Decay and Disgust in 1664 London -- The Sweet Smell of Decay, a Book Review

Photo: from the book's Goodreads page.

I really liked this book despite its inconsistency. Some parts are very well-written, and some...well, aren't. Very odd. You can get a paragraph or two, or a few pages, with exceptional prose, or description; but then suddenly you get a dead-weight clunker of a paragraph, or sometimes just a line or two. There are shifts in tone, too. Suddenly--and I mean you can hear the screeches--a character becomes shady. Suddenly a scene changes, or you can't see it clearly. Towards the end there's a well-drawn action scene--and then suddenly you're at a trial, and it's very drawn-out. And the main character, Harry Lytle, does this and does that, and seemingly never stops, to do anything, and you realize that can't be, and it all doesn't come together, but it's okay because you're reading about yourself going through the motions as Lytle, and that's enough. In fact, that's the point, and undoubtedly the author's intent.

Very tough to explain.

But despite it all, you have a main character who is likable in his opaqueness. Who is he? What does he do? Not really ever explained, but he's a common enough bloke, and he's supposed to be you, the reader. He's just accessible enough to be us. We're the ones doing what he's doing, seeing what he's seeing. That transition is so seamless, you don't even realize it happened.

1664 London is really the main character, and it is supported well. The mystery isn't really mysterious. (The plot is more of a mystery, if you know what I mean.) It's all explained at the end, not very well, as the bow falls off and isn't neatly tied. But you won't care, because you're there for the sights and sounds of 1664 London, and you will get a lot of that, and you'll like it. The logistics of the ending is a head-scratcher, as are all of the characters when they take off their wigs to check for lice. Everyone's bald, and everything's filthy and gross, and 1664 London is just a disgusting place, where people get hanged but don't die, and their intestines are ripped out and burned and they don't die, and they're then tied hand and foot to horses and ripped apart, and if they still don't die, they're carted in a wheelbarrow to the nearest river and dumped in. And then their heads are stuck on a pike on a bridge or tower. And a prisoner about to die this way soils his pants, and that's described, and you realize that's what you're reading this for--the details, like you're there in 1664 London, and you're happy to be there by reading about it, because you sure as hell wouldn't really want to be there.

That's why this book works. If you like the history of historical fiction more than you like the fiction of historical fiction, you'll like this one. I'm on to the next, A Plague of Sinners.

How to Succeed in Business While Really, Really Trying -- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Photo: The photo we all know, (but how accurate to his personality is it?) from Ben Franklin's Wikipedia page. All of the photos in this entry come from the same page.

(Copied and pasted shamelessly from my Goodreads page. Yes, Goodreads. Don't judge.)

Actually, I have the 1932 hardcover, with red boards and very small print, that this paperback is taken from; but I couldn't find that in the listings, and I'm too lazy to create my own for it, and if you've been able to deal with this sentence, you should be able to read this book, no problem, though Franklin used bigger words. There are lots of semicolons and commas and pedantic words, but that was the style of self-labelled philosophers at the time, so the reader has to deal with it.

Though, to be fair, the reader should deal with it, because this is worth reading. I found a lot to like about this, including:

--Ben Franklin came from almost nothing, and became one of the most known, liked, respected, and wealthy men of his time.

--He wrote plainly about how to get this done, and it amounted to just a few things:

* work your ass off, at printing, business in general, or whatever the hell it is you do

* want to work your ass off; want to succeed

* if you see a good thing, pounce on it, fast, before someone else does

* keep your word, even if it's to your (slight) detriment

* form lots of clubs, and be friends with other good businessmen (and men in general)

* moderate, in all things, except business while young

* want to be a decent person, and strive for it

* if you write well and work hard, you'll be known for it

(This last is surprisingly true, then and now. Most people, IMO, don't write well or work consistently, daily, hard. I'm one of the more active people I know, and I have been disgustingly lazy this summer.)

You may not know that Ben Franklin came from Boston, MA; moved to Newport, RI; then to New York City, then to London, England, then, finally, to Philadelphia. He moved around a lot, mentally and physically, and became a successful (and busy) diplomat after he became a very successful businessman and printer. He never stayed still, and I'll bet his energy was at times difficult for his wife to deal with. (I offer this to you from personal, bitter experience.)

He was one of the most fit and physical guys around in his youth. Written in three stages when he was older (the last time just a year or so before he died), his Autobiography (edited; not in full) comes across as plainly written as he was plainly spoken, and it pulls no punches. It shows he was known for his rowing and swimming prowess when younger, and he speaks highly--as did most guys of his time--of long walks. It seems he was quite different when younger, physically, than the rather robust portraits we have of him as an older man. But who knows? The grim expression of his mouth and lips in portraits (he often looks like he was biting down hard on something) was the common trope in paintings of the time; George Washington looks like he has just finished biting someone's face off, by comparison. So were these guys bitter, too-serious old men, in pain from their wooden false teeth? Who knows, but Franklin's writing doesn't make him seem that way.

(Though, a quick note about his teeth: He was a very successful printer, of course, and he did all or most of the work himself for most of his printing career, so he put a lot of lead in his mouth, between his teeth, when he was setting type. My father, a typesetter himself early in his career [which he missed when he got promoted, though he preferred the better pay and benefits], said he put heavy lead type in his mouth all the time when setting it, and so did everybody else. If he did that in the 1960s and 1970s, Franklin did that in the 1700s--and they shared the same dental fate as well.)

Another quick note: It seems Franklin was a helluva salesman, as all of his money as a printer came, of course, from subscriptions to his newspaper. As you may imagine, he sold those himself, as well. Since he was very strong at interpersonal communication (he joined lots of philosophical clubs, and started a lot of those, and social clubs), this may have been easy for him. As I said, he was well liked; it seems that nobody tired of him asking them to buy subscriptions to everything, from his paper, to his Almanack, to other pamphlets and start-ups of his friends, social and political.

And--he made a lot of money from almost-Ponzi schemes. He'd take on apprentices, or help printers from other states, and when they got situated with their own businesses, they had to give him a percentage of their business for X number of years. This would sooner or later end, but I'll bet it was part of a contract. Lots of guys happily signed up for it, so it seems to be a mostly win-win for everyone involved.

He also had lots of trouble with the wrong friends when he was younger. He'd at first make business decisions or friendships with men who proved to be unreliable, drunkards (a big problem), lazy, greedy, or inept. Surprisingly, he never broke off these friendships. They did, in bitterness of his success, and he was always glad to be rid of them--but he always waited for them to break up with him! I was glad to see this, as I've made similar mistakes over the years. Sometimes I did the breaking-up, sometimes they did, but I was always glad it ended. Who needs the drama?

(Doesn't look like the Ben Franklin we're used to, does it? Painted during his lifetime by Benjamin Wilson, in 1759.)

A benefit for Ben Franklin in Philadelphia at the time: No major papers or magazines yet; no monopoly on the time or money of the successful. The literacy rate, of course, was low, but I'll bet the time spent reading of those who could read was a lot higher than it is now. I know a helluva lot of college-educated people who never read. Don't you? Franklin's paper and other printed material sort of formed a monopoly at the time in Philly.

Franklin started the first public library in the colonies, and the first volunteer fire departments. He helped set up successful postal delivery and was the first Postmaster General. We know about his kite and electricity experiments (not covered in his book), but he also had hundreds (!) of other patents, for things like printing presses (obviously), wood-burning stoves, and who knows what else. He just glosses over this accomplishment.

He spent a lot of time with his personal blueprint for personal and moral success, which I'll go over in a different blog. (Go to stevenbelanger[dot]blogspot[dot]com.) This section of his book is what most people remember about his Almanack--another huge success never gone into in his book. In fact, there are no aphorisms here--no, "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." Ever see the magnet that has the second half crossed off and replaced with, "Tired as hell"?

Anyway, the very surprising thing about his Autobiography is what's not in it. You would think that a successful printer would print a lot about his business success, political success, scientific success, social success, personal success, or his moral, social or political views--but he never did, outside of his Almanack (which everyone knew he wrote). But his press was never a publishing house. There were lots of successful, literate guys with libraries--which he mentions frequently and of course approved of--but it seems he was just too busy to print his own Autobiography.

He finally did when he was much older--while he was bored in France or in England in one of his diplomatic posts later in life. He had a very detailed outline, starting from his very early Boston days, but he only finished a very small percentage of it while alive. No Almanack. No Declaration of Independence! No Revolutionary War! No coverage of his diplomatic successes, before or after the war. (The British and French, apparently, loved him. So did a lot of women over there, if you catch my drift.) He was already a widower when the war came, and I think he re-married afterwards, but was never at home. I'm guessing that he spent a lot more time in France and England in his life than he ever spent in Philadelphia. This is definitely true after the war; he was a very successful diplomat in France. He served in this capacity from 1776 to 1785, and he died in 1790.

I could go on. Very, very interesting life. Very interesting guy. Highly recommended.

Dracula

If the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys got together with a Victorian expert and a diehard fan of everything vampire, and then they all read Bram Stoker's Dracula together, they would write The Annotated Dracula, by Leslie Klinger. As it turns out, Leslie Klinger is all of those types of people, as well as an extremely intelligent and philosophical guy. It reads like you and Klinger got together and read every single word of Dracula (not an easy task), which has something to say on almost every single page.

You'll learn more than you thought possible about Victorian England. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the railway schedules for almost every train in England and Europe. (I'd forgotten how much train travel there was in this book.) You'll also learn much about specific London streets and whereabouts, as well as about Carfax, Parfleet, and many other places in England. You'll learn the rivers, streets and locales of Buda-Pesth (I did remember that this was--and maybe still is--the original spelling of Budapest. But now I know why it is.) You'll learn everything you'll ever want to know about everything vampire and Dracula--including the surprising fact that the original Count had no problem at all walking around in the daylight. (That's a movie construct, mostly from 1922's Nosferatu.)

You'll see all of the discrepancies, minor (none of the journal and diary dates jive) and major (I did remember that Stoker had his characters give poor Lucy many blood transfusions--without concerning themselves with blood type. Even as a kid I knew you can't do that, as you can't empty and change a person's blood like you can a car's oil. But blood transfusions were a relatively new-ish thing in 1897, and Stoker took a chance and threw it in there.). Many of these discrepancies, like how there seems to be a full moon every single night, and how one train in Varna couldn't have gotten someplace as it says because it would actually take a lot longer, you could probably do without. But it's like MTV's Pop-up Videos: if you're in the mood for such arcania, you'll love it, if for no other reason than to just pass the time. (You don't watch Pop-up Video to learn something, do you?) Anyway, if you don't enjoy that kind of quaint nothingness, you probably shouldn't be reading this.

I'd read Dracula twice before, but I wanted to read it again with somebody who knew a lot about everything Victorian, as my current WIP partially takes place in 1890s New England. (Not the same, I know, I know.) But I wanted a feel for the time. And Klinger is an expert on everything Victorian, as he has also written a book that annotates every single Sherlock Holmes short story and novel that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. Klinger did the same for Poe, too, but of course Poe was of an earlier time. (These books are all on my list of things to do.)

The constant sidenotes don't deter from the actual reading of Dracula, though someone who's never had to read scholarly things with a ton of footnotes, endnotes or sidenotes may take awhile to get used to this. I read the book and stopped to read the notes every time a little number appeared, and never got sidetracked. Some of these notes are short, some very long, and often there are consecutive pages of notes without the novel, to get caught up with itself. And the print of these notes are not the super-small letters you may remember from the glosses of your collegiate or academic days, so they're fine to read, without straining.

My one caveat is that Klinger uses a conceit that all of the characters are real people, and that the discrepancies are an intentional attempt to hide the truth that they don't actually kill Dracula at the end, and that he lives to fight another day--in tons of other books, movies, comics, graphic novels, etc. You get the idea. Occasionally this conceit did stay me, and I swiftly moved on over such notes. Klinger did this in his Annotated Sherlock Holmes as well, and I wish he hadn't done so here, but how else can you do this kind of thing and yet make it different from all of the similar annotated books of Dracula out there? (Yes, there are several.) Klinger also had to convince his publisher to print such a book as this, and I guarantee this conceit was in his pitch. Otherwise, it may have come across as yet another glossed scholarly work, and who the hell wants to publish or read another one of those? (Well, okay, I read a lot of the scholarly articles Klinger cites in his bibliography, cuz I'm cool like that.) Still, you've got to make it different, and you've got to make it interesting.

So I forgave Klinger this trespass (and I skimmed over many of those annotated conceits) and I read it to enjoy all of the other notes--plus the book itself. Don't forget about the book! It was still as clumsily written as I'd remembered it, and yet it was still as effective as I'd remembered it--sometimes in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way. (Everyone interrogates Renfield as he's dying, and then they all leave him to die alone on the floor as they--finally!--run to Mina's room.) And, yeah, Dracula, as it turned out, was hiding in the building next to Seward's asylum almost the whole time. Whatever.

So if you like Dracula, the book, or the movies, or the Victorian Era, or if you're in the mood for a MST3K riff on all of these things, then this is the book for you. It also comes with the famous short story, "Dracula's Guest," that looks like an early attempt at a Dracula chapter, but not a "missing" or edited-out chapter, like you may have heard. There are many more discrepancies between novel and story than similarities, and it wasn't published at all until after Stoker died, which means it probably was never supposed to see the light of day. (See what I did there?) He published a few books of collected short stories, so if he'd wanted to publish it, he would have. This story looks like a discarded draft of a chapter that was going to show part of Harker's journey to Transylvania, but it's obviously not necessary, and Harker himself is never mentioned in it, so you should enjoy it as a separate story. It's still cool, as "The Dead Travel Fast," is still there, and it's still creepy enough.

Overall, highly recommended, especially in an appropriately-nerdy, have fun as you learn kind of way. And there's nothing at all wrong with admitting that.

Model and 16-year old boy Arrested and Charged with Insulting Turkey's President

 

 

 

1st Photo, from a site's article I've pasted rather than linked because you should read it, is from http://www.bustle.com/articles/66565-ex-miss-turkey-merve-buyuksarac-faces-prosecution-for-quoting-from-a-poem-on-instagram

2nd Photo: Former Ms. Turkey, Merve Büyüksaraç, from The London Telegraph, at this website, pasted here instead of linked, because you should really read it: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/11433974/Former-Miss-Turkey-faces-prison-for-insulting-Recep-Tayyip-Erdogan.html

Right now there's another brimming totalitarian regime in the making.  It's in Turkey, where Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, has briefly imprisoned this woman, and who has officially charged her with the crime of criticizing and insulting him.  Ms. Büyüksaraç copied a poem to her Instagram account that over 900,000 other Turkey citizens had shared--yet she has been the only one to be charged with a crime for it.  If convicted, she could serve up to 2 years in prison.

According to the article linked above, "Ms Büyüksaraç shared a quote from the satirical The Master's Poem - in which verses from the Turkish national anthem are used to criticise Mr Erdoğan.

The 26-year-old said she "may have quoted a poem" believed to be from Uykusuz, a Turkish satirical magazine, but soon deleted it after a friend warned her she could have committed a crime."

I am currently looking for this poem, which may also have a different title.  I searched for about 1/2 hour online, to no avail.  If anyone can find it, please comment and let me know so I can put it here as a show of solidarity and of freedom of speech.  (It's okay if it's in a language we can't read; it's the point that counts here.) 

During his time in power, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also:

--blocked Twitter and YouTube for a month, last year

According to the linked article:  "The decision to block Twitter in March 2014 came after audio recordings allegedly revealed corruption among those close to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the then Turkish prime minister. They had been widely shared on Twitter. It was a tense period ahead of the country's local elections and despite the outrage and upset the ban caused, the leading Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the majority of votes. Mr Erdoğan became president in August."

--charged a 16-year old boy with the same crime.  According to this site, "In a case that attracted wide attention, teenage schoolboy Mehmet Emin Altunses will go on trial on March 6 on charges of insulting the president in a speech in the conservative Anatolian city of Konya."  In a more specific article, from The Guardian, a Pulitzer-prize winning paper: "The 16-year-old student, Mehmet Emin Altunses, was taken away from his school on Wednesday and jailed for making a speech during a student protest in which he reportedly said Erdoğan was regarded as the “thieving owner of the illegal palace”."

--built the "palace" the boy referred to.  This palace--home of Turkey's President, not king--is "the world's biggest palace" and is outlined in this article:

"It boasts 1,000 rooms and has a total floor area of 3.1 million square feet. This makes it four times the size of Versailles, home of the lavish Louis XIV, the “Sun King” of France. Buckingham Palace only has 775 rooms. In Turkish, it's called the Ak Saray - White Palace - and, as the Telegraph's David Blair points out, the "quixotic architectural style seems to cross the Ottoman and Seljuk traditions with that of a modern Chinese railway station". Then there's the silk wallpaper.
The former Turkish prime minister also spent £115 million on a new presidential jet."

The palace looks like this inside (and that's the man you're reading about):

--ordered armed policemen to stand outside a newspaper's office and inspect copies to make sure it did not publish what the government considered a dangerous photo from Paris's magazine Charlie Hebdo.  That magazine had itself come under attack by extremists, and many of its writers and other employees had been shot and killed.  Consider this quote, from express.co.uk:

"Delivery trucks leaving the offices of Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, based in Istanbul, were stopped by police after the publication revealed plans to publish cartoons from the French weekly.
The trucks were only allowed to pass after armed officers confirmed the French magazines' controversial front cover not been included in the newspaper."

And the photos from that site:

I say that any country that tells armed policemen to stand outside of a newspaper's office is not a free country, and it does not have freedom of speech.  Any country that restricts internet and social media access to its citizens is not a free country.  Any country that arrests a former model for sharing a post that over 900,000 other Turkish citizens had also shared is not a free country.  Any country that arrests a 16-year old boy from his classroom because he had the nerve to question the ultra-lavish abode of his non-monarchy, is not a free country.  This is odd, because Turkey actually is a free, non-secular (for now) country.  Its leader is a president, not a king or religious leader.

But for how long?
 

Book Review: Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

Photo: Book's cover (and the Chiandros portrait) from mathomhouse.typepad.com.

Mostly-fascinating collection of essays, thoughts, theories and placing-you-there Elizabethan history that attempts to understand nothing less than the very mind of Shakespeare, as a man of his time, and--as Ben Jonson famously wrote--as a man "not of an age, but for all time."  Besides a couple of chapters about the politics and religion of his time that I found a bit too dry, the book succeeds at doing so.  It is at its best when it sticks to the literary and theatrical stuff: his plays, his theatres and the people he knew.  If anyone doubts the existence of a non-university man who got a woman eight years his elder pregnant, married her, and left them behind to find his glory and future in the theatres of London, England, let them read this, and they will doubt no more.

This book brings Shakespeare to life like few things I have read.  Michael Wood's book and a couple of others are just as good, in different ways.  And they all delve into the man and his time using their own conceits.  The conceit of this one is to break the book down into sections that correspond to Shakespeare's famous "Seven Stages of Man" speech from As You Like It.  (This is the one that begins with the even-more-famous line, "All the world's a stage.")  And so Bate chronicles the life of and mind of Shakespeare by breaking his life up into the seven parts that we all supposedly share.  I got the feeling that Bate had much of the book written already, via separate speeches and chapters, and tied them all together with the conceit of the seven stages, but whatever.  It doesn't matter, because it works.

The narrative is at its best when it brings us pell-mell into Elizabethan England.  We see it as Shakespeare may have, and we witness things, and become aware of city-wide and nation-wide news that he would have been aware of.  We meet the Burbages, and Heminges, and Condell, and the theatre and publishing climates of the time.  We see him as one of the many in these realms, and as one in the businesses he was in.  He is placed firmly in his time, and yet the book works well also when it shows him to be a chronicler of his time.  Shakespeare is renowned as being perhaps not just the best writer of our times, but also as the best mirror to his own time, without blocking the visage with his own image.  He is within his world, and yet surprisingly intellectually and philosophically detached from it, so he can show it to us, and paint a picture of our human nature, and yet not include his own views and preferences in it--all at the same time.

In short, we know what Hamlet thinks--but we never know what Shakespeare thinks.  Of course, no writer is his character, and no character is its author.  We know all of one, and very little about the internalization of the other.

But Bate's book gets us closer to it than perhaps anything I've read before.  The best compliment I'd give to this book is that it shows you something different about Shakespeare and his England, even if you thought you'd read it all before, like I have.  If you enjoy that kind of literary history, and a biography of him (a little) and of his time, and of his place in his time (a lot of that), then you'll enjoy this.

Shakespeare Had No Part in the Publication of His 1609 Sonnets

Photo: Title page of the 1609 Sonnets, from its Wikipedia page.

Clinton Heylin's So Long As Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare's Sonnets is a very quick and interesting read about Shakespeare's unauthorized (according to the author--and I agree with him) 1609 Sonnets.  He deals with the times very well, and with the publishers, printers and other authors of the time, too.  He tackles a lot of issues, a lot of theories, and a lot of the works of other critics, both old and current (including current literary critic Katherine Duncan-Jones, who he criticizes so brusquely, so often, and with such glee, that it seems personal), and does so with a breezy writing style and a lot of his own research and proof.  He writes more about how many critics are wrong about something (especially the fore-mentioned Duncan-Jones) than he does about what he's right about, but finally he takes a stand about why he thinks Shakespeare played no part in the publication of his sonnets in 1609. 

I don't like the method in which he does this, however.  He essentially summarizes the thoughts about a topic, then writes about what literary critics throughout the ages have written about that topic, then writes about why he thinks they're wrong about what they've written (again, especially Duncan-Jones, who he really seems to dislike personally), and then--and only then--writes about what he believes is correct, and why.

However, at that point, he states his case well, and the reader has a thorough understanding of the idea, the history of the idea, all the people surrounding that idea, what the critics have written about that idea, and finally what he thinks about that idea.  When you're done, you feel as if you've learned something, and you feel like you've just read from an authority, which I suppose you have.

And so to take it from there, listed below are my reasons for why I believe Shakespeare had no part in the 1609 publication of his sonnets.  If I can toot my own horn here a moment, I'll point out that I wrote all of these down after I read up to page 91, and that Heylin only writes about a couple of them.  The rest--for better or for worse--are all mine.

I believe that Shakespeare did not approve of, or participate in, the publication of his Sonnets because:

--He was in semi-retirement by 1609, rather late in the game to publish a book of sonnets.  Such a thing would've been done to jump-start a career at that time, not end one.  Shakespeare would be fully retired just four years after its publication.  He'd be dead within seven years of its publication.

--The sonnet fad had petered out in London by the late-1590s.  Shakespeare was a follower of fads; his thumb was very much on the pulse of his public.  He would not have published something a decade out of fashion.  If he'd wanted them published at all, he would have published all 154 of them by 1595.

--By the end of the 154 sonnets, he was clearly tired of them as a mode of expression.  Shakespeare was forever changing his writing styles, so much so that by 1609, his Problem Plays showed a roving creative mind that was at odds as to how it wanted to express itself.  By 1609, Tempest-time, he was WAY over the sonnets as a mode of expression.

--Though he embedded sonnets into his plays throughout his career, he last used them in his plays with seriousness of presentation in Romeo and Juliet, in roughly 1593.

--The Sonnets have a very (infamously) questionable Dedication that speaks more of its publisher and procurer than it does of its writer.  Or of Pembroke, or of Wriothesley, or of whomever.

--By 1609, the leading dramatist of London, a part-owner of the Globe, a very wealthy man and a very esteemed Gentleman, owner of two huge homes and two large tracts of land, and the favorite of all of the King's Men to the King himself, had no need at all of a sponsor, of an Earl of Anything, to support him, or to sponsor his writings.  But he would have in 1593, though not any later than that.  And he would not finish writing something by 1595 and wait until 1609 to publish them--if he wanted to publish them at all.

--In 1593, sonnets were hot; in 1609, they were not.  Shakespeare, who was very good at making money, at striking while the iron was hot, would've published all 154 of his sonnets--if he'd wanted to publish them at all--by 1595, in order to make as much money as possible from them.  Though a huge name by 1609, his sonnets would not have been, and indeed were not, a bestseller.  He would know that.  Though not one to turn away from money, he would not have needed it badly enough by 1609 to publish these sonnets.  But Thomas Thorpe was that desperately in need.  How did he procure these sonnets if Shakespeare didn't give them to him?  Nobody knows.  But they did not know each other well.  Thorpe was not amongst his friends.

--We're taught that the Sonnets, when combined, create a storyline created by three large groupings of them.  An older, wiser man urges a younger man, whom he obviously loves, and fantasizes about, and whom he is possibly having a relationship with, to procreate so that he can live forever (though the narrator insists that his art of writing will do this for the younger man as well); a convoluted affair between the younger man, the narrator, and a "dark lady," creates anguish for the narrator; the "dark lady" and the younger man leave the narrator stewing in his own bitterness and lust.

This is actually not the case.  There's no connected storyline here.  The three groupings are not seamlessly connected.  In fact, quite often, back-to-back sonnets are not connected.  Shakespeare would not have published them like this, in these groupings.  They are three distinct groups, one not having to do with the other.  And I'm not even convinced that there are three groupings here.  I'd bet that Thorpe put this together more than I would that Shakespeare did.

--Sonnets 1-17 strike me as a group of sonnets that a 1590s Shakespeare would have been hired to write so that whomever hired him could deliver them to the Earl of Pembroke, who slept around a lot, never wanted to marry, ignored his Queen's urging to marry specific women, who was apparently super-handsome and beloved by all (if you know what I'm sayin') and who finally married, though not happily, nor exclusively, by 1608.  It was a common practice for writers to get paid to write such things, as well as elegies, eulogies, songs for others' plays, etc.

--Shakespeare was also not one to beat a dead horse, or to repeat something over and over without even the slightest of thematic change.  Yet all sonnets 1-17 say is: "Give birth so you don't die," and nothing more.

--Shakespeare was a hugely profitable and popular writer by 1609.  He would not have given any writing to Thomas Thorpe, who already had one foot in bankruptcy and the other in ineptitude.  His writing would've gone to the best publisher and bookseller (as one was commonly both) in London.

--The Sonnets are infamously uneven.  Some are eternal masterpieces.  But #145 is clearly an earlier sophomoric, badly-conceived, melodramatic, juvenile effort, probably written for Anne Hathaway (as her name is punned within it) before they were married, when Shakespeare was about 19.  By 1609, at age 45, he would have blanched to see it in print, for all of super-critical London to see.  This would be like me seeing my high school stories in print.

--The Sonnets, as I mentioned, do not have an arrangement that Shakespeare would have devised.  The last two sonnets, called the "Cupid Sonnets," have nothing at all to do with the previous 152 sonnets.  Numbers 29 and 30 are clearly companion pieces, mirror-images of each other.  But #129 is a bitter and violent purge of self-hatred and regret, about a narrator who lusts uncontrollably for a "dark lady," and is in a self-created Hell because of it.  #130 is an amusing over-exaggeration of a woman's physical imperfections, too numerous to be taken seriously, the point being that their love is special because it's not based on a superficial physicality.  In other words, there's no lust involved.  These simply do not go together.  The genius who intertwined the complexities of the double-plot of King Lear, and who combined pitch-perfect self-examination with a revenge plot in Hamlet, did not put these sonnets together.

--#126, alone of all 154, are six pairs of rhyming couplets--12 lines, not 14--and therefore also does not have the same rhyme scheme as the others.  It's a well-written experiment, not meant to be included with all the rest.  #99 has 15 lines, not 14, as line 5 is extraneous.  Further proof that the Sonnets were published without Shakespeare's supervision--and certainly without his approval.

These are the reasons why I believe that Shakespeare played no part in the 1609 publication of his sonnets.

Flu Notes for Virus Novel, Still Untitled

Photo #1: Human Host, by Scott Camazine/Alamy, from nationalgeographic.com:  Human lungs are the most terrifying tools of the plague. Pneumonic plague, seen affecting both lung fields in this x-ray, is the only form of plague spread from person to person. It is transmitted by coughs and sneezes. The fatality rate of pneumonic plague is a staggering 95 percent. Treatment can be effective during the first 24 hours of infection, but plague is often mistaken as the flu. Victims are lucky to live more than 48 hours.

Photo #2: Plague Warfare, by Jason Lee/Reuters/Corbis, from nationalgeographic.com:  This building near Harbin, China, was host to Japanese germ warfare experiments during World War II. The boxes were for breeding rats, the vehicles for fleas infected with plague. Upon release these rat agents carried the Black Death—as well as cholera and anthrax—to infect enemy Chinese. Plague is still studied by governments and terrorist organizations for possible germ warfare applications.

It's worth mentioning that every source I've read says that the world is overdue for a super-virus that would devastate worse than the 1918 flu.  Wish me luck as I work on this novel.  I've already decided that the work would be present-day, but with flashbacks to other epidemics.  You'll see what I mean (I hope).  I already have a lot of images in my head about this; I can't wait to get them down on paper.   

More ominous notes from the book mentioned in yesterday's blog:

1918 flu virus: more than 40 to 50 million people died of flu in 1918-9 in less than one year, over 4 times the war casualties.  Pg. 306.

An estimated one-fifth (20%) of the world’s population was infected, and 2 to 3% of those died.

Major influenzas of 1957 and 1968 were mild, 1 to 1.5 million died worldwide each time.

1918 flu was unique because, for the first time, the very healthy died, not just the infants and elderly. 

Word “flu” first used by W.H. Auden: “Little birds with scarlet legs/Sitting on their speckled eggs/Eye each flu-infected city.”

91^st Psalm: “You need not fear the terror by night,/nor the arrow that flies by day,/nor the plague that stalks in the darkness.”

On November 7^th,1918, the ship Talune introduced the disease into islands of Upola and Savii.  Within 3 months, over 21% of those populations died, as did similarly those in Fiji and Tahiti.  “It was impossible to bury the dead…Day and night trucks rumbled throughout the streets, filled with bodies for the constantly burning pyres.”  Pg. 308.

See typhoid in Plymouth, PA in 1885; yellow fever in Philadelphia, 1793.

The plague killed 14% of 1665 London in 7 months.---Warren Vaughan, American Journal of Epidemiology, 1921.

See Numbers 11:31-34 for description of bird-caused plague.

Flu travels through the air in droplets launched by coughing or sneezing.  Victim incubates virus between 24 hours and 4-5 days before symptoms are obvious.  First signs are headache, chills, dry cough, fever, weakness, and loss of appetite.  Generalized fatigue and, in some, bronchitis and pneumonia follow.  Total recovery takes several weeks or longer.  Influenza is a distinct entity; it is not “flu.”  It is a virus and can be transmitted between people, dogs, pigs and ferrets, interchangeably.

The influenza viruses that strike humans are divided into types A, B & C.  Influenza A is the historical one, infecting man, pigs, horses, seals and birds.  This virus and its hosts have adapted mutually over many centuries and created a reservoir that ensures perpetuation of the virus.  It likely originated in aquatic birds.  When such viruses or their components mix with human influenza virus, dramatic genetic shifts can follow, creating the potential of a new epidemic for humans.

Tissue taken from a 21 year old private who died of 1918-9 Spanish flu and those of a native Alaskan who died in 1918 and was buried in permafrost were used to resurrect the extinct 1918 influenza virus.

Resurrected 1918 virus is 100 times more lethal than other strains; it produces 39,000 more virus particles than other influenza strains. Pg. 321.

H5N1 bird flu, first isolated in 1997, had by 2008 killed about 60% (236/373; 63%) of those with it, but had not jumped repeatedly or easily between humans.  75 million drug courses available in US today would treat only 25% of the population.  See http://www.whitehouse.gov/homeland_security for info. on US’s plan to control a pandemic.  Also www.pandemicflu.gov.

Outbreak of April 2009, human to human passage, led to WHO phase 5 alert.  Occurred in spring (rare), infects young adults, spreading rapidly.  Type of this H1N1 was similar to that of 1977, so those aged 32 and older should have some protection against this latest outbreak.

Possible future devastating outbreaks of measles, influenza, smallpox, and HIV/AIDS.  In US, 40,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS every year; anti-viral triple-drug therapy has increased life span so much of those infected that they will likely die of something else like heart attack, stroke, etc., but it still remains within them, and if it mutates…

Soviet Biological Weapons Program created new smallpox by inserting genes of Ebola with it.  This disbanded, but where did those scientists go with their stocks of smallpox?

Cholera

Pg. 243: “…infect ten people with Ebola in downtown Manhattan and you could kill a million, or more.”

“If the two viruses [H5N1 and ordinary flu] did encounter each other inside a human host, a far more ominous strain of H5N1 might emerge.  It could be as infectious as the influenza bug that swept the globe in 1918, but several times more lethal.”  Pg. 246.

There were two waves of 1918 flu.  The first, in the spring, make people ill for just 3 days, then they recovered.  But the second wave, in the fall and winter, the genetic makeup had changed since the first wave, and this second one did all the damage.

20% of infected get mild dose of normal flu and get better.  But the rest get 1 of 2 things: so much fluid in the lungs that they can’t get enough oxygen and they suffocate.  They die in days or hours, delirious with high fever, gasping for breath, fall unconscious and die.  Second possibility started with normal flu symptoms—chills, fever, muscle aches.  But by day 4 or 5, bacteria swarms into their injured lungs and they get pneumonia that usually kills them.  Faces turn blue or black and they cough up blood.  Bodies were stacked at the morgue like cord wood.  Pg. 16. Those with black feet would not live.

There's more scary stuff about West Nile, Mad Cow, Ebola, and others, but you get the idea by now.  Makes me want to wash my hands every 10 minutes.