Poetry, Writing

Limericks limited

8 Comments

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 limited →
Uncategorized

Dirty Politics

Leave a comment

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?

Fiction

Questions on West Oversea

Leave a comment

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

Fiction, Reviews

Gone For Good, by Harlan Coben

Leave a comment

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.

Uncategorized

Our Viking republic

Leave a comment

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 →

Uncategorized

Try, try again

Leave a comment

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 →

Uncategorized

The Upside of Freedom

Leave a comment

Multigenerational, African American family diningHow do you think of freedom? Perhaps you think of it as the absence of restriction. I think conservatives frequently define it to say the government is not regulating us. The free market is free from government regulation, you see. This negative definition is good as far as it goes, and perhaps the only way it makes sense when a politician talks of freedom.

However, freedom can be positively defined as the ability to fulfill your God-given roles in life, or more simply, the ability to do what is right. (These thoughts are not original with me, in case you are wondering; I’m just blogging off the top o’ me head.)

For example, think of an alcoholic with $20. He could have the first type of freedom by having no restrictions on him from his family or community, and with that freedom he could drink himself into stupor. While he would be free to drink all the whiskey he can afford, he would not be free from the whiskey’s bondage over him, and he would not be free from the turmoil or doubt that lead him to drink in the first place. How can he find that positive freedom? How can he gain the ability to what is right when he has sold himself into an alcoholic bondage?

He needs community. In a sense, he needs less negative freedom in order to obtain more positive freedom. It really does take a village to raise a child, but that village is family, church, and small community, not federal or state government. We may think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, but we actually act within a social context. We rebel against real or perceived restrictions. We align ourselves with teams or labels because we want to be part of that group, and we want that group to win, generally speaking.

And in the long run, don’t we want to be right? When we make our choices, don’t we want them to succeed, for them to be correct choices whatever that means? That works in community, first with the Lord who made us, next with our family biological or spiritual, and then with our larger community. The ability to do with is right is the upside of freedom.

Happy Fourth of July.

Writing

And you may “quote” me

Leave a comment

Quotation marks, like pretty much every element of punctuation and orthography, are a subject of much contention and fun-poking nowadays. (There’s even a blog devoted to unnecessary Q.M.s.)

When I became the editor of the Journal of the Georg Sverdrup Society, it was patiently explained to me by our president (who is an educator) that I’d been using quotation marks wrong all these years. I’d been putting closing quotation marks before punctuation marks in the case of partial quotations—for instance:

He used to talk about pancakes, which he called “flapjacks”.

That just seemed right to me. And our president told me that would actually work in England, but not in America. In America we write:

He used to talk about pancakes, which he called “flapjacks.”

The English also indicate “quotes within quotes” (were those unnecessary quotation marks? Suddenly I’m all insecure about it) differently. In America, we start with double quotes and then switch to single quotes, while in England, it’s the opposite. Thus:

American: John said, “My father used to say, ‘Never trust anybody from Chattanooga.’”

English: John said, ‘My father used to say, “Never listen to anyone from Minneapolis.”’

Some countries don’t even use quotation marks. In French (at least when I studied it in college) they indicated quotations with a tilde at the beginning of the sentence.

Il dit, ~ Je ne comprends pa.

I’ve also read some Norwegian texts that used that form, though I don’t think it’s very popular over there anymore.

And then there’s the Spanish with their upside-down exclamation points: “¡” which just weird me out. That has nothing to do with quotation marks, but I’m groping for a way to end this post, and that seems as good as any.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture