(via Jordan Ballor)
Colson on Kuyper
(via Jordan Ballor)
The cold facts on Colfax
If you’re in the neighborhood of Colfax, Wisconsin tomorrow, I’ll be playing Viking at a community celebration there. Noon to five. Be there or be somewhere else.
I’ve been thinking about walnuts. In Anders Winroth’s The Age of the Vikings, which I reviewed recently, he talks about walnuts as an exotic treat in Scandinavia at the time. He describes them as tasting sweet.
Walnuts do not taste sweet to me. They taste like slightly crumbly bits of wood.
I’ve long been pretty sure my sense of taste is defective. I seem to be particularly insensitive to sweet-tasting things, which would be why I crave sweet stuff that’s cloying to other people. While mildly sweet things (like walnuts, apparently) don’t register with me at all.
Do you find walnuts sweet?
‘No Coming Back,’ by Keith Houghton
In the wake of Vidar Sundstøl’s “Minnesota Trilogy” books, which did not send me over the moon, I tried a different mystery novel, also set in Minnesota’s Arrowhead region – No Coming Back, by Keith Houghton.
Alas, I did not love this one either. While Sundstøl’s books are stylish but (in my opinion) perverse, Houghton’s book seemed to me over-beaten and under-baked. Though not without promise.
Jake Olson returns to his (fictional) home town of Harper, Minnesota after nearly 20 years gone. He’s been in prison, convicted as a teenager of killing his girlfriend, Jenna. He didn’t do it. Now (and this is one of the first of many improbabilities that abound in this story) the local newspaper publisher, who has always supported him, hires him to re-investigate the murder and identify the real killer.
On the same day Jake comes home (another improbability), a large tree, a local landmark, is toppled by a storm. Under the roots a skeleton is found. Jake is convinced it’s Jenna’s. Now he’s on a mission, but he has lots of opposition. Jenna’s brother has promised to kill Jake. The local sheriff has always hated him, and is just waiting for an excuse to bust him and send him back to Stillwater on a parole violation.
And there are larger challenges. Everybody in this book – everybody – is lying. Everybody has something to hide.
The whole thing was too much for me. Too many conspiracies, and too complicated. Too many lies. Too much violence for the setting. Too many villains. Toward the end I didn’t even care about Jake, which is a major narrative failure.
I think Keith Houghton shows promise as a novelist. He can turn a good phrase when he’s on his game (though his diction can be sloppy too). But this book was just too convoluted and nihilistic for its own good, in my view.
Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.
‘The Secret of Wild Boar Woods,’ by P. F. Ford
At this point, my ongoing reviews of P. F. Ford’s Dave Slater novels are more in the line of reading reports than reviews. You already know what I think of them – not top-level literature, but amusing entertainment.
In The Secret of Wild Boar Woods, Detective Sergeant Dave Slater is landed with a new partner – a cute little female detective. To make it even more precious, her last name is Darling (and yes, comic hay is made out of that). They are called to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, last scene waiting for her mother outside her school. When the missing person case becomes murder, they’re faced with a confusing tangle of intertwining relationships, familial and sexual, among the girl’s family and their friends. Meanwhile Dave patiently attempts to teach his green and volatile new partner how to act like a grown-up cop.
As always, the story was entertaining. As always, I’m a little annoyed by the author’s treatment of his characters. He changes his mind about them between stories, so that someone we’ve been taught to like in the last book because a bad’un in the present book. That, in my opinion, is not playing entirely fair with readers who faithfully follow the series.
Still, The Secret of Wild Boar Woods was pretty good reading, and it’s not expensive in Kindle. Recommended, with cautions for adult themes.
Medieval Women Were Not Waifs
A new exhibit at the Getty offers a revealing look at women from the Middle Ages.
With an understandable weariness, the exhibition’s creators acknowledge, both on the introductory museum label and catalogue book jacket, that most people imagine medieval women as damsels in distress, being rescued perhaps by a dragon-hunting St. George. One has to meet the popular mind, fattened by dismissals of the Middle Ages (“a world lit only by fire”), where it unfortunately lags. But to slay this myth as surely as St. George speared his dragon, the curators unfurled manuscripts of a different, lesser known legend, that of St. Margaret. Consumed by a dragon, Margaret ripped her way out of his stomach herself with a crucifix. Like Jesus, it seems, Margaret could be born (from a dragon at least) without the help of a man.
Two-thirds of Vidar Sundstol’s ‘Minnesota Trilogy’
Kind of like Sigrid Undset, only anti-Christian.
That’s my reaction after reading the first two volumes of Norwegian author Vidar Sundstøl’s “Minnesota Trilogy” – The Land of Dreams and Only the Dead.
Lance Hansen is a “forest cop” – a policeman in the Superior National Forest, in Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region. He’s a good man, devoted to his (broken) family and fascinated with genealogy and local history. One day, while checking out an illegal camping spot, he finds a naked man babbling in a foreign language. At length he recognizes it as Norwegian, his father’s native tongue. Nearby he finds another naked man, viciously battered to death.
The case is quickly handed off to the FBI, as the crime scene is on federal land. But Lance keeps poking around the edges. Not to find the truth – he’s very much afraid he knows the truth – but because he saw something that day, something he has not told and will not tell anyone, for personal reasons. Continue reading Two-thirds of Vidar Sundstol’s ‘Minnesota Trilogy’
News from the frontier
Today is my birthday. I could tell you how old I am, but then I’d have to kill you.
All in all, it hasn’t been a bad one. A friend had me over to grill on Saturday, and on Sunday I had lunch with another friend. And today at work, three guys from the seminary came to my office and sang “Happy Birthday.” But in a whisper, because it was the library.
Very good, guys.
You know what getting older is like? I have a Metaphor. It’s like you’re walking in the woods, and following the path just like the maps said. And then suddenly you’re off the path, and you don’t know where the heck you are. And there’s no point trying to find the path again, because you’re never going back to the path. It’s deeper into the woods from now on.
Henceforth, don’t call us Senior Citizens. Call us Pioneers.
Mark your calendars
On August 12, the Vikings and I will be attending the 75th Anniversary of the Activation of the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate), also known as the Viking Battalion, at Camp Ripley, near Little Falls, Minnesota. The address is 15000 Highway 115, Little Falls 56345.
I’ve told you about the 99th before. They were a “foreign legion” brigade recruited mostly from stranded Norwegian merchant sailors and Norwegian-Americans, after the Occupation of Norway. They served with distinction in the Battle of the Bulge, and participated in the “Monuments Men” operation. At the end of the war they were in charge of the transition back to civilian rule in Norway. A few of them were siphoned off for special duty, and became part of the original core of the OSS (later the CIA).
The event will be open to the public from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
The organization’s web site is here. There’s also a Facebook group.
New Gawain and Green Knight Translation
James Wilson praises a new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by John Ridland, calling it a “startling success.”
Most translators have either abandoned the [loose alliterative lines of the original] altogether or tried to replicate its alliterative movement in hopes of conveying its harsh, Germanic energy. Ridland, in contrast, renders the poem in loose iambic heptameter, thereby giving us a form that sounds both native and natural to our ear. He also introduces sporadic and spritely alliteration to preserve a hint of the poem’s exotic roughness.
He offers an excerpt, which you might compare with this translation (from the first stanza of part two):
a year turns full turn, and yields never a like;
the form of its finish foretold full seldom.
For this Yuletide passed by, and the year after,
and each season slips by pursuing another:
after Christmas comes crabbed Lenten time,
that forces on flesh fish and food more simple.
(via Prufrock News)
‘The Red Telephone Box,’ by P. F. Ford
The Dave Slater mystery series from P. F. Ford continues. In The Red Telephone Box, Detective Sergeant Slater’s partner, DS Norman, disappears. Norman has been taking secretive calls for some time, and Dave hasn’t wanted to poke into his affairs. Now he has to.
At the same time, a “new broom” has arrived in the police station in Tinton, Hampshire. Detective Inspector Goodnews (seriously, that’s her name) has been sent in to straighten out the somewhat chaotic organization of the department. Dave gets off to a rocky start with her, but gradually comes to appreciate her leadership qualities and detective skills. Also, she’s quite attractive, and they’re soon both hard at work denying to themselves their mutual attraction.
I’ve spoken condescendingly about the writing in this series, and in truth it’s not top notch. But there’s an interesting metanarrative in view here – minor subplots in the various books form an overarching narrative which (one assumes) will be made manifest in books to come. That helps keep the reader’s interest up. And author Ford isn’t afraid to mess with the cast. The characterizations, on the other hand, are a little ham-handed. Characters seem to do drastic things for inadequate reasons, just to move the plot along.
But I’m enjoying the series. I’ll read a couple non-related books now, and come back to Dave Slater. Mild cautions for adult situations.