Fiction

Bernard Cornwell: A Writing Master

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Joseph Bottum praises the achievements of historical writer Bernard Cronwell. “Cornwell prides himself on the historical accuracy of his books,” he says, “as well he ought. But it is a thin accuracy, limited to the stories’ fast-paced action.”

In his Saxon chronicles, Cornwell tells the tale of Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a child of a Saxon lord in Northumbria who was captured and brought up Danish raiders. Beginning with The Last Kingdom in 2004 and extending to the latest volume with Warriors of the Storm, Cornwell has been using the series to raise awareness of the historical foundation of England, in those moments when Alfred the Great fought off the Danes and established what Cornwell believes is the first unified people that could be called English.

Read Lars’ review of one of Cornwell’s Arthur legend books, The Winter King. (via Prufrock)

Non-fiction, Religion

How Un-European America Is

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A brief story about the aftermath of September 11 nicely illustrates how different things are in secularized Europe. I was at a conference of European and American lawyers and jurists in Rome when the planes struck the twin towers. All in attendance were transfixed by the horror of the event, and listened with rapt attention to the President’s ensuing address to the nation. When the speech had concluded, one of the European conferees—a religious man—confided in me how jealous he was that the leader of my nation could conclude his address with the words “God bless the United States.” Such invocation of the deity, he assured me, was absolutely unthinkable in his country, with its Napoleonic tradition of extirpating religion from public life.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia in his 2002 essay, “God’s Justice and Ours.”

Also, The Federalist has collected fifteen quotations from Scalia’s wonderful pen, like this one: “Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment.”

Fiction, Non-fiction, The Press, Writing

A Critic Is Like a Eunuch…

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… in a bakery. Is that how it goes? Whatever.

A.O. Scott would disagree with that metaphor, as he explains in his new book, Better Living Through Criticism. Fangirl Alissa Wilkinson reviews it.

Like a parent reconciling bickering siblings, Scott contends that criticism and art don’t merely need one another. They exist only because of one another: “criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood…”

Doesn’t interpreting art ruin the experience? Can’t we just appreciate it for what it is? “This is an old and powerful—in some ways an unanswerable—argument against criticism, rooted in the idea that creative work should be taken on its own terms and that thought is the enemy of experience,” Scott writes. “And it is indeed precisely the job of the critic to disagree, to refuse to look at anything simply as what it is, to insist on subjecting it to intellectual scrutiny.”

Because there are such things as good and bad metaphors, good and bad headlines, and compelling and lackluster stories. Critics can engage a piece on a different level than we have and challenge us to think about it and our reaction to it, which is close to, if not the same thing as, what artists do.

Uncategorized

What Does Your Generosity Cost?

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Freedom

Perhaps you’ve heard of the friend who loves to cook, so he invites people to his apartment or they invite him to their house and he prepares a loving, wonderful meal they couldn’t buy anywhere in town. Often his friends bring the steak or salmon, but they can’t do all of the shopping for him because he knows exactly what he wants and orders some of the spices in bulk. His chief ingredient is himself.

Perhaps you live in a community of volunteers, a place where people help each other regularly. They’re led by a few who seem to have a gift of seeing needs and knowing how to respond. They’re always painting, carrying, cleaning, assisting, or delivering something with others and probably chewing on someone’s ear at the same time. These people generously give their time and spirit.

What does the generosity of these friends cost them? Some of this work can be quantified in dollars, but at least half of it cannot. It’s skill, love, kindness, and optimism. It doesn’t break down easily, if at all, into dollars, but it does cost something. It isn’t free.

If you were one of these people, cooking a meal or helping a neighbor, what would you say your generosity cost? Why do you do it? Why do others do it? What would your life look like if no one ever gave anything like this to you?

These may not be easy questions, because we tend to think kindness doesn’t cost us anything. Skill may be the work of a lifetime, but what does it really cost on a particular project? When we aren’t paying for it, we may not see it.

But nothing is free. Everything costs something to someone.

I’m sure many people do believe some things are actually free, because they refuse to think beyond themselves. But I think many more people understand that things do cost something to someone, and they don’t care what it costs so long as whoever-it-is continues to pay for them.

Uncategorized

A Load of Cock and Bull

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“If truth can protect us from jaguars, dragons, demons and preachers, why can’t it protect us from presidential candidates whose cock-and-bull stories rank right up there with the Incas’ and the Mundas’?” — Marty Kaplan, “Cock-and-Bull Candidates” Sept. 28, 2015

What’s the origin of the phrase “cock and bull,” meaning “a load of hooey” (Hoowey? How do you spell that)? One story is about a battle of hype betwixt two inns.

The Cock and the Bull were two of the main coaching inns in the town and the banter and rivalry between groups of travellers is said to have resulted in exaggerated and fanciful stories, which became known as ‘cock and bull stories’. The two hostelries did, and still do, exist.

I gather these inns do, in fact, still exist, but whenever you hear stories like this, you should respond, “Oh, really?” or “Is that so?” Whatever you say, don’t believe the story. They’re almost never true.

As The Phrase Finder points out, “What is missing from the Stony Stratford tale, and this is commonplace in folk-etymological sources that attempt to connect language with a particular place (see by hook and by crook, for example), is any link between the supposed origin and the meaning of the phrase. Why should patrons of the Cock and the Bull have been any more likely to make up fanciful tales than anyone else?”

The actual (or at least much more probable) origin of “cock and bull” is the French term “coq-a-l’âne.” I know. You were just about to say that yourself.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War,’ by Joseph Loconte

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I’m not sure C. S. Lewis would have approved of this book. He maintained, on numerous occasions, that an author’s biography should be of no interest to the reader. Studying the lives of Milton or of Spenser, he insisted, would provide no insight into the meanings of their works beyond what an intelligent reader can gather from reading the plain texts.

Still, I think Joseph Loconte’s A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War serves a useful purpose. Amidst the tremendous popularity of the works of Tolkien and Lewis all these decades after their deaths, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about their artistic motivations (particularly in Tolkien’s case. I’m pretty sure a lot of fans of the movies think the books are about environmentalism). Loconte follows the two men’s lives, concentrating especially on their experiences in the First World War, and explains how the experience of battle (Lewis remembered thinking, “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about”) impressed itself on their memories and their imaginations. In the midst of the great disillusionment that swept Europe after the armistice, Tolkien kept his bearings, because he’d never fallen for over-optimistic enthusiasms like eugenics but had put his faith in eternal things. And in time he was able to help his friend Jack Lewis to understand as well.

For fans unfamiliar with the lives and the thought behind the books of these two men, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War may be very illuminating. It’s well written and well researched. I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sin Walks into the Desert,’ by Mat Ingwalson

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I’m not entirely sure what to say about Sin Walks into the Desert by Matt Ingwalson. The book’s concept was interesting enough to persuade me to download it, and I read it to the end (something I’m less and less willing to do with sub-par books). So this is a well-crafted and interesting novel. Very noir, in a modern vein, which is to say, kind of goth.

Sin (short for Anderson, his first name) is a… well it’s hard to figure what he is. He’s a loner. He looks and dresses and has tattoos like any ordinary punk, and he’s fairly neurotic. But he has special skills. As a boy (not that long ago) he was on the verge of murdering someone when his uncle (an FBI agent) summoned just in time by his worried parents, swept him up, took him home with him, and began training him to turn his natural gift for violence to useful purposes. But Sin never joined the FBI, or even the military. It isn’t made clear how he makes his living, unless I missed it.

Anyway, his uncle, whom he calls el Viejo, has disappeared, and friends fear something bad has happened to him. So Sin sets out to track the captors, employing the formidable skills he learned from the old man. This leads to a pretty shattering revelation, when all is said and done and a few people are dead.

If you like your books dark, you’ll like this one. I found Sin himself hard to like, but the writing and characterization are good, laid down in spare, downbeat prose.

Cautions for the usual. Moderately recommended, only because of my ambivalence about the main character.

Goofing

Hoo’s sorry gow?

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The other day, for reasons I don’t recall, the word “hoosegow” entered my mind. If you’re like me, you know it mostly from Westerns. It’s what crude cowboys called a jail. “Throw him in the hoosegow!”

It occurred to me to wonder about the origins of the word. Off the top of my head, I guessed it was one of those American borrowings from Dutch, like “boss.” The “hoose” element sounds like the Germanic “hus” or “huis,” meaning house.

So I looked it up. Turns out it’s not Dutch but Spanish, from the word “jusgado,” meaning jail. One of those cowboy borrowings from the Mexicans, like high heeled boots and sombreros.

And now you know too. Because I’m generous. Not a master of languages, but generous.

Update:

A Spanish-speaking friend tells me jusgado does not mean jail, but a male prisoner in a jail. This means dictionary.com is mistaken. I want my money back.

Fiction

Women Who Wrote Mysteries

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No voracious reader of detective fiction will complain [about Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s: A Library of America Boxed Set], since these were all better-than-average books of their era, which was no mean feat in the days that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler defined the new prose of the hard-boiled American crime novel. It’s just that the uniting theme—declared in the book’s introduction and echoed in its many reviews—is that women authors of those days were unfairly oppressed by mystery publishers and neglected by mystery readers, but those women nonetheless managed to create, unnoticed, the never-seen-before genre of the psychological and domestic crime story.

Joseph Bottum says this theme is nonsense (via Prufrock).

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Three Hostages,’ by John Buchan

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It was around 1980 that I caught a production of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages on PBS. The dramatization was a one-off; I don’t think that particular actor ever played Richard Hannay again. But it intrigued me enough to motivate me to read The 39 Steps, the first novel in the series. That made me a lifelong Buchan fan, but oddly enough I never read The Three Hostages until just now.

It’s good. I’d say it’s one of the stronger entries in a classic series.

In The Three Hostages, World War I is recently over. Richard Hannay, British intelligence agent extraordinaire, has settled down on a farm in Oxfordshire with his wife Mary (also a retired agent), and their small son. He looks forward (or thinks he does) to living the quiet life of a country squire. But then he receives an appeal for help. Three people, one of them a small boy, have been taken hostage. There is no clue as to the perpetrator. Reluctantly, Hannay agrees to look into it. Gradually he begins to suspect the last person anyone would suspect – a rising young politician who has endeared himself to nearly every influential person in London. A hopeless-seeming but successful investigation (hypnotism features strongly) is capped by a deadly man-to-man showdown in the Scottish highlands.

I was surprised – once again – by what a fine author John Buchan was. Among all the writers of the English “bulldog” school, nobody came near him when it came to writing readable prose. Richard Hannay is a vivid and likeable character, and all his friends are just as believable (his enemies, perhaps, a little less). He especially distinguishes himself in his descriptive passages, which are wonderfully done (this pleased me especially in the short section set in Norway).

Modern readers will be put off by racial and ethnic slurs which were a normal part of English life at the time. For some reason Hannay makes much of the villain having a round head, which he sees as un-English and sinister. On the other hand, those same readers will appreciate the active part Mary Hannay takes in the action.

If you’re open-minded enough to tolerate temporal diversity, The Three Hostages is great fun.