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Non-conversational reminiscences

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The Hafrsfjord Jubilee in Stavanger. These are some of the many people I did not talk to in Norway.

No book review tonight. I’ve had a sudden onset of translation work, which is a development approved at the highest levels. It had been a while. But it slows down my reading.

So let’s pick up on a subject I left hanging. I wrote a lot here, before I left, about my self-education program to improve my conversational Norwegian. I downloaded an app to listen to Norwegian radio, and watched some Norwegian TV too. How did that go, you ask?

Not very well, to be honest.

During the course of my preparations, I thought I was comprehending the language a little better. That didn’t “translate” (pun unintended) into any actual benefit, in practice. When I faced real human beings in Norway, I found I still couldn’t understand them without several repetitions. And I hate inconveniencing people. Especially when they generally speak English already, and the whole thing could be done more efficiently that way.

Discursive interjection: What is it with language study books and the conversations they give you to memorize? I didn’t resort to any of those during this process, but I often thought back to my time as a student.

A model conversation for the student to memorize goes like this:

Student: “Kan du si meg veien til stasjonen?” [Could you tell me how to get to the station?}

Policeman: “Ja, rett fram til hjørnen, og så til venstre.” [Yes, straight ahead to the corner, then turn left.]

Now we all know what happens in real life:

Student: “Kan du si meg veien til stasjonen?”

Policeman. “Ja, rett fram til hjørnen, og så til venstre.”

Student: “Unnskyld? Vil du si det igjen?” [Excuse me? Could you say that again?]

Policeman: “Rett fram til hjørnen, og så til venstre.”

Student: “Si det igjen, takk?” [Say that again, please?]

Policeman: “You are an American, right?”

Student: “Yeah…”

Policeman: “Just go straight ahead to the corner, take a left and you’re there.”

Student. “Oh. Okay. Uh… takk.”

That’s how it actually works. And that’s how it generally happens in my experience. Carrying out a full conversation, when the other person is an English speaker, is just asking them to spend time being my teacher for free. And I can’t ask that.

Cant. Ask. That. It’s not in me.

However, on a few occasions, I did encounter people whose English was worse than my Norwegian. Then I was able to communicate, with some effort.

And that’s the return I got for my effort. I guess it’s something.

There was a joke I used to make, when I was young and studying Norwegian. I said, “I want to be able to not talk to people in a second language.”

Turns out I spoke prophetically.

I’m pretty sure a normal person would be conversational at this point. I think my real problem is psychological – I’m blocked by my social discomfort.

Still and all, my print-only language skills allow me to make some money in hard times. That’s nothing to nyse [sneeze] at.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Judge Me Not,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“You stay in town long enough, and I’ll own you too. I tell you to eat grass and you’ll eat grass. I know. You’re telling yourself you’re a big strong guy and you’d die before you’d take orders like that. That’s fairy story stuff, Morrow. Hero stuff, like in the books. People aren’t like that. You can break people. You can break anybody in the world, if you know how to go about it. If you want to be smart, just join my team. Dennison doesn’t have to know. Keep the five grand. You like this little girl? Take her home with you. She’ll do anything you tell her to do.”

I said of the last old, republished John D. MacDonald novel I reviewed that it felt like a “programmer,” a quick project slapped together to meet a deadline. MacDonald did, after all, work on contract for the pulp paperback trade.

Judge Me Not, the latest one I read, is a very different specimen. Though written for the paperback market, and at a very early point in his career, and though it follows the conventions of the pulp genre, it transcends all that and (in my opinion) achieves the level of serious literature. It belongs up there with Hemingway – or at least with Dashiell Hammet.

Teed Morrow is a sort of professional reformer. He served in the occupation forces in Germany after the war, and then teamed up with his former commander to work for civic reform. They’ve gotten themselves hired as city manager and assistant in the town of Deron, New York. They’re on schedule with their plan to expose and oust the current mayor and the gang that supports him.

But Teed isn’t quite the straight arrow his boss, a widowed father of two daughters, is. Teed’s a bit of a swinger. And right now he’s sleeping with the mayor’s wife. Who could it hurt?

What he and his boss don’t realize is how seriously corrupt and vicious the gang running the town is.

That becomes very clear when Teed wakes up one day to find the mayor’s wife murdered in his lake cabin. He manages to dump the body before the cops show up (heroes disposing of women’s bodies seems to have been one of MacDonald’s go-to tropes at the start of his career; it’s featured in the last three of his novels I’ve read), but that doesn’t prevent his being arrested and beaten within an inch of his life by the cops.

And that’s just the beginning. It will get much, much worse before Teed manages to take the fight back to the enemy.

Judge Me Not’s plot genuinely surprised me. It was troubling and a little shocking. Very bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it, but there’s a moving redemptive element too.

I was highly impressed with Judge Me Not. Cautions for sexual situations (1950s vintage, so they’re not very explicit). Highly recommended.

Music

Sunday Singing: “And Can It Be”

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“And Can It Be” sung by an English congregation

Today’s hymn is one of the most familiar ones we sing, Charles Westley’s “And Can It Be.” The prolific hymnist Charles Westley (1707-1788) was the “bard of Methodism.” He may have written 6500 hymns.

John Julian writes in the Dictionary of Hymnology, “The saying that a really good hymn is as rare an appearance as that of a comet is falsified by the work of Charles Wesley; for hymns, which are really good in every respect, flowed from his pen in quick succession, and death alone stopped the course of the perennial stream.”

Our video example skips verse two and handles the refrain differently than the verses copied here (perhaps they are singing an Anglican variation).

1 And can it be that I should gain
an int’rest in the Savior’s blood?
Died he for me, who caused his pain?
For me, who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Refrain:
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

2 ‘Tis myst’ry all! Th’Immortal dies:
who can explore his strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
to sound the depths of love divine.
‘Tis mercy all! Let earth adore,
let angel minds inquire no more. [Refrain]

3 He left his Father’s throne above
(so free, so infinite his grace!),
humbled himself (so great his love!)
and bled for all his chosen race!
‘Tis mercy all, immense and free,
for, O my God, it found out me! [Refrain]

4 Long my imprisoned spirit lay
fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray;
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off, my heart was free;
I rose, went forth, and followed thee. [Refrain]

5 No condemnation now I dread;
Jesus, and all in him, is mine!
Alive in him, my living Head,
and clothed in righteousness divine,
bold I approach th’eternal throne,
and claim the crown, through Christ, my own. [Refrain]

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Poetry, Publishing

Writing as Reality TV, Old Tech, and the 2022 Bestsellers

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Writers everywhere say their craft is much like a reality show–their every action watched and analyzed, applauded and jeered. Looking awesome while writing or typing have been the notable skills of great authors such as Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, and Willy Makeit. The first reality star author, Dante Alighieri, is supposed to have said, if he were any more verbosely handsome, he’d be king.

Big Brother is after American authors in Kwame Alexander’s proposed show America’s Next Great Author. He’s putting together a pilot and calling for contestants who will pitch novel ideas to the judges. Six contestants will be selected for a month-long reality show retreat during which they will write the novel they pitched. And that’s not all.

“Throughout the retreat, they’ll also participate in storytelling challenges and work with mentors to develop their stories,” Publishers Weekly reports. Show co-creator David Sterry said “the challenges will ‘show off a writer’s ability to use words, think fast, be creative,’ but also help them to learn to market and promote their books ‘because writers are called upon to do so many different tasks now in modern publishing that have nothing to do with writing your book.’”

And will they have anything like their book or their sanity when they finish? (Via Prufrock)

Surely they took this idea from Monty Python’s Novel Writing sketch, featuring the athletic writing talents of Thomas Hardy.

Old Tech: Frank Adams’s Writing Tables, 16th-century English writing technology via 𝕊onja Drimmer on Twitter – “It’s especially famous for two things: its erasable pages and the survival of its original stylus.”

Bestsellers: Among the bestselling books of 2022, Colleen Hoover is making a killing. Publishers Weekly has the list. Hoover’s novel It Ends with Us is #1 and three other novels are on the list too.

National Poet: The Library of Congress has appointed the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón. (via Literary Saloon)

Photo: World’s largest buffalo, Jamestown, North Dakota. 1990. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Woman in the Waves,’ by William J. Cook

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This book grabbed me on the first page, with a well-written description of a walk on the beach.

Unfortunately, it lost me soon after that. But I stayed with it out of an odd sort of train-wreck fascination.

Woman in the Waves by William J. Cook is part of a series, and apparently wraps up business from previous books. But it stands alone all right. I certainly won’t be going back for the preliminaries.

Peter Bristol is a college professor in Driftwood, Oregon, a widower who has regimented his life strictly to regain a sense of control. One day, on his weekly walk on the beach, he sees a woman in a wedding gown walking into a heavy surf. Although he tries to rescue her, she’s gone in a moment.

Then, not long after, he finds a woman’s severed arm on the beach. On one of its fingers is a valuable diamond ring.

Policeman Charley Whitehorse is chief of police in Driftwood. In spite of the coincidence of Peter reporting both incidents, he doesn’t suspect him. His thoughts can’t resist turning to a man he knows to be a killer, who eluded him in a previous case – another college professor with a sexual taste for young coeds.

The story itself was okay, though melodramatic at the end. But the storytelling was highly amateurish. It read very much like a lot of well-meant Christian fiction – and often slipped into theological discussions. But no particular faith was affirmed, and a fair amount of profanity was present. Also there was premarital sex without criticism.

The author’s main problem was over-writing, something I complain about in a lot of my reviews. One of the characters asks at one point, “Is everybody around here becoming a [expletive deleted] philosopher?” A moment of self-awareness by the author, because everybody does philosophize in this book. Which leads to another problem – all the characters think and talk the same way. Gangsters and cops and college professors – you can’t tell them apart by their speech. In general, it’s a good idea to convey information to the reader through thought and dialogue rather than information dumps. But there are limits. Not everybody thinks out everything they’re doing every time they perform habitual acts, but they do in this book. A lot of very unnecessary information gets conveyed.

Also, the characters tend to make theatrical gestures, like leaping up and shaking their fists at the heavens. Scenes like that need to be used judiciously, if at all.

So I did not enjoy Woman in the Waves, and I do not recommend it.

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Norway Journal, Final Installment, Day 13

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June 24: Reporting from Gardermoen Airport in Oslo, where I am spending more of my life than I ever wished. It’s been a long day, and I’m only about half-way through.

I got up, not too early, and Trygve asked me if I wanted to see some more sights before I left. Why not? He took me to various places. We saw the Utne Hotel in Utne (which has no connection to his family, though he is related to the people who built the Ullensvang Hotel).

He took me to a fascinating place I’d never heard of (that I remembered). It’s Agatunet, the only partially preserved medieval klyngtun in Norway (if I remember correctly). A klyngtun was what I described the other day, where all the neighbors on various parcels on a farm lived clustered together in something like a village. One part of the tun’s main building, the Lagmandshus, was bujlt in 1221 according to dendrochronology. It was the home of Sven Bjorgulfsson Aga, a lawspeaker who was mysteriously murdered a little later and found beheaded across the fjord. Never solved. Otherwise, Agatun is a rare surviving klyngtun even without the medieval building.

The dark-colored end of this building is the surviving part of the 13th Century Lawman’s house in Agatunet.
Genuine 13th Century wooden wall.
Original carvings in the wood.
Inside the courtroom.
The other side of the building. Less interesting, but the light was better on this side.

We drove up to Voss, stopping for a few more photo opportunities…

Voss, I think.

…and had lunch in Voss. Biffsnirper, an unusual Norwegian dish consisting of shredded tags of beef which you dip in a sauce. Served with French fries and a salad. I quite liked it. Not sure what the sauce was.

Biffsnirper.

Finally we went to the bus station and figured out what I was supposed to do with my suitcase (keep it with me) and where to get on the train. Trygve and I said goodbye. He really delivered a tremendous visit, especially considering how I jerked him around about the dates. It seemed to mean a lot to him that, after 16 years, he’d been able to keep his promise to take me to Svelland farm. It meant a lot to me, too.

The Bergensbanen is considered one of the most beautiful train rides in the world. It takes something over seven hours, and crosses the Hardangervidda plateau and stops at various localities headed for Oslo. I arrived some time after 10:00 p.m.

I’d been told that there were buses to the airport right there, and that I could just ask someone where to find them. In fact, I spent about an hour and a half wandering through the railway station, across the footbridge to the bus station, and back. Almost nobody was working at that hour. I saw no security officers. The people I worked up my nerve to ask knew nothing.

Finally I decided to just take the airport train, which was clearly signed and for which buying a ticket was easy. The track was easy to find too. So that’s how I got to the airport, a little after midnight.

Since then I’ve been vegetating here at the airport. If I had any class I’d have gotten a room at a motel and slept decently, but I nodded in a chair, reading when I couldn’t sleep (which was most of the time). I was waiting for instructions to appear on the big board to tell me where to check in. Finally I stopped checking (didn’t want to lose my seat) and arbitrarily chose 9:00 a.m. as the time I’d check again. The desk number was up by then. I proceeded down to desk 2, where there was a very, very long line doing that switchback, stay-between-the-ropes Disney thing. I assume they were understaffed due to the strike. I got my boarding pass at last, went through security, and got over to the gate side, where I now sit recharging my cell phone and waiting for the time to come to go to the gate. Many challenges lie ahead.

Final note: Challenges indeed. The flight to Reykjavik was packed and uncomfortable. I asked about Lost & Found at the airport, to see if I could get back the Amazon Fire I lost. They told me it had to be done online. The check-in line was long again, but the flight to New York was only about half full, and thus comfortable. At JFK customs took forever, and then security took forever and ever, amen. I ended up missing my connection, spent a night in a cheap hotel in Jamaica, NY, got onto a (delayed) flight to Minneapolis on standby, and finally arrived after 10:00 p.m.

I refuse to think about all that. My trip to Norway was, considered in itself, a wonderful experience and could hardly have gone better. Many thanks to all the friends and family who went to such trouble to make it such a good time for me.

Fiction

The Wingfeather Saga Animated Series Coming End of Year

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The first season of the animated adaptation of Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga will be streaming from Angel Studios after Christmas 2022.

Angel Studios is the company responsible for The Chosen series as well as two clean comedy shows, Drybar Comedy and Freelancers (The first season of Freelancers is mad-cap hilarious.)

Last week, World News Group released an interview with two men behind The Wingfeather Saga series, Neal Harmon, co-founder of VidAngel and Angel Studios, and the series showrunner, Chris Wall.

The interview has a few points of interest, and I want to share only one of them here. Wall talked about some of the difficulties in finding partnering studios who may push or insist their story hit certain cultural values they don’t want to hit. Angel Studios said, “You guys make your show. Like, we’re happy to provide feedback for what we think works, you know, audience metrics and that sort of thing. But you know your people, you know your content, go make that.”

Netflix wouldn’t have it that way. Wall said, [edited] “We were told they’re not going to do Wingfeather Saga, they’re not into it over at Netflix, because it’s patriarchal in structure. And we’re not going to do those kinds of stories. . . . because we have a grandfather and a mother and these kids that live together and like we’re not into that. It has to be, you know, a single mom or a dad and any other kind of gender or sexual things you can put in there, they’re into it.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Folks’ Blues,’ by Steven Womack

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A surprising number of older mysteries are showing up these days, a development that pleases me a lot. Such books are enjoyably un-Woke, by and large. Dead Folks’ Blues, by Steven Womack, is a pretty good book with roots in classic hard-boiled.

Harry James Denton is recently divorced, and recently fired from his job as a newspaper reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. He moved into a smaller apartment, switched to a smaller, older car, and set up as a private eye. So far, most of his income has come from repossessing cars and skip tracing for a buddy in that business, and his operation is sinking fast.

Then in walks Rachel Fletcher, blonde, beautiful and rich. Once upon a time, Rachel and Harry were in love. But they drifted apart, and she married a successful surgeon. Now she’s living the good life.

Except it’s not as good as it looks. Her husband, she tells Harry, has a gambling problem. She’s pretty sure someone has threatened his life over unpaid debts. She’s willing to pay Harry – generously – to keep an eye on him.

The money, on top of Rachel herself, is irresistible. But this case will be full of surprises. Harry will find himself unconscious on top of a corpse, followed around by sinister characters, and beaten within an inch of his life before – belatedly – the whole plot comes together for him.

Dead Folks’ Blues was fun to read. Author Womack does a pretty fair job with his hard-boiled narration, though he needs to learn when to stop talking and trust the reader to get the joke. Also, I figured out Whodunnit pretty early.

Not sure if I’ll carry on with this series. It shows promise, but there are suggestions of leftish political leanings – and such things tend to only get worse. But it was worth reading. I do recommend it.

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Norway Journal, Day 12

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June 22: A day of disaster that ended better than I feared. “The thing that I have greatly feared has come upon me,” as it says in Job. I’d worried that this trip was going too well, and today I discovered a serious problem – all of my own making.

Yesterday I told Trygve that I needed to take time to fill out some US Customs re-entry forms (turned out they didn’t apply to me after all) and book my tickets for my bus trip to Oslo Friday. I chose a bus to ride, started the checkout, and came up against a problem I’ve encountered before and should have remembered. I can’t buy anything online with a credit card in this country. They want to text me a security number, but the cell phone tied to the card is my American one, which doesn’t work in Europe.

Then I realized that I’d made the same calendar mistake I made before with Trygve. First I told him I was coming Tuesday, and then (for some unknown reason) I bought a ticket for Monday. Now, I realized (to my horror) that my plane leaves Friday, not Saturday. So Thursday needs to be my travel day. That’s tomorrow.

I apologized profusely to Trygve, who seemed fairly sanguine, however. After trying a couple things, including a call to my credit card company, he said the best thing was to drive to Voss and buy a train ticket to Oslo there. This is the Bergensbanen, a famous rail line I’ve ridden before. We weren’t sure my card would work there either, but what choice did we have?

Statue of Knut Rockne in Voss. You can tell from the look on his face he thinks I’m a moron.

We drove to Voss (famous as the birthplace of Knut Rockne, and a beautiful place in its own right), and found a ticket machine in the entry hall – out of order. You can’t buy a ticket from an agent anymore. It’s all automated. Trygve led me up to the platform, and we found a machine there that did sell me a ticket. And my card worked.

Sigh.

Relieved, we did some driving around, doing some of the sightseeing Trygve had been planning but now will be prevented from doing. Three waterfalls, plus the Norwegian Nature Center in Eidfjord.

I forget what these falls are called. Voringfoss, maybe.
This one is called the Skjervsfossen. I could have gotten a better picture if I’d stepped closer to the edge of the observation platform, but I didn’t want to show off.

Up to the Hardangervidda plateau itself (at least the edge of it), where we looked at Sysenvatn, an artificial lake built for hydroelectricity and some other sights on the plateau.

Just a random, picturesque spot.

Then we drove back (it took a while). I was feeling better by now, though I still feel dumb. I think I ought to have my mental acuity checked by a doctor when I get home.

We went out again about an hour later to pick Trygve’s son Kjell up from dayschool. We then went to a few picturesque spots above the town to take pictures. It really is quite dramatic. I think I’m going into Sublimity Shock. I need the Midwest to get my blood sugar level back down.

Tomorrow we may do some more sightseeing before my train leaves, but we need to give ourselves time to get to the station, because those narrow mountain roads are prone to long traffic delays.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Alexandria,’ by Paul Kingsnorth

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Well, I have done it. I have completed reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Buccmaster Trilogy. Frankly, if I’d known what I was getting into, I’d probably have given it a miss. But in the end, it did grab me.

Alexandria, the third book of the trilogy, almost seems to take us back to the 11th Century setting of the first book, The Wake. It’s about people living a primitive life in fen country. Only this isn’t the past, it’s the post-apocalyptic future, some time after global warming (one assumes) has permanently heated the earth and raised the water levels.

The main characters, who speak in the same kind of crude old English dialect as Buccmaster in The Wake, are all that remains of one of the few remaining, primitive human tribes. Once there were hundreds of them, but they’re down to seven. There are a patriarch and a matriarch, a married couple with a young daughter, one other old man and a young man, who has no sexual outlet except for carrying on an affair with the married woman.

They are a matriarchal society, and they worship an earth goddess. Their creed is the importance of the body – there can be no life without the body. Their great enemy is Wayland. (We remember Wayland as Buccmaster’s god in The Wake. But now Wayland isn’t a blacksmith god, but the guiding spirit of Alexandria, which is an artificial intelligence bank into which most of humanity has uploaded its consciousnesses. Emissaries from Alexandria, strange semi-human creatures in red cloaks, constantly dog them, tempting one tribe member after another away into the supposed delights of Alexandria.

Toward the end, when the villagers have to flee rising waters and head for Glastonbury, where they expect final illumination, I began to actually be engaged with this story. Although there’s no Christianity here, except in passing allusions, the central question is a profoundly Christian one – what does it mean to have a body and a soul? Do body and soul have to be at war? Can there be a marriage between them?

I don’t necessarily recommend Alexandria or the Buccmaster Trilogy, unless your brow is pretty high as a reader. But it’s a meaningful literary exercise from an author who’s now a Christian.