I often post old hymns here, especially on Fridays. But I’ve never posted one this old — it’s “O Gladsome Light” (Phos Hylarion) a hymn still used in Orthodox churches, and first known from a manuscript around 300 AD. But it could be older.
I should mention that others promote a hymn called the Oxyrhynchus Hymn. You can decide for yourself.
Have a good weekend.
“How’s it going?” a hypothetical interlocutor asks me.
Well, stuff is happening. My life is not dull. On a positive note, I just got an opportunity (not a lead-pipe cinch, but a possibility) to get involved in a writing project. I’m not going to tell you what it is right now. If I make the cut, I’ll let you know. If not, I’ll plausibly deny any and all knowledge of the whole matter, an eternally believable dodge in my case.
I have, I think I’ve mentioned before, two separate editing jobs with deadlines coming up soon. One pays money, the other (I can only hope) treasures in Heaven.
Have I done any more driving for Uber Eats? Not this week. I’ve been busy with the editing stuff, and – can I be frank with you? – I’m still a little scared. I’ve learned a lot in my first few runs, and one thing I’ve learned is that my Android phone is way underpowered. The many glitches I’ve experienced in the Uber Eats app are (I now suspect) due to my phone just running out of memory. I’d already decided to restart the thing after each delivery. Now I plan to refuse all “stacked” deliveries – deliveries where you pick up from two vendors located close to each other, and then deliver both in a single run. Every time I try that, the app refuses to give me directions, and I have to switch to Google Maps. I’ll see if doing only singles makes it better.
But not tonight. More editing has come in. I figure I need to prioritize the editing, even though shirking Uber Eats embarrasses me.
A friend suggested I get a new phone. I told him that if I could afford a new phone, I probably wouldn’t be driving for Uber Eats.
Life, said the wise man, is a choice of the lesser of two embarrassments.
In England after World War II, Jack Monroe is a doctor in the US Army Air Corps. To his surprise, he’s ordered to go to Germany and observe a top-secret autopsy along with an international group of physicians. The subject of the procedure is supposed to be an obscure German named Martin Bormann. Jack considers the autopsy perfunctory and unprofessional, as if somebody is covering tracks. Afterward he can’t resist going see the English doctor who was also present, only to learn that the man has been run down by a car.
Inquiring further, he gets into contact with Simon and Dionne, a couple of young people who turn out to be agents for a shadowy organization of Holocaust survivors. And that leads to all the intrigue and adventure that follow in Michael Berk’s Mission 37, first volume in a series.
The book wasn’t bad, all in all. It was more like a mystery than the usual thriller nowadays, as the main focus is on the puzzle of Martin Bormann’s fate rather than on action and violence. There is action and violence, but our hero is more often rescued than active in the fights. (The solution to the mystery, I ought to mention, did surprise me.)
There is romance and sex in this book, but the sex happens offstage.
The writing was passable, better than a lot that I see these days. My main complaint was typesetting – there are whole sections where the quotation marks disappear for no apparent reason, making the dialogue hard to understand. I suspect the fault is in A.I. proofreading.
I did appreciate the book’s pro-Israel slant, which is not only rare but brave nowadays.
I recommend Mission 37 moderately.
I found this video on YouTube. It seems to me both wonderful and troubling.
First of all, Jack Lewis is using “my” microphone. It’s a Blue Yeti, and I have one exactly like it, even unto the color. (Or “colour,” as he would have spelled it.)
Secondly, it’s pretty well done, except for a couple glitches. The voice appears to be cloned from Lewis’ well-known The Four Loves recordings. (On the downside, I’ve read a statement from one of Lewis’s friends, who says that that was not his normal speaking style.)
The troubling aspect is – of course – just that this is A.I. I’m almost obligated to hate A.I., which took a much-needed job away from me.
The very idea of resurrecting actual humans through A.I. is just disturbing to many of us, whether it’s affected our bottom lines or not. It seems creepy, like necromancy. However, I’m not sure that creepy feeling is to be trusted. When radio was a new technology, there was a fair number of sincere Christians who denounced it as demonic – voices coming through the air; that has to come from the domain of the Prince of the Powers of the Air! (For our young readers, that’s a biblical reference to the devil (Ephesians 2:2 in the King James Version).
But the bottom line, for me, is that I found it kind of fun.
I’d like to see more of this sort of stuff, and no doubt I will. Maybe somebody can recreate Moody preaching, or Jonathan Edwards declaiming “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (contemporaries reported that he read it from a manuscript, in a very rote voice).
The best thing about A.I. might be that it could kill Hollywood. We can bring back the great actors of the past and cast them in new movies, bypassing Wokeness. I’d love to see a young Clint Eastwood playing Travis McGee, for instance. Authors could have total control of film adaptations. Who wants to do an A.I. production of The Year of the Warrior for 50 bucks? I might be able to spring for half of that.
A friend of mine, a Vietnam veteran, used to talk about a war buddy of his. “He loved the war,” my friend said. “He was addicted to the action. He never wanted to go home – and he never did.”
If violence can be an addiction, can it be treated like other addictions, with a 12-step program? That’s the original conception behind Rob Hart’s The Medusa Protocol, book 2 in his Assassins Anonymous thriller series.
Astrid is a new member of Assassins Anonymous, which is like Alcoholics Anonymous but way more secretive, because all the members have mortal enemies looking for them. She’s on her way to a meeting one night when she’s abducted, ending up in a remote prison on a South American island.
She’d been brought into the group by Mark, her sponsor. Using the CIA resources he still maintains, he manages to figure out where Astrid has been taken. He and another group member pack up their kits to go after her. Only one thing is unusual for men like them – they’ve made a commitment not to kill anyone along the way.
In some ways, I found The Medusa Protocol a very satisfactory adventure story. The characters were interesting and the theme – personal redemption – was appealing and sometimes inspiring, occasionally skirting close to Christianity.
My big problem with the book, though, was plausibility. The willing suspension of disbelief. We’re supposed to believe that it’s possible to renounce killing and go into firefights relying on paintball guns, tasers, and martial arts skills, and hope to prevail. I’m only a (former) playacting fighter in the medieval sword fight field, but I’m pretty confident that when you enter “kinetic” situations like that, people tend to get killed whatever you do. The idealists first, of course, but where bullets fly, “friendly fire” tends to happen.
I’m also expected (yet again) to believe in a small woman who somehow awes much larger and stronger men possessing equal training, on the basis of her amazing Girl Power, or something. Also she employs one life-and-death trick that seemed pretty darn iffy to me.
Still, if you’re looking for a thriller on a higher moral level, The Medusa Protocol is pretty entertaining. (I might note that the author employs the annoying [to me] present tense for most of the story.)
Someone on Basefook brought this project to my attention. The idea is to locate the lost bones of St. Olaf (best remembered as a character in my Erling novels) for scientific and cultural purposes.
For a saint as problematic as he was in life, St. Olaf swung disproportionate weight in the religious life of the European Middle Ages. His shrine in Nidaros Cathedral was a rich and elaborate one, making the city of Trondheim a very popular pilgrimage destination (perhaps people calculated that the hard trip over Norwegian terrain would earn them extra penance points). Pilgrims streamed in from all over Europe, lifting up prayers, looking for miracles, and spending money. Sigrid Undset describes such pilgrimages in several of her novels.
During the Reformation, Olaf’s shrine was demolished and broken up, the proceeds going to the king. Yet it seems that the bones themselves were not destroyed. Instead, they seem to have been re-buried covertly. Anyone who knew the secret of their location did not pass it on. But now there’s this project to rediscover them using modern scientific techniques.
My Basefook friends have expressed mixed views on the project. Many of them are – reasonably – concerned that if the bones are recovered, they will once again become the object of pilgrimages and devotion. We Protestants don’t hold with that stuff, and I agree.
Yet, all things considered, I’m for it. I believe in freedom of religion, so let the Roman Catholics do what they like. If it serves as a counterweight to the advance of Islam in Europe, it’s the lesser of two evils, it seems to me. What I’d like is for Lutheran Norway to be preserved, but I’ll take a Catholic Norway over a Muslim one.
Also, I’ll be interested in what analysis of the bones will reveal.
I signed the petition. I’ll be watching the project’s progress with interest.
There’s a new show on movies, games, books, and other cultural artifacts, and it’s hosted by Andrew and Spencer Klavan. Episode two Klavans on the Culture dropped yesterday on a subtle horror movie based on a small, popular game, Exit 8.
The movie doesn’t have much to talk about. Like the game, it’s more of a feeling than a story. The hosts spend half of this episode talking about ghost stories and recommending a couples recent books.
I run into many people who are looking for books to introduce them to the Vikings. Kirsten Wolf’s 24 Hours in the Viking World isn’t a bad book for the purpose, in spite of some weaknesses.
The plan of the book is a little strange, but it’s part of a series of similar books set in various historical periods and places, so readers must appreciate it. Each chapter is devoted to a single hour of the day. For each hour, we focus on one Viking Age character. These characters’ locations and historical dates are not coordinated – the reader is shuttled back and forth in time and space.
We see men commit murders, build ships, and compose poems. We see women give birth, prepare feasts, and take up unaccustomed weapons in defense. Each situation is described in detail, so that some aspect of Viking life is illuminated. New Viking enthusiasts will learn much here.
The weakness of the book is in the dramatizations The author, an academic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows her material but is not gifted in scene-setting or dialogue. The dialogue is too modern (in my view), with characters delivering lines like “Hang in there.” And the characters – especially the men – are generally more sensitive in their conversations with their wives than I suspect real Viking men were. The characters, in short, talk like modern people dressed up in Viking clothes.
On the plus side, author Wolf is not a partisan of the “Lagertha Party” in Viking studies. When she recounts the famous Vinland episode where Leif Eriksson’s sister Freydis brandishes a sword to scare off the “scraelings,” we’re told she has no idea how to use a sword. I’m not sure I’d have gone that far myself, sexist though I am. Ditto for her statement that Icelandic women had “no legal rights.”
One chapter involves a baker at Hedeby in Denmark. Oddly, his name is given as Hans Jensson. That’s a bizarre name choice for a Viking, as both “Hans” and “Jens” are colloquial versions of the Christian “John.” And it took time for those adaptations to evolve. I don’t think those names existed as such in the Viking Age.
Still, 24 Hours in the Viking Age isn’t a bad introduction to Viking everyday life. I recommend it moderately.
I pick up a fair number of novels through free and low-price offers from various sources. I made it about a third of the way through one of them recently before I dumped it. “Why did you do such a thing?” you ask, wide-eyed. I shall explain.
I won’t give you the title or the author; I don’t like dissing a book unless I’ve taken the trouble to finish it. And the prose was actually okay, if somewhat unimaginative. The book was part of an ongoing series. The series involves a private eye who’s struggling with a deteriorating relationship with the woman he fell in love with in an earlier episode. He’s also constantly bullied by the office manager at the agency he works for (she’s his boss’s mother). And he’s a slave to his cat.
What struck me about this detective “hero” was that he was almost entirely what’s nowadays called a “beta”. He’s supposed to be big and strong and capable of handling himself, but he’s constantly worrying about his relationship and his job and his pet. I began to suspect that the author of the book must have been a woman writing under a man’s name, but maybe it was a male author aiming at the female audience. Because this (in my experience) is how woman authors tend to frame their stories.
Make no mistake – I like my heroes to have home lives and relationships. I just don’t like to see them “simping” all over the place. (I’m pretty sure that if I ever had a girlfriend, I’d be a gold-medal simp, but that doesn’t make me admire such behavior.)
I’m going to say something now that will probably offend our female readers (there might be as many as five in all, I suppose). I think this whole feminism thing has been a misunderstanding.
You know the constant complaint women have about men? That men want to go ahead and fix things, while women simply want to talk about them? I think that’s our problem in a global sense.
The female point of view has been explained to me thus: When a woman talks to a man about a problem, she’s not actually talking about the particular thing she brought up. She just wants to talk about her general unhappiness, and that precise problem is only meant as an opening example. What she wants is to explore the whole range of her concerns. When the man jumps in and “fixes” it, he’s short-circuiting the process by which women naturally work through things.
I think feminism is the same thing, on a grand scale. The women of the world (or at least the West) said, “We’re unhappy. We can’t have careers like men do. We’re restricted to motherhood or nursing or clerical work.” So the men went ahead and fixed it. We gave them all kinds of opportunities, so that now they dominate the universities and are beginning to dominate business and politics.
And the women are more unhappy than ever.
Because that wasn’t the actual problem. They’re still waiting to work out the actual problem. Meanwhile, we’re surrounded by miserable female businesspeople, academics, and politicians.
I think we need to talk it all over again, and we men should listen this time.
Or rather, the rest of you men should. I’m old and single. I’ll just sit over here and read a book.
It is my custom sometimes, during Viking events, to read sagas from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders instead of something off my Fire device, as if that made me more historically authentic. This past weekend, at the iFest in St. Paul, I read The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty. Finnbogi’s Saga is not one of the great ones, but it does (as Sherlock Holmes used to say) present certain points of interest.
All the sagas tend to settle into what I would call tropes (scholars no doubt have a better term for them). But the later sagas become both implausible and predictable. Finnbogi’s Saga contains a number of boilerplate elements, combined with what seem to be genuine family anecdotes.
We begin in fairy tale (or even mythological) mode with the familiar theme of the abandoned child. The hero’s father, miffed at his wife, orders her to “expose” their next baby (that means to leave the child out on a hillside for wild animals to kill; it was a common choice for deformed babies or ones whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them). Sorrowfully she does so, building a sort of hollow cairn on a scree-covered hill and leaving the child inside. Of course a poor couple discover him and raise him as their own. They name him “Urdacott” (Scree-cat). However, no one believes this strong and handsome baby could be theirs – from the beginning people suspect who the real father is. Eventually, the real father’s brother convinces him to accept the boy. Later on, Urdacott is fortunate enough to rescue a shipwrecked Norwegian merchant who – when he later dies – leaves both his wealth and his name – Finnbogi – to the boy.
Then young Finnbogi, like most saga heroes, sails off to Norway (this is in the time of Jarl Haakon), proves his strength and courage in various fantastic adventures, and gains the jarl’s favor along with more wealth. After that he goes home to Iceland, where his exploits gradually become more prosaic. He gets involved in a long feud but is eventually reconciled with his enemies.
An intriguing element here is that Finnbogi’s final feud is also dealt with in another saga, Vatnsdal’s Saga. Some scholars believe it was composed in response to Finnbogi’s negative portrayal in that story.
There was a scene that amused me in the section describing Finnbogi’s time in Norway. In one adventure, Finnbogi comes up against a dangerous bear that’s been marauding in a certain neighborhood. The local residents begin their countermeasures with a legal proceeding:
So it came about that Bard called together an assembly, outlawed the bear, and placed a price on his head.
The bear is in fact treated as semi-human. It would be fun to draw the conclusion that people in those days thought of bears as a wilder kind of human being, but I suspect it’s just a narrative device.
I also noticed that in a couple cases, over the course of the feuding, people are killed, but nobody bothers to prosecute for homicide, because the victims didn’t have enough status to make it worth anyone’s trouble. A reminder that the majesty of the law becomes injustice when everyone isn’t equal in its sight.
Not a great saga, The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty is nonetheless intriguing in many ways.
