English History in a Nutshell

A nonsense project that I've been tinkering with since February. Hopefully it isn't too long.

Before 1066 A.D.
England inhabited by savage immigrants, named after their favourite warring accoutrements. The Celts love their kilts, the Picts their pick-axes, the Angles their fishing rods, and the Saxons their axes. Later on the Angles and Saxons coöperate on a fishing-rod-axe, which wreaks havoc in the piscine and human world and seals their supremacy. But for some centuries the Romans, named after their fondness for dark, red-tinged green lettuce, have the upper hand.

122
Hadrian's Wall. A pre-emptive measure against Genghis Khan; known officially as "Hadrian's Security Fence."

1066
Norman Invasion. The Battle of Hastings is named after the haste in which the Saxons fled from the besieging Normans.

1215
Magna Carta signed at Runnymede. King John is in an intoxicated state from the mead for which the town is famous, and once he reaches the friendly tipsy stage, the barons tell him to sign a piece of paper, and he agrees with many a jovial hiccough. On the morning after, the friendliness, tipsiness, and joviality have evaporated, and his metaphysical hangover* is tremendous. The barons, however, are pleased. That piece of paper haunts the dreams of heads of state to this day.

1455-87
Wars of the Roses. The Royal Garden Show descends into violence after the competition for the best new rose cultivar ends in a tie between two powerful noble families. For the next three decades, the houses of York (a white rose) and Lancaster (a red rose) fight for the title, and the spade and the hoe are put to a new and brutal use. The strife ends in Bosworth Field, where a new garden show is held with improved security measures. The Tudor family, whose members come from both houses, wins the rose contest with a third entry: a pink hybrid of the warring houses' cultivars. Almost everyone is conciliated, though there are grumbled accusations of plagiarism; the swords are beaten back into the ploughshares whence they came and the world of gardening resumes its wonted tranquillity for another thousand years.

1509-74
Reign of King Henry VIII. A pioneer in British family law, specializing in divorce de facto and de jure. Among his other notable accomplishments is his action during the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-40): England is plagued by acid rain, which severely damages its religious edifices, so His Majesty spearheads a government initiative to retrieve and preserve the gold and jewellery and artwork from the crumbling ruins.

1588
Battle of the Armada. An imprudent Spanish explorer returns from the New World with a giant armadillo (Armada sapiens) on board his ship. The creature predictably breaks its bonds and considerably damages the Iberian fleet. At last Queen Elizabeth I magnanimously orders her own navy to take a whack at the beast, which it does victoriously (for Britannia rules the waves). Oddly enough, the Spanish are not grateful.

1611
King James Bible. The king, battling low self-esteem, orders his scholars to rewrite the Bible, replacing every mention of "God" with "His Most Gracious Majesty." He then distributes it free of charge to the populace, which makes the book very popular.

1642-51
English Civil War. So named because of the extreme politeness with which the affair was conducted. At King Charles's beheading, for instance, a contemporary overhears this exchange:

Executioner: Be the block sufficiently commodious, Your Majesty?
King: Oh, quite; thank thee kindly for the inquiry. Might I remark that thy axe is splendidly polished?
Executioner: I were hoping that ye'd note it!

1666
Great Fire of London. After much lobbying by the Puritans, whose temper was soured by the the monarchy's restoration, God obliges his constituents by cleaning up London with a few well-aimed lightning bolts.

1683
Ryehouse Plot. In a perfidious act of psychological warfare, the political opponents of Charles II plan to blow up the factory where the king's favourite rye bread is baked. The plot fails.

1688
Glorious Revolution. England tires of the absolute monarchy, so Mary and her husband William, Prince of Orange, are invited to come from the Netherlands. Much flattered, the latter agree to a parliamentary system so permissive that Albion's legislators go on a long partying spree. At the end of the night, however, a name for the revolution must be found. Everyone writes down a complimentary adjective on a slip of paper and puts it into a hat, Sir Robert Onslow closes his eyes and pulls one out — "glorious" it is.

1775-83
American Revolution. Faced with a scarcity of the crumpets, Devonshire clotted cream, and thin cucumber sandwiches that made it all worthwhile, the Americans conceive a violent dislike toward British tea in particular and Britain in general. The British government sends the Hessians to mediate; the Hessians decide to extend their diplomacy in the Clausewitzian sense, which measure meets with disfavour. After decades of relations as astringent as the controversial drink, Britain withdraws from the continent and henceforward keeps its tea to itself. In after centuries it is agreed by all countries that Britain may also keep the rest of its cuisine to itself, with the sole exception of fish and chips.

1815
The Napoleonic Wars, between England with its allies and France, end. The epic Battle of Waterloo is fought in the shadow of the great toilet that gave the Belgian town its name. Napoleon, leader of the Gallic forces, inspires his troops to great deeds through his eloquent exhortation to remember that "from the height of yonder edifice, forty centuries are contemplating you." But France loses and its chief is sent to the Caribbean island of St. Helena for a "holiday," as the Mediterranean retreat of Elba had proved not to be sufficiently "away from it all."

1832
Reform Bill. Parliament has become increasingly dissolute, with backbench MPs peddling gin and opium in full view of the Speaker, and the overtasked Speaker calling everyone naughty names. So King William IV calls the House to order in a lengthy lecture that is more sorrowful than angry; the sobered and penitent politicians pass a bill promising to behave henceforth.

1853-56
Crimean War. Its name derives from the British, French, Ottoman and Russian conviction that it would be a crime to let the military-industrial complex lie inactive.

1899-1902
Second Boer War. So called by the British because they are proving good at losing, and feel this to be a bore.

1914-18, 1939-45
Britain's long search for warmongering that is more unsavoury than its colonialist ventures is amply rewarded.

1956
Suez Crisis. A signal failure in good humour on the part of the Egyptians when British and French paratroopers try to annex the Suez Canal.

1979-90
Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister and is promptly nicknamed the "Iron Lady" for her habit of bringing along a decorous, housewifely clothes-iron to parliamentary debates and then flinging it at the opposition whenever the spirit moves her.

1999
London Eye. Increasingly concerned about security, the British government builds a giant ferris wheel to keep a constant watch over the city.


* metaphysical hangover: term that comes up often in discussions of Kingsley Amis's ruminations on alcohol

Germany vs. Turkey: 3-2

The Germany vs. Turkey match in the Euro Cup took place this evening, and we watched it on the television whilst hearing the radio commentary in the corner room. Gi. was cheering Germany, whereas J. and I were cheering Turkey; everyone else was (fairly) neutral.

It was a good, gripping game. Going into it, the Turkish team was down by many players because of injuries and fouls in the previous matches, and there were hardly any substitutes, but the bets (if I correctly interpret the charts that accompany the Guardian minute-by-minute reports) were still largely in their favour. They had come far despite the expectations to the contrary. Germany, though a solid team, had not been doing so well.

Even though a goal was not scored in the first 20 minutes, and after the equalizing German goal in the 26th minute there was nothing for a long while, it was thrilling enough. Then and later, it felt as if there was always a drive toward the goal. There was fouling and diving, but none of it, or so I thought, on a truly dastardly order; the one bloody clash of heads between Simon Rolfes and Ayhan Akman was accidental; it did disturb me that the referee made bad calls on the fouls. The fouling was done with panache, but the diving wasn't, so the poor sportsmanship of the latter was unredeemed by histrionic interest. In the second half the Turkish team was not at all mobile enough, and there were at least three times when, if one player had run a little into the open, his teammate could have passed to him and he might have scored a goal.

What added to the drama was the double outage of the television feed, due to a looming thunderstorm, so that, from here to London and Rome to Montreal and Argentina (as I learned in the Guardian's report), viewers were left with a blank screen and inane fill-in commentary. Whenever this occurred, the crowd somewhere out in the streets roared with disdain. But the second time, on television, a genius hooked us up to a Swiss channel's footage, so we could follow the game after all.

The match went into the final ten minutes with Germany leading 2-1, but then that fortuitous goal was scored by Semih Senturk, and so it looked as if Turkey might still win, until Philipp Lahm scored in the 89th minute. At that point there was much jubilation, which I felt out of place because the injury time — four minutes — had yet to be played. And, sure enough, Turkey was granted a free kick. It was like a film. Teammates and opponents haggling around in front of the goal. Goalkeeper with concentrated face. Spotlights glaring. Stadium at the highest pitch of excitement. The player on whom it all depends nervously licking his lips and mentally preparing to shoot. His foot draws back, it swings and makes contact, the ball is in the air, soaring and soaring . . . and it goes far over the net. So not a Hollywood ending, except from the German perspective.

Then the game went out with a whimper and not a bang, as a last-minute substitution was made by the German side, and goalkeeper Jens Lehmann took his time with launching out the ball, which was then passed around in the Turkish half and kicked over the centre line in one final, long, shallow shot, as the whistle was blown and the spectators began to celebrate the German victory. At this point, I admit, I had a rather long face. But the Turkish side did have lots of chances that it muffed, so I'll concede that the team that played marginally better won.

Predictably, the celebration in the streets was enthusiastic and protracted, though the last time Turkey won a game it was much more lively. The honking, the chanting, and the whistling were quite over in about an hour. However, a most unfeeling individual did set off two firecrackers close to our apartment after 1 a.m.*; the window was open, it was noisy, and it even startled Mama from her sleep.

*On June 26th, and in German time (I set this blog to publish in Pacific Standard Time, and haven't changed it because I like having my clocks at different hours, and exercising my mind a little whenever I want to know the time).

A Trio of Small Triumphs

Turkey has won the Euro Cup quarter-final against Croatia, after a painfully protracted game with half an hour of extra time plus a penalty shoot-out (which was fairly decisive, though). The usual repertoire of cars beeping in rhythmic staccato or one prolonged note, and overflowing with flags and jubilant fans, and crowds streaming down the sidewalks screaming and shouting slogans (mostly "Türkiye!" or, in one case, "Wer hat gewonnen? Tür-ki-ye!"), whistles, and squawking horns, was rounded out by a bird whistle and even a drum. I followed the game on the Guardian minute-by-minute report, but one could keep score without its assistance. When a goal almost fell, the ambient roar was heightened with agonized shrieks of anticipation only to fade out in disappointment, and when it did fall, the noise swelled into a triumphant roar punctuated by popping firecrackers.

Anyway, the post-victory celebrations are fun and euphoric for about half an hour, but after that it becomes a trifle tiring. At least firecrackers don't disturb me much any longer; I'm afraid of them, in themselves and because their noise resembles that of gunshots, and think the world would be fine without them, but I've learned to take them in stride when they're nowhere near me. Speeding cars and alcohol consumption worry me more. Since I've come here I've tended to associate soccer with cheap beer, dark streams of urine and shards of bottles on the sidewalks, and drunken ditties intoned unsteadily in the dead of night by sad people with the temporary I.Q. of a vegetable and the inevitable prospect of an awful hangover in the morning. I haven't seen drunk-driving, but it's definitely a possibility. Also, when the firecrackers go off and people are screaming it sounds like a war zone or a violent protest, which I don't like either. But, all said and done, these are all good reasons why the beeping cars and happy flag-waving which have so far marked Turkey's victories, though not conducive to sleep, are harmless and pleasant. And I don't detect unsavoury nationalism, either, just a sense of shared excitement.

* * *

My most enjoyable internet reading of today was two reviews of Mike Myers's new film The Love Guru. I had no intention of seeing it anyway, even if the reviews had been favourable, since it is not my style of humour. But as it is, the critics came up with splendidly scathing lines, splendid even considering that criticizing the film is apparently like shooting fish in a barrel. When we read the first paragraph of the Slate article, J. and I were speechless with laughter.

A. O. Scott of the New York Times pondered the word "unfunny," and found it insufficient. His conclusion (italics mine):

“The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

Now from Dana Stevens of Slate:

This tale of a guru who brings joy to all who meet him is the most joy-draining 88 minutes I've ever spent outside a hospital waiting room.

and the pièce de résistance:

There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they're good (though, strangely, not the reverse). And once in a while there is a movie so bad that it takes you to a place beyond good and evil and abandons you there, shivering and alone.

This is quite honestly how I felt when I watched Robert de Niro's CIA film The Good Shepherd. Though it wasn't bad technically, and I don't dislike the actors or the director, it was truly traumatic and repellent.

The Assignation

Last night I foraged among our bookshelves again from a haphazard perch atop one of our folding-chairs, and started a humorous novel about New York society in the 1950s. But I also read another of a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, which (apart from "The Pit and the Pendulum," which my Grade 8 English teacher read out loud to us, and "The Tell-Tale Heart") I first read five or six years ago.

"The Assignation" is set in Venice at an indeterminate date. It begins with a dramatic retrospective lament by the narrator:

Ill-fated and mysterious man! – bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination, and fallen in the flames of thine own youth! Again in fancy I behold thee! Once more thy form hath risen before me! – not – oh! not as thou art – in the cold valley and shadow – but as thou shouldst be – squandering away a life of magnificent meditation in that city of dim visions, thine own Venice – which is a star-beloved Elysium of the sea, and wide windows of whose Palladian palaces look down with a deep and bitter meaning upon the secrets of her silent waters.

I think this is an odd and interesting departure from the detached and relatively unemotional perspective of the conventional narrator, especially if he is not a central figure in the plot. But, given Poe's sensational use of first-person narrative in other stories, the departure is only to be expected. The portrait of Venice, poetic not only in its alliteration, does seem surprisingly understated, though. At the same time Poe's melodramatic exaggerations of em-dash and exclamation mark and "thee" and "thou" are not at all understated, and, as usual, are half moving and half amusing, but as a whole not quite my cup of tea.

Anyway, Poe continues,

Yes! I repeat it – as thou shouldst be. There are surely other worlds than this – other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude – other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies?

Maybe it's a stupidly obvious thing to say, but I suspect that the author is addressing his own problems here; he certainly spent many "visionary hours" full of overflowings of his everlasting creative energies, which sundry friends and relations probably thought were a use of time infinitely less worthwhile than working on a real job.

The plot slowly unwinds when a baby plops into a canal from a window in the Ducal Palace, amid a highly romantic backdrop, which is sadly lacking in most such incidents: "the deep midnight, the Bridge of Sighs, the beauty of woman, and the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal" (walking on water, eh?). The mother shrieks; people come running out with torches and quickly fling themselves into the water. These rescuers are "stout swimmers" but infinite idiots, because they only paddle around on the surface of the water instead of diving after the infant. The highly picturesque mother, a Marchesa, has emerged on the marble steps of the palace and "looks on," as the captions of newspaper photos always put it, but is gazing in the direction of the prison of the Old Republic. The father, a Machiavellian figure, is standing further up the steps and beguiling the time by tranquilly strumming on the guitar in between giving orders. This whole procedure must have taken at least three minutes, by which time the child would evidently be dead.

But in Poe's version of things, a cloaked figure then steps out of a shadowy niche at the prison, where he has been loitering, and dives into the water. He is an idiot, too – he keeps his cloak on, never minding that its water-logged weight would drag him down – but he is not an infinite one because he actually dives and rescues the baby. In a jiffy, (or, as Poe puts it, "in an instant afterward") he delivers the baby to the mother, who ignores it; consumed with deep and in my view selfish emotion, she mumbles, "Thou hast conquered," with a Poe-ian love of obsolete pronouns. Anyway, (spoiler alert) the story goes on much in the vein of the death-party at the end of The Count of Monte Cristo, but much more delirious and erudite,* and without a happy end.

As for the characters, I admit that I internally giggled at the way their appearance is described. I am at times in awe of beautiful people, but don't find them sublime, really. Here is the rescuer:

With the mouth and chin of a deity – singular, wild, full, liquid eyes, whose shadows varied from pure hazel to intense and brilliant jet – and a profusion of curling, black hair, from which a forehead of unusual breadth gleamed forth at intervals all light and ivory – his were features than which I have seen none more classically regular, except, perhaps, the marble ones of the Emperor Commodus.

The mother's eyes are described weirdly, being, "like Pliny's acanthus," "soft and almost liquid." I gather from a quick internet search that Pliny used those adjectives to describe the quality of the acanthus's green, but the only state in which I can imagine acanthus leaves being "soft and almost liquid" is if they have rotted away to mush, so that simile is, in my view, unluckily expressed.

At any rate, all poking of fun aside, I like the story. As is typical with Poe's writing, it has a brilliant density and boldness of thought, fervour, and imaginativeness, which I greatly admire despite the excesses. I don't mind histrionics as much if they are a natural mode of expressing unruly feelings; otherwise they antagonize me, be it in literature, theatre, or music (especially opera).

Quotations taken from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 2, at Project Gutenberg.

* The Greek seems completely wrong, though; instead of "Gelaxma", as it appears in the book, the god of laughter was "Gelos." (Project Gutenberg went with '+7!=9!, but this is its amusing fault and not Poe's.)

Finding Poetry in Finance

Bankruptcy

-bank'rupt cy

is some alpha, mostly omega
in the world of figures
spreading on screens,
over newsprint,
into folders and files
and multi-digit cheques.

a stately brass piggy bank,
wreathed in binary numbers,
chained to a business-like
laminate desk
by a red plastic chain

begins to erupt,
its golden or green-white bowels
floating themselves
out a proverbial window,
conveniently nearby,
golden eagles and green Washingtons
diving into the final cy
of financial eternity —

a land of arrows pointing to hell
and red lines plunging to the x-axis
driven by a fateful gravity.

(Written for my Grade 11 English class, where we had to come up with a poem about a word; it was printed in the Spring 2003 issue of the Claremont Review — not the Claremont Review of Books, but the other one.)