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.
Roman Theater in Taormina
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.
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
The listing, which has since been removed, has been called ‘sexist’ and the ‘worst advert ever’ by online commenters
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.
Madness is better than defeat. Down the river is the light of reason.
(From Orson Welles’s screenplay for an unproduced adaptation of Heart of Darkness 1939)
I recently made two simultaneous discoveries. And they go together quite well. The first, after a recent trip to Iceland, is Víkingur Ólafsson, the Icelandic pianist, whose recently-released Mozart & Contemporaries breathes new life into, well, Mozart and his contemporaries. It goes well with the book that follows, so go ahead and push the play button below before proceeding. Go ahead, we’ll wait.
Is there any feeling a bibliophile loves more than looking for a book for (literally) years, finally finding it, only to find it exceeds your wildest expectations?
My book recommendation engine The Hawaii Project mentioned Madness is Better than Defeat by Ned Beauman to me when it was released back in 2017 because it knew I would like it (it’s good at that kind of thing). I put it on my TBR. A blurb:
A wild, astonishing literary thriller by arguably England’s most accomplished young writer, about Manhattan and Hollywood in the 1930s, Mayan gods, and a CIA operation gone terribly wrong–the Man Booker short-listed Ned Beauman’s magnum opus thus far.
Those of you who know my love of espionage books, and the works of Tim Powers, could guess this might appeal to me. Declare, and Last Call, especially – they are in the very small set of books I’ve ever given 5 stars too, back when I thought ratings and reviews were a useful thing to do. And this book has that same “smell”. It especially whiffs of Declare. But still, I’d been disappointed before, so I didn’t just order it. And strangely, it never made it to any of my local bookstores. (I know, I could look at it online; but it’s not the same). So, year after year, whenever I was in a bookstore, used bookstores especially, I would look for it along with other wayward books. Never found it.
Until yesterday.
Down in Raleigh, NC, visiting with people where I grew up, I wandered into Mr. Mike’s Used Bookstore. (No, not Magic Mike’s, although I might have made that joke to my wife…). There, along with a book about Caesar’s Legions, Caroline Alexander’s book about The Iliad, and a book about the science of music perception (thinking about doing a music startup/project…), there it was. The cover in all its Mayan glory.
My haul from Mr. Mike’s.
Well, I liked the cover quite a bit more than what I’d seen before. The fonts looked good. The book had a nice feel to it. Read the first page. It might as well have picked up where Indiana Jones left off – a warehouse full of mysterious objects and an investigation by a CIA officer. By page two, we’ve encountered rum aged in barrels made from coffin wood, which has magical properties:
This is how I know. During the failed Cuban War of Independence in 1868, a wealthy Spanish family called the Azpeteguias, who owned sugar plantations near the Valle de Vinales, were besieged inside their villa by their own farmers. They died of yellow fever, all sixteen of them, before they could be relieved by the army. It was decided to send the bodies to Havana for burial to ensure they wouldn’t be desecrated by the locals. But the farmers ambushed the caravan in the hills, prying open the coffins and tipping the bodies into the dust. In 1953, when I was still working for the agency in Cuba, I did a significant favor for a friend of mine in Pinar del Rio and afterward he gave me a bottle of rum that had been aged in a barrel made from staves of Azpeteguia coffin wood.
I have about twelve ounces left. It’s what’s called a diagnostic liquor. According to folk medicine, the long aftertaste is the most volatile fraction of the rum escaping out of your mouth as tinted vapor after it’s already washed through your guts. You taste yourself on it. There are some old bourbons with the same property…
I get that rare feeling. Of having taken one small wrong turn, and left the real world to enter a just-slightly-adjacent world that’s just as real, but not quite the same, where the same rules don’t apply.
OK. Sold. It goes into the pile to go home with me. ($4.99 btw).
Now, I’m on the plane and diving in.
Quickly, after learning about magic rum, one of our protagonists is dragged away from a large wager involving a longshoreman wrestling a live octopus in a diving tank, force-fed a nebulizing spray that instantly sobers him up, and taken to see his oh-so-rich father, who informs him he is to go to the Spanish Honduras to disassemble and bring home (!) a newly discovered Mayan ruin. (Which ruins our rum-drinking CIA hero claim have magical properties btw). Meanwhile a young aspiring filmmaker is taken to see a hermetic Howard Hughes like character who owns a film studio, was involved in a gondola crash that nearly killed him, and now lives in a spider’s nest of bell-laded cloths made from the Gondola to prevent anyone from sneaking up on him unawares. (Meanwhile, the Vikingur Olafsson’s Phantom-of-the-Opera-like music in the playlist above is playing in my headphones…). I feel like I’m watching an old black-and-white film with this soundtrack… Anyway our filmmaker is to go make a movie at the same Mayan temple. And a local newspaper editor is berating his young gossip writers for their lack of performance while a small Pomeranian barks at him to calm down (this scene is hysterical but I really cannot do it justice here), eventually deciding to send one of them along with the film crew to the Honduras.
By this time, I am valiantly and fruitlessly trying to stifle hysterical laughter, the tears are running down my face behind my COVID mask, my wife is shushing me and I’m starting to draw alarmed looks from my fellow passengers.
Then there is the young archaelogist who has stumbled into the middle of an orgy involving her archaelogist mentor who escaped from the Mayan jungle with, shall we say, a new outlook on life? And suggests she go to the Honduras in his stead?
And I’m only 40 pages in.
This is why I read.
I’m reading as slowly as possible because I know I’ve found magic, and that I’ll only be able to experience this magic once for the first time, and it might not last. Every other paragraph is a turn of phrase or sentence I want to highlight. The writing is outstanding, this is fantasy writing done by a Booker-nominated writer with a demented imagination. That transporting experience when you realize that for 2 hours you’ve been completely unaware of anything happening around you.
What books click for people is very personal; your mileage may vary (online reviews seem to adore this book or hate it or both, no middle ground here). But Madness is Better than Defeat starts as a virtuoso performance. Worth a read.
Outlaws. Horse Stealing. Rounding up a posse. Vigilante Justice. Feuds. Anti-heroes who walk tall, take no shit, give no fucks, and get into fights at the slightest insult.
The Wild West right?
Nope.
Meet Grettir, the 10th century “hero” of the Icelandic Grettir’s Saga. Outlawed, twice, first for killing the man in a fight over a perhaps-stolen food bag, second accidentally burning down a house with 12 people in it. Along the way, he tears the arm off of a troll invading a hall, and dives to a cave under a waterfall and kills another one (Beowulf, anyone?). His biggest battle is killing Glam, an Icelandic zombie (draugr, in Old Norse) who is haunting a farm. Grettir is larger than life, both in reputation as well as physical size. His life ends when (spoiler alert) he’s living on the Island fortress of Drangey, gets a witchcraft-infected wound, and is then overcome by his enemies and killed.
I’ve been reading Grettir in advance of an upcoming trip to Iceland. I was curious about Grettir as the hero of the saga, as he’s not an entirely sympathetic character (that’s Icelandic understatement). As a child he kills the geese his father make him take care of, partially flayed the horse his father made him take care of, and badly scratched his father’s back with a rake when his father made him scratch his back. Yet, he is somewhat of a national hero in Iceland, it’s said that more place names in Iceland are named after him than any other saga character.
Looking around for analogs, I was thinking about the outlaws of the Wild West, like, say, Billy the Kid. His first arrest at age 16 was for stealing food, an odd parallel to Grettir’s first killing over a food bag. Before the Kid had turned 21, he’d killed eight people. In contrast to Grettir, the Kid traveled in a pack, joining a posse called the Regulators nominally tasked with a executing a kind of “civilian” justice (oh the irony). (By the way, the word regulated in those days meant something more like well-functioning, in good working order or well-managed, rather than “controlled by government regulations”, 2nd Amendment students take note). Caught and convicted for murder by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the Kid escaped jail, and went on the run. Tracked down by Garrett, the Kid was killed near Fort Sumner, NM.
Here’s where it gets weird. I’ve been experimenting with a location-based history app – one that will tell you the history of a particular location and places of interest near you. Randomly, looking for historical data, this page popped up: https://www.historynet.com/the-man-who-invented-billy-the-kid-book-review.htm. It’s an article about (this is gonna get a little meta), the man who wrote the biography of the person who was the ghost-writer for Pat Garrett’s biography of Billy the Kid. That person was Ash Upson. From the article:
Ash wrote that Garrett, “in addition to being long-headed…is likewise long-legged, his full height being somewhat under 10 feet.” In the previous decade Upson claimed to have met young Henry Antrim (the future William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid) at the Silver City boardinghouse run by the boy’s mother, Catherine Antrim. That might not be true, but the author confirms Upson “did meet Bonney in Roswell, the small hamlet which Ash had a hand in protecting during the Lincoln County War.”
OK, so Garrett was apparently also Grettir-sized, but that’s not the fun part. Roswell? Roswell NM? Where a UFO crashed in 1947? Yep. 66 years almost to the day after the Kid’s death, a weather balloon UFO will crash in Roswell[1]. The aliens came for Billy the Kid, we just never knew. Henry McCarty, aka Billy the Kid, is buried in Old Fort Sumner Cemetery.
Grettir? Well, after his death his killers cut off his head for proof (to get the reward), and took it back to the Althing ( the Icelandic parliament ) to claim their reward. Incensed at the disrespect of cutting off Grettir’s head, and the use of witchcraft to kill him, the Althing in turn outlawed Hook, Grettir’s killer (Grettir would eventually be avenged by his kinsman Thorstein Galleon, who killed Hook in Constantinople).
Grettir was buried twice, once in Reykjastrang, then when the church was moved, he was buried in his hometown of Bjarg (legendary location here).
I am always fascinated by the paths to discovery, the chance happening onto something you didn’t know existed yet always wanted. It’s been a thread, without my really realizing it, of much of my career, from leading the team building the Endeca discovery engine, to the goby “things to do” discovery app, to The Hawaii Project, a book discovery engine, and to an as-yet-unnamed music discovery system I have been building in my head.
Yesterday’s discovery path was sufficiently amusing I thought I’d write it down.
I have a thing for cocktails. And books. And cocktail books :). I have a cocktail book running around in my head I want to write some day, so I’m periodically surfing the web looking at or for interesting cocktail recipes. I was looking for a recipe for homemade Grenadine (pomegranate juice and sugar, basically) and stumbled upon the following article.
Drink like Hemmingway with his most intriguing cocktail invention: the Death in the Afternoon Cocktail.
Amongst other interesting tidbits, I found this interesting cocktail:
Journalist, explorer, occultist, and infrequent cannibal William Seabrook created the Asylum, consisting of one part gin, one part Pernod, and a dash of grenadine (poured over ice, but not shaken). He said it would “look like rosy dawn, taste like the milk of Paradise, and make you plenty crazy.”
Wait what? sometime-cannibal? WTF? I had to go read more about this person. (yes, I made this Homeric-sounding cocktail, and…one ounce of Pernod is A LOT. VERY anise flavored. The things we do in the name of science….Interesting cocktail, not an everyday drink, but interesting. )
So, a quick glimpse at Seabrook on Wikipedia yields a very intriguing character. Turns out he was a writer and occultist, a friend of the well-known Aleister Crowley. And yes, a sometime-cannibal. With an apparent penchant for bondage.
William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 — September 20, 1945) was an American occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist, born in Westminster, Maryland.
and
…In the 1920s, Seabrook traveled to West Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook writes about his experience of cannibalism in his novel Jungle Ways; however, later on Seabrook admits the tribe did not allow him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself.
His book The Magic Island, based on his travels in Haiti, is credited with the introduction of the “zombie” to popular culture (the undead creature, not the cocktail!).
Later in life, he committed himself to an institution for the treatment of severe alcoholism, and wrote a book about his experience called (you guessed it) Asylum, whence the name of his cocktail.
And then I found the real nugget: “In Air Adventure he describes a trip on board a Farman with captain Renè Wauthier, a famed pilot, and Marjorie Muir Worthington, from Paris to Timbuktu, where he went to collect a mass of documents from Father Yacouba, a defrocked monk who had an extensive collection of rare documents about the obscure city at that time administered by the French as part of French Sudan. The book is replete with information about French colonial life in the Sahara and pilots in particular.”
Now, one of the best books I’ve ever read is Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, simultaneously a philosophical exploration as well as an exciting adventure story, describing his flight through the Sahara, his eventual crash and escape. So Air Adventure is ringing some bells…I track down a copy of Air Adventure. Here’s the opening paragraph:
It was only when the sandstorm rose up from the Great Sahara, ripped us down out of the pretty sky, and taught us that it could make skeletons out of airplanes as easily as camels, that we really began to get acquainted with the desert, or to take it or ourselves seriously.
Pretty promising. And such a strange path to discovery, of a book I should have known existed! Air Adventure was published in 1933; Wind Sand and Stars in 1939, so Seabrook pre-dates Saint-Exupéry, but cannot find any evidence they knew of each other.
In 1945, Seabrook died by suicide — an overdose of sleeping pills. Maybe I won’t be making more of those Asylums after all.
Pretty much since high school, I’ve had what W. H. Auden called “The Northern Thing”, a fascination with Vikings, Scandinavia, and their conflicting views on Fate (everything is predetermined) and Free Will (you must fight to death, and never give up, even as your fate is predetermined) (and do see Auden’s translation of the Elder Edda mentioned below!).
I’m not sure precisely where it started, but it was somewhere at the intersection of Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons, and the teenage male fascination with death and destruction. That led to a college flirtation with becoming a medieval studies major (I read Old Norse and Old English for a brief time), before succumbing eventually (and probably for the better) to Mathematics and Computer Graphics.
This year I had a chance to travel to Iceland, the land of Fire and Ice, and the home of the medieval sagas I loved even as a teenager (ok I was kinda “not like the other kids”). Iceland also happens to be the home of Jolabokaflod, the “Yule Book Flood”, the tradition of giving books as gifts for Christmas. My kind of holiday (read about my trip here).
In preparation for my trip, I wanted to re-read some of my old favorites, as well as a new books that would give me context and re-kindle my interests in all things Norse. Myths, Sagas and some recent fiction, here’s what I read, plus a few promising books I found while I was there.
The Myths.
Snorri Sturluson is largely responsible for much of what we today think of as Norse mythology. Blond Valkyries carrying the fallen in battle to Valhalla, the one-eyed Odin and Thor’s Hammer. Sturluson wrote three of the northern world’s medieval masterpieces, the Prose (younger) Edda, the Heimskringla (the history of the Kings of Norway), and Egill’s Saga (one of the classic Icelandic sagas). (btw Egill was quite the asshole, see this hilarious recap on the Grapevine, a great Icelandic website). The Prose Edda is not to be confused with the Elder Edda, which, for maximal confusion, was NOT written by Sturluson. The Prose Edda, originally written as a treatise on poetry-writing (and to gain favor with a young King Hakon of Norway), is one of the main sources for much of what we know of Viking mythology, containing tales of Odin, Thor, Loki, and other gods.
Now, Sturluson, in addition to being a writer, was, as we might say today, an “operator”. Cunning, powerful, legalistic, and always looking out for himself. As you can imagine he did not come to a good end. All of this and more is captured in Nancy Marie Brown’s masterful Song of the Vikings, which tells Snorri’s tale alongside the Norse tales he captured (or created, your call).
We think of Norse mythology as ancient and anonymous. But in fact, most of the stories we know about Odin, Thor, Loki, and the other gods of Scandinavia were written by the 13th-century Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson. Notice I said “written” and not “written down.”
The Elder Edda (not written by Snorri) contains a collection of mythical writings from old Norse mythology. My favorite is the Havamal, (“the sayings of the High One”), purported to be the pithy sayings of Odin. This is the home of cheery thoughts such as
“Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”
(In case you are wondering about that “burnt” bit, legend has it that the Vikings chieftains sometimes had their wives burned/buried/cremated along with them).
The Sagas
The sagas are the treasure of Icelandic literature. Written in the middle ages, most of the anonymously, they vary from mythological adventure stories to quasi-historical extended family sagas, and are sometimes referred to as the first prose (non-poetic) novels. Here’s a few of my favorites I (re-)read:
Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. A retelling/reconstruction by Poul Anderson. This is a classic grim Viking tale, “brothers to the death”, “defiance in the face of fate”, “blood & treasure” mythological saga. A bit hard to find these days, but look a bit online for a used copy. (And if you love this, go for Anderson’s The Broken Sword right afterwards).
Njal’s Saga is essentially Iceland’s Iliad. It tells the story of a spiraling series of conflicts that result in fifty year blood feud between Njal and various of his enemies. Like the Iliad, Njal’s saga can be quite gory (including Njal’s family being burnt alive in their house), and is something of a meditation on vengeance and its effects. It also offers insight into medieval Iceland’s byzantine legal system (one of the world’s first), and the workings of the Althing, the world’s first parliament, which occurred annually at Thingvellir, which we visited.
Grettir’s Saga. One of the last of the great Icelandic sagas. Grettir’s Saga is a mix of the historical (Grettir’s father escapes from Harald Fairhair, the King of Denmark), to the mythological/fantastic: Grettir’s doom is set when he fights the draugr (an undead zombie) Glam, who, as Grettir is killing him, curses Grettir to become unlucky and weak, which leads to his eventually becoming an outlaw, and to his death. Grettir’s saga has striking parallels with Beowulf, with Glam standing in for Grendel. Good fun, if you like that sort of thing.
Sometimes reading the old stuff can be a bit of a grind. So I mixed in some modern stuff, some of it with an historical/saga angle, some not.
One of Iceland’s more famous authors is Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I read her Last Rituals, wherein a young German student with a dark interest in the Icelandic sagas and magic is found murdered, with strange symbols carved into him. A procedural murder mystery, I enjoyed it but found myself wanting a bit more depth in characters and in Icelandic backstory. Still I was reading in translation so some of that may be the translation. In this vein, but more enjoyable for me, was:
Where the Shadows Lie by Michael Ridpath. Boston, Iceland, Tolkien…pretty much hits all my highlights. A fun Icelandic romp. A Boston detective with Icelandic heritage heads to Iceland and ends up investigating a murder involving J.R.R. Tolkien and a lost Icelandic saga. My kind of book…
Also in a similar vein, although I did not get to it (yet!) is The Flatey Enigma by Arnar Ingolfsson.
Lastly I read some modern Icelandic fiction, without the saga backdrop. Sjón might be Iceland’s most famous writer, both for his works and for his collaborations with Björk. The Blue Fox is poetical fairy tale about a Reverend hunting a blue fox, intermixed in a tantalizing way with the story of an abandoned child, apparently with Down’s Syndrome. Lyrical, bleak and mysterious, it’s also a quick read.
Likely Iceland’s most commercially successful novelist is Arnaldur Indriðason, author of the Inspector Erlendur series, the first of which is Jar City. I re-read Silence of the Grave, the 2nd in the series – a brutal, yet fascinating mystery. It explores domestic violence, the tension between countryside and city Icelanders, between Icelanders and the British & Americans, and drugs and the dark side of Reykjavik. Of particular interest to me was the exploration of the post-WWII presence of the Americans and the tensions and grievances it created. (As an aside, and not meant as any insult, but Iceland is perhaps the most “Americanized” of the European countries I have been to, and I got a sense for how that might have happened from this book).
Books I found
Books are a big part of Icelandic culture (they are one of the most literate countries). And they have some great bookstores….and yet… books are $%!@ expensive in Iceland. A small paperback usually runs about $26! So, haunting a few bookstores, I found some really interesting books….that I decided to get when I was back in the states. :).
Smile of the Wolf looks really interesting. Essentially a modern fiction novel wrapped in the skin of a medieval Icelandic saga. Fish Have No Feet, from Booker International nominated Jon Kalman Steffanson, offers a unique insight into modern Iceland and the ways in which it has been shaped by outside influences. If you want some dark humor and Icelandic slacker culture in a modern setting, try 101 Reykjavik (the name of this book, as well as the main area of Reykjavik, as well as a movie made from the book). Be warned: it sounds like it’s not for everyone.
But Iceland is! Everyone seems to speak English there, so (assuming you speak English), it’s an easy place to visit, and it has a rich literary history as well as a rich actual history. Enjoy!
(P.S. In between starting and finishing this post, I read the first few chapters of Smile of the Wolf. Wow. If anything I wrote here sounds interesting to you, start with Smile of the Wolf. Bracing like a shot of the “Black Death” the Icelanders are found of drinking.)
