1. epicene — having both male and female characteristics; weak, feeble
Michael York strikes an epicene note in his portrayal of Brian Roberts in Cabaret.
2. tonneau — rear compartment of an automobile, esp. in earlier models
While it may be fun to drive, you cannot store much in the tonneau of a 1962 Morgan Plus 4, so try to find one with a luggage rack if possible.
3. demilune — crescent; half-moon shape; triangular-shaped outwork open at rear, ravelin
Inside the demilune were now many buildings—stables, barracks, even a smithy—which had slowly been added during the long years of peace.
4. derogate — to lessen in authority or esteem; to partially repeal or abrogate
We do not believe his latest work in any way tends to derogate from the high regard his creative talents have always enjoyed.
5. baldachin — rich brocade; canopy over a throne, altar, or doorway
Not only did the fine baldachin over the Sun King’s ceremonial bed provide the necessary pomp for his intimate meetings with trusted associates, the curtains could be pulled shut to signal the end of the session at need.
6. muniment — document establishing claim to rights or privileges (usu. in plural); means of defense or protection
His claim was all the more unshakeable, supported as it was by muniments of indubitable authenticity.
Some troublement of heart or evil night’s vision has turned him from a bold yeoman to a lither coward who shirks his duty and hides from battle.
8. socage — tenure of land by rent or service not including military service
As wars became more dependent upon ready cash than upon the often uncertain performance of independent lords in armor, the crown became more willing to grant title to manors through socage as opposed to the feudal knight-service.
9. arabesque — fanciful decoration or ornament combining figures, flora, and fauna in flowing lines; fantastic, oddly mixed
As I looked more closely at the arabesque decorations upon the smoke-darkened tapestry I made out figures strangely out of place with the overall religious theme, bizarre grotesqueries more suited to Bosch than to a spinster’s study.
10. chemotropic — characterized by movement or growth in response to a particular substance
Introduced to the drug at such an early age, it is not entirely surprising that Pete evinced an almost chemotropic reaction in his pursuit of more and stronger highs.
Bonus Vocabulary
(trademark)
Bibendum — official name of the Michelin Man, from early advertising showing the mascot drinking glass and nails, with the slogan (from Horace) “Nunc est bibendum” (Now is the time to drink)
Eileen Gray’s striking armchair was inspired by Michelin’s Bibendum, and bears the same name.
The Scarlet Letters & The Glass Village, by Ellery Queen
In my notice of (not really) reaching the “500 Books Read” milestone, I mentioned briefly the book we’re looking at today, which consists of two previously published mysteries slammed together in one volume by Signet in an effort to cash in on the seemingly bottomless wallets of mystery readers. The two books thus combined were The Scarlet Letters (published originally in 1953) and The Glass Village (1954) by the writing team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee—better known to most as Ellery Queen. Under this pseudonym the two cousins produced a long string of books, of varying quality, and through those mysteries as well as many anthologies and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (edited by Dannay) they cast a very long shadow over the field of American mystery. Most, though not all, of their mystery stories featured the detective Ellery Queen. And they were also among the first to franchise their popular name, allowing other authors to ghostwrite novels under the ‘Ellery Queen’ imprimatur based on plots provided by Dannay, though none of those ghostwritten books featured their eponymous detective. (The noted science fiction author Jack Vance even wrote a couple of these novels.)
I first became interested in the specific titles in this 2 novels volume—well, one of them, at least—through my perusal of Mike Grost’s interesting mystery Web pages, “A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection“, and (of course) specifically his page about Ellery Queen. If you are interested in older stories in the mystery genre, Mr. Grost provides many recommendations and some excellent background and history for tales from the earlier days of this strongest of all genres. He can be a tad frustrating, though, to me at least, through his fervent analytical approach, breaking apart each author and each book as if its essence could be captured thusly; I doubt, for example, that I shall follow his recommendations as to which specific chapters to read for some novels he mentions on his site, as I do insist on reading all the intervening chapters between ‘Chapters 1-10’ and ‘Chapters 21, 24, 30’ (not just for mystery novels, though it does seem especially important for those). Still, I have found good suggestions from his pages, and his tastes seem to dovetail quite often with my own—Melville Davisson Post deserves to be read by every American, in my opinion—and so when he placed The Scarlet Letters 4th among his list of the top novels of Ellery Queen, I had no hesitation in grabbing a copy, which happened to be contained in the 2-in-1 paperback pictured above.
I hated it. No, that’s two strong. I hate only one thing, and never books or music. I can say, rather, that I did not like it, and did not like it very strongly. Indeed, The Scarlet Letters has some interesting points, and there is a persuasive build-up to the final denouement which comes as a nice bit of writerly legerdemain, but ….
The Scarlet Letters finds our author cum amateur detective Ellery Queen and his personal secretary Nikki Porter becoming involved in the lives of a married millionaire couple, Dirk and Martha Lawrence. (This is back when being a millionaire meant something, and in 1953, it meant quite a lot.) This power couple has the perfect marriage, until they don’t, and they begin to show the strain in public, at which point Martha reaches out to Ellery for help. Turns out that Dirk is insanely jealous of Martha, although Martha is a loving, devoted wife worthy of Caesar himself. Dirk has taken to drinking heavily, suffering from severe writer’s block (he and Ellery first met at Mystery Writers of America gatherings), and Martha is at her wit’s end. The solution to this contretemps, or at least Ellery Queen’s solution, is to introduce his own secretary, Nikki, into this stressed and stressful house so that close tabs may be kept upon the situation. So Nikki—who also happens to be Martha’s best friend—goes to live with the Lawrences as a writer’s secretary for Dirk. And then things get worse. And then worse still. And even worse. There is screaming, crying, drunken rages, violence, and what is generally named ‘abuse’ in today’s world, though in 1953 they obviously had a different word for it, if they named it at all. At the end of a long, very long time and seemingly longer novel, there is a big blow-up, some plot twists, and lives are shattered. There is also a crazy ending, made a little more palatable by the fact that our amateur detective learns a little about the law that he really might have known if he had been keeping up on the subject, say by reading Perry Mason mysteries.
Now I’m not going to give too much away, not only because mystery books should be a surprise to the reader, but also because I believe that the less you know about a book at first approach the more its power can take you whither it will. Too much knowledge or hype can ruin your experience, just as the old joke talking about steak points out. If you come to see Citizen Kane for the first time focused solely upon the nickname for Marion Davis’s clitoris, you miss pretty much the entire movie. (Afterwards, sure, go nuts, delve into every detail, nuance, allusion; though you still won’t watch it as often as The Fifth Element.) But I spent perhaps half of this novel ready to scream “Get out!” at the characters. I wanted to tell both Ellery Queen and Nikki Porter to leave what was obviously a bad situation. I particularly blamed Mr. Queen (the character, though obviously the writer shares the blame) for allowing Nikki to remain in a home where the tension was obviously racing towards the breaking point, and not entirely because of the bad husband’s actions. The story also took far too long to develop, and relied upon some fairly silly plot devices (though they did manage to provide the title). I found myself all too distracted, though you may very well have a different experience (as Mr. Grost obviously had), by the menace of encroaching domestic violence and the problem of unbearable marital tension which cannot be solved as easily as one solves a mystery in fiction. And then, after enduring an interminable set of maddening situations to which the only correct response would be, I repeat, “Get out!”, the book ended with tragedy and farce which could not repair the damage to my reader’s soul done by the previous pages.
But hey, that’s just my opinion. At least one other disagrees quite strongly.
In addition, had I not gone out of my way to get this novel, I likely would not have read The Glass Village, which I loved, loved, loved. So just like the old canard about the Chinese old man, I cannot be sure what is bad and what is good.
This story is a very different animal than the tale of privileged power couples among the New York City smart set just discussed, though it also combines tragedy and farce, and our Mr. Ellery Queen (the fictional detective, not the pseudonymous author) does not appear at all. In fact, The Glass Village is the very first novel under the Ellery Queen pseudonym to eschew the eponymous amateur detective. The reasons for this writerly choice are both obvious and intriguing, for the story is set in a (very) small town in New England into which it would have been very difficult to introduce the oh-so-urbane author and sometime sleuth (although this difficulty did not stop Dannay and Lee from grafting Ellery Queen onto a Sherlock Holmes story a dozen years later). The smallness of the town is crucial to the plot, both in terms of the town’s size as well as its mindset. This is not, however, a mere tale of prejudiced yokels, but is a much deeper recounting of a tightly bound community carrying not only the weight of decades of prejudice against outsiders, but also the burden of some of the weightiest ideals which gave birth to the United States of America.
Briefly told, The Glass Village tells of an almost incestuously small village in which a terrible murder is committed, the culprit is apprehended, and the entire town rushes to punish the brutal crime. In a feat of creative brilliance, the novel foists upon the reader a plot founded upon an almost unbelievable notion, that of a kangaroo court condoned by the larger state government for the purpose of quelling possible rebellion and likely further bloodshed. Though the bucolic staging of the small town life seems slow and almost ponderous at the very beginning of the novel, and this reader at least feared that I was reading another story as disengaging as The Scarlet Letters, every pastoral step through the bovine village in the opening chapters turned out to be both necessary and efficient at crafting the perfect setting for the jewel of a story to follow. Without giving too much away—heck, I’m hardly going to talk about the actual story at all—the slow pace of the first pages turns out to tell us everything we need to know and to make credible the incredible events which are to follow.
The book was originally published in 1954, and it is no accident that it came out in the same year as the Army hearings which finally began to unravel to maddening grip of Joseph McCarthy upon the very neck of democracy in the USA. The Glass Village is a jeremiad against that insensate rage and rush to judgment which forms all too large a part of the American history of Red Scares, anti-immigrant laws and movements, and—to our eternal shame—lynchings. But somehow Dannay and Lee have crafted in this novel a tale which does not wallow in ungainly allegory, does not hit the reader over the head with the hammer of Truth. Instead, their story reveals a deeper strain of high morality, and shows the very real passions which propel men and women into both the highest and the lowest actions which are both called by the name ‘patriotism’. The characters in The Glass Village are not so easily distinguished as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as those of, say, The Crucible, though some take similar unjustifiable actions. Instead, they are shown as very human, in the worst but also the best sense of the word.
But this is also a mystery story, and a darn good one at that (though I confess I spotted the key point early on). Where The Scarlet Letters had an all-too-believable plot ruined by unbelievable actions on the part of some of the main characters, The Glass Village has an altogether ridiculous plot—tragedy as farce, and comedy as terror—which somehow works on every level. It is a worthy successor to the best of the Uncle Abner stories. The main protagonist, a world-weary major recently returned from his second war (in Korea) who had lived in Shinn Corners (the titular village) as a child, is almost a prototypical outsider, but one who has a claim to belong. Strangely touched by his brief encounter with the true beauty residing in this fragile town, his cynicism will be forever changed, transmuted into something not entirely free of skepticism, but no longer resistant to those stirrings of the human heart which we moderns expend so much effort trying to suppress.
1. feist — mongrel dog; truculent person or animal
I wasn’t about to let some little feist ruin everything we’d worked towards for over a year.
2. git — (slang) fool, worthless person
“You’d better listen, you git, if you don’t want your face mashed in!”
3. pluricentric — having multiple centers
An American high school has a pluricentric social structure, in which the so-called student government usually has the least influence.
4. cadastre — property register used as basis for taxation
Whereas the highland entries are usually so vague as to be useless to the researcher, the lake property records in the county cadastre have proven to be an excellent source for details about the main landed families in the region, revealing their financial ups and downs through the purchases, sales, and transfers of the fertile farms of the valley.
5. jorum — large drinking-bowl
He promised to tell us the whole story, but swore that not a word of it would pass his lips before he had assuaged his thirst with a jorum of wine.
6. equipartition — division into equal parts; equal contribution to total energy by each form of a system
Here, once again, we see the superiority of nature to man, for the entirety of the system’s kinetic energy is governed by the iron rules of equipartition, whereas men can rarely share equally even a single pizza pie.
7. euphuistic — high-flown, overly ornate style in speech or writing
While most occupants of the executive suite claim to disdain a euphuistic style, preferring what they pretend is a realistic and “businesslike” mode of expression, the fact is that if all their buzzwords, jargon, and pompous phrases were removed, most of their speech would be reduced to “We did a thing” or “We are thinking of doing a thing” or “Maybe we shouldn’t do this thing”.
8. heptarchy — government by seven rulers; the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England extant during the latter half of the first millennium AD (often capitalized)
Such slavish obeisance to brutal overlords has not been seen since the days of the Heptarchy.
9. carking — (archaic) worrisome, distressful
Somehow the very means developed by supposedly scientific men to free us from carking care have become stressors worse than the worries they were meant to cure.
10. mens rea — (Latin) criminal intent, mental knowledge of wrongdoing which forms part of some crimes
Although ignorance is no defense, as the truism states, the court found that his illness left the major incapable of the mens rea necessary to find him guilty for his actions.
I’ve just now completed the 500th book since I began tracking my reading back in 2016. Of course, since I don’t really count comics and graphic novels towards my ‘Books Read’ total, I am not really asserting that I’ve read a spectacular half-chiliad of tomes, but just jotting this brief note in any case. (Comics are so short that I thought originally they’d skew the count; since then I’ve read plenty of short non-comic volumes, and a handful of lengthy graphic novels, so it all comes out in the wash, but … stet!) The “500th” book read—actually #440 in my ‘official’ count—is a strange pairing of old Ellery Queen mysteries, The Scarlet Letters joined in the same binding with The Glass Village. These books came out in the 80s as Signet tried to get people to buy old crime novels that might have seemed too short to readers grown used to reading fatter Ludlum-esqe thrillers purchased from the airport. Prolific authors of the past had their books packaged together to give them heft and (the publishers hoped) renewed sales. (These last two sentences are entirely unsupported by any facts I have at hand other than my own vague impressions; do no cite!)
The two novels are a mixed bag, with the first book being a disappointment to me, in spite of the high praise it received from Mike Grost on his extensive mystery site. In his review of Ellery Queen books, The Scarlet Letters is ranked fourth among the best of the pseudonymous author’s works. I found it cloying and maddening, as well as unbelievable and ponderous. The Glass Village, which is also well-liked by Mr. Grost, was a much better novel in my opinion, a very gripping story in the old American vein of the fight against the tyranny of the mob, quite pertinent to the 50s and—unfortunately—our own times. Maybe I’ll write a more detailed report on both books. Maybe.
For those keeping track, the book I finished reading just before this one was the Catechism of the Seven Sacraments, about which I wrote yesterday. That would make that ‘brick-illustrated’ religious book #499, though I’m counting it as a ‘Graphic Novel’ for my book counting purposes, meaning it doesn’t add to the ‘real’ count I use to determine when to mine my book data.
If you are looking for a Catechism for your young Catholic friend or family member who thinks that The Lego Movie was cool and who might possibly believe that Raiders of the Lost Ark is still relevant, you need look no farther than Kevin and Mary O’Neill’s Catechism of the Seven Sacraments, a comic book version of part of the larger Catechism of the Catholic Church, illustrated with LEGO®, with all the ‘Nihil obstat’ and Imprimaturs you need to feel doctrinally safe giving it to kids. Additionally, you get the latest interpretations of Covenant Theology from Pope Emeritus (!) Benedict XVI et. al., with its fancy focus on the Abrahamic covenant instead of the pesky Mosaic one. Written by a couple with an axe to grind against another’s LEGO® Bible, so the back of the book copy says, “this book makes profound theological concepts accessible to both the Catholic and the curious, the child and the adult.”
Of course, this is not a LEGO® production, as the publisher makes clear on the copyright page, as well as right there on the back of the book. No, this product is one of a host of Christian products using LEGO® but hiding behind the fig leaf of “brick-illustrated” denomination for their productions. At some point, I may pursue more deeply the legal intricacies of this use of LEGO® products for Christian wares, as I did in my investigation of so-called “Christian parody music”. My favorite example of LEGO® Christian products is Father Leopold Celebrates, which includes a Roman Missal and Lectionary, as well as Father Leopold’s collar, made especially for this item. (Full disclosure, I get nothing if you bought that item by clicking that link, except a small sad feeling deep inside.) Yes, some day I may delve more deeply into the world of LEGO® Christian warez, but that day is not that day.
And I honestly learned some things from this book, which isn’t too surprising, as I was not raised Catholic, but rather lapsed Baptist. (Though I turned out to be a crypto-Methodist, which is an entirely different story.) I learned just what to do with a Rosary, and some deets about the sacrament of Holy Orders, and …. Well, that’s mostly it. The rest is interesting doctrinal assertions, but having just read Voltaire’s “Ingenuous” I wasn’t completely convinced by the “brick-illustrated” argument placing the rite of confession in the Bible, and of course R. W. Morgan’s St. Paul In Britain—whatever else its faults may be—makes a strong case against the Bishop of Rome being more than just one among many bishops. But this is a Catholic book, so I am not surprised by any of these. And I wasn’t surprised by the bloody Jesus, either. Oh, the scourging. LEGO® Jesus does suffer here.
Inspired by “questionable interpretations in a popular brick illustrated Bible”, the authors set out to create this doctrinally safe story of the Seven Sacraments, and they quite honestly do a pretty good job. They are especially good with water scenes, and their set pieces—such as King David’s throne, or the plagues of Egypt—are worth the price of this book. The price I paid, that is, being next to nothing as I discovered it in a Little Library whilst walking our dogs. I suggest you pick up your copy in the same manner.
Perhaps the doctrinal issues with the popular “brick-illustrated” Bible are deeper than the fact that it (I’m guessing that The Brick Bible is what’s meant) uses a ghost figure for the Holy Ghost, or that sex and birth are depicted. Perhaps not. Certainly Catechism of the Seven Sacraments avoids using a ghost, and instead uses a funny little figure that I’m guessing is a dove, though it at times looks like a white rubber ducky about to drown itself.
And maybe it’s just being catty to despise the horrid font used, with the ‘H’ that is simply distracting and pointless, though I’m sure that’s the font the software came with. But reading through the nearly 300 pages is hard going, and as cloying as you might suspect. A lot of work went into this production, and I wonder what the kids think about this now that they’re older. (Not that much older; this was published in 2018, in the Before Time.)
There is also the Pentecost, which in this LEGO® version makes the descent of the Holy Spirit look like the apostles have flaming bags of poop on their heads.
But these are mere foibles, and though I was tempted to file this under The Banality Of Feeble, it is no worse than many other Christian tracts that I have read, and that I have and still do love. So you can check it out, if you’re into that sort of thing. In fact, you can get it on Amazon in a package deal with Father Leo celebrating mass.
And you can use the extravagant church backgrounds for your Zoom meetings, or just to remember what going to church was like.
Hopefully, you won’t have the same issue with this book that finally became a deal breaker for me: the lead narrator in the book, Fulton by name (which just happens to be the name of one of the authors’ kids), goes through the entire book wearing a backwards baseball cap. I guess that’s supposed to be … cool? (This is a slight exaggeration; he has his hat off once, whilst talking to some priests.) You know what’s cool? Smores. Though I’m not sure that LEGO® Smores are for me.
So … it’s the kind of thing that people who enjoy this kind of thing will find enjoyable. Maybe that means you. In which case, you can enjoy the spectacle. Even Charlton Heston couldn’t chew this scenery, that’s for sure.
And don’t forget the scourging.
Saint Patrick is just one of many saints depicted in the book
1. closestool — (alsoclose-stool) stool with hole in its seat, beneath which rests a chamber pot
The room he showed me was well-appointed, large enough to have a separate small chamber for the closestool, unlike the mere nook hidden by a curtain I used in my own house.
2. franklin — freeholder of land in 14th–15th centuries, ranking just below the gentry
The farmers all told the friar scandalous tales about the rich franklin who owned the inn and the ferry at the edge of the wood.
3. irremissibly — unforgivably, in a manner precluding all possibility of pardon
“Now that you know the true situation, my son, if you continue with your scheme you will be irremissibly damned—yes, damned.”
4. niveous — resembling snow; snowy
A nail had torn a large hole in the bottom of the package and the laundry powder lay in niveous mounds at the bottom of the closet.
5. urinator — (obsolete) diver
He couches his words in obscure references and euphuistic constructions so that one needs be an expert urinator to plumb the depths of his meaning.
6. preterlapsed — past, bygone
She stood in the photo arrayed in a costume from a preterlapsed era, long gone even on that day in the previous century when some anonymous photographer had captured her on film.
7. unwonted — unusual, not customary; unaccustomed
My frail grandmother spoke with such unwonted frankness that I became embarrassed and began to blush.
8. dolichocephalic — long-headed; of skulls having a breadth less than 3/4 the height
The cell had only a metal mirror—doubtless so that glass shards could not be broken off to form weapons—but the reflecting surface had become warped, making me look like some mustachioed and dolichocephalic Hunter S. Thompson.
9. shy — to throw with sudden or jerky movement
Without breaking stride he shied the rock in his hand directly at Jason’s head and was wrestling the mask off the killer’s face before I knew his intentions.
10. tenter — frame upon which cloth is stretched to dry evenly
The baron awaited her answer in the tower chamber, and his patience was stretched upon the tenter as never before when a dozen days passed with no reply.
Bonus Vocabulary
(idiom)
mare’s nest — illusory discovery
The hopes for cold fusion soon faded after other scientists had a chance to study the data, and once again the authors of the paper had found only a mare’s nest where they had thought to find the Holy Grail.
Most will be familiar with the “Uncanny Valley” concept in robotics and computer animation, the hypothesis being that as the designed object nears more closely an actual human being a point is reached at which the resemblance is so near as to call up emotional responses, yet the distance between the created object and its real exemplar is still such that those responses will be eery distaste or confusion or off-putting weirdness. That this idea is merely a hypothesis with little or no scientific basis may be seen in the fact that the crowds of people (back when there were crowds) attending premieres of Marvel movies did not flee screaming from the theater in revulsion at the counterfeit humanity depicted therein.
But since we human beings are story-making, explanation seeking, pattern seeing animals, may I be permitted to posit a similar idea as pertains to works of literature? For I believe I have just experienced something like the “uncanny valley” as I finished an old (over a century old, as it was published in 1909) novel by a once-popular writer, the book Simon The Jester by William J. Locke. I found it to be a perfect novel, with perfect characters, perfect observations, perfect dialogue … up to a point. And at that point, something strange happened, and I had an out-of-novel experience which left me disoriented and nonplussed by the very book which up to its closing pages had seemed a rare work of genius, but now became a burlesque grotesquerie, an incomprehensible jamais vu construction that left me shaken and somewhat sorrowful. Call it the Uncanny Asymptote of Nearly Perfect Fiction.
On a murky, sullen November day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-sudsy thing a mile away from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and superstition call the sea. The interim is mud—oozy, brown, malevolent mud. Sometimes it seems to heave as if with the myriad bodies of slimy crawling eels and worms and snakes. A few foul boats lie buried in it.
Here and there, on land, a surly inhabitant spits into it. If you address him he snorts at you unintelligibly. If you turn your back tot he sea you are met by a prospect of unimagined despair. There are no trees. The country is flat and barren. A dismal creek runs miles inland—an estuary fed by the River Murgle. A few battered cottages, a general shop, a couple of low pubic-houses, and three perky red-brick villas all in a row form the city, or town, or village, or what you will, of Murglebed-on-Sea.
A fine description of a depraved landscape
Simon The Jester begins with the titular Simon de Gex, M.P., seeking the most God-forsaken place in all England, in which quest he is successful. He hies himself to this most baleful clime, there to dedicate himself to a life founded upon the principles of Marcus Aurelius, specifically to be a “happy man” by his devotion to “good inclinations of the soul, good desires, good actions.” Simon calls this concept ‘eumoiriety’, based on the Greek word translated above as “happy man”, εὒμοιρος. The neologism is not entirely euphonious, and its continual appearance is perhaps the one discordant element in the novel’s first two hundred and fifty pages, and indeed its appearance was so perplexing to Mr. Locke’s initial readers that a special note was added to a subsequent issue of the magazine in which the first episode of the novel was serialized, explaining the unfamiliar (and now quite reasonably forgotten) term.
Simon has deep reasons for seeking a state of … ahem … ‘eumoiriety’, which I shall leave for the reader to discover for him- or herself. Though it seems that he should be quite content with his very fortunate life, in which he occupies one of the highest places in the great pyramid of being which is the British Empire in the first decade of the 20th Century, he suddenly jumps his tracks and leaves all his previous ruts, and of the adventures which follow this novel is constructed.
“These things are no one’s fault,” I said gently. But just as I was beginning to console her with what thumb-marked scraps of platitude I could collect—the only philosophy after all, such is the futility of systems, adequate to the deep issues of life—the door opened and the manager announced that the police had arrived.
Simon de Get is a true and wise philosopher, in spite of everything that happens
And what adventures they are. Recounted in wry and urbane reflections as a strange new world opens up before him, our Member of Parliament seeks to do good deeds, the first of which he sets himself is to remove his politic assistant Dale Kynnersley from the clutches of a gold-digging lion tamer, the fascinating Lola Brandt. But when he visits the femme fatale, Simon is peculiarly struck by the strangeness of her environs, her person, and her friend, the dwarf Anastasius Papadopoulos. This last strange figure trains cats—ordinary housecats—in feats of derring-do and mastery just as Lola once was mistress to a pride of trained lions.
The intersection of Simon’s world of privilege and wit with the demimonde of Lola and Professor Papadopoulos drives the novel into some strange and romantic places, though most of the action in Simon The Jester are the merest trifles. However, as Alexander Pope said, “Trifles themselves are elegant in him,” and that poet might have used Simon de Gex as the very model for this sentiment. For every page of Locke’s novel scintillates with sharp intelligence and trenchant insights. His narrator is the best of a rare breed, the true aristocrat, in the original sense of that word first needed Ancient Greece. Could such fine patriarchal British aristocrats have ever existed? One can only hope.
She looked straight in front of her, with parted lips, fingering her handkerchief and evidently pondering the entirely new suggestion. I thought it best to let her ponder. As a general rule, people will do anything in the world rather than think; so, when one sees a human being wrapped in thought, one ought to regard wilful disturbance of the process as sacrilege.
So courteous is de Gex that he will not interrupt even a silent woman
Simon The Jester is a novel I only read by accident, as it came to me as an unwanted (and unwonted) gift from a friend who that I “had a lot of books” and so naturally thought of me when she was getting rid of some old books. Besides the fact that I don’t read much in the way of hundred-year-old popular fiction, it also belongs to a genre I am hardly acquainted with, the romance. (The version I was gifted with includes as well four nice illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg, known today for creating Uncle Sam’s famous “I Want You!” poster.) But the suasive power of Locke’s beautiful language is remarkable, as each remark by the protagonist reveals a fine sense of propriety (in the best sense) and a very real understanding of the human condition.
In this age of flippancy and scepticism, if a human soul proclaims sincerely its faith in the divinity of a rabbit, in God’s name don’t disturb it. It is something whereto to refer his aspirations, his resolves; it is a court of arbitration, at the lowest, for his spiritual disputes; and the rabbit will be as effective an oracle as any other. For are not all religions but the strivings of the spirit towards crystallisation at some point outside the environment of passions and appetites which is the flesh, so that it can work untrammelled: and are not all gods but the accidental forms, conditioned by circumstance, which this crystallisation takes? All gods in their anthropo-, helio-, thero-, or what-not-morphic forms are false; but, on the other hand, all gods in their spiritual essence are true.
Deep thinking in a light trifle
And the sparkling insights of Simon accompany a pell-mell rush across colorful vistas of incident and romance, a journey through a world that is no more, and likely never was. Yet throughout the novel, Mr. Locke manages to make the most bizarre situations compelling fiction. Each crazed scene is more believable, more true than the last, until … until it is not.
And so we come to my crux with this novel, or perhaps with my reading. I have elided over most of the plot because Simon The Jester is worth reading on its own terms, and Locke provides continual surprise in his fine writing. But at some point very close to the end of the book, I became disengaged from the narrative world I’d effortlessly inhabited for the 250 or so prior pages. I can only liken it to an experience I had once of watching Terry Gilliam’s Brazil on network television, during the viewing of which I had become totally transfixed by the almost miraculous depiction of another world that is also our own, only to be shaken out of my dark reverie by the intrusion of an ad for foot odor products (or something like that). And though the poignant episodes of the last third of the book were some of the truest I have ever read of a man learning to care deeply for his fellow human beings, at some point the lines holding me tightly to the story slipped their moorings, or I slipped mine, and the end of the book slipped away from me like a bucket dropped down a well.
“Well, I’m damned!” said I, in my native tongue.
I don’t often use strong language; but the occasion warranted it. I was flabbergasted, bewildered, outraged, humiliated, delighted, incredulous, and generally turned topsy-turvy. In conversation one has no time for so minute an analysis of one’s feelings. I therefore summed them up in the only word.
Strong language indeed from our narrator
The question I have asked myself since completing this novel is whether the problem I found is within the book, or within myself. And I confess I have no final answer. As I say, I do not read romances as a rule, and perhaps my disdain for the novel’s climax is a dislike for the resolution of the romantic triangle. (There’s always a triangle.) However, I studied the idea of using the other leg of the triangle as the result, and am not sure that I should have liked that any better. It is also possible that Mr. Locke simply constructed a puzzle for which either solution was unacceptable—though as before, I cannot say whether ‘twould be unacceptable objectively, or to myself only. I leave the entire matter as a problem for the reader, telling you up front that I have no idea of the solution, if solution there be.
It is not so much the thing that is done or the thing that is said that matters, but the way of doing or saying it. In the commonplace pat on the hand, in the break in the commonplace words there was something that went straight to my heart. I squeezed her arm and whispered:
“Thank you, dear.”
Still, the language of this book—trifle though it be—is so excellent, so powerful, that it succeeds even where I may perceive some small failings at the end. So I cannot recommend Simon The Jester wholeheartedly, nor can I recommend it highly enough. William J. Locke is a fantastic writer, famous for what it’s worth in his own time. And his is a century-old voice well worth listening to. I’ll report after I read another of his novels, which I shall.
Another fictive milestone, as I just recently passed the 500 day mark in terms of audio tracks listened to through my iTunes. The (not so) momentous event happened just yesterday (April 11, 2020) at approximately 1:40 in the morning, as I was just finishing listening to “The Joan Fuller Murder Case”, an episode of the radio show Broadway Is My Beat, which aired originally (as far as the admittedly ‘sort of’ information available to me can tell me), back in 1950 on November 17th. Maybe that’s right, maybe that’s wrong, relying on stuff you read on the Interwebs is always a little sketchy. All I know for sure is, it’s a good show, worth a listen, and this episode was okay, I think.
I’m using the image of the Hillbilly tape box because a) I don’t have an image for Larry Thor’s show (he’s the star of Broadway Is My Beat”) and b) after all I have listened to that Elvis Hitler album as part of my 500 days of music and other audial … stuff. Naturally, 500 days only represents the time it would take to listen to every track
I’ve heard through iTunes if you listened to them back to back, no breaks between songs (and other). Of course, I’ve heard many songs more than once … but who’s counting?
Excelsior! On to the next 500 days … one song at a time. Not sure I’ll make it that far (I don’t even have that much tune left in my library), but if I do, it’ll be after August of next year. Hopefully by that point things will begin to clear up.
Professor Harlake spoke to the committee with an air of subrident superiority, as if deigning to respond only to prevent even more misinformed opinions from being promulgated.
2. fane — temple
The flowers were heaped on the mound like offerings before a pagan fane.
3. aliquot — exact proper divisor (that is, a number which can divide a larger number without leaving any remainder)
In this example we can see how shillings and pence were useful aliquots of the pound sterling, although in some cases the halfpenny was needed.
4. contravallation — second chain of fortifications built by besieging army to prevent relief of the siege by outside forces, facing away from the breastworks, etc. circumvallating the besieged place
Even as these well-funded groups laid siege to the Constitution, legislative and legal reforms were pursued to serve as a contravallation against any counterattacks upon the sinister attackers.
That summer as I helped Nathan check in the gym equipment for the entire club, I dreamed of being allowed inside the metal cage wherein all the gear was stored when not in use, but he had no intention of inviting me into his purlieu behind the locked red wire gate.
7. knacker — (British) to tire out; to damage
Running the two dozen bags of groceries from the car into the house in the middle of the pouring rain left me totally knackered.
8. secundum artem — according to the standard practice, skillfully
Of course Dr. Johns will do everything in his power to save Reginald’s leg, secundum artem, but you should prepare yourself for the possibility that amputation will be necessary.
9. toper — heavy or excessive drinker
He beheld the broken Nintendo Switch like a toper staring mournfully at his last bottle smashed on the ground.
10. gelid — ice-cold, frosty
Already the cold was sapping his strength, and each tortured breath left the gelid hair in his beard heavier with increasing ice.
Bonus Vocabulary
(British slang)
knackers — testicles
For a while I tried that tight legged black pants look à la The Specials, but the inseam was like a knife to my knackers.
So 57 days after my last thousand songs were heard, I have just listened to my 115,000th unique iTunes track, music familiar to anyone who has sat through David Niven’s turn as the famous British secret agent James Bond. The tune, “Sir James’ Trip To Find Mata”,* is one of Burt Bacharach’s contributions to the soundtrack for the original Casino Royale movie, starring—besides the aforementioned Mr. Niven—Woody Allen, George Raft, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, William Holden, Charles Boyer, Orson Welles, … oh, a whole host of big names who cannot help this disaster from 1967. The problems of this light and bouncy movie can be seen in the fact that it took five directors to bring it home. But, like many of the stranger motion picture artifacts of that strange decade (I’m looking at you, Modesty Blaise), it can be enjoyable enough as long as the viewer does not insist on anything making sense. Certainly the soundtrack is a breezy enough bit of fluff that doesn’t interfere with the ridiculous material presented on the screen.
The Stats
115,000 unique tracks takes up 757.25 GB of data (↑ 10.39 GB), which would take 499 days, 4 hours, 43 minutes, and 53 seconds to play from end to end (↑ 10 days and 6 hours). Remaining unplayed in my iTunes library of files are 76,499 tracks, 959 fewer than my last report (thus a mere 41 tracks have been added to my library since the last check-in). The unplayed files occupy 517.7 GB of data space (↓ 9.9 GB) and 269 days, 10 hours, 51 minutes and 18 seconds of time (↓ 10 days & 7 hours).
To reach the 115,000th unique track, I listened to 1246 songs since track #114,000, starting this latest tranche with T.S. Eliot reading from his play The Family Reunion. These 1246 songs occupy 11.83 GB of data, and 11 days, 6 hours, and 44 minutes of time.
It took 57 days to listen to the last thousand songs, meaning just over 17.5 new songs per day were heard.
17.5 New Tracks Heard per Day
If we include the previously heard songs, we find that I heard 21.86 tracks per day, a little less than three songs a day fewer than the last set of one thousand songs. This is likely because I’ve added a handful of playlists bringing back old favorites for my daily commute.
21.86 Tracks Heard per Day
I hope to do a little data diving into the last five thousand songs, to report on listening behavior and any insights since the last deep scan of the data. I won’t promise that I’ll be able to get to it very soon, however, as I still have my day job—or rather, I still have my job to go to.
And … that’s all folks. See you next time!
* The apostrophe is not followed by the letter ‘s’ in the soundtrack listing, meaning either that the composer did not follow Strunk & White’s guidance or that he felt the “Sir James” was a character of Biblical stature.
