bloodygranuaile

Sometimes when I am having a bad time I like to read about people having an even worse time, so it is fortunate for me that my hold on Eric Jay Dolin’s Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World came in right before I fell sick last week.

Dolin lets us know right off the bat that this is not a story of far-reaching historical importance; instead, it is merely a really wild tale that he wanted to rescue from oblivion because of how nuts it is.

There are a couple of main parties in this story, which takes place during the War of 1812. Party 1 is the crew of the Nanina, an American ship on a sealing voyage to the Falklands, which had sailed out of New York right before war officially broke out. They were hoping to spend a year or so sealing and then sail back when the war had blown over. This didn’t quite work out for them. It is important to note, however, that the Nanina was in the Falklands on purpose and was not shipwrecked. The Falklands were otherwise uninhabited at the time, the Spanish settlement having been abandoned a year or two earlier.

The second main party is the crew and passengers of the Isabella, a British ship inbound from Australia. The captain of the Isabella is not the greatest at his job and manages to wreck the ship on one of the outer islands in the Falklands. The resourceful Aussies are able to set up a little camp on their spit of land that keeps them all alive, although not quite in the style they are accustomed to. They send some guys out in a longboat on a hail Mary trip to South America to try to get help.

While the guys in the longboat are on their way to Rio, the American sealers discover the stranded British Australians. Though the two countries are at war, the Americans figure that’s not really the top priority here outside of what they would have considered civilization. The Americans agree to cut their sealing voyage short and give the stranded Brits a ride back to the mainland.

Unbeknownst to them, the hail Mary longboat trip works out! While the Nanina is preparing to house its own crew and the folks from the Isabella, the head of British naval operations in Buenos Aires sends out his subordinate, William D’Arada, out to rescue his fellow countrymen in a rickety tub called the Nancy. D’Arada, upon arriving in the Falklands, is delighted to find not only the folks he was sent to rescue, but also a bunch of Americans! He promptly, and somewhat illegally, takes the Nanina as a prize and its crew as prisoners. His fellow Brits find this pretty ungallant but don’t do much about it. D’Arada sends the Nanina off to England under his prize master and then sails the Nancy back to Buenos Aires with the rescues from the Isabella.

Unfortunately, while D’Arada was upsetting all their plans, a hunting party of five men–mixed American and British–had separated from the main group to get food. When they returned to the main camp, everyone else had departed. Again, some of the Isabella passengers thought this was pretty douchey of D’Arada, but nobody really had the standing to mess with him, nor did they try too hard.

Thus, in the second half of the book, our cast of characters is drastically reduced, from two or three ships’ worth of people to merely five, plus a dog. These five guys (and their dog) have an eventful but, fortunately, never fatal eighteen months of Robinson Crusoe-ing it up in the Falklands, having interpersonal falling-outs, at least one mutiny, numerous attempts at conflict resolution in different levels of success, trips to hunt seals, hogs, and penguin and albatross eggs, and other such shenanigans as they wonder if anyone will ever come to get them. Navigating around the Falklands in their little shallop is dangerous enough that sailing to Rio or wherever seems to be out of the question, although if I recall correctly they do try once and basically can’t get the little boat out of the Falklands in one piece. Meanwhile, back in Buenos Aires, and then New York, and then London, legal and press machinations are afoot, and eventually, the Americans who had made it back to America–after some time as British prisoners of war–are able to send a brig out to the Falklands to rescue the five men. It takes some of them a whole other relay race of shipping voyages to get their arses back home again, but at least in the meantime they got to see some other people. One of the stranded men, Captain Charles Barnard (the original captain of the Nanina), eventually writes a rather pompous memoir about his adventures, which sells moderately well for the time and then fades into obscurity, until apparently one day Eric Jay Dolin found it and was like “This is nuts; I gotta tell people about this” and wrote Left for Dead.

This was overall a very fun read. I’m not sure it quite reaches the “masterpiece of narrative nonfiction” level of something like The Wager but I’d still definitely recommend it for fans of The Wager because it tells a similar type of story, and is very fast-paced and readable. Dolin goes to great pains to avoid moralizing about things like the ethics of sealing or basically anything other than D’Aranda’s personal conduct, which pretty much everyone except D’Aranda agrees was shitty. The book has lots of pictures, which I thought was great, and lots of footnotes, which were informative but interrupted the flow a little. There is plenty of interesting historical context to flesh out what the world was like for the people involved, which I think is valuable even if there’s simply no case to be made that this event had any particular far-reaching impact on history writ large. It’s an excellent addition to the “putting dudes in Situations” canon of maritime literature. Those dudes were for sure in a Situation! In fact, the Situations kept compounding into new and worse Situations, for quite a while! None of these Situations devolved into cannibalism, which was frankly a lucky break for these guys, but there weren’t too many other people around to eat anyway, so instead we get interesting lessons in how to hunt all the weird fauna that was hanging out in the Falklands around 1813 or so, and several near-death experiences with elephant seals. Exciting!

In one of my book groups, we decided to kick off the year with Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s classic of media studies, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. I voted for this but for some reason I was under the impression that it was a short book; I was extremely wrong about that. This is a 350-page book only because it is blithely printed with small, single-spaced text on fairly large pages–basically, standard hardback sized pages, but mass market paperback print.

It is pretty content-dense (the prose, while hardly magazine-like breezy, is pretty readable by scholarly standards), and also the subject matter is very depressing, so it took me a while to get through even though I am very interested in this sort of thing. One of the strengths of the book as a work of both scholarship and argumentation is a weakness in terms of its readability: It backs up its points with evidence, and lots of it. The beginning of the book lays out the “model” by which media spin and servility happen and the rest of the book mainly consists of very detailed case studies about mass-media fuckery that were relevant at the time this book was published in the 1980s–the Vietnam war, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, coverage of foreign elections, coverage of specifically murders of humanist activist clerics in foreign countries, and a fascinating chapter on an attempt to assassinate the Pope that I had somehow never heard of. All of it makes the New York Times’ role in lying us into the Iraq War in the early 2000s sound more like standard operating procedure than a rare and embarrassing lapse, which, personally, I think is because it was (the New York Times is a bloodthirsty rag and I will never, ever forgive it).

This book is largely interesting as a Foundational Text of leftist media criticism and as a source of interesting information about stuff that happened during the Cold War, but it also does hold up fairly well as a way of explaining how media works. The media has changed quite a lot since this book was published in the ‘80s, and the rise of the Internet and of social media has really thrown a wrench in the way media works in many ways, but TV news still exists and millions of people still watch it, and the New York Times still exists and is still considered the flagship paper of the United States (because we are a fundamentally unserious country)–and, perhaps most importantly, the legacy media still portrays itself as a credible, resolute investigative watchdog against unchecked government power that works in the public’s interest and informs them about how the world works. This is a very important thing to have a realistic assessment of if one is evaluating or participating in conversations about how people these days are all stupid and don’t know how shit works because they get all their news from TikTok, which is indeed bad, but the solution proposed is usually to get these dumb-dumbs to “realize” that they should be consuming “real” news so that they can have a “realistic” and unified understanding of the world and consensus reality like the country did back when everybody watched Walter Cronkite every night. The conversation about the abandonment of legacy news in favor of whatever we’re flocking to now that Twitter’s unusable is incomplete if it does not address that people’s distrust of the mass media is correct because the mass media is indeed full of shit, it’s just that the correctness ends there and from there you can go in many, many different directions, most of which are dodgy. Anyway, I think the book provides enough explanation of the sorts of things that put pressure on media coverage that an intelligent person can extrapolate a bit when trying to factor in things like Facebook.

Winter to me always feels like a good time to revisit Tolkien, so yesterday while recovering from Christmas I picked up the copy of Beren and Lúthien that I had borrowed from my girlfriend over the summer. Like most of the books on Tolkien’s unfinished works, this was put together by his son, Christopher Tolkien, as part of the run of post-movie-series books that revisited tales told or explicated in works like The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth series, but that rather than being compilations of many different tales, focused on one tale per volume and took us through their development and the various drafts.

The tale of Beren and Lúthien is one of the most important tales of the First Age, and it is referenced a lot in The Lord of the Rings, especially as concerns the romance between Aragorn and Arwen. This work compiles various versions, both finished and unfinished, in verse and in prose, to illustrate the development of the tale over the years as Tolkien fiddled with it, changing names and occurrences and how much detail to go into. The early versions of the tale are interesting particularly for how they differ from the version alluded to in The Lord of the Rings, which must be regarded as canon: in the very earliest draft Beren is not even a mortal man, but an Elf (or Gnome) from a rival group of Elves. In addition, one of the earlier version features Morgoth’s (or Melko, in this one) lieutenant Tevildo, the Prince of Cats, a rather comic character who occupies the space in the more serious later versions occupied by Sauron (who also goes through a bunch of names, spending some time as Thu the Necromancer). Tevildo is some sort of demon in cat form who holds all other cats in thrall and makes them big and scary, and his enemy is the hound Huan, who sticks around through all versions of the story even when the silly cat vs. dog rivalry is abandoned. Some of the cats have silly names like “Miaule.” I loved this version of the story but it definitely had a more The Hobbit sort of bedtime-stories-for-children vibe than this particular tragic romance seems to call for. Sometimes we forget that Tolkien could be a very funny man when he wanted to be.

This book also has a bunch of gorgeous illustrations by Alan Lee, apparently the only person to do correct Middle-Earth illustrations, going by some of the nonsense I’ve seen. It really is just a gorgeous book, gorgeous story, gorgeous poetry. (And much easier to read than the HoME series.) Highly recommended for Tolkien fans.

For reasons related to my current maritime disasters kick I vowed that this December I would finally read the copy of The Great Halifax Explosion that has been sitting on my shelf since January 2019. I first learned about the event when I visited Nova Scotia in 2017 and everybody was doing centenary stuff about it, and I am reminded of it every year when Boston gets its Christmas tree, which the Haligonians send us in thanks for our relief efforts. So I know the short version of the story pretty well but I wanted to read the book-length version, which is why I bought this book when I saw it in an airport, a place I almost never buy books.

The short version of the story is that at 9 o’clock in the morning on December 6, 1917, two ships accidentally bonked into each other in Halifax Harbor. This was not a very fierce crash and it would not have been a huge deal except that, Halifax Harbor being a major port in the World War One supply line, one of the ships was carrying six million pounds of explosives. The resulting blowup was the largest man-made explosion in history at the time and would retain that record for another almost thirty years until the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This short version is very exciting but doesn’t contain any important lessons, other than maybe that it was very heroic for Boston to send so many doctors and nurses and blankets and hits of cocaine afterward.

The long version is a whole different story! In addition to the added human interest element, of which there is quite a lot–eyewitness accounts by survivors, photographs, a lot of historical context of the different neighborhoods in Halifax and Dartmouth–John U. Bacon spends a good amount of time giving a play-by-play account of every single safety regulation, norm, and best practice that was disregarded over the course of both ships’ journeys, starting with the Mont-Blanc’s unsuitability for the job it was doing and going through the inadvertent packaging of the Mont-Blanc into a perfect floating bomb, Halifax Harbor’s decision to rescind safety protocols like requiring munitions boats to fly a red flag, and the Imo’s Captain From’s impatient decision to blow out of Halifax Harbor at top speed in the wrong lane and play chicken with anyone coming the other direction. This book has lots of things it wants us to learn about the importance of safety regulations, which I agree is very important. It’s also genuinely thrilling reading–well paced, and you can see the disaster inching nearer with every corner cut. I also learned a lot about Halifax and the people who lived here, which as an idiot American I am in sore need of education on.

The explosion itself occurs about halfway through the book, and the second half describes in horrifying detail the immediate aftermath–told largely through the eyes of the ordinary survivors we’ve been getting to know in the first half–the relief and cleanup efforts in the following few weeks, and the later legal wrangling to determine blame, a series of four trials that started with the local Wreck Commission and ended up being appealed all the way to London. The descriptions of the medical relief efforts, from both the local and semi-local Canadian doctors who could make their way in that day and the US contingent sent by Massachusetts’ first experimental iteration of a disaster relief commission, are thorough, vivid, and incredibly nasty. I found it absolutely riveting but some readers might get squicked, so caveat lector if you are squeamish about gross medical stuff, especially eyeballs.

While I read this in December specifically to be seasonal, I did not expect the Christmas season connection to affect me as much as it did, especially reading it warm and cozy in my bed on a bitingly cold morning, reading about these poor folks whose windows had all been blown out of their houses trying stay warm through a particularly ill-timed blizzard. It manages to get all heartwarming at the end, so I guess it really is a Christmas book. It’s not one that could ever be made into a family holiday movie, though; too many people get their eyeballs removed.

Continuing my Lois McMaster Bujold adventures, I read Cetaganda, the next installment in the Vorkosigan Saga. This one follows Miles and his much handsomer, much dumber cousin Ivan as they go on a diplomatic mission to the Cetagandan Empire, which until very recently has been a recurring enemy of Barrayar.

Miles and Ivan were actually not sent to Cetaganda on any mission other than their public one, which was to represent and deliver a gift from Emperor Gregor at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress Lisbet Degtiar. However, a very sensitive intelligence mission attacks them before they’ve even docked properly at the Cetagandan shuttle station (getting them to dock improperly is the opening salvo of the plot, in fact). Miles then spends a tight 300 pages trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and which Cetagandan nob is trying to frame Barrayar for their own treason so they can start another war, which, while Barrayar has won the last couple wars against Cetaganda, they’d still really like to take a good generation-long break from. Miles’ ability to do intel/counter-intel is initially hampered by being in a strange civilization where he doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t know how stuff works, but through sheer enfant-terrible-whiz-kid-ness and plot armor a mile thick, he manages to avoid dying (multiple times) for long enough to talk his way into cultivating some allies, spinning some theories, and gaining access to all sorts of very off-limits-to-barbarian-outworlders spaces in Cetagandan culture.

The Cetagandans are master… well, eugenicists, basically, although (as far as we can see) they are less about murdering undesirables (for genetics reasons, anyway; they’re real big on it as part of regular imperial expansionism) than about tinkering with gene lines to create an incredibly baroque and insular aristocratic power structure, kind of like how all European royalty are cousins with each other, except since it’s being done by Science instead of the old-fashioned way they can avoid any unfortunate Habsburg chins and suchlike. The upper class of genetically on-purpose Cetagandans are called the haut, and they are all very hot, and the women float around in little force-bubbles when in public so no one can see them. The sort of gentry or lower-aristocratic class, from which most of the military brass is drawn, are called the ghem, and the highest honor a ghem-lord can win from the Emperor, even higher than the Order of Merit, is an haut-lady wife. The other big division of labor in Cetagandan society is gender, with the women in charge of the genome project and the men in charge of externally facing Imperial politics. This division does not in any way usurp the class solidarity of the haut, of course.

All this is a bit baffling to Miles, who comes from Barrayar, a place where power is very firmly in the hands of Men Who Can Kill Lots of People. Fortunately, as befits a protagonist, Miles is a quick study, and has the benefit of being constantly underestimated. (He is, in fact, so underestimated that at one point the as-yet-unknown antagonist sees Miles poking around and assumes that Ivan must be the one directing him, and promptly kidnaps Ivan, who is a dumbass who doesn’t know shit about what’s going on.)

In very classic Miles fashion, our hero spends nearly as much time and effort trying to avoid reporting his mission to his superiors–either the Barrayaran ambassador, or the protocol officer, who is actually the embassy’s ImpSec commander–because he doesn’t want them to take the mission away from him and send it up the chain of command, which is what would probably happen given that Miles is a 22-year-old lieutenant with no subordinates.

This gets increasingly difficult as the shenanigans heighten. A low-ranking, broke young ghem-lord takes a sort of half-assed interest in the Barrayaran oddities and plays a series of minor xenophobic pranks on them that are sometimes actual assassination attempts, which he doesn’t seem to be aware of. Ivan develops a reputation among the ghem-women while Miles does detective work and keeps causing minor diplomatic incidents by being in places he shouldn’t be. An Imperial servant is murdered and it is staged to look like a suicide, and Miles tries to gently direct the Cetagandan security officer in charge of the investigation to do actual investigating instead of wrapping it up quickly and quietly, which he is under significant pressure to do. This works because Miles, insufferably protagonist-y as he can be, is certainly not The Guy With the Only Brain Cell–in fact, in this particular book he seems to be surrounded mostly by very smart and competent people, except for Ivan and Lord Yenaro (and even they are competent at some things. Yenaro’s competency, unfortunately, is perfumery, not political intrigue).

Overall verdict is pretty in keeping with the rest of the Saga: a little tropey but a lot of fun.

My yearlong read for 2024 was a very fancy copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which I had never had to read in school, even during the three weeks when were trying to speed-learn Middle English (I think we might have looked real quick at the prologue, but that was it).

The Canterbury Tales is very serious foundational English literature, which is why there are copies of it with leather binding and gold-edged pages and ribbon bookmarks, and all the bells and whistles. But despite what I thought was a decent amount of familiarity with the idea that classics are usually classics because they are good and entertaining and the things that make stories good and entertaining is that they are usually at least a little bit funny and a little bit insane, I was still not quite prepared for how chaotic this work was. The individual tales vary wildly in tone and genre and content and, occasionally form–most of them are told in verse, but an apparently random handful are told in prose. They each have a prologue that connects them back to the frame story, introducing who will tell the next tale and chronicling the general bickering and nonsense between the pilgrims.

A possible alternate title for this work would be “Are The Straights Okay?: The Poem,” and I must say that from my vantage point the straights do not seem to be particularly okay. A bunch of the stories are basically dumb sitcom Boomer humor about how marriage is terrible and the opposite sex is out to get you and women are awful for not endlessly submissive to their shitty husbands, although there are also a number of stories about how the shitty husbands deserve to be humiliated for being shitty. Some of these are very funny, like The Miller’s Tale, in which a young wife and her affair partner (a student who boards with them) play a series of tricks on both the dimwitted husband and a random local who is also in love with the wife, which culminates in tricking the wannabe affair partner into kissing the actual affair partner’s butthole. But there are other times when the various characters on pilgrimage appear to be trying to earnestly dispense worldly wisdom about marriage and men and women and I’m not sure if their ideas about good marriages or bad marriages are more appalling. The prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale, which for some reason is like twice as long as the Tale itself, is simultaneously a full biography of the Wife’s marriages and completely incomprehensible. Reading it made me grimace so hard I almost got my face stuck like that.

Possibly one reason the straights are not okay is that they are all, regardless of their personal level of devotion, extremely Catholic. Catholicism permeates every word of this book, and not just the beliefs of Catholicism, but the omnipresence of the Church as the main institution in society. Catholicism is essentially hostile to both straight people and non-straight people, but differently. It also employed a huge number of people around the 1390s or whenever these poems were being written. Because it employed so many people, they could not all actually be pure of heart and godly of soul and ascetic of body and all that stuff good Catholics are supposed to be. This is great for the poem, and some of the funniest bits are about various clerically employed people who are bad at their jobs or who at least all hate each other. My favorite Tales in the book are the Friar’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale, which come one after the other, because the Friar and the Summoner hate each other’s guts. The Friar’s tale is about how summoners are all nosy, greedy douchebags who would frame their own mothers for crimes for a nickel, which has fun ACAB energy. The Summoner’s tale in return is about how friars are hypocritical layabouts and freeloaders whose supposed vows of poverty rake in too much free loot from people with real jobs, and involves a guy tricking a friar into letting him fart into his hand, and then some sort of weird riddle where they have to figure out how to apportion a fart into equal shares and distribute it to all the friars. But my absolute favorite part, and possibly the best single page of poetry in all of English literature, is the prologue to the Summoner’s tale, in which an angel transports a sleeping friar in a dream to Hell, and the friar is like “I don’t see any friars here, is that ‘cause we’re all so good and holy?” and the angel is like “No, they’re around,” and then it turns out that all the dead friars in Hell live inside Satan’s butthole. Hilarious! Very serious classic literature is all about farts and Satan’s butthole, don’t you know.

Another very funny part is The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, where a canon shows up like “I heard we’re telling stories” and his yeoman is like “COOL I HAVE A STORY it’s about a canon who is an alchemist and a FRAUD, all the alchemists are FRAUDS, here’s how they trick people into giving them money DON’T GIVE MY BOSS MONEY” and truly people are people at all times in history (this is, in all seriousness, the point of reading classic literature).

Tragically not all of the Tales are this funny. The worst offender unfortunately occurs right at the end, with The Parson’s Tale, which is not a poem nor even a tale, but merely a 50-page sermon on sin (spoiler: Catholics think basically everything is sin). It ends with Chaucer apologizing for everything he’s written and translated in his life that isn’t appropriately religious, including for writing the naughtier of The Canterbury Tales. This is a huge bummer of a note to end on. I am biased because I am an unrepentant Catholic apostate, but I do think that the literary tradition of the West would be significantly impoverished without that section of poetry about dead friars living in Satan’s butthole.

For a brief moment I was trying to plan a trip to Nantucket this month, before I had to concede defeat and realize that I had too much other stuff on my plate, including too much traveling, to squeeze it into this particular damp drizzly November of my soul and also the freakishly warm and drought-y November of the actual calendar. But before deciding to defer this trip I had already put a hold on Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which I had intended to be my ferry reading. Despite being tragically unable to read it on or while traveling to Nantucket, I had an absolutely great time reading this book, partly because I read much of it while taking time off work, and partly because it’s just that good.

The sinking of the Essex, a whaleship that sailed out of Nantucket in 1819, is now best known as being the real-life tragedy that inspired Herman Melville’s classic Moby-Dick, a book that I am, with the help of an enabling crew of terminally online boat gays, increasingly not normal about. In Moby-Dick the attack by the titular whale happens right at the end, and then Ishmael as the sole survivor is quickly picked up by another ship. So I was a bit surprised to find that that was not at all what happened with the Essex–most of the crew (or possibly the entire crew?) survived the initial sinking, and then most of them died over the next two months as the three whaleboats full of men wandered around the Pacific making bad decisions and eventually resorting to cannibalism, before they got close enough to the South American coast to be intercepted and rescued. (I probably shouldn’t have been surprised about a book about a shipwreck involving cannibalism, but I was, in part because my mother recommended the book to me and she does not usually go in for books full of fucked-up gross shit the way I do.)

Another difference between this book and Moby-Dick is that Moby-Dick is an extremely long book that takes me a long time to read (so far, four months for my first read and two years for my second), whereas In the Heart of the Sea clocks in at a tidy 250 pages or so and I ripped through it in like three days. If I didn’t have things to do in my life I could probably have read this in one sitting. It’s definitely a triumph of narrative nonfiction if speed of reading is any metric. It’s also really fun in how it engages with its source materials–the ship’s first mate, Owen Chase, wrote an account of his travails, which became a reasonably popular publication and which Melville read while out whaling in the Pacific. It turns out that the ship’s cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, also wrote a memoir about it, which nobody read or published for over a century, and which definitely challenges some of the things Chase wrote. Other accounts derived from interviews with the few other survivors, including the unlucky Captain Pollard, also exist, and I found it very interesting how each of these takes allocated responsibility for the various disasters and successes of the voyage.

Philbrick doesn’t shy away from discussing the more uncomfortable aspects of this trial, stressing that while it is a ripping good story and an impressive feat of not-capsizing-the-tiny-boats, it is not exactly a feel-good story of the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of adversity, either. A bunch of this adversity was self-inflicted due to plain old racist fearmongering about cannibals, and the pattern of deaths raise some uncomfortable questions about Nantucket clannishness vs. its self-congratulatory history as a bastion of Quaker abolitionism and therefore Definitely Not Racist. It’s not a story about heroes; it is for sure however a story about taking some guys and putting them in extreme situations, which is pretty much what I read boat books for. A+ boat book, a modern classic for a reason.

As I cannot go off to sea despite it being the damp drizzly November of the soul (actual November has been drought conditions), and as I could not for tourism-revenue-related purposes knock anybody’s hat off in the streets at any time in the past six weeks or so, I instead indulged my current boat mania by getting David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder to read on my writing retreat.

This book tells the tale of Her Majesty’s Ship the Wager, which sailed out of England as part of a fleet of ships on a secret mission to intercept a Spanish treasure galleon as part of the imperial misadventure hilariously named the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The hilarity pretty much ends there, though, since the War of Jenkins’ Ear was very stupid and turned out badly for pretty much everyone involved until it drew to an embarrassing stalemate after a couple of years. Some of the folks that it turned out badly for were the crews of the seven ships that sailed under the command of George Anson to try to nab this treasure galleon, which was sailing out of the Pacific side of South America. This meant that the fleet first had to get over there from the Atlantic side, a feat which at the time–this being the 1740s, before the construction of the Panama Canal and well before climate change reliably opened up the Northwest Passage to Arctic cruise ships and Stan Rogers fans–could only be accomplished by sailing around the bottom of South America, through the Cape Horn/Tierra del Fuego area, which are some of the roughest seas in the world.

Basically everything that could go wrong here went wrong, starting with delays in getting the ships up and running and a shortage of fit sailors with any experience at all. By the time they reached the Cape a bunch of guys had already died either of scurvy, accidents, or being really old guys who had been ignominiously hauled out of retirement. Two of the ships fell behind and turned back to the Atlantic; the rest pressed on, during which HMS the Wager–already on its second or third captain by this point–also fell behind, but pressed on. This did not go well for it, and it ended up stuck between two rocks right off a mountainous little blob of land now named Wager Island. Thus commenced several months of hardscrabble survivalism and nasty political infighting, in which the newly minted Captain Cheap tried his best to maintain order and imperial naval discipline, to little success. Fun interludes include a visit by some of the area’s nomadic natives, who helped out the half-dead sailors for a little bit until some of the more poorly behaved ones drove them off. Eventually some of the more resourceful mariners concocted a plan to enlarge a longboat until it was big enough that they could escape on it. This plan was received as enthusiastically as anyone could muster, but conflict arose again between the Captain, who wanted to try to sail west and complete the mission, and nearly everyone else, who wanted to head back to the Atlantic and try to rejoin civilization at the neutral Rio Grande. This situation eventually escalated into a full-blown mutiny, and the bulk of the sailors took the longboat and went east, leaving the Captain and a few loyalists on Wager Island, where they started building their own boat to go west in. This did not work and eventually they had to also be rescued by natives, who guided them up to mainland Chile where they were arrested by Spaniards and eventually sent back home. A third group of folks, who had left with the original bulk of mutineers and then stranded on a beach partway up Argentina, also eventually made their way home (or some of them did), where the various groups of people promptly got into an eighteenth-century flame war in the press, publishing various accounts of their journey and trying to convince the public that the other factions were to blame for various episodes embarrassing to imperial pride and the delusional self-image of the British as very nice gentlemen who are more civilized than everybody else. The Admiralty held a half-hearted court martial, in which it was determined that it wasn’t Captain Cheap’s fault that the ship was wrecked and then everyone was sent home to write more best-selling books about their versions of what happened.

David Grann tells this wild ride of a story with a lot of panache, writing with sympathy for all the humans involved and none at all for the imperial powers writ large, providing lots of vivid detail and excerpts from first-hand accounts by the handful of folks who carefully kept logbooks and diaries throughout the ordeal–including John Byron, teenage midshipman and grandfather of the future Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. There is some context/commentary about English imperialism which is pretty solid and provides some interesting framing about how and why these real-life “adventures” went down compared to the way the British public understood the romantic tales of sea life. As a landlubber who is sort of susceptible to the “romantic tales of sea adventures” drama and a certified grizzled male hardship enjoyer (thanks to whoever on Tumblr came up with that one), I always love that Bilbo Baggins “oh no, I loved reading about adventures but actually being on one sucks!” type of thing, because it makes me feel smart that I know I only like reading about adventures and have no desire to do actual death-defying shenanigans whatsoever. Anyway, these are excellently written and very thrilling death-defying shenanigans, in which death wins very frequently. I highly recommend it if it is a damp drizzly November in your soul too.

In lieu of spooky movies, this year’s Halloween viewing was the first season of AMC’s The Terror, a lightly supernatural, heavily researched historical fiction horror series about the lost Franklin expedition, in which the ships Terror and Erebus sailed into the Arctic circle in search of the fabled Northwest Passage and never re-emerged. This was a very big deal at the time and, as the wrecks of the ships were only discovered in 2014 and 2016, continues to be a fairly big deal in certain circles as grisly new pieces of evidence about the fate of expedition emerges, like the confirmation that they are Captain James Fitzjames’ face.

In light of my newfound interest in ill-fated polar expeditions, a friend lent me a copy of Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, with the essay “My Odd Shelf” bookmarked. “My Odd Shelf” is about Fadiman’s collection of polar exploration literature, which consists of 64 volumes. As a newbie to polar exploration, I found this short essay to be packed full of interesting new information about it, even though the purpose of the essay was more to explain the concept of the Odd Shelf. (I don’t know what my Odd Shelf is, actually; maybe several of my shelves are odd.) I also did find the concept of the Odd Shelf interesting, and Fadiman’s musings on hers, her husband’s, and various polar explorers’ Odd Shelves to be endearing. After reading this charming essay I decided to read the other ones.

These are very personal essays, and as such it must be said that it was abundantly clear to me that, despite our mutual bibliophilia, Fadiman and I are clearly very different people. In addition to the obvious stuff–she’s married, has children, is a couple of decades older than I am, and lives in a loft in Manhattan–we also have some stark differences in the particular flavor of Book People that we are. Fadiman and her family don’t seem to be big genre readers–apart from one offhand mention of her father’s collection of science fiction novels as “junk,” there are no mentions whatsoever of anything that could be classed as speculative fiction. In “The Joy of Sesquipidalians,” an essay about long, rare, and obsolete words, Fadiman lists grimoire alongside words like adapertile and apozemical as one she’d reached adulthood never hearing and that nobody else in her extremely erudite circle of professional word nerds had either. As someone whose entire social circle, even the less literarily inclined ones, consists of fantasy nerds and gamers, I found this very discordant. Who doesn’t know what a grimoire is? (Someone who’d rather read a Toyota Corolla user’s manual than learn that fantasy novels even exist, I suppose.) I don’t even remember where I did learn the term; it shows up in all sorts of goofy witch books for children I read when I was nine.

The Fadimans–all of them, apparently–are also the sorts of physically active readers who like to make annotations, dog-ear pages, and leave books open facedown on their bedside tables, and I am not. While I have spilled my fair share of tea on my fair share of pages, I like fancy leatherbound paperbacks and complete matching sets, and am increasingly only purchasing books if they will make a nice objet d’art on my shelves; otherwise, why pass up the two twenty-minute walks through historic downtown Salem that come with getting it from the library? (I also get the sense that Fadiman, being from an older and more financially stable generation, did not run the gauntlet of frequent apartment moves that marked my early adulthood, and has thus forced me to be more selective in the books that I have retained ownership of than I will ever be quite happy with. What on Earth possessed me to give away my Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles novels, honestly.)

That said, there was still much here that was indeed Relevant To My Interests. The urgency of buying very specific old books in secondhand shops, and the stark contrast with the commodified reliability of buying new books in normal bookstores, was very relatable to me, as a person who is trying to save space in her tiny condo and get more steps in by getting all her normal books from the public library like a responsible public-minded member of the community and not a greedy cave-dwelling book dragon. The essay on William Gladstone’s invention of rolling compact shelving, “The P.M.’s Empire of Books,” was also fascinating for just that reason. The essays on reading books in the places they were written or are about, and on eating while reading, both appealed to me as a similar type of atmospheric reader, although Fadiman does not render any opinion on reading books by seasonality, which is the kind of atmospherics I find myself indulging in the most (probably because I can’t afford to travel a lot to read all the books that take place outside New England).

Despite being a bit dated, and the wholesale snub to the existence of the fantasy genre, I did end up liking this book quite a lot, and made sure to photograph the list of sesquipidalians from that essay so I can make sure I commit them all (except grimoire, for which there is no need) to memory.

I didn’t know if I was going to make this week’s book club because I left the reading to the last minute, but I did in fact read Melissa V. Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.

The first thing that struck me about this book is that it was written in 2011 and, while the stereotypes she dissects are still around, the current/recent events she uses as case studies are much less current and recent. The last section of the book is about Michelle Obama’s public image, which was a bit of a trip down memory lane, since it’s been a few years since Michelle Obama was omnipresent in public life. It’s also striking at times how clear it is that this book was written and published shortly before the first Black Lives Matter wave; it would be impossible to write this book now without ever mentioning BLM. Other sections feel a bit less dated just because their impact seems more lasting; I don’t think about Hurricane Katrina every day but it was a really big deal and the fact that there have been other hugely devastating hurricanes since then (most notably Hurricane Helene earlier this month) makes it more important, not less, to properly analyze all the aspects of Katrina and its aftermath.

Another thing I really liked about this book is its total avoidance of polemic, zippy overstatement, or One-Weird-Trick-ery. Harris-Perry is very up front about the limitations of her research and addresses critiques about overfocus on feelings/vibes/personal psychology over materialist politics. She defends her subject both by arguing for the place of understanding people’s perceptions in political action and by matter-of-factly acknowledging that this is one book on one aspect of politics and there are other books on the other aspects of politics that are important. It’s a refreshing change from a lot of current events writing, which seems to always have to frame itself as THE book with THE answer on THE key factor to solving THE problem, and I think that is almost never true, honestly.

Structurally the book had a bit of a grab-bag nature to its case studies that some folks in book club said made it feel a little disjointed, and I think this is probably true, but the individual sections were all pretty interesting. The book walks us through the three main stereotypes about black women imposed by white society–the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the angry black woman–and also looks at the idea of the “strong black woman” and its function in both empowering and limiting both black women’s self-images and the way they relate to political action and expectation.

While the expectation of strength was probably the most analytically interesting of the stereotypes examined, the one I found myself having the strongest reaction to was the “Mammy,” partly because I was less familiar with it and partly due to the inclusion of some really fucked up tidbits like the campaign to put a national Mammy monument on the Mall in Washington DC, or the photograph of a truly hideous kitschy restaurant called Mammy’s wherein the restaurant bit is inside a big hoop skirt, like the cake part of one of those Barbie cakes that used to be a thing. It’s really ugly and weird. I promise there’s a whole lot of actual analysis of the Mammy stereotype and how it affects black women but those two little tidbits were just so starkly gross and weird.

Overall I found the book illuminating and we had a pretty good conversation about it, even if we did end up getting off-track several times.