The Foppish Casual Dance of Atoms

He said Bruno was a terrible heretic.  I said he was terribly burned.

–Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist

This much I knew about Giordano Bruno even before Stephen Dedalus told me, and before I had seen the statue of him that stands where the stake once stood, in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome.  I knew that he advocated Copernicus’ theory of the heliocentric solar system, which was bad enough, but I didn’t realize what a truly terrible heretic he was until I read Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve.

The Swerve traces the viral influence of the Epicurean poet Lucretius on Western culture after his rediscovery in 1417, and Bruno was clearly infected.  A friend described him as an Epicurean in the vulgar sense, meaning a fun guy to have dinner with, , but he was a follower of Lucrettius in much more threatening ways: not only was the Earth not the center of the universe, there was no center; any star in the sky might be a sun with equally important planets and life forms revolving around it.  And humans, in particular, were not the reason for the world to exist, but creatures like all others, made of the same atoms.  God did not go around planning our lives in infinite detail, counting (as Jesus would say) the hairs on our heads.

Given this précis, I’m sure you’ll agree that he deserved to be turned over to the Holy Office (the Inquisition to its friends), to have a stake driven through his tongue to stop his insane and destructive filth, to be burned to death, and to have his ashes crumbled and scattered lest anyone try to save a relic.  But a summary of opinions doesn’t give the flavor of his cheeky blasphemy.  Here is a passage from something with the catchy title The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast—Mercury, Jove’s assistant, is explaining what a hassle it is to arrange a special Providence for every sparrow that falls, etc., even for one afternoon in a sleepy village (Bruno’s hometown of Nola in Campania):

That today at noon two of the melons in Father Franzino’s melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won’t be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. Jove requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of the Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that several shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox two hundred and fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio’s foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim’s progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random.

Laurenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all….

That the skirt Mastro Danese is cutting on his board shall come out crooked. That twelve bedbugs shall leave the slats of Constantino’s bed and head toward the pillow: seven large ones, four small, and one middle-sized, and as for the one who shall survive until this evening’s candlelight, we’ll see to it. That fifteen minutes thereafter, because of the movement of her tongue, which she has passed over her palate four times, the old lady of Fiurulo shall lose the third right molar in her lower jaw, and it shall fall without blood and without pain, because that molar has been loose for seventeen months. That Ambrogio on the one hundred twelfth thrust shall finally have driven home his business with his wife, but shall not impregnate her this time, but rather another, using the sperm into which the cooked leek that he has just eaten with millet and wine sauce shall have been converted….

 

As you see, I’ve actually shortened it a bit, but I hope this is enough to give an idea of how Bruno provides both a devastating reductio ad absurdumof divine intervention in our lives and a psychedelically vivid evocation of the material world.    I am especially fond of the different fates of the dung beetles—how that must have irked the believers—but Bruno’s exuberant attachment to the world of human and other animal bodies is just as important.  James Joyce must have been gobsmacked when he ran across this, and you can see in these villagers the distant cousins of Leopold and Molly Bloom.

Incidentally, I briefly mentioned Bruno’s belief that all things in on Earth and in the sky are made of atoms in different shapes and combinations, a theory he picked up from Lucretius (who got it from Democritus via Epicurus).  This was one of his most terrible heresies, and Greenblatt explains why.  The Council of Trent, as part of its general campaign of medieval nostalgia, had adopted as dogma a neat trick of Thomas Aquinas, in which he used the Aristotelian distinction between the substance of a thing and its accidence to reconcile the paradox of transubstantiation.  The idea is that the host becomes the body of Christ in substance even while it retains accidental properties of a wafer.  But in the atomic theory, the sensory properties of a thing are a product of the kind and arrangement of the atoms it is made out of, so the obvious fact that the host is a wafer means that it really is a wafer.  Therefore the atomic theory is wrong, and we have to fry anyone who mentions it.  Inneresting, as we say in Minnesota.

Here at least the fanatics of Counter-Reformation could find common cause with the fanatics of Reformation.  In the 1600s, the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson undertook the arduous task of translating ‘lunatic Lucretius,’ and came away despising not only his general impiety but especially his embrace of the “foppish casual dance of atoms.”  My guess is that, as often happens, she scorns the dance because she was not invited.

Of the Papal, by the Papal, for the Papal

“Tell me, Martin,” he said. “Weren’t some of the popes — of course, not our present man, or his predecessor, but some of the old popes — not exactly … you know… up to the knocker?”
There was a silence. Mr. Cunningham said
“O, of course, there were some bad lots… But the astonishing thing is this. Not one of them, not the biggest drunkard, not the most… out-and-out ruffian, not one of them ever preached ex cathedra a word of false doctrine. Now isn’t that an astonishing thing?”
“That is,” said Mr. Kernan.
               –James Joyce, “Grace”

 

Pope Alexander VI has gotten some bad press over the years; if the name doesn’t ring a bell (and the task of keeping the popes straight makes the welter of English Henrys and Edwards look like child’s play), then his maiden name, Borgia, might be more familiar.  But John Julius Norwich, in Absolute Monarchs (his history of the Papacy) asks us to take a more balanced view:

To survive with its independence intact, [the Papacy] desperately needed adequate finance, firm administration, and astute diplomacy, and these Alexander was able to provide in full measure, however questionable his means of doing so.  He proved it in only the second year of his pontificate, when he persuaded Charles VIII to leave Rome, thus saving himself and his successors from being nothing more than satraps of the French.  For this alone, he deserves the gratitude of posterity.  The fact that he has not received it is due largely to his private life….

 

Norwich himself gives a lively account of Al6’s ‘questionable’ tactics.  He raised to industrial efficiency the practice of selling indulgences (remission of sins for a fee) and offices, from bishoprics to cardinals’ red hats; when he ran out of offices to sell, he made up new ones, stuffing the Curia with important-sounding officials who had no actual job.  It would be unfair to suggest that he would have betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver—only a rube like Judas would let a valuable item like JC go so cheap.

He did give out some goodies for free…to his children, especially his favorite son Cesare (well, Giovanni was his favorite until one day he was dredged out of the Tiber with his throat cut—it seems the Borgias weren’t the only ones in town who knew how to play rough).  Cesare and Al  turned the various communities of central Italy known as the Papal States into a Borgia family empire by murdering their current rulers and confiscating their property.

His Holiness’ private life was also touchingly centered on his kids, who were more numerous than is really suitable for a Catholic priest.  For example, an entry in the diary of Cesare’s party planner records an evening attended by the whole fam, where first prostitutes danced with the servants, then chestnuts were spread on the floor and the girls had to crawl around naked and pick them up, and finally prizes were awarded to the guests who could screw the most prostitutes.  The lifestyle helps explain why Al6 needed to be such a good fundraiser.  Somehow, given the nature of Al’s position, it seems odd to say that these things are just his private life, as who should say, “Reb saunders was a great Orthodox rabbi; he loved to spend his Saturdays munching pork rinds and bowing before the statue of Ba’al in the basement.”

This, then, is what we’re supposed to be grateful for: that Al6 helped turn the Vatican into a smoothly-running Death Star of exploitation, and ensured that its profits would flow, not to Frenchmen, but to the Catalan Borgias and to warring Italian clans such as the Barberini, Chigi, and Pamphilj.  I confess that I am not feeling it.

Surely many readers of Norwich’s colorful, if inevitably rather repetitive, account ask themselves whether the Papacy is a good idea.  But the author, despite claiming to be an agnostic, never questions his belief that a good Pope is a powerful Pope.  After detailing centuries of bigotry and abuse, he remains shocked at modern anti-clericalism, claiming that the resentful French and Italians “should know better.”  He also seems puzzled by the idea of the separation of church and state, which he recognizes as an American obsession.  What is going on here?  Partly, I think, it is an upper-crustian’s rock-solid faith that those who have power and wealth deserve to have more, and partly it is the storyteller’s tendency to identify with his subject.  Someone writing a history of Pepsico would presumably take it for granted that corporate success and profit are a good thing.

Even viewed in this corporate light, Al6 is a very problematic figure.  He fended off a takeover bid, to be sure, and generated short-term windfalls for top management, but devoted little or no effort to ensuring that customers got a quality product, and his disrespect for the company’s core values did serious and lasting damage to the Catholic brand.  Perhaps he and the other Renaissance Popes thought along the lines of the famous SNL commercial: “We’re the phone company.  We don’t care; we don’t have to.”  If so, they were wrong.  It was only a few years after Alexander’s death that Luther nailed his theses to the wall, starting that ultimately took a giant bite out of the Church’s market share.  The Church’s response, introducing the new Tridentine product now with Baroque flavor crystals, revived enthusiasm among its core customer base but only served to alienate those who were tempted by the unglamorous but sensible Protestant competition.

Norwich ends his book with the assertion that if St. Peter were to return, he would be proud of the institution that exists today.I’m not sure that he would recognize it as having anything to do with the underground movement he belonged to.  Actually, I think his most salient reactions would be, first, shock that Jesus hasn’t returned yet, and second, dismay that Berlusconi is still in power.

Squalor Victoria: the self-indulgent genius of Charles Dickens

The great thing about re-reading Dickens, as I recently found when I returned to Bleak House, is that you mostly know which parts you should skip.  There is, after all, much to enjoy—he creates a fabulously dense atmosphere, for one thing.  In this case, the fog and smog and mud of London are a macrocosm of the futile, constipated quicksand of the Chancery court; the lawyers even address the Lord Chancellor as “M’lud.”
The legal system, like London, is a machine for producing useless filth.  The refuse of Chancery ends up in the warehouse of Mr Krook, the rag-and-bottle man who collects everything and never sells anything.    Krook himself spontaneously  combusts, generating a nasty oily substance that coats the walls and ceiling and even permeates the air (we first encounter this when his lodger, Tony Jobling aka Mr Weevil, notices that his candle is sputtering and seems to be surrounded by a cabbage-like halo.
Mr Krook has, or had, another lodger, Miss Flite, herself a party in a Chancery suit who has confused the judgment she is waiting for with the Judgment described in Revelations.  Pending such judgment, she keeps birds (larks, linnets, and goldfinches, to be precise), and of course we learn their names:
"Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin,
Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags,
Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. 
I especially love Gammon and Spinach.  Such bizarreries draw part of their charm, as do the gadgets of steampunk, from the drab and stodgy Victorian background.  Rigid linguistic etiquette serves as a straight man for characters who violate it, as when a lady, infuriated by the preening of Mr Turveydrop (an aging fop who maintains his rock-and-roll lifestyle on the back of his son’s drudgery), becomes more and more worked up and finally boils over with “Oh, I could bite you!”  The irascible invalid Mr Smallweed, irritated at the unsatisfactory progress of an interview in a law office, shouts out “Brimstone beast!” and then, in an effort at repair, turns to his granddaughter and explains, “I was thinking of your dear grandmother.”
Now that I’ve given the Dickens his due, though….Virginia Woolf’s comment that Middlemarch is one of the few English books written for grown-up people always makes me think of Dickens as the obvious contrast.  I do not begrudge Chuck his absurdly contrived coincidences; of course we know that Esther will learn the truth about her parentage and will just happen to run into her mother, from whom she was separated at birth.  But  he stage-manages his emotional scenes with the artistry and tact of a porn director.  To understand this one, it is probably helpful to know that Esther’s looks have been ruined by the ravaging scars of smallpox:

I cannot tell in any words what the state of my mind was when I saw in her hand my handkerchief with which I had covered the dead baby.

I looked at her, but I could not see her, I could not hear her, I could not draw my breath. The beating of my heart was so violent and wild that I felt as if my life were breaking from me. But when she caught me to her breast, kissed me, wept over me, compassionated me, and called me back to myself; when she fell down on her knees and cried to me, “Oh, my child, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy mother! Oh, try to forgive me!”—when I saw her at my feet on the bare earth in her great agony of mind, I felt, through all my tumult of emotion, a burst of gratitude to the providence of God that I was so changed as that I never could disgrace her by any trace of likeness, as that nobody could ever now look at me and look at her and remotely think of any near tie between us.

I raised my mother up, praying and beseeching her not to stoop before me in such affliction and humiliation. I did so in broken, incoherent words, for besides the trouble I was in, it frightened me to see her at MY feet. I told her—or I tried to tell her—that if it were for me, her child, under any circumstances to take upon me to forgive her, I did it, and had done it, many, many years. I told her that my heart overflowed with love for her, that it was natural love which nothing in the past had changed or could change. That it was not for me, then resting for the first time on my mother’s bosom, to take her to account for having given me life, but that my duty was to bless her and receive her, though the whole world turned from her, and that I only asked her leave to do it.

It goes on for quite a while in a similar vein, but you get the idea.  Oscar Wilde famously said that one must have a heart of ston to read of the death of Little Nell without laughter, and I applaud the sentiment, though my own reaction is not so much mirth as embarrassment that the author has let himself go in such an obvious way.
In his pursuit of the tear-jerking money shot, Mr D is willing to sacrifice not only taste but also psychology and ethics.  Can he really be so naïve as to think that a person can be overwhelmed with “natural love” for someone they’ve never met?  And her first thought is to be extra super grateful to God for giving her the pox?   This is a quibble, though, compared to his characteristic handling of Esther’s marriage.
Esther is engaged to her benefactor, the much older Mr Jarndyce, a saintly figure who is supposed to strike us as adorable but is actually really annoying.  He doesn’t seem to be attracted to her, even before the smallpox, which is just weird, but whatever, he decides at some point that she’s really in love with the rather wooden Dr Woodcourt, who is certainly in love with her.  Does he talk to her about it?  No, of course not, he arranges a wedding date with her, has her make all the plans and pick out her wardrobe and stuff, then tells her he’s bought a house for Woodcourt and will she come look at it.  She dutifully appears, notices that the house seems to be decorated in her taste, and now Jarndyce reveals what’s behind door #2.  He’s not going to marry her at all, he’s arranged for her to marry Woodcourt.  Har har, what a lovely surprise.  Me, I would kick him in the shins and call him a manipulative bastard at this point, but of course Esther just melts with gratitude.
To be fair, this whole thing isn’t actually Mr. J’s fault—he is tiresome, always going on about the east wind, but he isn’t the kind of power-tripping asshole who would pull this stunt.  He is a mere puppet, with Mr. Dickens’ hand up his ass, and must do whatever milks the maximum melodrama out of the situation.  I won’t bore you with more examples, but Dickens does this all the time, not only wringing extra emotion out of contrived set pieces, which would be enough of a sin for a serious writer, but making his characters do his dirty work when he can’t invent the means himself.  For a man who otherwise appeared to harbor such affection for his creations, this is a sad bit of double-dealing.
OK, I obviously didn’t manage to fast-forward over all the parts that I should have skipped, but I was able at least to avoid throwing my reader against the wall.  Perhaps the third reading is the charm.

If you love someone, set them free

In his American Nations, Colin Woodard sets out to debunk the idea that Americans used to agree on a fundamental set of values and that we live in an age of degenerate disunion.  He is right to point out that different groups of Americans have always held different beliefs and pursued them by different means, though he goes rather far when he divides modern America into exactly 11 distinct “nations,.”  When he likens the difference between Minnesotans and Iowans (citizens of Yankeedom and Midlands, respectively) to that between Armenians and Turks in Turkey or between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq…well, he’s gonna lose some people there.

Woodard’s thesis is that today’s ideological divisions are directly traceable to the character of the early (European) settlers in the various regions.  Thus he begins with a survey of European colonization in North America; this is mostly well-enough done, though you might do better to read Alan Taylor’s American Colonies (Woodard sometimes sounds like the Reader’s Digest version of Taylor).  One place where he diverges wildly from Taylor, however, is in his treatment of the different concepts of freedom in the North and South.

The patricians of Virginia, in this account, saw themselves as heirs to the libertas of ancient Rome, which was basically the freedom of slave-owning aristocrats to boss it over everyone else.  I think Woody hits some pylons here, especially when he throws Athens in as if it were identical to Rome, but I guess it’s close enough for government work.  Now we come to the northern alternative to libertas:

This was a fundamentally different notion from the Germanic concept of Freiheit, or freedom, which informed the political thought of Yankeedom and the Midlands…..

For the Norse, Anglo-Saxons, Dutch, and other Germanic tribes of Northern Europe, freedom was a birthright of free peoples, which they considered themselves to be.  Individuals might have differences in status and wealth, but all were literally born free, all were equal before the law, and all had come into the world possessing rights that had to be mutually respected on threat of banishment….It was this tradition that the Puritans carried to Yankeedom.

As George Takkei would say, “Oh, my!”  This paragraph is not merely a turkey but a veritable turducken of wrongness, with one nasty layer stuffed inside another. 

Let us begin with the pseudo-learned invocation of the modern German word Freiheit, which I consider to be the argument’s drumstick. Freiheitisn’t any more meaningful, and certainly not any more “Germanic,” than plain old freedom, but its use gives us a clue about where Woodard is getting his material.  Nineteenth-century Germany was the center of a movement to create a home-grown substitute for the classical studies around which intellectual life had revolved.  Techniques of study once reserved for the Bible and Greek and Roman authors were applied to Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied, and scholars combed Tacitus’ Germania and early medieval law codes in search of a common Germanic cultural and political heritage.  This project picked up adherents in England and, as I found out from Garry Wills’ biography of Henry Adams, also had influential admirers in America.  My guess is that you won’t find many German books extolling the virtues of old-time Germanic Freiheit published after the spring of 1945, and it is disconcerting to find one in 21^st-century America.

You might wonder whether early Germanic tribes or post-Romantic cultural nationalism have anything at all to do with the Puritans, and you would not be alone, but let’s leave that aside.  What about that egalitarian Germanic utopia?  Our first guide to Germanic culture is Tacitus, in the 1^st century CE, and he repeatedly mentions the role of slaves.  For example, he says that Germani will sell themselves into slavery to pay off gambling debts.  Tacitus gives the overall impression of a society  that is not quite as rigidly stratified as his own, but then few cultures consisting of modest-sized tribes can ever have been as stratified as the worldwide engine of exploitation that was Imperial Rome.

Another culture mentioned by Woodard, that of the Norse Vikings, really was a slaving empire.  They would accept inanimate plunder, and would even trade if the places they visited turned out to be well defended, but their bread and butter was human chattel.  I’m pretty sure we get the word ‘thrall’ from Old Norse, and it’s no accident.

So the Germanic Freiheit  thing is total Quatsch, but maybe we can salvage the Anglo-Saxons?  Later English people really did claim that their rights were an inheritance from before the Conquest; to be sure, the most plausible of these claims were, as in Magna Carta, not about universal liberty at all, but about the rights of nobles to wield power vis-à-vis the king (the Anglo-Saxon kings often ruled in conjunction with a council of witan, or wise guys).  As for everybody being equal before the law, well….when the Venerable Bede tells the story of Pope Gregory seeing English slaves in Rome, he shows no sense of indignation, or even surprise that the Pope should spend his day off at the slave market, but only pride that he thought the English slaves were cute.

It’s been a while since I read the Anglo-Saxon law codes, but my recollection is that they are full of the distinction between earls and churls.  A good example is the sliding scale of wergild amounts.  Wergild is blood-money, compensation paid to the family of a person you have killed (if this sounds weird, consider that it replaces the institution of blood-feud).  In a typical code, the wergild for an ordinary freeman is 200 shillings, for an earl 1200, for a king 30,000, for a slave nothing (well, you’d have to pay something, but it doesn’t make the wergild chart because it’s a property crime).  Several codes also include similar scales for oaths; that is, the testimony of an earl was worth so-and-so many times that of a mere free man, and the testimony of a woman still less.  Now, these codes were probably not much used in day-to-day dispute resolution, but they present what people thought of as ideal justice.

The word ‘free’ comes from a root meaning something like ‘love,’ the same root as ‘friend’ and the German word for peace (also ‘sapphire,’ btw).  The idea must have been that we think a person is naturally free if they are among our loved ones, our friends, those with whom we are at peace.  Anyone else is outside the pale. This would have been perfectly understandable to the Romans who enslaved conquered peoples, to the  West Africans who did likewise, or to the Americans who bought slaves from the West Africans and worked them to death on plantations.  For inalienable rights and universal freedom, we need to look somewhere else.

 

 PS: Another interesting aspect of Woodard’s book is that none of his 11 nations has any special place for African-Americans.  I am no scholar of these matters, but I would have thought that black Americans had as distinctive an identity as, say, Midlanders or Left Coasters.

International Man of Mystery Dance

One of my nephews was a big fan of Casino Royale;  early in his 23^rd or so viewing, he turned to my niece and said, “This is the part where the cars and the clothes make me want to cry.”  There is, however, also an anti-Bond tradition of English international thrillers, less glamorous and more appealing, exemplified by Graham Greene’s ‘entertainments’ of the ‘30s and ‘40s—if you’ve read or seen The Third Man, Ministry of Fear, or The Confidential Agent, you will know what I’m talking about.  I recently read two novels by Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Demetrios and Journey into Fear, which evoke a similar world where foreigners don’t all speak English, where the lighting may be poor and the politics ominous but the prose is bright and polished.

A world, also, without Bond girls.  Greene may include a bit of (usually wholesome) romance, while Ambler’s women are mostly engaged in some form of prostitution (to his credit, Ambler doesn’t glamorize or sentimentalize this industry).  Latimer in A Coffin for Demetrios seems to belong to the “man delights not me, no nor woman neither” school.  The hero of Journey into Fear has a wife (not shown) who is  said to be beautiful but of whom he thinks as though she were his accountant or tailor.  Makes you wonder about the author.

Which brings us to his autobiography, Here Lies.  This is a cool title, and the I enjoyed the book probably more than the novels.  This may be in part because I have a soft spot for the English and tend to find them adorable when they’re not downright odious (a big reservation), but I’ll try to give you a sense of what I found so appealing..  Here is Grandpa Ambler:

His lifelong weaknesses were chronic asthma, a sweet tooth that favored Turkish Delight, and a recurring belief that the reams of commemorative doggerel he wrote would one day become publishable.

That’s a pro at work, starting out with a the brief and humdrum, establishing a pattern with the slightly more distinctive second term, and then rolling out the long and surprising punch line.  His other grandfather, a carpenter, smelled “of peppermint drops and mahogany dust.”

Eric’s sex education was handled by his Uncle Frank, only a few years older than he was:

[He] supplied me with the essential stuff and nonsense for years of bad dreams by telling me in secret what he had been able to find out about the mechanics of sex and childbirth from the other boys in his school playground.”

Things start to make sense.   Much later, Uncle Frank prompts a bit of classic deadpan.  We are told that he has come to visit, seemingly recovered from his wartime trauma (German labor camp), now prosperous in a new suit and silk shirt, working in the scrap-metal industry.  Ambler concludes this innocuous paragraph:  “It must have been at about that time, I think, that he began his remarkably long career as an embezzler. “

One gets the impression that nearly all English people of the early 20^th century were semipro musical-theater performers, and the Ambler parents were no exception.    Their troupe played a lot of gigs for wounded soldiers during WWI, and though “Reg and Amy Ambler” were quite good, little Eric was fascinated to hear that another singer in the group had gotten “the bird”:

Her air of refined condescension had always seemed to me to invite dislike and abuse.  If she had sung off-key too, that would have sealed her fate.
“What did they shout at her?”
“Oh, things like ‘Get off!’ and ‘Go home and tell your mother!’  and they blew very loud raspberries in a very rude way with their tongues out.  Now stop talking about it, you little toad.  Don’t be so morbid!”

Eric’s aunts found jobs as stewardesses on shipping lines.  Once on leave  Auntie Sis  took little Eric to a picture theatre.  “”It was very crowded, and we had to sit at the side, very near the front.  For several years, even after I had read Zane Grey, I continued to believe that all cowboys were narrow-shouldered  with elongated faces, and that the chaps they wore were made of narrow strips of plywood.”

One more theatrical tidbit, about a trip with his mother to see Peter Pan in the West End:

I caused a disturbance  by refusing noisily to join  in  with the other kids to save Tinkerbell by saying that I believed in fairies.  “Spoilt the show, the little fiend,” my mother reported over the small whiskeys that evening.  My father laughed.  I left my hiding place behind the stairs and went back to bed.  All was well—no-one now need know that I had believed in Captain Hook  and been frightened by him.”

Eventually, puberty plunged him back into the murky world that Uncle Frank had adumbrated.  Enrolled as an engineering student, Eric used to play hookey by watching trials at the law courts.  One day he saw a suit for breach of promise (!), where a seedy, pasty-faced woman successfully prosecuted her seedy, pasty-faced boarder.

If I had not heard the evidence, I would have found the idea of that drab pair actually succeeding in the act of copulation hopelessly far-fetched.  They were unmarried—that should have been an insuperable obstacle  for such unattractive people.  Yet, awful as they were, with none of the romantic advantages of a Paula Negri aor a Ralph Ince to help them, they had somehow managed to do it, and to go on doing it, not just once, but several times.  It made you think.  Had I perhaps been overestimating the difficulties, or was lust as blind and all-conquering as love was said to be?  If it was, then there was hope for fiends and horrors everywhere; there was hope for me.

His first job  required him to learn the various tasks performed in a large factory; this was interesting enough, but not without attendant risks:

The only departments of the Ponder’s End works that I feared were the ones in which there were lots of women working together.

It is kind of Eric to be so frank with us.  The ironic distance with which he is able to treat his younger self probably owes a lot to his having transferred to the wild, bohemian world of a London advertising agency (weirdly this is not a joke).  His arty colleagues taught him about Vorticism and, I suspect, introduced him to seamy nightclubs where the danceuses moonlighted as call-girls.  To judge by the novels, though, any meeting with a woman remained a Journey into Fear.

Holy Roman Emperors, Batman!

Unlike some of us, my sister J had a social life when she was a student, and this source of distraction  sometimes led to unhappy quiz experiences, as when her German prof expected her to write something about Charles the Big (Karl der Grosse).  To her chagrin, she later figured out that this obscure monarch was the man known in English under his Frenchified name, Charlemagne (both versions mean ‘Charles the Great’).

The name Karl/Carl/Charles/Carlo/Carlos/Karol has a twisty history.  The Germanic versions are the originals; they started out not as a name but as a word meaning ‘man,’ ‘guy’ (I believe the German word Kerl still has the sense of ‘regular guy, dude’).  The word then went in two opposite directions—The Old English form, ceorl, came to be contrasted with eorl, ‘nobleman,’ and thus a “churl” (for that is how ceorl was pronounced) was a person of lower class.  And as typically happens, (see villain), a class distinction was turned into a moral one, and to behave churlishly was the opposite of behaving nobly (too bad we don’t have the word earlishly for symmetry).

Meanwhile, the association with the Big Dude Charlemagne sent the same root in the opposite direction.  In various Slavic languages, the name Karol became the word for king (for example, korol’ in Russion, as in the title of Nabokov’s novel Korol’, Dama, Valet, King, Queen, Knave).  This development nicely parallels its female counterpart, in which a root meaning ‘woman,’ cognate with Greek gyne, evolved into the high-class queen and the low-class quean’skank, hussy.’

Of course, the Russians didn’t use korol’ as the title of their own ruler, but instead drew on another personal name.  Tsar, like the German Kaiser, comes from the family name of Julius Caesar.  As a kid, I assumed that Julius was his personal name, as with Julius Erving or Julius Rosenberg, but actually it’s another family name.  The Caesares were a subclan of the Julii, so basically all the guys in a Caesar family portrait would have been named Julius Caesar.  To be sure, Roman men did have a praenomen or personal name for intimate use, so the famous JC was, like his father and grandfather, Gaius Julius Caesar, but there were so few of these that usually a first initial was used:  P for Publius, Q for Quintus, C for Gaius (don’t ask).  Still, you can imagine that Romans did a lot of finger-pointing to specify who they were talking about.

They also used a lot of nicknames, which could become part of a person’s official name and eventually a clan name.  Like many aspects of Roman culture, the nicknames were about what you’d expect from 9-year-olds: Rufus ‘Red,’ Balbus ‘Stammerer,’ Brutus ‘Dummy,’ Strabo ‘Squinty.’  Cicero apparently had an ancestor with a wart or mole that looked like a garbanzo bean (modern Italian ceci).  Some of these were so common that they too could be sources of confusion: Caesar and his great rival Pompey both had close relatives named Squinty, and the group of JC’s assassins included two Dummies.

Bad as the situation was for the men, it was worse for the women, who didn’t have a praenomen.  All the sisters and daughters of all the Julius Caesars were named Julia.  JC’s mistress Servilia married a man from the Junius Brutus clan and gave birth to a son (the M. Junius Brutus who stabbed his mother’s lover) and three daughters, named Junia, Junia, and Junia.  In such cases, when pointing was inconvenient, the daughters were known by ordinals, Prima, Secunda, Tertia (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd).  Apparently, when the sex cooled down between JC and Servilia, she suggested that he take up with #3 daughter.  When JC sold some real estate to Servilia, Cicero joked that she had gotten a great deal because he knocked a Third off the price.  The fact that no-one thought women needed their own name tells you a lot about their status in Roman society.

But as long as we’re talking about Servilia…during the fracas over the Catiline conspiracy, JC’s arch-enemy and world-class prig Cato (who happened to be Servilia’s half-brother—there’s a very Dies Vitarum Nostrarum quality about these people) accused JC of being secretly in correspondence with the conspirators.  When a letter was handed to JC during the debate, Cato saw his chance and, in high dudgeon, demanded that Caesar read the letter aloud.  When JC demurred, Cato became more insistent, until Caesar finally handed him the note and invited him to read it out himself.  Of course, when Cato glanced at it, he saw that it was a love-letter from Servilia, a sort of wax-tablet predecessor of congressional sexting.  Cato threw down the tablet and, in one of the great “Look, a chicken!”  moments of world history accused Caesar of being drunk.

Hating on Same-Sex Marriage: it’s a thankless job, but apparently someone has to do it.

Someone I used to know posted this link on Facebook (I know some people regularly cull their FB friend lists, but I actually do like the person in question, and anyway my friend count is already in the loser range).   The argument, in brief, is that with so many more important things happening, we should not care about marriage equality, because the kind of gay people who want to get married are so bourgie that they don’t deserve to have their rights defended:

http://blackgirldangerous.org/new-blog/2013/3/27/6-things-that-happened-while-yall-were-pre-occupied-with-gay-marriage

 

My first thought is that McKenzie has confused dangerous with crabby..  It may seem puzzling that someone who  claims an intense interest in the rights of queer people should speak with such bitterness and contempt of “so-called marriage equality” (she pretends that she just thinks other issues are more important, but her tone tells a different story).  Youu might be surprised, though, how often one hears similar attitudes; there is  something about ‘gay marriage’ that bugs the hell out of  some of the more radical types.

Of course some people disapprove of marriage, and I can understand not wanting to have your intimate relationships defined and circumscribed by the State. Well, so what?  I disapprove of lots of things, comb-overs and Healthy Choice TV dinners and Frances Mayes, but it is, as they say, a free country.  The real importance of marriage equality has  less to do with marriage than with equality.   Besides being the right thing to do, it brings home to mainstream Americans, the kind of people who, like GW Bush, tend to divide the world into “moms and dads” and “evil-doers,” that millions of gay people want basically the same things they do: to share a home, raise a family, live in security.

And that’s what scares the McKenzies of the world—if you’re heavily invested in being a dangerous Other, then what happens if people stop being scared of you?  What happens when a once-reliable group identity , defining itself against the nasty hegemonic outside culture, begins to blur, when  (some) lesbians start wanting to wear bridal gowns and probably do the two-step at their receptions?

It’s an age-old phenomenon: the greatest threat to the radical purist comes not from oppression but from progress.  One thinks of George Orwell and his disillusionment when he found that the Communists during the Spanish Civil War were more concerned with crushing the rest of the  Left than with fighting the Fascists.  McKenzie is probably right that so-called marriage equality brings us no closer to  our revolutionary transformation into a nation where there is no rape (though really, was anyone ever raped by people who were  on their way to a gay wedding?), where the prisons are full of white people, and the transsexuals of Arizona can pee wherever they want.  FWhile we wait for utopia, though, anything that reduces the ambient level of bigotry is reason enough for the rest of us to take a moment and dance a little happy dance.