Music

We're doing leprechauns wrong

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For your St. Patrick’s Day enjoyment, one of my favorite Irish songs, done by my favorite Irish group, the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

I suspect I may have posted this clip before. I don’t care. It’s only once a year, and this song embodies one of my favorite aspects of Irish culture—the joyous hyperbole of Hibernian rhetoric. C.S. Lewis recalls in Surprised By Joy how his father (an Irishman, of course) used to launch into Ciceronian philippics denouncing the horrific misbehavior of his sons, to the point where sometimes they had to restrain themselves from laughing. One of my favorite stretches of my own writing was Father Aillil’s curse against Erling’s enemies, near the beginning of The Year of the Warrior. One of the reasons I enjoy inhabiting Aillil’s skull is the opportunity to declaim on the large scale, unrestrained by reason or good taste.

Ireland has opened the world’s first Leprechaun Museum. Judging from the story (which might, I’ll grant, provide an incomplete description) it seems to be primarily an exercise in feeling very small, walking around among giant-sized furniture. If that’s the idea, I’d say it misses the point of leprechauns entirely. Continue reading We're doing leprechauns wrong →

Publishing

Lessons to be Learned Here

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In this article on Russian censorship of independent publishers, the writer reports:

Two years later he found himself in much more trouble over Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, a heartwarming narrative in which clones of Khrushchev and Stalin enjoy some tender sexual moments together. In fact Blue Lard had been published in 1999 but it was not until 2002 that anybody took offense. Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth movement flushed copies of Sorokin’s works down a giant toilet erected outside the Bolshoi Theater, apparently as part of a battle against “…immorality, cynicism, and the humiliation of our culture.” Sales exploded, reaching a total of 100,000.

. . . [Ad Marginem’s publisher, Alexander Ivanov, said of their arrest over publishing this book,] “We felt danger, but our main sensation was… surprise at the idiocy of the situation, that we had to discuss literary issues with the police. It seemed to me that they themselves were a bit shocked by this investigation.”

(via Books, Inq.)

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It's shamed I am. Shamed.

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Am I a hypocrite?

Apparently.

Am I for sale?

It would appear so.

As you may recall, I groused a while back about the new animated Disney movie, How to Train Your Dragon. Not merely because of the historically inaccurate horned helmets on the Viking characters, but because of my intense weariness with the innovation—which long since became a cliché—of the sympathetic, victimized dragon.

Dragon

Guess what? One of our local IMAX theaters (the one at the Minnesota Zoo), has asked the Viking Age Club and Society to be there in costume for the opening, next Saturday. And I’ve agreed to participate.

My price? A free ticket to a movie I’m not even particularly interested in.

It’s for the good of the club, I tell myself. To raise our public visibility and attract new members.

So I’m taking a bullet (or, more authentically, an arrow) for the group.

I’m a hero.

That’s how I intend to look at it, anyway.

Now the only question is, why did they invite us for the 20th, when the official opening is a week later? Sneak preview?

I’ll keep you posted. As it is, we’re scheduled to be at the Great Clips IMAX Theater at the Minnesota Zoo from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., this Saturday.

For those of you in the area, who wish to come and rub it in.

Update: I just found out this is a special preview. My source wasn’t sure if it was open to the public or not. So if you come to mock me, you may not get in at all. Which only serves you right.

Non-fiction

Irish Comfortable Familiarity with Death

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Great Irish Lives is a collection of Irish obituaries from a people who appear to relish the news of someone stepping into the great beyond. Suzanne Strempek Shea, writing the review, quotes from one obit, “We believe there is no doubt that Mr O’Connell expired on Saturday, the 15th of this month, at Genoa. He yielded up his latest breath at the distance of many hundred miles from the remains of [his] humble dwelling….” She then writes:

Don’t let language stop you from reading, and learning. The obituary of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Jan. 13, 1941, includes the story of his meeting as a student with W.B. Yeats, whose obit resides nearby. The back-and-forth: “We have met too late,” the budding novelist said, “you are too old to be influenced by me,” to which the poet answered, “Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.”

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DreamWorks To Film "The Help"

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DreamWorks has acquired the rights to produce Katheryn Stockett’s debut novel, The Help, is a good read in Southern literature. They hope to begin filming this summer in Mississippi. The book is good, and the author has consulted the script, so the movie may be passable.

Reviews

Film review: Outlander

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Outlander

I’d heard rumors about this movie Outlander, a science fiction/Viking movie hybrid, starring the redoubtable Jim Caviezel. I’d heard some good things about it, so I rented it from Netflix, hoping I’d be able to recommend it to you, the discerning consumer.

Alas, I can’t honestly give it much of a boost.

What you’ve got here, essentially, is a cross between The Thirteenth Warrior and Predator. If you’ve seen those movies, frankly, I can’t think of much reason to watch this one. Unless you’re just keen to see a Viking ship in a movie, which is always worth the trouble (unless the movie is [ptui!] Beowulf and Grendel, which we hates, we does).

Outlander ship Continue reading Film review: Outlander →

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Report from the barricades

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This controversy over the health care bill must be galvanizing the American people, because it roused The Most Sedentary, Antisocial Man in America (your humble servant) to join a rally at the Minnesota state capitol in St. Paul on Saturday. Although it was unseasonably warm for mid-March, we had overcast skies and a nasty cold wind, and I wished I’d worn a nondescript watch cap, rather than my stylish fedora.

I persuaded a friend to come with me. We heard, among others, Captain Ed Morrisey of Hot Air blog, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (I was able to tell my friend that I’d shaken her hand once, which filled him with satisfying awe).

Very stirring. On the evening news, our local CBS affiliate seemed conflicted in their reporting of the attendance. At one point they called it a huge rally. A minute later they described the crowd as “hundreds.”

My own guess (and I’m not very good at this) was about 2,000 people. That jibes pretty well with the estimates of the capitol police, as reported here at Power Line.

Don’t look for me in the photos. I was pretty far back. And I’m not very tall.