Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Fiction, Religion, Uncategorized

Of Northmen and Kingsnorth

Leave a comment

Now I draw toward the conclusion of a brief, strenuous stretch of days leading up to the rigors of a long airline flight (different from prison incarceration, as I often say, mainly in that you’re likely to get out of prison ahead of schedule). Friday I drove up to Brainerd to speak to the convention of the 1st District of the Sons of Norway. Spoke twice on Viking Legacy and got a very good response. My only disappointment was that somehow I was boneheaded enough not to check my stock of the book. I had three copies to sell of the book I was promoting. Well done, Marketing Genius! I did have plenty of my novels, The Year of the Warrior and West Oversea (see the upper right, if you’d like to buy them), and they went pretty well.

Anyway, it was a good experience, though driving two hours (each way) is more of a challenge than it used to be – not so long ago, it seems.

Then on Sunday it was Danish Day at the Danish-American Center in Minneapolis. Last year I planned to go, but that was when Mrs. Ingebretsen, my poor PT Cruiser, broke down. The sequel to that, as you may recall, was three-and-a-half months without my car.

This year I crossed my fingers and made it. Nice day, and a good number of our Viking club members showed up to wear costumes and fight with blunt swords. The younger ones did the fighting – I looked on with a paternal smile. I only sold one book, but I never sell much at Danish Day. It was good to be out there again with my A-frame tent. And the young people were very good to help with the loading, unloading, and setting up. And down.

Our friend Gene Edward Veith has a fascinating post today (behind a paywall, alas, but I’ll link to it here anyway) about the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, previously unknown to me, who has quite a conversion story – out-Lewising C. S. Lewis himself. He went from being an atheist to being an environmentalist, to being a seeker, then a Wiccan:

I had known, I suppose, that the abyss was still there inside me—that what I was doing in the woods, though affecting, was at some level still play-acting. Then, one night, I dreamed of ­Jesus. The dream was vivid, what he had looked like. The crux of the matter was that he was to be the next step on my spiritual path. I didn’t believe that or want it to be true. But the image and the message reminded me of something strange that had happened a few months before. My wife and I were out to dinner, celebrating our wedding anniversary, when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.” When I asked her what on earth she was talking about, she said she didn’t know; she had just had a feeling and needed to tell me. My wife has a preternatural sensitivity that she always denies, and it wasn’t the first time she had done something like this. It shook me. A Christian? Me? What could be weirder?

Eventually he found a home in the Romanian Orthodox Church. His full account can be read on his blog here.

Dr. Veith says he’s ordering Kingsnorth’s novel Alexandria. But since it’s the third book of a trilogy, I can’t resist starting with the first installment, The Wake.

Authors, Uncategorized

Wodehouse and other trivia

Leave a comment

Above, for no other reason than that somebody posted it on Facebook, a bit of an interview with P. G. Wodehouse. I’m guessing it’s from the 1960s or so, and he had a long and productive career still ahead of him at that point. An inspiration to us all.

I note that somebody blocked sharing on the video of Norwegian Constitution Day festivities I posted yesterday. Just as well, I suppose. I thought it was from the same day, but I’ve since seen actual 2022 footage, and everybody in the Royal Family looks older. I won’t delete the post – a man might as well stand behind his honest errors and take his lumps.

The May 17 celebration last night went well, and I think my lecture was a success. So I was told, anyway. We had an actual Hardanger fiddle player there, dressed in a bunad (folk costume), which lent plausibility to the proceedings.

Gradually I am completing my preparations for my Great Adventure in Norway. Today I finally succeeded in alerting my credit card company to the fact that I’ll be traveling to unaccustomed spaces. They have a button for that purpose on their member’s page online, but pushing that button produces no results at all, like those “Close Door” buttons in elevators. So today I called them, worked my way through the phone tree, and got the notification done. I looked about me for the praise of the multitude, but alas, I was by myself. So I tell you now.

Next challenge, activating the European sim card I bought for my cell phone.

I think I’m making progress on my Norwegian language comprehension. I decided yesterday that I was understanding just a little more of the news broadcasts on Norwegian state radio. Not enough to be of much practical use yet, but something. A little. Maybe. I hope.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Goofing, Poetry

When ‘Brunch’ Was New, the Limits of Science, and Worthless Commercials

Leave a comment

Something inspired me to look up a distinct definition for the word brunch the other day, and I happened upon this piece from Punch magazine in 1896. Merriam-Webster says the earliest brunch is believed to have appeared in print in 1894, and this aligns with that claim.

“According to the Lady, to be fashionable nowadays, we must “brunch.” Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter’s Weekly, and, indicating a combined breakfast and lunch. At Oxford, however, two years ago, an important distinction was drawn. The combination-meal, when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is “brunch,” and, when nearer luncheon, is “blunch.” Please don’t forget this. 

Tis the voice of the bruncher., I heard him complain,  
“You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again!  
When the clock says it’s 12, then perhaps I’ll revive,  
Meanwhile, into bed, yet once more let me dive! 

“The last meal I had was 3:00 AM.;  
I’m a writer, so please don’t such habits condemn!  
This cross between supper and breakfast I’ll name,  
If you’ll let me, a ‘suckfast’ –and ‘brupper’ ‘s the same!”

It goes on to lesser effect. What else do we have?

Lewis on Science: C.S. Lewis understood the limitations of science better than many scientists. Michael Ward writes:

What is frost to someone who has never encountered it? What is a degree of frost? Ordinary language would be more helpful in explaining the situation: “Your ears will ache … you’ll lose the feeling in your fingers” etc. The word numb will convey more than any number.

However, what Keats tries to convey in his poem can’t be rendered as a thermometer reading. It is not univocal or universal; we can’t translate his poem into, say, Japanese without loss or at least alteration. And yet if we want to know just what it feels like to go outside and breathe the bitterly chill January night air, Keats paints for us a very vivid and sensible picture. He communicates knowledge to us that the ordinary and scientific ways of speaking leave out.

In other words, poetry is a kind of knowledge, and since knowledge is a synonym for science we could quite legitimately say – if we wanted to – that poetry is a branch of science. 

“Numb and Numb-er,” by Michael Ward, Plough.com

Lewis on Science-Fiction: Lewis wrote about science-fiction a good bit and broke it down into several genre categories.

Poetry: How Fame Fed on Edna St. Vincent Millay

And this video by Rachel Oates, “Atticus Is Everything Wrong With Modern Poetry,” is an amusing criticism of a published writer who appears to have turned his Instagram posts into a paper-published thing.

Commercials: “If I were endowed with wealth, I should start a great advertising campaign in all the principal newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one short sentence, printed in huge block letters — a sentence that I once heard spoken by a husband to a wife: ‘My dear, nothing in this world is worth buying.’ But of course I should alter ‘my dear’ to ‘my dears.’”

Photo: The Big Shoe, Bakersfield, California. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors

MacArthur Accused of Overlooking Abuse

2 Comments

Last week, Julie Roys published a report of evidence and testimony from wounded people in the ministry orbit of Grace Bible Church. It’s not something I want to repeat here, maybe because I don’t have an axe to grind with MacArthur. He’s one of the big voices on my side of the church–that would be the big tent side (small ‘r’ reformed or Calvinist), not my specific side (PCA). But like the accusations against Zacharias, this seems important and relevant enough to post.

There are many details, and I don’t understand how there wasn’t an accountability structure in place to take accusations seriously without preferring the victim or the perpetrator. It’s an application of the doctrine of original sin, that being anyone is capable of sin, even pastors, and the perpetrators of heinous sins are going to work on appearing to be above such things. On the other hand, accusers can lie, therefore accusations should be given some amount of due diligence to uncover the truth.

I’m worried that this story is an example of the corrupting nature of power. I’m worried this shows MacArthur and his people chose mega ministry over responsible shepherding. But even as I type that, it sounds false, because I know the pastor of a fifty-member church, the owner of the greasy spoon down the street, and the head flight attendant on a single aircraft can all be tyrants of their domains. Power doesn’t need size to corrupt; it just fertilizes the seed already planted.

The gist of this account is read in these paragraphs toward the end. Wendy, the primary victim, wanted to put everything behind her, but she read the report last month of Grace Baptist excommunicating a woman for not returning to her abusive husband.

Wendy said that similar to how she naïvely assumed her father had not sexually molested anyone else, she also assumed MacArthur had not covered for other pedophiles like her father. Wendy said she now believes covering for abusers is a pattern with MacArthur that needs to be confronted.

“It’s not okay to believe the perpetrator,” Wendy said. “I just don’t want other people to be damaged by Grace Church or other churches not handling things in an appropriate manner.”

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Big Publishers, Writer’s Complaints, and Blogroll

Leave a comment

Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, who took up writing as a career after losing his respect and position at Dabney Oil in 1932, read a laudatory profile on Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker and said, “I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life.”

Well, someone should have told Chandler he had his own genius as well as his own version of the good life, which needed amending.

Mark Twain vented his spleen on the writing skill of James Fennimore Cooper with many accurate complaints like this one:

For several years, Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so — and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some “females” — as he always calls women — in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon-blast, and a cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn’t strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain in the dense fog and find the fort. Isn’t it a daisy?

Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 1895

What are other people saying about books?

Big Publishers: There are five powerhouses in U.S. publishing today: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. If judges approve a currently contested merger, Penguin Random House would be allowed to buy Simon & Schuster, reducing the big publishers to four. This would make German media group Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House and is already the world’s largest trade book publisher, in an Amazon-sized company. (via ArtsJournal)

Today is St. George’s Day in England, a day celebrated on par with Christmas at one time.

We fairly hope … that this day
Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.
To cry “Amen” to that, thus we appear.
You English princes all, I do salute you.

Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 5

Birthday: It is also Shakespeare’s birthday. He was born April 23, 1564, which is a date deduced by the record of his baptism in the Parish Register at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday 26 April 1564. 

Block Party: Thoughts of Shakespeare naturally turn one’s mind to Brooklyn and “a timeless block party that could be 400 years old,” notes the NY Daily News.

Word Game: And when you think about block parties, you think about the word guessing games that are all the rage amongst the hip kids. The Folger Shakespeare Library has their own version called Prattle. This one is new to me. I’ve been playing Wordle and Quordle for several weeks now.

Photo: Bus Depot, angle view, Bond Street, Bend, Oregon 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Reading

‘People Try to Put Us Down,’ My Generation

Leave a comment

Jeffrey Polet reviews Emory professor Mark Bauerlein’s second book on the “Dumbest Generation,” Millennials, whose poor education has underserved them. He says, they don’t have the “moral imagination” to speak to the real world. If only they’d read good books.

Multiculturalism didn’t multiply heritages and enhance each one; it left the students with no heritage at all, no relationship to past greatness.” As witness to this claim Bauerlein offers Malcolm X, who, he avers, would have scoffed at the denuding of such a wealthy heritage. Instead, Malcolm X transformed his life when his prison cell became a refuge from the world, allowing him to read day and night, thus awakening “the long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” It was by placing himself in the horizon provided by the great works of the past that Malcolm X was able to turn his life around and give it purpose.

The “Dumbest Generation” has finally grown up – Acton Institute PowerBlog

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

Unable to Define Our Terms, Good Podcasts, and the Nazis We Are

1 Comment

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II

I may have some entertaining posts for you soon. The links below have a couple bits of entertainment, but the rest are about matters to grave to laugh over.

Hunter Baker: “We cannot extol being a ‘wise Latina’ in one instance and then remain ambiguous on what a woman is in the next instance.”

Old Books: A collector talks about the books of William Strunk, Jr.

After Gettysburg: Meade and Lee at Rappahannock Station

Maria Stepanova: The Russian novelist, poet, and publisher has written about the war and her country. “Dreams about catastrophe are common in what was once called the ‘post-Soviet world’; other names will surely appear soon. And in these recent days and nights, the dreams have become reality, a reality more fearful than we ever thought possible, made of aggression and violence, an evil that speaks in the Russian language. As someone wrote on a social media site: ‘I dreamt we were occupied by Nazis, and that those Nazis were us.'” (via Books, Inq)

Podcasts: I think I told you before how good World’s Effective Compassion podcast series is. The third season on prison ministry has just concluded–ten compelling episodes. Next week World will begin a true crime series on the horrible story of Terri Schiavo.

This episode of the Hillsdale Dialogues with Hugh Hewitt and Larry Arnn is provocative in clarity, especially if you’re inclined to believe the ill-considered conclusions Tucker Carlson has drawn lately (see the comments here). How closely will Zelensky follow the footsteps of Churchill?

Photo: Hanks Coffee Shop sign, Benson, Arizona. 1979. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors

Tolkien Day

1 Comment

Today is Tolkien Day – the day the Ring of Power was destroyed in the Crack of Doom, according to The Return of the King. It became New Year’s Day for the people of Middle Earth, and it’s no coincidence that it’s the Festival of the Annunciation in the western Christian calendar.

Tolkien was recorded reading excerpts from his work by friend George Sayer in 1952. Somebody has mixed his voice with music and images from the Peter Jackson movie to create this video. Works pretty well, I think. I still get the old thrill when I listen.

This is why I decided I wanted to write epic fantasy nearly 60 years ago, my friends.

Tolkien is reported to have had a speech impediment – he bit through his tongue in his youth and is said to have slurred his speech, and his tendency to talk fast did nothing to help it. But when he was lecturing he sounded like this. Clear-voiced like Theoden.

Authors, Fiction, Goofing

‘A Voice From the Past’

1 Comment

As a man who likes to work (and needs to work) I’m pleased to say that I’m kind of snowed under these days. Which leaves me little time for either reading (for reviews) or composing those pearls of wit and wisdom that make me so beloved by more discriminating spirits on several continents. So of what shall I blog?

I remembered an old British TV series, “Wodehouse Playhouse,” of which I’ve seen a few episodes. I searched YouTube and found only one — this one, which I haven’t seen. However, it starts well, and it’s a Mulliner story. It’s presented in segments, and (if I understand correctly) you can follow them through the suggested links, collecting them all and impressing your friends.

Have a good evening.

Authors

A Review of Lewis’s Medieval Mind

Leave a comment

Understanding C.S. Lewis’s worldview, not as merely Christian with a British spin but as devoutly medieval, will help new readers grasp and enjoy his work. Lewis would hate social media and maybe every Internet. He disliked the mechanistic world and preferred organic nature. (I’m seeing this unfold in That Hideous Strength, which I’m reading with friends over several weeks.)

As an educator, Lewis the scholar sought to restore to students a medieval mindset capable of what Baxter calls “the right sentiments of praise and admiration for creation.” As we have lost our appreciation for that “slow, contemplative, symphonic world” that was the medieval cosmos, so we have lost our delight in the kinds of books medieval people loved, books that held up other criteria besides mere originality.

C.S. Lewis Was a Modern Man Who Breathed Medieval Air… | Christianity Today