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.