Christian Science Fiction writer Brandon Barr has posted a glowing, nay, fulsome review of The Year of the Warrior at his blog here.
Thanks to Brandon. As Mark Twain once said (I think, in some form roughly similar to what I type here), “I can live three months on a good compliment.”
[Tonight, the next Ole Olsen letter, one of the shorter ones. Letter 1 is here; 2a here; and 2b here. I know nothing about the life of the author’s father, my great-great-great grandfather (whose name was also Ole Olsen), except that he once sailed on a merchant voyage to China.]
Kvalevaag, the 12th December, 1892
Mr. Jan Hendrik Olsen,
Dear Son, with your wife and child,
After receiving recently your very welcome letter, with the accompanying contents which were a joy for us here at home, that all is well worth praising and thanking the Lord for, who holds His hand over us in every way, both for soul and body, and also provides us each day with all that we poor humans need for daily life. Ja, it is grace upon grace from our Lord that He is so good toward us poor sinful creeping things, who do nothing but what is against Him. Ja, Lord help us all to appreciate Him, that He is a good Father toward us, but I see that things have worked out poorly for me. I want to grumble against Him, that I always get too much suffering from Him. Oh, wretched man that I am, when and where will it be otherwise with me? The Lord knows. God help us all.
Also, as before, I can note for you children that the Lord, in His eternal grace and mercy, has borne us in His patient arms up to this day, granting us to remain in the day of grace thus far. Ja, that is a great thing the Lord has done for us, to bear with us a while longer here, we who are so disobedient toward Him as we are, ja, Lord help us.
Ja, so I , Father and Mother, tell you that we have managed to be up [and about] every day this year too. God be thanked for it. But it should perhaps also be said that we aren’t always equally energetic, especially Mother, but what can we do? We must go on here as long as we can keep moving, for I have no one to trade off with at my side; ja, that is how things have turned out for me. Ja, God knows that it is often hard for us to think of, that we in our old age should have it so hard and weary as we have it. Ja, ja, that is our lot, but God who sees and knows all, He has a way out for us too, when He thinks it good. Ja, His will is best. Continue reading Olsen letter #3
I plan to see Max McLean’s production of The Screwtape Letters this weekend in Chattanooga. It should be terrific, probably even convicting.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of Minnesota’s most famous sons, though it’s hard to imagine any author less typically Minnesotan. I once visited some people who lived in the town house he once occupied, on St. Paul’s toney Summit Avenue.
Anyway, Robert J. Avrech, one of the consistently most interesting writers at Big Hollywood, posts about Fitzgerald’s sojourn in Hollywood today. Although he doesn’t agree entirely, he quotes the opinion of one of Fitzgerald’s friends, John Lee Mahin, who blamed at least part of the author’s implosion on political pressures from the film community’s burgeoning Communist movement.
His work was condemned, they said, and he believed them. He denounced himself even more harshly than his judges, accusing his work of being trivial and superficial.
“He actually told me he’s ashamed of The Great Gatsby,” John fairly snarled. “Those cursed Do-gooders… they’ve got him believing his work isn’t worth a tinkers damn just because he wasn’t waving a banner or marching in a picket line. They’ve destroyed him, as sure as God made little apples.”
Joe Carter, over at First Things, blogs about an interesting trend in current book cover design—pictures of women with the eyes cut off.
In spite of one commenter who thinks it’s just a way to focus on… a different feature, I think there’s something more complex going on here.
Mystery is a very compelling quality, in men and women. I think there are still mystery men in our cultural world, but the mystery woman seems to have pretty much disappeared. Any woman who isn’t “in your face,” “letting it all hang out” is looked on as some kind of throwback to the Victorian era. Female movie stars used to keep their private lives private (the studios often made up entirely fictional biographies for them). They never showed up in public without make-up, and dressed to the nines. The mystery, the “glamor” (which comes from an Irish word meaning “a magical power to deceive”) was a major part of their allure. For most female stars today, a nude scene is a rite of passage, and their affairs and break-ups are conducted in front of a battery of cameras.
Where are the women on the book covers looking? Are their expressions quizzical, or frightened, or knowing, or arrogant? The mystery is intriguing. It draws you in. I’d be willing to wager psychologists suggested this design element, to get readers to think, unconsciously, “There’s mystery here. I must buy this book to find out what it is.”
I wonder if eye contact means as much to normal people as it does to me. Because of my shyness disorder, making eye contact is very difficult for me. I avoid it. (I expect some people think me dishonest because of it, which I regret.) I have to make a distinct effort to make eye contact. When I meet someone’s gaze, I feel almost as if I’d been shocked, as if a spark has been struck. And I feel vulnerable, as if I’d opened my door to a stranger. Even if the person is someone I know and have no reason to distrust.
The up side is, I live a life full of mystery.
Looking for that perfect Christmas gift? Look no further. Despair.com offers gifts “for the person who has everything, but still isn’t very happy about it.” Here’s a great suggestion for the business executive or the corporate stooge in your life. Get him the Demotivation lithograph, which says, “Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people.” Or the Worth lithograph: “Just because you’re necessary doesn’t mean you’re important.”
Priceless.
Here’s an interesting puzzle that’s got people in Viking studies scratching their heads these days. If you go to this link at the Old Norse News blog, you’ll see a picture of a little silver figurine recently unearthed by archaeologists near the ancient royal site of Lejre, in Denmark.
The figure is seated on an elaborate throne. If you look closely, you’ll note that a bird sits on each arm of the throne.
Now Snorri Sturlusson’s Prose Edda, our chief source of information on the Norse myths, tells us that the god Odin had a throne in Asgard, and that he kept a pair of ravens, Hugin and Munin, who flew out every day to get news of the world, and then flew back to light on their master’s shoulders and whisper what they’d learned to him. Obviously, this figurine is a pretty good match for Odin. It even seems to have a damaged eye, and Odin was one-eyed.
The problem is that the clothing is clearly female.
What does this mean?
One possibility that comes to my mind is the obvious joke—it might be Odin in drag. One thing we know about his cult is that he was associated with a shamanistic ceremony called seið. There are numerous indications that seið was generally performed by women, and that men who participated in it were deemed to have performed a kind of unmanly act, comparable to sodomy.
Perhaps that’s the meaning of the figurine. Maybe Odin has changed genders to perform a seið. Purely a guess, from someone who has no great love of Odin.
One thing to bear in mind when studying Norse mythology is that, when Snorri wrote the material in the Prose Edda down, he was under the Church’s eye. He was purposely making the case that one could study the old gods academically, without falling into heathen practices.
Which makes it likely he left some stuff out.
This is one of the intangible rewards of blogging.
A few days ago I wrote about the death of mystery writer Stuart M. Kaminsky, mentioning how much I liked his books.
Today Kaminsky’s son Peter responded in the comments.
How very strange and satisfying.
Last night, I was talking about sex with some guys . . . wait, that doesn’t sound right. I was talking . . . I was minding my own business when suddenly someone asked me what ‘the birds and the bees” had to do with . . . the subject at hand.
Today I have an answer from our Etymology Desk: We don’t know. The phrases appears to have developed last century, but note this article from The Phrase Finder on suggested origins. None of them actually use “the birds and the bees” in reference to the act of marriage. There’s a 1927 newspaper article, but it couldn’t have been the coining of the phrase. Perhaps this is the influence of teachers whose oral instruction permeated the culture.
As for a related phrase, The Word Detective tells us that we don’t know the origin of “naked as a jay bird.” Why pick on jays when they aren’t unclothed any more than any other animal? Evan Morris says maybe it’s because blue jays are stand out among birds, obnoxiously so, in color and volume. On a discussion forum, someone says the folk wisdom he was told has to do with baby jays being pushed out of their nests before they have any feathers. Still, the printed evidence of this fails.
I went to see Disney’s new A Christmas Carol on Sunday. I didn’t like it as much as Ted Baehr and Michael Medved, whose glowing reviews persuaded me to see it in the first place, did. But I did like it, and I suspect it may grow on me, and the DVD will end up on my Christmas Carol shelf, along with the Sim, Scott and Finney versions, which I watch liturgically every Yuletide.
One bit of good news is that the familiar computer animation technique, which director Robert Zemeckis seems to have infinite faith in, has improved considerably. The eye problem, especially—the way all the characters in Beowulf seemed to be blind, because they couldn’t track the objects they were observing—has been solved. Facial expressions are also much better. Still, I find the animated people—almost human-looking but not quite, and mostly with slightly enlarged heads—a little off-putting. On the plus side, Tiny Tim (with whom I’ve never been very happy ) is much less irritating than usual here, and only spends a short time onscreen.
The animation technique brings one big, solid advantage. Here, at long last, we have a Scrooge who looks like Scrooge, a Scrooge who looks like the man I imagined when I first read the story (and I’ll bet you did too, if you’ve ever read it. Which is worth the trouble). Sim, Scott and Finney, for all their excellences (and they had many) didn’t really look like Scrooge. Their noses and chins weren’t long enough, and did not incline toward one another. Jim Carrey doesn’t look like Scrooge either, but the magic of CGI changes that (he also looks like the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, as he plays all those roles. There’s a very odd scene where Christmas Past, along with Old Scrooge, is watching Young Scrooge, so you actually have a Carrey watching a Carrey watching a Carrey). Continue reading Disney’s A Christmas Carol