alternative one, based on the King James version.
I corresponded with him by e-mail for many years, but only knew him personally for a short time when he was a visiting instructor at the seminary where I work. He and his wife were/are splendid people, and I think he will be hard to replace.
Hvil i fred (Rest in peace), Dr. Yri.