It’s Advent season, coming up on Christmas. I have my Christmas tree lit, and some candles are burning away like the billy-o, and I’m going to share another Sissel Christmas clip, because that’s what I do.
I believe Sissel has said this is her favorite song out of all her repertoire. I especially like the arranger’s hat tip to Grieg in the instrumentation.
How do I start this post without indulging my self-righteousness?
Probably impossible. I’m a pretty self-righteous guy when it comes down to it.
Let’s try this – I’m sure there are lots of principled leftists out there who are not reveling in the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Health Group.
But there sure seem to be a lot of them – and loud ones – playing Madame DeFarge right now. Reinforcing my unjust, unChristian prejudice that says that if you scratch a leftist, you’ll find Robespierre.
I know nothing of Brian Thompson’s personal life, beyond what Wikipedia tells me. He may have been a man I would not have liked. He may have been a man I despised.
He did not deserve to be murdered.
But that point is an obvious one, and not really the object of this post.
I was taken aback when I discovered Brian Thompson’s point of origin.
He was born in Ames, Iowa, but he grew up in Jewell Junction, better known to those familiar with it as just Jewell. He attended South Hamilton High School and the University of Iowa.
Distant bells rang in my long-term memory. I know Jewell, Iowa.
I had two roommates during my first year of college. One of them came from Jewell. I visited his home. Sang in a choir concert in his church. He used to talk about good old South Hamilton High.
But my connections go further than that. That part of Iowa is, in a sense, a homeland for me.
I’ve written here before (long ago; there’s no reason you should remember) about a collateral ancestor of mine. His name was Wier Weeks and he was a pioneer in the Norwegian immigrant community around Lisbon, Illinois. Lisbon became one of the centers where Norwegian newcomers settled in the mid-19th Century.
Eventually, the land filled up with Norwegians. (People doubtless sickened and died from the sheer social dullness.) So they got together, held a meeting or something, and decided to create a satellite colony. They sent out spies to find a likely place, and settled on an area in central Iowa. This area comprises such towns as Story City, Radcliffe, and Jewell. And it was there that my father’s parents’ families came in the 1880s. My grandfather Walker was born near Radcliffe, my grandmother near Story City. Both families moved north to Kenyon, Minnesota in the early 20th Century.
If you’re wondering what lesson I mean to draw – I guess it’s this. People from small towns in the center of Iowa are not the elite. They are not Mayflower descendants. They’re not even strictly WASPS, being (to a large degree) Scandinavian rather than Anglo-Saxon.
Thompson’s alleged murderer, on the other hand, was born to an affluent family in Maryland, and attended the exclusive Gilman School in Baltimore.
In other words, this was an act of “revolutionary” violence visited upon a member of the middle class (one who got above his station) by a member of the elite.
Which is, it seems to me, emblematic of revolution in the modern world.
Today the whole world is discussing the fall of Assad in Syria, the arrest of the Brian Thompson killer, and the verdict in the Daniel Penny trial.
It is a busy news day.
Which is rather sad from my point of view, because otherwise I’m confident everybody would be talking about the release, this weekend, of The Year of the Warrior in paperback on Amazon.
You realize what that means, don’t you?
It means that you can now own the whole series of Erling Skjalgsson books, all the same size, lined up on your favorite bookshelf, to the envy and amazement of all your most most sophisticated and insufferable friends.
Just make sure to leave a space for The Baldur Game (coming soon).
I started this business of formatting books for Amazon (if I remember correctly, though I have an idea I may be mistaken on some points) while setting up The Baldur Game. I watched how-to videos on YouTube that took me through the process of making a Microsoft Word document into something you could humbly submit to the gatekeepers of the great publishing leviathan.
I was terrified to do it, frankly. I am an old man, what they call a “digital immigrant,” someone who’ll never be quite at ease with all the ones and zeros. And yet I worked at it to the point where I’m actually relatively at ease uploading books now.
So I figured I might as well go ahead and make all my Erling books manifest. One after the other, I worked my magic, and behold, they did appear, and I held them in my hand, like the treasures of far Cathay.
And I cannot lie – there’s a thrill to holding your book that just doesn’t happen seeing it appear on a Kindle. Like holding your baby rather than looking at his picture. (But with less diaper changing and mineral oil.)
I even think I’ve developed a minor flare for design. I think the paper books I’ve created possess a sort of simple elegance. They look good to me. I am not ashamed of them.
This 1774 hymn was noted in the earliest record as a Christmas hymn by Robert Robinson (1735-1790) of Norfolk, England, and it shows how the first coming of the Lord is often blurred with his second coming. The original music for the hymn was lost, but what’s that to any hymn?
“I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
“And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.” (Daniel 7:13-14 ESV)
1 Mighty God, while angels bless thee,
May an infant lisp thy name?
Lord of men as well as angels,
Thou art every creature’s theme.
2 Lord of every land and nation,
Ancient of eternal days;
Sounded through the wide creation
Be thy just and lawful praise.
3 For the grandeur of thy nature,
Grand beyond a seraph’s thought,
For created works of power,
Works with skill and kindness wrought.
4 For thy providence that governs
Thro’ thine empire’s wide domain;
Wings an angel, guides a sparrow,
Blessed be thy gentle reign.
5 But thy rich, thy free redemption,
Dark thro’ brightness all along;
Thought is poor, and poor expression,
Who dare sing that awful song?
6 Brightness of the father’s glory,
Shall thy praise unutter’d lie?
Fly my tongue such guilty silence!
Sing the Lord who came to die.
7 Did Arch-angels sing thy coming?
Did the shepherds learn their lays?
Shame would cover me ungrateful,
Should my tongue refuse to praise.
8 From the highest throne in glory,
To the cross of deepest woe;
All to ransom guilty captives,
Flow my praise, for ever flow.
9 Go return immortal Saviour,
Leave thy footstool, take thy throne;
Thence return, and reign for ever,
Be the kingdom all thine own.
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Amen.
A Christian professor of fiction published a piece “To the Christian Writer” in which he recommends good art as a thing separate from Christian faith.
He begins by saying, “there’s no such thing as Christian art.” If someone wants to be a Christian, he should pursue it wholeheartedly, but “bad art comes out when you compromise art-making with some other intent.” Some other intent like Christian morals.
“If your fiction feels like it’s veering toward a moral conclusion, stop.”
I want to understand this professor’s argument and view it charitably, and I agree moralistic fiction is often shallow and ugly. I’m sure if I ever gain the courage to pick up Sheldon’s In His Steps, the novel that gave us the question “What Would Jesus Do?” I’ll regret it. I couldn’t make it past chapter one of The Shack. But separating Christian devotion from art sounds post-modern to me in all the wrong ways. What is art if it cannot be pursued as an expression of Christian truth?
I’m not sure he’s actually saying that, because he also says, “As a Christian person, would you not say it’s a joy to follow God? So follow him through your work. Quit telling him where to stand and how to speak.” That’s good. It calls back to moralistic work which may sound Christian while being far from it. That’s not good art.
“Preconceived moralizing jacketed in fiction aims for the head and the heart. If you want to be a good writer, aim elsewhere.” What does that mean? Aim for the spleen? What is good art if it doesn’t move the heart or elevate the affections (thinking of Jonathan Edwards’s language)? What makes the work of Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, Barbara Kingsolver, Haruki Murakami, Annie Proulx, or Salman Rushdie objectively good that he recommends them over Lewis, Chesterton, and O’Connor?
Could it be we’re actually wrestling over cultural respectability — that our work would find approval in the New York Times Review of Books or Harper’s Magazine?
I think art is its own virtue, like planting and tending a tree, and artistic choices are also moral choices. Some choices are going to be more accessible to the public than others. Some will require greater levels of skill to succeed. In all of these choices, the best ones (though maybe not the most popular) will be true, real, and good. Isn’t that what Christian art is all about?
Photo by Peter Ivey-Hansen on Unsplash
Always reliable. That’s the great thing about Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels, set in England’s lake district, not far from the Scottish border. The setting is as is expected – the fell country where Skelgill loves to fish and run. Dan Skelgill is a police detective, assisted by his (also reliable) sergeants – transplanted Londoner Sgt. Leyton, and attractive local Sgt. Emma Jones.
One of the great traditions in their neighborhood is the Bob Graham Round, a grueling fell running race. Skelgill has come up with an idea for a new variation, one that takes the same route but incorporates lake fishing. He’s taking some vacation time to test the concept out when he learns of the death of a local runner, killed by a hit and run driver, with no witnesses. Although he can’t take an active part in the investigation because he’s on holiday, he keeps in touch with Leyton and Jones as they investigate. That’s the premise of Murder in the Round.
Skelgill is (I think I’ve said this before) almost the opposite of Sherlock Holmes. Logical deduction is not his forte. He’s more like a hominid from the hunter-gatherer period, operating mostly by his senses, getting messages from the scents in the air and the tracks on the ground.
I used to wonder how long his low-key flirtation with Sgt. Jones would go on, but I’ve come to accept that Dan Skelgill lives in one of those fictional universes where no one ever grows older. They’ll both be young and smoldering as long as author Beckham goes on writing.
Good entertainment. Recommended.
I’m sure you’ve spent the whole day wondering how my project of uploading The Year of the Warrior for Amazon (paperback) went this morning. I thank you for your concern, but (as is so often the case) I overestimated my capacity.
What actually happened was that I spent my whole session doing some final tweaks on formatting – I had to create a table of contents, for one thing. MS Word has this utility for creating tables of contents, and it’s pretty slick once you’ve figured it out. Then I fixed my page headings and numbers, which I should have done before creating the table of contents. Because adding the page headings changed the word capacity of each page, so all the numbering changed, and I had to update the table. Also, I had to go through the whole thing and find places where I’d inadvertently created unnecessary blank pages by not keeping my page breaks tight. Which, of course, changed the page numbers again and required another table update. Several, in fact.
I’ll try to upload tomorrow. I’m thinking I’ll probably be able to upload it on my own account, rather than piggybacking on Baen’s listing. The main problem with that is that I won’t have my reviews to go with it. The reviews are many and – surprisingly – largely favorable.
I’ll probably have to beg my fans to put up new reviews. (Hint, hint.)
The video above is, of course, the immortal Sissel Kyrkjebø, doing the Norwegian Christmas hymn, “Deilig er Jorden” on Norwegian TV in 1991 (with English subtitles). The melody will be familiar to you. We call it “Beautiful Savior.” It generally surprises Americans (it surprised me) to learn that “Beautiful Savior” is a Christmas hymn in Norway.
I’ll also draw your attention to the way the Christmas tree is decorated. In Norway, it’s customary to take the silver garlands and run them straight down from the tree-tip to the base. The intention, I think, is to suggest the rays of the star (or angel) at the tree-top.
We Americans tend to wind our garlands around the tree. I’ve always assumed the intention is to mimic the way snow lies on fir tree branches.
Writing/publishing update: I’ve worked my way through The Year of the Warrior to prepare a paper version for Kindle Direct Publishing. (Note: This is a very long book. If sheer mass of paper is gauge of literary greatness, I’m on a level with Sigrid Undset and Tolkien and Tolstoy.) I’ve tried to clean it up, fix automatically generated punctuation problems, add a comma here and there where I thought it would aid reader comprehension.
So tomorrow I figure I’ll try to upload it. I anticipate that this will not work. This book is different from the others, because Baen Books still publishes the e-book (at my request). Will the Amazon system accept a paper version from somebody else? I expect there will be problems with that.
Amazon’s customer service has actually worked well for me in the past. I just figure there’ll be hoops to jump through. I’ll keep you posted.
Above, a sweet little video from NRK, the Norwegian state broadcasting service, with one of Norway’s favorite Christmas songs, Å Jul Med Din Glede.
The first verse means something like this (literal; no attempt at versification):
O Christmas with your happiness, oh childlike desire,
We all bid you welcome.
We all greet you with jubilant voices,
Ten-thousand times welcome!
We clap our hands, we sing and we laugh,
So glad we are, so glad we are.
We swing around in a circle and curtsey – and bow.
I don’t talk about politics much anymore on this blog – times have changed. Blogs are no longer a big thing for political discussion (nor for discussing books, come to think of it, but I think they’re better suited to books). The more immediate, shorter-form media like X are bigger today – though I can’t honestly say the level of discourse has improved.
But that’s beside my point. My point is that I want to touch on politics today – but not, I hope, in an inflammatory manner.
Though what I’m saying might work out more offensive (for some) than the kind of plain insult you see on X or Facebook.
Here’s what I have in mind. It’s no surprise, I imagine, that I’m pleased by the results of the recent presidential election.
But it’s not so much because I’m over the moon about the man we elected.
It’s about the fact that – it seems to me – we may be seeing at last the beginning of the end of Boomer ascendency.
I’ll grant that Donald J. Trump is a Boomer himself. (I’ll even grant, for the sake of argument, that I’m a Boomer too.)
But the leadership team he’s bringing in seems to be mostly younger people. Millennials and Gen X and… I forget what they call them all. They’re all whippersnappers to me.
I put much hope in whippersnappers these days.
The new leadership team that’s coming in never put flowers in their hair and went to San Francisco. They never dreamed of Woodstock. They never tuned in, turned on and dropped out.
In my opinion, we’ve had plenty of that.
The Greatest Generation raised us. They’d been through the Great Depression and World War II. They’d been deprived. They’d suffered. They’d tightened belts and watered down the soup through many long years.
After the War, they came home and vowed to give their kids everything they never had.
We got spoiled.
As we Boomers grew up, we were told over and over (I was there, I remember) that we were the smartest, best-educated generation the world had ever seen. We would change the world.
And boy, did we change the world.
We turned it into a hellscape. We started one war after another. We fostered radicalism and terrorism. We did our best to eradicate classical wisdom and undermine liberal democracy.
I think we’ve changed the world enough.
Maybe the kids can salvage something from the wreck.
Good luck, kids. I’m praying for you.
Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for—for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart—not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road’s end.
So it is done at last. I have completed yet another reading of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter – volume 3, The Cross. Tiina Nunnaly’s translation this time.
It’s a little like completing a long mountain hike, I guess. There’s more than one point where you pause along the path and think about how far you have to go, and sometimes you do get tired. Yet that’s just part of the experience, what you go through to enjoy the clear air and the spectacular views.
In case you’re not familiar with the story, the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy begins with our young heroine, the beautiful daughter of doting parents in 14th Century Norway, rejecting the dull young man they betrothed her to, and running off with a handsome, dashing knight.
In the following two books, she has to live with the consequences. Erlend, her husband, is not a prudent man. He leaves the management of their farm to others (often to Kristin herself) to involve himself in political intrigues, which in the end lose him his ancestral estate. In this book, they have retired to Kristin’s home farm, where Erlend is resented by the neighbors. Sigrid’s chief concern is transferred to their seven sons, and she learns the torments that accompany parenthood. Meanwhile, the Hound of Heaven is always pursuing her.
There’s exquisite irony in watching Sigrid, as she passes through the stages of life, first inspired by romantic ballads, then compared to a ballad, and finally seeing her son inspire a ballad of his own through his misguided actions.
Read Kristin Lavransdatter, and you’ll come to know Kristin better than you know a lot of your friends and family. In a sense, the trilogy is a soap opera – but it’s what soap operas aspire to be; a deep, unwavering examination of the human soul in its glory and its weakness. The scenery descriptions are vivid and immersive. It’s also a paeon to the grace of God.
Not light reading, but highly recommended.
