The History Blog

Check out this neat article about the flurry of recent books about the decline and fall of Rome.

It’s by Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of a great decline book of his own, that was the source of the greatest list of all time. His experience gives him an interesting insider’s perspective on what publishers are up to (ie, trying to sell books, of course).

For example, on the left is the cover art he wanted, on the right is the cover art he got:

In the great battle of meditative vs. lurid, lurid wins hands down. (Not that I’m hating, mind you. I dig them both.)

Anyway, the books Perkins profiles offer a variety of theories for the fall, but he thinks they all cluster around a central anxiety.

But it is hard not to conclude that a widespread anxiety over a modern “decline of the West” underlies the presence of all these books on the disintegration of the Roman empire, and of a reading public prepared to buy them. It is certainly very striking that so many books have recently appeared on the dissolution of Rome’s power, and so very few chart its rise and apogee. Europeans, and their descendents the North Americans, have had it very good for four or five centuries, thanks to their dominance (military, political, economic, cultural, even religious) over the globe. Romans had it very good for about the same number of centuries. Then things got a lot more “complicated” for the Romans. Are we in the modern West headed in the same direction?

Most of the six books make explicit and/or implicit analogies between the Roman then and our modern now. James O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire takes a particularly intriguing stance.

His takes is that Eastern Emperor Justinian ruined things for everyone when he invaded Italy and defeated the Ostrogoths who had established a fairly serviceable kingdom after killing the last emperor and sacking the place. From O’Donnell’s perspective, the barbarian Ostrogoths were trying preserve Roman civilization, and Justinian was an impulsive militarist who didn’t think through the long-term consequences of his bellicosity.

Sound like anyone we know?

It’s called The Capture Of Cerberus. Christie wrote it in 1939, thinking it would be part of her Labours of Hercules short story series in Strand magazine.

Publishers turned it down, probably because there’s a rather unfortunate German dictator in there and Poirot has to solve the mystery of who shot him.

The Capture Of Cerberus (she wrote a completely different short story with the same title in 1947) revolves around a dictator called August Hertzlein, who is clearly Adolf Hitler.

In the course of the plot, Christie expresses the naive hope that Hitler could have been converted to Christianity and begun preaching love and peace.

There really were people in the Thirties who believed this. One of them was Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford Group, a hugely influential movement which has gone under various titles, including Moral Rearmament and Festival Of Light.

The story was found in her longhand notebooks by John Curran, a Christie enthusiast and author in his own right.

You can read the Hertzlein excerpt in the Daily Mail. (It begins about abruptly with a bold paragraph about a quarter of the page down.) The short story will be serialized in subsequent Saturday editions.

The whole of Cerberus and The Mystery of the Dog’s Ball, another unpublished story Curran found in Christie’s attic, will be published along with her notebooks in Curran’s latest book.

Incidentally, don’t believe the Mail’s gloss that Poirot’s ever so mild expressions of horniness might have scared off the publishers. His attraction to flamboyant redheads of dubious morality — the Countess Vera Rosakoff in particular — is a recurring theme in Poirot stories.

Forbes magazine is promoting a book Steve Forbes and some other guy wrote about the commonalities between leaders in the ancient world and leaders today. I know, I know… Dorky and vainglorious, I’m sure. It’s not on my Amazon wishlist, suffice it to say.

However, in the process of promoting it they’ve interviewed some luminaries from various fields asking them what effect the ancients have had on them. Now that’s good reading. (Scroll down to the list of “Leaders on the Classics” to read the interviews.)

From author Rita Mae Brown:

Tell us about a time when lessons learned from the ancients contributed to your success.

There hasn’t been a day in my life since I started Latin in ninth grade that I haven’t benefited by the lives of the ancients. Yesterday Seneca contributed to my success. I’d cut my leg and didn’t much feel like going to work. Seneca wrote, “Scorn pain, either it goes away or you do.” I went to work.

Greeks or Romans?

All those years when I stood alone, the example of Horatio at the bridge pulled me through. The nod goes to the Romans.

Rita’s a girl after my own heart.

From Teller, of Penn & Teller (yes, he does speak):

Tell us about a time when lessons learned from the ancients contributed to your success.

I make my living humbly, doing live shows. Western theater hasn’t changed very much since the Greeks invented it. It’s still very primitive: A bunch of people watch some other people tell stories. So when I first read Aristotle’s Poetics in college–especially his very nuts-and-bolts dissection of what makes a sound plot rich in ironic surprises–this changed everything I subsequently did. I often laugh that would-be writers spend a fortune on specious screenwriting seminars when they could get the real goods from Aristotle with a quick Web search.

That’s the book The Venerable Jorge poisoned in The Name of the Rose to keep people safe from he sin of laughter, so you know it has to be good.

Over 9,000 actually, ranging from medieval treatises to first editions of 20th century novels. Library officials think they’re just lost in the stacks, not stolen or removed from the premises.

One item, an essay entitled Of the Lawful and Unlawful Usurie Amongest Christians, by 16th-century German theologian Wolfgang Musculus, is valued by the library at £20,000, and has not been seen for almost two years. Others are precious only to a specialist market, such as a set of tables of 1930s London cab fares, or the 1925 souvenir history of Portsmouth Football Club.

Although the library has not listed any value for thousands of the books, a quick Guardian tot-up of the market price of nine collectible volumes came to well over £3,000 – including £1,300 for a first edition of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891, missing from the library’s shelves since 1961. [...]

Most of the losses are 19th and 20th century texts, including first editions of novels by Charles Dickens and John Updike, although many older books have also vanished, including a 1555 edition of 12th-century Jewish scholar Moses ben Maimon’s Letter on Astrology, missing since 1977, and a 17th-century guide to Rome.

Many of the books turned up missing in and around 1998, the year the library moved from the British Museum to St Pancras, so it’s very possible they were put on the wrong shelves in the confusion of the move.

Still, some of these have been missing for decades. You can declare a missing person dead after 7 years. How long before they admit that the first edition of Dorian Gray is gone for good?

Jane Austen was a great writer, sure, but I think we can all agree there was a severe paucity of zombies in her oeuvre.

Now, thanks to Quirk Books and author Seth Grahame-Smith, this historic injustice will finally be redressed.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.

The edition will also include zombified illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock, the illustrator of Austen’s original editions.

Yes, of course I have pre-ordered it. And now so will you, don’t deny it.

There’s a neat article in the Guardian with wonderful pictures and descriptions of the rooms in which some well-known British writers past and present have put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard).

Roald Dahl’s raggedy little shack brought a tear to my eye, because on the walls you can see letters from schools and fans that he saved for years. I sent him a letter when I was in 5th grade and got the most wonderful personal reply from him. The 5th grade students the year after wrote him when the teacher was reading “The Witches”, and he answered them too.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm’s room is another favorite of mine. It’s layered in books and papers, and Hobsbawm’s description is endearing as hell.

Some of the shelves visible on the picture behind the two desks contain books on subjects I still work on: nationalism, the history of banditry. Most of them, however, are filled with the foreign editions of my books. Their numbers amaze and please me and they still keep coming as new titles are translated and some fresh vernacular markets – Hindi, Vietnamese – open up. As I can’t read most of them, they serve no purpose other than as a bibliographic record and, in moments of discouragement, as a reminder that an old cosmopolitan has not entirely failed in 50 years of trying to communicate history to the world’s readers. And as an encouragement to go on while I still can.

For that price I’d expect it to have been a newly discovered Michelangelo original, or at least personally written by the reanimated corpse of Michelangelo himself, but no, it’s just a coffee table book about his work. And it doesn’t even have color pictures!

Using the high standards of the privately published books in the 19th century — an ideal known as the “book beautiful” — as a starting point, FMR sought expert artisans from various fields to create something Ms. Ferrari described as “a work of art in itself.”

Aurelio Amendola’s black-and-white photographs were printed on paper made exclusively for the project. There are detachable reproductions of Michelangelo drawings on handmade folios created according to centuries-old traditions. And then there’s the cover: a scale reproduction in marble of the “Madonna della Scala” (“Madonna of the Steps”), a bas-relief of the Virgin and Child sculptured by Michelangelo when he was still in his teens. The original is housed in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.

It took two white-gloved attendants to lug around the 46.2-pound book at its City Hall debut.

The dimensions (45×70, 5×8 cm) are inspired by a Fibonacci sequence whose first and final terms approach the golden ratio. The publishers were going for that full-on ancient harmony in the visual arts thing.

There are only 99 copies in the first limited edition, and since it takes 6 months to make one of these books, so you can’t run out and buy me a copy. Better plan ahead for my birthday instead.

You can find more details (in Italian) and film of the book itself on the publishers’ site.

Yasukazu Minagaki was an early 19th c. physician who made amazingly detailed and realistic anatomical paintings of executed criminals he had dissected.

Unlike his Western colleagues, Minagaki didn’t truck with no idealized Vitruvian forms. He was paintbrush-deep in the gruesome reality of decapitated bodies.

The Kaibo Sonshinzu is a collection of color anatomical drawings on two scrolls by Minagaki Yasukazu, a doctor of the late Edo Period. The collection was intended to cover inadequacies in the results of dissections conducted by Koishi Genshun, a doctor from Kyoto. Taking the Western-style anatomies of the German doctor Johann Adam Kulmus and others that appeared in Anatomische Tabellen as a reference, the collection is significant in that it includes illustrations by the doctor himself based on observations of individual organs from more than 40 bodies. Containing 83 illustrations, it is said to be the best collection of anatomical drawings by a Japanese hand from the early 19th Century.

I’d say it’s one of the best collections of anatomical drawings by any hand from pretty much any century.

For more anatomical drawings from the Kaibo Sonshinzu scrolls, see here and here.

One of my favorite authors, Ursula K. LeGuin, has written a book about my favorite subject: Ancient Rome.

It’s called “Lavinia”, and the eponymous heroine is the legendary daughter of Latinus, King of the Latins, and the wife of Aeneas, hero of Troy, son of Venus and progenitor of the Julian clan. (For a quick and dirty rundown of the period, check out the remaining fragments of Appian’s History of Early Rome.)

It’s no garden variety historical novel, though. For one thing, Lavinia has some understanding that she might actually be fiction, a creation of the poet Virgil whose shade she encounters in a sacred grove.

For another thing:

Lavinia makes for an unlikely heroine, which is just what Le Guin likes about her. From Mulan to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sassy, kick-ass girls are preferred nowadays to circumspect homebodies like Virgil’s Latin princess. There may even be a touch of self-reproach in Le Guin’s choice of Lavinia as her main character, since the heroine of her 1971 novel, “The Tombs of Atuan,” is a priestess named Tenar who rebels against a life entirely devoted to serving a pantheon of nameless, implacable gods. Lavinia, by contrast, embraces the ritual aspect of her designated role, all the humble and solemn daily sacrifices, the scattering of sacred salt, the tending of clan totems, and even her own fate, as a woman destined to have little choice in who her husband will be.

To be fair, the Tombs of Atuan aren’t anywhere near as appealing a childhood home as the bucolic hills of central Italy, and Lavinia wasn’t snatched from her parents as a wee sprog to be raised by servile eunuchs and cold priestesses.

Amazon tells me I’ll have “Lavinia” by Tuesday. A book report will ensue.

Fair warning: this is going to be a long, long entry.

My homey Illusory Tenant introduced me to the Futurists a hundred years and four discussion boards ago. Among his many talents, IT is immensely knowledgeable about music, and Futurism played a raucously innovative role in early 20th century music.

Futurism celebrated the speed, force, and aggressive advancement of technology. Anything traditional, melodic, respectful of the past was anathema. From Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto of Futurism:

Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?

(Poor Marinetti would leap out of his grave beat me senseless if he knew he and his movement would be lovingly featured in this obsequiously backward-looking digital cemetery.)

But what inspired this entry is that I just found out that Futurism didn’t limit itself to art and politics. Oh no. Marinetti wrote a cookbook, and what a cookbook it is.

It commands a dramatic combination of flavors, textures and scents, all of them not so much a meal as an experience, to put it mildly. Chemistry is king — eat your derivative hearts out, molecular gastronomists — and the meal itself is performance art as well as nutritional patriotism.

Needless to say, pasta gets the same treatment as museums. From the 1930 Manifesto of Futurist Cooking:

It may be that a diet of cod, roast beef and steamed pudding is beneficial to the English, cold cuts and cheese to the Dutch and sauerkraut, smoked [salt] pork and sausage to the Germans, but pasta is not beneficial to the Italians. For example it is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental scepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.

It’s like looking in a mirror, man.

Unfortunately, the following picture of Marinetti made the press right about that time, slightly undercutting the power of his patriotic appeal:

Marinetti claimed in the later Cookbook that this picture was a montage spread by the foes of Futurism to discredit him, the 1930′s equivalent of “That’s not me!!!1!1 My enemies Photoshopped my head on that naked, prone body slathered in Crisco and axle grease.”

The manifesto only listed 4 specific recipes: Alaskan Salmon in the rays of the sun with Mars sauce, Woodcock Mount Rosa with Venus sauce, a sculpted meat cylinder, and the non-meat sculpture Equator + North Pole.

Marinetti was big on the sculpted meat. In fact, the rallying cry of Futurist cookery was “Pasta is dead. Long live sculpted meat!”

In 1931, the manifesto was made (sculpted) flesh in the form of the one and only Futurist restaurant: The Tavern of the Holy Palate in Turin.

Decorated in aluminum, The Holy Palate served Futurist delicacies against a backdrop of poetry readings, perfume sprayed by the waiters over diners and fanned about by an airplane propeller, and in the unkindest cut of all, Wagner operas.

Aerofood: A signature Futurist dish, with a strong tactile element. Pieces of olive, fennel, and kumquat are eaten with the right hand while the left hand caresses various swatches of sandpaper, velvet, and silk. At the same time, the diner is blasted with a giant fan (preferable an airplane propeller) and nimble waiters spray him with the scent of carnation, all to the strains of a Wagner opera.

Chicken Fiat doesn’t have all the accessories, but it’s probably my favorite Futurist abomination. Chicken Fiat (named after the Italian industrial dynamo, natch) is chicken roasted with ball bearings inside until the meat has absorbed the metallic taste, then served on pillows of whipped cream.

But these dishes only scratch the surface of the full multimedia experience that was dinner at The Holy Palate. They enlisted every sense to keep people’s tastebuds in high gear, so to speak.

Smell and taste, unlike sight, hearing, and touch, are chemical senses. As such, they are subject to relatively rapid sensory fatigue. A Futurist cuisine had therefore to find ways of reestablishing “gustatory virginity.” To annul one set of tastes and smells before presenting the next set, a suction fan would draw scents out of the room. To intensify sensory acuity, they
periodically changed the lighting and room temperature, suddenly instructed the diners to quickly move themselves and their dinners two places to the right, released a live turkey into a room where diners had just eaten the bird, and presented blue wine, orange milk, and red mineral water.

Marinetti published The Futurist Cookbook the next year. It elaborated on the principles so concisely stated in the manifesto and included all the recipes from The Holy Palate.

Sadly, it’s long out of print and terribly expensive, so I haven’t had the chance to read it yet. For some reason, it’s not available at my local public library. Damn pasta-eating Communists.

I did find a great description of one recipe in the book that sounds both somewhat palatable and awesome as opposed to just awesome:

Marinetti was not entirely indifferent to the romance of fine dining, and does include a “Nocturnal Love Feast” in his cookbook. The meal, which should be eaten at midnight on the island of Capri, climaxes with a cocktail called the War-in-Bed — a relatively appetizing blend of pineapple juice, egg, cocoa, caviar, red pepper, almond paste, nutmeg, and a whole clove, all mixed in the yellow Strega liqueur. He declares that modern women (preferably sheathed in dresses made of gold graphic patterns) will inevitably be won over by the intellectual rigor of Futurist cooking, describing one beautiful donna’s wide-eyed response: “I’m dazzled! Your genius frightens me!”

The sexy cannot be denied.