Race of Scorpions: Flypaper Thoughts

• I began reading the third book in Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series today.
• It is called Race of Scorpions.
• I'm in love.
• I didn't expect to be here this soon.
• My previous experience of Dunnett is slow bewitchment.
  
• I love (love love love) Dunnett's other series, the Lymond Chronicles.
• Francis Crawford of Lymond: so beautiful, so intelligent, so tortured.
• So (so so so SO) melodramatic. 
• I fell in love slowly over six books.
  
• Nicholas vander Poele: also beautiful, also intelligent, also tortured.
  
• Not yet as melodramatic. 
• Not yet.
• But I am already enchanted.
  
• The book opens with Nicholas grieving.
• The writing is so good it is unholy. 
• Aside from the gut-wrenching depiction of grief, there are the character descriptions.
  
• Meet, for instance, Anselm Adorne.
• 'He was now thirty-seven and a man of great comeliness, with a slender build which could yet carry off prizes at shooting and jousting; a clear brain which increased his wealth and brought him the confidence of the city, and an easy manner which made him both a good drinking companion and the happily married father of an increasing number of small children.'
• [Aside: they don't make 'em like they used to.]
• Scene change, from Nicholas, coping with grief and politics, to his adversaries in Anjou.
• They are having Witty Repartee At Court.
  
• Exhibit A: Jordan de Ribérac, father of Simon, to René, Duke of Anjou, about Simon: 'He has yet to master trade, monseigneur. I feel it will take a decade or two before he can successfully contemplate strategy.'
• BURN.
• Yes, Jordan is talking about his son.
• No, he is not a nice man.
•  Exhibit B: Jordan de Ribérac, catching the reader and René up on the events of books one and two:
• 'Nicholas vander Poele, he calls himself. An unfortunate youth with a talent for numbers. He married his employer, killed all his relatives, and made a great deal of money bringing Venetians and gold back from Trebizond.'
• Jordan ain't wrong.
  
• I might need to take back what I said about Nicholas and melodrama.
  
• Exhibit C: One page later, René and Jordan have moved on to pondering whether Simon should join the duke's side of the war over Naples:
  
• R: 'So I can hope for no practical help from that noble jouster, your son?' 
• J: 'From Simon? Whatever side he joined, it would lose.'
• Again: BURN.
• I hate Jordan from Multiple Events of Book One (which I shall not spoil) but he's also made me shout-cackle twice in three pages and I don't know what To Do.
  
• René of Anjou, on the other hand, is my New Favourite. 
• I actually know the author of a book about René of Anjou.
  
• Based on my limited knowledge of the history, Dunnett has René dead to rights.
• I demand more René of Anjou.
• Scene change: Nicholas, shit-stirring, near Naples.
  
• Tobias Beneventi, physician, one of Nicholas' (understandably wary) business partners, inquiring just what exactly he is up to: 'So what's the attraction? You enjoyed fighting the Turks and want more of it? Or are you passing, taper in hand, reactivating all your favourite fireworks?' 
• Melodrama ahoy!
  
• That's only the first sixty pages, friends.
• I'm in love.
• I'm in love.
  

My Favourite Print

The last time I was home for Christmas, my sister gave me the print which hangs above my desk.

Done is better than perfect.

The root of most procrastination--certainly mine--is wanting to do something perfectly but despairing that I will meet that standard. My sign reminds me not to take myself or my work too seriously, and helps me encourage myself to keep going and finish projects I care about.

Character Voices

In honour of International Dorothy Dunnett Day, please enjoy this wonderful interview with David Monteath, the narrator of the Lymond Chronicles audiobook.

 

The full interview might only be for the truly dedicated, but fellow Dunnett fans should skip to 27:10 to hear Monteath demonstrate the contrasting voices of the hero Frances Crawford and his adversary Graham Reid Malett; if you are new to the books, skip to 37:35 to hear readings from the first and last books in the series, Game of Kings and Checkmate.

I also recommend a 1982 interview that Dunnett did on the Radio Four programme Desert Island Disks--she had fabulous taste in classical music, and a delightful way of speaking about her work. (If you are not in the UK, and the above link does not work typing 'Dorothy Dunnett' into Apple Podcasts, should bring up the recording). 

To absent friends. Enjoy!

Dorothy Dunnett's Papers

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across the National Library of Scotland's handlist of the contents of the historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett's personal and literary papers. To tell the truth, I was looking for House of Niccolo fanfiction, and somehow ended up with a 66-page archival catalogue.

A happy accident, because the handlist makes for fascinating reading, especially the sections to do with her historical novels. I can promise you that there are professional historians who make less organised research notes. What particularly fascinates me is the chronologies--both of historical events, and of events in the novel. When I did my MPhil, my supervisor encouraged me to make a chronology as part of my research on Merovingian letter writing. I had never been asked to do so before and abandoned mine before it got very far; but it is a method of organising research notes which I would like to try for future projects. In novels which are as intricately plotted as Dunnett's keeping track of who was where, when seems like it would be an absolute necessity; and I love the idea of getting a peek behind the scenes.

Then there are the character biographies! Especially for the House of Niccolo series, seems to have created a biography of each major character. These character studies include a file I really want to see:

197. Notebook entitled “Sweet Scorpian” with notes on Nicholas and reaction of others.

Three quarters of the way through Spring of the Ram, one of the things I am loving is how Nicholas' character is revealed by the reactions of his fellow merchants--and how, like the blind men and the elephant, each of them has a piece of the truth and thinks it represents the whole.

Even just reading the handlist is an amazing peek behind the scenes of her writing--hopefully one day I'll have the chance to look at some of the files and learn from them.

Making the Most of Reading Week

Next week is Reading Week at my university, and in my week without classes I intend to read.

The following books are on the list.

"John Rylands Library" by BinaryApe is licensed under CC BY 2.0

1) The Spring of the Ram by Dorothy Dunnett. Trebizond is rapidly becoming one of my favourite Dunnett settings, and I'm now determined to find a book on its history, or a podcast, or something to learn more about it. Plus, the development of the character of the hero of the series, Nicholas, is fascinating. I still can't get over the fact that Nicholas is the same age or younger than some of my students.

2) Race of Scorpions by Dorothy Dunnett. Because I have to find out what happens next to Nicholas and the men he ringleads.

3) King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett. Yes, I like Dorothy Dunnett a lot. King Hereafter, a novel about the historical Macbeth, is one of those rare books with which I've fallen so completely in love that I am reading it very slowly so that it doesn't end.

4) Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature by Kathryn Hume; I am starting a Fun Project, which is an article about time-travel as a method of researching the Middle Ages. Yes, there are enough science fiction novels with this theme that I could (probably) manage a book, but I'll start with an article. I'm at the beginning of my literature search for relevant stuff on The Medieval and Science Fiction, but I liked Hume's article on medieval romance and science fiction a lot, so this seems like a good place to start.

5) Theodora by Stella Duffy. Having glanced through this, I'm a little wary (inspired by trying to read Procopius sideways, I have Very Specific Ideas about Theodora), but I also don't discover new historical novels about late antiquity every day so I'm giving this a go.

6) The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel. Hopefully some helpful tips and tricks to help me put things off a bit less.

7) Baptism of Fire by Andrzej Sapkowski. I was inspired to start reading the Witcher after watching the Netflix series, which I greatly enjoyed. It's not always the most beautiful prose--I suspect a lot is being lost in tone and humour from the original Polish--but there's something incredibly original and compelling about the way that the book takes stereotypes of high fantasy and twists them into new shapes. 

Do you have books you would recommend? What are you reading these days?

How I Do History

One of my favourite history publications is Contingent Magazine, an online magazine written by historians for public audiences. Articles range from longer features about particular historical topics, to source-focused columns, to short essays about how historians do their work. I love that the magazine celebrates the process of learning about the past and invites others in to experience it. The writers typically have advanced degrees in history--usually PhDs--but do not have full-time, permanent academic jobs; the magazine was founded by and takes its name from the term 'contingent faculty', the people who make up an increasing number of historians working at universities today. 

My favourite part of the magazine is its column, How I Do History, which contains interviews with scholars outside the traditional academy about their jobs and how being a historian factors in. Seeing the range of jobs other historians do has been huge source of inspiration for me and I urge you to check out some of their columns, and share them with others. As it happens, I am currently working on a How I Do History column, and provided that it is accepted, will be coming to a screen near you with a bit more about how I do what I do, and why, and how being a librarian factors in.

"Library warning poster" by Phil Bradley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The hardest question for me to answer has been

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work? 

So far my answer is:

Historians are storytellers, but people sometimes seem to think we are fact-checkers or trivia buffs. Knowing facts and dates is important of course, especially the latter, since it helps a historian understand a sequence of events in order. But timeline tells a pretty limited story and an isolated fact has little meaning without context. Particularly for the Middle Ages, where our supply of facts and dates is more limited than for historians who study other periods, I wish more people knew about the detective side of our work—with limited information, we put together a fragmentary puzzle to tell stories of how people lived and why they made the choices that they did. Sometimes we develop new tools for how we put those pieces together, and sometimes we get new pieces when librarians and scholars find unknown manuscripts, or archaeologists dig up something new, but we are always, always coming up against the limits of what we know and what we can know.

It's my favorite thing about studying the period.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the answer--for one thing, I think that most people actually work under the misconception that we have fewer medieval sources than is actually the case; but more importantly, popular narratives about the Middle Ages: chivalry was a guide to behaviour, knights in shining armor rode around saving fair maidens, the Church told everyone what to do, nobody bathed, Everyone Was White, say more about modern culture than they do about what the Middle Ages were really like.

Science fiction, one of my other favourite things, strikes me as similar to this sort of medievalism--reflecting similar prejudices, oppression, and blind spots--but also being notoriously inaccurate. It seems to be truism in scholarship about science fiction that its writers almost never succeed in accurately predicting the future but are usually quite good at reflecting their own contemporary anxieties. The Middle Ages, for some reason, seems to inspire a similar approach. 

To put what I said above differently, it's the combination of brain-bending weirdness and scope for the imagination which keeps me coming back. 

One Train May Hide Another

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,

As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.

That is, if you are waiting to cross

The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at

Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read

Wait until you have read the next line—

Then it is safe to go on reading.

In a family one sister may conceal another,

So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view

Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.

One father or one brother may hide the man,

If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.

So always standing in front of something the other

As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.

One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide

The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another

On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;

One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica

     one tomb

May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide

     another,

One small complaint may hide a great one.

One injustice may hide another—one colonial may hide another,

One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath

    may hide another bath

As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.

One idea may hide another: Life is simple

Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein

One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory

One invention may hide another invention,

One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.

One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting

By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,

These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin

May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The

     obstetrician

Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but

One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.

A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides

Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in

A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag

Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.

In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by

     the mother's

And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker

May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee

Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love or

     the same love

As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers

The better love fingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"

Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"

And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the

     Garden of Eden

Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.

Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.

When you come to something, stop to let it pass

So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,

Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory

Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,

The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading A

     Sentimental Journey look around

When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see

If it is standing there, it should be, stronger

And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore

May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk

May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and

One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs

Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the

     foot of a tree

With one and when you get up to leave there is another

Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,

One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man

May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.

You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be

     important

To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Kenneth Koch, "One Train May Hide Another" reprinted in The Zoo of the New, ed. Nick Laird and Don Paterson (London, 2017), p. 261-3. Poetry foundation

 

One of my favourite poems I have found this year. I love how it builds from the title, through its marvelous chain of ideas, to the final line.