John Rhys-Davies on how The Lord of the Rings may have been influenced by World War I.
“Tolkien’s experience of war left him with ‘a deep sympathy and feeling for the “tommy,” especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties.’ He based the character of Samwise Gamgee on common soldiers that he had known during the war, men who kept their courage and stayed cheerful when there was not much reason to hope.
World magazine is praising a new Irish movie called Calvary, which depicts a Catholic priest whose life has been threatened by a parishioner who suffered abuse by another priest in the past. Writer and director John Michael McDonagh wanted to talk about serious issues in this film, not smirk like a hipster at anyone who claims to believe something.
“The film is not made for ironic hipsters who are slouching through life, never coming up with any emotional or intellectual response for anything. As if that’s too—‘Oh, I don’t want to get into all that, let’s just watch some TV show.’ To me, it’s a film made for those people, who I assume is all of us, who are striving for some kind of philosophical decision about why we’re here. Fox Searchlight probably won’t like me saying this, but it’s a film about death. There’s lots of references to death all the way through, and it’s coming to terms with what’s going to face us at the end of our lives.”
He goes on to describe his love for Flannery O’Connor.
This one should have been a winner. Certainly for me. A hard-boiled mystery set in the Viking Age, written by a modern Dane to illuminate King Cnut (or Canute, or Knut) the Great, conqueror of England, a remarkable man mostly forgotten by history. I really wanted to like this book.
Sadly, I was disappointed with The King’s Hounds by Martin Jensen. Not that it was awful. It just didn’t grab me much.
Our detectives in this story are Winston, an English illuminator (he paints pictures in books) and Halfdan, a half-Danish nobleman’s son, recently deprived of his family estates.
They join forces while on their way to the city of Oxford, where King Cnut has called an assembly. A noblewoman has summoned Winston to draw a portrait of the king for her. But when they get there the patroness is gone. Instead they meet the king who (for somewhat unconvincing reasons) decides Winston is just the man to investigate the recent murder of a Saxon nobleman. They have a three day deadline, or the king will Be Displeased, and probably kill them.
So they start wandering around the town and its many visitors’ camps, asking questions. Along the way Winston falls in love, Halfdan kills a couple assassins and saves a pretty girl’s life, and a bewildering number of nobles are forced to reveal their secrets.
It’s hard to say why it all bored me, but it did. The authenticity level wasn’t bad. The royal deadline on the investigation should have raised dramatic tension. But it seemed like just one repetitive scene after another. Characters blurred into one another; even Winston and Halfdan didn’t really come alive for me.
I don’t think I can blame the translator. I was impressed with the absence of the stiffness I generally note in translations from Scandinavian novels. In fact, the prose kind of reminded me of my own – except that I would never put neologisms like, “bugging me,” “debriefed,” and “gold digger” in a story set in the 11th Century.
Didn’t work for me, to my great regret. Your mileage may vary. Only mild cautions for language and mature content.
“There’s an old saying that you should never judge a book by its cover. Today, perhaps, that conventional wisdom has rarely had more meaning. To a degree that might astonish the reading public, a significant percentage of any current bestseller list will not have been written by the authors whose names appear on the jackets.”
Andrew Crofts, “one of Britain’s most invisible and yet successful writers,” has written out his experiences as a ghostwriter for 40 years. Bestselling ghosted works include a lot of “misery memoirs.” (via Prufrock)
Just now I’m traversing what somebody (I think it was Bunyan) termed “a plain called Ease.” I have a few weeks off from graduate school, so I’m doing a little more reading for pleasure, and also watching quite a lot of TV, both the broadcast kind and the kind you get from Netflix and Amazon Prime.
A couple weeks ago I got to thinking, as I sometimes do, about Wild Bill Hickok, to me one of the more interesting characters of the wild west. I decided, with some reluctance, to watch the series “Deadwood,” which is getting to be fairly old as cable series go, but I’d avoided it.
It proved to be what I’d heard – lively, gritty, and profane. I watched the first season, mainly to see how they treated Wild Bill. Taken in that regard, I was mostly pleased. I’ve waited a long time for a really good portrayal of Wild Bill, and Keith Carradine’s character here is pretty close to the reality, as I see it.
Nevertheless, I finished that first season with the same resolve I reached when I finished the first season of “Mad Men.” I couldn’t think of a reason to spend more time with these extremely unpleasant people. Wild Bill is dead. Seth Bullock and his partner are pretty good, but most everybody else is either a fool or a knave. Continue reading Viewing report: ‘Deadwood’
“Traditionally, reference Bibles look like dictionaries that you look things up in,” [Mark] Bertrand said. “Reader-friendly Bibles are more like novels. I think what is happening is that we’re lamenting that people don’t read their Bibles enough, and now we’ve realized the design of Bibles has an influence on that.”
The acceptance of this new format for Bible reading may come out of our distracted habits of Internet reading, notes Dane Ortlund of Crossway.
A French woman blogs her bad experience at an Italian restaurant in an up-scale French tourist town on the Atlantic, and her review eventually ranks fourth in all Google searches for that restaurant. That was too high and hurt the establishment’s reputation, lawyers argued, so a French court has ordered her to change the post’s title (she retracted it entirely) and pay $2,000 in damages.
French lawyers say this won’t become a precedent at all. Sure.
I won’t name the restaurant, in case it adds to the blogger’s grief, but the CS Monitor says that while the bad review is offline (though archived by Internet gnomes), many comments are being posted about how this restaurant can’t take criticism.
Also in this report: “German politicians are considering a return to using manual typewriters for sensitive documents in the wake of the US surveillance scandal.” This is probably a smart move.