Apparently I now live in a state that no longer recognizes the priority of federal law. I post the song above out of a sense of prudence, so that I won’t be considered a traitor by my secessionist neighbors.
The lyrics to the song “The Bonnie Blue Flag” were written in 1861, by an entertainer named Harry McCarthy. The tune, like so many of our best tunes, was stolen from the Irish — the original song was called “The Irish Jaunting Car.”
The music in this clip comes from the 2003 movie, “Gods and Generals.” The visuals are a montage.
In tonight’s episode, a sad story about a book, plus some writing advice.
I won’t name the book or the author. At the start he showed some promise as a writer of Christian fantasy. His prose wasn’t professional, but it interested me. He made a good first impression. I was rooting for him, in spite of his often-clumsy style.
But he lost me when he started using demons as point of view characters. That’s a dangerous experiment, and not advised for newbies. I don’t think I’d try it myself. We’re talking about a whole different level of intelligence here; it doesn’t work (in my view) to portray suprenatural beings thinking like human villains, even very smart ones.
“But what” (you may ask) “about The Screwtape Letters?” The Screwtape Letters (in my opinion) is spiritual satire, not intended as the kind of fiction where the reader suspends disbelief. The Screwtape Letters is more about exploring ideas than characters.
But setting aside the issue of demons, I asked myself, “What writing advice would I give this author, if he were to ask me for guidance” (based on my own tremendous success, of course)?
Here’s the exercise I’d set him – based on an exercise in a correspondence course I took once, back in ancient times when people took correspondence courses.
The Exercise (note that this is not intended to make the piece of work you’ll tackle suitable for publication. It’s just intended to give your writing muscles a workout):
Take a piece of your own writing. Preferably at least a page long.
Check the word count.
Now, cut it to 50% of that.
Cut unnecessary verbiage. Cut adjectives and adverbs, replacing them with more vivid nouns and verbs. Find precise individual words to replace longer phrases. Interrogate each sentence and phrase to make it justify its existence. If it’s just decorative, excise it.
What you get in the end may not be anything like publishable prose. Or anything like the writing you want to produce. But it will teach you how to trim. You’ll be surprised what you can accomplish along those lines.
The final, mature style you adopt for yourself may be nothing so Hemingway-esque. But the exercise will do you good, like a workout in a gym.
“The fact is that Kate is bigger than anything she owns. It’s a subtle point, but if you strain you’ll begin to get it. She’s bigger than her furs, or her car, or her pretty house on Nicholas Street, or anything else she holds title to. She herself is the big thing. She’s an accepted artist who’s doing good and will do better, and she can say, ‘I’m big, and therefore I have these things,’ not, ‘I have these things, and therefore I’m big.’ It’s only little people without any real meat to them who have to say, ‘Don’t look at me, look at what I own.’”
I’ve enjoyed Stanley Ellin’s novels recently, but I wasn’t really prepared for The Key to Nicholas Street (set in 1951). Dorothy Sayers called Gaudy Night “a love story with detective interruptions,” and Nicholas Street is a sort of domestic drama with detective interruptions. It’s also kind of a Rashomon story, where we observe events from various points of view.
The story is set in a fictional, wealthy neighborhood in one of those communities where professionals commute to New York City. We see it first through the (pretty superficial) eyes of the housemaid, who sees everything in movie and magazine terms. She’s the one who discovers the body of the neighbor – a successful, beautiful commercial artist – at the bottom of the cellar steps in her home.
Then we get the perspective of her employer, an autocratic matron who’s been disappointed by the business failures of the rich man she married. She is a judgmental woman, obsessed with social status. She strongly disapproved of the late neighbor, and makes a plausible murder suspect.
But everybody’s a plausible suspect. There’s the matron’s husband, a man without much character, who’s having an affair. Her daughter, who’s dating a man her mother doesn’t approve of, a man who has been involved with the victim and might have been jealous. Also the son, going through an awkward adolescence.
I thought at one point that this was the kind of book that justifies adultery, but it’s more complicated than that. In the end, we find a surprising hero and a strong affirmation of moral truths.
I have to say I figured out whodunnit, but only for authorial structural reasons, not because I deduced it from the clues.
The Key to Nicholas Street wasn’t exactly my kind of book, but it was pretty good.
Above, a hymn much better known in England than on this side of the pond (though I doubt it’s sung much in schools there anymore), “Jerusalem,” a musical setting of William Blake’s poem. It’s been called England’s second national anthem.
It’s based on the legend (how ancient the legend is seems uncertain) that claims that the first Christian in Britain was none other than Joseph of Arimathea, the character from the gospels who gave up his tomb for Christ’s burial. According to the legend, Joseph was involved in the tin trade, with connections in Britain. Supposedly he was also Jesus’s uncle, and took Him along on one of his business trips to the barbarian island. Later, after the resurrection, he is supposed to have gone there as a missionary, founded the church at Glastonbury, and thrust his staff into the earth, where it budded to become the famous Glastonbury Thorn (which was, according to my reading, in fact a Middle Eastern variety of tree). We Protestants cut it down during the Reformation, but cuttings have been taken, and some survive.
(Another legend, by the way, says Aristobulus, St. Paul’s associate mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans, was the first missionary to Britain.)
I’m studying Glastonbury right now, because it will play a part in my Haakon the Good book. It’s a matter of record that King Athelstan raised a number of foreign princes at his court; this is one of the facts that make the story of Haakon’s fosterage with Athelstan plausible.
And Athelstan was a strong patron of Glastonbury Abbey, promoting it as a center of learning. Among the clerics educated there was the famous St. Dunstan – whom I intend to incorporate into the story.
I also had a strange, stray thought this morning, which I managed to snag with my little metaphorical net before it flew away. I thought of a way to suggest that a character is an angel, without actually saying he is an angel. I think it’s kind of clever, though it will probably pass over most readers’ heads.
Now I’ll have to figure out a place for an angel in the story.
The Round-Up was one of the many odd-ball restaurants in Sarasota, a town known more for its well-heeled tourists and wealthy retirees who lived on the offshore Keys than its cuisine. There are some good restaurants and there is a h*ll of a lot of variety, including the Round-Up, which boasted a red-on-white sign in the window, “The Best Chinese Tex-Mex in Florida.” Few challenged this claim, especially not the homeless who wandered past every day.
Revisiting an old favorite, one of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lew Fonesca mysteries. My fondness for these books rests largely (in my perception) on the degree to which I identify with the hero, so I was astounded, on this second reading, to realize what a very good book Vengeance is – and what a dynamite twist ending it features.
Lew Fonesca is a process server living in Sarasota, Florida. He settled here when his car broke down. Three years ago, he was a district attorney’s investigator in Chicago, but his wife’s death in an auto accident put him into a tailspin, leading to his despairing drive south. Now he rents a small office and lives in a little room behind it. He gets around town by bicycle, and reads books or watches old movies on VHS for entertainment. He’s a small man, balding, middle-aged, and depressed. He has one friend, old cowboy Ames McKinney, whom he once helped to locate his old partner, who’d stolen a fortune from him. It ended in a classic six-gun showdown.
Lew isn’t a private eye, but people are starting to come to him to find people for them. In Vengeance, he’s first visited by Beryl Tree, a middle-aged woman from Kansas whose 14-year-old daughter has run off. Beryl is pretty sure she’s in Sarasota with her father. She’s also pretty sure he’s molesting her.
He also has a second client, a wealthy man whose trophy wife has disappeared, after cleaning out their bank accounts. The man swears he just wants Lew to give her a message, an offer of reconciliation. Lew finds the man a little fishy, and is less interested in this case.
The Lew Fonesca books aren’t exactly hard-boiled, but they’re certainly not cozies either. Perhaps they should be called over easy. Lew isn’t a tough guy (he’s lucky to have gun-toting Ames to back him up), but he’s tough in his own way – just because he doesn’t give a rip. Death doesn’t mean much to him anymore.
Except that he’s just met a woman – a social worker – who sparked his interest for the first time since his wife’s death. Fortunately, he has a good psychologist to talk these matters over with.
I loved this book. The Lew Fonesca series is my favorite section of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s considerable literary portfolio. Highly recommended, with cautions for very dark, mature themes.
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.
First of all, for the record, I’m not depressed at this moment. I intend to write about depression, but I’m being theoretical, based on a rich store of personal experience.
My visit to the dentist this morning, so far as I know, did not prompt me to thoughts of depression. This was my new dentist, by the way. My old dentist (to personalize a corporate entity) started out very good, until the original guy retired due to his health. He sold it to another dentist, who sold it on to another dentist, and each new iteration proved more incompetent than the last, until it all descended (or so it seemed to me) into pure quackery and fee-seeking. So I broke with them at last and settled on a different practice, also in my town. This practice is so solid-appearing and reassuring that it comforts me just to drive there (and it’s only 2 blocks from my house. I could walk, but it’s January. Gimme a break).
This new dental practice is located in a brick building whose solidity has always pleased me. I thought it might be a surviving building from my town’s early years, but it turns out it was built by an architectural firm that has its offices upstairs from the dentist. Their building is their showpiece. Well done.
What took me to the dentist? I popped a crown yesterday afternoon, and they got me in to get it fixed this morning. My mouth is a museum of ancient dental work – you could teach a class on the evolution of oral surgery based on my X-Rays. (I recall a Jonathan Winters comedy special from my childhood. In one sketch he portrayed a movie star being interviewed in his Hollywood home. He broke into song at one point, and I recall one line – “I have 32 pearly white teeth, And one of them is AL – MOST MINE!”)
Anyway, they checked carefully to make sure there was no underlying decay (no problem), and then they glued it back in with the latest in high tech dental adhesive. And my new insurance (had to change it; my old company fled Minnesota, as all sensible companies do) covered most of the work.
I’m tempted to quit this post right here – it seems to me plenty long already. On the other hand, I promised you my insights on depression, and writing about my dodgy teeth makes for a poor topic, in my opinion. Depression is so much more festive.
It occurred to me recently that I was something of a hypocrite in my musical ministry years. Not intentionally, or so I tell myself. I was just singing Christian music with my friends. I could hardly make up my own lyrics. (Except we did; we wrote most of our own stuff. And I did the lyrics. Never mind.)
But, as I recall it, a majority of those songs were about how joyful and happy we were to be Christians. (And there is nothing at all wrong with that.)
But in my own case, I wasn’t very happy and joyful. I’ve never been that kind of Christian. Everybody else’s testimony seemed to be, “Jesus saved me and filled me with joy!” (Perfectly legitimate, too.)
But my actual testimony was more like, “Jesus kept me from killing myself. Without Him, I don’t think I would have grown up.”
That’s not a contemptible testimony, I contend. It just doesn’t lift the spirit a lot. You don’t sell a lot of records with that kind of message (or you didn’t in those days).
“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord,” says St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:4-5.
There’s a place for depressed Christians too. That’s my testimony, and I’m sticking to it.
On checking my old reviews, I find that I have reviewed at least one book in Blake Banner’s “Dead Cold Mysteries” series before. The book I just read, The Dead Don’t Lie, is a prequel to that series – but it was published just last month, and it actually tells how the Cold Case squad began.
However, I have a suspicion (and all such guesses, it should be remembered, are flimsy things) that this book was originally written for a very different character in another time frame, but was re-written to shoehorn it into the Dead Cold Mysteries template.
John Stone, we are told, is a police detective in a New York precinct. Which makes it rather strange when a sultry dame walks into his office and asks to hire him to deliver blackmail money for her. (The author’s rationalization is that this woman is so alluring that Stone falls for her right off and is putty in her hands.)
She’s lying to him, of course. Soon John Stone is approached again, by a mysterious foreign man who claims to be working for the Vatican, who wants his help in recovering a stolen artifact. As the story goes on, there will be killing and kidnapping, and Stone will work generally without backup or keeping his superiors updated.
If all this sounds like a strange way for a working police detective to operate, I entirely agree. I had a strong feeling that this book had originally been written as a private eye novel, set (probably) in the 1950s (there are no cell phones in view, and at one point our hero uses a pay phone). Also, in one scene, John Stone is addressed as “Mr. Lackland.” That, I would guess, is a failure of the “find and replace” function in the author’s word processing software.
I keep going back to Blake Banner, because I vaguely recall him as an author I like. But in fact, I wearied of him a while back because of the over-the-top improbability of his action scenes. Also, he’s prone to cliff-hangers, though that sin is not committed in this book.
I finished The Dead Don’t Lie, but I can’t really recommend it highly.
“Bare is the back of a brotherless man.” (Kari Solmundarsson)
This is to publicly certify that I have completed another re-reading of Njal’s Saga, from the Complete Sagas of the Icelanderscollection. My chief take-away is that I didn’t remember it as well as I thought I did.
My faulty recollection revealed itself mostly in the fact that I forgot how complicated the whole thing was. In my first reading report, I named Hallgerd Long-legs as the chief villain. But she actually disappears about half-way through the story, after her husband Gunnar is killed. Two further major sections follow, with at least one further villain.
The first villain is the very strange character of Mord Valgardsson. He remains a figure of loathing in Iceland to this day; I read somewhere that one of the worst insults to an Icelander is to call him a “murderous Mord.” Mord delights in manipulating people into murder, playing both sides against the other. His motive for this behavior seems obscure. He’s just a bad guy.
Yet, ironically, when it comes time to prosecute the men who burned Njal and his family in their house, the injured parties pressure Mord into leading the prosecution – which he does quite effectively.
After the burning, there’s no clear villain anymore. The burners (one of them is Gunnar’s son) are painted negatively, except for their leader Flosi, an honorable man who seems remorseful and fatalistic. The great hero of this section is Kari Solmundarsson, a family friend who manages to escape the burning, and devotes himself thereafter to getting even. His attempt to prosecute ends in an epic battle at the Thing (an amusing element in that episode is one man who promises to keep his warriors on the sidelines, in order to intervene once the killings reach the limits of the plaintiffs’ ability to pay fines for them). After that, Kari takes the law into his own very capable hands, and the story proceeds to describe the experiences of some of the burners at the Battle of Clontarf, after which, eventually, both Flosi and Kari call an end to it after pilgrimages to Rome.
Among the points that struck me was a scene at the jarl’s hall in Orkney, shortly before Clontarf. Kari rushes in and kills a man before the jarl, in a scene suspiciously similar to the killing of Thore the Seal at Augvaldsness by Erling Skjalgsson’s nephew Asbjorn (which you may recall from my novel, King of Rogaland). It’s touches like this that make historians look askance at saga accounts.
I also noted with interest that in many of the fight scenes, a fighter’s weapon gets caught in a wooden shield, and the shield’s owner then twists the shield to disarm the man. This is a move much prized among Viking reenactors, and I’m happy to say that I accomplished it myself once. (Others have done it more; my reflexes aren’t very good.)
Also, the scenes of lawsuits at the Things involve a whole lot of Norse legalese, which is just as stilted and tedious as in the English/American tradition.
That covers it, I think. If I recall any more, I’ll post about it tomorrow.
Chapter 106 of Njal’s Sagarelates one of those weird, disorienting tales that pop up here and there in the sagas, tales that remind us how very foreign these characters are to our modern world. It takes place three years after the Althing has voted to accept Christianity as the national religion. Njal, the saga hero, plays a major role in the deliberations.
There’s a man called Amundi the Blind. He’s an illegitimate son of Njal’s son Hoskuld, and has the misfortune to be blind. His father was murdered by a man named Lyting, and the sons of Njal prosecuted a case against him, winning substantial compensation. But Amundi the Blind was not a party to the lawsuit, and received nothing.
Amundi attends the Thingskalar Assembly, one of the regional Things, and Lyting is there. Amundi has himself conducted to Lyting’s tent, goes inside, and asks him what he’s going to pay him for his own loss. Lyting laughs at him. Amundi says “I don’t find that just before God…. And now may God settle matters between us.”
He turns to leave, but just as he reaches the tent door, his sight is suddenly restored. He rushes back into the tent and buries his axe in Lyting’s head. Then, as he passes out through the threshold again, his blindness returns forever.
This bizarre story is related by the saga writer without comment. Since it immediately follows the conversion narrative, and since Amundi appeals to God and is answered with a “miracle,” the implication would seem to be that God granted him his revenge. Yet the saga writer, writing (probably) in the 13th Century, is too smart to say something like that right out. It’s just part of the story – make of it what you will.
Which is good advice for all saga readers.
A strange atmosphere descends on the saga after the conversion. Murderers, and those getting revenge for murders, all now consider themselves Christians, but don’t seem to be quite sure how the new faith ought to impact their lives.
The sons of Njal, having been deceived, have wickedly murdered a man named Hoskuld, a family friend who was actually Njal’s foster son. As the men seeking vengeance for Hoskuld surround Njal’s house and realize they can’t beat the family in a fair fight, they make up their minds to burn them in their house. Their leader, Flosi, says, “There are two choices, and neither of them is good: one is to turn back, but that would lead to our death; the other is to bring fire and burn them inside, and that’s a great responsibility before God, for we’re Christian men.”
The question of how Christians deal with vengeance was in fact the central theme of a splendid trilogy called Bodvar’s Saga, by the Norwegian writer Vera Henriksen. Sadly, it’s never been translated into English. I once actually wrote to the publisher myself, offering to do the job, but they didn’t respond.
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