Category Archives: Reading

Authors, Fiction, Reading, The Press

Not 1, but 2, Scandinavian stories

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My own photo of the reconstructed Viking houses at L’Anse Aux Meadows, some years back.

File this under “News That Surprised Absolutely Nobody:”

Counting tree rings reveals that wooden objects previously found at an archaeological site on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula were made from trees felled in the year 1021. That’s the oldest precise date for Europeans in the Americas and the only one from before Christopher Columbus’ voyages in 1492, geoscientists Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee and colleagues report October 20 in Nature.

You can read the rest here at Sciencenews.org.

1021 is actually fairly late in the game, if you give the sagas any credence. But most of us believe the Greenlanders were here for quite a few years. The sagas describe three expeditions in detail, and it seems probable that the Greenlanders would have exploited American resources (especially lumber) for quite a long time, even after they gave up on the idea of a colony.

I hold to the widely-held theory that the L’Anse Aux Meadows site in Newfoundland is not the entire Norse American enterprise, but merely a station – possibly a pretty insignificant one. The only real activity we can identify there from the archaeology is boat repair and its ancillary crafts.

Our good friend Dave Lull sent me this article from The American Conservative: A Norwegian American Journey, by Sam Sweeney.

Growing up in rural Montana, I was a bit removed from the Norwegian enclave in western North Dakota that my mom’s family is from. We ate lefse at Thanksgiving, but other than that, compared to my cousins I was not particularly in touch with my Norwegian heritage. I never felt a particular connection to Norway as a country, but do mention my heritage to Norwegians I meet, as there are a surprisingly high number of them in the Middle East, where I’ve spent much of the last decade. Reading Giants in the Earth, however, was an enlightening experience, and it brought to life the journey that my ancestors took from Norway to the Dakotas.

After reading O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious, the writer goes on to ponder Scandinavian cinema (I myself have seen The Last King and The King’s Choice, but none of the other films he describes). The article is interesting, though I was wondering by the end what its point was.

I personally am not a fan of much Scandinavian literature or film, as I expect I’ve made pretty clear. I read Giants In the Earth in college, and my major take-away was what a depressing book it was. I never read the sequel, Peder Victorious, but a friend described it to me, and the description didn’t appeal much (here’s a hint – the name “Victorious” [Norwegian Seier] is darkly ironic). The same friend described other books by Rolvaag, like The Boat of Longing, and that sounded even worse. I do not recommend reading Rolvaag if you struggle with suicidal ideation.

Scandinavians have a bent for looking at things coldly and in a brutal, unsentimental light. When the Scandinavians were Christian, I think, they found ways to mitigate that brutal honesty. Now that they’ve mostly “transcended” Christian faith, they seem to have settled on a glum fatalism, like those dogs in the famous Learned Helplessness experiments.

I think that probably explains most of their current social policies.

Reading, Writing

Epic writing update

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Still got some reading to do before my next book review. Picked up yet another book about Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral. I don’t know why I keep reading these things. Officially, I’m a Wild Bill Hickok partisan, but there aren’t as many books being written about the Prince of Pistoleers (got to check if there’s anything new out there). But that OK Corral business just keeps fascinating people. The book I’m working on seems promising, in terms of fresh information.

That put me in the mood to watch “Tombstone” again. Like all Earp movies, it falsifies all sorts of stuff, but it works so well as a film – and they did make the effort to make it look authentic. Love those costumes.

And it has some great epic moments. I so love epic moments, where your heart soars a few yards, like Soti in The Year of the Warrior. Made me wish I could write some of my own.

And what do you know? I have some to write! A Work In Progress nearing completion, just needing a few more edits to steer it the tradition of Cecil B. DeMille. Or Sergio Leone. Or whoever directed “Tombstone.” (I forget.)

I finished another draft of King of Rogaland last night. Then this morning as I got up, I thought of a few lines I needed to add, to contribute to the general transcendence of the epic as a whole. Tonight, I start another read-through. I’m close now, I think. This book seems to have more moving, intersecting parts than anything I’ve written before. I think I’ve got most of my ravens in a row now – I’m only aware of one point I’m still not sure about.

Of course, you never know what self-inflicted follies, of my own creation, still lie in wait for me. That’s all part of the (epic) process.

Reading, Religion

You Must Be Common afore You Be Oncommon

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Ronni Kurtz describes the encouragement he finds (along with Pip) in Great Expectations: Don’t long for a future time after you’ve studied and learned all the thing; be grateful for who you are today.

Well, Pip, be it so, or be it son’t, you must be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommone one, I should hope! The king upon his throne, with his crown upon his ‘ed, can’t sit and write his acts of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet–Ah! And begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.

Authors, Reading

On historical characters in movies

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It’ll be a day or two until my next book review. I’m reading Act One, the autobiography of Moss Hart, the renowned Broadway playwright and director. It came up as a bargain e-book on Amazon, and it’s about two things I like – writing and the theater. It is an interesting book, and I’ll have much to say about it when I’ve finished reading.

The book was made into a biographical movie in 1963. I didn’t see it, of course (we rarely saw movies in our family), but I caught part of it on TV at some point over the years. My perception of the film (which got mediocre reviews) is marked by an article I saw in Parade Magazine at the time of the release. At least I’m pretty sure the article was about this movie. There’s a scene that exactly corresponds to what it described.

According to the article, when they were casting the parts of famous people who only appear briefly, they hired some of those people’s actual children to play them. I’m pretty sure a son of Robert Benchley played him in the scene where there’s a gathering in George S. Kaufman’s apartment. (Might have been Nathaniel, but I can find no mention of it online). There were others as well — I forget who. IMDb says nothing about this casting gimmick, but I like to believe I remember correctly.

There’s a formula in the movie business, I read somewhere: “When you’re casting famous real-life characters, the smaller the part, the more they must resemble the person they’re playing.”

That sounds paradoxical, but it makes sense in practice. When you’re dealing with a lead, you’ve got the whole length of the production to convince the audience that (taking an example purely at random) Kyle MacLachlan is Franklin Roosevelt. But when you bring somebody on for a minute as, oh, Humphrey Bogart, you don’t want the viewer to be diverted from following the story to ask, “Is that supposed to be Bogey?”

The movie that jumps to my mind when I consider this rule is “The Plainsman,” a 1936 film by Cecil B. DeMille, which stars Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok. Except in height, Coop bears no resemblance whatever to Hickok. His nose is the wrong shape, his hair is way too short, and there’s no mustache at all (Hollywood, after World War I, adopted a long-standing tradition of erasing almost all mustaches from historical characters. Only the Hippie Era shook them off it). But Buffalo Bill Cody wears the proper long hair and imperial goatee. As does General Custer.

I’m not sure how they managed to preserve Buffalo Bill’s beard and hair style in 1944’s movie, “Buffalo Bill,” starring Joel McCrae. But they got away with it. I suppose Buffalo Bill’s appearance was so iconic they couldn’t escape it.

Note to future producers: If a movie is ever made of my life, you have my permission to cast somebody thinner and taller to play me. But you need to keep the pigtail in the older scenes.

Reading, Uncategorized

‘Weariness and water were our chief enemies…’

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The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall here say little about it…. Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boats with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscapes of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XII)

I floundered for something to post tonight. Like so many Americans, I’m upset over a war strategy that seems both foolish and suicidal, with the fighting men (as always) paying the costs. Add to that that I’m reading a novel about the aftermath of World War I, the same sort of thing on a massive scale. So I settled on the excerpt from Surprised by Joy above, Lewis’s greatly softened public reminiscence of his war experience. (For a more candid view, see if you can find a copy of Jack’s Life, by Douglas Gresham, in which he relates what Jack told him in private about the war.)

I’d love to do a political rant, denouncing certain officials who shall remain nameless. But I haven’t the heart for it these days.

Fiction, Reading

Culling the Shelves of Bad Books

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Sometimes I browse a bookstore as I would other stores I visit while playing the tourist. I look at the many curious spines, letters, and colors, seeing the curiosity of one, the value of another, with little intension of buying either. Sometimes I go to a bookstore in hope of finding a few, specific titles or types of books or maybe anything by that guy who wrote those stories–you know the ones–about that cool thing, remember, and though I enter with hope, I must put it on a table somewhere to pick up something else, because I gradually despair of finding anything I want.

But there are times when I take a chance on a book I know nothing about. That’s when I run the risk of having my wife read it.

I’m a slow reader. If I wasn’t so good-looking, I’d be notably less successful than I am. My wife is fast reader, and I don’t mean by comparison to me. I can buy her a promising title from the used bookstore, and in two days, having read it through, she’ll ask me to take the trashy thing back.

I went to the used bookstore a couple weeks ago, carrying a mug of hope for reasons I don’t recall. Maybe it was our recent collection of trade-ins and having avoided the store for about a year. Inspired by Lars’s recent urban fantasy reviews, I wanted to find something fun and maybe good to try. So I went home with a steampunk novel, first of a series. Saying she needed to screen it for the kids, my wife read it immediately.

I think I read somewhere that nothing in steampunk was worth reading. It was all fan-fiction, heavily derivative. This book has to be step aside from that, because it was traditionally published by an author who has many other published books, but it isn’t good.

Getting all of this from my wife, the dialog is awful, particularly everything the heroine says. The plot is dragged down by her constantly wrestling over marrying someone instead of doing the adventure thing that you’d expect from a novel like this.

The devices and contraptions are interesting, even though they don’t move the story. The pirates are vile, needlessly dark, and disappear after their initial scuffle, which may be realistic but not fun. The zombie disease doesn’t make sense, and I don’t need to go on.

That’s the risk I run plucking a book off the shelf, being too kind to the cover art, and even reading the description or a random page. I’ve done that before to positive effect. More than that, I don’t need to buy books. I have many good ones on my shelves and more on that little Kindle thing that could spy on me if I didn’t put it to sleep with no wi-fi every day.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

A run of lackluster books and movies

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My reading of late has been oddly frustrating. After a beautiful Syttende Mai (the Norwegian Constitution Day, on which I had a couple actual human interactions, both of them surprisingly pleasant) I’ve come up against a string of bum books.

First there was a novel from a series I hadn’t revisited in a while. I didn’t get far into it before I remembered why I’d stopped reading the books; I saw some ugly stuff coming and sent the whole thing into the virtual rubbish bin. Then I started a Christian novel that looked intriguing. I have an idea the story might well be worth reading, but the prose was so awful I gave up on that one, too.

Now I’m reading a new book by a favorite author, which turns out on closer inspection to be a novella. A novella I’ve already read. Re-released under a new title. I’m still reading, because it’s pretty good, but I’m a little bitter too.

I’m in the habit of watching old movies on Amazon Prime in the afternoons. Yesterday I saw “High Voltage,” which stars William Boyd (before he was Hopalong Cassidy) and Carole Lombard (in her first major movie role, before she added the “e” to her first name). It was a highly moral melodrama about bus passengers caught in a blizzard in the Sierra Nevadas, and ends with a repentant Boyd on his way to jail in St. Paul.

Today it was “The Naked Hills,” with David Wayne and Denver Pyle. This was a western with aspirations. Instead of the standard shoot-em-up, it’s a story about how greed destroys a man’s life. David Wayne, in a rare starring role, plays a man who grows obsessed with finding a fortune, in the 1849 Gold Rush and after. The message was commendable, but the story was one-dimensional, and the resolution anticlimactic.

What surprised me was the theme song. It’s a number called “The Four Seasons,” by Herschel Burke Gilbert and Bob Russell. I knew this song from before. I have blogged here previously about my fondness for the old “Yancy Derringer” TV series. During the series’ original run, it had its own title song, “The Ballad of Yancy Derringer.” But when it went into syndication, for some reason (probably having to do with copyrights) they changed it to an instrumental theme. And that theme was this same “The Four Seasons” melody. Only without the verses they use in the movie.

There are even lyrics, which somebody sings at the beginning. As best I remember, they go something like this:

We have four seasons, four seasons  
To make our dreams come true.  
God gives a man four seasons, that’s all that he can do.

I don’t know if that last “he” refers to God or the man.

Kind of depressing, actually. But I have an ear worm now.

And if you have to have an ear worm, it might as well be a song you like.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Dune: Atreides Triumphant

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{Reading Dune for the first time] Update 5: Dune ends in a sudden halt. I suppose everything is wrapped up neatly enough, but there’s no page or two about everyone settling into a new life or looking forward to a new day. Nothing about drawing Rose closer, setting Elanor on your lap, and saying, “Well, I’m back.” It ends with Paul lowering the boom on his enemies, making demands, and done. Maybe the next book picks up immediately, but that brings me to main thing I intend to say in this post–pacing.

(By the way, how do you pronounce Harkonnen? I know how the 1984 movie says it, but I’m more comfortable putting the emphasis on the first syllable. Emphasizing the second syllable strikes me as thoughtlessly American. Herbert frequently agreed with me when he said the name, so I’ve read, but he may have said it the other way too.)

Book 1: Dune builds at an appropriately slow pace to strong climax. Book 2: Maud’Dib felt slow as I read the first few pages, but I may have been projecting. After Paul and Jessica collect themselves on the heels of the main event in book 1, the story kicks back into gear. This section has the one chapter I was tempted to skip. It focuses primarily on the death of an important figure, so it’s good to give such an event proper weight. But it’s also like reading appendix 1 on planet ecology and the visionary who intended to change Arrakis. Too much lecturing. Book 3: The Prophet picks up a few years after the end of the previous section and tells a quick story of longer period of time.

Dune has a lot of fighting, but Herbert doesn’t focus on it. The fights we see are the personal ones. He skips over taking village strongholds, defending hideouts from imperial soldiers, and knocking patrol ships out of the sky. Instead we get an explanation of how the tough, imperial troops are losing 3-1 against rebels, who are supposed to be scattered ruffians, to the disgusting Baron Harkonnen, who had assumed any fighting had already been handled. That’s just one example of how the story tells us where the conflict lies ahead in one chapter and how it’s behind them in the next.

Herbert writes well. He doesn’t try to make irrelevant scenes appealing. He’s willing to wrap them up off camera. I do wish he would have refrained from constantly referring to training. The reader has plenty of time to understand the deep, lengthy training Paul and Jessica have endured. Do we have to mention it every time they try not to blow a gasket?

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

Fiction, Reading, Religion, Reviews

Dune: Cynical and Yet Pro-Life

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[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 4: A couple observations on what I’ve read so far.

Paul Atriedes and Lady Jessica, son and mother, are both highly trained in the Bene Gesserit order. Jessica was a nun (if that’s the right word for her position) before being sold to Duke Leto as a concubine. You can see in that statement why nun doesn’t seem like the precise word for her. Others call her a witch and call the Eastern mystical quality of Bene Gesserit ways witchcraft. But what they do doesn’t look like magic at all. It looks like highly accurate intuition, mental processing power, and even kung fu.

At the same time, Jessica frequently criticizes signs of manipulative indoctrination she finds on the desert planet. There’s no indication of universal truths or God Almighty who calls people on every planet to himself. They never speak of faith, only of training. It seems somewhat, but not entirely, secularized.

Contrasted with this is faith of the Fremen, which Jessica would say has been delivered to them by emissaries of the Missionaria Protectiva. This part of the Bene Gesserit order is defined in the glossary as being “charged with sowing infectious superstitions on primitive worlds, thus opening those regions to exploitation.” Paul looks at the honest faith of the Fremen as a seedbed for jihad.

If the Atriedes would speak of universal moral truths or spiritual realities just once, it could remove the cynical smear of every other characterization of faith. But I don’t think they will.

Despite their jaded religious training, they take a remarkably pro-life stance on Jessica’s unborn child. Several times Jessica’s pregnancy has come up, never in the bizarrely clinical way some people talk today, and at a point when she feels compelled to risk her life for the greater good, Jessica asks herself if she has the right to risk the life of her child as well. In 2021 A.D. America, that’s an incredible statement!

I’m a little worried matriarchs of the Bene Gesserit order will emerge to play the part of Big Organized Religion Bent on Evil. Maybe they won’t in this book.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

‘People Overact, Take it Too Far’

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[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 3: I recently read the scene in which Paul sees one of the giant worms rise from the sand before him. They have this scene in the trailer for the upcoming film. Remembering that got me wondering if they had the same scene in the 1984 movie.

I know I said I didn’t want to see any more of that movie, but I don’t think the worms were the bad part. I found a WatchMojo video of ten reasons people hate Dune (1984), and now I really have seen as much as I need to see of it. Yeah, there are spoilers, but this movie doesn’t stick close to the book, so it’s matters less. And no worm rising from the sand–maybe that was the good part.

One main complaint is overacting. I remember catching an old sci-fi flick Solar Crisis somewhere in the middle. I think I started watching when Charlton Heston was on screen. After a few minutes, I thought, “Heston is the only good actor in this movie.” At least, he was the only believable figure walking around. Cut to a scene in a spaceship, and I wondered if these were the people who had been looking for clerical and janitorial work when all the real astronauts were deciding who would draw the short straws.

That’s something I’ve appreciated in what I’ve read of Dune so far. The characters, at least the good ones, aren’t peevish and bratty. Actually, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is not only evil, he’s full of bile. He probably wakes up every morning with a leer, but he gets little lime light in Book One, so he doesn’t weigh it down. Duke Leto, the Sean Bean character in this part of the story, has flaws, which Paul notes, but is predominately an admirable man. One of the native politicians feels pressed to like the Duke against his better judgement because he naturally commands loyalty. He inspires fidelity with his passion and generosity.

The overacting, what there may be of it, comes across as cutthroat politics. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is quoted as saying, “Politics is like bad cinema — people overact, take it too far. When I speak with politicians, I see this in their facial expressions, their eyes, the way they squint. I look at things like a producer. I would often watch a scene on the monitor, and the director and I would yell, ‘Stop, no more, this is unwatchable! No one will believe this.'”

I hope I don’t get much of it in the rest of Dune. It would ruin the whole experience.

Image by Parker_West from Pixabay