And the translation work keeps coming. This is most gratifying to me, though it means some long hours at the keyboard for a few days. Also I’ll have to bow out of something I meant to do with the Vikings tomorrow. One must prioritize, and I choose money. Not for my own sake, of course, but for the sake of the people who send me bills.
Above, another newsreel clip giving background on the “Atlantic Crossing” miniseries. Here you’ll see the arrival of the SS American Legion, on which our principal characters fled to America. We see Mrs. Florence Harriman, Ambassador to Norway, a character in the series, as well as Crown Princess Martha and her children. The news conference is precisely the one re-created for the series, even down to the dress Martha is wearing.
Another notable figure who travelled on the SS American Legion was the humorist/musician Victor Borge, a Jew fleeing Denmark.
Many long years ago, in 2002, I gave my very first lecture on the Vikings at Mayville State University in Mayville, ND. The invitation came thanks to my friend Dale Nelson, of the English Department. That culturally significant moment was recorded for posterity, and the video has just been posted at YouTube, as you see above.
The first time I saw this video, some time after the talk, I was impressed with how fat I looked. Now I’m impressed with how young I look.
I can’t guarantee I still stand behind all the opinions I express in this talk. One lives, translates, and learns.
I’m bogged down again with lucrative translation today. But in service of my vested interest in the miniseries “Atlantic Crossing” on PBS Masterpiece, I offer this film clip I just found, with footage of Crown Prince Olav and Princess Martha during their US goodwill tour in 1939 (briefly dramatized in the first episode). Unfortunately, it’s silent, but there are some title cards. You will note that the original Martha was rather taller than the actress who plays her (Sofia Helin), and wore rather larger hats.
Chess masters in Iran have chaffed against government restrictions on their conduct abroad. Women must wear hijabs in public, just as they would be expected to at home, and any player scheduled to play against an Israeli must forfeit the game. Any violation of these rules would mean personal punishment and likely repercussions for your family as well.
World News Group describes a few Iranian chess players who took a stand or suffered an forfeit and reacted by seeking asylum in France, England, or America.
Many Iranian stars like Firouzja go to France, but Moradiabadi recalled that when he visited the French Embassy, staff were condescending about having certain paperwork. When he went to the U.S. Embassy, the woman helping him kept saying “okie dokie” and told him she would help with any copies of forms he forgot.
In 2012 he obtained a U.S. green card and in 2017 became an American citizen: “That was a happy day for me.” Moradiabadi was delighted to see an Iranian women’s grandmaster, Dorsa Derakhshani, playing for the United States a few years ago, after the Iranian federation expelled her for not wearing a hijab at a tournament. She was a student of his in Iran as a young girl.
“Actors are leaving, artists are leaving, it’s everything. Chess is one of many things,” said Moradiabadi.
Suddenly, I have lots of translation work. For a day or two, anyway.
This helped divert my thoughts from the impending verdict in the Chauvin trial. This was of particular interest to me, since my city was likely to burn if the “wrong” decision was made.
But the verdict was just announced. Guilty on all counts. I’m pretty sure at least part of it is unjust, and likely to be overturned on appeal. So I have the uneasy sensation of being relieved, due to what looks like a lynching.
Of this I am ashamed.
I wrote down some thoughts for The American Spectator Onlinehere. They are not happy thoughts. Though some are clever, I think.
Viewed through the golden glass of the vestibule where we first meet him, wondering where he’s left his ticket of invitation and fuming inwardly because he can’t enter without it, he looks like a dogfish in aspic.
George Bellairs is a classic English mystery writer. I wasn’t familiar with his work before I bought He’d Rather Be Dead, first published in 1945. The book has much to commend it.
Sir Gideon Ware is the newly-elected mayor of the English seaside resort town of Westcome. He is a ruthless property developer who built the town into its present prosperity through hard work, loud promotion, flexible ethics and corner-cutting. At a dinner given to celebrate his victory, he falls under the table during his speech, and dies. Cause of death: strychnine poisoning.
Police Superintendent Boumphrey of the Westcome police is very good at keeping tabs on the citizens’ comings and goings, and even at keeping files on them, but feels this case to be above his pay grade. So he applies to Scotland Yard to send one of their detectives (this happens all the time in novels, but I’ve read the Yard never actually does this) to investigate. They send Inspector Littlejohn (he has a first name, but I can’t recall it), who proceeds in a quiet and matter-of-fact manner, working steadily to uncover the secrets of Sir Gideon’s past, and the force from that past that has now struck him down .
What I liked best about He’d Rather Be Dead was the prose. Author Bellairs had the gift of turning out a very apt sentence, like the one at the head of this review, or this one:
Mr Brown’s smiling lips parted to disclose two copious sets of teeth crowding upon one another like passengers for the last bus.
Not quite Wodehousian, but excellent in its own way.
The mystery itself involved a systematic progression through suspects and evidence, without a lot of fireworks. Characterization was not memorable, and even Littlejohn himself doesn’t leap off the page – almost all we learn of him is that he’s in a happy marriage. He isn’t even physically described until almost the end of the book – which loses him points with this reader.
But I must admit that I didn’t guess the murderer, though I thought I did.
I might possibly read another Inspector Littlejohn book, but He’d Rather Be Dead didn’t grab me a lot. The prose was excellent, but the key was pretty low for my debased modern reading tastes. I don’t recommend against the book. There’s much to be said for it.
In the course of my reading, I’ve occasionally run across references to Sexton Blake, an English detective/spy hero whose popularity flourished from the 1890s up to the late 1960s. The character’s longevity can be attributed to the fact that, after his creator (Hal Meredith writing as Harry Blyth) stepped aside, other writers took up the pen. He was featured in a number of magazines over the years, always in the medium of pulp stories aimed at boys. For much of his career, Sexton Blake was a more energetic version of Sherlock Holmes (kind of like the Guy Ritchie movies).
I thought it would be amusing to try some Sexton Blake stories, and the collection Sexton Blake and the Great War was cheap, so I bought it for my Kindle.
Alas, immature as I admittedly am, I’m not immature enough for this stuff. I got through the first short novel, The Case of the Naval Manoeuvres, written in 1908 by Norman Goddard, and that was all I could handle.
In this story, our intrepid hero is sent by the Prime Minister to the Shetland Islands, where he’s standing on the shore one night with his two sidekicks and his faithful dog Pedro, when a dangling rope just happens to hit him in the face. Blake, of course, grabs onto it, and is carried out over the sea. He climbs the rope and discovers it’s attached to a huge German airship. Scrambling up into the cabin, he finds that the ship is under the command of no less a personage than Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, to whom Blake has been of personal service once or twice in the past. This saves his life, but he is taken prisoner nonetheless. Predictably, he manages to escape, but clings onto the vessel’s framework and tracks the crew to their secret lair, where they have prepared a mechanism to guide their fleet in an attack on Great Britain. It doesn’t take long for Blake to disguise himself perfectly as a German officer, sabotage their machine, and kidnap the Kaiser. The Kaiser, in turn, will escape from Blake… and so it goes. Plausibility has no place in this scenario.
Our hero, of course (much like the heroes of our current CGI action flicks), can absorb any amount of physical punishment with barely a wince. He can be lifted high into the sky under a balloon, and plunge 80 feet into the ocean, without noticing the cold or needing any more care than a fresh suit of clothes. Interestingly, he also fights hand-to-hand with the Kaiser – which is less impressive than it sounds when you remember that Wilhelm was born with a crippled left arm (either the author did not know this, or he ignored it).
If you’re interested in pure, unadulterated Ripping Yarns stuff, this is the real goods. I think it would be fun to be able to appreciate stories like this… but I can’t.
Book Number 5 in Dan Willis’s “Arcane” series about runewright/private eye Alex Lockerby is Limelight. This book takes the series to a new thematic level, and I enjoyed it.
Alex has come up in the world from his humble roots. He’s getting better-paying cases these days, and hobnobbing with the very powerful, among them the Lightning Lord, the sorcerer who provides electrical power to this magic-dominated 1930s New York City. Another is Sorsha Kincaid, the Ice Queen, who provides its refrigeration and air conditioning. She and Alex are carrying on a wary flirtation, but in Limelight they don’t have much time for anything but crime solving and disaster aversion.
First of all, a famous woman mystery writer has been murdered, to the grief of Alex’s mentor, Izzy. Izzy asks him to investigate the case, and it soon becomes clear that someone wanted to stop her writing a novel based on the unsolved murder of a Broadway actress several years back.
But the police are more concerned with a more spectacular crime, one involving magic. A bank’s wall has been breached by an explosion that appears to have been set off by a rune – only everyone knows that there are no exploding runes. Alex sees evidence here of a level of runecraft he has never seen before – oddly initiated by runes that are themselves quite crudely drawn.
Limelight was not crudely drawn. It was tightly plotted, complex, and highly dramatic. It was fun to read, and I look forward to the next installment.
King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav shelter from a German air raid in 1940. Photo credit: Per Bratland (1907-1988). From Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
I was busy translating yesterday (got some work done on the novel too; it was a good day). So I don’t have anything to review tonight. Of what shall I write? Well, there’s a miniseries running on PBS, to which I have a personal connection. I’m sure you’re following this excellent production closely. I’ll share some of my vast personal store of knowledge to give you some background information, illuminating and enriching your viewing experience.
You may recall a scene where King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav discuss whether to remain in the country, risking capture and capitulation, or to flee to England, which could be construed as abdicating. “This could mean the end of the monarchy,” one of them says. (Maybe not in those very words; I translated it but I don’t have eidetic memory.)
Their concern here is greater than it would be for ordinary monarchs. The Norwegian monarchy was actually still experimental, and a little shaky. Haakon and Olav had spent their entire lives inventing and sustaining a modern Norwegian royal tradition.
Norway, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, lost its independence for a period of about 500 years – from the mid-14th Century to 1905. Roughly 400 of those years were spent in union with Denmark, and then it was transferred to Sweden by the Congress of Vienna in 1814.
With independence coming, the question was, what form of government would Norway have? A lot of Norwegians admired France and the US, and favored a republic. But republicanism was unpopular among the European elite. Republics were notoriously unstable; France was suffering a string of government turnovers.
When the Norwegians voted to become independent, Sweden was uncertain whether to oppose the move or not. Military action was not off the table. They let it be known that they were more favorable to having a monarchy next door than a republic. So when Norwegians (the explorer/diplomat Fridtjof Nansen among them) went to speak to their favored royal candidate, Prince Carl of Denmark, they explained that if he agreed to become king, he might very well secure Norwegian independence and prevent war.
Prince Carl had his reservations. The brother of the king of Denmark, he had a perfectly fine career as a naval officer, and had never meddled much in politics. Accepting would involve radical lifestyle changes and new responsibilities for his wife Maude (daughter of Edward VII of England and not an outgoing person) and his young son Alexander.
But they were won over. They began with a brilliant public relations move. Knowing that the last two kings of Norway had been named Haakon VI and Olav IV (Olav had died young of a congenital condition, ending the independent Norwegian dynasty), Carl changed his own name to Haakon, and his son Alexander’s to Olav. So they became Haakon VII and Olav V. Symbolically, they were picking up the dynasty precisely where it had left off half a millennium ago.
The Norwegian constitution granted the king a fair amount of power. Haakon deliberately refused to exercise it, keeping himself to ceremonial and non-political activities. Even when the Labor Party (Arbeiderparti), dominated by Communists and inclined against monarchy, took power in 1927, Haakon insisted on working with them.
The decision to evacuate and form a government in exile lost them a measure of support. Some Norwegians who joined the Nazis actually blamed the king and the crown prince for abandoning them.
But they persevered, and when they finally returned victorious in 1945, they were more popular than ever. Olav in his turn was highly regarded (and accessible. Have I mentioned I saw him in person once?).
There’s a precious handful of writers whom I reread every few years just to remind myself what great writing is. Hemingway isn’t one of them.
Several recent releases from my favorite authors have recently been released, but I haven’t bought them because they’re kind of pricey, and things are a little tight just now. But I couldn’t resist David Handler’s latest Stewart Hoag book, The Man Who Wasn’t All There.
As with all the recent books in the series, this one isn’t contemporary, but is shoehorned into Stewart’s past. The Man Who Wasn’t All There is set in the 1990s. Hoagy has finally overcome the writer’s block that metastasized into drugs, divorce and destitution for him, and is clean again, working at last on his next novel. Even better, he has reconciled with his ex-wife, actress Merilee Nash. He’s been living in her New York apartment, but he’s just moved out to her Connecticut farm to winterize the house when he isn’t creating, while she’s in Budapest shooting a movie with Mel Gibson.
It’s great until he’s approached one day by a tubby little man with serious BO, who’s cobbled together something resembling a state trooper’s uniform, and carries a pistol. This delusional man is looking for Merilee and tries to push Hoagy around. Hoagy and his faithful basset hound, Lulu, run him off.
Hoagy then calls the police, and soon a fleet of official vehicles show up. Turns out the weird little man is Austin Talmadge, the second richest man in Connecticut. He’s delusional, and sometimes goes off his medications and harasses people. This is of concern to his brother Michael, the richest man in Connecticut, a recluse who’s close to the governor. The police are soon headed out to bring Austin in again, but it goes wrong, and Hoagy (along with Lulu) gets kidnapped by the loony billionaire. Much violence and mystery follows, until Hoagy figures it all out.
The Man Who Wasn’t All There went down very smoothly. The Stewart Hoag books are consistently fun to read. Hoagy is a bit of a snob and a dilettante, but possesses just enough humor and self-awareness to make his company amusing. Occasionally he hints at opinions I don’t care for, but (as you see above) he sometimes gets it right. He disses Hemingway in this one, and that always pleases me.
