Plus ca change

 Whereas so much of the terminology of medieval history and criticism is the invention of the eighteenth century, the terminology of troubadour poetry is wholly contemporary. The worldly, witty, and self-conscious verse was discussed and evaluated by its practitioners and their circles. Poets wrote verses criticizing and satirizing each other and theorizing about their own poetry. Literary controversy developed, with songs exchanged like challenges. Should poetry be clear and accessible, easy to understand, and social in nature (trobar leu), as in the verses of Bernart de Ventadorn and Raimon de Miraval, or should it be personal, allusive, and difficult, making use of colored words with overtones and nuances, like the poetry of Arnaut Daniel (trobar clus)? Macabru boasted that he had written poems he himself could not understand.

- from The Knight in History, 56. 

Name Ideas

Rhinelander Waldo, NYC Police Commissioner in 1911

Chidiock Tichborne, Elizabethan Poet

Barnabe Googe, another Elizabethan Poet

Mountstuart Elphingstone, Victorian colonial viceroy

Tenche Coxe, American colonial writer

Elmo Zumwalt, American admiral 

Hate-Evil Hall, early American quaker

Pringle Stokes, 19th-century British naval officer

America

 America is not a lie; it is a disappointment.

- Samuel Huntington

Before pleasure has a chance

Analysis and understanding heighten appreciation. Sometimes, however, they obtrude: trying to force knowledge before pleasure has a chance. Pointing this out is not sentimental or anti-intellectual; on the contrary, the goal should be to encourage intellectual precision by putting it in a stringent, fitting relation to the actual experience of the poem. Well-meaning teaching can muddle that process by leaving out the experience. 

- Robert Pinsky, from Essential Pleasures, 4. 

Boys can't love

 James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937), the beloved Scottish playwright who created one of literature's iconic characters, Peter Pan, formed an unlikely friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle that survived many years and vast differences between two of the most popular writers of their time. 

Conan Doyle was a sportsman. Fond of skiing, he has been credited with introducing that vigorous activity to Switzerland. An aficianado of pugilism, he was praised for his skills as a boxer and wrote two books with boxing themes: Rodney Stone (1896), which focused on bare-knuckle fighting during the Regency era, and The Croxley Master: A Great Tale of the Prize Ring (1907), about a boxing medical student. Famously, Conan Doyle was asked to referee the racially charged Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries heavyweight championship fight in 1910. Johnson, the new champion, was an arrogant black man, so Jeffries, the old former champion, was called out of retirement in the interest of white supremacy. Conan Doyle declined the offer, stating that it was more likely to foster bigotry than combat it. 

Barrie, on the other hand, stopped growing when he was still quite small (5'3" according to his passport), was extremely introverted, and though he was married, his relationship was apparently uncomssumated. "Boys can't love," he explained to his wife. 

Nonetheless, Barrie and his friends, Jerome K. Jerome, Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, and others, founded a cricket club, called Allahakbarries. Conan Doyle was the only member who could actually play cricket. 

- from Otto Penzler's introduction to J.M Barrie's Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Late Sherlock Holmes", in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories. 

You, then

There were thirty-five students in the class; thirty-six, counting Freddy, who took the last seat in the row by the back wall, behind Susan. There were no windows, and the walls, except for the green blackboard, were covered with cork. The city noises were shut out completely. The students, mostly Latino and blacks, were silent as they watched the teacher write Haiku on the green board with a piece of orange chalk. The teacher, a heavy-set and bearded man in his late forties, did not take roll; he had just waited for silence before writing on the board.

"Haiku," he said, in a well-trained voice, "is a seventeen-syllable poem that the Japanese have been writing for several centuries. I don't speak Japanese, but as I understand haiku, pronounced ha-ee-koo, much of the beauty is lost in the translation from Japanese to English.

"English isn't a good language for rhymes. Three-quarters of the poetry written in English is unrhymed because of the paucity of rhyming words. Unhappily for you Spanish-speaking students, you have so many words ending in vowels, you have the difficulty in reverse.

At any rate, here is a haiku in English."

He wrote on the board:

The Miami sun,
Rising in the Everglades - 
Burger in a bun.

"This haiku," he continued, "which I made up in Johnny Raffa's bar before I came to class, is a truly rotten poem. But I assure you I had no help with it. Basho, the great Japanese poet, if he knew English and if he were still alive, would positively detest it. But he would recognize it as a haiku because it has five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Add them up and you have seventeen syllables, all you need for a haiku, and all of them concentrating on a penetrating idea.

You're probably thinking, those of you who wonder about things like this, why am I talking about Japanese poetry? I'll tell you. I want you to write simple sentences - subject, verb, object. I want you to use concrete words that convey exact meanings.

I know you Spanish-speaking students don't know many Anglo-Saxon words, but that's because you persist in speaking Spanish to one another outside of class instead of practicing English. Except for giving you Fs on your papers, I can't help you much there. But when you write your papers, pore - pore - over your dictionaries for concrete words. When you write in English, force your reader to reach for something."

There was a snicker at the back of the room.

"Basho wrote haikus in the seventeenth century, and they're still being read and talked about in Japan today. There are a couple of hundred haiku magazines in Japan, and every month articles are still being written about Basho's most famous haiku. I'll give you the literal translation instead of a seventeen-syllable translation."

He wrote on the blackboard:

Old pond.
Frog jumps in.
Water sound. 

"There you have it," Mr. Turner said, scratching his beard with the piece of chalk. "Old pond. Frog jumps in. Water sound. What's missing, of course, is the onomatopoeia of the water sound. But the meaning is clear enough. What does it mean?"

He looked around the room but was unsuccessful in catching anyone's eye. The students, with sullen mouths and lowered lids, studied books and papers on their armrest desk tops.

"I can wait," Mr. Turner said. "You know me well enough by now to know that I can wait for a volunteer for about fifteen minutes before my patience runs out. I wish I could wait longer, because while I'm waiting for volunteers I don't have to teach." He folded his arms.

A young man wearing cut-off jeans, a faded blue tank top, and scuffed running shoes without socks, lifted his right hand two inches above his desk top.

"You, then," the teacher said, pointing with his chalk.

"What it means, I think," the student began, "is that there's an old pond of water. This frog, wanting to get into the water, comes along and jumps in. When he plops into the water he makes a sound, like splash."

"Very good! That's about as literal an interpretation as you can get. But if that's all there is to the poem, why would serious young men in Japan write papers about this poem every month in their haiku magazines? But, thank you. At least we have the literal translation out of the way.

Now, let's say that Miami represents the old pond. You, or most of you, anyway, came here from somewhere else. You come to Miami, that is, and you jump into this old pond. We've got a million and a half people here already, so the splash you make isn't going to make a very large sound. Or is it? It surely depends upon the frog. Some of you, I'm afraid, will make a very large splash, and we'll all hear it. Some will make a splash so faint that it won't be heard by your next door neighbor. But at least we're all in the same pond, and - "

There was a knock on the door. Annoyed, Mr. Turner crossed to the door and opened it. Fredy leaned forward and whispered to Susan. "That's some pretty heavy shit he's laying down. D'you know what he's talking about?"

Susan shook her head.

"Us! You, your brother, and me. What's the other word mean he keeps talking about - onomatopoeia?"

"It's the word for the actual sound. Like splash, when the frog jumps in."

"Right! See what I mean?" Freddy's eyes glittered. "You and me, Susan. We're going to make us a big splash in this town."

- from Miami Blues, Charles Willeford

Cher Ami

The Meuse-Argonne campaign would be the war's biggest American battle. ... Early in the battle, Major Charles Whittlesey of the U.S. Seventy-seventh Division and more than five hundred men, trapped in a ravine behind enemy lines, were surrounded by a much larger force of Germans. For two days, the Americans fought off the enemy troops. On the second day, their food ran out. Then they were hit by an American artillery barrage intended for the Germans.

Private Omer Richards had carried into battle a cage holding eight carrier pigeons, birds trained to carry messages between specific locations. Several birds, dispatched with messages asking for help, had been shot down. By now there was just one bird left - a favorite named Cher Ami, French for "Dear Friend." Richards clipped a message to the pigeon's left leg, giving the Americans' location: "We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage on us. For heaven's sake, stop it!"

Cher Ami flew off through a blizzard of enemy bullets and exploding shells. The bird reached his loft, twenty-five miles to the rear, just twenty-five minutes later. He had been shot through the breast and blinded in one eye. But he had delivered the message clipped to his leg, which also had been hit by a bullet and was dangling by a tendon. The shelling was immediately halted.

Nothing else was heard from the beleaguered Americans, who had become known to the world as the Lost Battalion. In an effort to rescue them, two divisions moved out toward the German lines, and as they approached, the Germans withdrew. On October 7, and after a five-day siege, the 194 survivors of the Lost Battalion's 554 men climbed out of their ravine and marched back to the American lines.

Cher Ami lost his shattered leg, but army medics carved a small wooden leg for him. The French awarded the doughty little pigeon their Croix de Guerre medal for bravery under fire. And he was sent to the United States to become an army mascot.

- from The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman

Jury of his peers

"He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist."

- Henry David Thoreau on John Brown

It was a serpent...

Few creatures excite such a mixture of awe, fear, and fascination as snakes. And few are the subject of so many myths and folk beliefs. One of the oldest is that it was a "snake" in the Garden of Eden which was responsible, in John Milton's words, for bringing "death into the world, and all our woe." But there is no reference to a snake in Genesis; it is, rather, a "serpent" that tempted Eve. Serpents, in antiquity, were not necessarily snakes; any creeping thing, especially if venomous or noxious, was called a serpent. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the term was applied to a variety of creatures, including both salamanders and crocodiles. Admittedly, the temptation of Eve by a crocodile does seem to verge on the ridiculous...

- from The Dictionary of Misinformation, Tom Burnam

The heretical sorcerer

Among the pseudepigrapha connected with the apostle Peter, none is more interesting than the apocryphal Acts of Peter, a document that details Peter's various confrontations with the heretical magician Simon Magus. The narrative shows how Peter outperforms the magician by invoking the power of God. Consider the [...] account in which Peter proves the divine authorization of his message by raising a dead tuna fish back to life.

In the ultimate showdown between the heretical sorcerer (Simon Magus) and the man of God (Peter), Simon the magician uses his powers to leap into the air and fly like a bird over the temples and hills of Rome. Not to be outdone, Peter calls upon God to smite Simon in midair; God complies, much to the magician's dismay and demise. Unprepared for a crash landing, he plunges to the earth and breaks his leg in three places. Seeing what has happened, the crowds rush to stone him to death as an evildoer. And so the true apostle of God triumphs over his enemy, the preacher of heresy.

- From The Bible, Bart D. Ehrman

Thousands of Thoughts

"There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes."

- Thackeray

Know your lines

Samuel Goldwyn:

• "Include me out."
• "Let's bring it up to date with some snappy nineteenth-century dialogue."
• "I had a great idea this morning, but I didn't like it."
• "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on."

Alfred Hitchock:

• "There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it."

Spencer Tracy's acting advice:

• "Know your lines and don't hit the furniture."

Nom de guerre

• Kirk Douglas's real name was Issur Danielovitch.
• Samuel Goldwyn, of MGM - Shmuel Gelbfisz.
• Walter Matthau? Walter Matuschanskayasky.
• Edward G. Robinson was Emanual Goldenberg.
• Michael Curtiz was Mihaly Kertesz.
• Peter Lorre was Lazlo Lowenstein.
• Harold Arlen was Hyman Arluck.
• Mel Brook is Melvin Kaminsky.

Daring, villainous and unmerciful.

It was soon after [this] that Thomas Blood, a self-styled colonel, made his extraordinary and almost successful attempt to steal the crown jewels. Blood was a notorious desperado whose grandfather, an English army officer, had settled in Ireland where he had been elected Member of Parliament for Ennis. Thomas was born in Ireland in about 1618 and, through his father's influence, had become a Justice of the Peace at the age of twenty-one. During the Civil War between Parliament and the royalists he had, with characteristic opportunism, fought first on one side, then on the other. Contriving somehow to be on the winning side when the war was over, he was rewarded with confiscated royalist lands. In 1650 Blood married the daughter of a well-to-do Lancashire landowner, and his future seemed happily assured. But at the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 his estates, in turn, were confiscated by the Court of Claims, and embittered and penniless, as he put it himself, he embarked upon the life of an adventurer. It was a life he was never afterward to abandon.

In 1663 Blood was implicated in a daring plot to seize Dublin Castle. After the plot's failure, he escaped from the authorities and roamed about Ireland in a variety of disguises before settling down in Holland and then in England, where he succeeded in passing himself off as a doctor. In 1670 he and some companions made an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap and hold for ransom the Duke of Ormond, the Lord High Steward. But having failed to retrieve his fortunes this way, he conceived an even more daring crime - the theft of the crown jewels.

At that time the crown jewels were kept in a cupboard behind a wired grille in the basement of the Martin Tower. They were in the custody of the Assistant Keeper of the Jewels, Talbot Edwards, an ex-soldier of seventy-six who lived with his wife and daughter on the upper floors of the Martin Tower. Since his meager salary was so often in arrears, Edwards had sought and obtained permission from Gilbert Talbot, Keeper of the Jewels, to show the collection to visitors for a fee.

One day in April 1671 an aged, bearded clergyman in the robes of a doctor of divinity came to the Tower and asked if he and his wife, an equally ancient lady, could see the crown jewels. Granted permission to do so, the couple was conducted to the Martin Tower where the old lady, upon sight of such valuable and mystical regalia, was seized with "a qualm upon her stomach." She prevailed upon Mr. Edwards to fetch her a glass of spirits. This was provided by Mrs. Edwards, who invited the clergyman's wife to her own private apartments where she could lie down and recover her strength upon a bed. The invitation was accepted; and when the lady and her husband departed some time later, they expressed themselves as being "very thankful for this civility."

Wishing to express his thanks in a more generous manner, the clergyman returned to the Tower a few days later with a present of several pairs of white gloves for Mrs. Edwards. These were accepted with delighted gratitude, and the clergyman was asked to call again whenever he felt so inclined.

The next time he did so he made some flattering remarks about Mrs. Edwards's daughter, such a "pretty gentlewoman"; and he mentioned that he had a nephew about her age, a young man with a handsome income of some two or three hundred pounds a year in land. "If your daughter be free," he added, "and you approve of it, I will bring him hither to see her, and we will endeavor to make it a match!"

Delighted by the prospect of so wealthy a son-in-law, Mrs. Edwards asked the clergyman to dinner. He accepted readily, said grace with deep piety, and offered up a prayer for the king and queen and all the royal family. After dinner, Edwards conducted his guest through the Martin Tower, pointing out its most notable antiquities. During the tour the clergyman expressed his admiration of a case of pistols: they were just the very article to serve as a present for a young nobleman of his acquaintance, if Edwards could be persuaded to part with them for a consideration. Edwards readily agreed. And so, having arranged to return to the Tower with his nephew at seven o'clock on the morning on May 9, the clergyman departed.

Dressed once again in his clerical attire, his unprepossessing features disguised as before by a false white beard, Colonel Blood - for, of course, it was he - arrived at the Tower on the ninth. Blood was accompanied by his son, to act the part of the nephew, and by two others, introduced as friends of his who had a strong curiosity to see the crown jewels. All four men carried walking sticks with rapier blades concealed in the shafts, and all had daggers and pistols in their pockets.

His wife was on her way, Blood told Edwards, suggesting that they wait for her arrival before going upstairs to the ladies. In the meantime, perhaps his friends might see the jewels? Edwards was happy to oblige and conducted them downstairs. The young man remained outside; and Miss Edwards, dressed in her best clothes and excitedly looking down upon him from her upstairs window, supposed that he must be the young nephew, her intended bridegroom.

No sooner had Edwards reached the bottom of the steps that led down into the cellar than a cloak was thrown over his head and a gag pushed into his mouth: "a great plug of wood, with a small hole in the middle to take breath at, was tied on with a waxed leather which went round his neck. At the same time they fastened an iron hook to his nose that no sound might pass from him that way."

The conspirators told Edwards that no harm would come to him if he stayed quiet, but the brave old man refused to submit. He struggled to free himself and made as much noise as he could. His assailants gave him a few "unkind knocks" on the head with a wooden mallet until he fell to the ground, where he continued to struggle until one of the men stabbed him in the belly. "There," his attacker said, kneeling down beside his head and listening for the sounds of breathing, "he is dead, I will warrant him."

The three men then set about breaking into the cupboard where the jewels were kept. Blood got out a crown and stamped on it so that it could be more conveniently concealed under his cloak; one of the others picked up an orb and pushed it down his baggy breeches; the third put the Black Prince's ruby into his pocket and began to file a scepter in two.

Just at that moment Edwards's son arrived unexpectedly at the door of the Martin Tower. He had been abroad in the army for several years and was now on leave. Blood's son attempted to delay the young solider at the door, but since this was his family's home he could not reasonably be prevented from entering it and going upstairs to see his mother and sister. As soon as he was out of sight, young Blood rushed down to warn his father what had happened.

The colonel and his accomplices emerges from the Martin Tower with the pieces of the regalia they had so far managed to steal from the cupboard hidden under their clothes. Walking as quickly as they dared,  but not running for fear of arousing suspicion, they passed by the White Tower, then went through the gateway of the Bloody Tower and along the outer ward toward the Byward Tower. Before they had reached the Byward tower, however, there were loud shouts behind them.

Edwards's son, having greeted his mother and sister, had gone downstairs to see his father whom he had discovered on the floor of the Jewel House, still alive but lying in a pool of blood. The alarm had been given and the pursuit began. The yeoman on guard at the gateway of the Byward Tower attempted to stop the four by-then running men with his halberd, but Blood let fly at him with his pistol and, followed by the others, raced out along the causeway toward the Middle Tower.

Instead of seeking safety by escaping through the Middle Tower, however, Blood and one of his accomplices turned to the left, jumped down onto Tower Wharf and pushed their way through the crowds along the river front. Shouting "stop thief" at the tops of their voices, they pointed to their pursuers as the villains. For a few moments it seemed that they might escape in the confusion they succeeded in causing, but they were soon overpowered and thrown into the dungeons, where their two companions shortly joined them. The benign old clergyman was seen to be, in fact, a beardless, tall, "rough-boned man, with small legs, a pock-frecken face with little hollow blue eyes." His features were "daring, villainous and unmerciful."

A pearl and a diamond had fallen out of their settings in the crown during "the robustious struggle." But both they and the Black Prince's ruby were eventually recovered and returned to the custody of Talbot Edwards, whose stalwart behavior was rewarded by a grant of 200 pounds. So delayed was the payment, however, that Edwards was obliged to sell his right to receive it at a discount of 50 per cent in order to pay his doctor's bill. He died soon afterward.

Colonel Blood fared much better. The king, intrigued by accounts of his exploit, wanted to meet the famous rogue. At the interview, Charles was evidently much taken with the colonel's outrageous charm and impudence, his disarming rascality; for Blood was not merely pardoned, but his lands were restored to him together with a pension of 500 pounds a year.

Such munificence naturally led to rumors that the king had all along been in league with Blood, that sorely pressed for money, he had proposed the theft to Blood so that the two of them might share the proceeds. Others held that the king, when drunk, had laid a bet that the crown jewels would be stolen and had put up Blood in order to win his wager for him. The truth was more prosaic. In return for his freedom, his lands, and his pension, the ingenious and daring colonel was to act as a spy for the government and the court, to spread rumors in the city when required to do so, and to inform against republicans and would-be traitors. He evidently found the bargain a satisfactory one, for a few days after it was concluded an acquaintance found Colonel Blood strutting about on Tower Green wearing a handsome new suit and periwig, "exceeding pleasant and jocose."

- from The Tower of London, Christopher Hibbert