Monthly Archives: January 2016

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bulldog Drummond,’ by H. C. McNeile

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In my ongoing quest to live in the past, turning a blind eye to the harsh truths of the modern world, I’ve been experimenting with reading some of the old classics in the mystery and adventure fields. I’ve long been a fan of John Buchan. I tried E.C. Bentley and Marjorie Allingham, and wasn’t overwhelmed. I thought I’d sample the Bulldog Drummond series, by H. C. (Sapper) McNeile, and I bought this inexpensive Kindle collection.

It’s pretty much what you’d expect. Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond is a big, unhandsome, wealthy Englishman, bored with civilian life after surviving World War I. One day he takes out an ad in the Times, offering to do any job as long as it’s dangerous. He has no objection to breaking the law in a good cause.

One of the numerous replies he receives stands out. A young woman, Phyllis Benton, asks him to investigate the group of men with whom her father has gotten involved. She fears that they’re dangerous, and are getting him into something illegal. Drummond promptly falls in love with the girl, and quickly starts interfering with the criminals (as indeed they prove to be) in various clever and annoying ways. He gradually comes to understand that it is no ordinary crime being planned by this international group, but an act of sabotage on a national scale.

It’s interesting that Drummond falls in love in this, the very first book in the series, and stays with the same girl through all the sequels. In our time that would probably seen as a drawback, limiting the hero’s sexual options. But in 1920, when the book came out, standards were different, and it probably served as a sign that while there would be violence to come, erotic hijinks would not be on the menu.

The book was entertaining in a sort of schoolboy way, but I found it a little naïve. Perhaps my tastes have been corrupted by modern mystery stories, but I like a little more complexity in my heroes. Hugh Drummond talks piffle quite in the same vein as Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but Sayers does it better, and Lord Peter has a deeper heart.

Still, it was a ripping enough yarn for the sort of thing it is. Mindless entertainment, competently delivered. Nothing particularly objectionable on the moral side.

Non-fiction

Vanity Fair, From Wicked to Indulgent

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Paul Bunyan's Vanity Fair

How did Vanity Fair go from Bunyan’s celebration of debauchery to Condé Nast’s celebration of “all forms of cheerfulness”? A new book explains the transformation. “Together they create the Janus-face of modern capitalism, described by the American sociologist Daniel Bell as ‘puritan by day, hedonist by night.'” (via Prufrock)

Uncategorized

Virtually Exploring a Dali Painting

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Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, 1935

The Dali Museum has developed a virtual reality presentation of Dali’s Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus” for visitors to explore like a game, taking surrealism to a new technological level. They have also included “some of the recurring motifs from his other paintings in the museum’s permanent collection, including Weaning of Furniture Nutrition (1934), Lobster Telephone (1936) and First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain (1973).”

Religion

Destroyed: Elijah’s Monastery in Mosul

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Dair Mar Elia - Mosul, Iraq

“St. Elijah’s Monastery of Mosul has been completely wiped out,” reports the AP today.

“A big part of tangible history has been destroyed,” said Rev. Manuel Yousif Boji. A Chaldean Catholic pastor in Southfield, Michigan, he remembers attending Mass at St. Elijah’s almost 60 years ago while a seminarian in Mosul.

“These persecutions have happened to our church more than once, but we believe in the power of truth, the power of God,” said Boji. He is part of the Detroit area’s Chaldean community, which became the largest outside Iraq after the sectarian bloodshed that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003. Iraq’s Christian population has dropped from 1.3 million then to 300,000 now, church authorities say.

Fiction, Reviews

The ‘Rosinante’ novels, by Alexis A. Gilliland

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Long, long ago, when I first began writing short stories (and before I pretty much gave up writing short stories), my one regular market was Amazing Stories Magazine, under the editorship of George Scithers and Darrel Schweitzer. One of the writers who also appeared often in those pages (rather more than I did) was Alexis A. Gilliland. I went on to novelistic obscurity in fantasy, while Gilliland became a prize-winning science fiction author. After several successful novels, he seems to have given it up and turned to cartooning, as best as I can tell from an internet search.

Anyway, our friend Ori Pomerantz sent me Gilliland’s Rosinante trilogy novels, The Revolution From Rosinante, Long Shot For Rosinante, and The Pirates From Rosinante. I’m grateful for his generosity.

Rosinante is a space station built for mining activities on an asteroid. About the time Charles Cantrell, the manager in charge of constructing the station, is completing the project, developments on earth leave him and his workers more or less abandoned. So, unwillingly, he sets up a local government, aided by his chief subordinates, a brilliant Israeli woman and a sentient computer called Skaskash who has an odd predilection for metaphysics. This allows author Gilliland to do some Heinleinian experimentation with questions of government, freedom, and religion.

These books were written in the 1980s, and are set a couple decades from today, so it’s interesting to note how the future has changed. The great environmental disaster affecting space travel here is ozone depletion (remember that?), and the foremost world power challenging the North American Union (the United States is called the “Old Regime” and is gone, and most people claim they don’t miss it) is Japan.

These novels are what’s known as “hard” science fiction. There’s no interstellar travel here, and most problems are solved through the application of scientific principles which seem (to a scientific illiterate like me) highly plausible.

The issue of religion was problematic for me. The great villains of the first two books are a group called “Creationists,” who rose up as a powerful movement and helped to destroy the Old Regime. These people seem to be nominally Christian, but either the author didn’t know any real Creationists, or he made the effort to differentiate his Creationists from the real ones, in order to avoid giving offense. These Creationists seem to have no devotional or church lives, drink immoderately, employ prostitutes, and swear like sailors. Their great cause is preventing genetic manipulation, and they’re willing to abort the children born from such procedures, or even to murder them once born.

The religious problems go even deeper. The declaration is made, as if self-evident, that earth religion could not possibly apply off the planet. Therefore one of the computers invents a new, improved religion which sweeps through the space stations and space vessels.

Well written, for those of you who like this kind of story. Not really my cup of tea. Cautions for adult themes, though not extreme.

Authors

The Saga of Tormod

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Tormod Torfæus (1636-1719) was accustomed to more comfortable lodgings. An Icelander who had lived many years in Norway, he was an officer of the king and used to being treated with respect. But this old Danish inn offered nothing but cheap beer and food, and a room he had to share. He was bone-tired and wanted his sleep, but another Icelander kept blundering into the room and trying to turn him out of his bed.

The year was 1671. Tormod had sailed home to Iceland to clear up some estate matters following the death of his brother. He decided to return home by way of Copenhagen, but his ship was wrecked near Skagen, though the passengers all survived. They had to make a long foot march to get passage on another ship, and then bad weather forced the new ship to seek harbor on Samsø Island. And that was how Tormod came to be overnighting in this miserable hostelry.

Every time he began to fall asleep, the door would open, and a drunken Icelander, Sigurd, would come barging in and try to push him out of his bed. Then they would fight, and the landlord would come and tell Tormod to go back to bed. Finally Tormod begged the landlady to give him a different room. She complied, and he lay down with some hope of a few hours’ sleep. But he’d grown suspicious of this establishment, and lay his rapier on the table, near at hand. Continue reading The Saga of Tormod →

Fiction

Could Skywalker be an Avenger?

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Marvel’s creator Stan Lee says the people behind the Marvel cinematic universe want to make successful movies. If that means they think an ultimate fan-fic mashup like Star Wars and Avengers together will make a great movie, well . . .

“I created the Avengers by taking many of our characters and making a team out of them,” Lee tells The Big Issue. “We can have as many characters join the Avengers as we want to for future movies. That might be fun, all of a sudden Luke Skywalker is an Avenger!”

Heh. I mean, if we’re talking  fan fiction here, why not something like this?

And in news that’s not even remotely possible to be related, superhero sit-coms are coming.

Religion, Uncategorized

Heathen? Thank a Christian.

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A page from the Flatey Book.

Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.
–G. K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of the White Horse”

It’s pretty well known that Norse mythology is far better preserved than any other European pre-Christian mythology. This is largely because the great saga-writer and poet Snorri Sturlusson, a Christian, persuaded Icelandic churchmen that the old Norse Eddaic poetry was worth preserving, and that a knowledge of the old myths was necessary to preserve it.

In my translation work on the brochure I’m doing for the Flatey Book publication project, I learned about a further debt that Icelandic culture (including modern, reconstituted heathen culture) owes to the church.

Here’s an excerpt from Prof. Titlestad’s essay in the brochure:

In the farthest north of Iceland, at Hólar in Skagafjord, dwelt the mathematician, cartographer, culture-builder and bishop Guðbrandur Þorlaksson (1541-1627). He was the first to draw a good map of Iceland. He had a printing press at his disposal and published/edited 80 books. A graduate of the University of Copenhagen, he was the first to publish extracts of the Bible in Icelandic. In this way he established a more secure basis for a national language than Norwegians possessed – they had to get along for centuries in Danish.

It’s often stated that modern Icelandic is the same language spoken by the Vikings. That’s only approximately true — the language has changed a little. But it’s close enough for general purposes. If Jarl Haakon, who time-travels to the 21st Century in my novel Death’s Doors, showed up instead in Reykjavik, he’d get along fine making himself understood.

But the reason that old language was preserved in its early form, as we see above, is because a Christian bishop wanted to have portions of the Bible printed in Icelandic.

Writing

Pause Story Here For Exposition

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I read part of a book last year that started well. The characters were young and humorous. The story promised to be imaginative, but after the main conflict was declared and things began to roll, it all slowed back down when the characters essentially went to school. Not literally. They went to a research library, which is close, but the plot at that point became “Our heroes research the threat and consult experts.”

Close to the same thing happened in another book I picked up last year, except instead of going to school, wise characters with extensive knowledge of the backstory took the young heroes aside to explain many, many things. As I understand it, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones suffered from the same problem.

But doesn’t a story need some explanation? If you’re working on something you want to resonate, something that captures timeless truths, don’t you want to spell a few things out? Sure you do, but you need to tell your story beyond the point where your readers are asking the questions you answer with your exposition.

Writers throw this gutterball for different reasons. Continue reading Pause Story Here For Exposition →

Publishing

The Flatoy Book

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I hope I’m not out of line quoting a paragraph from my own translation, in progress, of a promotional booklet for the Norwegian Flatøy Book project. This passage discusses the decision of the Icelandic bishop Brynjolv Sveinsson to turn the big manuscript (two volumes) over to King Fredrik III of Denmark in 1556. The original author is Prof. Torgrim Titlestad:

Brynjolv built on insight that had been developed within the Icelandic culture ever since Arngrimur’s pioneering work in the 16th Century, but he was possibly more aware than the others of the unique civilization-building impulses contained within the Norse heritage, as especially expressed in Flatøybok. Flatøybok can be understood as a kind of “Noah’s Ark” of ideas, stocked with the fundamental concepts of the Norse world in order to survive as a time capsule in a threatening future. This distinguished Flatøybok from older saga literature. The book was a “generational ship,” laden with the experiences of many people over many generations. The Norse culture had grown up outside the sphere of Roman dominion, and thus was different from European feudal culture with its comprehensive, hierarchical class structure. The Icelandic author Bergsveinn Birgisson (1971-) has expressed himself on the message of these medieval authors to the world (2015): “We had our own unique culture up here in the North, with a value of its own, which we desire to preserve for future generations.” And as his spiritual ancestor Brynjolv might have said, “And we would wish that the world would learn from it.” Brynjolv desired to send this “ark” to Copenhagen so that the book might be published and made available to European readers. Flatøybok was meant to sail out into diverse intellectual harbors and then cast off again for further voyages around the world.