Today’s Thanksgiving hymn is “We Gather Together,” a 1625 anonymous song, translated from the Dutch anthem “Wilt heden nu treden” by Theodore Baker. The melody is a popular sixteenth-century Dutch folk tune.
“… for the LORD your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory” (Deut 20:4 ESV).
We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing; He chastens and hastens his will to make known; The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing. Sing praises to his name; he forgets not his own.
Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining, Ordaining, maintaining his kingdom divine; So from the beginning the fight we were winning; Thou, Lord, wast at our side; all glory be thine!
We all do extol thee, thou leader triumphant, And pray that thou still our defender wilt be. Let thy congregation escape tribulation; Thy name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!
Sheila had written the shortest letter, asking plainly for Scrabble, providing no alternative. They decided on a spinning globe of the world for Grace, who wasn’t sure what she wanted but had written out a long list. Loretta was not in two minds: if Santa would please bring Enid Blyton’s Five Go Down to the Sea or Five Run Away Together or both, she was going to leave a big slice of cake out for him and hide another behind the television.
Claire Keegan’s 2021 novella, Small Things Like These, is a story about Bill Furlong, a hard-working father of five girls. He’s the man who keeps his 1980s Irish town, New Ross, warm, selling timber, coal, anthracite, and slack. It’s honest work that puts a roof over your head, though the windows may be drafty. He regularly remembers his childhood as the son of a single woman who worked for a kindly widow. Surely, he thinks, someone in town knows who his father is, if by nothing else than a strong resemblance. But no one has even suggested a possibility.
With the Christmas holidays coming and typical last-minute fuel orders to fulfill, Furlong makes a delivery that raises significant questions about his role as a man and member of the community.
I don’t know why I love Irish things. I think half of my family hails from Ulster, which probably means they were Scottish, but something provoked me as a teenager to define myself as being half-Irish (in the loose way many Americans talk about their heritage). All that to say, Keegan’s novella had cozy moments in both the Christmas atmosphere and the Irish dialogue. I found those pages nostalgic somehow. I bought the book wondering if the whole story would be that way.
No, this is a sparing, literary work that captures a few days of Bill Furlong’s life. He’s a man of few words, so a brief story like this fits him, leaving us with a good impression of him and perhaps the same questions he has. I don’t want to spoil the book by articulating those questions, but I will say they are relatively timeless and fit with the Christmas story, just as the title echoes the primary theme: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Mt 25:40 NKJV).
I have enjoyed Colin Conway’s 509 series, detective novels set in the Spokane, Washington area. When the story collection, The Eviction of Hope, showed up, I realized I hadn’t read one of the books in a while, so I got this one.
The concept (based on a real-world situation) is that “The Hope,” a residential hotel, once a grand place but now home to transients and drug addicts, is being sold for gentrification. That means the residents, some of them hard-luck civilians, others low-level criminals, are being thrown out onto the streets. Author Conway gathered a group of established crime writers to imagine some of the stories of those dispossessed people.
I am of two minds about the stories in this book. They are well-written. Several of them grabbed me.
However, most of them are downers. One, in particular, involves a Christian woman who disappoints us morally.
All in all, The Eviction of Hope was depressing but well done.
I offer the two pictures above for your perusal and ponderation.
The top one is one of my favorite personal snaps, which I used as my desktop wallpaper for many years. It’s from my first Norway cruise (2001, I think). As I recall, I took it from the aft deck, on the Aurlandsfjord, at breakfast on my birthday, which is in July.
The second picture is one I generated the other day using my bete noir, Artificial Intelligence. My new laptop includes the Paint app, which has a brand new AI feature. I tried a few experiments with it in odd moments, and one time I asked it to show me a Norwegian fjord.
It gave me three options, of which the one above was one. I thought it looked familiar.
I wonder if the gnomes of the interwebs incorporated my image into their “fjord” database.
Of course, how many possible combinations of mountains and water can there be? My photo pleased me because it was sort of an ideal of a fjord. The resemblance therefore, could easily be coincidental.
[Not only do I hate AI, but I fear it. I cannot bring myself to openly accuse it of plagiarism. What grim vengeance might it take?]
As an aside, I might mention that my attempt to restore curly single quotation marks, in the draft of The Year of the Warrior that I’m preparing for Amazon paperback, was wholly successful. It worked. It worked at once. It worked better than I dared hope.
I forgot to show you a picture of the new, fully realized, paperback version of King of Rogaland. So here it is. That’s a pretty good cover, I think.
I also think I told you I’m working on an Amazon edition of The Year of the Warrior in paperback. At the risk of sounding self-satisfied, I’m actually kind of impressed with it. It’s a good story – grabs the reader and keeps the action going. I’m not sure I’ve improved a whole lot as a writer in the 25-plus years since the thing was published.
I was taken aback to discover that the final draft I’m working with – as well as the privately printed version I’ve been handselling for a few years – features “dumb quotes” rather than “smart quotes.” You probably know what that means – smart quotes are the curly ones, curving forward and backward, that you find in printed material, which MS Word usually creates for you automatically. Somehow (I think it must have been during the text’s brief sojourn as a Google Doc) it lost its smarts. And I’m embarrassed to offer the book to the Amazon public in such a state. It would be a blow to my aforementioned self-satisfaction.
So I did a web search and found a method for converting them back. To my astonishment, it worked. Now I’m trying to figure out how to do the one-slash quotation marks and apostrophes.
I’ll probably mess it up. I need to save backup draft.
I tell you, you turn your back for a minute and the parade passes you by. Case in point: the movie The Arctic Convoy, which apparently came out in July with my even noticing.
This film holds a unique place in my heart, as it was the first film script I ever worked on as a translator. (Looks like it may also be the last one to actually be released.) I had responded to an inquiry for translators in a Facebook group, and a chunk of The Arctic Convoy (then simply entitled Convoy, obviously an unhappy name choice for the American market) came to my email box.
I did my usual magic, and my boss seemed pleased with my work. So I was allowed to join the pool of subcontractors.
As I recall, my boss had another employee serving as a sort of vice-boss, and that employee critiqued my next submission. She wasn’t happy with my work. She told me the kind of “dynamic equivalence” I do (trying to produce equivalent idioms in natural English) wasn’t the right idea. What they wanted, she said, was a flat, literal translation. Basically AI stuff. This was disappointing, as I genuinely enjoy freer translation work, but I needed the money and complied.
The next critique I received, after I’d done another chunk, was from the main boss. Pay no attention to what the sub-boss says, she told me. Do that thing you did the first time. And I was happy, and our relationship flourished, with some ups and downs, until Artificial Intelligence Conquered the Earth.
Anyway, critical reviews of the movie haven’t been fervid, but it looks pretty exciting to me, and I know the story is strong. If you saw the miniseries The War Sailor (which I also worked on), this deals with the same topic, but concentrated on a single voyage.
Lord Emsworth finished his port and got up. He felt restless, stifled. The summer night seemed to call to him like some silver-voiced swineherd calling to his pig….
And suddenly, as it died, another, softer sound succeeded it. A sort of gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.
The nuts and bolts of P. G. Wodehouse’s short story collection, Blandings Castle, are easily covered. This is a compilation of several early Blandings Castle stories, featuring Clarence, Lord Emsworth, followed by a few odds-and-ends stories, and finally a few of the Mulliner stories, in which Mr. Mulliner tells a group of pub friends stories about his various relations – in this case, relations who lived and worked in Hollywood (as Wodehouse himself did for a time).
I won’t describe most of the stories. They are what you expect, and they are delightful.
Instead, I want to indulge in a few theological observations, because that (oddly) is where my thoughts went as I read.
The Great Divide in Wodehouse is drawn, of course, between the Jeeves stories and all the rest. What I began to wonder about as I read is the fact that – although they both operate in the same fictional universe (there are even stories where characters cross over), they seem to nevertheless operate in different theological universes.
The Jeeves stories, it seems to me, take place in a fallen universe. There is “evil” (admittedly rather silly evil) in the Jeeves stories, and poor Bertie Wooster would come to ruin (usually an unhappy marriage) without Jeeves there to rescue him. Jeeves shares the first two letters of his name with Jesus. He is a very present help in trouble. Although infinitely higher and more intelligent than Bertie, Jeeves has emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant. On him depends all the innocence of Bertie’s fictional life.
The Blandings Castle stories, on the other hand, seem to be set in an unfallen world. “Evil” of the same kind as in the Jeeves stories does indeed arise, but it always resolves itself without any heroic intervention. There seems to be a natural balance in this world, and the proper order reasserts itself automatically.
It occurs to me that this may be some kind of unfallen world. Perhaps Eden was like this, and Heaven will be again. Problems arise, but the natural order reasserts itself.
(I do not, I hope you understand, imagine that Wodehouse had these concepts in mind. I don’t even know what – if anything – he believed. I just think that his genius, like all great genius, drew on Eternal Things.)
I might also mention (honorably) one of the miscellaneous stories, neither a Blandings nor a Mulliner: “Elsewhere, a Bobbie Wickham Story.” This one was a gem.
Bobbie Wickham is a familiar character from the Jeeves stories – she was even engaged to Bertie on at least one occasion. Like all Wodehouse girls, she’s smarter than any of his young men, stubborn, self-willed and sweetly ruthless. Here we see her at her best; like Bertie she is being coerced into a marriage she does not wish, so she sets about manipulating the males around her. If you’re familiar with H. H. Munro (Saki), you probably remember the story, “The Open Window.” The girl there whose speciality was “romance at short notice” was a forerunner to Bobbie Wickham. Wonderful story.
In summary, this is a delightful collection of delightful stories which can only do good in the world.
Today’s hymn of humble reliance on the Lord comes from an Englishman who was devoted to Sunday School. William Freeman Lloyd (1791-1853) was born in Uley, Gloucestershire and worked in Oxford and London. The tune is an adaptation of an aria from Giovanni Paisiello’s opera La Molinara (The Miller Girl).
“But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hand; rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors!” (Psalm 31:14–15 ESV)
1 My times are in Your hand; my God, I wish them there! My life, my friends, my soul, I leave entirely to Your care.
2 My times are in Your hand whatever they may be, pleasing or painful, dark or bright, as You know best for me.
3 My times are in Your hand; why should I doubt or fear? My Father’s hand will never cause His child a needless tear.
4 My times are in Your hand: Jesus, the Crucified; those hands my cruel sins had pierced are now my guard and guide.
5 My times are in Your hand; such faith You give to me that after death, at Your right hand I shall for ever be.
A hundred years ago in Vietnam, when the French controlled their education, Edgar Allan Poe was believed to be “America’s literary giant.” They were familiar with eerie stories of supernatural beings, which a long-standing Chinese genre gave them, so discovering Poe was like grandkids discovering Mam-ma.
“Poe’s name evoked liberation of the mind, and he was praised as someone who had ascended from the mundane by the power of imagination,” Nguyễn Bình writes for Literary Hub, offering several examples of Poe’s influence on the nation’s literature.
In 1937, author Thế Lữ began writing detective fiction. “In the story “Những nét chữ” (Letter Strokes), [Hanoi-based hero] Lê Phong told the Watson-like narrator: ‘The stuff about reading people’s thoughts from their faces like Edgar Poe and Conan Doyle said… I’m only more convinced that they’re true. Because I just did so.'” (via Prufrock)
A couple more links for today.
Ted Gioia says the big guys are out to get independent creators. For example, Apple is squeezing Patreon. Google says it can’t find select websites. It’s ugly. Gioia writes, “I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.”
And is this the best sci-fi classic most fans have missed? “Though it routinely ends up on best-of-all-time lists, somehow, the 1974 science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye never actually seems to get read.” A quick glance at the first of 2200 reviews on Goodreads suggests the book hasn’t aged well.
Photo: Dinneen Standard station, Cheyenne, Wyoming. (John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)
I wanted to find some video of Sigrid Undset’s home, Bjerkebaek in Lillehammer, tonight. My translation of the Undset bio has gotten to the point where she’s an established literary figure, in a position to organize her life however she likes. One of the first things she did was to buy Bjerkebaek and remodel it in the style of a medieval farm.
But alas, the videos I found were either very short or in Norwegian without English subtitles. So I ended up looking for virtual tours of Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, which was also an important place to Undset, the Catholic convert. Her books include several journeys and pilgrimages there, a place where medieval Norwegians often went to pray at St. Olaf’s shrine.
I’m sure I’ve told you before that (according to my mother) one of my great-grandfathers worked as a laborer on the 19th century cathedral’s restoration. It needed restoration badly — centuries of Protestant neglect had left the place in pretty bad shape before National Romanticism inspired the population to want to see it the way it had once been.
I visited there on one of my Norway cruises, and have very pleasant memories of Trondheim and the cathedral. It was a beautiful day, and Trondheim is a beautiful town, laid out in a circular grid, like spokes in a wheel. To add to my pleasure, the archbishop’s palace (seen in this video) was hosting a medieval fair that day.
