This week I have a deadline.
It's not the deadline for this diary (9:00 pm Saturday night, in case you're curious, and yes, there have been weeks when things have fallen apart, the center has cracked like an egg in the hands of a short order cook at my favorite diner, and I've been frantically checking links and swearing violently at the Triple Felinoid at 8:59:55 before clicking "publish now"). No, this is something completely different, though just as enjoyable, and potentially a lot more time consuming.
Back in May, when I went to the Kalamazoo Medieval Studies Congress, I was wandering through the Evil Book Room when I saw two men with a box of books on a table. I knew who they were - they're there every year, tucked into the same little corner by the cafe where hungry exhibitors and participants fuel up before going to yet more panels on the teological and sociological aspects of monastic practice in Ruritania - and I'd always wanted to write for them, but somehow it never happened until now. Other scholars had always gotten there first and snagged the books on old textiles, and I had been left to sigh and wish I'd been quicker, or had arrived a little earlier to go through their selection before the rest of DISTAFF arrived.
For you see, they weren't selling the books. Oh no. They were giving the books away. The only thing they asked in return is that whoever took a book would then agree to read it over the summer, write an 800 word review, and then send them the review by September 1st.
800 words to get a free book? When I typically write twice that in an evening after work, 4-5 times that on a Saturday when I have no distractions? Even given the amount of prep work needed before actually sitting down to write, that's a bargain compared to the usual price of an academic title.
I think you can understand why I've always been so disappointed that I've never gotten there in time...
Until this year.
This year they had a little book on one of my secondary interests: the Renaissance obsession with what Dame Frances Yates called "the occult philosophy of Neoplatonism, hermeticism, and natural science fused with Kabbalah, magic, and alchemy in Western culture. This little-known aspect of Renaissance, Baroque, and early Rococo philosophy, music, painting, architecture, and theology was the driving force behind an astonishing amount of the artistic and philosophical heritage of Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries, was still influential until the mid-19th, and has enjoyed something of a minor revival in the last 50 years thanks to Yates and her successors such as Joscelyn Godwin and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.
I first became aware of occult philosophy when I picked up a copy of Dame Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment in the early 1980s. This book, which centers on the Rosicrucian movement of the early 17th century in Germany and its possible role in the attempt by the Elector Palatine to become King of Bohemia, was a revelation to me, and I quickly read everything else by Yates I could lay my hands on. Magical memory, Christian kabbalah, Neoplatonism, the Corpus Hermeticum, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz - this material fired my imagination as few things have, and I've maintained a keen interest in it for over twenty years.
So when I saw that the Sixteenth Century Journal needed someone to review a book on occult philosopher Athanasius Kircher's legendary, doomed attempt to translate hieroglyphics almost two hundred years before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, I snatched up the book, cradled it to my heaving bosom, and asking in trembling tones if they'd pretty please let me review it?
The editors, kind and desperate men that they were, had no objections to this. And so I walked out of the Evil Book Room with my new treasure in my hands, certain that I could read it, take notes, and dash off a review well before my deadline. I had the whole summer ahead of me, so this would be easy!
Little did I know.
As long-time readers of this series are well aware, my summer was somewhat ruined disrupted by a back spasm that turned out to be a gallstone attack that quickly morphed gallbladder pancreatitis, which meant removal of the offending organ. I spent most of a week in the hospital, another week recuperating at home before I went back to work, and about three more weeks regaining my strength. I only started feeling like my old self at the beginning of the month, and it's been a lot harder to get back into my routine than I thought it would be.
Needless to say, none of this was precisely conducive to reading, analyzing, and then reviewing a book about a 17th century polymath and his blindingly inaccurate translations of Egyptian writing.
That's why I'm going into what I call Stealth Mode this afternoon and holing up at the Garret in Florence to write a review of a good book instead of a diary about bad books.
This wasn't what I originally intended today - I had something else in mind entirely, even if it didn't quite achieve the toe-curling horrors of the Rob Liefeld "art" I inflicted on your last week - but if I'm going to make my deadline, it has to be done. "Real Life comes first," as we say in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and as much fun as I have writing about lousy books (and art, and movies), maintaining my reputation in the scholarly community is just a smidge more important.
Fortunately, all is not lost! Tonight I bring you a taste of things to come, aka "Ellid's fall diary schedule!" Even better, six of these entries were the diaries I was planning to write before my gallbladder decided to take revenge for every joke I've made based on the first lines of Caesar's Gallic Wars, so you're getting not only the fall, but the summer, too! Isn't that amazing?
And so, without further ado or dramatically mixed metaphors, here we go! Take it, Wally Ballou!
September 7 - Back to the Kitchen, Modern Jezebel!
September 14 - Play Up! Play Up! And Play the Game!
September 21 - Wonder Dogs We Should Wonder About
September 28 - Lost Empires and Noble Savages
October 5 - Exorcise at Home!
October 12 - "The Last Time I Hit 'Save' was Wednesday!"
October 19 - Erudition and Obelisks
October 26 - Forecast Cloudy, with Chance of Stock Market Crash
November 2 - Dinosaurs and Other Heresies
November 9 - In Flanders' Fields
November 16 - Monk Gregory's House of Screaming Horrors
November 23 - Remember the Ladies
Isn't that scary? Don't you just want to crawl into your wee bed and weep? Especially since one of these diaries is the fun parts version of the book review I'm writing today.
Have a great weekend, everyone! Happy fall!
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And so, my friends - do any of these titles intrigue you? Do you have suggestions for winter diaries? Books I can recommend in my annual early December shopping list? Maybe a book on occult philosophy I can read in the bathtub? An Egyptian obelisk for sale, cheap? It's the last weekend of summer, so let's have fun!
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