Book Review: Please Excuse My Daughter

Reclaimed from Blogjob...

Title: Please Excuse My Daughter

Author: Julie Klam

Author’s web page: http://www.julieklam.com/

Date: 2008

Publisher: Penguin / Riverhead

ISBN: 978-1-59448-980-8

Length: 257 pages

Quote: “[T]he only argument against retiring that I could come up with was that no one would really notice.”

This is a well written book that I happened not to like, but you might like. I want to run on at some length about the reasons why.

Julie Klam was a spoiled rich girl. She married a man who didn’t make enough money to suit her. They produced a baby. It took Julie 257 pages to decide that, rather than trim her budget to fit her husband’s income, she wanted to put more energy into “pitching” her writing.

Blurbs on the jacket of this book, supplied by people to whom Klam “pitched” the book, claim that Please Excuse My Daughter is funny, poignant, original, droll, hilarious, happy, sad, touching, terrific, a must read, always endearing, exhilarating, unstintingly honest, very smart, and slyly moving.

With the kind of build-up reviewers and blurb writers are expected to give a book these days, books can hardly help being disappointing. I didn’t notice who uttered the title line, in the book, or which daughter was the embarrassment—the young Julie to her mother, because she hadn’t married a richer man sooner, or the baby whose gestation period is the subject of so many toilet jokes? When the baby learns to read, she’ll have something to be really embarrassed about. People who are old enough to have babies are supposed to have outgrown toilet jokes.

There are women who’ve written about their pregnancies and their babies’ infancies in such a way that squeamish revulsion was not my predominant reaction to their writing. Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions comes to mind, or Erma Bombeck’s I Lost Everything in the Postnatal Depression. It’s not the mention of body fluids that turns a whole book into one big gross-out; it’s the failure to mention any other thoughts but the body fluids. There are women whose ability to sustain cerebral lives amidst the baby spew makes us all proud, and there are women whose submersion in baby spew needs to be kept away from young girls because it makes them dread growing up to be women.

Which is, of course, a tragic mistake. What put me off Please Excuse My Daughter has nothing to do with gender, or even with pregnancy. At some points, like pages 127 to 222 inclusive, there is a certain obsession with icky medical details (first his diabetes, then her pregnancy), which are narrated in second-grade toilet-talk language. There’s also a throwaway line about a full month of mourning for a dog who died of old age—by humans who have human families, and you realize that the characters in this book don’t really have lives.

That’s what the story is supposed to be about…and with all those other people saying that Please Excuse My Daughter is funny and true and moving and all that, I want to explore my reaction in depth.

The characters don’t read, they don’t think, they don’t get out much. They seem to move around physically, but they don’t observe plants or animals or oceans or historic sites or different cultures in the places they visit. Sometimes they go to jobs, but their work doesn’t seem to mean much to them. They have a vague sense of ethnic background, but it’s only background. They may or may not be registered to vote, but whatever political beliefs they hold mean no more to their daily lives than whatever religious beliefs they hold do. They soak up mindless, passive entertainment from pop culture but don’t create or participate in art.

There’s a funny New York City apartment-hunting story that reveals, not just the pathetic desperation with which urban landlords market anything remotely resembling a view (“a sliver view, not a river view”), but the irrelevance of such marketing. Our characters have conditioned themselves not to look at views, and Klam says, “I hate mountains.” And then I realize what’s really the matter with all these people. They are ingrown. They don’t look at the big wide world beyond the ends of their noses. Probably most of the people they know aren’t exactly like them, but they wouldn’t notice a difference. The inevitable consequence is that they’re boring; the most exciting things that happen, to them, really do involve body fluids.

One of the occupational hazards of being a writer is getting lost in one’s own head. Some writers get lost in erotic fantasies, some in ideological rhetoric, some in vividly visual but meaningless dreamscapes. I tend to get lost in abstract cerebration about the syntheses my mind forms between information absorbed from my madly eclectic reading. Some writers, perhaps especially women from the Northern States—Judy Blume and Gwen Macsai are other egregious examples—get lost in the sensations of not perfectly healthy bodies, which is pardonable if viewed as a disease symptom; given a couple of degrees of fever I find my physical sensations fascinating too, but these writers imagine that everyone else is interested in itches, urine, and nausea as topics of conversation too, which is less pardonable.

If you no longer find yourself shrieking with mirth every time someone says “pea,” Please Excuse My Daughter is not very funny, although it does have some funny lines:

“[M]y cloth­ing…sits in my closet, so hopeful, so disappointed. ‘I’m going to be in a jacket photo of the author!’ spouts the TSE black cashmere sweater.”

“[E]mergency rooms…aren’t happy places…Why don’t you ever see anyone from the society pages?”

“I felt like I could really get behind a good addiction…I googled ‘street drugs’…and [then] typed in ‘wedding dresses’…And very quickly, within minutes, I got hooked.”

There’s also a whole sequence (pages 76 to 100) that made me smile, not because it’s especially funny in its own right and not because I could relate to it personally, but because it’s so exactly like the stereotypes in How to Love Yankees with a Clear Conscience. Earlier in this book, we’ve read about how the Klam parents bought a big house in the country to display their wealth, but the Klam children didn’t like living in the country—“When I say we became accustomed to the wildlife, I don’t mean that I did…Matt still gets green when he recalls the morning he put a coat on to go feed the horses and put his hand in the pocket to find a living, breathing, wriggling mouse, which ran straight up his sleeve.”

Young Julie missed her four-year-old memories of New York City so much that, before marriage, her first long-term relationship was with a Mafia type. Anyone else would rather pick up and stroke the Big Apple’s favorite house pet, the cockroach, than even think about talking to this kind of guy, but Klam describes him in as much length and loving detail as she later gives to diabetes and eclampsia. I kept thinking “One shouldn’t stereotype even New Yorkers this way, this is sooo meeean,” and reminding myself, “But one of them is doing it.” Eww…ick…chortle.

Klam’s description of her rural childhood disturbs me. I always imagined that if people like these characters, the sub-species Homo denaturatus, had spent more time in the country, as children, they would have become more interesting.

Klam thinks the moral of her story is that rich parents should try to teach their daughters not to be princesses. I see nothing wrong with being a princess–it’s not as if any other field of specialized work were wide open these days–but I think Please Excuse My Daughter might be used to illustrate the need to teach daughters not to be self-absorbed denaturati. I can’t help wondering whether teachers who made Klam read more, editors who demanded more thoughtful studies of specific topics, or even a society that wouldn’t allow toilet jokes to be passed off as even conversation (much less as literature), might have molded Klam into the sort of writer who could write a factual memoir at age 40 and make it interesting.

We cannot all be Anne Lamott, Erma Bombeck, Jamaica Kincaid, Lauren Slater, Betty MacDonald, Maxine Hong Kingston, or Margaret Halsey. Perhaps most of us shouldn’t try to publish memoirs about ordinary private lives at early ages, but those of us who do want to write in this perilous genre should at least try to find things to say about the world beyond the ends of our noses.

I suspect that Please Excuse My Daughter may contain valuable clues for parents who want to make sure they don’t inadvertently rear denaturati, but I can’t tell you what they are. This bothers me. I’d been comfortable with the belief that, if parents lived in the country, made their children play outdoors, and didn’t have television, they’d be safe.

Anyway, Please Excuse My Daughter is recommended to anyone who wants to laugh about body fluids and/or about Northerners and/or about denaturati.

Posted on September 11, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, Humor Tags denaturati

A Place I'd Like to Visit but Never Have

The Long and Short Reviews blog challenge of the week asks where bloggers have always wanted to visit, but never visited.

http://www.longandshortreviews.com/miscellaneous-musings/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-for-May-31-2023/

Easy peasy. Name a place that is separated from my home in Virginia by a large amount of water. If it's a country, a state, even a large city, it would be a place I've wondered about but never seen, and don't really plan ever to see. There were abundant reasons not to buy airline tickets in 1971. Since I wasn't the one buying the tickets I had let my husband talk me into a trip to Ireland in 2001. Then the airlines started banning knitting needles and peering inside people's shoes--and having reasons to peer at people's shoes--and we agreed all future travel would be done by car or train.

So, was Ireland the place I most wanted to visit? No, it was the place someone was offering us a great deal on airline tickets to visit. All my life I've liked the idea of learning about new places but been less enthusiastic about the actual travel, which is hard on my delicate celiac digestion. 

I like my own country, even my own house, and feel very little desire to leave them. Other places interest me because they're different. I'm not sure that travel for its own sake really does much to educate people, but I do enjoy reading blogs about the places where other people live.

Web Log 5.29.23

I read several poems yesterday. They appealed to more profitable publishers than the online writing communities I frequent. They did not particularly appeal to me. (I am so coarse, the things the poets see / Are obstinately invisible to me...)

Poems 

Very "conservative" patriotic poem:

https://classicalpoets.org/2023/05/29/a-poem-for-memorial-day-by-james-a-tweedie/

Zazzle 

Mine: 

https://www.zazzle.com/butterfly_garden_tapestry-256929146149359943 

https://www.zazzle.com/butterfly_garden_tapestry_ii-256538555096044248

Not mine: 

https://www.zazzle.com/butterfly_garden_tapestry-256554206620372307

https://www.zazzle.com/blue_flying_butterflies_morpho_tapestry-256555554043642291

Which should you buy? It's more of an ego boost for me when you order my designs, but it actually raises more money for the butterflies when you use my links to buy other people's designs. Zazzle artists don't compete against one another.

Book Review: Do You See What I See

(Reclaimed from Blogjob)

Book Review: Do You See What I See

Author: Russell Targ

Date: 2008

Publisher: Hampton Roads

ISBN: 978-1-57174-559-0

Length: 239 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: “Our principle (sic) source of suffering is our defense of the story of who we think we are—the story of Me.”

Interesting quote for a memoir…by definition a printed copy of “the story of Me.” Russell Targ is an 89-year-old, extremely nearsighted physicist who believes in extrasensory perception. His other books have been about ESP and a Buddhist-flavored New Age spirituality, which explains why this is the first of his books that I’ve actually read.

So, do his accounts of how psychics were able to draw images similar to real locations convince readers that ESP is real? Only if you want to be convinced. If you draw a landscape from memory or imagination every day, whether you’re thinking about the location of something someone is looking for or about images you’ve seen on television, in the course of a year it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll draw one image similar to the location of something someone is looking for. You could have picked it out of the person’s mind…or you could have produced a coincidental resemblance.

Americans seriously, scientifically debated about the existence of ESP, fourth-dimensional space, and other concepts that still interest Targ, in the mid-twentieth century. One source of what seemed promising data was the discovery that some people have High Sensory Perceptivity. When people testing their telepathic skills are physically close to each other, even if they then separate themselves by a mile or two before attempting to transmit a message, most people who have the HSP trait will get encouraging results. What’s going on here is not what Targ describes as telepathy. It’s perception of pheromones, the airborne “molecules of emotion,” via mostly unconscious nerves located between the mouth and nose. We don’t consciously perceive most pheromones as odors, but we manage to smell and react to them anyway.

Pheromones explain why we may be intensely attracted to someone we might objectively consider less attractive than someone who “feels like a relative.” They also explain how it was possible for the novelist Upton Sinclair and his wife to appear to transmit simple pictures to each other telepathically. If you know someone well, you can not only pick up the person’s overall mood, while exposed to the person’s pheromones, but have a pretty good guess what sort of mental images accompany that mood for that person, through pheromones. The results of tests of your unconscious communication with one another will be fascinating, but when the goal is to locate someone in a distant country, pheromonal communication has not made psychics more useful than randomly throwing darts at a map.

Targ is, beyond all doubt, HSP. Despite a combination of genetic and traumatic eye damage severe enough to be called “legal blindness” in the U.S., he described himself getting more use out of his damaged eyes at 70 than some people get out of healthy eyes at 25. Is it possible that he’s conditioned himself to believe that he has ESP because his perceptivity has always been acute? It is likely.

In Do You See What I See, Targ describes a few memorable successes of his own and his friends’ ESP experiments…and hints at a dull majority of failures similar to what the rest of us were obtaining, during the years of ESP exploration. Does he prove that he and his friends were truly psychic, or does he prove that the unconscious mind guesses, just as the conscious mind does, and anyone who keeps guessing for seventy years is likely to have some great stories to tell? Probably, whichever opinion you inclined toward before you read it, Do You See What I See will confirm for you.

Meanwhile, it’s as entertaining as talking to any seventy-something with an intact memory is likely to be. Targ knew some interesting people; Alan Alda, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Bobby Fischer. Targ’s life at the time of writing had acquired an inspirational quality. His self-description as “a blind biker” may be somewhat misleading since he was actually a nearsighted rider of a specially built, small, slow bike, but perhaps it’s defensible on the grounds that it establishes Targ as an interesting and likable character. Most people who read books would probably enjoy meeting him, and therefore most people who read books will probably enjoy reading his memoir.

Posted on September 14, 2015Categories A Fair Trade Book Tags extrasensory perception, high sensory perceptivity

 

Things I Wouldn't Want to Do Without

This post is a revision of one that appeared at Blogjob in 2015.It was prompted by another Blogjob blog, which, of course, no longer exists. 

In order to make this blog challenge interesting we have to leave out the basic survival needs of food, water, air, shelter, and companionship, and write about five other things we, individually, wouldn’t want to try living without. (“Hot water” is not the same as “water.”) That way everyone who takes this challenge has a different list. Here’s mine, for today–another day I might think of different things.

1. The resident cats at the Cat Sanctuary. They’re my friends, not on the same level that human friends are, but on a level that’s more necessary to my day-to-day life. Writers don’t really need people to talk to–what we instinctively want to do is write, not talk–and, although the cats and I can and do “converse” about some things, we belong to different species and don’t really have much in common. In human-to-cat communication you’ve had a tremendous success, which some (of both species) don’t even want to believe is possible, if you can reliably “say” and “hear” messages like “I like this" and "I think that's dangerous.” But the resident cats are more valuable friends than many other humans who merely talk about what they and I think and feel with our convoluted human brains. The cats don’t talk or think or feel that way at all, but they do keep mice from nibbling our home down to the ground.

2. The mountains around the Cat Sanctuary. I did too much travelling at too early an age. The effect of being told that too many different places “would be my new home” was not to teach me that all places are beautiful. It was to teach me that all other places are Not-Home, and although Not-Home can be interesting it’s never quite as nice as Home.

(Home is a place, not a person. Thank God. People don’t live as long as the earth and the mountains. My home is a place that recalls memories of people I’ve loved, but it’s fortunate for me that my home is primarily a place where I do things I love doing, because so many of those people I’ve loved are no longer alive.)

3. Writing. Writers don’t really stop putting words together, at least not when we’re awake. We think in words. We dream in words. We’re likely to feel that pictures, gestures, touches and other physical demonstrations are clumsy efforts to say things that Real Human Beings Like Us would say in words. We have to push ourselves to remember that our words need to mean things.

4. Cash. Writers are squeamish about mentioning this one. We like to imagine that, because the things we most enjoy aren’t usually products with specific price tags, we don’t need money to enjoy Finer Things like music, flowers, and good conversation. That’s all very well, and certainly people who dedicate their whole lives to piling up vast hoards of money, and neglect the Finer Things, are boring or insane or both. Nevertheless, if we don’t have any money, there won’t be much music, many flowers, or much good conversation in our lives either. If you want to debate about this, that suits me just fine. Send me all your money, live on roots and berries for six months, and then tell me what you think.

5. Freedom. Self-determination. Whenever I’ve said this, other U.S. baby-boomers who know me personally have thought it was an odd thing to say, because what I personally do with my freedom is not usually what was marketed to our generation as “liberation.” I harbor no grandiose dreams about doing anything for Humanity, although I enjoy helping my neighbor (the “near-be-er,” the person nearest to me at a given time) as much as anybody else does. I’m definitely not interested in drugs, polygamy, promiscuity; I'm not intolerant of, but not obsessed with, things that used to be forbidden by various church rules, profane language, junk jewelry, smooching in theatres, heavy metal music, or even flared-leg jeans. And I can take road trips or leave them alone, but preferably the latter. What I want the freedom to do is, in fact, to live a quiet, “conservative,” auntly life with a minimum of drama and upheavals. I find people who seek out “excitement” for its own sake deadly boring. But if other people crave more “excitement” than I want, good luck to them and let them have it–somewhere well away from me. The important thing is that people respect each other enough to leave each other alone.

Posted on September 30, 2015 Categories Uncategorized Tags me me me me me, networking4 Comments

Book Review: Kenilworth

(Reclaimed from Blogjob, with apologies...I've been reading a new book I'm eager to share, but I've not finished it.)

Title: Kenilworth

Author: Walter Scott

Date: 1821 (many reprints)

ISBN: none, but click here to see one of the reprints on Amazon

Length: typically about 350 pages

Illustrations: vary

When a book is as old as Kenilworth, does one write a book review, or a book report? Technically, what I have to say about this bestseller of the nineteenth century is neither. It’s a protest.

I postponed reading this novel until I acquired one of the dozen or so reprints that are currently available. It was one of the nicer hardcover editions, with black-and-white photographs of real places and people named in the book. That said…this is not and never was a nice book.

Historical novels now usually contain a review of the facts that inspired the story and the parts the author invented. Most authors of historical novels are expected to stick to the known historical facts about real people, although this rule doesn’t seem to have been enforced on either Nikos Kazantzakis or Elliott Roosevelt. Walter Scott was another novelist, like these two, who got away with falsifying the known facts. That’s what’s wrong with Kenilworth. I was underwhelmed by Jesus channelling the chap Kazantzakis wrote about in an earlier novel, and by Eleanor Roosevelt solving all the murders in the Eastern States, too.

This novel uses the names of three real people for major characters in a plot that more or less completely falsifies what’s known about them. In England’s Tudor Period, the confirmed facts about most well-known real people are scandalous enough; Scott, not satisfied with the real dirt on Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, and Amy Robsart, drags their names through the sewer. Before reading Kenilworth it is, therefore, useful to have read a factual study of these people. Since my local library has a copy of Elizabeth Jenkins’ Elizabeth and Leicester, and yours may not have one, here’s a short list of pertinent facts:

1. Robert Dudley, a younger son of the Earl of Northumbria, married Amy Robsart when he and Queen Elizabeth were about twenty years old. The Dudley children were brought up as close to Henry VIII’s heirs as their scheming father could manage. Guildford Dudley, the eldest brother, had been browbeaten into marrying Elizabeth’s elder half sister, Jane Grey. Robert Dudley may have been Elizabeth’s closest friend, but Elizabeth, who had been molested by Kathryn Parr’s second husband as a teenager, didn’t want to marry anybody. She went to the Robsart-Dudley wedding with her brother, the future King Edward. It was no news to Elizabeth that Robert and Amy were married…but it would have surprised her if anyone had ever referred to Amy Robsart as Countess of Leicester, because she hadn’t given Robert the title of Earl of Leicester at the time. Amy’s title was “Lady Dudley.”

2. As queen, Elizabeth I flirted outrageously with her courtiers—most outrageously of all with Robert Dudley—and discouraged their wives from coming to court, probably because no married woman likes to watch a single woman flirting with her husband. Lady Dudley, however, was never a prisoner. For years she enjoyed an active social life at a low, wide, two-storey house called Cumnor or Cumner. She liked horses and was often seen riding. What eventually confined her to her bedroom was a mysterious, debilitating disease.

3. Exactly what went wrong with Amy Robsart will never be known, but her first specific complaint was about a “malady in her breast” that, within two years, grew into pain all over. The mystery about her death at Cumnor was how she managed to break her neck when there were only two flights of stairs to fall down. If her “malady” was breast cancer, which then metastasized, that would have explained the pain all over and the brittleness of her bones. Amy, however, would not have known that breast cancer tends to metastasize, and probably did entertain all kinds of fears about poisoning and witchcraft. A 2008 investigation of Amy’s mortal remains suggested violence...or euthanasia.

4. Prejudiced people accused Robert and Elizabeth of having had Amy murdered so that they could marry each other. Since they didn’t marry each other and there was no clear evidence that Amy was murdered, the accusations were hard to take seriously. However, throughout Robert’s life, a rather startling number of people who became inconvenient to him did die—usually from what seemed to be natural causes, and never while he was in their neighborhood. Robert Dudley was regarded as a devout member of the Church of England; he even wrote a Christian book. At this period in English history, it wouldn’t have been unusual for a member of a church to have employed murderers, possibly without knowing it.

5. Nevertheless, while suffering from a fever, Elizabeth made a will leaving a suspiciously large bequest to Robert Dudley’s valet. It is often assumed that this was a bribe to keep the man silent on the question of whether Elizabeth had ever spent a night in Dudley’s bedroom. If so, the bribe worked.

6. The title of “Earl of Leicester,” and other awards and decorations which Walter Scott imagines Robert Dudley showing off to Amy Robsart, were bestowed on Dudley after Amy Robsart died…possibly to  console him for the fact that, although he was free to remarry, Elizabeth still didn’t want to marry him.

7. After some years of unsuccessfully courting Elizabeth, Robert Dudley lowered his standard far enough to notice the infatuation of a confused younger woman. Douglas Howard was the name of the wife of the Earl of Sheffield. To get the Earl to divorce her, Douglas arranged for him to see a letter, apparently from the Earl of Leicester, insinuating that he and Douglas had already slept together and proposing to have Sheffield assassinated. Having Douglas declared insane was the easiest route to divorce; she was generally considered competent, though her bid for divorce was certainly reckless. The Earl of Sheffield died, apparently from an infectious disease, before the divorce was final. As on many other occasions when someone’s untimely death seemed suspiciously convenient for Robert Dudley, Dudley avoided suspicion by not taking the advantage the other person’s demise offered him. He did not immediately marry Douglas. .(Some historians question whether he ever married her at all, since neither of them mentioned their marriage for another ten years. They point out that the only living person who claimed to have been at the wedding ceremony was Douglas, and by that time it was known that, far from being delusional, Douglas was a coolheaded and capable liar.)

The wedding was a very quiet affair, Probably, having seen an example of Douglas's singleminded determination, Dudley wanted his second marriage to be easily annulled. The person who pronounced them earl and countess may not have been legally authorized to do so. Douglas was never presented to society as the Countess of Leicester, although by that time this was the title Robert’s wife would have had; she was always called Lady Sheffield. Nevertheless, a child appeared and was christened Robert, usually called Robin; he signed his name both "Robert Dudley" and "Robert Leicester," and the English courts recognized him as "Sir Robert Dudley" but refused to recognize "Leicester." Robin was said to look just like the Earl of Leicester, except that, at least as a child, he had blond hair. Robert Dudley never tried to deny that Robin was his son. At university Robert was listed as an earl's son, but, wanting to disown Douglas Howard, Dudley sometimes called Robin “my base son,” the phrase usually used for the results of exploitation of a working-class woman by a male aristocrat.

8. Douglas Howard was the one who petitioned Queen Elizabeth to recognize her marriage to Robert Dudley--not to get herself invited to parties, which "Lady Sheffield" always was, but to prevent Dudley disinheriting Robin. (Douglas spent a lot of time in France, where she was a consultant to Catherine de Medici.) Elizabeth was actually sympathetic to her claim; Douglas could prove that some sort of ceremony had taken place, though not that it had been performed by a properly credentialed clergyman. Robert Dudley was unsympathetic, perhaps partly because Douglas was too emotional and indiscreet to be a good partner for him, but also becase he had now become infatuated with Lettice Knollys, who was Elizabeth’s second cousin and was married to Elizabeth’s other good friend, the Earl of Essex. The political differences between the Earls of Essex and Leicester often reduced to competing flirtations with Elizabeth and Lettice. Historians seem to think it most likely that Essex died naturally from dysentery. Dudley tried to bribe Douglas to pretend their marriage had never happened; when she refused the bribe he became angry and swore he would never speak to her again. Their relationship became bitter when Dudley admitted to pursuing Lettice. Douglas decided to accept the offered alimony, and made a point of remarrying first. 

9. It was during this third, morally inexcusable, affair with Lettice Knollys that Dudley worried about what Elizabeth would say. In view of the facts that he was married to Douglas Howard and Lettice was married to Essex, who was out of the country, when Lettice became visibly pregnant, Elizabeth had quite a lot to say, and seriously considered locking Robert Dudley in the Tower. Mutual friends persuaded her that the country needed Dudley, so she finally allowed him to marry Lettice. Lettice also gave birth to a son and christened him Robert Dudley. His birth being properly announced at court, he was titled Baronet of Denbigh, and everyone who didn’t have to call him “my little lord” seems to have called him Denbigh. A sickly child, Denbigh died at age five.

10. None of Robert Dudley’s wives ever lived at Kenilworth Castle, which does have towers with long, rickety, dangerous staircases. Kenilworth wasn’t opened to the public for fifteen years after Amy Robsart had died at Cumnor. Elizabeth gave it to Robert Dudley as a gift; he spent several years having it made livable, but never tried to make it a home. He willed Kenilworth, and three other manor houses, to Robin, though Lettice fought hard to keep Robin from inheriting anything.

In short, Walter Scott’s fictionalization of Amy Robsart seems to have been an attempt to compress all three of Robert Dudley’s wives into one character, which is what makes his characterization of Amy so hard to take. One minute Walter Scott’s Amy is as tough and selfish as Lettice Knollys, the next minute as puny and whiny as the real Amy during her illness, the next as ambitious as Douglas Howard, and at no point whatever, in Kenilworth, does Scott try to portray the historical Amy Robsart—the cheerful, sensible, horsey girl who became ill and died too young. 

He doesn't succeed very well in characterizing the Earl himself, either. The nicest observations made of Robert Dudley's character are backhanded compliments. He was not as unscrupulous as his father or as pious as his short-lived brother, and though he did owe his success to an unusual number of untimely deaths, he was never near enough to any of the deceased to be suspected of having murdered anyone, himself. Scott favors the theory that Dudley was pushed forward in life by servants,, whom his social position obliged him to pay, whom he could not at first afford to pay well, and who could see benefits to themselves in every promotion Dudley got. Douglas, and some of his other contemporaries, may have honestly believed he'd conspired to have all those people murdered, and admired his cleverness in getting away with it. He was called "The Gypsy" and, though portraits suggest his hair was brown or even auburn, Essex and other non-admirers had a lot to say about his "black" complexion.

Now that you know how careless Scott was with facts, you may enjoy his fiction if you like that sort of thing. My copy of Kenilworth does have a few things to recommend it. It’s a vintage edition, and includes those photos of the portraits of all those Tudor Period characters and Kenilworth and Cumnor, and some fanciful paintings of Scott's characters by people who hadn't read much history. Scott's audience created the cliche of ingenues having fair hair and real heroines having dark hair. Some editions of Kenilworth gave Amy Robsart raven waves. Historically speaking, their hair would have been mostly if not entirely covered for public appearances, but dark hair had been out of fashion's favor since Anne Boleyn's time and none of the Earl's wives was ever accused of having it. .

As fiction…well, I can’t imagine sane and sober adults talking the way Scott’s characters talk. One always has to remember that he wrote these novels longhand, leaving very little time for research or editing, and he was paid by the word. I can imagine someone who had a lot of time remaking some of the basic stories of his novels. Not this one, though. Historical fiction should be written with a reasonable respect for historical fact.

To buy a copy of Kenilworth in good condition from this web site, send $5 per book + $5 per package to either address in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. To buy any specific vintage edition may cost more.

Nobody even knows for sure what Amy Robsart really looked like. This may be a portrait of her. Or not. The black drapery sewn on behind a white cap was a fashion that seems to have looked better on a lot of other ladies than it did on this one..

“Unknown lady by Levina Teerlinc c1550 Yale University” by Levina Teerlinc (1510/1520–1576) – Tudorhistory.org, direct link. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Unknown_lady_by_Levina_Teerlinc_c1550_Yale_University.jpg#/media/File:Unknown_lady_by_Levina_Teerlinc_c1550_Yale_University.jpg

These disparate drawings seemed to have been sketches of Douglas Howard: 

Lettice Knollys might have seemed nicer at first; she certainly does not seem to have been prettier. Portrait artists seem to have disagreed whether she started out with bright carrot-red or dark yellowish blonde hair. This portrait seems to seek the middle ground and show her hair as red-blonde. There is general agreement that her hair was frizzy and, though sometimes powdered stark white like her Japanese contemporaries', her skin was florid. She sat for several portraits, some very badly drawn, all agreeing that she was a fashion victim..Her main attraction was probably that she was Elizabeth's cousin.

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester...Scott implausibly imagined him posing like this for Amy, at home. He may have been conceited enough, but he wouldn't have had those decorations during her lifetime. As a fifth son he wasn't expected to rise much farther up the social ladder than Amy, whom Scott calls "a poor knight's daughter." 

Robin, in real life, inherited Kenilworth Castle. He never lived there. He sold it to a friend for seven thousand pounds, of which less than half was ever actually paid; the title was thus still his, and passed to his widow when he died, and the widow sold the castle for four thousand pounds. Robin's portrait was done when he was a teenager; no positively identified portraits of him as an adult survive. He went to sea and had a long and adventurous life as an explorer, writing a memoir that sold well.

Posted on September 18, 2015 Categories Book Tags English history, Tudor period

Butterfly of the Week: Pachliopta (or Atrophaneura) Mariae

Once again, the genus name for this week's butterfly has changed while the species name stayed the same. One of the "Rose" Swallowtails that were reclassified from Papilio to Atrophaneura to Pachliopta, it's always been given the species name mariae; Maria's Rose, or Rose of the Seas.

In flight it could almost be accused of trying to look like a cat, at least to suggest that idea to watching birds...

Relatively little has been written about P. mariae, perhaps because, while it would certainly stand out in North America, in the Philippines it's just another Rose Swallowtail. There are a couple dozen species that can all be described in the same words: 

* Adult butterflies are large, with wingspans three to six inches

* Bodies are black and red, the red color sometimes fading to pink, orange, or yellowish white 

* Wings are bsically black or faded black

* Forewings have black or faded black bars outlining the veins, often with white, light gray, or buff in between 

* Hindwings have spots in red, white, or shades of pink, orange, and cream faded from red or white

* How faded the colors of living butterflies look is an individual variation, with fading more common and conspicuous in some species than in others; 

* Flight behavior shows that the wings are stronger and better coordinated than most butterflies' wings; hind wings can move independently of forewings, giving these butterflies special "gaits" and moves 

* In most, not all, species gender differences are visible at least to experts; females generally are larger and lighter-colored than males

* The primary food plant is a vine in the genus Aristolochia

* Eggs are laid by ones, usually on a new young leaf, spaced widely enough that the caterpillars don't defoliate their food plant

* Eggs have a round shape. their surfaces usually showing droplets of aristolochic acid 

* Caterpillars show some mixture of red, black, and white pigmentation, a product of digestion of their food plant; in the caterpillar these colors often blur together into shades of brown or aubergine color, though at some stages in some species separate areas of color are visible

* Most caterpillars have a white "belt" stripe, the shape, position, and definition of which varies only slightly between species

* Caterpillars show many bumps and sometimes bristling hairs on the upper surface 

* Caterpillars are only slightly humpbacked, with smaller osmeteria than some other Swallowtail caterpillars have, and are slow to display their osmeteria

* Pupae have a wide, flat shape and irregular surface that apparently mimics a dead leaf

* At all stages of life these species have distinct odors; which butterflies probably use to recognize one another by sex and species; humans notice many but not all of their scents

This photo is a .webp file rather than a .jpg, so it may not display in some browsers. If you're not seeing a clear picture of a vividly colored butterfly, you may want to visit the PhilippineLepidopt site some time when you're using a newer computer; it has clear pictures of all three subspecies of mariae and of several other tropical swallowtails and birdwings. (Birdwings are in the swallowtail family, too. They are huge. Their species names come further along in the alphabet after Atrophaneura. This web site will get to them in due time.)

Mariae is one of the species in this group. Possibly by chance, and partly because some of the other Red-Bodied Swallowtail species have special traits that attract attention, so far mariae doesn't seem to be the species anyone has chosen for special attention. Many Google hits for this species are links to lists of the different Red-Bodied Swallowtails, often diagramming the wing spots to show how the species can be identified. There really is a consistent correlation between wing spot patterns and the microscopic, but crucial, differences in body shape that produce distinct species. It is not always possible to identify an individual with one wing spot pattern or another, though often it is. Individual swallowtails vary.

https://picryl.com/media/seitz9faunaindoaustralicaplate15-88cc9c

is a typical illustration of P. mariae and other swallowtails with similar wing spot patterns.

(Is that one really mariae? They're supposed to have tails but in real life swallowtails often lose a tail; the right hind wing does seem to have its tail. In real life, also, butterfly pictures also get mislabelled...)

Native to the Philippines, it has a wingspan a little over four inches, and is considered neither rare nor endangered. At http://scinet.science.ph/union/Downloads/STII-S-542.29_A2533-17-27_115646.pdf Julian Jumalon described his experience rearing P. mariae and what he knew as Papilio almae, now considered a subspecies of Pachliopta mariae, in captivity; he said the caterpillars grew only about two inches long before pupating, and their white "belts" consisted of two thin stripes rather than one thick one. He used "sienna" and even "siennish" to describe shades of brown in the ranges produced by earth pigment from Siena, Italy, meaning a yellowish brown when the clay is "raw" and a reddish brown when it has been "burnt." Rose Swallowtail caterpillars often look reddish brown, and the pupae look yellowish brown.

Web Log 5.28.23

the

Christian 

Art and readings...

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/art/the-glory-of-the-creatures

Funny 

Dad joke from @NorthernOvation: 

Zazzle 

Not mine: 

https://www.zazzle.com/monarch_butterfly_coffee_mug-168761055437774986

This is lovely...not only the non-North-American butterfly (a tropical "relative" of Florida's Zebra Longwing), but also the idea that people in other countries can set up their own Save the Butterflies collections in aid of their own butterflies.

https://www.zazzle.com/z/ffxo0m5p

North America doesn't even have a close "relative" of this Tailed Jay butterfly. This web site will feature an article about it some day, if the Internet and I last so long.

https://www.zazzle.com/z/ab9jzsjf

Mine: 

https://www.zazzle.com/save_the_butterflies_his_black_swallowtail_mug-256451937998061364

 

Web Log 5.27.23

One link. One tweet. I'm still spending too much time coping with glyphosate reactions. This web site will have long link logs again, some days.

Technology 

It's not just that ChatGPT will steal people's published work without credit, though that would be bad enough. It's that ChatGPT's bland, soporific prose will not be impartially stolen from all the published work out there.

A writer who's hired me as an assistant sent me a page of serious nonfiction from ChatGPT. Person then said that of course the next section of writing would be per own ideas and story, but person wanted to use ChatGPT output too--it was so fascinating to see such grammatically correct, informed-sounding prose coming out of a computer...Without even noticing, in a piece of writing that was supposed to be politically neutral reportage, person used four sentences from ChatGPT that contained five left-wing virtue-signal phrases. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein 

Web Log 5.26.23

Only one link. No question. Surfing and tweeting is less interesting when Twitter's failing to support the logging mechanism.

Books 

I don't usually like e-mails that waste space using a lot of graphics to say what they could say in words, so I find it interesting that I did enjoy scrolling through the graphic-loaded author list for this forthcoming anthology of topophilic poems.

https://bellepointpress.substack.com/p/regional-writing-and-its-universal

 

Book Review: Suppose We Are Israel

Title: Suppose We Are Israel

Author: James S. McGaw

Publisher: America’s Promise

Date: not shown (a reader of one of my copies thought 1902, which was the publication date of a hardcover book this booklet cites)

ISBN: none

Length: 16 pages

Quote: “If we are Israel, then God has…kept faith with Abraham.”

Why was there ever an Anglo-Israelite Identity movment? Given the New Testament teaching that all sincere Christians are adoptive descendants of Abraham, why did adult Christians ever feel a need to prove that physical descendants of Abraham might have populated the west coast and islands of Europe? For some ministers in the twentieth century, the Anglo-Israelite controversy was enough to move their radio broadcasts out of competition for Sunday morning slots and thus attract audiences who were in real churches on Sunday morning…but why did anyone need the Anglo-Israelite Theory to be more than a “hook” into history?

(History does not, in fact, either prove or disprove the Anglo-Israelite theory. The hypothetical wanderings of the “Lost” members of the ten northern tribes of old Israel involved people who wrote down very little history. Abundant evidence suggests that some European Christians could be physically related to their favorite Bible characters, but does not positively prove that they are. Some, not all, Jewish men inherit Y-chromosome DNA that has not been dispersed throughout Europe.)

The Rev. Dr. McGaw wrote this pamphlet in support of the full-length book Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright, which argues for the Anglo-Israelite theory, which became an important part of his faith and the faith of several Christians in the late ninetenth and early twentieth centuries. 

At this period in history, growing religious tolerance allowed Christians to admit that while God had promised to bless the heirs of Abraham in this world and the next, Jews were still being herded into slums, barred from owning land or entering many trades and professions, blamed and persecuted for doing the work the law allowed them to do, and generally not receiving the blessings promised to the children of Abraham. Western Europeans were receiving those blessings, especially if they had migrated to North America. This observation was actually being used to “debunk” the Bible. Christians who chose to debate in favor of the Bible wanted an explanation of why the blessings seemed to have been transferred to the “adoptive” heirs. Anglo-Israelite theory was that explanation. It taught that the British Isles and the nations along Europe's Atlantic coast might have become the homes of physical descendants of Abraham. If so, the prophecies of blessings for Abraham's descendants had already been fulfilled.

Today's DNA studies, and Modern Israeli history, suggest a different interpretation. Abraham had other sons and grandsons besides Israel. If a genetic quirk that is still peculiar to Jewish men is not found among British men, that suggests that any undocumented physical connection between "Anglos" and Israelites that may have existed failed to transfer whatever was special about Isaac's descendants to any British "race" (tribe). Instead, the special blessings promised to Israel as "Judah's sceptre and Joseph's birthright" may be yet to come. McGaw's argument is still interesting, but it may be wrong.

There were schools of Anglo-Israelite or Euro-Israelite thory that were used as excuses for hating Jews. Other schools of thought used the theory as a base for friendly outreach to Jews, as McGaw does in this pamphlet, thanking a Jewish friend for referring him to Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright. The pastor who talked most about it to my parents, when I was growing up, used it as a reason to encourage Christians to study the whole Bible, look up their family history, and of course tune in to his radio broadcasts. McGaw specifically says that “there is no place here for race pride” in the sense of arrogance or bigotry, but “for appreciation of the gifts bestowed by God upon us as a race.” (He used “race” in the old sense of “people claiming descent from a common ancestor.” For him Celts and Saxons were different “races” from Italians.)

Historically the more benign versions of Euro-Israelite theory seem to have predominated, because Hitler and Mussolini didn’t try to exploit it.

The comments—relevant and otherwise—handwritten in my copy of this booklet show a late twentieth century, skeptical reader’s reaction. Many whole-Bible Christians do not feel that Anglo-Israelite theory is a necessary base for studying the whole Bible. The reader concluded, “Bible says ‘a mighty angel will preach gospel to all Earth.’ (Men love lies for gain & fame.)”

For myself, I don’t know how typical I may be…My first conscious commitment to Christianity occurred while my family were involved with the Lord’s Covenant Church. We were whole-Bible Christians. I am a whole-Bible Christian. I am comfortable with a truth that seems to make many people uncomfortable: we don’t know everything, nor will we know everything. I don’t feel a need to believe any theories about ancestors who left no records of who they were, much less what they believed. 

What I do know is that following the teachings of the whole Bible is self-rewarding, enough that any reasonable person might want to live as an adoptive heir of Abraham. The Bible makes clear, and the L.C.C. taught, that individuals from any ethnic group might choose to make this commitment, as did Ruth, and the rules about separation from unclean foreigners no longer applied to them. In any case the Ishmaelites (Arabs), Edomites (descendants of "red and hairy" Esau, generally understood to meant northern Europeans), and descendants of Abraham and Keturah (Africans and Indians) are clearly identified as descendants of Abraham who were destined to follow the descendants of Jacob, or Israelites, into material wealth and spiritual prosperity.

In the ancient prophetic vision it may have mattered whether people were "Nordic," or true White, light-haired and hairy-skinned, like Esau, or "Mediterranean," dark-haired and smooth-skinned, like Jacob. It never mattered in the sense that one type was more valuable as human beings: Jacob and Esau were born as twins, and both were loved. It would not have mattered in the sense that anyone's human potential was limited by ancestry, but it may have mattered in the sense of a prophet's having foreseen a certain individual doing a certain thing. The church has not received such a "key" to the understanding of any prophecy, but it ma receive such a "key," according to the prophecies themselves, in due time. 

In Heaven our ancestry may matter...a little, if there are ceremonies in Heaven, in the order of precedence on formal occasions or suchlike. As far as salvation and morality are concerned it doesn't matter. Anyone who senses the vocation within may be adopted as a spiritual heir of Abraham and enjoy the benefits of living by the whole Bible's teachings. If we are Abraham's heirs physically through the children of Keturah, whom Abraham didn't have time to teach much, or through Esau, who was less favored ("hated") because he lacked spiritual sensitivity, or through Ishmael or not at all, God still knows us by our own names and can bless us as God chooses.

Meanwhile the English-speaking countries have certainly enjoyed blessings beyond the rest of the world. So if others still want to support their whole-Bible Christian practice with McGaw’s claim that it is their duty to claim the birthright of their British ancestors’ “race,” or races, this book is for them. Otherwise, it is an historical curiosity.