Fiction, Reviews

‘City of Angles,’ by Jonathan Leaf

2 Comments

During this time, he had prepared his own lengthy speech, a philippic the equal of Cato’s addresses against Carthage. Everything about her was fake and phony. She was a cheat and a liar and a bad woman. She was a threat to goodness, and, inasmuch as silicone was made from sand, she was a menace to the continued existence of the world’s beaches.

[Disclaimer: The book under consideration here, City of Angles, was referred to me by a friend, and I received a free review copy from the author.]

Billy Rosenberg is a struggling Hollywood writer. On the strength of one successful novel he moved to California to work in the movies. But his career is struggling. He’s painfully aware, in a town where presentation is everything, of the impression he makes with his cheap shoes and rattletrap car.

So he’s surprised when beautiful, surgically-enhanced actress Vincenza Morgan (originally Kelli Haines of Eagan, Minnesota) sits down at his table in a coffee shop and talks to him. Vincenza is, in fact, scared. Her career had seemed about to take off, thanks to an indie film she just helped produce. She’d gotten A-list star Tom Selva to star in it, thanks to their mutual membership in the International Church of Life (think Scientology), the most powerful force in town. Everything looked great, until she opened her car trunk and found Selva’s corpse stuffed inside.

She knew she ought to call the police, but she was on her way to an audition, and the First and Greatest Law of Hollywood is you never blow off an audition; being dead would only be a marginal excuse. And now she thinks she’s being tailed by agents of the Church in a van. She could really use a place to stay tonight…

City of Angles is a comedy of manners – but it’s dark comedy, and the manners are Hollywood manners. The chief thing one learns in this story is that nobody ever says what they mean. Candor is kryptonite. One honest word might undermine the whole town and slide it into the ocean. The plot works out happily, though – depending on what you mean by “happily.” Which leaves the reader with things to consider.

I’m a sucker for a Hollywood tale – I’ve felt the city’s attraction but am very far from having the nerve to challenge it face to face. So I enjoyed City of Angles, which was expertly written and packed with sharp innuendo. [One technical error I noted was that the author places Burnsville High School in Eagan, Minnesota rather than in Burnsville where it belongs both in logic and fact. I can only assume that locations have been changed to protect the innocent.]

Recommended, with cautions for grownup stuff.

Music

Sunday Singing: That Easter Day with Joy Was Bright

Leave a comment
“That Easter Day with Joy Was Bright” performed by The Westminster Choir of Westminster Presbyterian of Buffalo, New York, follow by an improvisation on the hymn’s Latin melody

It’s still Easter this month for our Sunday Singing posts. This hymn was translated from a longer Latin verse, once attributed to St. Ambrose, and now believed to have been written by a sixth or seventh century Gaul. The text copied here was translated by Englishman John Mason Neale in 1861 and altered by the editors of the Trinity Hymnal.

Though the hymn is short enough, I feel it could be sung about 1.5x faster. In the video, the choir above does not sing all of these words and the organist improvises on the tune for a few minutes afterward.

1 That Easter day with joy was bright:
the sun shone out with fairer light
when to their longing eyes restored,
th’apostles saw their risen Lord.

2 His risen flesh with radiance glowed,
his wounded hands and feet he showed;
those scars their solemn witness gave
that Christ was risen from the grave.

3 O Jesus, King of gentleness,
do thou thyself our hearts possess,
that we may give thee all our days
the willing tribute of our praise.

4 O Lord of all, with us abide
in this, our joyful Easter-tide;
from ev’ry weapon death can wield
thine own redeemed forever shield.

Fiction, Goofing

The Sound of Words Change, Reading Courage, and Jargon Demo

Leave a comment

It doesn’t take much to raise questions about the English language that the casual user can’t answer. Why do we pronounce bury and berry the same way? Fury and jury look like the way they sound, but not bury.

In Old English, the word for bury was byrgan, and that “y” was pronounced like a short “oo” or “ew” as in took and few. Many other words used “y” and were converted to an “i” spelling. Bridge and kiss are two examples, but bury didn’t follow the normal route and retains, I gather, something of its historic sound. I suppose berry from Old English berie always sounded like we pronounce it today with bright and shallow 21st century American accents.

I learned another thing while looking this up. No, two things. First, the Internet isn’t great at teaching you how to pronounce certain types of words. Ask it how you pronounce the Old English gecyþnisse, and you’ll get this link, which is good. Ask it how to pronounce dryhten. Oh, it’s “driç.ten.” But I want to hear it, not read another spelling of it. And what about the “oo” sound for y’s?

Second, the words apple and berry are the original words for fruit. If the fruit in your hand isn’t a berry, it’s an apple, even as late as Middle English. Bananas in Middle English were “apples of paradise.” Dates to “finger-apples.” Cucumbers were “earth-apples,” and, yes, cucumbers are fruit. Melon developed in Greek from a word meaning “goard-apple” and was used generally for fruit.

Anyway, what else we got?

Crime Novel: A new comedic crime novel is “morbidly funny” and “lighthearted literary entertainment at its best.” City of Angles is playwright Johnathan Leaf’s first novel. You’ll be reading more about it in days to come.

Downgrading Education: “What worries today’s administrators about [great books] is not their purported irrelevance, nor the allegedly harmful language or controversial arguments they contain. It is rather the example they provide of characters like Huck Finn, who preferred eternal damnation to snitching on his friend Jim.”

Favorite Novel: “Simply put, Tristram Shandy is a novel I love, one I’ve reread more often than almost any other. It never wears out . . .” I remember one of my English professors loving it too.

And finally, a brief presentation of Rockwell Automation’s retro encabulator in easy to understand, common sense jargon.

Breaking News: A sequel demo was released last year, “living proof that leveraging existing assets is not plagiarism.”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Uncategorized

My ancestors in the news

2 Comments
Avaldsnes Church on Karmoy island. Picture by me June, 2022.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this blog hasn’t been providing enough Viking News lately. Why would anyone come to a book blog, except to read about Viking News? Sure, I’ve given you a few saga reviews in recent weeks, but what you want (I have no doubt) is the kind of breaking, “you read it here first” information for which my name is, perhaps not renowned, but definitely -nowned.

Well, I’ve got one today. Not only is it a major archaeological story, but there’s a personal connection to me – which makes all the difference, I know.

The story was announced yesterday, but I waited till an English version appeared today to share it. Because I hate translating for free.

This from Sciencenorway.no: New Discovery of a Viking Ship in Norway

Just over a hundred years ago, the archaeologist Haakon Shetelig was incredibly disappointed when he did not find a Viking ship during an excavation of the Salhushaugen gravemound in Karmøy in Western Norway.

Shetelig had previously excavated a rich Viking ship grave just nearby, where Grønhaugskipet was found, as well as excavated the famous Oseberg ship – the world’s largest and most well-preserved surviving Viking ship – in 1904. At Salshaugen he only found 15 wooden spades and some arrowheads.

“He was incredibly disappointed, and nothing more was done with this mound,” says Håkon Reiersen, an archaeologist at the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger.

It turns out, however, that Shetelig simply did not dig deep enough.

About a year ago, in June 2022, archaeologists decided to search the area using ground-penetrating radar or georadar – a device that uses radio waves to map out what lies below the surface of the ground.

Now if you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have a personal connection to Karmøy island. My great-grandfather Walker was born there (under another last name, naturally), and baptized at Avaldsnes Church (pictured above). The three mounds described in this article are a short distance north of the church, and I don’t believe I’ve actually ever seen them.

Still, I was at Avaldsnes last June, precisely when they were doing the georadar surveys. That pleases me immensely. I was On the Scene – if clueless as usual.

Fiction, Reviews

‘An Inconvenient Death,’ by Dan Walsh

Leave a comment

In the second book of the Joe Boyd series, An Inconvenient Death, Joe, a police detective in the town of Culpepper, is camping with his family (apparently he’s a workaholic, and this is a good development). While his son is walking their new puppy, the dog locates a buried human skeleton. Although Joe calls the discovery in, he manages to convince his superior officer to let him continue his vacation, leaving his younger subordinate Hank to start the investigation on his own.

Hank proves to be very competent. Based on what remains of the clothing, along with a high school class ring found nearby, he manages to pinpoint the likely victim – a boy who worked in a local convenience store and vanished in 1988.

Meanwhile, in a writers’ group that meets at a local church, a couple female members are annoyed by one of the male members. He’s socially awkward and “creepy,” and he keeps bringing in pages from his work in progress – a book about how three high school boys murder a convenience store worker and hide his body in the woods.

G. K. Chesterton once said (I quote from memory), “There are two meanings to the word ‘good.’ If a man were to shoot his grandmother from a distance of 500 yards, I would call him a good shot. I would not necessarily call him a good man.”

There are two kinds of good book — a book that is morally good, or a book that is good in terms of the writing craft. An Inconvenient Death is morally good. Salutary virtues are praised and nobody uses a word harsher than “crap.” Even more admirably, it deals in a genuinely Christian way with the awkward issue of scandal in the church.

It is not, however, good in terms of writing. The author, like so many young authors, overwrites. He informs us what people are thinking and feeling without letting them reveal those thoughts and emotions through gesture and dialogue. He sometimes doubles his dialogue – first recounting a conversation, and then having that conversation repeated to another character in detail (this bores the reader). He tells us how people greet each other at the beginnings of conversations (also boring and unnecessary). There are grammar mistakes from time to time too.

Also, the suspense could have been ratcheted up considerably.

So, my bottom line is, I appreciate the effort to write a clean, uplifting mystery, but An Inconvenient Death wasn’t very well written.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Penitent Priest,’ by J.R. & Susan Mathis

1 Comment

I suppose this will happen more and more as I grow old and fuzzy-brained, and the list of books I’ve read stretches longer than the unabridged dictionary. I picked up a set of the first three books in the Father Tom series for Kindle, only realizing toward the end of the first volume, The Penitent Priest, that I’d already read it. And reviewed it here. And forgotten it completely.

The Amazon page says this is a revised edition, so maybe the changes were extensive enough to mitigate my embarrassment. I note that my main concern with the book the first time through was the number of coincidences in the plot. I felt the same way this time, but it didn’t bother me as much. Perhaps that’s one of the problems they addressed in the revision.

In any case, Father Tom Greer is a Catholic priest in Pennsylvania. He came to his vocation late in life, following the murder of his wife in Myerton, the town where they lived. The crime has never been solved. Shortly thereafter Tom cut all local ties and left town, eventually attending seminary, getting ordained, and being put to work as an archivist.

But now (the book is narrated in the present tense, something I dislike on principle. Though I can’t say it actually decreased my enjoyment any) the archbishop has assigned him to fill in for the priest at St. Clare’s Church in Myerton. Then one day, in the confessional, someone tells Tom something that makes him believe they witnessed his wife’s murder, and might even be responsible. Then he gets a look at his late wife’s laptop, which a friend has been holding, and learns from her e-mails that she had a stalker. But when he tells the police detective in charge of the case, she says that’s not enough for her to take action on.

This encounter is complicated by the fact that the detective turns out to be a former girlfriend of Tom’s, one he nearly married before he met his wife.

What I liked about this book – the prose is excellent. The dialogue is natural, smart, and engaging. The characters are believable.

What I disliked (though not as much as on my first reading) — the number of coincidences in the plot. They interfered with my willing suspension of disbelief.

Still, considering that this is a “clean” novel, without profanity or sex and with excellent moral values, I was very impressed with The Penitent Priest. Our hyper-Protestant readers may not consider a Catholic novel a “Christian” work, but I think most any Christian can read this book and appreciate its values and even (for the most part) its theology.

So I recommend it, all things considered. I enjoyed reading The Penitent Priest. I think the authors have talent and good instincts.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Egil’s Saga,’ by Snorri Sturlusson

6 Comments

That same evening that Egil left home, Skallagrim had his horse saddled, then rode away from home when everyone else went to bed. He was carrying a fairly large chest on his knees, and had an iron cauldron under his arm when he left. People have claimed ever since that he put either or both of them in the Krumskelda marsh, with a great slab of stone on top.

Skallagrim came home in the middle of the night, went to his bed, and lay down, still wearing his clothes. At daybreak next morning, when everybody was getting dressed, Skallagrim was sitting on the edge of the bed, dead, and so stiff that they could neither straighten him out nor lift him no matter how they tried.

If you ask a saga fan which is the best saga, they’re likely to say either Egil’s or Njal’s Saga. In my case, it usually depends on which one I’ve read last. Both sagas excel in one quality you don’t expect in a medieval book – complex, layered characterization. In some ways they’re like modern novels.

But they don’t start out like novels. A novel writer tries to start with a bang, to engage the reader in the conflict from page one. Icelandic sagas are localized stories written for a localized audience. The first thing the Icelandic reader wanted to know was where the action would occur, and where in the matrix of interrelationships around him the story falls. So we start Egil’s Saga with the tale of Egil’s grandfather Thorolf, who supported King Harald Fairhair’s conquest of Norway, then fell out of favor and was finally killed by the king Then we see how Egil’s father Skallagrim relocates to Iceland (getting his vengeance along the way), and stakes his claim as one of the early settlers. Finally Egil himself appears – big and strong, ugly and soon bald, but wicked smart and the greatest of all skaldic poets.

Egil goes out as a Viking – what else could he do? – and also tries to claim his inheritance in Norway, becoming a mortal enemy to King Eirik Bloodaxe, whose son he murders. He fights as a mercenary in England (on the English side) and has the kind of set-piece side-adventures that tend to show up in sagas.

Eventually, we come to the dramatic climax of the saga – amazingly, not a battle or even a duel. It’s an act of headstrong audacity. Shipwrecked on the coast of Northumbria, Egil learns that Eirik Bloodaxe is the new king of the country. Instead of putting on a hooded cloak and making tracks, Egil heads straight for York, to beard the king in his den. Supported by his best friend, the king’s man Arinbjorn, Egil offers Eirik a proposition. In return for his life, he will compose a poem for the king so brilliant and memorable that it will secure his fame forever. When he succeeds (brilliantly), Eirik is left with no choice. To kill Egil now would shame him forever.

Make no mistake – Egil is a bad man. He’s a thief, a slave-taker, a cold-blooded killer. He cherishes his hatreds and dabbles in magic. And he doesn’t mellow as he gets older; only weakness makes him a little safer to be around.

Yet there’s pathos there as well. His poetry provides a glimpse into his heart as he mourns the friends and family he’s lost, and the injustices he’s suffered. He’s as faithful a friend as he is dangerous as an enemy. And his courage is mind-boggling. Possibly pathological (there are many theories about brain and psychological disorders he may have suffered from).

I was pretty effusive in my praise of the translation of the Vinland sagas in the collection I’m now reading, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I must admit I was less happy with this translation (by a different translator). I thought it erred a bit on the side of literalism, suffering the awkwardness that literal translation entails. (Stylistically, I prefer the Penguin edition.) I also noted a couple textual oddities I hadn’t remarked on before. One is name spelling. Some of the choices seem to me odd – Hakon for Håkon, for instance – it gives English reader the wrong impression about pronunciation. And Kari for Kåri – a Norwegian acquaintance once complained to me about using that spelling in The Year of the Warrior, as in modern Norwegian Kari is a woman’s name (I changed the spelling in the next volume). The orthography is oddly mixed – they use double quotation marks in the American style, but English spelling, as in “harbour.” A lot of characters’ nicknames are rendered in novel ways; I’m not sure that adds to the value of the thing.

What we have here, I think, is a scholarly translation. I still recommend the collection for its completeness, if you can afford it. But you can get Egil’s Saga in a perfectly adequate translation for much less.

In either case, I do recommend you read it.

Authors, Publishing

Plum crazy

Leave a comment
P. G. Wodehouse in 1930

Our friend Dave Lull has shared an article about the latest sign of the Apocalypse – the bowdlerization of the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The link he sent went to an article hidden behind a paywall, but my formidable investigative skills enabled me to locate a cognate report here, at National Review:

Wodehouse joins a growing list of prominent authors, deceased and living, whose works have been tinkered with by sensitivity readers, including Roald Dahl, R. L. Stine, and Agatha Christie. Penguin Random House, which recently relented to a degree on the Dahl edits, has released new editions of the Jeeves stories that include trigger warnings, the Telegraph reported.

The warning on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank You, Jeeves reads: “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”

It goes on to state that the changes do not affect the story itself. The 2022 edition of Right Ho, Jeeves has also been edited and features the same disclaimer.

The traditional word for this kind of activity is “Bowdlerization,” named for Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), an English physician and social reformer who’s most famous for producing The Family Shakespeare, in which he (and his sister) cleaned the offensive words out of the Bard’s plays.

Thomas Bowdler used to be mentioned pretty often back in my college days, in the Age of Aquarius, when we were letting it all hang out and “keeping it real, baby.” We Baby Boomers, in the toilet flush of our youth, laughed at the weak-minded old English who’d get the vapors from hearing a dirty word or two. Thank Henry Miller we’d evolved past all that!

Well, in the 2020s we Boomers are still more or less running things, but in our dotage we’ve succeeded in sinking beneath Bowdler’s level. It ought to be noted that old Thomas did not hold a copyright on Shakespeare’s works. He never made any attempt to remove the original versions of the plays from the literary market; he simply offered an alternative to people who wanted one. Penguin Random House has changed the official, copyrighted text of Wodehouse for all readers, young and old, wise and foolish. “We have a responsibility to shield the public, you know.”

The Great Pendulum swings in accordance with implacable laws of physics. Swing too far toward license in one generation and you’ll swing back to authoritarianism in the next. It seems we humans live just long enough, generally speaking, to betray our principles.

Music

Sunday Singing: Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted

Leave a comment

Continuing an Easter theme, here’s a marvelous hymn that fits our Good Friday meditations. “Stricken, smitten, and afflicted” comes from the Irishman Thomas Kelly (1769-1855), who wrote 765 hymns over 51 years. The tune, I believe, is of German folk origin with harmony arranged by American Paul G. Bunjes for Lutheran Worship (1982). The text below is taken from the 2006 Lutheran Service Book.

1 Stricken, smitten, and afflicted,
see him dying on the tree!
‘Tis the Christ, by man rejected;
yes, my soul, ’tis he, ’tis he!
‘Tis the long-expected Prophet,
David’s Son, yet David’s Lord;
Proofs I see sufficient of it:
’tis the true and faithful Word.

2 Tell me, ye who hear him groaning,
was there ever grief like his?
Friends through fear his cause disowning,
foes insulting his distress;
many hands were raised to wound him,
none would interpose to save;
but the deepest stroke that pierced him
was the stroke that Justice gave.

3 Ye who think of sin but lightly
nor suppose the evil great
here may view its nature rightly,
here its guilt may estimate.
Mark the sacrifice appointed,
see who bears the awful load;
’tis the Word, the Lord’s Anointed,
Son of Man and Son of God.

4 Here we have a firm foundation,
here the refuge of the lost;
Christ, the Rock of our salvation,
his the name of which we boast:
Lamb of God, for sinners wounded,
sacrifice to cancel guilt!
None shall ever be confounded
who on him their hope have built.

Bookselling, Music, Religion

The Bible Is Not an Instruction Manual, Browsing, and Holding Attention

Leave a comment

Isn’t it curious how the Bible is not an instruction manual? Some preachers and parents talk about it as if it is one, but if we know anything about actual instruction manuals, we know the Bible is nothing like them.

It’s mostly narrative history, even the prophecies fall into this. The gospels are not direct proclamations of good news, like what the angels declare to the shepherds from the skies, and the epistles, which are the most direct instruction, are more like single lectures from a larger course.

The Lord gave us a Bible with songs, proverbs, stories, and rules that require interpretation for a modern audience. Deuteronomy is the most like an instruction manual, and it isn’t something today’s believers can treat like a guidebook. Even the fourth commandment trips us up.

What we have in Scripture is the most marvelous book ever written. It shows us who we are apart from our vain imagination, and it shows us something of the majesty of the Almighty. It offers us the words of the Holy Spirit for feeding our hearts and minds from the hand of the author of our lives. It’s closer to a devotional than a manual.

This post may show how much Jared C. Wilson has influenced me, because when I looked up Midwestern Seminary’s For the Church site for something on this idea, I found two of Jared’s posts. From his book on the church, “The Bible is Not an Instructional Manual,” and again last year on the statement that the Bible is Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

Here are some other posts.

Bookselling: Jeremy Anderberg suggests intentional browsing. “There are a lot of great books published every year — every month! — but publishers are increasingly putting all their marketing power into a smaller group of titles, in hopes of ensuring that coveted bestseller or celebrity book club status.”

Chekhov: What would it mean to live in the light of Christ’s resurrection?

Cowboys: Craig Johnson, author of the Longmire series, talks about them in this interview.

“One of the big misperceptions about cowboys is that they were only dumb, itinerant, agricultural workers, when, in fact, most people of that period were self-educated. Heck, one of the most referred to books as being read by the cowboys in Louis L’Amour’s novels is Plutarch’s Lives.”

“I was having lunch with the Wyoming Office of Tourism, and they were telling me how much they loved the books, and I asked them why? They said that even though Absaroka County is fictitious I use all the businesses, landmarks, roads, and trails so that it’s easy to tell the tourists where they are. I’ve always found it’s easier to remember the truth, even when writing a novel.” (via Books, Inq)

What Holds Us? “Such attentiveness – call it curiosity or engagement with our surrounding — is a form of reverence and gratitude, and likewise an admission of willful ignorance: we learn little when we ignore our world.”

I don’t intend to start adding music to my Saturday posts, but I listen regularly to traditional music like what Julie Fowlis sings here and I want to share it. This whole album is marvelous.

A set of traditional songs starting with “Fodder for the small stirks”