in which work keeps me from blogging much

[rushthatspeaks]

It's not that I'm not writing; I am writing; this last week was literally the most productive writing week I've ever had. It's that none of that goes here, and the order of operations this week went something like 'the two paying outlets are first priority, then the Secret Project, then my own novel revisions, and as a break I will comment on someone else's manuscript, and then after a little time I have a different paying deadline', and you see how LJ/DW falls right off the end of that list, much to my annoyance. I have tidied away a great many deadlines and so hopefully this will improve.

Does not help that most of the things I would write about here want to be great clonking essays. I am sure they will be fun great clonking essays when I can get to them, but.

Oh, this is a small neat thing that happened about which I am not sure anyone will care but me, but I remain entertained--

-- so the strangest childrens' book I know is Terry Jones's Nicobobinus (yes, the Terry Jones from Monty Python), which begins perfectly ordinarily with Nicobobinus and his friend Rosie wanting to go look for dragons and then does some things I cannot even describe as a left turn at Albuquerque but more a sprightly leap into the WHAT. It has some prose tics I now find annoying, and the plot may well have been decided via repeated tossings of a Boggle set, but for sheer peculiarity of imagination I have never run into anything like it and I love it to pieces. It is one of the books I grew up on which makes it difficult for other books to surprise me. And it has held up as I have gotten older.

Now, for most of my life I have assumed that as soon as the protagonists leave their home-town, fifteenth-century Venice, they sail straight off the map and into the Land of What Is This I Don't Even, because they are fairly promptly captured by pirate monks, which seems unlikely. I recall, as a child, wanting to be sure about this, and going to an atlas and checking and seeing that the names in the relevant region were not remotely similar.

But last week I was reading a history of the Upper Adriatic, the way you do, and I realized that apparently my childhood error was in not consulting a fifteenth-century map, because I was reading an anecdote, with all the right place names, about the way that the clergymen of a particular town in what is now Croatia were considered rather scandalous because they used to bless the pirates which were that town's main source of revenue, and sometimes even accompany them on raids. And then I read about the history of piracy in the region, and how the Venetians used to conquer bits of it to try to deal with the pirates, only to find that all the money had gone into the churches, where it was much more difficult to extricate. And from that, it is a small leap to pirate monks, and I could see where Terry Jones got it.

I cannot recall the last time I had a moment of quite so much existential vertigo. There is basically nothing weirder than finding out that a completely made-up thing from one of your childhood books, a thing which you already checked up on, is pretty much true. It makes reality itself stranger when this happens. I had already learned, in college, that one should never underestimate the research capacities of Monty Python-- they did the only even vaguely accurate Arthurian movie, after all, and bits of it are from really obscure sources-- but this came out of left field.

Been thinking to myself every so often 'Pirate monks. Huh,' and smiling slightly. And really that is most of what has been going on around here.

Comments

[hunningham]

I've been googling "pirate monks" and just ended with a lot of links to the Samsonsite Men's Fellowship, which made me sad because I wanted to read about pirate monks in the 15th century. I need to work on my google-fu

[onyxlynx]

Hee!

(I actually saw this by way of a comment on Making Light, but yes! Pirate monks! To the glory of God! I gotta do more research!)

[kate_nepveu]

It's always nice to see your pixels, but I am glad you have a lot of other excellent things to be writing.

[msilverstar]

Oh, hey, I realized you might have a novel out right now and tried to find that info or at least your real name from your profile, and failed miserably.

Then I did a find on this page for "novel" and found it.

Then I did a search on DuckDuckGo and discovered that your lilagarrot.com points at your livejournal. Google is better, but it would still be helpful to your prospective readers to update your profile...

[rushthatspeaks]

When I do actually have a book out, I'll make it easier for people to link my name to my journals, but right now it isn't a high priority. Believe me, when I have a book out, I will be letting people know about it. ^_^

[athenais.livejournal.com]

This is what happened to me in college when I began looking into JRR Tolkien and his background! Serious freaky existential vertigo because I was so sure he had made everything up from scratch! In fact, I don't have enough exclamation remarks for how disoriented I was--and also rather angry that Elvish was based on Finnish. (Yes, not until college, I led a sheltered life, shhh.)

[sovay]

a small neat thing that happened about which I am not sure anyone will care but me

Nah. Pirate monks are universally awesome.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

This is cool. If Prince Bishops, why not Pirate Monks?

[sovay]

If Prince Bishops, why not Pirate Monks?

I look forward to the rest of this chess set.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I look forward to the rest of this chess set.

And its tessellated board.

Nine

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Rarely have I seen such a good use of the "Mris makes the Ooh Shiny face" icon.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Pirate monks! I've found that writing vortices call forth these strangenesses.

Write on!

Nine

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Pirate monks--wow!

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

This is better than my discovery that poppy fields actually are dangerous for children-- if it's opium poppies, the fumes put them to sleep.

[selidor]

There is also the problem that poppy fields make kangaroos hop in circles.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That is amazing and I am delighted.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I was reading about Fillipo Lippi and then he suddenly got captured by pirates and taken to the Barbary Coast and enslaved and then freed from slavery because he could draw and -- and -- how could this even be real? It makes me wonder what things from our lives will seem like this to our descendants.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I was reminded also of your discovery that Heinlein hadn't made up soda fountains :-)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I had dinner with Terry Jones once. We mostly talked about the Crusader Kingdoms, for lo: under the clowning he is really rather a serious mediaeval historian.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I did notice that The Canterbury Tales contains a lesser-known bit where Chaucer himself tries to tell a story about a not-very-brave knight and a three-headed giant, and gets stopped for being Too Silly....

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Somehow I am not surprised to hear that. Any of it.

[leah nicolich-henkin (from livejournal.com)]

Interesting.... half my family is form the upper Adriatic. I wonder if I have any pirate monks in my ancestry. What was the name of the history of the upper Adriatic that you were reading?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It was Jan Morris's history of the Venetian sea-empire. The pirates in question were Uskoks, from near what is now the city of Split.

... I kind of hope you do have pirate monks in your ancestry.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

And that's just the sort of name where you think, oh, well, he took "musk ox" and tweaked it, BUT NO.

I find that Rebecca West, in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, says of the Uskoks, "These are not animals invented by Edward Lear. They were refugees. They were refugees like the Jews and Roman Catholics and liberals driven out by Hitler."

Also, did you mean 16th century (i.e., 1500s)?

[pameladean]

Pirate monks! No, that's a really good description of that particular kind of feeling, and the intrinsic amazingness of pirate monks and the apparent total bonkersation [I am reliaby informed that "bonkers" is one of those adjectives that CANNOT BE USED AS A NOUN, to which I say oh yeah?] of the Jones book just make it even better.

There's a bit in one of Dorothy Sayers's essays where she relates her discovery that Ahasuerus in the Bible is Xerxes in Greek history. Her conclusions about this are not the ones I'd have come to, but the sheer sensation of the discovery, of two worlds colliding and being contiguous, is very similar.

P.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I had that sensation a number of years ago when I read a book of essays by Daniel Pinkwater and discovered that much of the weird and odd things that I loved about his fiction were things that he had, in some capacity or other, experienced in real life.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Yeah, like the bargain luxury cowboy suits in (if memory serves) Yobgorgle, Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario.

By the way, have you read "How Daniel Pinkwater Became My Own Personal Guru (http://forward.com/articles/206667/how-daniel-pinkwater-became-my-own-personal-guru/)" by Josh Nathan-Kazis?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't! Thank you for the link!

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

...one should never underestimate the research capacities of Monty Python-- they did the only even vaguely accurate Arthurian movie, after all, and bits of it are from really obscure sources...

Now that is a secret that I, so absorbed in my science stuff, had not known.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I took a class on the Arthurian legend in college, and we watched a film a week, and most of them were terrible. The professor had saved Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the last week, and we all assumed it was to give us a breather before exams, but when we got to it, everyone just sat there staring at it with our mouths open as the professor cackled madly at us. Then she explained that she liked to save the best for the last and also felt that we hadn't sufficient background to appreciate the movie earlier in the course. Which, yes.

ALL THE HERALDRY IS RIGHT. No other Arthurian film I have seen manages to make all of its costuming be from the same time period as itself, but in Monty Python's, all the heraldry is right. Sir Robin's arms, for instance, are the Chicken of Versailles, indicating that he is a bastard son of the King of France, and consequently Sir Lancelot's younger half-brother, which makes him even funnier. Most of Lancelot's dialogue is cribs from Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes, but only Lancelot and Robin get dialogue from those sources, because nobody else is French. There's a bit where somebody straight-up quotes the Alliterative Morte d'Arthur, which is, to put it mildly, not a common variant. It is the most ridiculously erudite movie I have ever seen and it only gets more hilarious the more of it you can trace.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Wow.