“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).
Today’s theme has been transition. Not a major transition in life, though that’s pretty much an everyday occurrence at my age, but a change of internet service, which in perspective shouldn’t loom as large as it seems to.
My old internet provider (which shall remain nameless) is cravenly withdrawing service from my area in a few weeks. So I went over to a cooler, more fashionable ISP, which shall also remain nameless, because if they want a plug they can pay for an ad.
They sent me a box with a modem, and told me about an app I could install on my cell phone, which would – they assured me – walk me through the installation process in about 20 minutes.
I knew it was a lie, of course. Surely they knew it was a lie too.
I floundered with the process for a while before figuring out they were telling me how to hook it all up through a coaxial cable. But I had no coaxial cable. I’ve never had cable in this house.
They don’t make it easy to contact an actual human being through their customer service page, but eventually I bulled my way through. That person, who communicated through online chat and seemed to be equipped with a pre-assembled list of positive affirmations (“I’m on this!” “I won’t fail you!”) soon deduced that I needed a technician to come out and drill a hole in my house. Amazingly, one was available today.
Long (and dull) story short, I now have cable internet. I had hopes of much faster speeds, but so far it seems about comparable to my old DSL service. I could get something better if I were willing to pay for it, of course, but that’s crazy talk.
In other news, I discovered yesterday, to my rapturous delight, that you can watch the old Ian Carmichael Lord Peter Wimsey productions from the BBC on YouTube. The first episode of “Clouds of Witness” is embedded below, for your convenience and cultural enrichment.
“An official personage like you might embarrass them, don’t you know, but there’s no dignity about me. I’m probably the least awe-inspiring man in Kirkcudbright. I was born looking foolish and every day in every way I am getting foolisher and foolisher.”
The seventh novel in Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey series is The Five Red Herrings, a book that, I fear, has not aged well. The Amazon reviews suggest that most other contemporary readers agree.
Back in the 1930s or so, readers loved their puzzles, and spent time on them. Crossword puzzles were a relatively new innovation, and they took the country by storm. A corollary was the railway timetable mystery, in which the culprit’s alibi is based on a clever manipulation of train times, and the detective must figure out the trick. I assume readers worked at these books the same way they did with their crosswords, attacking them with pencils and pads of paper. Railroad timetables were familiar and interesting to them, because that was how urban people traveled back then.
The town of Kirkcudbright, in the Scottish county of Galloway, is home to a renowned, picturesque artistic colony. These people are generally friendly and amiably competitive, but they all share a loathing of Campbell, a black-bearded semi-talent with a massive, defensive ego, a drinking problem, and a reflexive tendency to resort to his fists.
So no one is much grieved when Campbell’s corpse is found one morning in a river at the foot of a steep bank, below an unfinished painting on an easel surrounded with artist’s supplies. But Lord Peter, examining the site, notices something the police have missed. One object that ought to be there is not there – and it can’t be found. So it’s not an accident but murder, and the investigation begins. Suspects are not lacking. The problem is that they all have alibis that seem solid. Several of them involve travel on trains.
For a reader not willing to work the puzzle by means of transcribing timetables and comparing them closely, reading The Five Red Herrings involves a lot of taking things as given that you don’t quite follow. This makes for some fairly opaque reading for long stretches. But Lord Peter is as amusing as usual, and he does get some good lines off. And there’s some very clever work in the final solution to the mystery.
Most readers today find The Five Red Herrings the least interesting of the Wimsey series. But if you’re reading the books and enjoying them, you should probably not skip it.
Yes, you’re in the right place. This is where you get my occasional book reviews, but more often you get excuses for why it’s been several days since the last review. Not that you’d expect me to read a book every day. I know you pretty well by now, Gentle Reader, and you’re not unreasonable. As a matter of fact, I think you’re pretty gosh-darn patient.
It was a weekend full of translation work for me. Which is good. I approve, and am grateful. Only Christmas’ wingéd chariot keeps drawing near, and I haven’t started my cards yet. No, that’s not quite true. I gave the address labels a start yesterday. And then got confused and lost all my work. I shall resume, Sisyphus-like, tonight. If I can work up the energy. (My cold is better, but I’m still a little tired.)
The book I’m reading at the moment is Dorothy Sayers’ classic Five Red Herrings, which is considered a masterpiece of the railroad timetable school (which was very popular at the time). But I feel I’m not doing it justice, because I’m not making spreadsheets of all the data. Thus, my progress is slow.
But I share the little video above, which is the original titles for the BBC production of Clouds of Witness, back in the 1970s. Broadcast in the US on Masterpiece Theater. I always liked that music.
By the way, have I mentioned I did translation work on a production that was broadcast on Masterpiece Theater last spring? I’ll tell you about it if you insist…
“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” was a 12th century Latin hymn brought into English by John M. Neale of London. The Latin words come from an 8th century poem. This makes another commonly sung hymn with ancient roots.
Something triggered a memory today. I told my parents, over apple pie at Dollywood, that Jonathan Edwards had suggested the Lord had risen in the East and could possibly return in the West, even America. I don’t think he was suggesting it would happen, just that it could and would flow with the pattern of history. The main reason I remember that is the impression of impressing my parents with this detail from Edwards. A small thing. Both of them passed away in the last few years; now the holidays are different.
Pastor and author Tim Keller has been fighting pancreatic cancer for over a year. It’s now at stage IV. On Twitter Friday afternoon, he said, “It is endlessly comforting to have a God who is both infinitely more wise and more loving than I am. He has plenty of good reasons for everything he does and allows that I cannot know, and therein is my hope and strength.”
In The Atlantic this year, Keller wrote about his faith growing in the face of this struggle. Speaking of earlier in his life, he said, “Particularly for me as a Christian, Jesus’s costly love, death, and resurrection had become not just something I believed and filed away, but a hope that sustained me all day. I pray this prayer daily. Occasionally it electrifies, but ultimately it always calms:
“And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morning only by your grace, keep me in the joyful, lively remembrance that whatever happens, I will someday know my final rising, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my justification.”
Writing at Age 91. We don’t know what time or days we have…. what was I saying just now? Oh, never mind.
Do you like reading poetry? Does it matter if you enjoy it or is it a professional exercise? “I can only think that a large-scale revulsion has got to set in against present notions, and that it will have to start with poetry readers asking themselves more frequently whether they do in fact enjoy what they read, and, if not, what the point is of carrying on.”
Writing is ridiculous, bound to fail; even success feels like failure. “Some people doubt themselves far too much, others not remotely enough.”
Researchers have concluded contemporary worship songs are going stale quicker than they used to, for reasons they can’t explain. “The average arc of a worship song’s popularity has dramatically shortened, from 10 to 12 years to a mere 3 or 4.” I don’t want to suggest these are only the most consumeristic churches, but in my church circles, we sing old songs–maybe a new melody or arrangement, but the lyric is still several years to centuries old. What I’m sharing in our new Sunday post is the kind of singing I hope you have in your churches.
Photo: Wellsboro Diner, Route 6, Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. 1977. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
I think I’m actually in denial about Christmas this year. I need to get started with my cards and newsletters, and I need to get my tree up. I used to get right on those things the day after Thanksgiving, but this year it seems like a lot of work.
Still, it’s not too early to post a Sissel Christmas song. This is the young Sissel, way back in 1987, on Norwegian TV but singing in English for your convenience. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone do this song better.
My cold lingers, which it would be surprising if it didn’t, because it’s only been a few days. I have an idea this one will hang on, though. Had to do my annual eye appointment this morning. I arrived at the usual place, and behold, it was deserted. Lots of room in the inn.
I had a vague memory that they’d announced they’d moved. Again. This clinic changes venues more often than Nathan Detroit’s crap game in Guys ‘n Dolls. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, though, I was able to find the right location on my cell phone, and I still had time to make the appointment.
The new place is a medical complex. With signs for various clinics and services. But none for my ophthalmologist.
The address was right. I double-checked. I got out of my car and went to investigate.
By the door, one of those three-foot stand-up yellow plastic signs, saying my eye clinic was inside.
This seems to me a rather cruel thing, to have a vision clinic with no visible sign. Like playing blind man’s bluff with an actual blind man.
But I did get in. Verdict: My eyesight has deteriorated slightly, but only slightly. My cataracts (every old person has them) have advanced marginally, but not enough to call for Steps to Be Taken yet.
Also finished my translation job and submitted it.
