It’s Holy Saturday, so let’s begin with a few words about Christ.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. (Isaiah 53:8-11 ESV)
As for other subjects:
Read good books: Reading thoughtfully, like having a good conversation with an author, may be the very thing you need to reset your soul and rebel against the spirit of the age. “Christians who immerse themselves in creative writing are good stewards of their time — not wasteful — because writing, reading, and ruminating on words can glorify our Maker.”
Read and walk too: Some people have taken to walking while reading; some of them really can’t see where they’re going.
Booksellers New Friend?Once considered the embodiment of everything that was wrong in bookselling, Barnes & Noble is succeeding and many indie booksellers are rooting for it. (via ArtsJournal)
Isaac Watts’s “Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed” set to a common Irish folk melody
Ukraine is still under siege. NATO allies are sending ammunition, weapons, and food to Ukraine, but they will not close Ukrainian airspace to Russian aircraft. That would mean acknowledging World War III. I understand the hesitation, but I don’t understand, given everything Putin has said and done, how this isn’t a world war already.
Putin will not stop until Ukraine falls, and Ukraine must not fall. The only way out of this apart from NATO taking an active role in the conflict is either Ukrainian surrender or an uprising of the Russian people. The latter may happen anyway.
Mindy Belz has this piece on the Christianity of Ukrainians and how Putin is seen as a Christian despite his brutal oppression of them.
In related research, the Cato Institute has released its fourth annual Arms Sales Risk Index. “Selling weapons to governments that treat their citizens poorly increases the power of the state at the expense of its citizens, allowing them to respond to unrest and political challenges with violence.”
But I don’t want to talk about this here. What else do we have?
Word games: Based on under 200,000 tweets of game results, U.S. players rank 18th in the world of Wordle. Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are the top three. Among U.S. players, those in St. Paul, Minn. are #1.
Have you played Wordle? It’s fun, and you don’t have to stay with only one version of it. There’s Dordle, a two-up Wordle, and Quordle, a four-up version. Worldle is a geography version that tells you how far away in what direction is the correct answer. Heardle revives Name That Tune with six guess for sixteen seconds of music. I’ve enjoyed both Wordle and Quordle for a few weeks now.
Photo: Merced Theater, marquee detail, Merced, California. 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Every year creative works slip into the public domain for use in Geico ads and local craft fairs. This year, the first story by A.A. Milne of his delightful bear in the Hundred Acre Wood has become public domain.
“Milne actually wrote four books based on the character and books 2-4 have not lapsed into the public domain. This means that many of the characters from the series, most notably Tigger, have not lapsed and will not for a few more years. In fact, the image of Pooh wearing a red shirt was not published until 1932.”
Leyburn, North Yorkshire, England — A highly important collection of C.S. Lewis titles from the library of the author’s lifelong friend Cecil Harwood (1898-1975) is to be offered in Tennants Auctioneers’ Books, Maps & Manuscripts sale on 28 July 2021. […]
Leading the collection is C. S. Lewis’s personal annotated copy of Snorri Sturlason’s Heimskringla (Cambridge, 1932), a hugely evocative literary artefact shedding light on his mature engagement with the Norse sagas which had first stimulated his ‘imaginative Renaissance’ as a young schoolboy (estimate: £700-1,000 plus buyer’s premium).
I can’t find any information as to who got the book.
Publishers Weekly has their 2021 best books list out. They more than anyone can publish a Best-Of list early. If you were throwing out your own nominations for best books of the year, what you would say?
I’ve mentioned before that this blog shares a name with a bookstore but no other relationship. Brandywine Books of Winter Park, Florida, was a cute seller of used and well-kept book. The owner knew about our blog and I believe delighted in its existence. I know this because my sister stopped by a few years ago. The shop closed within the past two years.
Japanese readers are hooked on the belief that bestselling author Haruki Murakami should have won the Nobel for literature by now. The Japan Times claims Murakami is “best known for his 1987 bestseller Norwegian Wood,” but he has many other titles and presumably outpaces all other Japanese authors in sheer Nobel potential. The article notes a few reasons why he could contend for the prize and a few reasons he might not win it. (via Literary Saloon)
Did Ernest Hemingway actually say, “The rain WILL stop, the night WILL end, the hurt WILL fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found”? The Quote Investigator looks into it.
Author Glynn Young reviews the second Will Benson thriller, Blind Defence by John Fairfax, “so engrossing that the reader finds himself on the edge of his seat.”
Photo: Power’s Hamburgers, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1993. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.Purchase; John Margolies 2015 (DLC/PP-2015:142).
There should be a picture at the top of this post, showing me lecturing in my Victorian frock coat. But I didn’t think to have one taken. You’ll have to imagine it for yourself. This old photo of Boss Tweed should help.
The drive to Madison, Wisconsin runs between four and five hours, not counting gas and food breaks. That seems like a long drive to me in my old age, but I handled it. My chief concern was on-board entertainment, since the loaner I’m driving has no working stereo. I finally settled on buying an audio book from Amazon, and listening to it through earphones, on my Fire tablet. Worked OK, once I figured out how to start the reading at the beginning of the book. The Amazon people, like any good pushers, give you the first taste free, so I got a book I’d read already, Jørn Lier Horst’s Dregs. I’m glad I got a book I was familiar with, because sometimes one gets distracted (by Google Maps directions, for instance), and there’s no easy way to repeat text with your hands on the wheel. But all in all, a successful experiment.
As I mentioned last week, I’d been operating on the assumption that I was going to be lecturing on Saturday, then discovered it was really Friday. So I had to adjust my plans and rearrange my hotel reservation. That lost me any opening in the hotel where the meeting was, but I got a room just up the road. Within walking distance…. As if I was going to walk, with five cartons of books to carry, plus PowerPoint equipment.
The meeting was the Tre Lag Stevne, held every two years by a coalition of three Norwegian-American bygdelags. Bygdelags are associations of descendants from particular regions of Norway. Genealogy is one of their big activities. I’d spoken to them about Vikings, two years back in Alexandria, Minnesota.
This year the theme was the emigration period, including the Haugean evangelical movment. One of the organizers remembered that I came from Kenyon, Minnesota. He contacted me, saying he’d always been curious about the Old Stone Church, located between Kenyon and Faribault. Did I know anything about it? Indeed I did. The Old Stone Church (built around 1877) was the original building of my home congregation, Hauge Lutheran in Kenyon. On top of that, I grew up on a farm precisely 1.5 miles south of the old building. I had much to say on the subject, some of it pertinent.
Thus my lecture was outside of my usual wheelhouse, but I believe it went well. The audience was attentive, and they laughed in the right places. There were many questions afterward, and a lot of compliments. Book sales were good, but not spectacular as they were the last time I spoke to the three Lags. No real surprise there; you almost never do as well fishing the same waters a second time. But I made enough, along with my honorarium, to make a small profit on the trip – assuming I don’t price my time very high. Which I generally don’t.
On the way home, I had one very pleasant surprise. It’s my custom to eat at established franchise restaurants when traveling, purely out of timidity. I’ve had enough bad meals in small cafes to be leery of them – which, I imagine, has lost me as many good meals as bad ones over the years. But I pulled off the highway near Menomonie, thinking I’d find gas and a Culver’s at that exit. I got the gas, but it was the wrong exit for the Culvers’. So, being tired, I decided to take a chance on the café attached to the gas station. I wanted something resembling a genuine meal, not a burger and fries, so I gambled on the daily special, the fish dinner. I fully expected a couple of those sad, flat, freezer-dried planks of breaded fish you see so often in rural cafes.
Instead, what I found before me (after a wait, but you have to wait everywhere these days) was fish entirely indistinguishable from Culvers’ North Atlantic Cod. Which is high praise indeed. And the fries and cole slaw were better than Culvers, in my epicurean opinion.
I’ll give them a plug. The Exit 45 Restaurant. Tell ‘em I sent you, just to confuse them.
Then I drove home and collapsed.
This next weekend, a shorter trip, but more complicated and packing heavier. The Crow Wing Viking Festival, near Brainerd, Minnesota.
At last I found a lawn guy. I chose the guy who put up a flyer at my church, rather than any of the hard-sell sharks who went all feeding-frenzy on me after I waded into the Home Advisor waters. I may be sorry I made the choice one day, but at the moment I’m pleased with my sales resistance.
No word on the car yet, of course. I have a Viking event this weekend (the link to the Little Log House Antique Power Show is here, if you’re going to be near Hastings, Minnesota), and I’ve been forced to beg a ride from a fellow Viking who can accommodate all my stuff in his vehicle. I’ll owe him a favor now… heaven knows what might be asked of me one day. (I draw the line at felony-level violence.) I hope to have the new paper edition of The Year of the Warrior to sell at this event, and that kind of excites me.
I’m almost surprised to say it, but the new novel, King of Rogaland, is coming together, I think. Now that I’m starting to get the various plot threads tied up properly, I like what I’m seeing. I’ve got ongoing themes happening here; a uniformity of effect (I hope). One oddity of this book (for me) is that it includes more embedded stories than my previous books. By that I mean a character in my story sitting down and telling a story of his own. These interpolated tales, in general (I think), also advance the unified theme. Another oddity is that there are no major battles (hypocritical of me, I suppose, as I’ve criticized Stephen Lawhead for lacking the nerve to write battles). But the final confrontation is – I think – dramatic enough to have a similar artistic effect.
I read a quotation recently that impressed me. I don’t recall the source, or the exact words. But the gist of it was, “The better you get as a writer, the harder writing will be for you, because your critical standards will be raised.” So just go ahead and do it – if you’re having this problem, you’re probably a better writer than you think.
Oddly enough, I first posted the art above exactly three years ago, on June 18, 2018. It’s the cover for the new paperback edition of The Year of the Warrior. Baen Books still publishes the e-book, but I have their clearance to produce and sell this corporeal version. Various obstacles have arisen since that time to prevent production, but I finally took the bit in my teeth a few weeks back, and arranged with a printer I know to get this thing done.
My plan with this version is to sell it personally, at the Viking events I participate in. If you’re hoping to get it on Amazon, that probably won’t happen, because (I assume) I’d have to ask questions and go through a bunch of red tape to arrange for that. And I’m too old and lazy.
I’m not sure when I’ll actually have them in my possession. The printer sent me the galleys today and told me there’s a problem with the cover. I think I’m going to have to add space at the top and bottom to fill out the cover shape. But I haven’t looked at it yet.
I’m too old and lazy. I’ll get to it over the weekend.
I really like that cover, though. It would have had me wiggling like a fishing worm, back when I was a teenager. Jeremiah Humphries did it, and I think it’s my favorite cover that’s ever been done for one of my books.
Now if I can just find a few more events to flog them at this summer.
