Religion

They love Lucy

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This is St. Lucy’s Day, known as Luciadagen in Norway. Through the vagaries of history, St. Lucy came to have special significance in Scandinavia, based on a legend that she appeared one night during a famine, in a shining ship loaded with food for the people. It’s originally a Swedish custom, but widely observed in other Scandinavian countries too, for one girl of the family to get up early and prepare special rolls for breakfast, which she serves while wearing the Lucia costume, a white gown and a garland in her hair with lighted candles in it. She leads a procession of other girls, singing the traditional Italian song as performed in the video above.

More information about the day’s customs below the fold, courtesy of Sverre Østen’s book, Hva Dagene Vet, ©1988 by Ernst G. Mortensen’s Forlag (my translation): Continue reading They love Lucy →

Fiction, Reviews

The Shoulders of Giants, by Jim Cliff

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Any author who offers a fresh take on an old genre and carries it off successfully, deserves praise. So all in all I praise Jim Cliff for The Shoulders of Giants, the first volume in a projected new private eye series.

Cliff’s hero and narrator is Jake Abraham, a young private eye just starting out in his own office in Chicago. He says he grew up on Jim Rockford and Spenser, and he’s a little starry-eyed – and aware of it. The novelty of his character is that instead of the expected cynical, hard-boiled sleuth we’ve seen so often, Jake is young and optimistic and not entirely sure of himself – but nevertheless good at his job.

In this story he’s hired by a disgraced former police captain to find his daughter, who has disappeared. Before long her murdered body is found, and then there are more bodies, and soon the police are looking for a serial killer. Because one of the detectives is a friend of his, Jake is allowed to hang around, and even to help (he’s unique among fictional private detectives in actually standing aside and shutting up when the police tell him to), and his inquiries lead him at last into a deadly showdown with a murderer.

Jake is a likeable character, and I generally enjoyed the story. I do have quibbles. Author Cliff seems to have done a fair amount of research on guns, but he doesn’t seem to have much hands on experience – he thinks you’re supposed to shut one eye when aiming, which most instructors will tell you not to do, and he has Jake, in a gunfight in a dark room, waiting for his opponent to talk in order to aim at the voice, when he would have been able to aim at the muzzle flashes. And there are a couple language problems. He doesn’t know what “enormity” means, and he confuses the word “illicit” with “elicit.” He also suggests a murder method to the forensic scientists which I’m pretty sure they would have been familiar with.

Still and all, a good start generally. I like Jake Abraham, and am positively inclined toward the next book. Cautions for the usual language, sex (including a gay bar), and mature themes.

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Note to House Stark — it’s here

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Suddenly, without warning, a winter rang out.

It wasn’t winter on Saturday, but it became winter on Sunday. The forecast called for a few inches, and I wondered idly whether I’d need to use the snow blower.

But the snow kept coming. The question changed from whether I’d need to clear it out, to when would be the optimal time to start. I still had the idea it would taper off in the afternoon, so I waited until 2:00, then sallied forth. My neighbors, with whom I share the driveway, were already clearing off the area in front of their garage. I did the liturgical exercises necessary to start up a snow blower that’s been sitting since spring (even if you put fuel stabilizer in the tank, which I had), and then dug in.

I have often encountered bad snow for blowing, but this stuff was almost precision engineered to jam up in the blower chute. Heavy, wet, adhesive. The temperature was just below freezing, and the snow never quite made up its mind whether it wanted to be slush or not. I’d go a couple feet, then clear the chute with a stick, then go a couple more feet, repeat. It was a little better between the houses, where the sunlight didn’t reach. My neighbors stayed on the job too, which also helped. Eventually we got it cleared.

But it was still snowing.

It snowed through the night. The next night, after work, I ran the snow blower again, to clear the rest of the snowfall – a couple more inches. Fortunately the temperature had dropped, and this stuff blew out pretty nicely.

I realized that this was the first time in my life I’d been happy to see colder weather. Continue reading Note to House Stark — it’s here →

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Reading report: Angrvadil

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In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis recalls a turning point in his youthful imaginative life:

…I had become fond of Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf: fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner’s Drapa and read

I heard a voice that cried,

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, is dead —

I knew nothing about Balder, but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) ….

This would seem to be the passage that Saga Bok Publishers (the discerning Norwegian firm which has hired me to translate one of its books) references on the back cover notes of Angrvađil when it says (my translation), “Artists, politicians, and others have been inspired by the stories in this book – from C.S. Lewis who was ‘uplifted’ by the magical atmosphere of the stories – to our own Roald Amundson….” I’m not sure that statement is strictly accurate, since Tegner’s Drapa as such doesn’t appear in the book, but there’s some association if only in that the Swedish poet Esaias Tegner’s translation would have been the basis for the English version Lewis read (assuming he read Fridtjof’s Saga and not just Longfellow).

The good people at Saga Bok sent me a copy of their new translation of Fridjtof’s Saga, along with preliminary material, entitled Angrvađil: Sagaene om Torstein Vikingsson & Fridtjov den Frøkne (Angrvađil: The Sagas of Torstein Vikingsson and Fridtjov the Bold).

These sagas are part of what are known as the Fornalder Sagas. The Fornalder Sagas are very old stories, preserved in Iceland not as reports of actual events, but purely for their legendary interest. Prof. Titlestad, whose book I’m translating, makes serious claims for the value of the sagas as historical sources, saying that useful information can be preserved in folk memory for about 300 years. The Fornalder sagas were much more than 300 years old at the time of writing, though. One reads them for the pleasures of the stories in themselves. Continue reading Reading report: Angrvadil →

Authors, Religion

Why Christians Should Stay Away from Ayn Rand

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Joel Miller writes about the essence of Ayn Rand’s anti-Christian philosphy:

Rand’s disdain for altruism is at root a protest against the cross. Christ’s crucifixion was immoral for Rand not because people took Jesus’ life, but because he volunteered it. And worse, because he sacrificed his perfect life for our imperfect lives. As she told Playboy:

Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice.

Fiction, Reviews

The Scarred Man, by Andrew Klavan

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I’ve actually reviewed Andrew Klavan’s novel The Scarred Man (written under the pseudonym Keith Peterson, and recently released as an e-book by Mysterious Press) before on this blog. But I want to direct your attention to these books, and I re-read it recently, so it can’t hurt to discuss it again.

Mike North, the hero and narrator, is a young news reporter in New York City, and a very good one (this was written back before the internet holed the newspapers at the waterline). He is assistant to a legendary newsman named McGill, who asks Mike to come along upstate with him to spend Christmas at his home, since he (Mike) has no family. Mike agrees, and while there he meets McGill’s daughter Susannah, and falls so deeply and suddenly in love that everyone in the room can read it on his face. Susanna returns his feelings and they get along very well (including a sexual encounter under the Christmas tree while everybody else is sleeping) until somebody suggests telling ghost stories. Mike, on an impulse, makes up a story off the top of his head—about a sinister man with a scarred face, who dogs another man’s steps.

Suddenly Susannah is screaming, “Stop it! What are you doing to me?” She flees to her room, and the next morning she’s gone back to school.

It takes a few weeks before Mike realizes he has to go up to Susannah’s college and talk to her.

And as he pulls into the entrance to her college, he sees the scarred man from his story in his headlights.

I think this is one of the best set-ups for a thriller I’ve ever read. What’s especially great is that The Scarred Man is not a supernatural story. Everything that happens has a rational explanation. And it’s up to Mike and Susannah to figure it out, because the mystery involves the upcoming execution of a man who may not deserve to die. And the Scarred Man is still out there, dogging their steps, carrying the answers to their personal mysteries – which they may or may not want to learn.

On my second reading, I didn’t think the balance of the book was quite as great as the set-up, but it would be very hard for any story to meet that standard. Klavan fans who know him best from his current books should be warned that this is the early, liberal Klavan. He doesn’t slander conservatives, but the cultural insularity of his background shows through, especially in the addition of a character whom we are supposed to believe is a Christian fundamentalist preacher, even though his speech is peppered with obscenities. This is a fundamentalist preacher as imagined by a New Yorker who’s never actually met one. Attitudes toward sex may also offend some readers.

But it’s a great story, and one that will stick with you. Highly recommended.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Fourth Annual Advent Ghosts Storytelling

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Loren Eaton refers to the beautiful aurora in northern-most and southern-most skies, which is one of the cool aspects of the new Angry Birds Seasons update, but I don’t plan to talk about that here. I wanted to announce my participation in Loren’s shared storytelling event, Advent Ghost 2012. We will be posting our 100-word stories on our respective blogs on Saturday, December 22, and Loren will link to all of them on his blog. I’ll be sure to link to this indexing post too. Now, you have something to look forward to. There’s no need to thank me.

You can read past stories for this event and other flash fiction I’ve posted in our Creative Writing category.

Authors, Writing

Re-writing The Hobbit

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I know what you’re thinking, but this is post is not a rant about the changes that (one assumes) are being made in the new The Hobbit movie. Frankly, I’m looking forward to the movie. I looked at the web site today, and checked out the photo gallery, and there was one where the dwarfs were wearing hoods. Frankly, that was my main problem with the previews I saw. Tolkien was always consistent in putting dwarfs in hoods. Gimli’s lack of a hood in the trilogy troubled me. But this time they’ve got hoods, at least part of the time. So good.

No, I want to share with you this YouTube video, which was sent to me by Dale Nelson. It’s part of a lecture by Prof. John D. Rateliff, telling what he learned about Tolkien’s writing process through examining his original Hobbit manuscripts at Marquette University, where they are stored. I enjoyed it.

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Take six, they’re small

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So Dave Brubeck died today. A great loss, though he lived a very long life. I recall a conversation some years back where a guy told me he’d tried to get into jazz but just couldn’t. I agreed that I don’t get jazz either. “But I do like Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five,’” I said.

According to this piece at First Things, Brubeck was a convert to Catholicism. I recall a (different) friend telling me quite a few years ago that Brubeck was coming to his church to lead a musical event. So I’d heard he was a Christian, but didn’t know which branch.

They can always use another ivory maestro in heaven, I’m sure.

Haven’t written a rambling, self-indulgent post about my own life for a while. Come to think of it, our stats have gone up too. I wonder if there’s any connection… no. Impossible.

I did Thanksgiving with the family as is the custom, and it went pretty well. Except that I slipped down the basement stairs in the morning while getting the turkey ready, and came out pretty sore. It’s getting better slowly, but I’m confident I bent my tailbone. Again. I did it once before, years and years ago, and as it happens it occurred right here in Roseville, the summer I was doing youth work here. I should probably move away for my own safety. On the other hand, if it’s another 40 years before the next accident, I guess I’m pretty safe, even if I live as long as Brubeck. I did not go to see a doctor. He’d only tell me to apply heat and take pain killers, which I’m doing anyway.

I finally replaced the rubber stair treads I’d been meaning to put in for seven years, though.

The translation job forges on. I had one of those little “eureka” moments last night. The author, in talking about King Harald Finehair’s political system, used a Norwegian term, “statsapparatt.” I translated it literally – “state apparatus” – but knew a better term was out there somewhere. Last night I got it at last – “political machine.” I’m pretty confident that’s the actual idea. This pleased me no end.

Words are my life. Pathetic, isn’t it?