Here’s a Thoroughly Professional Video showing a couple of my antique books. They aren’t commercially valuable, but they’re pretty and have the humanistic value of a great books. On the left is the Complete Works of Shakespeare, a Walter J. Black edition, which I think means it’s cheap. I say it’s leather bound, but I’m sure it’s imitation leather. On the right is the Works of Edmund Spenser, an 1895 MacMillan edition.
It’s too bad I don’t have something really nice to show you, but I may record more physical books to better reveal their tangible value, especially if I can up my A/V quality.
Inklings: “The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) has purchased the historic Eagle and Child pub on St Giles’ from St John’s College, with plans to refurbish and reopen the space to the public.”
Poetry: From Philip Larkin “For nations vague as weed, For nomads among stones, Small-statured cross-faced tribes And cobble-close families In mill-towns on dark mornings Life is slow dying.”
The greatest displeasure of the largest number Is the law of nature. – Pao Chao, “The Ruined City”
Paul J. Pastor writes about The Kalevala, an epic poem written from Karelian and Finnish folklore, focusing on “the great bard Väinämöinen” who chooses to live
on the island with no words on the mainland with no trees.
After a long while, if I’m reading this correctly, Väinämöinen begins to sing the world into being.
Pastor applies this to our own small creative works. Silence, not just moments of quiet, but true silence that endures beyond our comfort can be “the great and difficult friend of the writer and the artist.”
We are not artistic dynamos. We cannot truly create anything of own mere will. We must rely on the Lord and his revelation, both general and specific. Noise, even a natural and healthy noise of life, can drain us—at least, it does drain me.
And yet what brings Väinämöinen, the bard of bards, into the fullness of his power is precisely that condition of emptiness that so disgusts or unsettles us. It is being in the boring-place, the empty-place, the still-place that something happens to him, something so vast that nature itself unlocks her most intimate secrets.
The great bard began singing on a rock so bare we would have trouble finding a similar one today, but we may find a deafening silence among ruins, a place where
. . . grains of sand, like startled birds, are looking for a safe place to settle. Bushes and creepers, confused and tangled, seem to know no boundaries.
These verses come from fifth century Chinese poet Pao Chao (or Bān Zhāo). In “The Ruined City,” he describes a vast plain with visible canals and roads cut into it, all leading to crumbled ends and weeds.
The young girls from east and south Smooth as silk, fragrant as orchids White as jade with their lips red, Now lie beneath the dreary stones and barren earth. The greatest displeasure of the largest number Is the law of nature.
This too is silence and a little despair; we need more than human hope to endure it. Can we throw seeds into the wind that will sprout in what time the Lord will give them? Kyrie, eleison.
If you know boldness, you know mercy too, because they are like sisters;
boldness is lighter than all things on earth, but compassion is lighter than anything.
It’s not my custom to review poetry on this blog; I write it poorly and read it with only middling comprehension. But the description I received of Olga Sedakova’s recently released volume, Old Songs, intrigued me enough to accept the offer of a free review copy. As might be expected, the poems baffled me a little, but they nevertheless left an impression. The translation is done by Martha M. F. Kelly, and seems excellent so far as I am able to judge.
Olga Sedakova is a Christian Russian poet, a survivor of the Underground in Soviet times and today a major critic of her country’s war in Ukraine. Old Songs was published only a few weeks ago, and still awaits its first Amazon review.
Speaking from my limited perspective, these poems seemed resolutely Christian in a realistic way. No easy answers. No assumption that rewards will come to us in this world. The poet knows suffering and placidly expects to suffer more. All temporal hopes are likely to fail; we believe anyway.
I felt like a child trying to follow an adult conversation through most of the poems (it’s not a long book), but certain passages definitely resonated. I particularly liked the one I placed at the head of this review. Here’s a couple other good ones;
Ah, I’ve watched people a long, long time, and strange things have I learned: I know that the soul is an infant, an infant until its final hour,
that it believes absolutely everything, and it sleeps in a den of thieves.
The dead don’t need a thing,
not houses nor dresses nor hearing.
There’s nothing they need from us.
Not a thing, save everything on earth.
Those are good lines. Recommended. I was impressed.
Fascism is a 1921 word that came from the Italian name for Mussolini’s anit-communist party, Partito Nazionale Fascista. The word Fascista actually means “political group,” but fascism has come to mean a particularly nasty political group because of its connection to the Mussolini’s policies. They were the Black Shirts, dedicated to what my 1953 Webster’s defines as a “program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
Curious that today the word seems mostly applied to those who rally for beliefs with which we disagree. No forcible suppression, just public argument, and—boom—you’re a fascist. A whole political party is committed to overregulation of industry and commerce, but no, it’s the homeschool moms who are fascists. Climate change is the reason they want to take away your gas stove, but is that fascism? Stop being silly. It’s only fascism with other people do it.
This word like many others is used without meaning, showing our society to be closer to Orwell’s 1984 doublespeak than anyone wants to believe.
Book Banning: Maybe the problem isn’t that someone complains about a book, but that public schools exist at all. Neal McCluskey writes, “The very idea of ‘neutral’ education—education that favors no idea or worldview—is not itself neutral. Elevating ‘neutrality’ over worldviews that believe that some things are inherently good and others inherently bad, and that children should be taught what those are, is a values‐driven decision, concluding that neutrality more valuable than teaching some things are right and others wrong.”
Comic books: Penguin Classics is publishing a Marvel collection of $45 hardback reproductions of the silver age stories of X-Men, The Avengers, and Fantastic Four. But wait, there’s more! They released three such editions last year: Captain America, Black Panther, and The Amazing Spider-Man. Gosh! Who could’ve thought they’d do something like that?
(Photo: The Donut Hole, La Puente, California. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)
Everyone knows, I hope, that actions speak louder than words, which is a saying my old book of proverbs seems to derive from similar, older maxims such as this one from the French: Le fait juge l’homme or the deed proves the man. (Phrase Finder points to a 1693 sermon for the specific wording.) Words reveal our intentions, how we frame a problem, and if our actions give proof to our words, people believe us. They attest our integrity. If our actions work against our words, then our hearers have every reason to say we’re full hot air.
Politicians have historically low trustworthiness, according to polls, because their job is to overpromise and underdeliver, especially congressmen. They can’t do all they say they will do, because they have to work with a crowd of others who promised to do other things—some of which should not be done. Since Nixon shattered American confidence, the highest average percentage of people “who say they trust the government to do what is right just about always/most of the time,” according to the Pew Research Center, is 54%. That was on October 25, 2001.
On Monday, we will mark the 22nd anniversary of the hijacking of four commercial aircraft in an effort to punish the United States for crimes against Islam. Many politicians and civil servants have learned nothing in that time, judging by their actions. They want to be judged by their words alone, and not all of their words. Only the current ones. Why dig up the past by rehearsing old lies when the current lie is all we need? If they say we’re safe, secure, prepared–that’s all the proof we should need.
This being the third year of the Biden administration, and our country is weaker than we were in 2001. Yes, it’s Biden’s fault, but any of the recent Liberal/Progressive crop would have done the same. Progressivism undermines its own goals. If the optics are good, the goal has been achieved.
They give money to Iran and say it can’t be used for nuclear weapons development, so it’s safe. They open the southern boarder to allow thousands of who knows who to cross every day but claim it’s secure, so no worries. They spend from the FEMA fund on non-emergencies and are caught short when wildfires catch Hawaii responders off-guard. Oh, but the optics were good on that one, so maybe the president can hand out some money, tell a story about almost losing his house and car, and that will smooth over hurt feelings.
If it doesn’t, you can shut up, because Progressives don’t want your words unless you agree with them. Disagreement on some subjects is violence.
If 9/11 were to happen under this administration, they would be give the same speeches they give today about bravery, American unity, and how the president knows from personal experience how hard something like this can be. But nothing responsible would be done.
Subtle Sounds: The Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, has a 93-foot tower with forty wind chimes for the forty passengers and crew who died while opposing their hijackers. It’s called the Tower of Voices. The National Park Service has a good description and many photos. This video has captures the sound better than others I’ve found.
Antiquities: In other news, detectorists win again! A Norwegian man named Erlend Bore found a “cache comprised nine gold medallions and gold pearls that once formed an opulent necklace, as well as three gold rings” dating from 500 AD. (via Prufrock)
Lars has been talking about poetry this week, which provoked me to consider it for the Saturday post.
A 700 A.D. Anglo-Saxon poem called “The Ruin” speaks of a city that was gorgeous even when destroyed.
Well-wrought this wall-stone which fate has broken
The city bursts, the work of giants crumbles.
In this translation by Michael O’Brien, you can see what is and what once was: frost on the stones, brightly color scraps of wood, bath-houses, and attractive homes. It had been a welcoming, beautiful home–a “haven.” Skilled soldiers lived here “proud and wine-flushed.” The baths were obviously luxurious. Only one wall remained standing.
Many men fell in the days of wrath;
Death took all the valor of earth.
Did invaders sack this city? No, it was the curse on all creation that eventually wore it down. One way or another, we all see the day of wrath. How do we live today in the light of what’s to come?
Language: “We are lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for poetry. All those millions of words and all those different ways of saying the same, or similar, things. And new words all the time.”
Parting Quotes: Here are a couple of statements pulled from Joseph Addison’s 1716 play The Drummer.
“That is well said, John, an honest man, that is not quite sober, has nothing to fear.”
“I should think myself a very bad woman if I had done what I do for a farthing less.”
When I read on Twitter (X) that novelist and editor Walter Kirn, along with David Samuels, had created “a magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper,” I looked up the website, and when I saw it would be for sale at one of my town’s cute local stores, I decided to check it out.
County Highway is meant to represent the heart of America, a place with natural rhythms, relationships, and grassroots sense. It’s written by “actual human beings,” which is more than some websites can say. “We hope to advance the same relationship to America that Bob Dylan had when he wrote his versions of folk songs” or when Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison wrote of their country.
I enjoy the feel of reading this paper, which cheekily touts itself as “America’s only newspaper” and plans to publish six issues a year for a $50 subscription. Kirn’s front page piece is on his visit to The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana, a place where memorabilia, props, and junk attempt to preserve a moral history. Duncan Moench has a report on artificial intelligence and the imminent threat of corporate technocracy.
I was pulled in by a review of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction), which says Kingsolver’s skill is clear and subject matter well chosen, but this “protest novel” in the form of Dicken’s David Copperfield is heavy on ranting, light on humanity. Other articles in this first issue include a lengthy piece that circles around Joshua Tree National Park, a front story on an American con man from last century, four pages on music, feature on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s falconry hobby, and a full page of legit classifieds: Wyoming cabins, bookstores, alpacas for breeding, and ‘shrooms.
I’ve enjoyed reading some of these, and there are a few more I’d like to get to. There’s a little poetry, a few wisecracks tucked in a small column, and attractive illustrations of a vintage sheen. The articles feel like those I’ve seen online and hoped to get back to, but often don’t. The Internet is ethereal; newspapers sit on the desk.
I may buy the next issue to try to balance what I read in the first, but I’m put off by the feel of the whole. Is it cynical? Maybe too secular? There’s a column about fugitives from someone who speaks positively about the Weather Underground. I believe he says he helped a couple of them back in the day. That’s like longing for time when your granddad would tell stories of fighting alongside Che Guevara. And then there’s this in a joke section: “Drag queen story hour — it’s what my pops used to call church on Sundays.” I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe I should untie my laces. (I wrote about the second issue also.)
Alt Culture: To balance the earthiness of America’s newspaper, let me point you to the new season of Doubletake from World News Group. This is a podcast of long features that can get complicated. Today’s episode is on what some people are doing in the Metaverse and a church trying to reach them.
Do Americans know more than the first verse of “America, the Beautiful,” specifically the second verse with the words:
“America! America! God mend thine every flaw Confirm thy soul in self-control Thy liberty in law!”
In one simple line, we see the law, not as the source of our liberty, but as a tool for protecting it against those who would take it away. But what “it” is remains a question.
It’s that loosely defined something we can’t get enough of.
“More liberty begets desire of more; The hunger still increases with the store.”
John Dryden
Fred Bauer has a piece on the different views of freedom we’ve had since the colonial days. We had Puritans’ “ordered liberty,” Quakers’ “reciprocal liberty,” Virginians’ “hegemonic liberty,” and Appalachians’ “natural liberty.” These are taken from David Hackett Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed.
“Ethical concerns,” Bauer writes, “factor into the notion of freedom as ‘elbow room.’ Patrick Henry argued that the centralized Constitution would threaten both ‘the rights of conscience’ and ‘all pretensions to human rights and privileges.’ That ethical strand offers a counterpoint to arguments that American freedom is simply about material prosperity. The genealogy of freedom is more complicated.”
Moving on to the links, we face a new frontier for ethical freedom in the choices we make with our technology. In other words, if we can do it, should we? How is using AI as described below not plagiarism?
One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking “you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?” https://t.co/hVbrO31fKj
To repeat the July 13, 2023, tweet above for preservation, Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) says, “One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking ‘you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?'”
She retweets Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) from earlier that day, who says, “Authors: we need to stand up with the actors. AI is ALREADY HERE in our work. I just spoke to a Very Famous Author who has to remain nameless for legal reasons. They are held up in a contract negotiation because a Major Publisher wants to train AI on their work.”
I’d think training a computer to mimic a popular author’s work would fall within the bounds of plagiarism. If not that, fan fiction.
Who furrows? Who follows? The owl in the hollow The hawk in the meadow The jay in the hedgeapple tree Who follows the farmer who furrows his fields? Who furrows? Who follows? We three.
Fiction: It may be common for online chat to express a desire for short novels, but do readers want them? Nathan Bransford talks about the dangers of writing shorter works. “When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!”
Trapped: In other news, 100 people were trapped for hours yesterday in Agatha Christie’s old home by a large tree that had fallen across the only access road. They hung out mostly in the tea room. One witness reported the staff were “doing a great job, they are giving us free tea’s and things. It’s a bit bleak.”
The Viking hall at Ravnsborg, Knox City, MO. Photo by me.
It’s been a little while since I reviewed another saga in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Tonight’s saga is not a saga at all, but a tale, just two pages long. It’s a sort of parenthetical incident found originally in the Icelandic Morkinskinna saga manuscript. I can’t find any cheap collection you can buy that contains it, so you’ll have to take my word about it. Its title is The Tale of Arnor, the Poet of Earls.
“Earl,” of course, is a translation of “jarl.”
Arnor Jarlaskald is a figure known from the saga histories, and considered one of the great skalds of the 11th Century. This story doesn’t explain his nickname (he deals only with kings here), but we’re told elsewhere that he got it because he spent a lot of time with the jarls of the Orkneys and composed often for them. Otherwise he was a merchant.
This story is set during the time when King Magnus the Good (St. Olaf’s son) ruled jointly with King Harald Hardrada. (Harald had come back from Constantinople dripping with money, intending to depose his nephew Magnus and take over Norway. Intermediaries convinced them to do a deal – half of Harald’s fortune in exchange for half of Magnus’ kingdom. Though their time together wasn’t without tensions, they managed to keep the peace, and when Magnus died, it’s remarkable to note that nobody seems to have suggested that Harald murdered him. That’s the sort of thing Harald easily might have done, after all).
In the tale, Arnor arrives in the town (doesn’t say what town here; no doubt it’s explained in the larger context. Could have been Nidaros (Trondheim), but it might have been Tunsberg), having composed poems in honor of both kings. But he seems to have been told to wait, so he started to work tarring his ship. Then messengers came to summon him to court. He went directly, not even stopping to wash the tar off his hands.
He then goes into the hall, where both kings wait in their high seats. They ask Arnor whose poem he means to recite first. Arnor says he’ll start with Magnus, because “it is said that young men are impatient.”
Arnor begins the poem, and Harald (himself a poet) can’t resist interrupting to complain that it’s mostly about Arnor’s own journeys and dealings with the jarls. Magnus wants to hear more, and then the saga writer gives us excerpts from the original poem. Harald continues butting in with objections, but in the end he appears jealous. After hearing his own poem, he says, “My poem will soon fade away and be forgotten, while the drapa composed about King Magnus will be recited as long as there are people in the North.”
Which is true, because we have Magnus’ poem preserved here, while Harald’s is not.
In the end, Arnor is rewarded by Harald with a gold-inlaid spear, while Magnus gives him a gold ring and, later, a merchant ship and cargo.
This is a snippet, an anecdote without much of a plot. Its significance would seem to be in the insight it gives us into the characters of two very different kings. And probably an old man’s proud reminiscence of the days when he met celebrities.
Irrelevant details like Arnor’s dirty hands give a strong impression of verisimilitude. This sounds very much like a genuine memory, passed down only a few generations before being preserved on parchment.
Ukrainian novelist, activist, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award for 2021 Victoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She was “with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists on June 27 when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown,” The Kyiv Independent reports.
The IT professional-turned writer, 37, had lived in the States for a few years before returning to Ukraine to research war crimes.
In September 2022, “Amelina went to the liberated village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv Oblast and found the diary of her colleague, the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenklo, along with his father,” The Kyiv Independent reports.
“Vakulenko had buried the diary under a cherry tree in his yard before he was abducted by Russian occupation forces that March. The diary is now kept in the Kharkiv Literary Museum for posterity.”
In this 2020 interview with PEN Ukraine, Amelina offers this optimism (which I’ve had to translate via Google): To write Home for Home, I quit my favorite job, ruined the career I had built since I was seventeen. It was painful, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing – I gained a lot, but I also sacrificed a lot.
“I would not advise making decisions motivated by something external. There must be an inner readiness to live by texts, to turn oneself into texts, to write even when no one reads. No publisher can refuse this. If literature is your way of interacting with the world, miracles will happen.”
She also lists the New Testament among the books that have influenced her the most. “It seems that in the near future my heroes will not stop dying for others, but this is not about death, but about resurrection.”
Here are some other things to read.
Poetry: Last year, Steve Moyer wrote about Ukrainian poetry having depicted the corruption of war for decades. “Many of the poets writing today in Ukraine, however, compose in free verse, relying more on repetition, word play, juxtaposition of images, and rhetorical devices than on traditional forms and meter to convey the harsh reality they’re witnessing. Images such as rotting fruit occur and recur. Debris lying in snow and crumbling bridges make their appearances.”
“When I was working on my Paul Revere book, I remember hesitating over Charles Ferris Gettemy’s biography, The True Story of Paul Revere. The book was over a hundred years old. I can’t write in it, can I? It felt like some sort of aesthetic crime. But then, no. I need to keep track of ideas and details. Why did I have it to begin with? To use. Once I ditched my reservations, the payoff was immeasurable.”
