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.
“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.
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.
The Azusa Pacific University Men’s Chorale in 2009
“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.
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.
