Sunday media roundup, week two

So I guess my motivation for doing these is that I can feel myself growing dumber and I'm getting sick of saying nothing but "Oh, hell yeah dude" anytime I encounter a piece of art I enjoy. There's only one guy who can get away with that.

This week we'll look at a film, a book, a friend's manuscript and an online music event. Lets goooo!

Storygraph

I've been playing around a bit with the storygraph app after seeing it mentioned as an alternative to goodreads in the New Statesman.

I like how it graphs the moods and pace of the books you've read:

The left side has books I've marked as read and right is based on books I've marked as to read (based on imported data from goodreads). 

Turns out I like adventurous, reflective and dark moods and dislike inspiring, hopeful and relaxing moods. I like slower paced books more than faster paced ones, though not by much. Still, this is all very subjective, based on how people tag the books in question.

I'm probably not going to switch over from goodreads anytime soon. Storygraph's layout is rather clunky and with actual reviews downplayed there's even less of a feeling of community than on goodreads. Still, it would be nice to have an alternative to the now Amazon-owned book site.

Media roundup, week one

Decided I'll do a weekly roundup of the various media I've consumed over the last seven days as a writing exercise and as way to build a new habit. My goal is to write 52 of these roundups, with the hope that by the time I post the last one I'll have established a habit of posting more frequently on this blog.

This week we'll look at an online event, a play, a film, a podcast episode, a band and two articles.

Cinque Canti: this is how chivalry dies

This is one of my favourite pieces of poetry, from the purposefully abrupt ending of Ariosto's Cinque Canti, his sequel to the Orlando Furioso:

One drowns, another crosses swimming, another
the water's current drags in circles; one leaps into a
boat and leaves his horse; one makes his horse
swim behind the skiff; and where a boat appears,
the army crowds in so thickly that, full to
overflowing, the vessel either cannot leave unless it
empties or it sinks to the bottom along the way.

The crowd was no less packed at the entrance to
the bridge, which Charles was defending; and the
terrified men, for whom death weighs more than
any shame, grow to such a number that the King,
with all the forces he had with him, not only loses
the struggle but, piled together with many other
men and beasts, is himself thrown over into the
river beneath the bridge.

Charles falls into the water below the bridge, and
there is no one who stops to give him help, for
each man has so much to do to take care of
himself that there is little concern for others there:
there courtesy, charity, love, respect, gratitude for
favors received in the past, or anything else one
can say is put aside, and each one thinks only
about himself.

If Charles had found himself on any horse other

than the one on which he rode that day, he could

easily have remained in the water and never

returned to fair France again. His good horse was

white, except for some spots of black which

looked like flies and which he had about his neck

and flanks right up to the tail: by this horse

Charles was finally brought back to shore.

This is end of the chivalry. It's every man for himself now, with all of the epic grandeur drained away by the final stanza. 

The whole poem is worth a read: It features ships flying through the air, a parliament of witches and demons and evil faeries, alpine warfare, a haunted forest and a scene that Collodi would later borrow for his Pinocchio, of heroes living in the belly of a whale waiting for help to arrive.

This is from my earlier review on goodreads:

What a heartbreaking work. And incredibly powerful. A minimalist tragedy compared to Ariosto's maximalist masterpiece. The death of chivalry told through the characters who most embody it. Just about every character looks their doom in the face. Ruggiero and Astolfo in the belly of the beast, Ganelon when Orlando Incognito knocks him out and gives him as prisoner to Bradamante, Oliviero when he’s defeated in battle and taken prisoner, Charlemagne when his troops panic and he’s almost drowned in the rout. That’s the most powerful feeling I’ve ever wanted in a book, that knot in the stomach. The paladins of France will live on forever in my heart and in my dreams.

Viking hygiene

There are two famous medieval sources discussing viking hygiene.

First up is the Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan discussing the Rus, the vikings who established trade routes and settled in what today is modern Russia. I'm quoting here from Penguin's Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North:

They are the filthiest of God’s creatures. They do not clean themselves after urinating or defecating, nor do they wash after having sex. They do not wash their hands after meals. They are like wandering asses.

           .... 

Every day without fail they wash their faces and their heads with the dirtiest and filthiest water there could be. A young serving girl comes every morning with breakfast and with it a great basin of water. She proffers it to her master, who washes his hands and face in it, as well as his hair. He washes and disentangles his hair, using a comb, there in the basin, then he blows his nose and spits and does every filthy thing imaginable in the water. When he has finished, the servant carries the bowl to the man next to him. She goes on passing the basin round from one to another until she has taken it to all the men in the house in turn. And each of them blows his nose and spits and washes his face and hair in this basin. 

Elsewhere we have John of Wallingford recording how Danish men living in England were able to seduce English women because of their frequent grooming:

They were wont, after the fashion of their country, to comb their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their garments often, and set off their persons by many such frivolous devices. In this manner they laid siege to the virtue of the married women, and persuaded the daughters even of the nobles to be their concubines. 

I suppose the responsible takeaway from this is that standards of hygiene vary tremendously across a given people, but it's much funnier for me to imagine that the vikings were dirty and the anglo-saxons were even worse.

End in sight for pandemic?

April update to this post: lmao never mind

As of today, both of my parents have received the first dose of the vaccine and my 92-year-old grandmother is scheduled to receive hers on Monday. I suspect I'll be lucky if I get mine before July, but I'm relatively young, relatively healthy and relatively patient. I can wait.

Active cases in my town are down to about 12, with a total of maybe 2000 cases and a handful of deaths since the pandemic began. People are wearing masks and doctors and nurses are getting better at treating covid cases as they learn more about the disease.

More than that, the sun is out and the snow will soon begin to melt. I seem to recall the warm weather and being able to go outside gave us a bit of a break last year, though it wasn't until much later in the year. 

Still, we aren't out of the woods yet. The worst thing that can happen now is governments giving into the fatigue we all feel and relaxing our social distancing measures. Worse still, in Canada we live on top of a giant incubator to our south that never took the pandemic seriously. Though to be fair to the Americans, they're doing a much better job of vaccinating their population than we are up here.

At some point last year I made the prediction that 600,000 Americans would die of covid and 40,000 Canadians. Just a hunch, based on the numbers of the Civil War dead of one country and the WW2 dead of the other. The number of American covid deaths is officially at 534,000, though I suspect the actual number is much higher, probably already above 600,000 given how politicized the the issue is and how both Trump and Biden admins have been trying to play down the numbers. Canadian covid deaths stand at 22,434. The numbers might actually be higher than that, but I doubt they're double the official figure and I doubt they'll get there now––and I'm quite glad to have overestimated the Canadian number.

The real problem with the number of Canadian covid deaths, though, is that we're going to look at them and say, 'hey, that's not so bad.' Having the low bar of slightly better healthcare than the Americans has been a core part of our national identity ever since we implemented almost universal healthcare (no dental, vision, pharma, etc). Now we don't even have that. 

The end might be in sight for the pandemic, but I'm pessimistic about the reckoning that needs to come after.

New short story, "Chramn of the Wizard's Pingo"

I wrote February's short story at Dream of Shadows. You can read it here until August, after which it will be available in the print edition.

It's a sequel to my previous short story, "Chramn the Unconquered," available here.

Chramn and all of his tribespeople have their names taken from Merovingian history. Chramn's name comes from the Old French word for raven, and his strangling in the first story is a reference to the death of a Chramn in Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks. The Warriors, on the other hand, take their names from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso: Aquilant and Grifon are the twin sons of Oliver. Their names mean eagle and hawk, hence their line in the story. Likewise, in the Orlando Innamorato and again in Orlando Furioso, they face off against a giant named Orillo who first sends his giant crocodile after them. There's a great essay in, I believe, Fortune and Romance: Boiardo in America (edited by Jo Ann Cavallo) that talks about Orillo being symbolic of gnosticism. The bee brooch was inspired by the brooches discovered in the tomb of the Merovingian king Childeric I.

Both stories are offshoots of a novel I've been working on throughout the pandemic, a sort of sword and sorcery epic which takes my interest in the worlds of chivalric epics and medieval France and tries to spin it off into something new.

I wanted to set these stories on a fantasy tundra because it's a landscape I've been fascinated by for some time. It's similar to the steppe, a somewhat overused fantasy setting, plus it calls to mind all those great illustrations of ice age mammals. I also chose the tundra because I've become obsessed with caribou lately. They're really fascinating creatures, and the big implausible landsleighs (think viking longships crossed with toboggans and hauled by caribou) seemed like a nice evolution of that famous Frank Frazetta painting.

The story itself is, I guess, about feeling stupid and dumb and how sometimes just putting yourself out into the world can be part of the solution.