Today was one of those days where life reaches down into your calendar and reminds you that there are bigger priorities than the ones you’ve scrawled on your schedule. I went to a funeral today. It was the funeral of my uncle Ralph, not a blood uncle but the husband of one of my mother’s sisters. In terms of our family tree, this leaves but one survivor standing – also an uncle by marriage – in his generation.
Ralph was a plain, cheerful, energetic man who seemed to have discovered the fountain of youth until almost the very end. He worked as a telephone lineman, one of those guys who climb the poles at any time of the day, in any kind of weather. He owned every hand tool known to man, and his eidetic memory knew precisely where they could be located (often in the trunk of his car). If somebody needed something fixed, it was his great joy to jump in and help – and he knew how to do it right, too.
I don’t recall ever hearing a word said against Ralph. He lived into his 90s.
I must confess I was late to the funeral. My brain was absolutely convinced that to travel 2 ½ hours and arrive at 10:00 a.m., I needed to set out around 8:30. The logic of this calculation seems just as unassailable to me as it is wrong in reality.
I’ve done this sort of thing before. I don’t know what my problem is. Certainly it must be partly due to my functional innumeracy. Also I blame my difficulty in visualizing spatial relationships. I need to teach myself (even at this advanced age) to sit down and draw a clock face, and then shade in the hours, when I’m planning a trip.
On the drive I listened to the audiobook of Klavan’s When Christmas Comes. Almost wished the drive was longer.
And that’s how we really expose ourselves. Not in what we say but in the imagination we lay over the face of things. Because we can choose our words, strike our poses, but our delusions—no, these are wallpapered to our souls.
Andrew Klavan informs us in his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, that he once wrote a novel about Jesus. He’s not very proud of it; it was the sort of sophomoric story that young agnostics are prone to tell, once they’ve “figured everything out.”
But he wrote another novel about Jesus – in a sense. Man and Wife is not a Christian book, but its central character is a very evident Christ figure. And while the author did not quite understand yet when he wrote the book, you can tell he was asking the right questions.
Cal Bradley, the narrator, is a psychiatrist, chief administrator of a private mental facility in Connecticut which was originally endowed by his wealthy family. He’s good at what he does, but the real joys of his life are his wife and children.
His wife Marie came out of nowhere, it seemed, a simple-hearted, uneducated former waitress. She’s beautiful and she’s devoted to her husband, her children, and her church, joyfully serving them all. As far as Cal is concerned, she’s a miracle.
Then, one day while hiking near a local waterfall, Cal spies a woman who looks like Marie down in the gorge, talking to a strange man who seems oddly intimate with her. When he asks her about it, she cheerfully denies being anywhere near the place.
Meanwhile, Cal has admitted a 19-year-old man named Peter Blue to his facility. Peter is charged with striking his girlfriend, setting fire to a church, and assaulting a police officer. But the priest of the church begs Cal to help this boy. There’s something astonishing about his spirit, he says.
And Peter Blue does indeed seem remarkable. Not only is he a cooperative counseling subject, he exerts a healthy influence on the other patients. They follow him like disciples, and their symptoms are improving.
Only Peter Blue turns out to be connected to that same strange man Cal thought he saw with Marie at the waterfall. And Cal starts receiving threats, which he’s sure come from that same man. Is it possible Marie has been lying to him all these years? Can love and untruth exist together?
From a Christian point of view, Man and Wife offers a number of serious problems. But it should be remembered that author Klavan was working his way to faith when he wrote the book. The story is suspenseful and exciting and challenging; also moving and heartbreaking. I recommend it for thoughtful adults. Cautions for language and mature themes.
Bishop looked the man over. He was a big, evil chuckle-head. A white guy approximately the size of Denver. He had short blond hair and stupid eyes and a vague pharmaceutical smile. He had a voice so deep it sounded like an earth tremor.
Andrew Klavan’s Weiss-Bishop trilogy comes to a thundering conclusion in Damnation Street. I’m pretty good with words, but I struggle to express how much I enjoyed it. And I’ve read it before.
Quick background: Big, sad, middle-aged San Francisco private eye Scott Weiss has fallen in love with a woman he’s never even met – a prostitute who calls herself Julie Wyant. He also knows that she’s living on the run, in fear of the Shadow-man, a legendary professional assassin. The Shadow-man has a chameleon-like gift for disguise, and is an utter sadist. His dream for Julie is to catch her and torture her to death. That’s his idea of love.
This dynamic has formed a subplot in the first two books, but it takes center stage in Damnation Street, as very different obsessions draw these two men into a final showdown. In some ways they are mirror images of one another – so which force will prevail? Empathy or diabolic hate?
Weiss could use his partner, Jim Bishop, at a time like this, but Bishop failed him badly in Shotgun Alley. Bishop has always been the kind of man who lives on the edge, and he may have fallen beyond redemption now.
There is one more character in play, though. One I didn’t mention in the previous review.
The narrator of the trilogy is actually one of its most interesting characters. He’s clearly a fictionalized portrait of the author himself in his post-college days. He tells us he took a job with Weiss and Bishop because he’d always loved detective fiction, and wanted to learn about it first-hand, so he could write hard-boiled books himself.
In Dynamite Road, the narrator met Emma McNair, the girl of his dreams. But he was prevented from calling her because – with all the idiocy of young, horny men – he stumbled that very night into a sexual relationship with an older woman, and has been too cowardly to break it off since. In Damnation Street, he encounters Emma once again, and she gives him an ultimatum – “I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don’t come back until you are one.”
Which is how he comes to find himself in a fistfight outside of a brothel, giving Weiss the best backup he’s capable of.
But it all finally culminates in a showdown in a lonely house, where Weiss entices the Shadow-man. Author Klavan sets the scene like Hitchcock, letting us know everything there is to know about the Shadow-man’s plans, dangers Weiss can’t know. Time slows down, and the dramatic tension is exquisite, even after multiple readings.
These books can be taken on several levels. On the surface, they’re well-crafted hard-boiled mysteries. On a deeper level, they’re chivalric romances, transposed into a modern key. And – perhaps – on the deepest level, they’re meditations on that mystery of love and idealism that motivates all of Klavan’s work.
The publishers made a serious error in the Kindle edition, by placing their “Thank you for reading” message after the last numbered chapter, but before the Epilogue. Don’t miss the Epilogue, though. It’s important.
The Weiss-Bishop books are, I contend, an apotheosis of the hard-boiled genre. I recommend them, and even urge them upon you. But cautions are in order for violence, sexual situations, and very rough language.
“She changed things,” Whip Pomeroy went on in that same overly sweet, overly elevated tone. “She changed… everything. Everyone. She was like…oh—oh, an unreal creature. Like paintings you see. Or daydreams you have. She was the way people never are. You know? You can’t know.”
The time comes, periodically, when I know I need to re-read Andrew Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop trilogy again.
I think we’re all feeling a little out of sorts lately. The news has been pretty awful. Whatever way one feels the world ought to be going, it doesn’t seem to be going that way at all.
I get the feeling Andrew Klavan has been feeling like that too. I like to watch his podcasts – delayed, of course, on YouTube, because I’m too cheap to spring for a Daily Wire subscription. But Klavan seems a little tetchy lately. I get the feeling he’s getting fed up with the community he joined when he chose, some years back, to be baptized. Tired of e-mails from earnest souls asking how he can call himself a Christian when he writes about such awful topics, using such dirty language. I hope we don’t lose him over that, because we need him badly.
So I’ll supplement my previous reviews of the Weiss-Bishop books on this blog, and the one I wrote years back for The American Spectator, by again reviewing the two books I’ve read so far this time around – Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley.
The heroes of these books are a pair of San Francisco private detectives – Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop. The names themselves are suggestive – “Weiss” means white, suggesting the proverbial White Knight. And if Weiss takes that role, then Bishop suggests another chess man, the oblique piece that never moves in a straight line.
Scott Weiss is a former cop, big, sad-faced, overweight, and middle aged. He foreshadows Klavan’s current character Cameron Winter in being an intuitive detective. He has a knack for getting into people’s heads, for discerning their motivations and fears, predicting their next moves. His ability to track down fugitives is legendary.
Jim Bishop is younger, a handsome, buff risk-taker, a natural outlaw. He treats women like disposable objects, and they love him for it. (Weiss envies him this talent, with guilt.) Weiss pulled him out of the gutter and gave him a second chance. Saw potential in him. He’s a valuable operative, but it’s largely due to his willingness to break the rules, while Weiss looks the other way.
In Dynamite Road, Bishop is sent to a small town aviation company, where one of the owners suspects his partner is using their planes for illegal activities. Bishop, an expert combat pilot, goes to work for them, with a plan to replace the pilot the criminals have selected for their coming operation, incidentally seducing his wife so he can pump her for information.
Meanwhile, Weiss has fallen in love. A woman shows up in an associated investigation – a prostitute with the face of an angel. He grows obsessed with this woman, Julie Wyant. (Her name is reminiscent of Clyde Wynant, the subject of the manhunt in Dashiel Hammet’s The Thin Man.) He gradually becomes aware that he’s not the only man hunting this woman. The other is a mysterious, legendary killer known as The Shadowman, perhaps the most dangerous – and relentless – criminal in the world. (Continued on next page.)
“I don’t think there is a middle ground. I have a job here. I teach poetry to young people. Poetry is a thing. It’s a thing that does a thing, or tries to do it. It tries to use words to unite the material world with its greater meanings….”
Because I love Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels so, I make it my custom to read each one twice (when they’re new; no doubt there will be further readings down the road). So this is my second review of the fifth book in the series, After That the Dark.
Our hero, secret government assassin turned English professor Cameron Winter, finally has his first date with Gwendolyn Lord, the woman he’s been dancing around over the course of the two previous books. And it’s good. It’s more than good. They click. They complement each other. They seem to have very little in common in terms of tastes, but they fill each other’s empty spaces. It all rather scares him.
Just to make conversation, she tells him a story she figures is right up his alley. A friend of hers, who works at a penitentiary in Oklahoma, has witnessed a “locked door mystery.” A prisoner, a man who went crazy and murdered his wife and little son, had been locked into a padded cell, wearing only his underwear. A few hours later he was found dead, killed with a nail gun. Officially, it’s listed as a suicide, but where did he get the nail gun?
Just to please Gwendolyn, Winter goes to Oklahoma to ask questions. He does not expect that his questions will lead him to a confrontation with one of the most powerful men in the world, and with a nightmarish assassin he’s already tangled with once before.
On this second reading, I think I understand better what After That the Dark is all about. The heart of the thing is the body-soul nexus, the way flesh and spirit coexist. The dark conspiracy Winter uncovers and fights involves an attempt to overcome the problem of crime through purely mechanistic means. The scene where (spoiler alert) Winter goes to bed with Gwendolyn is a counterpoint, illustrating the truth that flesh and spirit are reconciled through love, not through man’s reason or technology.
I suppose that’s Klavan’s reason for putting the two of them in bed together – in spite of the fact that Gwendolyn is supposed to be a faithful, born-again Christian. It still bothers me, not because I demand stories where Christians are perfect, but because it seems to ignore Christian sexual morality altogether. Still, even fornication is “becoming one flesh” according to Scripture, so it works thematically.
An amusing continuing element in each of these books is the character of “Stan-stan Stankowski,” the ultimate undercover operative. Stan-stan always shows up at some point to pass on information, either from the government or from Winters’ old superior. The thing about Stan-stan is that he seems to have no personal identity, or even a body of his own. In the previous book he was passing as a large, burly wilderness guide. In this book, he appears as a tiny, delicate Asian woman. He’s literally impossible – if the books are ever filmed, they’ll have to use a different actor each time out. But it’s a funny plot device, and suggestive of the flesh/spirit conundrum that is this book’s theme.
All in all, I really enjoyed After That the Dark, like all the books in the series. I haven’t reconciled myself to the sex scene, but it’s not enough to turn me against this fascinating series.
He was thinking about this when the waiter brought the check to him. Gwendolyn made a motion toward her purse.
“Now, now,” he said, “don’t try any of that twenty-first-century stuff with me.”
“You’re right, she said. “It’s a rotten century. I only stay for the antibiotics.”
It has become a tradition for me to purchase and savor each new Cameron Winter book by Andrew Klavan as soon as it comes out, and to tell the world what a pleasure that annual event has become in my life. After That, the Dark is the fifth in the series, and I enjoyed it, though (I must admit) a little less than I expected. That is for reasons which author Klavan has no doubt anticipated and discounted in his own mind. I’ll get to that.
Cameron Winter, our continuing hero, is a former assassin for a super-secret government division which no longer exists. After its dissolution, he reinvented himself as an English professor, He now teaches at a small college somewhere in the Midwest.
A thread that ties the books together is his conversations with his psychologist Margaret, who is helping him work through his old traumas and sins. Recently she has been particularly interested in his relationship (or reluctance to initiate a relationship) with Gwendolyn Lord, a widow he met a couple books ago, with whom he struck immediate sparks.
In After That, the Dark, Cameron finally asks her out, only to be blindsided by how well it goes. The two are not simply compatible – they click together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And in this story, the investigation is sparked, not as usual by Cameron’s sixth sense for hidden mysteries in crimes in the news, but by a puzzle posed by Gwendolyn herself. She tells him about a friend who works in a prison, where a “locked room” murder occurred. A prisoner, who had been strip-searched, is found shot to death with a nail gun in a padded, locked cell.
Cameron goes to the prison town to look into the matter. He is not aware that he’s at the center of a conspiracy, among the moves and countermoves of highly placed, faceless, ruthless chess players. Cameron is a gifted operative, and he’ll need all his gifts to survive this one.
Was After That, the Dark fun to read? Sure was. Was it as good as its predecessors? Maybe not quite – I’m not sure.
My main problem was moral. Gwendolyn, Cameron’s new love interest, is an open and devoted Christian. Yet (minor spoiler alert) she falls straight into bed with him at the first opportunity. I could have understood that plot point if it were treated as a mistake, but in the aftermath she justifies it, saying that they were clearly made for each other by God, so it must be okay.
Andrew Klavan is a wise and perceptive writer. Surely he’s aware that everybody who’s ever fallen in love feels exactly the same way.
It should be noted that Klavan is a convert to Christianity, and comes to the topic from a different angle than “cradle Christians” like me. Also that these books are not intended as “Christian fiction” in the same way that the average CBA book is.
Nevertheless, that rationalization for premarital sex is, in my opinion, too predictable and conventional for a writer of Andrew Klavan’s considerable wisdom.
[Blogger’s note: I may or may not be able to post tomorrow. I’ll be having cataract surgery, and experience suggests I may not be able to read a computer screen for the rest of the day. Thank you for understanding.]
But philosophers, for their misfortune, are not the only people in the world. Genuinely mad and frantic people are all around them and do them the worst turn of all: they take them at their word.
I make it a practice to read Andrew Klavan’s non-fiction books at least twice. (And there’s more than a good chance I’ll get the audiobook of The Kingdom of Cain to listen to while I drive to Minot for Høstfest this fall.) So I sat down with it again yesterday, and found it just as compelling as on the first reading. Klavan offers new insights on good, evil, and art. And sometimes – I flatter myself – we think on parallel lines.
When I first reviewed The Kingdom of Cain, I mentioned two famous murders Klavan describes, which have gone on to inspire numerous works of imagination – the case of Ed Gein (who inspired “Psycho” and string of slasher movies), and the case of the original murderer, Cain.
But I neglected to cite one murder he spends considerable time on, one which – though pretty sordid in its own right – has had a remarkably prestigious literary progeny. That is the case of Pierre Francois Lacenaire, a pretentious Parisian thief who, with an accomplice, murdered a con man and his bedridden mother in 1834, to steal money that wasn’t there. It was far from the perfect crime – the two murderers were quickly arrested by the “stupid” police and put on trial for their lives.
But for Lacenaire, this development provided the one thing he’d always wanted – celebrity. He was a handsome man, and now he assumed the role of Byronic hero. He was, according to himself, a genius chained down by poverty and the injustices of society. He had struck back against the universe like some Titan out of Greek mythology. The public ate it up. Ladies loved him. Lacenaire went to the guillotine, but he went a famous man.
Lacenaire, Klavan says, was treading in the footsteps of the Marquis de Sade, whom he considers the only really self-consistent atheist philosopher. If there is no God, Sade reasoned, there is nothing in the world but power. Since one can’t be certain that other people even exist, and since one can’t feel anyone else’s pain, the only moral course is to increase one’s own personal power. Greater power gives one the scope to increase one’s pleasure, the only good we can know. One ought to do everything one can to increase one’s power, so one can force others to serve one’s pleasure. Any talk of love or compassion is unscientific sentiment, the excuse of the weak and cowardly.
Fyodor Dostoevsky recognized this logic – and rejected it. He had suffered imprisonment, had almost been executed, and had found God in suffering. So he wrote Crime and Punishment, one of the world’s great novels, based on Lacenaire’s crime, but refuting its logic.
But Friederich Nietzsche recognized the argument, too. And he agreed that God was dead – that we had killed God. Therefore, we now faced the terrible duty of becoming gods ourselves, so that we could forge a new, stronger morality.
Nietzsche despised antisemites. But his sister, who became his literary executor, was a violent hater of Jews. She worked to popularize her late brother’s writings among the rising Nazi Party.
And we know what fruit that bore.
That sequence is just part of the whole narrative of The Kingdom of Cain. The book is not only an essay on art, but a work of theodicy – an effort to explain how there can be evil if God is good. The answer to that, Klavan argues, will not be found in reason, but in art. Because art speaks in a more compelling language, offering not arguments, but a loving Face, for those with eyes to see.
Anyway, The Kingdom of Cain is a great book. It may prove a classic. It has my highest recommendation.
The legacy of Cain is murder. It is the attempt to kill the accusing image of God within us and re-create the world in the image of the desires we mistake for ourselves.
The novelist Andrew Klavan has morphed himself (in between writing marvelous mystery stories) into a philosopher of art in recent years. His book The Truth and Beauty examined the English Romantic poets, linking their artistic strivings to the search for God. I loved that book, but had trouble understanding its ultimate point. This led me to do some theorizing of my own (I’ve posted some of my thoughts on this blog). Klavan’s latest book, The Kingdom of Cain, suggests to me that I’ve been generally on the right track.
Andrew Klavan has often mentioned wryly that one of his great fears, when he became a Christian, was that he’d become a Christian writer – the kind of writer who tells stories about a little girl who prays that God will help her find her bunny rabbit, and God obliges. Instead, he has made his uneasy way working at his proper craft, writing the kind of stories he cares about and suffering the criticism of those readers who want bunny stories.
So this book begins as a sort of apologia for realistic (even earthy) Christian fiction – an issue that matters to me as well, in my humble way. Can depictions of the darkness of life – the ugly things that evil, twisted men do to each other and to the innocent – serve to glorify God?
Klavan thinks they can.
He starts out with the ancient, original murder – that of Cain upon Abel. He describes how the spirit of Cain has passed down through history to find full expression in post-Christian thinkers and psychologists – men like Nietzsche and Freud – and de Sade. How Dostoevsky pondered such ideas, found them wanting, and brought forth brilliant, moral works of art – Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. He describes the crimes of a nondescript Wisconsin psychopath named Ed Gien, whose hideous career inspired “Psycho,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” and a score of inferior knock-offs.
Then he ponders the mysteries of creation, the fall of Man, and redemption. The book ends in a vision of what the author considers possibly the greatest work of human art – Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” an achievement that contemplates what Christians consider the greatest crime of all time – the greatest crime possible – and transforms it into sublime beauty.
Here, he suggests, is an answer to the mystery of Theodicy, the question how a good God could permit evil. The answer, Klavan suggests, cannot be parsed in logic or spoken in words. Only Beauty, a gleam of light from Heaven received by the soul, can provide answers for those who have eyes to see.
But read The Kingdom of Cain for yourself. I’m certainly going to read it again. I experienced genuine physical thrills as I followed its line of thought.
Still haven’t finished the book I’m reading, so you get further puerile musings on art tonight.
I have read Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty twice, and I’m still not sure I understand it. I kind of suspect that’s the point of the book – that art is essentially an effort to convey an experience that can’t be pinned down in words. You “catch” it or you don’t. Kind of like Zen, I suppose, though I hate to use that comparison.
But my point (I think) is that art is mysterious and evasive. There are formulas, but they never really touch the heart of the thing. It’s what C.S. Lewis called “Joy” in Surprised by Joy, and he linked it with Romanticism – which, not coincidentally, is what The Truth and Beauty is also about.
I watched one of Klavan’s interviews on YouTube the other day, and (if my memory is correct) he said he talked about the value of Pi and Fibonacci’s theorem in TTAB. He said that Pi expresses itself in Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, which, he maintained, suggests that the Trinity itself is expressed in creation. Every living thing around us, from the smallest single-cell animal to the human and the elephant, develops according to that ratio. The leaves of the trees tend to grow in tripartite forms. Fractals create three-part shapes, leading to astonishingly naturalistic digital images.
The value of Pi – the number three plus a little more. Three, but not a static three. There’s some mystery added, a little extra to surprise us and keep us off balance.
Theologians have scoffed at the legend of St. Patrick teaching the Irish about the Trinity by showing them a three-leaf clover. “Bad analogy,” they say.
But what if the clover expresses the Trinity in a more profound way? Not as an analogy, but as an artifact? The metaphorical fingerprints of the Potter in the clay vessel He has created?
I think this Fibonacci stuff may be one reason why I was never a good artist, back when I was young and dreamed of making a living with pencil and brush. An art teacher in high school once told me I was good at symmetry, and that pleased me. But symmetry isn’t what you want in art, I think, most of the time. You want dynamism –a sense of movement, if only the movement of the viewer’s eye.
I missed that Fibonacci knack – dividing things into threes, creating a compelling imbalance. My work just sat there. (Among its other failings.) I always think of a panel from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip that impressed me – Hobbes leaps at Calvin, and the line of his body and tail is so elegant that you can feel the motion. I could never draw a line like that, though I wanted to very much.
Anyway, I guess it all goes back to a basic disconnect between our impoverished age and the past (the break came during the World Wars, I think). The old artists believed they were expressing God (or even pagan gods), and sought to recreate beauty. Nowadays, artists only think they’re expressing themselves – and they believe themselves to be cosmic accidents (bad for the environment too).
Christians are capable of producing really great art. Subcreation. Genuine, God-reflecting beauty. We’ve done it in the past. And our competition is occupying itself taping bananas to walls. It should be an easy contest.
But we need a) to take art seriously, and b) to encourage our talent.
Winter, who a moment before had been truly worried he was losing his mind, was now wondering if he was the last sane man on earth. So often he struggled with the fact that he had killed people. But just now he was wondering if maybe he hadn’t killed enough of them. Maybe he should have killed them all.
It has become my custom to read each of Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels twice, as I find them peculiarly suited to my emotional world (which is not to claim that I am anything like Winter, who is, for instance, both dangerous and attractive to women). On my first reading of A Woman Underground last fall, I didn’t find it as congenial as some of the others. I liked it better on second reading. I think I missed things the first time out, for purely subjective reasons.
Cameron Winter is not your average English professor. Not long ago he was a top-secret government assassin. His stories interweave his memories of his past as he confides in his psychological therapist, who is helping him work through his guilt and conflicts.
In A Woman Underground, Winter reminisces about a terrible assignment he carried out once, dealing with a human trafficker in Turkey. But his therapist, an older woman, keeps trying to turn the discussion to his old obsession with a girl he fell in love with as a child, who eventually turned into a very different person from the one he first knew. Winter tries to explain that both stories are connected. But then he discovers that this lost love made a secret visit to his apartment, though she missed him. That’s enough to put him on her trail – and soon he will realize that he’s not the only man out looking for her.
I think what made me uncomfortable in my first reading of A Woman Underground was that it hit me in areas that are sore spots in my own interior world – romantic obsession and betrayal. On my second reading I recognized better how well the story serves Winter’s character development and the overall series narrative arc. I was also happier with the darkly ironic denouement this time.
Either way, the book was utterly gripping, and I neglected things I should have been doing to read another chapter.
A Woman Underground is a superior mystery-thriller, worthy of the groundbreaking series to which it belongs.
Websites store cookies to enhance functionality and personalise your experience. You can manage your preferences, but blocking some cookies may impact site performance and services.
Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.
Name
Description
Duration
Cookie Preferences
This cookie is used to store the user's cookie consent preferences.
30 days
These cookies are needed for adding comments on this website.
Name
Description
Duration
comment_author
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
comment_author_email
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
comment_author_url
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
These cookies are used for managing login functionality on this website.
Name
Description
Duration
wordpress_logged_in
Used to store logged-in users.
Persistent
wordpress_sec
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
15 days
wordpress_test_cookie
Used to determine if cookies are enabled.
Session
Statistics cookies collect information anonymously. This information helps us understand how visitors use our website.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyzes website traffic for informed marketing decisions.
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
30 minutes after last activity
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
6 months after last activity
__utmv
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga_
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_gat
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
Marketing cookies are used to follow visitors to websites. The intention is to show ads that are relevant and engaging to the individual user.
A video-sharing platform for users to upload, view, and share videos across various genres and topics.
Registers a unique ID on mobile devices to enable tracking based on geographical GPS location.
1 day
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
Tries to estimate the users' bandwidth on pages with integrated YouTube videos. Also used for marketing
179 days
PREF
This cookie stores your preferences and other information, in particular preferred language, how many search results you wish to be shown on your page, and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
10 years from set/ update
YSC
Registers a unique ID to keep statistics of what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
Session
DEVICE_INFO
Used to detect if the visitor has accepted the marketing category in the cookie banner. This cookie is necessary for GDPR-compliance of the website.
179 days
LOGIN_INFO
This cookie is used to play YouTube videos embedded on the website.
