Above is a video of the Syttende Mai (17 of May, Constitution Day) festivities in Oslo. I think it was recorded today. The big celebrations were cancelled for the last couple years; I’m told this year’s had record crowds everywhere.
We see the Royal Family greeting the people, as is traditional for the holiday, from the balcony of the royal palace (surely the least beautiful royal palace in the world). The old king you see there is the same Harald you saw as a little boy in “Atlantic Crossing.”
Norwegians celebrate Constitution Day as their great national holiday for peculiar historical reasons. They adopted a constitution in a rash bid for independence in 1814. Sweden, which had just been awarded Norway as spoils of the Napoleonic wars, quickly stepped in to quash that notion. But they allowed the Norwegians to keep the constitution, with some alterations.
Thus the constitution became the center of independence-minded sentiment over several generations. Through the 90 years of union with Sweden, the celebration of May 17 was a quiet act of protest. Once independence was achieved in 1905, Syttende Mai possessed a traditional, sentimental value that could not be dislodged, even if anyone had wished such a thing.
I’m posting early today because I’ll be lecturing on Syttende Mai for a celebration banquet tonight. I hope I get it right.
Fairly often, when I don’t like a book, I just drop it. But sometimes I feel it necessary to write a bad review as a warning to the unwary. That is the case with Simon King’s The Final Alibi.
Jim Lawson is a psychiatrist in Australia in the early 1950s. But once he was a cop, and he participated in the arrest of “the Devil,” a monster who kidnapped young women and ate them alive (there is no lack of graphic description). The experience shook him so much that he left the police and went into psychiatry. He also wrote a couple bestselling true crime books about the case.
Now he gets a request to come back to the town of Cider Hill, where it all happened. Somebody has taken up where “the Devil” left off – the murders occurring now are identical. And the convicted killer is still locked up in prison. Could they have been wrong about him all this time? Is there some way he could be getting out to kill again?
Jim joins forces with an attractive young female police officer to try to figure things out – which will lead them to more encounters with mangled bodies. Also, Jim takes up again with the girl he rescued from the Devil back in the day, with whom he had an affair before he left town. But it turns out she has secrets, and she’s not the only one covering things up.
There’s a point where the thriller genre crosses over into plain horror, and (as I’ve often stated) I don’t like horror. This book portrayed far too much plain suffering and awfulness, far too explicitly, for my taste. (I think the intention is to tap the Silence of the Lambs vein). Also, the writing was sometimes weak, the author making bad word choices. And the central psychological diagnosis is one which, I believe, is no longer considered valid.
On top of all that, we’re left with a cliff-hanger, which always annoys me.
If you have a stronger stomach than I do, you may enjoy The Final Alibi. It was certainly a fast-paced, high-tension story. But they couldn’t pay me to tackle the next two books in this trilogy.
This song differs from the usual congregational singing I share on Sundays. It’s a gorgeous arrangement of Psalm 100 with a few benedictory words at the end.
Here is the lyric as rendered in a 1982 Episcopal hymnal. I’ve always found the last verse to be marvelously triumphant music that should fill the earth.
O be joyful in the Lord all ye lands; serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song. [Ant.]
2. Be ye sure that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. [Ant.]
3. O go your way into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise; be thankful unto him and speak good of his Name. [Ant.]
4. For the Lord is gracious; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth from generation to generation. [Ant.]
5. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.
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.
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.
I’ve been reading and reviewing David Chill’s Burnside detective novels for a few weeks now. Bubble Screen is third in the series.
Burnside is, as you may recall, a former pro football player, a former LA cop, and now a private investigator. Sometimes his football credentials, from USC and (briefly) the pros help him get work. In Bubble Screen he’s hired by Miles Larson, the owner of a cable installation company, who’s a rabid USC supporter and large donor. Cable boxes have been disappearing from his warehouses, and he wants to know who’s pilfering. He suspects the union rep.
The problem turns out to be bigger than some inventory shrinkage. Larson’s grown kids are a dysfunctional bunch, and there’s also been trouble at a warehouse in Las Vegas. And Las Vegas suggests a lot of sinister associations.
Meanwhile, Burnside is also trying to figure out what to do about his girlfriend Gail, who has finished law school now and is considering relocating to San Francisco to take a good job offer.
As I’ve mentioned before in these reviews, I’ve enjoyed the characterization in these books. The plots are okay. The writing is fairly bush league; Author Chill is prone to solecisms. This book includes such treats as: “moving behind the largess of his impressive desk,” and “I… knew the area intricately.”
Lines like that are good for a chuckle, but this time out the author seemed to take a couple of pokes at Christians too. So I figure I’ll break off with this series. I’m not all that invested in it.
Your mileage may vary. It was entertaining, and had a couple heartwarming moments.
I don’t intend to paint a target on my back by blogging on this subject, but by way of setting up this video for you, let me give you my summation of biblical manhood and womanhood. Many whole books have been written on this subject with ministries and study series to boot. You may know names of go-to people on this issue, and I don’t want to draw any fire from them or their tribal warriors. I just want to give a succinct summation of what I believe the Bible says about Christian men and women.
When people talk about biblical manhood or womanhood, they often want to know the distinctives, not what a biblically minded people look like, but what a distinctly biblical man or woman looks like. On these distinctives, the Bible says few little. Who of the two is to seek first the kingdom of God? Who is to build a house upon the rock and not the sand? Who is bear the fruit of the Spirit, walk as a child of light, and put on the whole armor of God? Both men and women should do this.
In short, both biblical men and biblical women should be maturing, faithful believers. That’s 90% of the subject in a few words. There’s a small handful of particulars to sort out in the remaining 10%, but in a context of mutual respect, these things should work out without much fuss.
But today, we have pastors composing lists on being a man that include inanities such as pulling your pants up and avoiding flip-flops. For many years, we’ve had teachers use the Bible’s instructions on wives being submissive to their husbands to say woman should submit to men in general, even to strangers on the street. That’s not biblical in the least.
Before I start ranting and committing the same sins I’m calling out, let me segue to this video, in which The Observer begins with comments on Galadriel’s presentation in the new Lord of the Rings series and continues with the essence of femininity and how feminists seem to hate it. She says the feminists are the ones asking why women can’t be more like men.
Disclaimer: The host, Galatea, isn’t defending biblical womanhood and gets profane at times, but the video’s amusing on the whole and her points are solid.
As the midges devoured them, they hummed and sang, and worked harder. They wandered like flocks of singers on their way toward some destination. In truth, it was more a lamentation than a song because the midges bit so terribly. And you needed two hands on your scythe. As in a pilgrimage, great peace attended them when they finished.
Of all the pilgrimage paths our Lord prepared, the one that runs through hay is the most beautiful. You pace with the scythe until you reach the neighbor’s fence, then you walk back. That route is the Lord’s way. The midges are a work of the devil.
Up until now, the greatest novel about the Norwegian immigration to America has been Ole Rolvaag’s Giants In the Earth. (It used to be kind of a big deal. I don’t know if anyone reads it anymore, except for my ethnic group.) I haven’t read GITE since college, but as I recall it, it’s depressing in a very Norwegian way. Everybody is unhappy until they die.
Now there’s a new great novel in translation about what we call the Innvandring – Edvard Hoem’s Haymaker in Heaven. I’m happy to report that, on top of being lyrical and captivating, it’s also somewhat less oppressive in tone than Rolvaag’s book. Wodehouse it ain’t, but it’s a brighter journey.
Knut Hansen Nesje is a poor cotter in Norway in the second half of the 19th Century, a widower with one son. Everyone just calls him “Nesje.” His great point of pride is that he’s the head haymaker on the big estate in the neighborhood. He works hard and long and with skill, taking pride in his work. When he’s finished at the estate, he has to work his rent out for his landlord. When there’s time left over, he works on clearing the parcel he rents high up on the mountain, which he hopes – eventually – to be able to purchase.
When a widow named Serianna shows up one day looking for work, they take an interest in each other, and eventually sleep together. Marriage follows after she becomes pregnant. They have several children, and cherish great hopes of all those young hands to help with the labor in the future. But the future will not be quite as they planned…
Serianna’s sister Gjertine eventually shows up. Gjertine is a “Reader” – that is, a Haugean, a pietist, one of my people (though these are apparently a later aberration of Haugeanism, which I have trouble recognizing. Gjertine dresses in a more provocative way than most Haugeans I ever knew would approve, and we’re told that she has been taught a “spell” by them – an incantation to magically stanch bleeding. I hope the author is exercising artistic license here).
Gjertine is beautiful and has many suitors, but insists on choosing her own husband. The man she chooses seems an odd choice — “the Saddle Maker,” who has a reputation with the ladies. She demands two years of continence from him before she will accept him, and surprisingly he complies. They seem to be happy together, but the world is changing…
Things are changing in Norway. Industrialization is coming in; labor and reward are now related in new kinds of ways. And the greatest change of all is the lure of America. It’s in the back of everybody’s mind. Lots of land. Wealth to be won. A more egalitarian society. Gradually, as families and one by one, people start departing for America, and we follow their various destinies on the North Dakota prairie. (It’s interesting to contrast the reaction of the wife in Giants In the Earth, who is oppressed to the point of agoraphobia by all the open space, and Gjertine, who’s delighted by the life and the colors.)
Nesje is a man perfectly attuned to the world he was born into. He’s not introspective; he takes life as it is. Which makes it all the harder for him to deal with a world that will never again be the way he feels it ought to be.
These are my people, of course, so Haymaker in Heaven may not speak to you as it did to me. I found it engrossing and deeply moving. Especially because Nesje, although physically very different, was almost a portrait of my father in his personality and character.
The translation by Tara Chace is good, but has some dead spots. I wish I’d had a chance to put my own hand to it.
Highly recommended. The author treats religious matters respectfully, in general, though I’m not sure he always understands. However, he doesn’t do a bad job of it either. The story, he tells us, is based on the lives of his actual ancestors. You may have trouble keeping the names straight.
The second book in David Chill’s Burnside series is Fade Route (I’m pretty sure all the titles come from football plays, but I’m fairly ignorant in that area). Once again he offers an engaging story about an interesting private eye looking into an intriguing mystery. Once again, some of the writing drove me nuts, but not enough to drop the book.
Burnside (no first name), briefly a pro football player, then a cop, and now a Los Angeles private eye, has time on his hands because his girlfriend is up in San Francisco studying law. So he’s taken to doing counseling work at a center for the homeless run by his friend, Wayne Fairborne. Wayne is a good guy who cares about helping street people learn skills that will make it easier for them to go back to work. He’s also running for mayor of Bay City (really Santa Monica; it’s an alias that goes back to Raymond Chandler), apparently as a Republican(!).
And then he’s murdered.
Who would want to murder Wayne Fairborne? Turns out there’s a fairly long list. His resentful brother-in-law. The string of women he’s had affairs with, or their husbands or boyfriends. And – not least – the incumbent mayor, who’s as crooked as a subdivision street.
Burnside will learn a lot about his friend Wayne, and much of it he doesn’t want to know. I followed the story with great interest, even in spite of lines like, “Dignity is a commodity that illuminates the trail.” And “Opportunities have a way of availing themselves to those who persevere.”
Recommended, as a fun read. Nothing terribly objectionable.
I am not reluctant, in my old age, to drop a book unceremoniously when I find the writing poor. Sometimes, if my sensitivities are outraged enough, I’ll tell you about it.
The case is somewhat different with Post Pattern, by David Chill. I found the writing very bad in places – especially in the area of word choice. However, I liked the character and the story enough to stick with it.
Burnside (yet another one-name private eye, in the Spenser tradition) is a Los Angeles private investigator. He was a star football player in college, and then became a cop. He was a good, by-the-book policeman until one day he gave a break to someone who didn’t deserve it. As a consequence he became a laughingstock on the force, and he quit to go private.
A wealthy young man, Norman Freeman, comes to Burnside’s office to hire him. Someone took a shot at him in his car the night before. Only he’s not sure the shot was meant for him. It could be – he’s a former pro football player who is heir apparent to a big auto dealership. He could have business enemies. But he also has a ne’er-do-well brother who hangs out with some sketchy people, and he was driving his brother’s car.
Soon there will be a real murder, and Burnside will wade into a whirlpool of personal motives, business motives, and dangerous dames. The world of ex-jocks is a major element here, which doesn’t do much for me personally, but it didn’t put me off. I liked that Burnside believes strongly in being armed at all times, and there wasn’t a lot of political correctness in view.
What author David Chill does well is create good characters. And good characters make up for a lot with me. I wish he’d had a better copy editor, but I still enjoyed Post Pattern, and went on to buy the next book in the series.
“Children,” says Mrs. Clinton, “are like the tiny figures at the center of the nesting dolls for which Russian folk artists are famous. The children are cradled in the family, which is primarily responsible for their passage from infancy to adulthood. But around the family are the larger settings of paid informers, secret police, corrupt bureaucracy, and a prison gulag.”
I added the last part for comic relief, something It Takes a Village doesn’t provide. Intentionally.
The late, lamented P. J. O’Rourke had something to do with my transition from liberalism to conservatism, back in the ‘80s. Not a determinative influence, but a step along the way. I would have become a conservative anyway, because liberalism was pulling its rug quietly out from under me, like Douglas Fairbanks in an old swashbuckling scene, though slower. But O’Rourke’s Give War a Chance was a book I picked up as I was coming to terms with the situation. I couldn’t buy his whole stoner-libertarian shtick, but a lot of the stuff he wrote made sense to me. And he always made me laugh, which counts for a lot.
CEO of the Sofa is a collection of his essays written around the turn of the millennium. He explains in his Acknowledgments that the title was suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ classic The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and he frames the essays with imagined vignettes from his home life, in which he cross-talks with his wife, his assistant, his godson (who apparently lives with them), their babysitter, their daughter (later two daughters) and the Political Nut (who is himself), along with occasional others.
It’s been a while since the early 2000s, and some of the material hasn’t aged well. And, of course, O’Rourke is himself gone now, which is a bummer. But it’s still a fun ride, touching on a miscellany of subjects from the UN to childbirth, from Hunter S. Thompson to the indignities of middle age. I didn’t always agree with the points, but it was always funny. Great lines were everywhere – “Two hundred and fifteen dollars for your story, ‘Chewing-Mouth Dogs Bring Hope to People With Eating Disorders.’”
I wish I’d written that.
Recommended, with major cautions for obscenity, drug humor, and general bad taste.
