Tonight was supposed to be a single diary.
As some of my alert readers may recall, I had to bail on my Labor Day diary due to a hard deadline on a book review. This book review, my very first for a publication not associated with textiles, was supposed to have been completed, proofread, and turned in to the editor in early August per Ellid's Master Plan for Owning the Summer of 2013, Yo! leaving me the rest of the month to read, write, go to Tanglewood, and similarly kick back and live large.
Alas, the Vessel of Evilness and Suckitude Formerly Known as Ellid's Gallbladder (hereinafter referred to unaffectionately as "Gally") had other plans. Thanks to one of Gally's lil' friends (hereinafter referred to not at all if I can help it) getting stuck on its way down, down to Goblin Town out into my lower gastrointestinal tract, the resulting jaundice, and the resulting pancreatitis, I spent four days in the hospital, two weeks out of work, and over a month too worn out to do much more than flail about while the Triple Felinoid stared at me, let alone read an academic tome and write 800 coherent words reviewing it. I didn't even make it to Tanglewood, making it the twentieth-fifth straight year I've lived in Western Massachusetts without visiting the area's best-known summer classical concert series.
Thus it was that instead of finishing the review early and having a month to relax, I had to cram it into the last ten days of August and spend Labor Day weekend frantically writing, editing, proofing, cutting, and rewriting. It was not much fun. Fortunately the academic journal did accept the review, but to say that this situation was less than ideal is to put it mildly indeed.
The one good thing that came out of the entire mess was that I found the subject of what was going to a truly epic diary.
You see, the book I reviewed was about one of the greatest flops in European intellectual history. Written in dense, ultra-erudite prose by a leading seventeenth century linguist and scholar, it was nothing less than the first serious attempt to translate a seemingly lost language into a modern tongue. The fact the translation was about as close to the actual meaning of the texts as those amusing (and quite probably apocryphal) Asian translations of movie titles that turn The Crying Game into Help! My Girlfriend is a Man! turned what had been the labor of a lifetime into a catastrophe of near-Titanic proportions. Even better, the author himself may well have made up at least some of his sources.
I think you can see why this would appeal to me, to the point that I decided to do this rather than Captain America, Socialist Scum!, which was my second choice for this week.
I'd done the research, I was rested and ready, I'd written the outline and even written the introduction...
And then my doctor called to tell me that despite all the dietary changes I've made since Gally was a bad, bad internal organ and was subjected to removal with extreme prejudice, despite the reduction in fat intake that reduce my triglycerides by almost 20 points, my overall cholesterol went up eleven points. And since this was not only unexpected but officially a Bad Thing, she was putting me on medication to remedy this situation.
I was (and still am) shocked down to my tippy-toes - I did everything I was supposed to, so how the !#$@!$@!$@$ this happened is beyond me - but since I like being alive, thankyewverramuch, I dutifully went on simvastatin this week. I also started looking into possible alternatives since I'd heard some dubious things about simvastatin, better known by its brand name as Zocor.
I think you can guess what happened next.
That's right. Two days into my course of treatment, I was suffering from a textbook case of simvastatin side effects not to be confused with a Chattanooga Choo-Choo: muscle pain, weakness, achy joints, coldness and cramping in both legs, a migraine that would not quit, and mild confusion/disorientation. The only thing that responded to any of the pain meds I had on hand was the migraine, and that only after a double dose and two large cups of coffee.
Needless to say, I called my doctor immediately. Not only was I in pain, I was having trouble walking since I had the unpleasant sensation that my legs did not belong to my body. I knew the cholesterol had to come down, but surely there was a better way to handle it.
My doctor, a wise woman, agreed. She took me off the Zocor immediately, told me to wait a week, and will talk to me next Friday. I'm feeling considerably better, although my legs are still colder than normal and I'm taking it easy this weekend. I've laid in a supply of oatmeal for breakfast in place of my usual raisin bran, have flaxseed oil on order, and plan to up my exercise level as soon as I finish up a big project that's been eating up my spare time.
Alas for those who faithfully read my journeys into Darkest Badbookistan, all this means that I was feeling so crappy for a good chunk of this week that I was unable to finish this diary.
Therefore, tonight I bring you not a whole diary, but Eric the Half-a-Diary the introduction to what was supposed to be tonight's diary. The rest will appear next weekend, and I hope to God you'll all come back and read the thrilling, chilling, conclusion.
My thanks for your indulgence...and now, take it, Wally Ballou!
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My first scholarly attempt at describing medieval patchwork a few years ago was completely wrong.
This was partially my fault. I made the common mistake of believing that just because much post-Renaissance art attempts to portray the world as realistically as possible, that pre-Renaissance art had the same goal, and thus the geometrically patterned cloths of honor hanging behind so many Madonnas represented actual textiles. I had no idea that many of these alleged textiles were either allegorical (such as the “cloth of gold” in certain Netherlandish paintings of Madonnas where the donor who commissioned the painting requested that Biblical verses be incorporated into the “brocade” to show their piety), stock patterns based on Spanish silks (damn you, Bernardo Daddi!), or crude attempts to portray a striped or woven fabric by artists who did the best they could given the techniques available to them at the time.
These flaws were correctable, and thanks to several long, hard research sessions at local libraries, I was able to amend my paper sufficiently that three years, four drafts, and uncounted migraine induced by reading teeny-weeny print in dimly lit study carrels (curse you, WEB Dubois Library!) later, my paper was finally accepted for publication. It came out last year to a fair amount of critical acclaim, and barring future archaeological discoveries, it's reasonably safe to say that future quilt and textile historians will have to deal with my work.
Alas, the same cannot be said for my first attempt at describing medieval patchwork, which was not especially scholarly but was deadly serious, at least to me.
It was the early 1990s. I had just begun teaching classes on early quilting and patchwork in the Society for Creative Anachronism, America's largest medieval re-enactment and recreation group. There was very little in print about either subject, and I had to do a lot of original research simply to prove that either patchwork or quilting had even existed during the Middle Ages. Even then, I had certain people asking why I even bothered, or tell me to my face that I was wasting my time.
It stung, being called a fool, or deluded, or just plain wrong. I won't deny that. I may not have been an academic at that point, but I had my pride, and I was damned if I was going to admit that conventional wisdom was right when I was all but certain it wasn't. And so, even during the height of the early 1990's recession, when money was tight and Wingding and I came closer to losing our house than I care to think about, I would somehow scrape together the extra money to purchase any book that contained even the tiniest fragment of information on pre-17th century quilting, patchwork or applique.
I rooted out a bare handful of references to early patchwork, most of the "well, the textile hanging off that balcony sure looks like a patchwork, so it probably is" school of speculative scholarship. The best was a poem that described a quilt made of "two sorts of silk cloth in a checkerboard pattern," but until a letter by a French merchant boasting of the time in 1507 that he made an 8,000 piece wallhanging of wool and bet the whole town they couldn't match it surfaced a few years later, that was about it.
I was on the verge of giving up when I hit what I thought was the jackpot: an article in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine that described not one but two pre-17th century pieces of patchwork. Better yet, these objects, one a 13th century Spanish cope, the other a 15th century English chasuble, not only had what the article's authors claimed were impeccable provenances, both were worked in complex geometric patterns that hinted at a long, rich, and hitherto unknown patchwork tradition that spanned two countries and several centuries.
Is it any wonder I all but swooned with delight? And promptly incorporated these objects, which between them were worked in no fewer than five patchwork patterns, into my teaching and written materials?
Or that I wanted to crawl into a cave, change my name, and wail uncontrollably to the stalactites and stalagmites and the blind white fish of the underground lakes when I found out five or six years later that the article I had seized upon with such ecstasy was completely, utterly, one hundred percent wrong?
That's right.
The article was wrong.
And I, who had confidently relied on its accuracy when I passed along this wonderful new information to friends, family, and students throughout what we members of the Society for Creative Anachronism like to call "The Known World," was not only wrong, I was guilty of the greatest of scholarly sins: I hadn't gone back and checked to see that my secondary sources were accurate. If I had, I might have realized much, much earlier that:
- The supposed patchwork cope in Spain was actually a geometric brocade that had been identified as such thirty years earlier in the standard book on medieval Spanish silks; and
- The "Tudor cope" that was allegedly made for an English recusant family so their priest could fold up his vestments and pretend they were bed quilts had been made in the early eighteenth century, not the early sixteenth.
"Ouch," as they say in the Common Speech of the Western Lands.
It was major, and humiliating blow, and the memory of it hovered over my shoulder like a malevolent little guardian demon fifteen years later as I researched, refined, rewrote, and otherwise prepared what became "Anomaly or Sole Survivor? The Impruneta Cushion and Early Italian 'Patchwork,'" the aforesaid scholarly article. I double, triple, and quadrupled checked every single reference, no matter how small, to the point of e-mailing two Italian scholars, tracking down a copy of a 12th century poem in a language that I was unable to read, and asking a co-worker who was visiting his family in Budapest to translate a copy of a Hungarian book on a quilted royal patchwork. Some of this work was unnecessary, and some was born of sheer paranoia, but I was absolutely determined that this time, this time, my research would be correct no matter what.
Fortunately I seem to have succeeded, for I've yet to receive anything but plaudits for "Anomaly or Sole Survivor," and a good thing, too. My life isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it sure beats trying to write these diaries while doing penance for my scholarly sins in a cave surrounded by blind white fish, bewildered bats, and uncounted millions of stalactites, stalagmites, and cave formations that look like Jesus riding a T-rex to the defense of General Custer.
Alas, the same cannot be said about the subject of tonight's madness. This brilliant, erudite, multilingual scholar was one of the lights of his age, a worthy citizen of the Republic of Letters that united Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and even Muslim scholars in the early modern age. He has been called "the last man who knew everything," and had it not been for a book that stormed the very gates of scholarship in a doomed quest to translate the untranslatable, he might well still be counted one of the lights of his age.
The scholar in question was a Jesuit linguist, translator, and polymath named Athanasius Kircher. The book that made him a laughingstock was called Egyptian Oedipus. In it, he did nothing less than attempt to solve one of the most vexing scholarly questions of his age: how to translate the mysterious hieroglyphs that adorned so much Egyptian art, architecture, and obelisks.
And since he wrote in the 1650's, not the early 1800's, he got it completely wrong.
END PART I
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So - have you ever finished a project only to find that you've followed the coyote right off the cliff and now heading toward the valley floor and a big fat puff of dust? Ever had side effects to a medication? Encountered an obelisk? Gather 'round the monitor and share....
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