Not long after WWI began, there was Christmas. Military units ran out of munitions and soldiers, and perhaps the will to fight over the holidays wasn’t quite there.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
‘In the Bleak Midwinter’
Not a bad lillejulaften (little Christmas Eve, as they call it in Norway). No great accomplishments chalked up, but I got a couple things done that I’d been putting off. Faced a minor appliance crisis – I learned it was a false alarm, though the diagnosis cost me a little. Still, I was expecting much worse. And I got paid for some translation, which always brightens a day.
“In the Bleak Midwinter” came to mind for a song tonight. Sissel sings, of course. Based on a poem by Christina Rossetti, it’s bald-faced anglicization of the Christmas story. Whether Jesus was born on December 25 or not (I like to think He was, just to annoy people) it certainly wasn’t in a snow-covered landscape. But our Christmas celebration isn’t only about the first Christmas (though it must be about that primarily). It’s also about the long tradition of commemoration we enjoy in the Christian tradition. Legends included. And in a tertiary way, about the traditions of our own tribes, whatever they may be. My tribe is Scandinavian, and we make kind of a big thing out of Christmas (for reasons I discuss in my novel Troll Valley).
Tomorrow I’ll bake pumpkin pies. No holiday is guaranteed, but this Christmas looks to beat last year’s all hollow, at least for this jolly old elf.
Hope it’s the same for you.
‘The First Shot,’ by E. H. Reinhard
Tampa police detective Carl Kane is called to an abandoned industrial building to view a crime scene. There are two middle-aged women dead behind the factory, killed execution-style. Inside are the bodies of several men, also shot to death. It’s hard to work out a scenario for the crime, which seems brutal beyond necessity. Shortly after that, there’s another mass killing, after hours in a strip club. Again, the crime looks as if somebody has been killing more people than they need to, in a simple robbery.
That’s how The First Shot, by E. H. Reinhard, starts. We follow the investigation as it progresses, until Kane finally finds himself face to face with an incredibly murderous psychopath.
“Incredibly” is the operative word here. The First Shot is an example of the sociopath story so popular in crime fiction today (I first encountered it in John D. MacDonald’s books. He did it better). The problem with the villain here is that he’s plain, flat evil. No motivations, no personal history, no redeeming qualities at all. Someone created for you to hate, and for no other purpose. Although I believe evil exists, I don’t believe anyone is solid, homogenized evil through and through. Tragedy, as Aristotle (I think it was Aristotle) told us, should evoke pity and terror. This guy evokes only terror. Which means he’s paradoxically both dull and evil.
I also don’t enjoy watching the innocent murdered. That happens again and again in this book.
The hero, Carl Kane, isn’t much better. We learn a couple things about his personal life – he transferred from Milwaukee after a bad divorce. He’s gun-shy in regard to relationships. And that about covers his character development. Other than that, he’s indistinguishable from the rest of the cops (I did have trouble telling them apart).
On top of that, the author tends to over-write. A lot of his verbiage could be cut by a good editor.
So all in all I wasn’t much impressed with The First Shot, and won’t be following this series.
St. Thomas’ Day, brother
The longest night of all the year, as the poet tell us. The winter solstice. St. Thomas’ Day. And the anniversary of the death of Erling Skjalgsson of Sola, hero of my Viking novels, at the Battle of Boknafjord. It’s a tribute to Erling that we know the precise day of his death, thanks to the saga writers. There are a lot of eminent medieval characters, especially that far back, whose dates are unknown or disputed (indeed, we can only guess when Erling was born).
Anyway, I like to honor the day.
In other news, after many months I finally have an essay in The American Spectator today. It’s often said that our times are beyond satire. In my case they seem to have overloaded my capacity for wry commentary. But I found one thing to write about at last: In Praise of Younger Sons.
Remember, after today the days get longer.
Colder, but longer.
Whenever I think about that paradox, it seems to me somebody didn’t read the small print.
“In The Bleak Midwinter”
“Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.”
This marvelous arrangement is not for congregational singing like I’ve been posting on Sundays. This composition comes from English composer Richard Allain, recorded by conductor Dominic Ellis-Peckham with the London Oriana Choir.
Trailer for ‘The Northman’
I am doing my best to keep my Christmas spirit up. Watched a couple of Christmas videos yesterday, including A Christmas Carol (Alistair Sim) because I needed it. This big translating project I’m doing (for which I thank God, by the way) is, shall we say, about the farthest thing from Christmasy you can imagine. And I’ll say no more about that.
Above is something that feels like a Christmas gift to me. A trailer for an upcoming film called “The Northman” that looks like it might possibly not stink.
It looks like they made some effort to be authentic with costumes and props (there’s a horned helmet there, but it looks ceremonial, which is correct). It’s supposed to be a story about a prince named Amleth, who wants revenge for his father’s death. That suggests inspiration from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (see my novel Blood and Judgment. I wonder if I can sue them for plagiarism. Probably not).
I’m confused about setting. News reports talk about Iceland, but there are no forests in Iceland, and it’s never had a king. But I expect the story moves around some.
Looks like an R rating, and this article suggests elements of witchcraft, so be warned.
But I expect I’ll go to see it.
Advent Singing: Of the Father’s Love Begotten
“Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” was originally a Latin poem by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (AD 348-410), titled “Corde natus ex parentis.” It was translated by in the 1850-60s by J. M. Neale and H. W. Baker and paired with the Latin plainsong melody of “Divinum mysterium.”
Verse three of the lyric copied here is omitted in the video above.
1 Of the Father’s love begotten
ere the worlds began to be,
he is Alpha and Omega,
he the source, the ending he,
of the things that are, that have been,
and that future years shall see
evermore and evermore.
2 Oh, that birth forever blessed
when the virgin, full of grace,
by the Holy Ghost conceiving,
bore the Savior of our race,
and the babe, the world’s Redeemer,
first revealed his sacred face
evermore and evermore.
The Dreaded Trip
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?
(This flash fiction is part of Loren Eaton’s shared storytelling for 2021. Go there to read more 100-word, Christmastime, ghost stories.)
‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing’
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.
Also, it’s gorgeous.
If you don’t like the weather, move to the desert
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.