Moving House

Forwarding address: clock.quiblit.com.

I Was Going To

type out the recipe, from the cookbook of Alexandre Dumas, for young elephant's feet. Then I said to myself, I said, "Kevin, dude -- this is the world-wide web. And your influence is enormous (needless to say). Do you really want to feel responsible should some sweet young elephant, no doubt the apple of its mother's eye, suddenly disappear, only to end up in a stockpot with two slices of Bayonne ham, half a bottle of Madeira, and fifty little pimentoes? No. No, you don't. Plus that's a lot of typing."

Enough to know that Dumas apparently did publish a cookbook -- actually it sounds more like a cooking encyclopedia, some thousand pages long, with digressions on topics like burns (how best to treat them). Come on, Penguin books: you know you want to put out a new translation of this, you know you do.

In the meantime, if you're dying to find out how to cook young elephant feet (and, let me emphasize, if you live in a country with absolutely no free roaming elephants, and where the zoos and reserves have adequate security) then you should hunt up Guy Endore's "Autobiography-Anthology" of Dumas.

Apparently the trunk is tasty, too.

~

Alas, my mental picture of Dumas appears to have been wildly inaccurate, at least in terms of height. Here's a description of him that Endore quotes "from the diary of the Goncourt brothers:"

Dumas is a kind of giant with the hair of a Negro, the salt beginning to mix with the pepper, and with little blue eyes buried in his flesh like those of a hippopotamaus, clear and mischievous; and an enormous moon-face, exactly the way cartoonists love to draw him.

"From the diary of the Goncourt brothers" is a little mysterious. Did they really keep a co-diary? Was their handwriting so similar that scholars can't distinguish who wrote which entry? Did they take turns writing alternate words, like the father and son conspirators in that Sherlock Holmes story, so that each would be equally responsible for every entry?

Or is Guy Endore merely a doofus?

~

Doofus or not, here's a passage from Endore's enconium on the Count of Monte Cristo:

But that's the dream of every man! Every man to whom life has been unjust. And which of us has never felt that injustice? Which of us has never felt that there was a secret conspiracy against us, so that born to wealth and fame, we have somehow lived in misery? Which of us has not felt robbed of a beautiful and rich bride?

And who has not dreamed of finding some great treasure? And then appearing among our false friends in an impenetrable disguise, rich as Croesus, to administer stern and well-deserved punishment upon his enemies?

Except for the "finding some great treasure" part, I can honestly say that I've never dreamed of dreaming any of those things.

Myles na gCopaleen had a great line about a man only needing (quoting from memory, here): "money, drink, and opportunities for scoring off his enemies. Give him those three things, and you won't hear much squawking out of him."

But I mean, seriously -- "Which of us has not felt robbed of a beautiful and rich bride?" Is that really a common, near-universal feeling? Do millions of grown men actually wander about the world, grumbling about how they could have married that hot wealthy chick, if it weren't for the machinations of their enemies? I'm appalled.

Endore is the author of Werewolf of Paris. I've heard of this before; it's supposed to be a classic of its kind. Now I'm tempted to read it -- if I can find a cheap paperback somewhere.

the S.S.

I read little contemporary non-fiction -- maybe 3 or 4 books a year, usually connected to whatever story I'm working on. But whenever I do, I'm always struck by how stereotyped the prose style is -- whether the topic is trash, or lexicography, or the Stratemeyer Syndicate, they might all have been written by the same person, if you judged strictly by the style: standard journalese, gently salted with the sort of "fine writing" that garners marginal kudos from High School English teachers. I blame the Universities, personally; but if you believe that style (when it isn't a contrived affectation) is always merely an index of how someone thinks, this pervasive sameness is mildly depressing.

I'm about halfway through Ms Rehak's book, and am now skimming and skipping cavalierly to get it over with, having already enjoyed the parts that really interest me: how Edward Stratemeyer started and ran his crazy "Syndicate", inventing the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and the lunatic Bomba the Jungle Boy ("For Bomba is white... Bomba is white!") among numerous others, making a fortune and revolutionizing the publishing industry; and how his daughters, with no business or literary experience, were forced to take over the Syndicate after their father's death, and managed to successfully keep the empire afloat for decades and decades. Great stuff. Also love the fact that in letters, Harriet Stratemeyer refers to the Stratemeyer Syndicate as "the SS".

But I wonder if Ms Rehak is responsible for the subtitle ("Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her") or if it was wished upon her by the publishers. Because it's simply inaccurate -- going by the facts contained in this very book. Mildred Wirt was responsible for ghostwriting most of the original Nancy Drew books; Harriet and Edna S played a huge role in shaping the development of the character over the years (and came up with the vast majority of storylines, secondary characters, etc) -- they surely deserve the majority of the credit. But Edward Stratemeyer created Nancy Drew. You know, words do have meaning.

the Brother-in-Law

is moving to Toronto in a couple weeks, to design space robots at the U of T (no, really -- space robots). On Thursday he brought over a bunch of stuff to store in our basement, and a big old tub of books.

I haven't had a chance to go through them all carefully yet (the Bell-Jar? Really, Paul?) but I've already found one absolute treasure: a copy of the Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford. I'd read an excerpt of it before, but never seen a copy of the whole thing.

Ashford wrote it in 1890 at the age of nine. Then it sat in a drawer for thirty years until a family member came across it, thought it was hilarious (it is), and convinced Chatto & Windus to publish it. The main story is a love triangle between Alfred Salteena ("an elderly man of 42"), the 17 year old Ethel Monticue, and Salteena's pompous friend Bernard Clark, who invites Mr Salteena and Ethel for a visit:

My Dear Alfred,

I want you to come for a stop with me so I have sent you a top hat wraped up in tishu paper inside the box. Will you wear it staying with me because it is very uncommon. Please bring one of your young ladies whichever is the prettiest in the face.

I remain Yours truely
Bernard Clark

Mr Salteena is naive, enthusiastic and excitable. (He also has fat legs, a fact that's emphasized repeatedly, with the implication that Mr Clark's thin legs are what win him Ethel's heart.) He especially gets excited when he's served breakfast in bed, which happens several times and which apparently strikes him as the absolute height of class and luxury. Ethel is "peevish" and "sneery":

I shall put some red ruge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house.

You will look very silly said Mr Salteena with a dry laugh.

Well so will you said Ethel in a snappy tone and she ran out of the room with a very superier run throwing out her legs behind and her arms swinging in rithum.

Well said the owner of the house she has a most idiotick run.

Leaving Ethel in the care of Mr Clark (big mistake), Mr Salteena puts himself in the hands of the Earl of Clincham, who specializes in helping commoners become gentlemen:

Personally I am a bit parshial to mere people said his Lordship but the point is that we charge a goodly sum for our training but however if you cant pay you need not join.

I can and will proclaimed Mr Salteena and he placed a £10 note on the desk. His Lordship slipped it in his trouser pocket. It will be £42 before I have done with you he said but you can pay me here and there as convenient.

Brilliantly, the Earl's program for converting Mr Salteena into a gentleman seems to consist entirely of introducing him to people under a false name: "You wont mind if I introduce you as Lord Hyssops do you... it wont matter and will look better."

My only complaint is that the book is too short -- I finished it in about an hour last night. So there you go, Paul -- I forgive you for trying to palm off Sylvia Plath on me.

Half A Handful Of Cannibals

Back when, my wife used to lead canoe trips into northern Ontario. At Wendigo Lake, the version she heard of the wendigo myth was that, when the cannibal demon possessed someone, the person would eat himself -- starting with his own lips and face, and working outward. This is brilliant; but of course the more usual version is that the man possessed would kill and eat others. There's more than one documented instance of a man, believing himself possessed by a wendigo, begging his family to kill him and destroy his body before he's compelled to eat them.

~

At one point in the Thin Man, Gilbert -- the painfully awkward and desperately unhappy teenager who may or may not be sleeping with his sister, and who takes refuge in a laboriously assumed intellectualism -- asks Nick Charles about cannibalism:

"-- in the United States, say. Is there much of it?"

I went over to the bookcase and got the copy of Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America that Nora had picked up in a second-hand book store, found the place I wanted, and gave it to him....


Gilbert, book in hand, came over to us. He seemed disappointed in the story I had given him. "It's very interesting," he said, "but, if you know what I mean, it's not a pathological case." He put his arm around his sister's waist. "It was more a matter of that or starving."

"Not unless you want to believe him," I said.

~

My absolute favourite encounter with cannibalism in literature was in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

I'm going from memory here, but the episode went something like this: Sun Jian has been forced to make his way on foot and incognito back to his kingdom, following a disastrous military campaign. He spends one night at the house of a woodsman, who recognizes him. The man goes out hunting, hoping to be able to provide a suitably magnificent meal for his royal guest, but he's unable to catch anything -- so he goes home, slaughters his wife, cooks her and serves her.

Here's the kicker: when Sun Jian learns what happened, instead of being disgusted and horrified, he's actually touched and charmed. And when he gets back to his palace, he sends the woodsman a whack of money to show his gratitude. The author (or was it an editor?) remarks that this is fortunate, since the woodsman will certainly need lots of money if he hopes to find another wife.

~

'Upon my soul, they are nice, even half-cooked -- delicious! I'll have another half-dozen, there are lots of them -- delightful! I can't keep the gravy from running out of the corners of my mouth. Upon my soul, Mrs Lovett, I don't know where you get your meat, but it's all as tender as young chickens, and the fat actually melts away in one's mouth...'

A modicum of reflection will tell you that human meat -- especially from the middle-aged men who primarily make up Mrs Lovett's pies -- is more likely gristly, greasy and tough as old horse meat, than 'tender as young chickens.' That's okay -- what makes the story horrible (instead of merely disgusting) is not that thousands of Londoners inadvertently commit cannibalism, but that they really really enjoy it.

Be Happy in Your Work

'Continue at your work,' said the voice, 'or death will be your portion as soon as sleep overcomes you, and you sink exhausted to that repose which you will never awaken from, except to feel the pangs of death, and to be conscious that you are weltering in your blood.

'Continue at your work and you will escape all this -- neglect it, and your doom is sealed.'

'What have I done that I should be made such a victim of? Let me go, and I will swear never to divulge the fact that I have been in these vaults, so I cannot disclose any of their secrets, even if I knew them.'

'Make pies,' said the voice, 'eat them and be happy. How many a man would envy your position -- withdrawn from all the struggles of existence, amply provided with board and lodging, and engaged in a pleasant and delightful task. It is astonishing how you can be dissatisfied!'

After that lovely fat hammy passage -- on page 161 out of 256 -- alas, String of Pearls starts to fall apart.

By this point in the book, a reader of the meanest intelligence will have figured out from the ridiculously broad hints, asides and verbal wink-wink nudge-nudges -- even if he didn't know it already, for example from having read this blog -- what Sweeney's barber-chair does; what the foul smell from under St Dunstan's Church is really all about; and where the supply of meat for Mrs Lovett's pies comes from. But for some dumb-ass reason, the author[s] are committed to pretending that these things (and several other, less important ones) are all "mysteries" until the final chapter -- perhaps to give the reader an opportunity to feel smugly clever for having "figured it out."

Regardless, it's an idiotic decision, because it means that instead of concentrating on what's really interesting -- Todd skulking and scampering about his subterranean empire, lugging chunks of his victims to and fro -- we have to endure the asininities of two naval gentlemen playing detective and sounding for all the world like the goofy gophers, a plucky heroine (if plucky meant vapid and delusional), the irritating refusal of Sweeney's former apprentice to die quietly in his nice madhouse cell like we all want him to, and no less than two boring, completely irrelevant short stories thinly disguised as conversation.

Nothing on how Sweeney started his slaughter-factory, built or discovered his tunnels, or came up with the idea of turning his victims into pies; nothing on where he found or how he invented the wonderful machinery; nothing on how he and Mrs Lovett entered into partnership, where they met or what their relationship was. Not even -- and speaking here as a fellow-writer, this is flabbergasting to me -- not even a climactic chase scene through the tunnels. The "big finish" is more like "half-assed farce", and as I read it, all I could think was, "Oh, come on, you're not even trying."

Which is probably true. What do you expect for a penny? Effort?

Some Good Advice

for all you aspiring barber/mass-murderers out there.

First, resist the urge to take on an inquisitive young apprentice in your barbershop. Sure, the extra couple bucks a week will come in handy, and it's always nice to have someone to run errands, sweep up the hair from the barbershop floor, and to terrorize with vague threats about his mother -- but what about peace of mind? There's nothing a barber/mass-murderer needs more than peace of mind if he hopes for a long, remunerative and spirtually fulfilling career.

Second, before you really get underway with your business of shaving chins and slitting throats, make arrangements with a good fence. Take that extra effort to find the right man. That way, when you murder a mysterious sailor who happens to be carrying a fabulously expensive string of pearls as a present for his dead companion's fiancee, you won't be subjected to the hazardous and difficult business of trying to sell them yourself, and will be saved the embarrassment and effort of being first chased down the streets of London by an excitable mob, and then up a tenement stairwell by a throng of bloodthirsty robbers, beating them back with only a mop for a weapon. It's just this kind of tedious and unnecessary business that brings premature grey hairs to so many barber/mass-murderers you meet.

(Contrariwise, if you're a young fellow who's been apprenticed to a barber, and you begin to suspect him of being a mass-murderer on an unprecedented scale but can't do anything about it because he's blackmailing your poor mother, don't walk around the shop soliloquizing when you think you're alone. Of course he's going to pop out from behind a doorway, having overheard you. That's what barber/mass-murderers do. Any time they're not barbering or mass-murdering, they're happily crouching behind doorways, waiting for good opportunities to pop out. There's a little thing I like to call "thinking to yourself, without speaking out loud." You should try it some time.)

~

When we first meet Sweeney Todd, he's far more comic gargoyle than sinister uber-villain; he's tall, skinny and misshapen, a coward and a bully -- with the emphasis very much on coward. A little later (during the pearl-fencing adventure mentioned above) he takes on a kind of swashbuckling, daring and resourceful character for a couple chapters -- also suddenly displaying an almost superhuman strength, tossing grown men through plate glass windows without even slowing his pace. Then he suddenly goes back to the cowardly bully we first met. Then he suddenly develops a penchant for ludicrous disguises (including, hilariously, a habit of wearing a mask, but only while stalking his dimly-lit underground tunnels to which no one else has access anyway -- apparently he doesn't want to risk having the rats identify him in court one day).

Now (I'm about halfway through the book) he's showing signs of turning into a criminal mastermind, even though up to this point he's never displayed more than slightly below-average intelligence. All of which might suggest multiple-authorship, but it might just as easily be evidence of rapid, improvised and alcoholic composition. Anyway, what do you expect for a penny? Consistency?

None of it matters. The true fascination of the book isn't in Sweeney's slaughters (and it sure as hell isn't in the god-awful comic and sentimental subplots, ripped straight out of Pickwick and Dombey and Son respectively), but in Mrs Lovett's pies. The author[s] love to linger on how popular these meat pies are -- a regular phenomenon -- how everyone from high to low, poor to rich, suburbs to City, enjoy them. So succulent, so tender, so flavourful! And the high point of the book so far -- by far -- has been the description of the vast underground cellar where the pies are made: thousands upon thousands of pies produced daily by a single, imprisoned homeless man working a series of crazy infernal machines (the story's set in 1785, remember), and slowly starting to realize where the supply of meat is coming from. And what's that shadow falling across his shoulder? He turns on his stool and sees a masked man raising a hammer....

There are two really interesting things here. The obvious one is cannibalism in the popular imagination. The one that I wasn't expecting when I started the book, is the fascination with machinery, and the equation of machinery with evil. There's more loving detail expended on Mrs Lovett's automated pie-making machines than on Sweeney's murders; and I'm eagerly awaiting the passage that explains Sweeney's barber-chair. I want to talk more about this later; remind me, will you?

One to Four Months My Ass

More like 6 to 8 months, but no matter: Amazon has finally coughed up String of Pearls: A Romance, the original story of Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

In the long interim since I ordered it, the book underwent some kind of weird metamorphosis. The cover changed, "Sweeney Todd" was added to the title, the price almost doubled and the length was cut by about two-thirds.

A quick read of the introduction reveals some the reasons: this new edition is based on the original, 1847 serial, not the 1850 re-issue, which was padded grotesquely (probably by a different author) to cash in on the original's popularity: hence it's much much shorter than the book I thought I was ordering. The title was no doubt changed for the simple reason that the original title is really gay.

As for the cover and the price, well -- the great thing about Wordsworth editions has always been that they're crazy cheap, and they look, read and feel cheap to boot. But Wordsworth now appear to be upgrading -- investing a little more in design and scholarship -- which I appreciate as a reader, but lament as a cheapskate.

As for the book's disputed and uncertain authorship (usually ascribed to Thomas Peckett Prest but probably contributed to by several of Lloyd's hacks), this seems a decent brief intro to Edward Lloyd's fiction factory and the world of penny-dreadfuls.

I See Nipple!

My Dover edition of Best Ghost Stories of Sheridan LeFanu was compiled and published in 1964. The title's a little misleading; at least one of the stories has nothing to do with ghosts.

"Carmilla" was apparently a key influence on Bram Stoker, and almost every introduction to a LeFanu book I've read crows about how superior it is to Dracula. (Which it is, for one simple reason: it's waaaaay shorter.) Being thoroughly uninterested in vampires, I've always skipped it; but being fond of LeFanu -- and it being way too hot and muggy out to concentrate on anything really interesting -- I decided last night to give it a try.

I'm now not surprised that it has such a lofty reputation: as a horror story it's feeble at best, but as thinly-disguised schoolgirl lesbo-porn, it's superb. Our titular vampiress is a beautiful young woman who only eats (ho ho) other women, by preference other lovely young women, whom she "fascinates" and showers with affection during the day:

My strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her breast rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration.... and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses.... she drew her arm closer around my waist, and let her pretty head sink about my shoulder...

The Dover edition's illustrations very accurately capture the story's raison d'etre: surreptitious titillation. Completely uncredited and unsourced, they're designed to look old-fashioned: sort of faux-Victorian woodcuts. The climactic (ho ho) illustration for "Carmilla" shows our lesbo-vampire leaning over one of her beautiful, um, victims, whose nightie is flung open to reveal implausibly firm, cantalope-like breasts. And sure enough, almost obscured by the shadows but definitely there if you look closely, nipple.

The damn thing oughtta come with a packet of kleenex.

Wise, Words to the

If you're starting a blog and hope to update it semi-regularly, don't launch it when you have a two-month old baby at home, at the beginning of a summer when you plan to spend almost every day you don't have to go in to work, up at the cabin.

Also: when starting a major outdoor project like, say, repairing, stripping and repainting your deck, check the weather forecast and make sure you aren't on the cusp of a record-breaking heatwave.

Live and don't learn, that's our motto, as Hobbes said. (The stuffed tiger, not the stuffy philosopher.)

That'll Learn Him

For eight bucks last winter, on one of my used-book store binges, I picked up a leather-bound, closely printed (in columns), 840 page book called World's Great Detective Stories, published in 1928 by Walter J Black, Inc (never heard of them).

It's about as odd a collection as you can imagine. My guess is that Mr Black, Inc paid for the bare minimum of copyright material by popular mystery-writers, in order to attract readers, and then just filled up the rest of the book with anything old, copyright-expired, and vaguely crime-related that he could get his hands on.

There's a few of the names you'd expect (Poe, Doyle, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace) but there's also excerpts pulled as if at random from writers like Boccaccio, Balzac, Tolstoy, Cervantes and the Thousand and One Nights -- even one excerpt from the Koran. No translators are credited anywhere, 90% of the stories are given no source at all nor even a date, and typos abound.

But the real glory of the book (and I didn't realize this until after I'd bought it and brought it home) are a host of anonymous stories taken out of the penny-dreadfuls of the early Victorian period, which tended to be true crime digests (as opposed to the mid- and late-Victorian penny-dreadfuls, which went more for serial fiction). They're given by-lines like Robber Tales, Prison Chronicles and French Court Records and they range from the merely curious ("Ghosts in Court") to the infamously bizarre ("Sawney Beane").

I was reading a couple of the stories last night, as kind of a palate-cleanser amid all this piracy, mainsprit-jibbing and Madagascarity, and came upon this sweet little proclamation of justice, courtesy of Parisian Criminal Records:

"Jean-Baptiste -- guilty of murder and parricide -- condemned to have both hands cut off; his arms, legs, and thighs and body to be bruised and broken; afterwards to be fixed upon the wheel, there to linger so long as God shall please; after which, his body to be burned and scattered to the winds. A fine of ten livres to the king."

I know, I know, it's an old joke, but it made me laugh out loud. Since his whole family is executed along with him (they having all participated in either killing the old man or covering up the crime), I wonder who they levied the fine from?

Your Own Private Pirate

So, you're Daniel Defoe, writing volume two of a bestselling compilation of pirate biographies. Needless to say, you're going to slip in your own private pirate, entirely fictional, and pretend it's a true story (Fuck you, Oprah!) -- you'll even pull the old "a private manuscript has come into my hands" gag. You cleverly dovetail your fictional pirate's story with actual, historical events and people, in order to give your man's story an air of veracity -- and then you so cavalierly ignore chronology that a careful reading of the dates given elsewhere in your own book prove that the story can't be true. Why? Because that's just the kind of dude you are.

Unfortunately, I have to report that -- apart from the fun-and-games with fact & fiction aspect -- Capt Mission is a bit of a dud. The good captain is a ridiculously idealistic figure, who together with his trusty lieutenant (a lapsed priest given to long, Thomas Paine-esque speeches about the equality of man and the iniquity of churches and states) founds a Utopian colony in -- wait for it -- Madagascar. The colony is done in by bad luck and some poor planning (fortifying heavily against attacks from sea, but underestimating the danger of attacks by land), but there's every implication that, with a little luck, it could have flourished -- a thoroughly workable model of church-free democracy and racial equality.

The "racial equality" bit is the most interesting part, here. Mission and his men all marry native women, and there's none of that nonsense about christianizing or civilizing them, nor a trace of racial anxiety in their attitude; they also make a habit of raiding slave ships, rescuing the would-be slaves, and then integrating them as equal citizens in the newly founded nation of (I shit you not) Libertalia.

This goes some ways towards atoning for the truly atrocious, cringe-inducing middle section of Colonel Jack, which devolves into little more than a pamphlet on why slave-owners should treat their negroes kindly (ie, because it will maximize your profits in the long run). But it doesn't make this section of the General History of Pyrates any more entertaining.


(Since I already mentioned Col Jack, I can't resist the urge to quote its full title, which is my favourite book-title ever:

The History and Remarkable Life Of the truly Honourable Col. Jacque, commonly call'd Col. Jack, who was Born a Gentleman, put 'Prentice to a Pick-Pocket, was Six and Twenty Years a Thief, and then Kidnapp'd to Virginia, Came back a Merchant; was Five times married to Four Whores; went into the Wars, behav'd bravely, got Preferment, was made Colonel of a Regiment, came over, and fled with the Chevalier, is still abroad compleating a Life of Wonders, and resolves to dye a General.

The fact that the title as a whole is not particularly accurate as a description of the book's contents is pure bonus. If I'm not mistaken, the first edition title-page had the visionary and beautiful mistake "Four Times Married to Five Whores", which he should have known better than to correct. )

Sorry, Ladies

I was shewn the Bark of one [tree] (whose name I do not know) gravely affirmed to have a peculiar Property of enlarging the Virile Member; I am not fond of such Conceits, nor believe it in the Power of any Vegetables, but must acknowledge, I have seen Sights of this kind among the Negroes very extraordinary; yet, that there may be no Wishes among the Ladies for the Importation of this Bark, I must acquaint them, that they are found to grow less vigorous, as they increase in Bulk.

John Atkins, naval surgeon, as quoted in Defoe's Pyrates
(St Thome, Del Principe and Annabono)

I love the idea of Dr Atkins wandering around coastal Africa, stealing surreptitious glances at the local cocks and assuring himself (and the Ladies back home) that hey, it's okay, I hear those really big ones have a hard time keeping it up anyway. Better small and energetic than big and flabby, right?

Just for the record, my Virile Member is both Bulky and Vigorous, thank you very much. And he called himself a doctor.

Defoe or Not Defoe?

There's a famous bit in Robinson Crusoe, chapter 4, when Crusoe has gone back out to the wrecked ship to see what he can salvage. He finds a stash of money in one cabin, and delivers a very pretty little soliloquy:

I smiled to myself at the sight of this money: "O drug!" said I, aloud, "what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me - no, not the taking off the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no manner of use for thee - e'en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving." However, upon second thoughts I took it away...

This is ultra-typical Defoe, not just the dry humour of it, but also the basic theme or idea. Again and again, Defoe's characters complain about what a burden money is, but they can never actually bring themselves to leave it alone -- a conundrum that Defoe is obviously amused by but thoroughly understands.

In the Plague Year, the narrator lets himself linger too long in the city because of his business interests; in Colonel Jack the young hero -- a homeless orphan who has to beg for food -- gets money for the first time in his life (as a share of a pickpocketing racket) and spends the night alone, awake, crying and terrified -- he can't really spend it without creating suspicion, and he's afraid that if he spends the night in his usual haunts he'll get his throat cut for it, but he can't bear the idea of just stashing it somewhere and hoping no one will find it. And his short novel the King of Pirates is pretty much all one parable on the theme. The narrator (based on the legendary Capt Avery) is so successful as a pirate, that he and his men are trapped by the wealth they've accumulated, stuck in Madagascar together, bound by mutual distrust, chained to money they can't actually spend.

...

The first chapter in Defoe's Pirate book is on that same Captain Avery. Avery was probably the most famous pirate of the time (he and Kidd were the only two pirates excluded from the General Amnesty proclaimed by England at one point), and a number of legends grew up around him -- most importantly (to Defoe), the legend that he founded and ruled a colony in Madagascar.

So in King of the Pirates, Defoe debunks the legend and suggests the colony was little better than a makeshift, self-imposed prison, where the pirates bided their time until they could figure out how to get back to Europe and enjoy their wealth. But in the chapter on Avery in the General History of the Pyrates, he goes much much further: he treats Avery as a complete sham, who had one lucky prize in his first and only expedition, never went to Madagascar at all, and eventually died in poverty after returning to England and unsuccessfully trying to fence the load of diamonds he stole from his companions. (There's apparently no documentary evidence for Defoe's version of Avery's latter years -- he probably just made it up.)

This is funny stuff, and it's an hilariously cynical way to start the book. (Happily, the second chapter -- on William Teach (Blackbeard) -- is much more what you'd expect: classic piratey stuff, with lots of fire and brimstone and drunken recklessness. No "Arrrrr, matey"s, though.)

So based on just a couple chapters so far, I'm leaning towards "yes" on the Defoe authorship question. I should say that 1) there's apparently no documentary or other definite evidence one way or another, the most anyone can say is he definitely could have written it, and the rest is just basically arguing from similarities to his other work, style, subject matter, etc; and 2) I'm far from a scholar (or expert on Defoe) so my opinion is worth precisely squat, but I'm enjoying forming it.

Apparently

while I was at the lake this week, I missed seeing Frank Thomas hit number 500; and even more regrettably missed, in the same game, seeing AJ Burnett have a hissy fit and toss his glove into the stands. That's too bad -- it's moments like those that make being a sports fan worthwhile, even when your team is idling in a Traffic Jam of Tediousness on the Freeway of Mediocrity.

On the whole, however, I'd rather still be at the lake.

Of Dumas, Cruelty, & Capt Pamphile

-- which might have been better titled the Gratuitous Slaughter of Many Interesting Animals.

As I said below, the book alternates between anecdotes about Dumas' artist friends and their exotic pets, and tall tales of Capt Pamphile, the hunter/explorer/pirate/all-around-crazy-person who was responsible for bringing many of these animals to France.

I have to say that, on the basis of this book, there has never in the history of the world been a worse bunch of pet-owners than these Parisian artistes. One by one, a frog, a parrot, a cat, a trained black bear, two monkeys and a tortoise all die atrocious deaths, all because of their owners' negligence and stupidity. Some of the animals are mourned (such as the monkey James I, who not only gets an elaborate and sentimental death scene, but who also gets one of the best footnotes in the history of footnotes: 'If you get a voucher from M. Jardin,' Dumas kindly informs the reader, 'you can purchase the death mask of James I for the price of the moulding. M. Jadin lives at 5b, rue de la Rochefoucald.') but most of them are seen dispatched with callous disconcern.

And Dumas saves the final, most horrifying death for the final page of the story (not counting appendices) -- tucking it in with hilarious insouciance, almost by way of afterthought. "Ha ha," he seems to be saying, "You thought I was going to let one of the animals get off with just being maimed, didn't you? Well, you thought wrong: he dies too..."

...

If there's a moral to the story -- and probably there isn't -- it might be in the words of Black-Serpent, a Huron chief who says contemptuously to Pamphile, '[A] Huron is not a white man, pointlessly destroying the creatures of the Great Spirit.'

But probably, you know, there is no moral -- just a genial and completely thorough misanthropy, something like, "Aren't people completely awful? Luckily they're pretty funny too."

Intriguingly, Dumas often interjects comments along the lines of, "Even though Pamphile was an irreligious old reprobate who had already seen many wonders, he couldn't help but feel a sense of religious awe when he saw [insert phenomenon of nature here]." Statements like these occur often enough to be a kind of leitmotif.

But it ought to be added that many of the animals are almost as awful as the humans, especially the two monkeys, James I and James II, who are greedy, nasty and violent -- and appropriately enough, particularly beloved by their human counterparts.

...

I've read the Three Musketeers maybe half a dozen times over the years, I love that book -- except for one episode, the mock-trial and execution-style-murder of Milady, which I read once and have never been able to stomach reading again.

A few years ago, I ploughed through the Count of Monte Cristo with a kind of horrified fascination. If you've never had the pleasure, I can give you a quick breakdown: the first two hundred or so pages (basically, everything up to and including Dantes' escape from prison) are wonderful and exciting; the next eight hundred or so pages are excruciating and horrifying, an overblown, histrionic, turgid and bloated piece of sustained cruelty, with a heady dose of crass money-worship thrown in to boot. It was so fascinatingly awful I couldn't put it down; so fascinatingly awful that lately I've been thinking about reading it again.

There was only one part of Captain Pamphile that reminded me of this side of Dumas, the execution of Milady/Count of Monte Cristo side. The Captain and a young and injured Sioux warrior seek refuge in the cabin of a shrewish old woman near Lake Superior. In the middle of the night, the old woman and her two sons attempt to murder their sleeping guests. Pamphile and his companion kill the sons; then the young Sioux lynches the old woman, stringing her up from a tree, and burns her cabin to the ground.

In the introduction to the Hesperus edition, translator Andrew Brown comments that Capt Pamphile is 'entertainingly amoral rather than villainous' until he 'indulges in the slave trade... The slave trading episode in his career is the book's heart of darkness.'

This is trite and politic nonsense. First of all, if Mr Brown thought Pamphile was some kind of lovable rogue up until then, I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley. Second, it's overwhelmingly clear that Dumas disapproves of the slave trade (he was the grandson of a Haitian slave himself); but it's not at all clear that he disapproves of lynching old women, especially when it's an heroic Sioux warrior committing the act. There's a heart of darkness for you.

Nefarious Forgeries at Devil's Gap

Family cottages and cabins can be great places to find books -- especially if they've been around for a couple generations, and are shared by several branches of the family.

At my family's cottage, a few weeks ago, I found the incomparable Cleanliness & Godliness. At my wife's family's cabin this week, the hunting wasn't as good, but I did discover an oversized hardcover reprint called the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. It had the Study in Scarlet, the Hound, and three or four of the better-known stories, and was apparently aimed at eleven-year-old boys, with exciting pictures and all the longer words glossed in the margins.

What made it a find, though, was what came after the Holmes stories: a fairly arbitrary (and completely anonymous) article on how to detect forged documents. Now, none of the Holmes stories were about forgeries, and none of the techniques discussed had anything to do with the Holmes period, but I did learn that ball-point pens were unavailable before 1945, that if you ever find two signatures exactly alike you can be sure that one's a forgery (I think I already knew that), that old people's hands often shake (knew that too), and that you -- yes, you -- could enter the exciting profession of document verification!


I wish publishers did this kind of thing more often. I hope that if Sandbag Shuffle is re-printed after my death, the publishers throw in instructions for building a teepee, or a recipe for homemade root beer, or something.

...

I hate it when translators try to approximate dialects. A Parisian cab driver, circa 1830, shouldn't speak with a cockney accent -- he just shouldn't.

Also: a tiger in Africa strikes me as a mundane if amusing mistake. A giant boa constrictor eating a wolf along the banks of the St Lawrence River strikes me as frankly bizarre, though who knows? If I were Nigerian instead of Canadian, maybe my reaction would be reversed.

Capt Pamphile

I generally picture Alexandre Dumas as about 5'5 and 275 lbs, waddling sternly between rows of tables in a dimly-lit warehouse, occasionally yelling "Harder! Faster! Smarter!" (or, I suppose, the French equivalent) at the hunched-over, half-naked writers chained to their stools -- pale and skeletal, chain-smoking and furiously scribbling out passages of Queen Margot and the Man in the Iron Mask.

This is no doubt completely accurate, but of course only applies to Dumas in his later years; Captain Pamphile is from an earlier period, when he was primarily a successful playwright who wrote stories on the side, and is set among his real-life friends (even giving their actual, real-life addresses -- I'd like to try getting away with that in my next book), a bohemian set of artists, writers and one slightly pompous young doctor (who opens the story by conducting a rather mean-spirited experiment on his friend's pet frog) who spend all their time lounging around one another's apartments, eating, drinking, smoking, and collecting exotic animals. These anecdotes alternate with tall tales about the explorer Pamphile, source of at least one of these pets (a monkey named James I). Pamphile is a cheerfully ridiculous, foul-mouthed, arrogant cartoon -- we're introduced to him casually slaughtering a geographically-challenged tiger, a crocodile, and a hippopotamus, all while eating lunch.

I'm only about a quarter of the way in, but so far enjoying it a good deal. Not quite as much as One Thousand and One Ghosts -- and let me pause here for a shout-out to Hesperus Press, who do a fabulous job of dredging up out-of-the-way oddities and neglected little beauties by great writers -- but enjoying it all the same.

Finally Arrived Yesterday

in the mail, from Amazon, my long-awaited copy of Defoe's General History of the Pyrates. (Except, of course, that it may not be by Defoe at all -- I'll get into that later.)

I love introductions, postcripts, notes, indices, glossaries and all that scholarly apparatus crap -- they're like foreplay, to me -- and this edition is absolutely stacked. Even more I love maps and diagrams. One of my abiding ambitions is to write books that will make publishers want to put maps in, and this one has tons of maps, illustrations, and even reproductions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diagrams of ships.

This is practically porn -- like, really good porn, with hot lesbians and professional camerawork and everything. Best twenty bucks I've spent in a long long time, and I haven't even really started reading it.

My Wife Has Decided

that she wants to get the little nipper baptized. Even though she hasn't gone to Church in something like twenty years, isn't religious, was married (to me) in a civil ceremony (which may or may not make our child a technical bastard, I'm unsure of the current policy) -- still and all, she was raised Catholic and therefore, she feels, her daughter should be raised Catholic as well, so that she has a chance to learn about and then reject religion the same way her mother did. Plus of course the in-laws are all thrilled, and hey, we're all about spreading sweetness and light, you know?

Me, I don't much give a shit -- plus it gives me a chance to meet and converse with nuns and priests, a new experience for me, so I'm excited about that.

So we had to attend a baptism class last night. Three quick observations: one, there were four babies at the class, three girls and a boy. All three girls (including ours) had names that begin with "A". Coincidence, or trend? (Ours was the only baby to have a saint's name, however. This made me smug. I felt like saying, "We gave our baby a good Catholic name, didn't we Father Massey?" But I didn't. Though it would've been funny.)

As for the boy (name beginning with "C"), well, the priest had asked us to explain why we chose the names we did, and the boy's parents explained that they are both elementary school teachers, and it was one of the few names they could think of that wasn't tainted by association with some snot-nosed brat they've had to teach. The contempt for all their students, past present and future, was absolutely palpable. Bet they send their kid to a private school.

Second observation: man, that Father Massey had a great vocabulary, and without a hint of ostentation. Just slipping those polysyllabic gems into conversation, smooooth like silk. Let's give it up for a Jesuit education, everybody.

Finally: at one point we were shown a ten-minute video detailing the ceremony itself (where to stand, what to say, etc). Fairly boring, but it was all worth it for the opening, pre-credit sequence. First we see a drawing of Christ's face (70s style animation, white outline drawing). The camera pulls out and reveals that Christ is holding His cross out in front of him like a rifle; then the camera swings around so that the "barrel" of the cross is pointed right at our faces. Baptize your baby, or Jesus will shoot you dead.

I thought that my brother-in-law (attending as the designated godfather) was going to pop a blood vessel from the effort of not laughing out loud. This didn't just make my day, it made my week.

Unsolicited Parenting Advice from Strangers, 2

The nice Jamaican woman who helps run Juliana's Restaurant informs us that breastfeeding mothers should avoid all green, leafy vegetables, especially lettuce and cabbage, "because it makes baby gassy." Also beans, needless to say.

Later, when we've left the restaurant and start down Toronto St, a young woman offers to sell us a stockpile of formula, cheap. We're breastfeeding, we tell her. Oh, she says. Well, if you change your mind, just drop by [censored] Burnell St and she'll hook us up.

Unsolicited Parenting Advice from Strangers

Taking Agnes for a walk around the neighborhood in her stroller. She starts to fuss and cry towards the end of the walk, probably because it's almost time for her to eat.

A woman who is pulling her car out on Victor stops the car -- perpendicular across the street -- and opens the door so she can lean out and yell, "Your baby might be too hot! My baby cried once and it was because I had him bundled up too hot."

Later, we receive a second-hand piece of unsolicited advice via my mother, who was told by the woman who runs the El Salvadoran grocery store on Sargent that she should tell us that hot chocolate is very good for breast milk.