Before returning Four Queens to the library, I had a quick look at Nancy Goldstone’s speculation of what would have happened if Saint Louis of France had struck up a deal with the Mongols, fellow enemies of the muslim empire:

Louis was no match for the descendants of Genghis Khan…Given the history of Mongol behaviour, of which there was substantial precedent, the alliance would have been broken as soon as the Muslim forces were subdued. Louis, Charles [of Anjou], and Robert [of Artois] would have been beheaded with ruthless efficiency, Marguerite [queen of France] and Beatrice [Countess of Provence] would have been sold into slavery, and the course of European history would have been changed forever.

(Page 129)

Another quote from Nancy’s Goldstone’s Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe. This time it’s two translated letters, one from the crusading King Louis IX of France (1214 – 1270) and the other the response from the sultan of Cairo, Ayyub (c. 1205 – 1249).

Here’s Louis’ chivalric letter:

You will be aware that I am the head of the Christian community, as I acknowledge that you are the head of the Moslem community…I have given you sufficient demonstration of our strength and the best advice I can offer…If this country falls into my hands, it will be mine as a gift. If you keep it by victory over me, you may do as you will with me. I have told you about the armies obedient to me, filling the mountains and the plains, numerous as the stones of the earth and poised against you like the sword of destiny. I put you on your guard against them.

Ayyub’s diplomatic response:

Fool! If your eyes had seen the points of our swords and the enormity of our devastations, the forts and shores that we have taken [from you] and the lands that we have sacked in the past and the present, you would gnaw your fingers in repentance! The outcome of the events you are precipitating is inevitable: the day will dawn to our advantage and end in your destruction. Then you will curse yourself.

(Page 130)

One of the books I am enjoying right now is Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone. The book follows the 13th century four daughters of the Count of Provence as they marry into the French and English royal families.

One of the best parts of the book is the description of the Holy Roman Emperor at the time, Frederick II (1194 – 1250):

Frederick’s was the most interesting personality of the century. He was called Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. Certainly, he was the most educated ruler in Europe. He read widely, spoke seven languages, and had even written a book (on falconry). He was interested in everything: science, alchemy, history, law, architecture, medicine, mathematics. He started the first university in Europe where the teachers were not paid by the students but by the state, and then recruited the respected scholars in his empire to teach at it.

When the Mongol Empire heard of Frederick’s Empire, Goldstone describes the outcome with better words than I could muster:

When a descendant of Ghengis Khan, who was wreaking havoc in the Muslim world, wrote threateningly that the Holy Roman Emperor should surrender his lands and come to his court to become one of his vassals, Frederick replied that he’d think about it and to please hold open the position of falconer.

(Page 85)

One of the byproducts of my reading of The Great Cat Massacre‘s Chapter One: Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose, is that I ordered the latest translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, by a Christopher Betts. I’ll add this book to my 73-book list I whipped up in preparation for my trip to France.

Perrault’s fairy tales were the original Mother Goose stories. They are not the nursery rhymes we know by that name. In fact, many of the nursery rhymes we know don’t have the meanings we were taught: I learned Ring Around the Rosie originally as a rhyme; then an elementary school teacher told me it was about the plague; now it isn’t about the plague anymore. Perrault’s stories, published in 1697 in a book called Les contes de ma mère l’oie. The stories reappeared in Germanized form as written down by the Brothers Grimm, who got their stories from Jeannette Hassenpflug, who got them in turn from her French Huguenot refugee mother.

Yet Perrault was not the only person writing fairy tales in Louis XIV’s court. Darnton brought up Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, a writer and scandaleuse (she ran away from her husband to Spain). When I looked her up, I found another modern translation: Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Sixteenth-Century French Women Writers. I’ll add it to my ridiculous reading list. Unfortunately, I have to look up the other female fairy tale writers: Catherine Bernard, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, Marie-Jeanne L’Hériter de Villandon, and Henriette-Julie de Murat.

But that’s enough for tonight. Time to actually get some real reading done tonight.

*spoiler*

I am still listening to The White Plague by Frank Herbert during my commutes and I noticed something that has been making me cranky for a few hours now. The novel is about a widower who releases a woman-killing plague to avenge his own wife’s death at the hands of the IRA. But, in the midst of millions of women dying, the governments of all the countries around the world searching frantically for a cure, the madman himself watching his plan come to fruition – in spite of all this, Herbert rarely mentions the word “woman.” Or “female” or “girl” or anything even referring to the double-x-chromosomed beings. Every character in the book talks about the plague but never about women. The world is becoming unhinged in typical post-apocalyptic fashion, but no one talks much about the people really suffering in all this: every single female human on the planet.

Seriously, in the audiobook, I maybe hear mention of a woman or of women, say, every hour and fifteen minutes. In other words, on each CD, there’s only one mention of womanhood.

Eventually by about the sixth CD, there is a little more mention of women. You know, stuff about Irish women in the diaspora being sent back to Emerald Isle on coffin ships and the IRA thugs guarding the beaches raping them before they catch the plague and die.

Out of three female characters – two whom were smart scientist types – the two smart ones die. So we’re left with Miss Reluctant Catholic Slut. The same reluctant slut who threw a condom across the room because it was sinful.

And you know what? She’s pregnant now.

This is turning into Children of Men. Ugh. Get her some cows.

Thanks to my friend B and L, who took me to Seattle’s Science Fiction Museum a few years ago, I came out with a small list of not-bad sounding science fiction novels to read. One of them was Frank Herbert’s The White Plague. I recently found its book on tape version, to which I am listening during my commutes.

This 1982 book is about a plague that only kills women. Who wouldn’t be interested in imagining the possible responses? Unfortunately, just as with Children of Men, I have a feeling that the women in Herbert’s novel are on their way to bovinization. Remember when the protagonist of Children of Men first meets the last pregnant woman on Earth? She’s hobnobbing with cows. In a fucking barn.

To prove that Herbert is a sexist bore, here’s some dialogue one of the characters has with a female secretary about the impending doom of womankind (and the secretary herself):

I have important information that the president of the United States should know. If there’s any need for you to know, I’m sure someone will tell you.

So the secretary is about to die and that’s what he tells her? Prick.

A few paragraphs later, this characters shows how much faith he has in womankind’s intellectual abilities as he outlines a plan for salvation:

And, Jim, one of the first things to do is to get as many young women as possible into that Denver hideaway the military is so proud of. Women, got that? And only enough men to run the technical end of a survival plan.

Obviously they intend to breed mindless cows who can’t bother to learn how to operate a “survival plan.”

Was 1982 still so sexist? The book so far paints a very Stepford picture of the world, where Irish wenches worry about losing their virginity before marriage and most women are maternal domestic slaves who pack suitcases for their dick husbands by the time they finish a phone call to the president’s office.

Another 19 hours left of this novel.

This blog post should have been written right after I read the book, but I needed to wait for a time when I had lots of work and needed the procrastinating. As luck would have it, I forgot what I was going to say. I jotted down the page numbers of two quotes for future reference. I know I Capture the Castle was a good book, but it’s probably good I don’t blurt out any spoilers here.

Just read the novel – though with a word of warning if you don’t like teenage girls and their romances. The narrator here is one, though filtered through a woman in her fifties. Playwright Dodie Smith (most famous as the writer for 101 Dalmatians) took two years to write and re-write a year in the life of a 1930s teenager with literary aspirations living in a decrepit castle in England. The writing comes out pretty good, the characters are all perfect for not being perfect – normal people with no one entirely villainous, like most people in real life. There’s comedy too, with the bear fur coat part as my favourite.

Now for my two quotes – for my reference – probably boring for you, dear reader:

Page 277, on finding help in bad times:

Then I told myself that as I never gave the Church a thought when I was happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn’t. You can’t get insurance money without paying the premiums.

Page 279, the best description for the use of religion I’ve heard, which more people should keep in mind:

‘It’s merely shorthand for where we come from, where we’re going, and what it’s all about.’

Courtney Humphries writes it better than I can retell it:

Thom Verhave, a psychologist working at a pharmaceutical company in the 1950s, tried to apply pigeons to an onerous aspect of commercial production: quality-control inspection. Touring the area where capsules were manufactured, he watched as about seventy women examined each capsule one by one on conveyor belts, discarding the “skags,” capsules that were dented, misshapen, or discoloured. Figuring that pigeons could do the same task, Verhave proposed the idea to the director of research, who had just managed an expensive but failed attempt to use a machine to inspect capsules. Verhave was given permission to develop a demonstration device, and he trained two pigeons to recognize common defects and report if they spotted one. Within one week of training, both birds were inspecting capsules with 99 percent accuracy. Their performance garnered visits from higher-ups at the company, but soon the board of directors quashed the project. Even if it worked, who would buy drugs from a company that used pigeons for quality control?

(From Superdove, pages 91-92)

As I continue reading Superdove, there are more great pigeon trivia tidbits I will be using to impress family members at Christmas dinner:

• Squab meat is low in fat and rich in iron. (Turns out I have a squab recipe I clipped out from a cooking magazine article called “The Twelve Days of Christmas” – I wish I kept the recipes for the drumming drummers, piping pipers, a-leaping lords, dancing ladies and a-milking maids.)
• When precocial birds like chickens, turkeys and geese hatch, they are immediately mobile. Altricial birds like pigeons are born weak, naked and blind.
• Pigeon fathers and mothers both secrete crop milk to feed baby pigeons.
• Pigeons as supermarket meat never really took off because pigeons can procreate about twelve times a year. Compare that to the 200 plus eggs a chicken can lay in a year.
• The US’s largest pigeon meat operation is the Palmetto Pigeon Plant* in South Carolina.
• According to British historian Joan Thirsk, alternative crops and livestock rise in popularity during periods of excess cereals. In post-Black Death Europe, the smaller human population meant grains could be put aside for feeding birds; similarly, the low grain prices in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries also translated into increases of raising pigeons.
• Fancy pigeons like the English short-faced tumbler have such short beaks that foster parent pigeons must feed their young.
• Pigeons don’t have X and Y chromosomes; just one sex chromosome, with females having one chromosome and males having two copies.
• The skin around a pigeon’s eye is called a cere.
• Pigeons cannot fly at night because they have terrible night vision.
• Pigeons will return to a home loft even after years (hence their use as messenger pigeons – “one-way communicators” as Humphries calls them. Pigeon racing, where pigeons are timed on how long it takes them to return home, “is the ultimate test of the bonds between people and domestic animals” (page 66).
• Noah sent out a raven from the ark before he sent out the dove/pigeon. The raven never bothered returning.
• Messenger pigeons were used in ancient Egypt to tell the downriver dwellers when the flood waters arrived; Julius Caesar may have used them in his Gaul campaign; the Crusaders used them; and during the 1870 siege of Paris, refugees escaping with their pigeons sent messages back to those still in the city on waxed paper attached to tail feathers.
• During WWI and WWII, military pigeons were divided into their own companies and even received medals for bravery (established in Britain in 1943). Some brave pigeons were Flying Dutchman, Beachcomber, Commando, William of Orange, Billy, Princess, and GI Joe (his stuffed body is now at the U.S. Army Communications Electronics Museum at Fort Monmouth, NJ).
• Two-way communicating pigeons travel between home lofts and food locations.
• Cher Ami was another pigeon hero: he was shot in the chest, lost a leg and an eye. After he died on June 13, 1919, his taxidermied remains went to the Smithsonian (click on link to see Cher Ami).

*The Palmetto Pigeon Plant has a pigeon cursor that freaked me out the first time I went to the site. As for the “House for Forced Matings,” why didn’t they just call it the “House for Non-consensual Pigeon Sex” or the “House for Pigeon Rape”? The company has diversified since 1989, now raising cornish hens, silkie chickens and poussin chickens.

“When something is everywhere, it paradoxically becomes invisible and its value diminishes in our minds,” says Courtney Humphries in Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan…and the World.