Bobby buries himself in the closet and puts his Hansel bear between him in the door. Mother won’t find him—won’t take him away.
“Where are you, Bob?” she calls.
He closes his eyes to make himself invisible, but the door slides open, she grabs his legs, and out he goes.
“It’s time to go to Grandma’s, you plump kid.”
Now bound in his car seat, whimpering, Bobby sees the fetid river, the deadened wood, and the approaching bread-colored, pock-marked house with striped poles and the billowing chimney of Grandma’s monstrous oven. His sister never came back. Why should he?
I come before you tonight a beleaguered man. Not unhappily beleaguered. I have paying work to do, and that’s always cause for rejoicing. But I’m looking at a big job here – bigger than I expected. What I’ve got is a full-length feature film to translate. I haven’t done a lot of those, and I’ve never done one all by myself before. (I’ve done a whole miniseries, but that’s different.)
A full film script, in case you’re interested, runs a little under 100 pages in this case. My rough reckoning is that I can translate two pages per hour. So we’re talking about better than a week’s work here, figuring eight hours to the day. And then I’ll have to proofread and polish.
Money in my pocket. Merry Christmas.
In lieu of a book review or anything interesting to say, I post the one, the only Sissel Kyrkjebø above, singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” She’s accompanied by a heretic choir and orchestra, but on the other hand they use the old “Born to raise the sons of earth” line, unaltered by political correctness. That does my heart good.
An old illustration of Thor, who made an unscheduled appearance last night. Based on our personal acquaintance, I don’t see much resemblance.
I have traveled relatively widely in this great country, and relatively narrowly in the world at large. But I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere where somebody didn’t tell me, “The thing about living around here is, if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.”
We say it in Minnesota too, but the joke fits other places better. Southwestern Alaska, where I spent one summer back before the Civil War, was the place where I noticed it most. The Alaska sky never had just one weather going on. It was sunny over here, but stormy over there. And something different a half an hour later.
However, Alaska has no thunderstorms (this is odd but true). I’m not sure that doesn’t disqualify them on a technicality.
There are doubtless places where the old gag isn’t true. San Diego comes to mind. And no doubt sub-Saharan Africa is hot and dry for long stretches at a time.
I say all this as preface to my account of yesterday’s weather in Minnesota. It was scripted by Terry Gilliam, I think. He’s a Minnesotan, after all.
I told you about the snow storm we had last weekend. Nothing very odd about that – though the pattern in recent years has been for real winter weather to come on slow. The first few snowfalls of the years have under-delivered. But this one had reason to be proud of itself. It lived up to old men’s childhood memories.
The next few days were warmer, and quite a lot of the snow melted away, leaving the ground patterned like an Appaloosa’s hindquarters. The temperature soared into the 50s yesterday, and as night fell we heard thunder. A genuine thunderstorm, in the middle off December. A great writer (it was me) once wrote, in The Year of the Warrior, “We had thunderstorms in February, which is a joyless thing.” Or words to that effect. There was much profound truth in that line.
And then winter came rushing back. High winds had been promised, and they showed up on schedule, Temperatures plunged. This morning when I went to the gym, it was in the 20s. The glitch in the Matrix had passed. The rubber band had snapped back. Thor, disturbed from his sleep, had turned over and gone back to his snoring.
People to our southeast are still recovering from tornadoes the other day, so it would be ridiculous for me to complain. But the day was remarkable, memorable, and worth chronicling.
I’m writing it down here because I’m sure I’ll forget.
In other news, I got a nice translating job today, which should take maybe three days to finish and bring in a decent pay day.
But not if I don’t stop jawing about the weather and get back to work.
The shadow of Inspector Morse overhangs the landscape of British detective fiction. Morse may have been the most successful English mystery protagonist since Sherlock Holmes. I have a suspicion that the thirst for a new Morse may be behind H. L. Marsay’s creation of Inspector John Shadow of York, whose first adventure is A Long Shadow. Shadow does crossword puzzles (though he doesn’t seem to ever finish them). He listens only to old music (though it’s 20th Century standards, not opera). He grumps at his younger partner. He’s not Morse’s clone, but he seems related.
One cold night a young homeless woman dies on a street in York. The very same day a skeleton is uncovered by an excavation crew – a murder victim from more than 30 years ago. And soon more homeless turn up dead – all poisoned by cyanide in vodka. Inspector Shadow has an intuition that the present-day murders have some connection to the old one. But who has a motive? The business owners who want the homeless people cleared out? Drug dealers? Some psychopath?
I have to tell you I figured out who the murderer was fairly early on – and I’m not all that good at solving these things. The author needs to work on her (she’s a she) red herring skills. But I liked Inspector Shadow himself, and enjoyed the reading experience. York is an interesting historical city, so I appreciated the setting too. I went ahead and bought the sequel, A Viking’s Shadow, for reasons too obvious to explain.
A Long Shadow doesn’t get my highest recommendation, but it wasn’t bad. I don’t recall the language being too foul.
Jack Lynch’s series of mysteries about San Francisco private eye Pete Bragg continues with Speak for the Dead. I’m not sure what the title means in terms of the plot, but the book was enjoyable.
Pete Bragg gets a call from an old friend from his newspaper reporting days. There’s a bad situation at San Quentin prison. A prisoner named Beau Bancetti, a biker gang leader, has attempted to escape with some buddies. The attempt failed. Now he and his friends are barricaded in an activities center, with two guards and two women as hostages. He demands that somebody go up to his home town and help his brother Buddy, who’s been charged with murder. Buddy isn’t like him, he explains. He’s painfully shy and gentle. He couldn’t kill anyone.
Ordinarily the prison administrators wouldn’t worry about hostages being killed. It’s one of the rules – civilians who go inside know the risk. But in this case, one of the hostages happens to be a popular female movie star incognito; they don’t want the bad press. So they need a private eye to go to Beau’s home town and investigate the murder. Would Pete do it?
Of course he will. And from the time he shows up in town he knows something screwy is going on. Nobody believes Buddy Bancetti could murder anyone. But a lot of them are hiding something too. Pete will be attacked by thugs, and shot at by a sniper. Then he’ll uncover a nasty conspiracy.
The story moved along well and kept my interest. My constant complaint in reading this series has been that Pete rarely actually solves a case – he’s usually a step behind and only puts it all together just in time to avoid getting killed. This time he actually solves one – and it’s pretty complicated.
Author Lynch seems (he’s gone now) to have had a thing about marijuana – this story includes an argument for legalization, which annoys me. But I guess that ship has sailed.
Another concern was a scene where he allows himself (purely for information-gathering purposes) to get into a semi-sexual situation with an underage girl. I think that’s the kind of scene you could get away with back in the 80s – you couldn’t do it today.
But generally it’s an okay book. I don’t give it highest marks, but it passed the time and did not bore me.
But he was wrong, you know. Eddie-My-boyfriend got it wrong altogether, evil little troll that he was. That wasn’t what the look on my face was expressing, not at all. I wasn’t feeling shock and horror at the hypocrisy and phoniness and decadence of modern life. In fact, in that moment, it didn’t seem hypocritical or phony or decadent to me at all…. The one solid reality I could cling to… was, again, our Christmases, our past together, my love.
It was a strenuous weekend, by my declining standards. We got a heavy snow Friday night – I’m not sure exactly how much, but I think I read it was about 7 inches. Heavy stuff, too. And my kindly neighbors, who always move the snow for me (we share the driveway) suffered a failure of their snowblower. So they hired some neighbor kids, whose snowblower broke down too. Thus, there I was, with the neighbor lady, shoveling in front of my garage for about a half hour. Somewhat to my own surprise, I didn’t collapse of a heart attack.
Then I had to go and buy a new inkjet printer. Because for the life of me I couldn’t make the old one work with the new wifi. Also the tray has been broken for some time. That meant a trip to my favorite computer store and a long wait in line. And then the inevitable siege, trying to make it talk to the wireless network. I succeeded at last (this always feels like sorcery, employing incantations I don’t understand at all). Which made it possible, at last, to print my Christmas newsletters.
Moving on to books, you may recall how intensely I disliked Trevanian’s The Loo Sanction, which I reviewed on Friday. Fortunately, I had the perfect antidote at hand. Andrew Klavan’s new book When Christmas Comes, which I adore and was planning to re-read anyway.
When Christmas Comes could almost have been written as a counter to The Loo Sanction (I’m not saying it was. I’m just saying they both deal with the same questions in drastically different ways.)
Both the heroes, Trevanian’s Jonathan Hemlock and Klavan’s Cameron Winter, are American academics who formerly worked in covert espionage operations. Dangerous men, skilled at killing.
And both of them walk into situations where hypocrisy is (or is apparently) rife. Hemlock into the world of cutthroat international politics. Winter into a seemingly idyllic American town where a clean-cut, decorated veteran is on trial for murdering his sweet wife. With the Christmas season as a backdrop, offering lots of opportunities for comment on commercialization and the emptiness of tradition.
But unlike Hemlock, who smashes fetishes and is himself smashed in return, Winter never closes his heart. Much of the book is taken up with his narrative – to a psychologist – of the story of his love for a girl named Charlotte, whom he spent time with every Christmas as he was growing up. And how the magic of those early Christmases was undermined and overwhelmed by old secrets of horrific ugliness.
And yet Winter has the wisdom to discern the truth, even in the midst of lies and hypocrisy. “The great good thing,” as Klavan describes it in his autobiography. As long as he still believes in the great good thing, he remains open to salvation.
A repeated theme in When Christmas Comes is “psychomachia,” the literary device where the characters in a story represent aspects of the storyteller’s own soul.
If that’s so, then in giving life to others, as Winter does at the end of the story, he may also be given life himself.
I don’t know whether it would be better for Andrew Klavan to write a sequel, or just leave us with that hope.
“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” has no known author or melody smith. It’s listed as a traditional 18th century carol and appears in many hymnals with many variations in lyric. The recording above uses five verses that seem mostly familiar and a little unfamiliar. I don’t think I’ve ever sung the fourth verse offered here or this verse I see in Hymns for a Pilgrim People:
“Fear not, then,” said the angel, “Let nothing you affright; This day is born a Savior Of a pure virgin bright, To free all those who trust in Him From Satan’s pow’r and might.”
A line of severe storms with a chance of tornadoes is pressing in on my area of the world. It’s not raining here now, but it likely will by the time I publish this post. The storms have already prevented a roofing project I had planned to participate in this morning, which isn’t good (because that roof isn’t going to patch itself) but may be good for me, because I felt more worn out than usual after a church Christmas dinner last night. I mostly washed dishes, but lifting trays of 25 glasses into a dishwasher is moderate-level lifting and I’m just a puny office worker.
Anyway, nobody cares about that.
In this week’s World Opinion, Hunter Baker urges us to pray for the overturning of Roe and a better understanding of human life.
World Radio has released all four episodes in a long story on the abuse and recovery of the key witness against a wicked Mississippi church leader who abused many children over many years. It’s a story that reveals important truths many of us can use in our own communities. I’ll link to the first episode. You can find the rest by searching the website or your podcast app.
The estate of George Orwell has been looking for someone to write a sequel to 1984, telling the story from Julia’s point of view. Now author Sandra Newman will put it together. The Guardian states, “It is the latest in a series of feminist retellings of classic stories, from Natalie Haynes’s reimagining of the Trojan war A Thousand Ships, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, a version of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which centres on the life of Shakespeare’s wife, and Jeet Thayil’s Names of the Women, which tells the stories of 15 women whose lives overlapped with Jesus.”
Arsenio Orteza writes, “Those seeking proof that everything old is new again need look no further” than a couple new releases from Warner Classics boasting a 3D orchestra and spatial audio. I’ve also heard this year’s shopping trends have Hot Wheels, Barbies, and board games at the top of the list.
Sarah Sanderson read Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle“ recently. “I too find myself living in an age of anxiety. Tolkien worried that the Nazis would drop a bomb on him before his work was done. I ‘doomscroll’ my national, state, and local COVID numbers daily.”
Mary Spencer attempts to find romance in romanticized Midwestern winters. “He looked at her and she blushed. At least, he thought she blushed. It could have been windburn.” [This post is on McSweeney’s, so let me add that I’ve come across hilarious posts on McSweeney’s before and have not linked to them here because at some point they got nasty. This post only veers toward that territory, so I’m sharing it, but you may see what I’m talking about in headlines to other posts.]
Photo: Fairyland Cottages, Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Jonathan Hemlock, who appeared in Trevanian’s earlier novel, The Eiger Sanction (which was filmed by Clint Eastwood), is a retired American art professor and world-famous critic. But he had a secret life as a “counter-assassin” for an espionage agency referred to, not so subtly, as the “CII.” He hated both his employers and his targets, but the job made it possible for him to indulge his passion for collecting Impressionist masters. As The Loo Sanction begins (1973) he’s retired and spending a year in London on a cultural visit for the embassy.
Then he’s kidnapped by a British Intelligence agency known as “the Loo,” roughly equivalent to the one he used to work for. He doesn’t want to work for them, but is extorted into doing so by threats against people he likes.
His job, he’s told, is to steal a package of films, films made secretly at an ultra-secret London sex club. The owner of these films will be in a position to blackmail the entire British government into doing what he wants (Jonathan can almost see the head of the Loo – the most hypocritical Church of England vicar imaginable – salivating at the prospect of controlling them).
Jonathan will come up against a formidable enemy, a grandiose crime lord who is both an aesthete and a sadist. Along with a supporting cast of equally appalling psychopaths. He will barely survive.
A lot of people won’t survive. Generally, the better you like a character in this book, the more likely they are to die horribly.
Trevanian can be amusing in his acerbic comments, at least when I agree with him. But the story of The Loo Sanction is a story of unremitting cynicism, where every ideal is laughable and all institutions are not only corrupt but satanically vile. The plot gets crueler and crueler as it goes along, and finally ends in Hell.
I have rarely disliked a book as much as I disliked The Loo Sanction. I’m not even going to link to it on Amazon. Someone depressed or suicidal could possibly happen on it, and I don’t want to risk the consequences.
I’m having a blast binge-watching the old BBC Lord Peter Wimsey series, with Ian Carmichael. It occurs to me that these adaptations are now far older than the original books were when I first watched these things. Life is cruel that way.
The philanthropist who posted the videos on YouTube (you can buy the DVDs here, but the price they want is extortionate) posted them in the wrong order, so I had to rearrange them for my own perusal. I watched “Clouds of Witness” first, as God intended, and then “The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.”
I’m happy to report that they hold up extremely well. The scene design and costuming are unmistakably 1970s (hairstyles are always a giveaway), but within those parameters they’re very well done. Nowadays a lot of that stuff can be faked with CGI, but the BBC did well with real props and settings as they existed at the time.
The best part of the productions, of course, is Ian Carmichael’s portrayal of Lord Peter. He was, as he himself admitted, a little too old for the role. This creates awkward moments, especially in energetic scenes, or when his double chin makes itself too apparent.
And yet he does the role so brilliantly. He’d already played Bertie Wooster, who’s essentially the same character without the brains. The mannerisms are the same. But there’s a gravity underneath it all, and his human sympathy resonates with the viewer.
But my favorite character, I truly believe, is Mervyn Bunter, Lord Peter’s valet (think Jeeves) as portrayed by the Welsh actor Glyn Houston (another actor plays him, sadly, in “The Unpleasantness,” but fortunately that error was corrected in later series).
Houston is splendid in a layered performance. On the surface, his Bunter is the perfect gentleman’s gentleman, discreet, dignified, and proper in speech. But his extremely expressive eyes and delivery manage to convey all this pair’s unspoken history – how he saved his master’s life in the war, and has since nursemaided him through numerous bouts of shell shock and depression. Lord Peter will forever be in his debt, but it’s a matter they never speak about. Words would make it maudlin.
Or Magdalen (though Wimsey was a Balliol man, as I recall).
