What I read last month, with a smattering of Tudor-era history and a lot more from the modern era. This month:
Spenser's The Faerie Queene
Bacon's On the Advancement of Learning
Browne's Religio Medici
Theodor Fontaine's The Stechlin
Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage
Bernard Malamud's God's Grace
Maria Dahvana Headley's The Year of Yes
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century
....and the usual assortment of historical mystery novels.
Enjoy!
Diagnosis of the Soul: Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne
Were I of Cæsar’s Religion, I should be of his desires, and wish rather to go off at one blow, then to be sawed in pieces by the grating torture of a disease. Men that look no farther than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I, that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that Fabrick hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and, considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my GOD that we can die but once. ’Tis not onely the mischief of diseases, and the villany of poysons, that make an end of us; we vainly accuse the fury of Guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholding unto every one we meet, he doth not kill us. There is therefore but one comfort left, that, though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death: GODwould not exempt Himself from that, the misery of immortality in the flesh, He undertook not that was immortal. Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of flesh, nor is it in the Opticks of these eyes to behold felicity. The first day of our Jubilee is Death; the Devil hath therefore failed of his desires: we are happier with death than we should have been without it: there is no misery but in himself, where there is no end of misery; and so indeed, in his own sense, the Stoick is in the right. He forgets that he can dye who complains of misery; we are in the power of no calamity while death is in our own.
No, it's not about Christianity as practiced by Renaissance Italy's Medici family. It means "The religion of a doctor", and it claims to address the question still asked today: Why would an educated doctor/scientist, who emphasizes reason in his work and life, still fall for all that superstitious nonsense?
In Browne's time, the answer is, Because they still BURN people who don't! But he's too diplomatic to say so. Instead, his answer is, Because Christianity is so beautiful! It explains unknowable things, gives us a reason why we're here, and promises eternal happiness, if we are good and testify.
Browne's book is short and doesn't say much in reason or theology that hasn't already been said in Aquinas (Bookpost, December 2013), and he couches it as autobiography (it is) and original, independent thought (it is not). Browne alternates between claiming to prove theology by the use of reason (he doesn't) and flowery prose about God's unprovable goodness (at one point he expresses thanks that he did not live back in the age of miracles, so that he could prove his faith all the more by believing without evidence, which is the opposite of reason. If he lived today, Browne might be the guy on FaceBook who responds to "Share this picture of a lizard for no reason whatsoever!!!). Then he instructs us as to those scriptural assertions that are open to reasonable debate (example: whether or not Judas hanged himself) and which are not (example: the Great Flood, although it is permitted to speculate that maybe the Tower of Babel was an attempt to enable people to survive possible floods of the future).
Browne has a learned way of writing, he refers frequently to past "great books", and he is described as an example of a gentleman to be admired. Were he not included in the Harvard Classics, however, I might well have passed him by, and not considered myself much the poorer for it.
Edwardian Rom-Trag: Portrait of a Marriage, by Nigel Nicolson
The bag contained something--a tiara in its case for all I knew--and, having no key, I cut away the leather from around its lock to open it. Inside there was a large notebook in a flexible cover, page after page filled with her neat pencilled script. I carried it to her writing table and began to read. The first few pages were abortive drafts of a couple of short stories. The sixth page was headed "July 23rd, 1920," followed by a narrative in the first person that continued for eighty more. I read it through to the end without stirring from her table. It was an autobiography written when she was aged twenty eight, a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love that had possessed her, a love for another woman, Violet Trefusis.
Maybe the thing that most hit home here were the old photographs. Men in high silk top hats, women in old art deco dresses and bonnets, posed stiffly, putting up a front of stolid manners and dreariness. Who knows what was going on inside their heads?
Vita Sackville-West was part of one such family. Prominent, occasionally scandalous, owners of one of those gigantic country estate homes built in the 16th century and damnably moldy by the time Vita was brought up there. During her marriage, she had affairs with women (most famously, Virginia Woolf, who based her novel Orlando on her); her husband had affairs with men--both at a time when such things were unheard of in polite society--the bisexuality, not the adultery. How times change.
Nevertheless, they put on a united front, got along as friends, and loved each other at least enough to have two children, one of whom, Nigel, published this book as Sackville-West's biography, interspersed with many of her own letters and two large sections of her autobiographical journal, with emphasis on Sackville-West's star-crossed pre-Woolf affair: feelings of shame and guilt, resolution to end the matter because of its moral wrongness, eventual tiring of the other woman, who drowns herself. Reading the book is like listening to Nicolson's and Sackville-West's voices on a scratchy old record, backed by a chamber quartet. Very moody and atmospheric.
The Tudor Murders: Sovereign, by CJ Sansom; The Three Kings of Cologne; The Green Man; The Dance of Death, by Kate Sedley; A Time for the Death of a King, by Ann Dukthas
"Forgive me, Master Chapman, but I was hoping that...well, that you could be persuaded to discover the circumstances surrounding Isabella Linkinhorne's death. Her body has been found on land that now belongs to me and, foolish though it may seem, I feel responsible for uncovering the facts of the crime and bringing the murderer to justice if I can. You're the only person I know who might be able to do this."
Oh, thank you God! You've taken over my life again!
--from The Three Kings of Cologne
"Let me understand this properly...Rab Sinclair confesses to stabbing his wife--his unarmed wife--but says it was done in self-defense? This informant of yours, this lay brother, is sure of his facts?"
"He swears to it. It only happened the day before yesterday, on Monday afternoon. Master Sinclair made no effort to escape and was arrested almost at once with the knife still in his hand."
--from The Green Man
Oldroyd stared up at me. He tried feebly to lift an arm and his mouth worked in an attempt to speak. I leaned over, as far as I dared. He reached up and gripped my robe with his scarred bloody hand. I held the side of the cart convulsively, terrified I might fall in with him, face-first onto that broken glass.
"The Ki--The King!", he said in a trembling whisper.
"What about him? What is is?" I heard my own voice shake, for my heart was juddering mightily in my chest.
"No child of henry and--" He gasped and coughed up a dribble of blood. "Of Henry and Catherine Howard--can ever--be true heir!"
"What? What is this?"
"SHE knows." He gave a convulsive shudder. "Blaybourne," he whispered frantically, his blue eyes staring inot mine as though by doing so he could hold onto his life. "Blay-bourne..." The word ended in a rattling gasp, Oldroyd's grip slackened, and his head fell back. He was dead; being lifted up had opened his wound and the last of his blood was even now spilling out over the spikes and needles of glass.
I hauled myself upright, my arms trembling. The workmen were looking at me, aghast. "What did he say, sir?" Craike asked.
"Nothing," I asnswered quickly. "Nothing."
--from Sovereign.
"Annoyed?" I could hardly get the word out. "Annoyed! I'm furious! Or I would be if I were going."
The spymaster sighed. "I'm afraid you've no choice, my friend. This is an order from the King. He was so pleased with your work in Scotland that he wants to make use of your services again."
"I didn't do anything in Scotland except come close to being murdered. What will happen this time? I'll probably be found floating face down in the Seine."
--from The Dance of Death
"The first is a fifteenth century painting of a group of singers. The second is a painting by Titian entitled The Young Englishman. Next comes Holbein the Younger's Portrait of Thomas More and his Family; Boulet's portrait of Two Lovers; Rembrandt's Members of the Clothmaker's Guild. A copy of Renoir's A Box at the Opera and finally, a photograph of Lenin and his staff taken in October 1918."
Segalla must have heard her puzzlement.
"You have a magnifying glass?" he asked. "Take each one in turn."
Ann obeyed. "Oh Lord, save us!...There's the same man in each painting...and it's you!"
--from A Time for the Death of a King
Sovereign is the third of Sansom's Shardlake series, and one that takes a giant leap forward in quality, in a series that wasn't bad to begin with. It's almost literature as opposed to mystery, with a high level of historical detail and a speculative plot that hangs on real characters and documents and, for all I know, may really have happened . See Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, Bookpost, July 2014, about Richard III--in fact I wouldn't be surprised if sansom turned out to be paying homage to Tey. Henry VIIII was something of a monster who claimed untoward victims, from Wolsey and More and Thomas Cromwell to his wives to the Catholic presence in England. In Sovereign, the King is in his Catherine Howard marriage (#5 of 6) and on a pilgrimage ('progress") to York to wave carrots and sticks at factions that still grumble over the treatment of their own Richard III. Shardlake, in charge of keeping a prisoner safe and healthy until he can be brought to London to be tortured, comes across several ominous documents that include a version of the Royal family tree and the Titulus Regulus (which figures in Tey's novel) and hints of the reasons for Howard's eventual execution. Vivid descriptions are everywhere--cockfights and bear baiting taking place in what was once a monastery; the enormity of the King's train of attendants proceeding north; the sinister figure of the King himself; andgry mobs and spit-roasted oxen and mud, endless, endless mud. And, oh yes, some mysteries to solve. Very high recommendations.
Meanwhile, Kate Sedley's formulaic Roger Chapman mysteries continue. By now, I know what a clue is pretty easily and had no trouble solving these three; however, as with Brother Cadfael, the characterization and story lines make them worth reading despite the lack of challenge. The Three Kings of Cologne are Roger's nicknames for the three phantom suspects in a story where a young woman is believed to have run off long ago with one of her three lovers--no one knows who any of them was, or can even prove beyond mere gossip and prejudice that they existed--but everyone's certain that there were three of them, and Roger needs to find them, because the woman's dead body has turned up 20 years later, and one of those three must have been the killer, right? Right? The Green Man is more an excuse to write about Richard's 1482 expedition to Scotland than a real mystery, and the attempt to murder-she-wrote it is clumsy and very improbable. On the one hand, the history is supposed to be why I'm reading these in the first place; on the other hand, don't even attempt to solve for motive, although the culprit is obvious. The Dance of Death is another excuse, this time about succession to the throne and the same subject that fueled Sovereign, handled with much less elegance. It nominally involves a mission to France, but the mission doesn't start until more than halfway through the book, and the fact that the crimes include some committed during the journey narrows the list of suspects down to, well, one.
Finally, a new series by Ann Dukthas features "Segalla the time-travelling detective", who doesn't really go back and forth in time; he just seems to live forever without aging. Two books in the series take place in the 16th Century, and A Time for the Death of a King is the first. As with Tey's The Daughter of Time (Bookpost, July 2014), which was apparently more influential than i'd dreamed, it tackles a doubtful historical crime--Richard III's nephews in Tey; the death of lord Darnley, husband to Mary Queen of Scots in Dukthas--with the solution supported by real historical documents. Segalla, in the prologue and epilogue, talks to a modern historian about "the truth", and says, if she doesn't believe his version, to look up this, that, and the other document that really do exist. Darnley's killing was bizarre and had the effect of turning an unpopular lord into a martyr and causing Scotland to rise up against Mary, driving her out of the country and into imprisonment and eventual death in Elizabeth's England. Dukthas's method is simply to ask who benefited; the rest follows.
Shock the Monkey: God's Grace, by Bernard Malamud
Cohn fell to his knees, fearing God's wrath. His teeth chattered; he shivered as though touched on the neck by icy fingers. Taking back his angry words, he spoke these: "I am not a secularist although I have doubts. Einstein said God does not dice with the universe; if he could believe it maybe I can. I accept your conditions, but please do not cut my time too short.
The rusty, battered vessel with one broken mast drifted on slanted seas. Of all men only Calvin Cohn lived on, passionate to survive.
This is a very strange book, part Job, part Lord of the Flies, part Planet of the Apes, and a lot more besides. Cohn is the sole human survivor of a nuclear holocaust who makes his way with an experimental monkey to an island where he prays to God fof forbearance as he oversees the rise and fall of civilization in miniature.
All the ugly parts a re a little bit beautiful, and all the beautiful parts are a little bit ugly. If there is a moral message, it is seen through a glass darkly. It's brief, easily readable, and highly recommended.
LEARN ALL THE THINGS! On the Advancement of Learning, by Sir Francis Bacon
The knowledge of man is as the waters, some descending from above, and some springing from beneath; the one informed by the light of nature, the other inspired by divine revelation. The light of nature consisteth in the notions of the mind and the reports of the senses: for as for knowledge which man receiveth by teaching, it is cumulative and not original; as in a water that besides his own spring-head is fed with other springs and streams. So then, according to these two differing illuminations or originals, knowledge is first of all divided into divinity and philosophy.
Francis Bacon's longest work is depressing to me. Thanks to the Christians and the Barbarians, 1,000 years after Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, a man like Bacon has to spend the first section of a book on knowledge trying to make the case that learning and knowing things is good. The church has convinced people that learning is heretical and bound to lead to Hell (code for, "We'll have to burn you if you discover that the earth goes around the sun"), and the barbarians have convinced them that book studies are unmanly and will soften people up to be easy prey for the big, stupid savages at the gates. Hence, the need to make the case for science. Glad we don't have to do that any more...oh, right. The Republicans.
After praising learning, Bacon devotes most of the book to an attempt to map out all of the bodies of knowledge that may be studied. As with The New Organon (Bookpost, August 2014) and the "idols of the tribe", Bacon's map has more relation to his own quirky vision than to what's actually out there. He starts by dividing all things into "history", "poesy" and "philosophy", with a religious subcategory for everything, and science put in all corners of the map. Non-human biology appears as "natural history"; medicine and sports in a "philosophy of the body" category opposite ethics and reason in the "philosophy of the mind" category; and physics as "natural philosophy". A long section deals with the study of "negotiation", and religious aspects of every branch are everywhere. Each subcategory reads like its own essay, as in the collection in last month's Bookpost.
Bacon is one of those philosophers who is rarely read today outside of introductory Humanities courses. It's not hard to tell why. Most of it has been surpassed or is taken for granted by all except the enemies of reason still trying to burn heretics and give noogies to nerds.
Die Zeiten, die sie a-changin sind: The Stechlin, by Theodor Fontane
The county had always gone conservative, and it was a matter of honor to go conservative again, as Luther had said, "even if the world were full of a thousand devils." It was incumbent upon the county to show this decadent world that there were still sanctuaries and that here was such a sanctuary. "We have, I believe", he concluded, "no one at this table who is completely at home in parliamentary matters, for which reason I have endeavored to set down in written form that which brings us here tonight. It is but a feeble attempt. Each of us does what he can and the bramble bush can offer nothing but its own berries. But even they can refresh the thirsty wanderer."
The blurb proudly identifies Der Stechlin as Fontane's masterwork. I don't think I want to read the lesser works.
Fontane was one of a group of German fin-de-siecle political reformers, and this medium length novel is a vehicle for pointing out how dated the Junker caste was, midway between the Franco-Prussian war and WWI. The title refers to both Lake Stechlin in the Brandenburg area of Germany, and to the stuffy old protagonist Dubslav, one of a long line of Stechlins, so old and venerable that they call him THE Stechlin. He lives on a country estate that presides over a village of a hundred or so houses, and conservative parliamentarians still look to him for advice. His son is a correct Prussian Officer. They follow tradition. In my English translation, they call each other "chappie" and other jarring British vernacular terms that make me think of PG Wodehouse's upper class twits instead of Germans.
The point is that Dubslav/Stechlin is out of touch, doesn't understand the bourgeoisie much less the proletariat, and his passing at the end of the novel is The End Of An Era. Imagine a kind but traditional man in his 80s today, brought up in the era before television, never bothered to become familiar with the Internet, still thinking of Eisenhower as the typical Republican. It's like that.
Thomas Mann was apparently influenced by Fontane when he wrote the much better Buddenbrooks. Brecht may also have been influenced--the passages where the narrative seems to pause and say "See? This is the world we live in." will be familiar to Brecht fans. Recommended mostly to fans of German literature who are interested in those in the 19th century who paved the way for movements in the 20th.
Waist Deep in the Big Money: Capital in the Twenty First Century, by Thomas Piketty
I will show that this spectacular increase in inequality largely reflects an unprecedented explosion of very elevated incomes from labor, a veritable separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the population. One possible explanation of this is that the skills and productivity of these top managers rose suddenly in relation to those of other workers. Another explanation, which to me seems more plausible and turns out to be much more consistent with the evidence, is that these top managers by and large have the power to set their own remuneration, in some cases without limit and in many cases without any clear relation to their individual productivity, which in any case is difficult to estimate in a large organization.
This is the trendy economics book of the year, possibly of the decade, and it makes me feel vindicated. For years now, I've been pointing out on internet arguments the central truth that wealth tends to concentrate into ever-fewer hands (people can argue about whether they "earn" it or "steal" it, but it doesn't really matter. The point is, they end up holding it all), and that when it concentrates into critical levels, then one of two things ALWAYS happens. Either the government hits a reset button and redistributes in a controlled way, or else there is a violent civil uprising, and the carrion-eating birds enjoy very frequent and delicious feasts. Which is it going to be. That's not my original idea; I first heard it from the Durants in The Lessons of History. But Piketty updates it, measures it everywhere there's enough data to measure (which pretty much means from the 18th century through the present), and concludes that something needs to be done about inequality.
And by "inequality", Piketty does not mean that we need to pay the bosses no more than we pay the peasants, or whatever straw man the Koch brigade is parading at the moment. Piketty believes (as do most liberals) that a certain amount of inequality is not only inevitable but positive for a healthy society. But it is at a gentle slope, maybe bisecting the graph at a 45 degree angle, where everyone is rubbing elbows with those a little better or worse off than themselves. as opposed to the wealth graph in America today, which crawls almost parallel to the X axis for the first 50% before curving up a bit and taking a sharp upswing to the stratosphere at around 97%.
You'll have to slog through several chapters of challenging data and equations in the first half of the book, defining national wealth and comparing the rate of return on capital with the rate of economic growth, before getting to the wide social pronouncements. Stick with it and do not skip. You need to understand the basics to understand the thesis that is making the One Percent scream with indignant rage and fear that they'll have to share some of their toys.
Piketty's very title is provocative: the word CAPITAL in big letters (just like Marx's "Das Capital", on purpose), with "in the twenty first century" in much smaller letters as an afterthought. Piketty is no Marxist, but he does give Marx's ideas, and failures, a close look instead of assuming everything he said to be wrong because he was Marx. The reason Marx's "inevitable" proletarian revolution proved to be evitable after all has been because of government reset buttons. Piketty recommends increased taxes on Capital the more the rate of return exceeds economic growth, but there are other ways. Piketty is not trying to provoke a socialist revolution. He is trying to prevent it.
Which, as a fellow member of the comfortable bourgeoisie, is what I've been saying all along, too. We know tho the peasants tend to burn first, while the One Percent is fleeing to their private islands in their private planes.
Here's a teaching song I made out of it (tune = "The Wee Cooper O' Fife")
There was an economist, lived in France
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
And the status quo got a kick in the pants
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
He wrote a report on the civil health
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
From base allocations of the wealth
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
"RETURN" includes dividends, interest and rent
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
Accruing to mostly the One Percent
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
While "GROWTH" is the tide that lifts all boats
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
Slaking the thirst of all of our throats
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
But Capitalism's fait accompli
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
Is that (R) is usually greater than (G)
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
When the rate of RETURN on capital's great
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
Compared to the overall growth rate
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
Then all of the money concentrates
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
Resulting in very few large estates
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
Inherited wealth plays too big a role
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
And the system staggers out of control
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
Return is high and the growth is slow
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
The people will imitate Jacques Rousseau
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
The upper tier gets more than they deserve
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
(Explaining the drop in the Kuznets curve)
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
The poorest will go to unfunded schools
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
And they'll be producing a lot more fools
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
There'll be a revolt of the dispossessed
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
The State may fall to civil unrest
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
The only way to restore public orders
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
Is a tax across international borders
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
A global wealth tax of two percent
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
Would make the distribution unbent
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
It would bring down the oligarchs
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
And avert the crisis predicted by Marx
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
There was an economist lived in France
Piketty, Pyeketty, Poo-Poo-Poo
He wrote it all down and left nothing to chance
Hardly frivolity, Wealth inequality.
Changing the polity, How'd-ye-do
A Surfeit of Douchetwizzles: The Year of Yes, by Maria Dahvana Headley
Imagine for a moment that you are young, female, and appallingly, possibly unattractively, well-read...you live in New York Ciity, the most exciting and romantic place in the country, and possibly in the world. According to the literature you're choosing to apply to your current situation, you are supposed to be wearing sequins to breakfast and getting your hand kissed by a heterosexual version of Cole Porter. Incandescently intelligent men are supposed to be toasting you with Dom Perignon. Instead, you're sharing a cockroach-ridden outerborough apartment with two roommates and one dysfunctional cat. You're spending your evenings sitting on your kitchen floor, drinking poisonous red jug wine and quoting Sartre....And instead of the smoldering, soul-bearing, abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you're getting stupefying lines like, "I'm listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out?"
I read a viral blog post by Maria Dahvana Headley last year and was impressed enough to go looking for more. I started with her novel Queen of Kings (Bookpost, July 2013), which, despite the historical fantasy, wasn't really for me. The book I really should have read then was her autobiographical The Year of Yes. This book is a commentary on urban life as we know it, on human relations, and maybe on the purpose of life in general. And it's delightful to read.
The premise is simple. Headley decided her social life was going nowhere, and shook things up by accepting every offer of a date she received for a year, from scary homeless people to scarier art students (acceptance meaning yes to conversation, an outing, a drink, not to casual sex. Headley is open-minded, not stupid). A comic/dramatic parade of horribles--and some jewels--ensues that, despite Headley's romantic frustration, turns out to be one of the more life-affirming, joyous, entertaining reads I've had all year. There are culture shock moments such as learning a thing or two about grace and class from the working-class neighbor. There are discoveries of soul-beauty in surprising places, such as the homeless man who thinks he's Jimi Hendrix--note that features of soul beauty do not mean that one necessarily wants to get close in the long term with the bearer of said features, but a one-off encounter has its rewards. My favorite one-off encounter was the one with the iguana-owning train conductor.
Most of all, there is Headley herself--reminding both me and herself of Dorothy Parker: literate to a degree that alienates her from her peers; outrageous; hungry for life in a city that has everything. Highly cultured, poised, and says "fuck" a lot. In other words, My People. I wanted to be friends with the woman who lived, observed and wrote The Year of Yes (time was when I'd have to write thank-you mail care of the publisher, but thanks to social media, I was able to find and friend her on FaceBook, and so my wish might well come true). I also recommended the book to three other women I know who reminded me of Headley--well-educated, delightful conversationalists, quirky, unhappily single, in NYC---and all three of them replied that they were doing the same experiment as Headley, and that the number of offers to say yes to had been zero, and never mind that their blog posts sparkle with every fiber of their being. Apparently you have to be under 40 for it to work. Very highest recommendations anyway.
Heroes for Hire: The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser
Tho when he saw no power might prevaile
His trusty sword he cald to his last aid
Wherewith he fiersly did his foe assaile
And double blowes about him stoutly laid
That glauncing fire out of the yron plaid
As sparkles from the Andville use to fly
When heavy hammers on the wedge are swaid
Therewith at last he forst him to unty
One of his grasping feete, him to defend thereby.
It seems to me, Spenser's gigantic classical poem, one of the longest in the English language, has passed its use-by date. It's written in an archaic English midway between Chaucer and Shakespeare, and eclipsed by both. Vs and Fs used instead of Us and Ss.
Maybe I was spoiled by having just had the wonderful David R. Savitt translation of Ariosto (See Bookpost, June 2014), which handles a similar poem in very up-to-date English. The poems do similar things, creating adventures for casts of dozens while drawing allegorical sustenance from the myths and theology of ancient Judaism, Greece and Rome, Christianity, Norse saga and Renaissance Italy (and in the case of Spenser, Arthurian legend and Queen Elizabeth's court, as well). Additionally, Spenser's heroes are supposed to represent the classic virtues (specifically holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy, a combination I've never seen elsewhere), and so every sword fight really represent the soul's battle against sins represented by the giants, monsters and evil knights in the heroes' paths--except that some things turn out not to be allegories at all, so that a reader like myself can waste several pages trying to figure out what the "Red Cross Knight"'s helpful dwarf companion is supposed to represent, when in fact he's really just a dwarf.
The book tries to do way too much, with a different main plot for each of the six cantos, and several subplots. To pull that off, a brisk, gripping, easy-to-read narrative style is necessary, and Spenser's endless specially formed sonnets in centuries-old spelling and grammar, just don't do it. Among the better parts (to me) are the tale of the female knight Britomart, representing chastity (because the token woman ALWAYS represents chastity, just like X is always for "xylophone"), and the section representing justice, in which knights wrangle problems of law and right instead of just bashing each other in the name of virtue.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/...