Books

This is quite old news already, but apparently Bernard Cornwell has finished another, fourth novel set in the Hundred Years War dealing with the battle of Agincourt (1415) and called ‘Azincourt’, which is French. For Agincourt.
I consider Cornwell on the whole an entertaining writer. He has a few excellent books (the Warlord Chronicles, particularly, which I consider among my favourite novels altogether) and a bunch of others that are okay, even if they merely seem an exercise in writing stories about individualistic warrior heroes facing up to (usually French) opponents from without and arrogant noblemen from within.
However, this new book seems to be a complete waste of time, as setting, characters nor prose seem to have anything new to offer. According to Bernard’s own site, the hero character is a longbowman (just like in the previous three HYW novels of Cornwell, although it is not the same person altogether as there’s a sixty year gap between that novel and this) with a massive longbow who quickly picks up a French girl he protects from evil villains, because he is a proper English hero.
Yawn.
Would it really be too much to ask to develop plotlines and characters? It seems Cornwell has merely grabbed the same characters from out of the freezer, pasted on a new name and face and dropped them in an ever so slightly different setting.
With the battle in mind (and subtly dropped into the title – think anyone might notice?), the book is bound to get high sales for that reason alone, and even more so because it is coupled to Cornwell’s name. However, I’m going to pass up on this one. I think I can dream it already… silly and martially ineffective Frenchmen (though at least one who will be sympathetic to our gallant hero), betrayal, love, arrows blotting out the sun, a cameo appearance of Henry V, etc.
But feel free to disagree with me; you can read a part of the book on Cornwell’s website here.

In other news, in a fit of joy after doing well at my recent exam, I bought and devoured The Reavers, George MacDonald Fraser’s last published novel before his death (and the only one readily available in Dutch bookstores, apparently) which is wonderful. It is set somewhere in the 1590’s, somewhere on the border between England and Scotland, where all is supposed to be quiet after peace has arrived. But not everything is as it seems, and the border is crawling with reavers (basically cattle raiders), English spies, Scottish spies, and Spanish villains plotting to re-catholicise the British Isles, starting with a daring operation codenamed Jimsnatch. The book is purposefully filled to the brim with anachronisms and insanity and is not a serious historical novel at all, and is all the better for it. All the characters are stereotyped to the extreme, from beautiful female lead Godiva Dacre to the pygmy Clnzh and the book even starts with a wonderful ‘It was a dark and stormy night in Elizabethan England, …’ after which the sentence rambles on for well over a page, explaining the extent of the storm and setting the scene (livestock being blown through roofs, small Essex villages whirling away, the usual). The book is worth the money for that sentence alone (try keeping a straight face reading it), though if you don’t like reading pure silliness you will probably consider it a waste of time.

Relics

The Crypt of St Servatius and the empty tomb of Charles, the last Carolingian duke of Lorraine

Last week I visited the Saint Servatius church in Maastricht and its treasury. I was positively surprised by the large amount of high quality medieval reliquaries. Obviously I knew of the most famous examples, like the golden statue of the Saint’s head, and the Noodkist – or Emergency Chest – which was to be carried through the city in times of dire need.

The Noodkist, one of the finest examples of 12th century Maasland art

However, I was unaware of the many other pieces they had, as fine as this massive golden chest, like the many ivory objects, including a chest fashioned entirely – and delicately – from ivory and adorned with wonderful 12th century romanesque depictions of animals and angry looking men. Unfortunately I cannot find any images of it, nor of the small objects they had, such as pilgrim’s pins, small crosses, etc.

On the plus side, they did have the key of St Servatius, which opens the doors of heaven. You can view an excellent photo of it here; also check out the next photograph, which shows the intricate mechanism for displaying the key (using a paperclip). All other photographs on this blog were taken from here.

Also, in my last blog post I included spoiler warnings. However, I was not serious and there were no real spoilers. It was all an elaborate ruse, inspired by the Karadzic trial.

Judging Rado

You may have noticed an exiting new TV show has just started on TV stations worldwide, Judging Rado. The pilot aired a few days ago, and while the episode was frankly a little dull, you could already see some future storylines interwoven into the plot. An anonymous source has leaked some information on the upcoming episodes to me, and I’ll post them here.

Spoiler warning! Read at your own risk! Do not read if you don’t want to be spoiled!

Episode 2
Rado, who pledged to run his own defence, must come to grips with the legal terms. He is aided by his wife and children, who smuggle the Law Dictionary into his prison, at grave risk of being found out. Meanwhile, nobody listens to his warnings about former American politician Dick Fullhouse.

Episode 3
Brambles, the prosecuting attorney, must struggle to complete his indictment in time. Meanwhile, judge Eary fights his coffee addiction and is moody as a consequence.

Episode 4
With the indictment completed, the trial can begin. Rado begins his defence but there is a lockdown in the court as a terrorist appears to have broken in. Suffering from coffee shortage and mounting tension, judge Eary suffers a heart attack.

Episode 5
Judge Eary has survived his heart attack. However, he is still locked inside a room together with Rado as Brambles must try and stop the deadly assassin.

Episode 6
As the assassin is caught, he kills himself and so makes it impossible for anyone to question him. No leads to Dick Fullhouse can be proven, even though Eary is now convinced he is involved and it becomes clear there is a mole within the court. The trial continues, but Rado suffers from loss of memory.

Episode 7
Brambles discovers by accident that the mole is in fact the court butler, who locks him up. Meanwhile, judge Eary prepares to read the verdict, but Dick Fullhouse arrives on the scene with an army of Daleks and attempts to assassinate Rado. Brambles, locked in the court’s liquor cabinet, is the only one who has escaped detection. But can he break free and save the trial?

This is where the season ends, with plenty of storylines left open and enough questions unanswered for a second season. Exciting!

But exciting life!

In my previous post I commented my dreams may be a reflection of a dull life.

However!

According to Charlie Brooker (in this column) it may be quite the opposite:

I’ve got a theory – an untested, unprovable theory – that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.

If your waking life is mundane, it’ll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they’re all uniform and boxy enough – and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can scarcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins – when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you’ll spend each night dreaming you’re the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6ft green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas.

That sounds entirely plausible. Let me now return to taming lions and fighting snake wrestlers.

Dull dreams

With the holidays starting and life generally dulling down, my dreams reflect a similar tendency of being completely uninteresting. Obviously this is an excellent excuse to talk about them.

In fact, these dreams are worse than normal dull dreams. They are actually so dull that, as they happen, my brain is frantically trying to delay me and prevent me from doing anything while it thinks up a new storyline, and it’s really bad at it. Last night’s dream is an excellent example. I don’t remember exactly how it started, but, basically, it was a family meeting of some kind and there was a shortage of something or other so I had to go down to the shop to buy more of the something or other (not that this has ever happened in my life).

So I took my bicycle and went down to the shop, purchased the necessary product and made my way back. Except I couldn’t find the proper house and accidentally cycled in through the backdoor of the supermarket (yes it is becoming less plausible at a frightening rate). Then I had to make my way through the supermarket. This is where my brain lost its way and couldn’t really think of anything original. Rather than either getting me out of the supermarket or conjuring up some fantastical twist in the story, I had to wait because someone had spilled drink on the path and the employees had to mop it up first. And then I had to wait in line and suddenly my bicycle had been replaced with stuff I had to buy. So I actually spent half the dream doing nothing. Thankfully, I woke up then, before even less interesting things started happening.

If Freud were alive, he’d probably be bored to death by now.

Ode to the fox

Reynard the Fox strikes again!

The innocent looking fox is actually a fierce and dangerous creature, as anyone who has read the Reynard stories should know. Apart from being able to trick bears and lions and, err, cats into their near-destruction, this particular one seems to have downed a prey considerably larger than itself. Ever the trickster, this fox uses its innocent expression and appearance to look, well, innocent.

Picture above taken from an article by Staatsbosbeheer about the Oostvaardersplassen here; picture on the left taken from an Utrecht Book of Hours.

A poststructural analysis of cooking

The frequency of occurrence and lasting appeal of cooking books as well as their ancient pedigree make it more than surprising that no previous study has ever attempted to discover the deeper meanings hidden inside. While other authors have achieved great results examining, for example, ancient myths, the same has not been done with cooking books. This study will attempt to right that wrong and discover what the actual point of cooking books, what message they seek to convey. To do this we will look at the three main ingredients that appear within any random cooking book:

1. Potatoes

The potato is a small creature from the Antipodes. It dwells primarily in caves, where it nourishes itself by licking dust off rocks. It is a rare and nocturnal animal. When the Europeans inherited the Antipodes from a wealthy uncle, the potato was one of their main interests, for it was rumoured to be capable of turning base metals into gold. Unfortunately this turned out to be false, and the European torture of the creature resulted into the death of the creature, which was boiled alive. Afterwards it was found that the potato was very tasty indeed, and more were hunted down and brought to the Old World. Because they were typically uncreative, Europeans did not seek to develop new ways of preparing potatoes, and to this day there are three main ways of preparing the animal: cooking, roasting and frying.

2. Rice

Rice is harvested from the depths of Asia. We are unfortunately not properly informed on the way it is created. We can only presume alchemy has something to do with it. Rice is a strange food and we are as yet unsure whether or not vegetarians should avoid it. In any case, it is preferably eaten after putting it in boiling water for a bit.

3. Bears

Everyone’s favourite dish, bears are best served raw. In Russia they prefer to eat the bear by picking it up by its tail, holding it above their heads and then letting it slide into the mouth in one go. Sometimes the bear is killed before this is attempted, but real Russians claim only degenerate Ukrainians etc do this.

We have seen the main ingredients. Two of them are definitely, without any doubt, animals. The other, rice, possibly is. Because it is completely illogical for two main ingredients to be animals but not the third, we will therefore assume rice, too is a creature. We will now examine the way in which these ingredients interact.

There is one very popular dish, especially in Northern Europe, which uniquely combines all the ingredients in one. It reads as follows:

Get some live potatoes and put them in front of a cave. A bear will come out. Once the bear chases the potatoes, throw rice into his eyes so that he is blinded. Order the potatoes to walk over it until it is dead. Shoot the potatoes. Put them all on the fire. Eat.

Clearly the rice takes on only an auxiliary function in this recipe, while the potatoes and the bear are the main course. Note how cleverly the potatoes are exploited to remove the obstacle of defeating the bear. We can therefore presume the following:

fig. 1
Bear > potatoes > rice

However this is only one look at the issue. Another structure would read like this:

fig. 2
Rice > bear > potatoes

It is clear that everything is sacrificed to kill the bear. If potatoes die in the process, this matters little. One can say, as in fig. 1, that the potatoes are more important than the rice, which matters little and is only used to make sure the potatoes survive. On the other hand, as in fig. 2, one can say that the rice is used in tiny measure because it is more valuable. Perhaps the serf hoards the rice more carefully and eats it only on Sundays, whereas the bear with potatoes would be his every day of the week staple diet. Certainly this is something future scientists will need to examine more closely, for example by examining loads of data about serfs.

Emergency – well, not really

Control Room: “South Wales Police, what’s your emergency?”
Caller: “It’s not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there’s a bright stationary object.”
Control room: “Right.”
Caller: “If you’ve got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It’s been there at least half an hour and it’s still there.”
Control: “It’s been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?”
Caller: “It’s in the air.”
Control: “I will send someone up there now to check it out.”
Caller: “OK.”

Control: “Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?”
Officer: “Yes. It is the moon. Over.”

Only in Wales
(You can listen to the actual emergency tape on there, too – highly recommended!)

The dwarf and the dragon

As the train took me north a little later than usual yesterday, the passengers were also not of the normal type. Rather than the standard commuters and students travelling to work or university most people yesterday simply got out at the first stop – at the next village. There were only a few who stayed all the way, including a priest and some students. It was overall very uneventful.

Until, halfway through – I believe at Venlo – two students got in and sat on the other side of the path. They carried with them two large books, apparently Dungeons and Dragons rule books of some sort, and a bag of dice in many shapes and colours. Yes, after talking through what their characters would be (‘I’m going to take a tower shield!’, ‘A dragon does not have shield ability!’), they had a fight against each other. Or at least started having one.

Now I’m sure all the terms I will use are incorrect, so please excuse me for that. I always have difficulty remembering jargon. When they started playing, the ‘looking up silly rules’ aspect of the game quickly overwhelmed the ‘role-playing’ part. A dwarf, with chain mail. How many steps can he take? 4? Or 5? You hit me, but I will take a save! You cannot take a save, we are playing the limited edition rules! What? I didn’t know that! If I had known that I would have made a different opening move! Well this is how we’re playing it and I did it precisely so you couldn’t save. I want to take my turn again. No because if you can then I should too! Etc etc.

Actually, I suppose there was role playing involved. Except all the characters were  big eejits.

Last lecture

The final coursework done, the final lecture attended, the final group meeting over and done with. The academic year is drawing to a close. Two exams to make and a 4000-word essay to write; all that is left, the final hurdles of my first year at the Radboud.

So, conclusions?

• Middle Ages FTW
• Raedts is awesome
• Nijmegen is still not the oldest city of the Netherlands
• Time passes very quickly