In desperate attempt to get Google to index some of my favorite pages about Richard the Lionheart from my Substack, I am including many of the links here.
Let us pray.
(Did you know we’ve made digital editions of some of the contemporary histories of Richard available at a nominal cost? You can find a listing here. A tale about pickpockets!
And more!
I have been, for reasons I will leave to the side for the moment, researching the mythical background of Sicily, which I visited last year. Of particular note, my traveling companions and I spent a lovely day in Taormina, an ancient city on a ridge, south of Messina. Absolutely stunning place, home to a beautiful medieval town and a striking Roman amphitheater.
Sicily has any number of interesting ancient myths attached to it. Scylla and Charybdis of Odysseus fame, the Fata Morgana (a nautical mirage in the Strait of Messina, named after Morgana of King Arthur fame), Mount Etna and the Forge of Hephaestus, Odysseus and the Cyclops, and more. As I researched, I learned that, at least in Sicilian legend, Sicily became the home of Dionysus, the god of wine, revelry, religious ecstasy, lavish festival orgies, Bacchanalia, and all that.
Dionysus? Sicily? Sounds off. He’s Greek, right? So I decided to research a bit.
A quick google of “Dionysus sicily” does not produce anything definitive (for maximal confusion, one of the early rulers of Sicily was Dionisius, a completely different fellow). It does, however, produce this: http://whitealmond-privatesicily.blogspot.com/2016/07/villa-dionysus-taormina.html
From this, I learn a few interesting things: Taormina has been a destination resort for literary types since ancient times. Cicero, Aeschylus, and others. Goethe, Guy de Maupassant. Slightly more recently, DH Lawrence came here, and reportedly wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover here, inspired by a true life love affair between an English lady expat and a local Sicilian gardener. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra here. The canonical cover, left, takes on new meaning for me knowing it was written in Taormina.
I also learned that there is a lovely B&B called Villa Dionysus (“Dionysio”), run by the host “Eros”. Ahem. We then learn that Eros is “professional novelist, analytical psychologist and adventurer who’s [sic] main themes are erotic philosophy, sensuosity [sic], the psychology of Carl Jung (a Swiss psychologist) and the philosophy of the early Athenian hedonists.” Double Ahem. And that he has a charming female assistant. Triple Ahem. Definitely moved on to throat clearing now.
How could I have missed this place when we came? And who is this Eros character, and are his books any good? Googling the villa itself to learn more about Eros came to naught. So I went to work finding the fellow himself. After about 15 minutes of Googling, I came upon this: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/lonely-hearts-job-advert-seeking-6626254
From which we learn: Eros is Eros de Grey, a nom de plume, and he’s apparently written a job advertisement for a Literary Assistant (“Miss Moneypenny cum Bree van de Kamp cum Archetypal Muse cum Lara Croft” sheesh), according to the ad. Well then. And apparently this ad has gone viral and is widely mocked as “the worst job ad ever.” It does, of course, read much more like a bad Tinder profile than a job ad. Still, he has an assistant named Emily, so something worked.
Mr. Grey is apparently actually “Stratos Malamatinas, who last made headlines as one of the directors of a company selling essays to university students.” HAHAHAHAHA of course he is.
None of Mr. Grey’s porn novels appear to have been published as near as we can determine, so the quality of his “erotic philosophy” are yet to be judged.
Still, it might be a fun place to stay.
Dionysus indeed.
Haven’t written here in awhile, been busy with Richard the Lionheart over on my medieval blog, here: https://medieval.substack.com. But I just finished reading Brave New World, the first time since high school, and thought I’d post a few thoughts.
As a dystopia, BNW provided plenty of food for thought. Drugs and sex and infinite distraction as the defining characteristics of how people are controlled. The echoes of today’s modern society are hard to miss. The presence of science as a driving force in society is pretty overpowering. The invention or Huxley’s near-invention of soma, helicopters, sex-hormone drugs, and other science seem ahead of their time.
The erasure of mother, father, family seem to lead to a well-behaved, polite society. Which is, on reflection, a bit odd, as the last 50 years or so would suggest the breakdown of the family seems to trend to the reverse. I suppose with enough soma everyone becomes well-behaved.
I found the intensive Shakespeare quotations and allusions interesting for a time, although it seemed a bit much by the end.
There is an old saw about civilized vs. savage people, that a savage man has a much easier time acting civilized, than a civilized man has in being savage. That might be from Tarzan, or perhaps Rousseau, or somewhere else, I can’t remember? Anyway, spoiler, that proves not to be the case here. And while I found John’s ending to be tragic, as an ending to a novel I wasn’t completely convinced. I could certainly imagine him remorseful; suicidal seems a stretch.
Perhaps it is because of my own preoccupations with the negative influence of media on our lives, and the dual and troubling issues of media censorship (left and right both!) and surveillance capitalism, I find 1984 a far more compelling and frightening novel, as a novel, than BNW, and a more disturbing dystopia. I think I am in the minority compared to most public review/criticism, which seems to favor BNW as the better book. But to my mind, BNF suffers from having little narrative tension throughout most of the book (nothing bad happens to anyone for nearly 3/4 of the book), a weirdly-shifting view of who the protagonist is, and an over-focus on society itself, rather than the characters being impacted. 1984 was grim and ominous from the beginning and I turned almost every page waiting for something evil to happen, and was often not disappointed. In contrast BNW felt more like an amusement park ride, a bit light-hearted even, until the last few pages. Interestingly, while 1984 focused quite a bit on the control of information, BNW did not focus on equivalents of the media much at all, except to mention that books were forbidden and history not taught.
Not to mention Huxley’s apparent fixation with the word “pneumatic”, which occurs no less than 15 times. 🙂 And the threat of getting sent to Iceland – I would take that punishment in a heartbeat!
Still I am glad I re-acquainted myself with it, had not read since high school. It’s good to be reminded not to drug ourselves, or let someone else do it to us!
By the way. There’s a TV show. Link.
Have started exploring the world of Richard the Lionheart and the third crusade. Follow along, I’ll be posting here:
Hot on the heels of being featured by Google (huzzah!), we’re excited to announce our new app TBR.
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Happy reading!
