A sharp-eyed British art collector saw a painting the auction house believed to be a “Rembrandt knockoff” valued at $3,100. He paid $4,500,000. Now that those in the know have looked it over closely, they say it could have sold for $40 million, because it is not a knockoff. It’s a unique self-protrait of the great Rembrandt. I love it.
I was reading a book from 1900 that referred to a bestseller of the day, Richard Carvel by Winston Churchill. I said, as perhaps you are saying now, “Is that the Winston Churchill?” No, it isn’t. There was an American novelist named Winston Churchill (born in St. Louis in 1871) and when the British leader (born 1874 at Blenheim Palace) began writing books of his own, he was concerned about confusion with the American. The two men wrote each other to clear things up, like this:
Mr. Winston Churchill is extremely grateful to Mr. Winston Churchill for bringing forward a subject which has given Mr. Winston Churchill much anxiety.
Read one of the letters here. Here’s a bit more on Churchill, the novelist.
A man I grew up with is blogging about his visits to various churches in our area. He’s a thoughtful guy with many good observations. When he talks about going to his parents’ church, he’s talking about my church. Will he make it to a Lutheran church one of these days? I don’t know. People have to draw the line somewhere, and what with all the snake-handling going on there . . . 🙂
I drove about an hour south last night, to meet my pastor brother from Iowa for supper. In the course of the conversation I discovered, to my surprise, that he’d been heavily involved in flood cleanup the last few days. And he hadn’t been going down to Iowa City or Cedar Falls, but to one of the nearest towns, where many of his parishioners live.
Its whole business district was under water. Devastating losses (though thankfully no deaths), and nobody had flood insurance, because historically the water has never come anywhere near this high. He said they’d all been out piling sandbags the night before the crest, but they might as well have stayed home and watched TV, because the river topped the bags by several feet.
His church has “adopted” a woman who’d recently moved to town, apparently because of low real estate costs, and bought a nice house “by the river.” She’d lost almost everything, and had no friends or family in the area.
I was ashamed I hadn’t called to check how they were doing when I heard about the flooding. When I heard of the massive earthquake in China (where his daughter is now), I called right away to find out if they’d heard anything (she wasn’t in any danger).
I guess that because I knew he himself doesn’t live near water, and because the disaster was “around these parts” rather than “way off in foreign lands,” I just assumed nothing bad could happen.
It’s a form of xenophobia, I suppose, to figure bad stuff only happens far away. Wishful thinking, too.
I approached the late Poul Anderson’s Mother of Kings with some trepidation. I wanted to read it because a) it’s a Viking historical fantasy, and b) I’m thinking out a book of my own in which one of the main characters in this one plays a part. But in a book about Gunnhild, wife of Norway’s King Eirik Bloodax and mother of King Harald Greyfell (and his brothers—they ruled jointly) I imagined I’d be dealing with a Marion Zimmer Bradley-esque feminist fantasy, all about what oppressors men are, how smothering Christianity is, and how real freedom is found in the worship of some Mother-goddess or other. I expected visceral, existential feminine rage.
Having read the book, I almost wish it had been like that. It would at least have had some fire to it.
Gunnhild is a character of mystery in Viking history and lore. Historians believe she was probably a Danish princess, conventionally married to Eirik Bloodax, son and heir of Harald Fairhair, who is remembered as the uniter of Norway. (Anderson seems unaware—or doesn’t care—that historians today doubt that Harald was really more than a regional overlord in the west, who may have begun the process of unification. For the purposes of this story he treats the account found in Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskringla, the Sagas of the Norwegian Kings, as literally true. I’ll admit I do the same thing in The Year Of the Warrior, but I claim in my own defense that the theory was new back then, and I hadn’t heard of it).
In the sagas and legends, though, Gunnhild is a very different character—the daughter of a Finnish (“Lapp” or Sami) wizard, a witch of fearsome power, terrible in her hatreds, lascivious in her morals, and bloody in her vengeances.
Anderson splits the difference. He imagines her as the daughter of a Norse chieftain, a girl who chooses to learn magic at the feet of two Finn wizards, whom she manages to kill off at the same time that she magically summons Eirik to sail in and sweep her off her feet. This is a promising beginning from the dramatic point of view, but sadly Anderson doesn’t sustain it. Once married to her prince, Gunnhild becomes a fairly conventional wife and queen, devoted to her husband and children. She assists them all through their lives by the use of her magical powers, but is thwarted more often than not. Her successes, when they happen, aren’t terribly impressive or lasting.
The result is that it’s hard to root for Gunnhild. She’s not good enough to sympathize with much, and not powerful or evil enough to be very entertaining. She becomes an almost passive center around which the drama of 10th Century Norwegian politics plays itself out. This is a great drama, but in this work it lacks (it seems to me) the rich hues and symphonic music of real epic. Anderson does some moments of pathos well, particularly concerning the deaths of Kings Haakon the Good and Harald Greyfell, but overall I found it pretty dry.
This is a problem I’ve always had with Anderson, and with Science Fiction writers as a group (no doubt there are exceptions). Science Fiction writers by and large (and that’s what Anderson primarily was), it seems to me, have a hard time handling human emotions, dreams and aspirations. They’re more oriented toward machines and machine-like people.
I always comment on books’ theological implications and treatments of Christianity in these reviews. Mother Of Kings provides unusual problems. Anderson is neither friendly nor hostile to Christianity, so it could be worse. Historically Eirik Bloodax ruled Norway as a heathen, but converted, along with his family, to Christianity when he fled to England and became King of York. Some of his sons seem to have been genuinely zealous in their missionary work (a point that’s largely ignored in Heimskringla). Gunnhild is portrayed here (quite reasonably) as a nominal Christian, uncertain as to what religion (Norse heathendom, Christianity or Finnish pantheism) offers the most useful magic for her exploitation. Clearly she’s a heathen at heart, but her deepest inclinations seem to be pantheistic. This can’t exactly be viewed as an argument for pantheism, though, because Gunnhild isn’t admirable enough to provide one.
Perhaps I’d have found the whole thing more exciting if I hadn’t already known the basic story. But I doubt it. I can’t really recommend Mother Of Kings very highly.
Here’s an old list of five comic novels by Roger Kimball. The list is by Kimball, not the novels.
Can books be too gorgeous to read? I would say yes, but I still want to leaf through them and feel bad about not using them. A book may be too pretty to read, but ink, no matter where it’s printed, is meant to be read. So I suppose pretty books should have blank pages.
The Complete Review has the goods The Final Bet by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, which claims to be the first Arabic detective novel translated into English. It’s simple, they say, but it’s interesting. “The locale and circumstances do add something to the novel, as Hamdouchi contrasts typical Moroccan police procedure with what is necessary for justice to be served,” they report.
A group of researchers conclude that sleep-deprived rats get juiced a bit on the smell of coffee alone. No taste, no sip, just a whiff. Because you know the best part of waking up is the smell of coffee in your house.
Also, here’s a report on long-term drinking of coffee may keep you from heart disease. And here’s your grain of salt to take with these reports.
In other news, our probe has found white stuff on Mars. Some believe it is the cocaine that lead to the end of Martian civilization. Skeptics doubt this belief.
