Dale Nelson sends this link, to an article from the London Telegraph about James MacMillan, an “accessible” contemporary composer who is a devout Catholic, and who has written a piano concerto called “The Berserking.”
The Archive of the covenant
Today I was going through some stuff in our Archives. A pastor had donated some material he’d accumulated in researching a book a few years ago, and I’d been letting it sit. Today, I decided, I will start putting it in some kind of order.
Archiving is a very odd occupation, and one for which (I might mention) I have no formal training. Do I catalog a pamphlet as a book, or file it as a document? How do I organize my document files? It appears the previous librarians weren’t sure either, so I can’t even refer to their precedents most of the time.
I decided to catalog the Christmas annuals as books. Our predecessor church body published a Christmas annual, and (God bless ’em) operated with such humility that they didn’t even include publishing information in many of them (no bragging from the editors!). One issue didn’t even contain any mention anywhere of what year it was for. I had to work it out deductively, and I’m not entirely sure I got the right answer. Continue reading The Archive of the covenant
The Meat of Allegory
Frank suggests The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is “a better work of apologetics than Mere Christianity” because it is allegory.
Limericks limited
During the last couple days, as some of you know, I’ve posted limericks on my Facebook page. I’ve done this because I couldn’t think of a mortal thing to say about my life that could possibly be of interest to anyone.
I hasten to add that I’m talking clean limericks here. My favorite limericks come from a collection of light verse that was in my childhood home (all decent). I did not learn about the scrofulous mass of the genre until I was a grown-up. According to Wikipedia, the experts say that “the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene.” I have no standing to challenge the experts, but the limericks I like are the ones that are clean and clever. Some marvelous effects have been achieved by geniuses (some of them anonymous) who used the form to create what seems to me transcendent nonsense. (I do not include Edward Lear in this group. I hate Lear’s limericks. His technique of repeating the first-line rhyme in the final line, in my opinion, destroys the very things that make limericks wonderful.)
Continue reading Limericks limitedDirty Politics
Talk something through with me. Why don’t conservatives fight dirty with liberals like they do with us (generally speaking)? Many have argued that we should fight fire with fire. An essay in the National Review argues this point, saying liberals don’t care about anything but political power and will argue any means, however illogical, to achieve their desired ends. So do you believe that and do you think conservatives should return evil for evil as it were? If not, why not?
Reading Narrative
Writers of short fiction may want to look into a notable online magazine, Narrative.
Questions on West Oversea
For those of you who waste your time on the Interweb playing on Facebook or doing who knows what, Lars had a great book published recently called West Oversea. I asked the author, Lars, who blogs right here if you haven’t noticed, a few questions about the book, which is also called “Westward Ho.” These questions may be more interesting to those who have read the book, “Go West, Young Viking,” but even if you haven’t, I hope the following will pique your interest a little more, assuming the strong reviews have not piqued it enough already. And if this introduction has just confused you . . . so let’s get to the questions.
- One of the major tensions in West Oversea comes from a magical object called The Eye of Odin. Is that object entirely your creation or did you pull it from one of the old myths? If it was from a myth, did the story you give in the novel about it’s origin come from the same myth?
A: The myth says that Odin plucked out his own eye in return for a drink from Mimir’s well of foreknowledge. He dropped the eye into the well, and we know nothing more of its history. I suspect I may be the first person to wonder about it.
- In both this novel and The Year of the Warrior, Odin or the power of Odin is a major villain or evil force. Is that just the way it worked out? Did you weigh Odin against other Norse gods when planning stories?
A: I find it impossible to think of heathen gods as having any real existence other than as evil spirits. C. S. Lewis hinted at some order of good daemons, at least in the past, but that’s kind of rarified for my ideas of the spiritual world. In any case, Odin has always been a sinister figure. He can look kind of noble and ethereal in a kid’s book, but in the poetry of the period he’s associated with corpses and hanged men and carrion-eating ravens. He routinely betrays those who put their trust in him.
Thor’s a little more sympathetic, and I treated him more kindly in THE YEAR OF THE WARRIOR. So I guess I’m doing the good daemon thing anyway. I imagine I’ll be sorry someday.
- At one point in West Oversea, Father Aillil has a vision of the future with several distinct figures speaking from their viewpoints. Did you have specific people in mind for those figures? I tried to peg one of them as Sigmund Freud, but I’d have to study them a bit before making my final guess.
A: Some of them are meant to be well-known people, some are just representatives. But I’m not going to spell it out. That would spoil the fun. Or the irritation, as the case may be.
- I could ask the same question of the American natives you describe later in the novel. Did you have specific tribes or people groups in mind there?
A: I did some research on pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands tribes. But our information on their cultures that far back is limited, and I made a lot of guesses. I think I vaguely meant the “nice” Native Americans to be Algonckians, or their ancestors.
- At one point, Erling, the hero of many and admired figure for many in that time, explains one of the things it takes to be a good leader. As a novelist, do you think you understand different types of people, at least academically if not more so, even if you couldn’t emulate them yourself?
A. I observe leaders and brave men with considerable interest. The novelist’s working question is always, “What would I be like if I were like this person?” We’re very different from one another, we humans, but we’re not so different as to be mutually incomprehensible–in most cases, at least.
- Have you thought about writing a novel in the same time period with a different focal character, say Olaf Tryggvason or someone in his court or maybe St. Olaf after him?
A: I hope to extend the Erling series into the reign of St. Olaf, and to do a St. Olaf-only book to cap the series. And I hope to write a non-Erling Viking book sooner or later. Maybe several.
Gone For Good, by Harlan Coben
Oh my goodness, Gone For Good is a splendid novel.
I hate to blaspheme Andrew Klavan by calling it the best suspense novel I’ve ever read, but I’ll go so far as to say I’ve never read a better one.
Will Klein, the hero and narrator, is a do-gooder. He works in New York City for Covenant House a (real-life) humanitarian organization that tries to reach out to street kids and (when they’re lucky) help a few of them escape that world before they’re irreparably damaged (which doesn’t take long).
He lives with his girlfriend, Sheila. She’s his “soul-mate,” and he’s planning to propose soon. The only reason he put it off was because his mother died of cancer recently, and life got complicated.
It didn’t help that, shortly before her death, his mother told him his older brother Ken was still alive. Obviously she was just raving.
Ken had been Will’s hero as a boy, up until the day his girlfriend (Will’s former girlfriend) was found murdered, and Ken disappeared. The official assumption has been that Ken killed her and ran.
Believing his brother innocent, Will has always assumed he was also murdered, his body never found.
Then Sheila receives a mysterious phone call, leaves a note saying, “Love you always,” and vanishes completely.
Will has always been a passive guy (I identified with him heavily). But now, the weight of personal loss becomes too heavy to endure, and he sets out (with the help of his friend “Squares,” a millionaire yoga guru) to find the woman he loves. Quickly he learns that it has something to do with his brother’s disappearance. And we are given just enough glimpses (in Hitchcockian fashion) of the plans and deliberations of his enemies to understood the extreme danger he’s walking into. Very powerful, very ruthless people are interested in the whereabouts of Ken Klein. But even this information leaves plenty of surprises along the way. The twists come relentlessly, right up to a jaw-dropping revelation at the end.
What I loved about Gone For Good was that the plot and the surprises all rose from believable, complex characters. Coben understands Solzhenyitsin’s dictum that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Every character in this book is flawed, but also well-meaning (by his own lights). The wide disparity between the things that individuals consider right and necessary is almost a part of the background scenery, like the Grand Canyon.
Outstanding. Recommended highly for adults.
Our Viking republic
I don’t generally post on Saturdays (I have a life, folks! Well, actually I don’t, but I like to schedule my time as if I did), but I want to say something about the Declaration of Independence today.
Have you noticed the opening paragraphs? How strange they are?
The framers start out saying (in brief), “Because we plan to separate from Great Britain, we feel an obligation to explain to the world why we’re taking this drastic action.”
Then they make this statement in Paragraph 2, which must have seemed very odd to many European readers:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it….
The very first reason cited for the existence of government is securing the rights of the people.
Not maintaining order and restraining social chaos.
Not the promotion and protection of trade.
Not the enforcement of godliness.
Certainly not the provision of social services to all citizens.
Securing the rights of the people.
Essentially (the authors were saying), government exists to do as little as possible, except when basic rights are threatened.
Where did this idea come from?
Much has been written about the sources of American political ideas. I haven’t read most of this material.
But I have a few ideas of my own. Continue reading Our Viking republic
Try, try again
My publisher tells me we got a glowing review for West Oversea from the Norwegian-American Weekly. I was nonplussed for a moment, having never heard of this publication.
It turns out it’s the last man standing among all the Norwegian-American newspapers.
At one time there were more than 50 papers published in Norwegian in this country. Around these parts, Decorah Posten was the big player, but I think the Nordisk Tidende in New York was bigger. There was also Washington Posten out in Seattle.
A few years ago, it was down to Nordisk Tidende (which became the Norway Times) and Western Viking, which was a consolidated paper.
Apparently they merged Norway Times and Western Viking recently, and thoughtlessly failed to inform me.
All in all, I think our Norwegian conspiracy to undermine the republic isn’t going very well.
I’ve been listening to talk radio most of the day. At one point somebody (I think it may have been on Mike Gallagher’s show) referred to Thomas Paine’s words in “The American Crisis,” “These are the times that try men’s souls.” And it occurred to me that, like so many statements written in the past, it’s misunderstood today. Continue reading Try, try again